Have you ever tried to create an interesting blog on a topic that people rarely interact with? Can you really build a thriving readership of loyal fans interested in a dry topic like root canals or debt consolidation? Most likely not.

It is far easier to go where the conversation is than it is to create demand from scratch. This is why so many forms of affiliate marketing (reviews, coupons, comparisons, etc.) thrive on arbitraging established brands. If part of your marketing strategy revolves around community, discussion, and citations (links) then it helps to build your business model around where the conversation already is and what is already interested in.

Topics like sports and baseball cards are easy to build communities around because there is a constant stream of new stats, lots of media coverage, and some billion-dollar brands people are interested in. The phrase armchair quarterback shows how much people love talking about football. And fantasy sports take it one step further by allowing people to compete against each other…further tying them into the game – often with some bets and/or pride on the line.

When I think of the other topics I read about a lot, they are also ones that are rapidly changing with lots of news and opinions and stats. DNJournal is a weekly score card for the domain industry. Every week, I look there and go “what was this person thinking?” and “wow they got a steal.” Domain names represent language, which is constantly changing. As the economy went to crap, bankruptcy.com increased in value.

The same patterns hold true for keyword rankings in SEO. There is always something new to talk about because the structure of the web keeps changing, and the search engines are forced to change along with it. With each algorithmic shift, the search engines make marketers look for more clever ways to exploit it for profit – looking for everything from how to rank for higher value keywords right on through to how to cheaply and reliably spam the longtail of search.

Stocks, finance, and macro-economics are the same way as well. Every day is a new set of stats, and media is skewed to represent the interests of existing business models. Most of the media is built off of constantly selling that now is the time to buy. If you are not that well known, are new to an industry, or have limited resources behind you, it is easy to view that as a disadvantage.

But sometimes those lack of ties give you the freedom to speak truth, which make you different and remarkable. Once markets become fairly established, many players become so conflicted that there is value in being different.

Wherever you see holes in competing models that represents an opportunity to be different. Niche contrarian investor blogs like The Big Picture, Market Ticker, and Zero Hedge have become so popular that they helped lead to the launch of the recently named SEO contrarian blog. So far it has been a great read, much like JohnOn.

Three thoughts from an SEO perspective:

• What keeps changing in your market that people love to talk about?
• What stats could you create that would be remarkable and mention-worthy?
• What prevents your competitors from being honest? What can’t they write about that you can?

And if you can’t answer those questions, then it’s worth subscribing to a few more feeds until you can.

Organic links – the ones that just happen are typically driven by things like public relations, brand awareness, unique content, existing exposure, and social networking. In competitive markets, some aspects of the evolving SEO field should be baked into the core of the company’s DNA. When you get interviewed, you have to know to ask for links. If you are in competitive markets and are operating at scale, it is unlikely that you will have your SEO be your contact point for all media relationships.

Profitable client projects

Some client projects are a slam dunk; where after a half hour of research, you see opportunities (including site structure, page titles, on page optimization, competitive research, and content ideas) that guarantee a multi-thousand percent ROI. SEO is the most explosive and has the highest returns when there is an already successful company that is in the game, but has not given a second thought to SEO.

All of the footprints (customers, customer interactions, customer lists, word of mouth marketing, organic links, a traffic stream outside of search, etc.) that comes along with having a successful company, works as a foundation which helps the SEO efforts boost the site even higher into the search results. As a bonus, those existing footprints on the web are also the hardest for competitors to clone. Once you have them, you have a lasting competitive advantage.

It is easier to take a website from page 2 or 3 of the search results to the top than it is to start building from scratch. In fact, many of the smartest SEO practitioners are willing to launch a site that is half done just so they can get it a few links and get it aging. Google likes old websites, so that is what we should give them.

Brutally ugly client projects

Conversely, the worst websites to work for (especially as client projects) are those which are not unique, those that are brand new, and those that tend to be thin on content. Why? These sites have no footprint on the web. And if they are to build one, it often requires aggressive push marketing, and is moving counter to the trend in search. Matt Cutts recently went so far as making a video recommending not trying to rank a thin ecommerce site.

