According to Google’s Annual Stock Holder Report, 99% of all its revenues come from their advertising programs (and not the 97% usually reported). For a company which almost did 35 billion dollars in revenue last year, that’s rather impressive.

As Google’s advertising flagship, Adwords is the bulk of that cash flow. The creative people at Wordstream did an infographic on the 20 most expensive keywords in Google AdWords. I was curious to see what it would cost if SEO was treated like Adwords. Meaning, what we would have to pay Google if they charged us per click for every #1 organic position we held in their search engine.

As long as there have been search engines there have been people claiming to be SEO pros/gurus/wizards/ninjas. These so called “experts” make amazing claims and promise you the world of rankings. However, in the end these charlatans often do more damage than good.

So, in hopes in saving a few souls from the dark side I introduce 6 tips in unearthing a true SEO Jedi.

6. Realistic Results – It is not uncommon to desire to have thousands of people to come to your website overnight—it’s human nature. However, it is also unrealistic, particularly with SEO. Yet, the SnakE Oil salesperson will prey upon this desire in hopes to make a quick sale. A true Search Engine Optimization Jedi knows that SEO takes time and grows slowly. He or she will layout guidelines that must be met in order receive results that are realistic for your website.

A few days ago I wrote about how you can redirect bad backlinks pointing to your website. Of course, this tactic is only helpful if you know what links are pointing to your website. Below is a list of websites that assist in displaying your backlink landscape. There are quite a few to choose from, but ultimately it just comes down to finding the one that best suits you.

One thing to consider when using these backlink tools is that most of them (with the exception of seomoz) use Yahoo’s search results. This is important, since Yahoo only shows your website’s first thousand backlinks. Usually, this isn’t a big deal, because many websites don’t have that many backlinks. However, as your site grows you will hopefully go over the thousand limit. If you want to take your backlink strategy more seriously I recommend looking at the paid backlink tools in helping you stay on top of your backlink game!

In the meantime, the below tools will help you get started on your seo backlinking efforts. If you know other backlink checking websites/tools let me know and I will add them to the list. ~Paul W.

An important element in ranking in Google is having other websites linking to your website. Simple enough, right? So simple that Google has written algorithms that try to penalize people for gaming their system.

If you gain too many “backlinks,” too soon; have lots of spammy backlinks; or both; you can trigger the penalty algorithms. These algos will assassinate your website and leave it in the land of the domain dead. You will no longer exist to the hundreds of millions of Google searchers.

The problem with these deadly algos, is that your competitors can “build” massive spammy links to your website, and potentially get you banned. Google denies this as possible, but I believe this to be a pernicious lie. I’ve seen first hand (but not by my hand) sites receiving the death ray of backlinks from their competitors and shortly after being penalized.

I just realized that I haven’t published my Pubcon South 2011 notes. Due to the ever changing nature of SEO I like attending conferences like this to stay on top of things. However, I found all to often that much of what you can find on the Internet is restated in the conference. My favorite quote from this conference came when talking one-on-one to a conference speakers (who will remain anonymous). He said to me, “How do I teach people just enough without teaching them too much?”

Unfortunately, I do feel that many speakers in most web marketing conference have this same attitude. However, at Pubcon South 2011 I did find some SEO nuggets of knowledge that I will share below. Yet, the best jewel of information I can offer is that you will learn a lot more talking to the speaker face to face, than just sitting listening to their well crafted presentations of “just enough” information =).

PubCon Notes & Thoughts
I am sharing only the best notes from my time at PubCon South. Most of my notes are based around social media, since I was charged with covering this venue, while others in my party covered the SEO aspects of the conference. There are many people who I have left out (including the speaker I quoted above), due to the fact that much of what was shared in their presentation were common knowledge.

For the last several years exact match domains have been the gold of SEO. You could buy one and with relative ease rank the domain on that exact keyword. So, if you had StoneGardenTurtles.com and were selling stone garden turtles than it was somewhat easy to rank on the keyword stone garden turtles. However, if you bought HippyTippyTurtles.com than it meant more work in gaining organic traffic on the exact keyword.

Recently, I have seen a shift with Google that suggests that exact domains have lost much of their SEO value. At the same time, I have also noticed that the usual links I have been acquiring are not as powerful. To confirm my suspicions I reached out to SEOMoz and asked their opinion on the matter.

SEOMoz’s Answer
There appear to be changes happening a lot lately with Google SERPs. In particular, I’ve noticed changes in the ranking of exact match domains. I think this is because of Google trying to take action against thin affiliate sites who buy exact match keyword domains and ranked very easily with few links and poor content. So I think they’ve been tweaking the algorithm a bit to try and solve the problem. I wouldn’t be surprised if you are seeing changes in SERPs because of this.

12/30/2010 UPDATE: My good friend Tyler sent me over a more in depth case study on the LDS Church’s SEO efforts. It comes from a U.K. Web Development firm, and the author breaks down the Mormon Church’s strong points in SEO. Very interesting read!

A friend of mine sent over the below music video by 3 Doors Down. He told me that the video adequately portrayed his frustration about trying to rank a brand new domain on a difficult keyword. When I watched it I couldn’t believe how well the video symbolized the SEO struggle. So, I added my own commentary to the video. If you get any other ideas to add to the video let me know.

Related Posts:

• The Adorable Face of Affiliate Marketing
• The Decline of Exact Match Domains
• The Mormon Church Knows SEO
• 4 Quick Tips On Making A Video Go Viral
• Taking Personalized Marketing to a Whole New Level

Josh Spaulding wrote a fantastic article about whether or not you should build backlinks to your article directory articles (let’s just call these articles, AD Articles). His answer:

“The answer to the question is 98% of the time, no. And 2% of the time, yes.”

link-building Obviously, backlinks are important to a site’s ranking. However, you may find that keeping track of all the backlinks you get becomes quite a chore! In fact, I sent an email to my programming friend to create a software to track backlinks. Yet, I lucked out because recently, a friend of mine passed on a free link tracking software, called Backlink Reporter.

Several of the nice features of Backlink Reporter is that it allows you to keep track of all of the backlinks you have acquired for one or several websites. It also helps you quickly discover which links you previously had that are no longer linking to your site. Obviously, no one buys links , but if they did this tool is great in making sure that they are getting the links paid for.

The nice feature that sold me was that it also tracks the page rank of the backlink. As stated in a previous blog, don’t let the “gurus” fool you, page rank still is a good metric on the power you will be receiving from a backlink.