Welcome to another issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. It feels very strange to see Easter items in the stores this early in the year, but so be it. Here's hoping all your Easter surprises, online and off, are pleasant ones. Before you turn your interests to the holidays -- whichever ones you prefer to celebrate at this time of year -- let me point out all the great stuff we have for you this week!

The article we're highlighting this week from eWeek is all about going green -- and we don't mean St. Patrick's Day green. We mean green in your office, and specifically, making that notorious consumer of resources, your network printer, better for the environment. From toner and paper to shopping for a new printer, we have you covered.

We're all about giving you options this week. On Wednesday we checked out a new search engine, still in alpha, called Galaxy IT. Its fractal-grid interface seems to be worth a look. On Tuesday we concluded our three-part series on social media optimization, helping you stay on top of the newest trends in SEO. And on Monday, we talked about what you can do to SEO a new web site and get it off to the best possible start in the search engines.

We're back to basics with the assortment of SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting for you this week from Tutorialized. Learn how search engines operate, how to promote your site to increase traffic, how to choose keywords for your website, and more! Stop by Tutorialized today and see what we have for you.

Our Thread of the Week once again deals with link buying, but in a different light. It's proof that everyone on the SEO Chat forums loves a good rant and a lively debate. The original poster expressed his irritation at what Google is doing to link buyers, and why he thought it didn't make sense. Lots of people weighed in with their own views of the matter. Why don't you?

Finally, our spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, talks about linking and PR. How much does PR matter? Should you focus on getting links from high PR sites and totally ignore lower PR sites? Or is this the wrong question to ask? Scroll down to the Spotlight for the answer.

Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

• Why should you never date a nerd with a popular website? Ask the girl who used to date Wikipedia's founder.
• Will George W's plan to take over the moon work? According to this giant moon dwelling robot and Robert De Niro, could be...could be.
• How do you become a billionaire? Simple... either be an idiot, or invent something for idiots.
• Are we under attack by the Death Star? Ask me that again in a few hundred thousand years.
• Hey, what's that hole sucking up all space and light? And why is it in some guy's laboratory?
• Watch the video!

Google leads the pack as far as search engine market share, but that does not stop other companies from trying to reinvent Internet search with new approaches. Galaxy IT thinks its visual interface provides users with a more intuitive way to search. Should Google be worried?

The short answer is no, of course, but new ideas in search deserve a good look at least, and perhaps some encouragement. Galaxy IT says they use fractal-grid technology to display search information in a visually organized manner. They note that this approach can be used to display any information that resides in a database.

There are plenty of other search engines that offer a more visual interface than the 10-links-per-page-in-a-list setup popularized by Google and the other major search engines. Quintura lets users enter a keyword and returns a cloud of words to help you focus your search results, for example. So the Galaxy IT concept is not totally unique.

Read Exploring a New Search Engine: Galaxy IT

Blog Marketing and Social Media Optimization
by Akinola Akintomide
2008-03-11

This article will not look at how to create or market your blog. It will simply look at how to market yourself on other people's blogs through paid blog advertisements. It will look at the big blog ad companies out there and then look at how a company can use them (hopefully with as little cash as possible) to promote its products. I will also look at how viral campaigns catch on in the blogosphere and how you can create some free cyberbuzz by letting your PR blow across it.

I have written several articles on social media optimization that discuss a number of ways to utilize it for marketing purposes. Studying social media optimization has to be intense, hands on, and ongoing. But there is one part that I simply mentioned and did not go into, called blog marketing. When all is said and done, apart from the big community sites, we have to look at the little community sites and the not-so-little communities that they are spawning. But first .. the bad news.

The bad news is that paid bloggers anchor their marketability to factors beyond their control. Indicators, like Alexa rankings and Google Page rank, are touted by bloggers eager to one-up their competition and get themselves a cut of the advertising dollars. This has led to web sites like www(dot)searchking(dot)com and www(dot)payperpost(dot)com facing difficulties because Google hand-picked them and their publishers for downgrading in terms of PageRank and possibly in their rankings.

Read Blog Marketing and Social Media Optimization

Use SEO to Get Your New Site Off to a Good Start
by Terri Wells
2008-03-10

To judge from forum posts and other sources, getting indexed in Google (let alone on the first few pages) presents a major challenge for a new web site. I even know of at least one SEO who will not touch new web sites. If you have a new web site, chin up; this article will offer you some tips to get you noticed in a good way by the major search engines.

If you are building a brand-new business web site, SEO should not be an afterthought; you need to think about it right from the beginning, along with the content of your site. It starts with keyword research. You know what you want to offer, but do you know how your target audience thinks about it? Say you are in the morbid business of selling coffins, and your market is all within a small tri-state area. Do your customers refer to them as coffins or caskets? Or do they use some other term? You get the idea.

Once you have done your keyword research, you are ready to build your content around it. Keywords really should fall naturally, but they definitely need to be in the body of your content to be noticed by the search engines. That is not the only place they need to be, of course, but I will get to the other areas in just a minute.

Read Use SEO to Get Your New Site Off to a Good Start

Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

How to Promote Your Site to Increase Traffic
SEO is about promoting your site to the world. Here is how to do so.
Read the tutorial.