Worse yet, many of the thin sites are to remain thin because the owner is a blow hard who is unwilling to change. These are the types of projects that have a less than 1% chance of being profitable and enjoyable. Any SEO who has taken on a dozen or more clients, should be able to spot the toxic client types and turn down those opportunities before they become headaches.

Building your own foundation

New businesses don’t have existing links and customer relationships and business partnerships to build off of. To put it bluntly, for these types of sites, often 100% of the marketing strategy is often driven by the SEO. Worse yet, because these sites have no cashflow and no rankings, they typically have a limited SEO budget. This is why it makes sense to do your own SEO from the start if you are short on capital. SEO can provide a competitive advantage, but if it is the only competitive advantage (and if you are trying to hire an external SEO) then you should be giving the SEO a large stake in the company – as they certainly earned it.

It is not that push marketing or new sites are bad, but in competitive markets, maybe the first $20,000 to $50,000 spent on building a solid SEO foundation has little returns, and real returns are six months to a year away. In those instances where a site is brand new, unremarkable, and built on limited budget, it often makes more sense for an SEO to clone the business model, but make it more unique.

If your site is brand new and does not have any competitive advantages, then you might want to consider letting it age a bit and doing a bit of your own SEO marketing before seeking professional help. If you ask for SEO help too early with too small of a budget, you might just create competition for yourself!

You only get to launch a product or service or piece of featured content once. Is the best way to maximize economic yield to make it free or paid? If it is free is can spread far and get many links, but it does not produce any revenue directly. If it is paid a much smaller audience will see it, and potentially one of them will be a competitor who will recycle your work and make it public to pull in links (I can’t tell you how common that is). I like the idea of trying to blend the free and paid ideas to get most of the benefits of free while actually being able to profit from your work.

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently posted about how he likes the monetization model of the Financial Times, which allows you to view up to 9 pages a month for free, and then starts charging for the 10th page and beyond if you want to consume that much information.

This model works well because it leaves the content open to the active web for linking and social media exposure while also making the content accessible for search engines to index and rank it to build up a passive latent audience. It is nearly as good as scroll cloaking from a monetization standpoint, but offers a much more credible and brand-friendly user experience.

Some people who are tech savvy will likely get around some pay restrictions. Danny Sullivan demonstrated how to read the Wall Street Journal for free, but most people will pay, just like people pay for billions of dollars of songs on iTunes that they could download for free. Insert a minor obstacle between the content and if it is popular and well-known most people will jump through it.

The loss for not using security is generally quite minimal if you have a good product at a fair price and target the right audience. Back when I sold an ebook it was available via an unencrypted and unsecure page. Over 10,000 people bought it, only about 5 people complained about the lack of security, and more than 5 people emailed me to tell me that they read it off a torrent network and then decided to buy the most current version.

Did the lack of DRM mean that I had to deal with a few dozen people who bought the ebook and then asked for a refund within 3 minutes of their purchase? Absolutely. But very few actually did. The end result of the model was more sales and more satisfied customers. I left the ebook unencrypted because that created a better customer service and I knew that any distribution via theft & sharing would act as free marketing and prevent me from having to deal with many of the worst potential customers.

In search, some people are great at getting lots of traffic, while yet another group of people are great at turning traffic into cash. It is a rare talent to be good at both, and I think many people in the SEO industry put too much focus on traffic and not enough on profits. I was certainly a member of the under-monetizer club, and have just recently started giving up my cool kids badge.

The three ways I have been able to do blend the free and paid models so far have been:

• Using the link equity from well-linked to pages to subsidize the rankings of pages that are commercially focused
• Splitting the content in half & making the first half free
• Launching for free, but erecting a barrier to entry after the content is well-established.

The first method is part of the classic affiliate model. You do something that is remarkable to pull in links, and the rising tide from that effort helps lift the rankings of all other pages on your site. If Google has to chose between ranking 5 approximately equivalent sites then the site which also has some well-linked content published on it will typically win.

When I wrote a post about the Google Vince update I knew it was going to cause a stir. I wanted the exposure, but also wanted it to generate revenues. The solution I came up with was to make the first half free and the second half part of our paid content, and market the premium content at the bottom of the free post with “Want to read the rest of our analysis? If you are a subscriber you can access it here.” The post earned a couple thousand inbound links, a response video from Matt Cutts, and it brought in a couple dozen new subscribers to our site. Not a bad return for about 4 hours of work.

