Andy McIlwain @ andymci.com

Tip 1: Diversity, Balance of Links are Key

You get in a rut so often when building links. Maybe you submit to directories all the time. Or maybe you’re trying to get press releases submitted. Or possibly you use comments in blogs to get links.

Mastaler said to do all of these things. The engines continually look at the types of links you have. If your links are all of one particular type, it’s likely to throw up a flag of suspicion, so vary the kinds of links you have.

Tip 2: Use Alert Services

This was a particularly interesting tip. While I use alerts from Google and Twitter, I hadn’t looked into the other services she recommended. These kinds of services can be used for tracking changes on your competition’s sites and also to keep an eye on the journalism field to see what topics in your target industry are being written about.

Two of the interesting alert service sites she mentioned were TrackEngine and WatchThatPage.

Being aware of the changes in your industry and your competitors can help you pick up potential link building opportunities. These will give you clues to what you might consider writing about to garner more links to your site.

Tip 3: Create a “Link to us” Page

People need to be guided directly into action. Creating a page like this can help guide people through what you want them to do for you.

For example, if I make a video about someone’s company or product, ask them to put a link to the video somewhere on their site. They almost always are happy to do it. But if you don’t ask, then they don’t do it. It probably just doesn’t occur to them.

Mastaler suggested that you let your vendors and clients know about this page. You might also offer an incentive for linking to you. She said that even something small, like a T-shirt, can often be incentive enough for people to link to you.

I won’t go into tons of detail here, but try to extrapolate on the idea of a “Link To Us” page – what sort of motivators could give someone a reason to link to you? Mull over that for a while.

We’ve recently discussed several ways of handling duplicate content on a single website; today we’ll look at ways of handling similar duplication across different websites, across different domains. For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. To help with issues that arise on such sites, we’re announcing our support of the cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element.

Keep your keyword list up to date. Keywords are the building blocks for all optimization efforts on your site. It is important to revisit this list at least once a year to cut irrelevant terms and add in new terms that you should be focusing new content on within your website. There are several free public tools such as Wordtracker and Google AdWords tools that you can use in order to expand your current keyword set, and obtain information on relevance and search volume. Once you have identified high traffic terms, incorporate those keywords into the top level pages of your website for maximum exposure.

Continually freshen web copy. Stale and outdated content can be unattractive for both users and search engines. In fact, search engines “reward” sites for having content that is fresh and frequently updated. When writing new content, have enough body copy on each top level page to support proper keyword phrase density: strive to include the primary keyword phrase approximately 5 times. And don’t forget that including the phrase in your URL and meta data are great ways to strengthen your pages relevancy for search. This task should be tackled at least once a year after you update your keyword list.

Do your own site crawl. Depending on the size of your website and how frequently the content changes, removing old pages and adding new ones to your sitemap file can be a tedious task. To make sure old pages are removed and new pages get proper visibility, perform a site crawl monthly and add important or top-level pages on your website to your sitemap. The crawl can be performed by pulling pages off your server, or for smaller websites, simply clicking through the site to get to the lowest level pages possible. In addition to updating the sitemap file on your site, create an XML sitemap file and submit it to the search engines monthly.

Fix broken links. Broken links not only have usability implications, but they can also negatively affect your brand by causing a poor user experience, especially when they reference old articles that were taken down, or products that no longer exist. Given that, it is important to have proper redirects in place to functional pages, and old pages removed from the site completely. In order to stay on top of this important task, schedule regular website maintenance at least once a month to fix any broken links on an ongoing basis, and ensure that you have a strong 404 page in place that provides a user with an easy way back into the website when they encounter a broken link.

Do regular traffic analysis. You probably look at your analytics on a monthly basis to understand where your external traffic is coming from. But when is the last time you examined other metrics such as top entry pages, time spent on the site, or bounce rate? At the start of each month, look for patterns or anomalies in your analytics data. For instance, if you notice that important high-level or product pages aren’t performing as you would like, try altering different variables on the page, such as content and call to action.

My take/spin on the list:

Keep your language and word usage relevant to your target. The terms and names that get thrown around on a day-to-day basis are in a constant flux. Stay on top of it. What are users seeking? What do they want? How are they going about looking for this content?

Never let your site grow stale. Keep it updated. And not just in the form of a blog. All of your website content matters in the long run.

Personally I wouldn’t obsess over keyword density, but make sure the content reinforces the titles which reinforces the subject which, of course, is based on whatever you’re targeting. (See where I’m going with this?) There’s no magic number, and you have more important things to worry about.

Run regular maintenance checks. Make sure nothing on your site is broken, missing or out-of-date. This also ties into the broken links bit.

Identify key Analytics metrics and keep track of them. Analytics will help you discover new opportunities and trends on your site, including what pages work – and what pages don’t.

Source: Search Engine Land: 5 Website Tips to Keep Your Branding Fresh

Here it is.

Alas, it doesn’t work for groups, won’t even let you share a username. That’s what we need. Everyone on your team adds items, everyone can cross off items. Go.

Maybe next revision. In the meantime, it’s so pretty you’ll cross stuff off just because you can.

PS Michael likes cothrive.

PS Rajesh likes Remember the milk.

PS Corey likes Things.

PS Jennifer likes this one.

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A couple of good ones in there (Remember The Milk in particular).

I’d still lean towards Google Tasks over any of them, though.

From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn’t go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it “lacks soul,” it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington’s analogy with fast food is apt – it is content produced quickly and made to order.

From a user’s perspective, content on the web can be divvied up into three major camps: answer-oriented (I have a problem/question and need a solution/response), news-oriented (something has happened and we need to know what) and discussion-oriented (thought-provoking articles or opinion pieces – albeit the quality of the thoughts vary from source to source).

The last of those three types is where quality journalism and quality writing still holds steady.

The first two, however, shall become the domain of content farms, where quantity trumps quality.

When we hit those sites, we’re not looking for prose or editorials; we’re looking for answers.

I personally have no problems with content farms, as long as they fill a niche and are useful for users. And if the trend is sustained and these sites reign supreme for the years to come, so be it – we’ll need to cope, adapt and move on.

The quality sources – the authoritative sites that have in-depth knowledge of certain industries or fields of study – will still have their place.

It’s an interesting comparison. I recently wrapped up a project for a client in which Google Apps were rejected for being too unprofessional. At the same time, the city of Los Angeles makes the switch to Google Apps for their in-house communication and collaboration.

More coverage from the Official Google Blog: Cloud Apps, big city: LA goes Google

If only we had artistic words of wisdom like these at our downtown Starbucks here in Kingston. Sigh. (More great Starbucks barista signage lies ahead.)

Somehow it syncs up and works. Don’t ask me how.