It's been less than 2 weeks since my 14-year-old daughter Chloe built and SEO'd her first website, a Neopets Cheats site. And already she's #16 in Google and #17 in Yahoo for her main targeted search term: "neopet cheats". That was pretty fast considering the only link to it was from my blog. According to a linkdomain: query on Yahoo, there is one additional link now besides my blog, but it's just from a splog where they siphoned off Google or another engine's results pages that contained Chloe's site.

This got me thinking: this was a bit too easy. The way that Google and Yahoo favor blogs, no wonder splogs (spam blogs) have become such a problem. And as long as it continues to be that easy, splogs will continue to be a scourge on the Internet.

There's an art to making an effective link request. For starters, you should not propose a reciprocal link, for 2 reasons: 1) the reciprocal nature of the link will basically nullify the SEO benefit you would have gotten, and 2) all the link request spams flooding webmasters' inboxes are of a reciprocal nature and you need to differentiate yourself as much as possible from that rubbish. Say these sorts of things and rest assured that your link request will go straight into the recipient's Trash:

• "Hi, Let’s swap links!"
• "I’ve already linked to you."
• "Great site!"
• "You already link to our competitor XYZ.com and we offer a better/complementary product."
• "Please use the following text in your link…"

When requesting links, think and act like a PR professional or a biz dev director, not an SEO. Or even think and act like an end-user of their site. "Hi, I found a broken link on _____. Have you thought about adding features like _____ to your ______ on your site? BTW, you might want to add xyz.com and abc.com as links." Just don't be disingenuous; provide real value with your suggestions. Even suggest links to competitors or sites that you have no vested interest in.

We all get link request spams, even Google engineers! (such as this one posted by Matt Cutts). Here's one I got recently:

Subject: Quality link request

Hello,

I found your website www.stephanspencer.com on Google.

We have a quality website at www.ace-mobility.com that will be well ranked on Google.

We are happy to upload a link onto this website in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I'm sure you appreciate that this would be of great benefit to us both.

To go ahead with this exchange please upload our link information below to your links page.

Please reply to all@acemobilitychoice.co.uk to say where you have uploaded it.

If you would like your return link presenting in a particular way please include this information in your email.

I will then arrange for your link to be uploaded and email you again to let you know.

Thank you.

Regards
Jessica


Please note, the link needs to be set out as below in order for it to be returned.
[rest of email ommitted]

All I've got to say to that is, "Yeah, right!"

Eric Ward shared some secrets on how he crafts link requests that work in Thursday's link building webinar for MarketingProfs which Eric and I co-presented. MarketingProfs will post the archive of the webinar in their Premium Library soon. And for those of you who aren't MarketingProfs premium subscribers (you should join, btw, it's well worth it!), I'll see if I can get permission from MarketingProfs to post an archive of the webinar here on my blog.

If you think SEO is hard now, just wait until search engines start varying the results for each individual, depending on their profile, search history, geographic location, and now... mindset. Yahoo Mindset is Yahoo Labs' foray into intent-driven search, where sorting of the results are partially dependent upon the searcher's intentions (whether they are in a shopping frame-of-mind or a research frame-of-mind). Yahoo is using machine learning to score web results as commercial or informational. Scores range from -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational).

It's a pretty cool idea but I don't think they've quite nailed it yet. (They do refer to it as a "demo" on the home page so I can't be too hard on them!) The big question is: does Yahoo decide what each page is, or does it decide on the whole site? Imagine being a commercial site and Yahoo decides you are researching only.

A trawl through some common search queries reveals that results on the research end are no less commercial than the commercial end, but the slider bar on the left of each result is different, so maybe the machine learning algo is scoring the pages differently.

Fold in personalized search (where search results vary depending on the searcher's profile and previous search behavior) and local search (where results vary by the searchers' geographic location) and then it starts getting really interesting for us SEOs. It'll make life a lot tougher for optimizers because we'll need three times the content if we want to be found at the commercial and research ends of the search, as well as in the middle.

Just as with personalized search, local search, and other innovations coming out of the search engines' labs, intent-driven search is yet another nail in the coffin of old-school SEO.

Despite the increasing use of search engine friendly URLs, custom meta tags and cleaner navigation, there's a lot of web content out there that is inaccessible to the search engines.

Perhaps it is in the "too hard basket" for many designers. In which case, perhaps you need a new designer! After all (repeat after me) You Are the Customer.

There's a nice article from SearchEnginePosition.com that discusses the topic: The Invisible Web Still Exists

Too many websites are not search engine friendly or are not properly optimized; in other words, are active members of the Invisible Web Club.

How do you get out of this club? I'm glad you asked:

1. Rewrite "dynamic" URLs to remove question marks, ampersands, and equals signs from them
2. Remove frames if you have them
3. Don't have links that rely on JavaScript to function
4. Don't embed navigation elements in Flash or Java
5. Provide alternate link-based navigation to content that is behind search boxes or fill-in forms (that includes JavaScripted pulldown lists!)

Writing articles is a great way to improve your search engine positioning – in fact some of the top referring keywords come from articles.

But do they produce leads? Possibly not, but articles are great for promoting your brand. You will be quoted in everything from college papers, class projects, theses, and blogs. Many of these will link back to you. Spiders will visit your site looking for new content. Combine it with RSS and you have a powerful way of syndicating those articles globally.

SearchEnginePosition's Rob Sullivan has written an interesting article about his own experience, which you can read here.