For a while we had a pop up ad on the SEO Book site, but I didn’t much like it, and many visitors complained about it. We instead decided to remove the pop up and shift some of our free Firefox extensions to require registration on the site in order to download them. This was accomplished by adding php if/else statements on the download page that verified the person was logged into a free account on our site before allowing them to download the tools.

The extensions already have tons of inbound links and great rankings, and using this strategy enables us to offer the option of getting our auto-responder to people downloading the tools. The tool download page also markets our paid services and we use our affiliate software to track sales. We have tracked many paid sign-ups through the tool download page, taking our free tools from a loss leader marketing channel to something that can pay for itself while offering free promotion & exposure to the site.

How do you blend free and paid? What have you found that works well for you?

Many reporters would like you to believe there is a firm wall between content and advertising, but often they merge…particularly for niche or trade related publications. When my wife was getting started in business and wanted to promote her first website, a trade magazine kept trying to push her for an ad and she kept saying no, preferring to invest in SEO. The following month, the trade magazine published what amounted to a public relations driven smear piece against some companies with similar business models to my wife’s company, while promoting a few of the largest brands in the space – who just happened to be big advertisers.

This same sort of advertising blend amongst media and advertisers is popular in virtually every media format. Television stations run fake news. Some magazine ads are designed to look like editorial content because that converts better. Popular online media sites ranging from WebMD (example) to the Wall Street Journal (example) publish ads on their site that lead to special advertising sections. If you miss the small “sponsored resource” disclaimer, you might think you are reading editorial content. Some ads even start off with a free editorial quiz that leads to an ad at the end (example). [Editor's note: this column may have a sponsor disclosure as determined by the publisher, and is not necessarily endorsed by the author.]

When I started writing online, some niche publications would not give me the time of day until I gave them some ad dollars, at which point in time I suddenly became an expert. And another set of people ignored me until Danny Sullivan linked to an article I wrote in late 2003. After he linked to my site, a lot of other people trusted me (somewhat) because they saw him cite me.

If your first entrance into the world of marketing is SEO, then it is easy to get taken back by how sausage-like media business models are. Google’s search guidelines for webmasters present an oversimplified view of the web because it suits their business model to do so. In such a world, a large percent of sites that rank violate their guidelines because to some degree that is where the competitive line is. Either you rank or you do not.

What separates the type of companies that can violate guidelines and rank vs those that get immediately punished is often how much other marketing they do and the relative size of their footprint. If a site is promoted through nothing but spammy techniques, then Google is not going to have much sympathy. But if a site is strong on the brand front, strong on the public relations front, and strong on the editorial front, and strong on the organic links front then it gets more room to fudge with the guidelines.

About a year ago, Todd Malicoat wrote an article about how brand size plays a role in SEO. If you are brand new to the web you might not have the money to invest  in brand building, but you still can build a strong foundation by investing in a strong web design and a strong domain name. It is hard to build a brand or get many organic links until you have a way to drive traffic to your website. Below I have listed 7 compelling (and relatively inexpensive) ways you can invest in pulling links (and other credibility signals) into your website.

1. Create featured content. Every page of your site should not have the same cost. Some pages of featured content should be much deeper than your typical content such that people think they are so much better than everything else that they feel the articles are citation-worthy.
2. Outbound links. When creating featured content, one of the best ways to help it spread to the right audience is to reference some of the thought leaders in that space directly in the content. That enables you to pitch them without seeming like you are pitching them.
3. Advertise on non-commercial keywords. Many non-commercial keywords are cheap because they have little to no direct business value. But some of them are often associated with ideas that are often talked about in the media. If you can create featured content and then advertise it on Google for about a dime a click, that can pull in a lot of links. One of our sites got links from the New York Times and the Washington Post using this technique.
4. Buy ads on sites that rank. Some sites that rank are not owned by people who know much about business. Some of them will want unbelievable prices for ads, whereas some others will sell ads for about 5% of the market rate. Buy the deals and skip the overpriced stuff.
5. PRLeads. If you have a smaller website and can not afford traditional forms of advertising or a big PR firm, then you can try to get quotes in the media by subscribing to PR Leads. It costs about $100 a month and you get to list topics where you would be a good fit for a quote. Media members ask for quotes via email and you respond to the ones that you might be able to get quoted in. After you are quoted, you can their logos on your site in an “as seen in” section.
6. Clean user experience. Some ad driven sites are able to get momentum quicker if they do not run ads on their site until after they start building an audience. Run ads too aggressively, too early and it might turn people off, plus if a site has little to no audience then it won’t make much money from ads. But if you build a lot of links and momentum first, it is much easier to make money from ad based business models.
7. Free samples. A decent link can cost $50 to $500. Many products and services sell for less than that. And some products (like software) have virtually 0 cost to distribute. So if you can find out a way to get your product or service in the hands of thought leaders, then that will typically have a  much better return on investment than traditional advertising does. If you mostly run an ad driven media site, then writing guest articles for other sites that have your target audience is a great way to get exposure in front of the right people.

