You may also know about the aStore feature in which you can easily create as many as 100 stores and host them on Amazon. A better option is to embed the aStore in one of your sites via an Iframe tag. The Iframe code is easily available when you are editing your aStore.

The beauty of all of this is that it is all easy to do, doesn’t require any shipping headaches from running your own store, and that there are millions of Amazon customers that won’t be put off when they are ready to checkout. The aStores show a “Powered by Amazon” logo, which would instill a level of trust in your customer.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and make a few aStores and add some Amazon product links to your blogs! It’s all free for you!

First, join Amazon Associates

Once you are registered, you will be able to begin building aStores. You can literally build an aStore in as little as 15 minutes! Although, I’d recommend taking more time, just to make it right.

Click here to Build an aStore

Once you’ve created your aStores, add your store to this free Amazon/aStore directory You do need to be a Squidoo member (remember, Squidoo pays you because they are a revenue sharing site).

If you’re not a Squidoo member yet, please click the logo

To make adding your links even easier, you can use this Firefox addon to easily add Amazon product links. The tool will give you the link in either html or as a simple url. It will include your Amazon Associates ID in the link. Very nice!

Maybe eventually Google will put the quotes into an RSS feed for blogs and sites about these people.  Pretty cool!

The latest features include:

Alternate views for search results - You can do a variety of search types including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types.

With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Keyword suggestions - You can view different keywords to improve your search results. As you type your search, Google’s technology will provide alternative suggestions to your queries in real time. *This could be helpful in coming up with good keywords for SEO as well!

Keyboard shortcuts - Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse. Current keyboard shortcuts include:

Key Action
J - Selects the next result.
K - Selects the previous result.
O - Opens the selected result.
/ - Puts the cursor in the search box.

The other part that I found interesting is that they apparently can “scan” javascript and Flash to find links. Previously, spiders were not able to crawl javascript, but this “scanning” now allows for data retrieval. That’s big news! All those links that I thought were useless because they were displayed via javascript may count for something now!

Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a

element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

How does one target a specific geographic region/country/city?

There are a few areas of SEO and marketing that you can do to improve your site ranking within a particular region, known as ‘geotargeting’. The biggest challenge would be ranking well in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) across a range of regions. It would probably require several regional campaigns.

1. Domain TLD: You can register your domain with a country specific TLD, such as “.co.uk”. This should help you rank better in the UK. The same can be done for other countries.
2. Hosting: This is a major factor, if web host server is located in France, then you are likely to rank well in France. Unfortunately, you may not rank well for search engine users in other countries. You should look around for webhosts from that area, for example: you can be hosted on a Maui server, if you are targeting a Maui audience.
3. Languages: If your site includes more than one language, you will have a better chance of ranking well within countries where that language is spoken.
4. Keywords Usage: If your website has too much content for “German”, as apposed to the “UK”, then the search engines may perceive this as the website is targeting the location mentioned in the content. I do not believe in keyword density as being of any value, but I do believe that including the keywords within the content would be relevant.
5. On page/site SEO: Create individual pages or sections of your website for the area you are targeting. Your efforts should then focus the traffic to these pages/areas. This includes link building, advertising, and other means to direct traffic and improve your rank in the SERPs.
   
6. Localized Link Building: Find local bloggers and websites (government city, state, country too!) and see if they’d link to you. Even better, see if they would write an article or two about your site or services.
7. Create a network: Buy domains and host them on localized webhosts. Create original, good content and point them to your main site. You may even get some referral traffic from them as well.
8. Google Local Business Center: By using the Google Local Business Center, you are also narrowing your site down to local areas.
   

   Use the Local Business Center to create your free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even coupons to print out and bring to your shop. It’s easy, free, and you don’t need a website of your own.







9. Google Webmaster Tools: Within Google Webmaster Tools, go to Tools, Set geographic target. You can associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area. You are currently not able to designate multiple regions.
10. Google Adwords: You can target regionally specific traffic via Google Adwords. This is an excellent way to get targeted traffic.
    
11. Yahoo! Local: You can list your site locally within Yahoo! Local for some additional traffic.
12. Use other local directories: You can use other directories to bring in local customers.
    • Verizon SuperPages
    • DMOZ
    • CitySearch
    • TrueLocal
    • Qwest Dex
    • Localeze
    • Merchant Circle
13. Use localized SEO companies: These companies specialize in improving your regional presence. If your own efforts appear to be limited or you do not have the knowledge or time, then definitely consider going with an SEO company such as these.
    • GeoLocalSEO
    • BoostLocalListings
14. Seeing the search engine results: Use Geoseo.com to view how your site/pages rank in the SERPs for specific keywords. It will show you results for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

If you’re not using this, it’s worth giving it a try. The purpose for this is to have notification when new links to your site are found by Google. This can be very good for any linkbuilding campaign.

Click Here: Google Alerts

The search terms should be similar to any one or all of the following:

link: http://www.example.com <— notice the space between link: and http?
link:http://www.example.com
link:www.example.com
link:http://example.com

The question has been asked, “what does the space do?” It’s strange, but it does bring up different results of backlinks, so it’s worth using this modification. Why there is a difference, I have no idea.

It’s very handy for watching progress of Google picking up new links to your sites.

You can set the frequency to:

• as soon as it happens
• once per day
• once per week

Also, it can be set it for Blogs, news, web, etc.

What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?

You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.

First, what is Knol?

Knol is a Squidoo/Wikipedia-like social media site brought to you by Google. Currently in beta, it is supposed to be a haven for authors to show off their writing skills and portfolios. Google introduced it to a select group of people in December of 2007. Here what Google had to say about it:

It is a “free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.”