How to Choose Keywords for Website
Part of the SEO work is to put golden keywords in your website.
Read the tutorial.

How Search Engines Operate
How do search engines and its spiders actually work? Read this article to find out.
Read the tutorial.

Honesty in Search Engine Optimization
SEO is not about how fast you can go, but the quality of the SEO.
Read the tutorial.

Force Search Engines to Read Keywords
Besides choosing keywords, it will need to be read by spiders as well.
Read the tutorial.

SEO for Flash Optimization
While Flash content is attractive, it is not the case for spiders. Learn how to do it right!
Read the tutorial.

How can this SEO Newsletter be better?

What do you like or dislike about this issue?
Is there a topic you want to learn more about?
What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement,
so please email us. Email us.

Everyone loves a good rant. This week's Thread of the Week got off to a rousing start with a rant on link buying, and went to three pages in less than four hours. It's still growing. Stop buy and join the discussion!

This whole "buying links is bad" thing is really irritating (rant)

For two reasons:

1. As a site/business owner, why in the heck wouldn't you want to buy links to get more traffic to your site. Why is it ok to buy traffic from Google Adwords, but not from a site selling link spots? This is a very slippery slope Google is creating by blatantly saying you'll get penalized for obvious link buys...

2. They're thinking is totally backwards on the subject. Their reasoning is based on the idea that "anyone can just go out and buy links", but what idiot goes out and buys links for stupid, crappy sites that don't give the end user the experience they want (there are tons and they go broke quick mind you)? If you as a business/ site owner feels that your site is good enough to spend thousands of dollars in buying links, then isn't that an indication that your site is WORTH BUYING these links for? I mean seriously, either you're:

a. not going to make any money from your paid links and then they'll come down (which in a perfect world would bring your natural listings down),
b. you'll make money from the paid links and keep them up, showing that the site is actually GOOD!
or
c. you have a bad site and have ridiculously deep pockets or just don't care about losing money, (but this option is the most unlikely out of the three).

The fact of the matter is that if you're willing to PAY MONEY FOR LINKS then you've probably got a site that's worth it. If anything is an indicator (besides user reviews or some other quantifiable user measure) of whether a site is worth getting natural Google listings, then MONEY SPENT on marketing and links is!

And don't even get me started on the whole "moral" issue either, that's a whole other thread!

/rant

There are 2 main reasons to buy links:
Traffic and Ranking

Google has nothing against buying links for traffic. Add nofollow and you are fine.
Google has something against buying links for ranking. Often the links are not relevant to the sites topic thus useless for the visitor. They simply exist to pass linkjuice and thats what Google does not want.

If you live from selling links from your site add to paid links a nofollow tag and you can still make your money.

My own opinion is that it's a good thing.
In a way it's sad that Google started this whole "link-mania" thing; now I can only see two options for them:
1. Change they're fundamental principle about links=votes and look for other ways to rank sites.
2. Devalue paid and spam links.

Otherwise he who has the biggest budget/most time to spam gets the #1 spot irrespective of the quality of his site.

You said "you'll make money from the paid links and keep them up, showing that the site is actually GOOD"... I do not agree with that; just because a site sells product/makes money doesn't mean it's the best site in its field.

You also said "The fact of the matter is that if you're willing to PAY MONEY FOR LINKS then you've probably got a site that is worth it" Worth it to you yes... Google is trying to find which sites are most worth it to the surfer not the site owner.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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Link Building: Quantity vs. Quality

It seems like the answer to most questions in SEO is "it depends on what you are trying to do." Take link building. One SEO Chat forum member recently asked whether it was better to have many back links from PR0 sites or just a couple from PR6 sites.

The poster did not mention whether the PR0 or PR6 sites were relevant to the site to which they were linking. That can certainly affect the answer. But before asking about relevance, perhaps the original poster's question should be answered with another question: better for what purpose?

As another forum member pointed out, if you're trying to gain PR, you want to get any high PR sites to link to you. If you want a good ranking in the SERPs, look at the relevance of the site linking to you, and ignore their PR. If you're trying to raise the amount of traffic visiting your site, again you want links from relevant sites.

But let's say that all sites are equally relevant. Should you then prefer a few links from high PR sites as opposed to many links from low PR sites? Usually, you should, but that doesn't mean you should completely snub PR0 sites. As yet another SEO Chat poster put it, "it is good to get a variety of keywords from different PR ranking pages. This way the search engines will not trace the linking pattern" as easily.

In fact, respected SEO Chat forum member gazzahk suggested an interesting way to handle links. Since links from PR0 pages pass along very little "link juice" and may end up in the supplemental index, he notes that "if I get a new link from a PR0 page I go and social bookmark the page the link is on. This is a way of getting some else's page" out of Google's supplemental listings.

Gazzahk also had some good advice about making a link more relevant by linking it to your most relevant internal page. "So if a good link is on offer consider writing an article that combines the relevance of the two sites," he explained. For example, "a PR6 link from a dog food site to an education site can have its relevance increased if you add an article on the education site about 'educating your dog/dog training' and then get the link to link to this page." Good luck in your linking endeavors!

Read the thread for this article.