There are literally thousands of SEO blog posts made every day. Sometimes it is hard to sound original or write something remarkable, particularly if you spend too much time reading too narrowly. It sets in a sort of tunnel vision that makes you think it has all been done. As the web grows richer and deeper more successful ideas will be driven through recycling.

Direct recycling typically does not work too well as most smart people will be able to locate the original source if the idea was successful. What does work well is to take up a related idea and add it to your site. There are recurring themes and stories that will work in any market. Just look at the magazines in the checkout line and notice how little the headlines change from month to month and year to year.

Being remarkable often means grabbing a new spin on a well worn story. Forrest Gump ran across America numerous times. Are you opening a thin classified site for low priced cars? Why not buy a car from your site and drive your beater cross country, while contacting relevant media outlets along the way.

There are a lot of human beat boxes that make weird sounds (to me anyhow). It is not my cup of tea, and yet today a friend sent me a link to a video posted on Facebook where there was a video (from Google) of a human beat box who also played the flute. The same guy probably would not have been remarkable enough to get millions of viewers if he didn’t add the flute to his repertoire.

There are dozens of formats you can use to publish content and thousands (maybe millions?) of effective marketing strategies. Nothing is going to guarantee success, but each day the web provides more free market research & examples of what has worked in other markets.

If you ever run into the limits of your industry and feel everything has already been done then all you need to do is pick up a book on another topic, read the news (outside your industry), or tie your other hobbies to your industry to find an interesting angle that has not yet been done. Some people might think your analogy or strategy is ridiculous, but you don’t need the approval of everyone to be citation-worthy to some.

Not everyone is able to ride a bicycle across a fence or off a bridge, but it is remarkably viral and linkworthy when someone does. Push the boundaries of your market, but try to stay out of the hospital! :)

Last week I was jolted by booting up my computer only to see the blue screen of death. The computer was dead, dead, dead and I had to replace it with a new one, going through the painful process of restoring all of my software, tools and data. The old computer was using Windows XP, while the new one had Windows Vista, which made the transfer of data a bit less easy than I had hoped.

I had most of my data backed up externally via Carbonite and via a 64GB Kingston flash drive. Unfortunately, my new hard drive was in a different format than the old one. It turns out the flash drive was able to transfer data easily enough, but it wasn’t as easy for me to recover everything from the external back up. Also, the old computer was the host for our community website with about 300 logins, and restoring that was no fun.

What follows are thoughts, tips and tools for recovering from a computer disaster. I’ll touch both on ways you can protect yourself ahead of time, as well as some of the cool tools I’ve installed.

Get a password manager

At the top of my to-do list before my computer died was to write all my passwords in an Excel spreadsheet, but I never got around to it. My first step in recovery was to install Roboform, a password manager that securely stores all of your user names and passwords and makes it easy to apply them whenever you need them. What is even more appealing is RoboForm2Go (which stores the login data on a USB drive) and GoodSynch, which makes it easy to synchronize that data across computers.

General software utilities

Here are the tools I use in my day-to-day activities as an SEO.

Dreamweaver is my favorite HTML editor and FTP program.

Snagit is a great quick image grabber and manipulator program, while Adobe Photoshop is my favorite image editing tool for more advanced editing. Smart Draw makes it easy to make nice flow charts and mindmaps.