What effect will it have on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, and Wikipedia?

Since this is a Google project, you can expect a ton of money, advertising, and support once it is finally released. There are already sites out there trying to capitalize on Knol, such as knolstuff. There are also sites that appear to be trying to convince people to join their site instead, and knol isn’t even out yet. Hubpages asks visitors to not wait for Google Knol message; “Why wait for Google Knol? Write your own Wiki pages on HubPages and Earn.” I could see Knol cutting into the Hubpages and Squidoo potential users, as they do not have the name recognition, however Wikipedia is very well entrenched. I think there will be a lot of buzz on the internet, especially within the writer and blogger communities, but I do not believe it will kill most sites (that have an established community), unless they are not already fairly well known.

News report from the time of the announcement:

Mike Mann is a prominent internet entrepreneur who sold BuyDomains company a few years ago for more than $65 million. His latest tech venture is just that, a venture capital firm based in Washington D.C. which goes by the name of WashingtonVC.

Yesterday Mann announced the purchase of SEO.com by WashingtonVC for $5 million as well as the formation of an SEO firm led by Dave Bascom. The company is formerly known as Web Targeted, search engine optimization company located in Utah. Jay mentions this new domain will give them a huge advantage over the fierce competition of Search Engine Optimizers.

Just the same, as far as SEO is concerned, it has the perfect domain name, is owned by one of the wealthiest people in the domain and SEO industries, and has a quickly growing forum.

So, if you are thinking about joining, this is the time to do it while it’s still young!

Please click the logo to join

Actually, NoFollow does not “stop” the search engine spiders (robots) from crawling, but instead Google and others simply do not pass “link juice” to the backlink.

However, as Geoland points out so well, there are other ways to block the crawling of links. The other methods are much more limiting than rel="nofollow", because at least NoFollow still allows the crawling and indexing.

Normal methods to check for NoFollow will not show you if a link is truly crawlable (including SEOQuake, right-clicking on a link and looking at properties, etc). In other words, “what you see is not always what you get.”

Robots.txt

One method is to use Robots.txt to control the crawling of spiders. Robots.txt is kept in the top level of the domain.

Examples

Blocks all robots

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Blocks all robots from crawling specific directories

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /tmp/

Disallow: /administrator/

Meta Elements

The robots attribute is used to control whether or not the search engine spiders are allowed to index a page and whether or not they should follow links from a page. The NOINDEX value prevents a page from being indexed, while the NOFOLLOW prevents links from being crawled.

The robots attribute is supported by all of the major search engines. In addition there are several additional values for the robots meta attribute that are relevant to search engines, such as NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET, which are meant to tell search engines what not to do with a web pages content. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file.

NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page.

NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page.

NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page.

NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results.

Example

<html>

<head>

<title>Create Backlinks to My Site</title>

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

</head>

Javascript

Any link written in javascript is not crawlable by search engine spiders. It will look like a normal link and will not be lined through (SEOQuake addon) or highlighted (Search Status addon)

Dynamic URLs

Some spiders may also avoid crawling any url that has a “?” in it (dynamically produced) in order to avoid spider traps which may then cause the crawler to download an ‘infinite’ number of URLs from a Web site. Thus it would probably prevent links on these pages from being crawled.

Linkbait is simply creating something that sparks peoples’ interest enough that they would create a link to you or use something that you offer, such as an image or a tool. They may knowingly or unknowingly create a backlink to your site.

With Google’s Matt Cutts doing a writeup of linkbait recently and an older one, it made me think more about it. The real thing always serves as the best example, rather than just explaining it. This seems to be an acceptable way of getting links, according to Google.

Here’s his definition: “On a meta-level, I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though). Sometimes even a little bit of work can generate a reason for people to link to you.”

Examples of Linkbait

www.stclaire.com - PR4 - Links 2,630



Matt Cutts used this “Technical Communications” site that had a clever sign making section.

Ning - PR7 - Links 761,100
Create your own social network for anything
A clever way that allows the user to create their own social network. It reminds me of meetup.com, but that is strictly internet based.

Muglo.com -PR0 (very new) - Links 0
Create your own smiley-faces for blogs, forums, etc

This is similar to the sign making site, but is limited to smiley faces. It has a simple name that is easy to remember.

One Red Paper clip - PR5 - Links 33,000

This guy was inspired by a Canadian boardgame called “Trade Up”. He had a stroke of genius when he decided to try it for real; trading a red paper clip all the way along until he ended up with a house.
He has since written a book about his experience. In addition he runs a forum in which you can try to trade other people for things, including paper clips. I’m curious if it would still work for others.

Road Trip to Oprah - PR4 - Links 1,680

You could do something extravagant like these guys.

We are on a quest to ask Oprah for $1 to join the producers of The 1 Second Film. The 1 Second Film is a non-profit global collaborative art project bringing thousands of people together to make a film that makes a difference. Anyone in the world can help produce The 1 Second Film by donating $1. From Kiefer Sutherland to Kevin Bacon, thousands of producers are already participating. All profits from our finished film will benefit the Global Fund for Women. It’s the start of a 5 Phase Plan to bring the world together, one second at a time.

Maybe it’s a little over the top…

SEO Tools - PR3 - Links 6,040

Search Engine Optimization Tools
If you have the technical skills or are willing to hire someone to create your idea, then you could come up with some useful tool. Other examples would be calorie calculators, sitemap generators, or interest rate calculators.

If you are struggling with how to create linkbait, have a look at this post called Link Bait Kindergarten for some great ideas on how to be creative.