Camtasia is a wonderful screen recording program useful for making how-to videos and showing search engine changes.

Microsoft Office is a great tool for saving content ideas, website layout plans, and link submission status. Their free Ad Intelligence Excel plug in is a great keyword research and market research tool. When you download Ad Intelligence Microsoft offers a free 60 day trial of Office. Google Docs is also a great, easy to use service.

Pidgin makes it easy to manage many instant messaging accounts with a single tool. Trillian is another popular similar tool.

StyleWriter is a great style and grammar editor, but their Vista version will not be out for another 6 months or so. When I was learning to write this program (and the feedback of a few thousand ebook customers) helped me immensely.

Backlink analysis

I think every professional SEO should have access to at least one backlink analysis tool. Here are several that I can recommend.

We have a free one that is about 85% functional called backlink analyzer, which is the one I typically use, mostly because it is quick and I spent many hours playing with it during development.

A couple of the better paid desktop link analysis tools are Advanced Link Manager, OptiLink, and SEO Elite (but beware the hype in the sales letter on that last one). Of the three, Advanced Link Manager is my favorite, as it has many features like auto-updating and storing links by the date they were found—which makes it easy to track the evolution of links to a competing site.

Recently there have been a lot of paid web based link analysis tools created. Majestic SEO, Shoemoney Tools, and SEOmoz Linkscape are all strong choices. Raven SEO Tools also seems to keep adding a lot of tools to their offering.

There are also some free web based link analysis tools, including Backlink Watch and Link Diagnosis. While I cover Firefox extensions later in this article, I think Joost de Valk’s SEO Link Analysis extension fits better here.

If you register your site with Google Webmaster Central you will be able to download your own backlinks there (but not the links to other sites).

Xenu Link Sleuth is a great free tool for analyzing your site structure and finding broken links. A couple other nice on-site analysis tools are OptiSpider (paid) and PageRankBot (free).

Firefox extensions

Some of the best SEO tools have been developed as Firefox extensions. Here are some of my favorites.

AdSense Notifier. If any of your sites make decent money with AdSense, this tool is a quick way to detect problems. It is particularly helpful if you have access to multiple AdSense accounts so you know if the issue is just slow ad reporting, or the issue can be isolated to a site.

ColorZilla makes it easy to grab the HTML color code from an image or website, and Palette Grabber allows you to grab the colors used in a website and save it as a color palette.

FireBug makes it easy to test making HTML changes inline. Good for fixing CSS errors.

Google Global makes it easy to compare rankings in various flavors of Google around the world, and of course the Google Toolbar has many great features, but I mostly use it for the site search option and the spell checker.

Greasemonkey allows you to add other UserScripts to modify various websites.

PDF Download makes Firefox less likely to crash when opening PDF files.

Rank Checker is a lightweight rank checking tool which also saves historical ranking data and has an auto-run feature for daily or weekly rank checking.

SEO For Firefox shows SEO oriented competitive research data inline with the search results on Google and Yahoo. If you are having trouble installing or using SEO for Firefox then SEO Quake is a good alternative. The SEO Toolbar shows similar data to SEO for Firefox in a toolbar and makes it easy to compare sites against each other. It also contains links to tons of other SEO related tools and allows you to select from a dozen different keyword tools.

User Agent Switcher is good for understanding the site architecture of large complex sites when they serve GoogleBot different URLs than they serve end users.

Web Devleoper allows you to change all kinds of settings to deconstruct a page.

Analytics tools

I would consider using Google Analytics if you have a thick website that would be exceptionally hard to replicate (like a SearchEngineLand or a TechCrunch) and/or if your main mode of monetization is AdSense and you want to tie together your AdSense and Analytics accounts to see what pages are monetizing best. That choice might be a bit more costly for sites that have easy-to-replicate or sites in small niche markets, like B2B. If you have a smaller or thin site and are afraid of sending all your user data to Google then I would consider installing Mint or GetClicky.

My favorite ranking analysis tool is Advanced Web Ranking. It is feature rich, automatically pulls in updated data, and even allows you to add competing sites and backtrack how they performed while you were collecting earlier data about other sites you tracked for those keywords.

Competitive research tools

Compete.com stole the show about a year and a half ago when they launched, but since then many other companies have made great progress on this front. Google has been busy commoditizing data, while many third party services have been busy trying to build value around the competitive research idea.

Google knows its data is worth a lot of money. And they have decided to share a lot of it with advertisers via their Search-based Keyword Tool and Ad Planner. Avinash Kaushik recently reviewed the tool, and Danny Sullivan reviewed the ad planner when it came out.

SEM Rush is probably my favorite competitive research tool for its speed, depth, and how it cross-references data. I liked SEM Rush so much that I was the first person to review the service and we used it to power our competitive research tool. Other similar tools include SpyFu, KeyCompete, and Keyword Spy. Each tool has it’s own proprietary keyword database and features.

WikiRank is a cool competitive research tool that tracks the traffic to different Wikipedia pages. Given Wikipedia’s great search engine rankings, this is a great third party tool for comparing the accuracy of data from other tools.

Some handy browser links

I tend to be quicker at doing things I like and slower at things I enjoy less. I suppose everyone is that way. So what I do is set my browser homepage in a couple different browsers to tasks that I should do frequently but often forget. Another option along these lines is to create a custom homepage of your own that offers links to various critical tasks you need to do frequently.

iGoogle and Google Reader are great for keeping up with the news quickly. These can be further enhanced by subscribing to custom news feeds (or other niche feeds) driven by keywords or link data.

Google Alerts offer you daily or instant updates of information related to selected keywords. I also bookmark select searches and other frequently used pages, like this Twitter vanity/brand search.

I hope you found some of these tips and tools helpful, and would love to know what tools you use and recommend. Please add them to the comments below.

Some project ideas I just sit on and wait. And since time is money, sitting on a good idea is usually a bad idea. If the idea is good, someone else is probably thinking of it too, and if they beat you to market then you are not remarkable when you launch. Search engines tend to like sites which have organic / editorial inbound links, and sites that they have learned to trust due to their age / history. The simple truth is that most new sites are web spam or duplication of existing sites, adding little value to search indexes. Using links and age as filters helps provide a barrier that makes it harder, more time consuming, and more expensive to rank low quality junk.

The best organic links often happen as a result of social interaction, customer recommendation, or just because the site is already findable in the search results. As Mike Grehan long ago said, when it comes to links, the rich get richer. If an idea is only in your head, and you have nothing on the web, then you have no chance for your idea to generate links, subscribers, or word of mouth recommendations. If an idea is only in your head then you have not shown up to the game, and you are falling further behind each day.

If you launch a domain, publish some content on a blog on it, and submit it to some of the major web directories, then you are at least getting the age clock going on your site. Perhaps asking a couple friends for some nepotistic links would help too. In time as you add more content, link to other related sites, and interact within your community, you will start picking up more links and RSS subscribers. As content management systems evolve, it gets easier to just crank out content and hope that some of it gains traction. Plug-ins like the Wasabi related posts Wordpress plug-in make it easy for webmasters to later add structure to a site that started without a solid structure.

Is there value in a strong launch? Yes. But it is easier to launch new ideas after you are already well known. Competition is so fierce that it is hard to launch a new product or service unless you already have some market exposure. Majestic SEO is a great example of this. They have a great product, but did not get anywhere near as much coverage as LinkScape did simply because Majestic SEO was built by an unknown provider new to the SEO market.

Is there value to doing market research ahead of time? Absolutely. It is what can help give you an idea of what business models to consider, and how to organize your website. If you have a small static site then by all means it makes sense to make sure you target important keywords and map them out against your site structure and on page optimization strategy. But if you wait on perfection, then you might never start. And people like to read writing that they can empathize with. If you start creating content when you are new to a field then you build up content that may capture the hearts and minds of people new to your field. Wait too long and people might think you are writing over their heads.

When you think of some of the highest traffic SEO sites, many of them were started before their business models were proven (and in some cases before they even knew what they wanted their business models to be). Build a passionate targeted audience and eventually monetization will follow. Regularly creating content and interacting with people daily ensures that when you try something out you will get quick feedback on if the idea works or not, and how to evolve it. Owning a topical media channel is typically far more powerful then trying to buy exposure within that industry.

Do you have a niche idea in your head right now? If so, what is stopping you from sharing it online today?

One of the things I frequently mention is that content and advertising are blurring so much that in many cases people selling information would be willing to pay to give that same content away in a few years. It is not that all old information is bad (in many cases older information is more pure than new remakes) but it is hard to keep attention in a competitive marketplace.

It is a fight for eyes and ears day in and day out. And it is even worse if you are starting from scratch. With that in mind I thought I would offer 5 ways to help new publishers rise above the noise and gain mindshare and marketshare in competitive markets.

Use a new format

My wife’s PPC Blog got a lot of exposure when she created a PPC flowchart. It is not that the flowchart had any huge new piece of information in it, but simply structuring content in a different format limited competition and made it different and remarkable.

I made a similar one for SEO, and it was quite popular. I recently surveyed our subscribers and multiple members mentioned that they joined to get more of the member’s only flowcharts. If a medium is easy to understand and few people are using it then it is great for link building and it is great for selling content.

Mix things together

When I created a keyword tool (or bought one off a programmer) it was essentially a clone of the Overture keyword tool that was anything but remarkable. So I played with PHP a little bit and had the results cross reference a variety of keyword tools.

Later we upgraded to pull data from Wordtracker and make CSV data export quick and painless. As new keyword tools (like the Google search-based Keyword Tool) are released, we add them to our results.

Our keyword tool recycles (and would be entirely redundant), but it adds value and became remarkable by cross referencing various other tools.

Target non-commercial keywords

If most of the people in your industry are targeting the same core keywords then you can build momentum talking about non-commercial keywords that are less popular.

These may not be short term money makers, but if they have less competition then ranking will be easier. As you rank for related keywords that builds a traffic stream that has the potential to convert or to link at your website. If they link at your non-commercial pages that still builds your overall site authority and helps other pages on your site rank better.

Group hug

You don’t have to be a subject matter expert to create expert level content. Learn enough about a topic to become pretty good, and then create a list of questions you want experts to answer. Compile those answers in a useful format and watch the links and traffic roll in.

Contests and awards work just as well. People love to have their identity reinforced and self-esteem boosted.

Use personal experience / information from another field

“What defusing bombs can teach you about link building.” Sounds interesting, and there are probably only a few dozen people in the world who could even think of writing such an article. Analogies make complex topics easier to understand, and some of the best analogies come from tying together your experiences from various disciplines.

Change. It is a part of life, especially on the web. Evolve or die.

But some things need not change to be successful. In some cases change undermines your momentum, particularly in the field of search, where most of the traffic goes to the top couple ranked sites.

One of the biggest problems in the field of SEO for enterprise-level sites is content management. Product lines, editorial calendars, marketing, and content management systems often dictate that pieces and parts of a site are organized in a sub-optimal way and/or move locations.

Back in 1998 Tim Berners-Lee stated that Cool URIs don’t change:

There are no reasons at all in theory for people to change URIs (or stop maintaining documents), but millions of reasons in practice.

In theory, the domain name space owner owns the domain name space and therefore all URIs in it. Except insolvency, nothing prevents the domain name owner from keeping the name. And in theory the URI space under your domain name is totally under your control, so you can make it as stable as you like. Pretty much the only good reason for a document to disappear from the Web is that the company which owned the domain name went out of business or can no longer afford to keep the server running. Then why are there so many dangling links in the world? Part of it is just lack of forethought.

The 10 year old document is as relevant today as the day it was published. And perhaps even more so since search is the primary mode of navigation on the web.

Map it Out in Advance

One of the easiest ways to avoid site decay is to plan your site out in advance. When you know where something belongs and have given it proper foresight its half-life is much greater than a site built nearly at random. The following image shows an example of how you can plan out URLs, page titles, meta descriptions, on page headings, and related keyword modifiers to include in the page.

Archiving & Static Hub Sections

Many publishing based business models cover a seasonal topic, like Christmas or the Coachella music festival. Each year those publishers could create a new section with a filename like christmas2009, but doing so may make it harder to rank for core generic phrases like Christmas. When a person links to a very specific URL it does not consolidate PageRank and anchor text between years. So in a zen-like fashion changing URLs each year throws away your old anchor text and has you starting from scratch again.

A better solution is to use a filename like christmas, and each year update it to talk about the current year, while archiving the default page for the prior year as something like christmas/2009/. In doing this, the core URL (yoursite.com/christmas) keeps building PageRank and anchor text each year, building off of last year’s success. Old content remains archived, and can be easily findable by linking to archives from the core page.

If you wanted to combine many core related URLs like christmas2008 and christmas2007 into 1 URL you can do so through the use of 301 redirects. Keep in mind that you want to think through what URLs you want changed, which ones you do not want changed, and then use a server header checker to verify the proper response codes.

Reclaiming Lost Link Equity

If someone is linking to a page that no longer exists on your site you are wasting link equity and traffic. Some content management systems offer features or extensions that can be used to track 404s and other errors. Drupal offers an error log and this Wordpress redirection plug in shows you pages people attempted to visit that returned a 404 status code. Your server logs should also help locate any pages with 404 status codes.

Once you discover a well linked to URL that no longer exists you have a couple options:

• Look through your back ups and/or Archive.org to see if any copies of the page’s content are still available. If the content was of high quality and you are uncertain why it went away then consider republishing the content on the same URL.
• If the page moved or the content is no longer relevant to your site, then 301 redirect the URL to a related page.

Google offers two tools to help you reclaim misdirected traffic and link popularity that is being wasted on dead URLs. They offer a 404 widget which can be used to help site users find related content on your site, which is useful for when someone makes a typo when typing out your filenames. Google Webmaster Central allows you to find 404 pages on your site that webmasters are linking to.

Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book. He also works with Clientside SEM to help large corporate clients improve their search engine rankings. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Bob Massa, one of the original SEOs (though I don’t think he likes to be referred to with that label), always talks about SEO from a conversion standpoint, offering quotes like “traffic without conversions is the epitome of futility.”

The SEO space is a bit crowded right now. So many people are fighting for attention that it seems like people are fighting without purpose. There may be more people writing SEO blogs than there are reading them. That abundance of new publishers makes it easy for established authors to build links by re-spinning old phrases with new definitions, but if those links don’t create profit what is the point?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Looking back a few years, I can see that I was a bit economically challenged. I tried helping many people for free… but then some of those people I helped for free could never get enough, plus when something is free many people simply do not respect it. I remember my wife reading a book about self-made Internet and info-based product millionaires, and coming across a guy who in the past valued my time at nothing, always reminding me of how poor he was (though never reminding me that he is economical with the truth!)

A side effect of this situation was that the people who paid me for my book would only get limited support because I was filtering everything at the inbox level – one of the easiest ways to reach burnout and miss a person or two. I kept answering more email, but only managed moderate growth while the value of what I had learned and the market we are in sharply increased. When you don’t charge for a finite resource (your time) market forces will drive the value of that resource down toward zero.

I am not suggesting that free is a bad price point. When you are new, it is one of the easiest ways to get to know the market and gain attention in the marketplace, but if you start to become well known the burden of free keeps increasing.

The concept of FREE as a business model

Free is one one of the best business models around. It worked well for Google search, and it may be the future of business. When we make economic decisions, we weigh the positives against the negatives to measure opportunity cost. The word free is so powerful that it makes us act irrational and overlook other costs (like our time).

Online publishing is organized by power laws, offering predictable imbalances everywhere we look. The key to making free profitable is to use it on things that are easy to make free – answers to common support questions, open source software, blog posts, white papers, and anything that helps do your mass marketing for you. Cory Docotorow recently described how free ebooks help build distribution by turning customers into marketers:

In an ideal world, people without a lot of discretionary income are given the electronic edition (which costs [nearly] nothing to distribute) for free. They act like the breezes that loft the dandelion seeds — they go around, telling people about the book and its merits. In this regard, they’re better than random breezes, for they undertake a directed distribution of the book, seeking to bring it to the attention of people who are likely to have a positive response to it.

If you want to keep an active voice online while selling information, give away as much as you can bear while charging a premium for things that are scarce (like your time) and build a customer interaction that is remarkable and better than free.

In a market with infinite competition, one of the easiest ways to increase the value of what you offer is to change the format and be choosy with who you are willing to accept as a customer. You have to optimize the experience by limiting the number of social interactions and social connections you are willing to take on.