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Google TV Ads have been in private beta since last summer, but now they’re groomed and prepped and available for U.S. customers. Why in the world should a search marketer such as yourself care about TELEVISION? I’m so glad you asked.

Offline advertising prompts online searches. Last summer, iProspect released study data suggesting that 37% of TV watchers are prompted to conduct a search based on a TV ad. I can attest to the validity of this statement as I’ve seen these results in the marketing analytics of a Fortune 500 company I previously worked with.

Because of this, integration is crucial. If your TV people aren’t talking to your Web Marketing people, then you’re not maximizing your marketing, plain and simple.

And then there’s the future. Expect TV advertising to become more and more interactive, so that it’s not just marketing campaigns that are integrated - but the actual ad is a mashup of TV + Web.

Whether you go with Google, engage in a local TV campaign or hire an ad agency, Google’s announcement today is a great reminder of keeping our marketing eyes on the big picture.

As a search marketer, you need to understand landing page optimization because it impacts your results. Higher conversion means a bigger impact for everything you do with search, and the availability of more dollars to invest back into search marketing. In today’s By the Numbers column, “Landing Page Optimization for SEM: Design and Execute,” Eric Enge outlines some of the best practices outlined in Tim Ash’s new book, “Landing Page Optimization.”

In this evolutionary algorithmic age every search marketer charged with boosting rankings on the organic SERPs knows, with fearful certainty, that building inbound links is essential. Utilizing social media communities to do so is a front-and-center tactic for many.

Sure, we’re all aware of mainstream players like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Propeller, etc…

However, there are hundreds of social communities other than the biggies. These niche’ player-communities can be terrific venues to engage readers of similar ilk, make friends, drive focused micro-busts of traffic, and build links. Some communities are junk. This post offers niche’ social site examples and provides links to lists which index and profile dozens of useful ones.

Dofollow and Nofollow
A quick word about Do/No follow. Most blogs (and many communities) these days attempt to discourage spam by removing "link-juice" passed on links dropped in discussion threads. That’s called "Nofollow." (Wikipedia is a classic example of Nofollow.) Nofollow links deliver traffic but there’s no SEO benefit. If you view the source code of this page, you’ll see that some of the social site links are Nofollow and therefore do not pass energy.

When evaluating the potential benefit of social community participation, it’s best practice to understand the objective and potential gain. Whenever a site, with decent Pagerank, "forgets" to turn off Dofollow, it’s an opportunity of sorts to build links of varying strength and value. The most important caveat is that gratuitous link dropping, without offering true value to the community, is spam and will likely be treated as such.

Every search marketing professional knows that garnering good quality, relevant, and "natural" inbound links to your site or blog is critical to drive your SEO ranking efforts. Honest participation in niche’ social communities, relevant to your product & services, is the tactic that many savvy SEMs reach for to build their site’s inbound link-profile. In addition to the community site links themselves, “hot” posts can result in feed subscriptions, increased readership, and links from other relevant and valuable sites.

Fark is a social news site in which moderators approve user link-submissions and post them to the homepage. The links are Nofollow but can drive noticeable traffic.

Slashdot is a community where techno-heads hang out and geek-jam. However, users submit stories about entertainment, politics, and other fun stuff. If editors approve a submission and it’s promoted the homepage, measurable traffic can result. Also, links in the body of each post are Dofollow and pass juice.

Metafilter is a moderated community, both by site administers and users, in which participants share interesting web content. Links are Dofollow.

Mixx is widely regarded as an up-and-comer in the social news world. A potentially mainstream Digg replacement site, many SEM folks had early-adopter Mixx profiles for fun and future marketing bang. Oh yes, they forget to turn off Dofollow so the links pass juice.

Hugg is a smaller community engaged in dialog surrounding environmental issues. There’s social exchanges about technology, politics, and science as well. Links are Dofollow.

Sk*rt is a Dofollow PR 5 fashion, food, and technology community, primarily comprised of females.

Stirr’dup is a smaller NoFollow social news site which categorizes news as technology, entertainment, news and politics.

Linkinn is a PR5 site specializing in offbeat video and pictures. Links are DoFollow and pass juice.

Lists of Useful Social Media Sites:

48 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities
Tropical SEO: Top 38 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic)

Respected blogger Sugarrae has posted a serious interview with industry leading link-building experts and is a must-read. Interviews include:
Eric Ward, the Link Moses behind URL Wire
Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
Roger Montti, the founder and owner of martinibuster.com
Todd Malicoat of Stuntdubl and Clientside
Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for SearchEngineWatch.com, his link building blog and course author SEMPO Institute
Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM
Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel
Michael Gray of the Graywolf SEO Blog
Andy Hagans, the lazy SEO of the Tropical SEO Blog
Jim Boykin of We Build Pages and Internet Marketing Ninjas
Rae Hoffman, CEO of Sugarrae and MFE Interactive

SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, is once again gathering feedback from search marketers for its annual State of the Search Marketing Industry Survey.
The survey collects data on respondents’ PPC and SEO spending habits, measurement techniques, and other topics to create a yearly snapshot of the search industry, as it did in the 2006 [...]

This evening Dave Weinberger author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Institute for Internet and Society will be a featured speaker at the ClickZ Awards being held at Gotham Hall in New York City. I am seriously looking forward to this gala event and was struck by several coincidences — loose [...]

For any search marketer working with large enterprises or agencies, integration is the toughest job they face. In today’s Search Ads column, “Breaking Down Silos: Specialization With Integration,” Matt Spiegel describes a challenge that makes changing bids on thousands of keywords seem like child’s play.

More: continued here
sew experts breaking down silos specialization [...]

I think one of the most crucial moments of every search marketer is when you realize not every link is created equal. Hopefully, this happened early in your search marketing career.Links have different values and a big part of a search marketer’s job (white hat, at least) is to acquire high quality links. [...]

The social web (or web 2.0) will catch a lot of search marketers off guard. Now you’re probably thinking, “I know about the social web. I’m a search marketer.” However, you may not realize just how powerful the social web is.The social web is not just getting 10,000 uniques with a front [...]

I just found this SEO story on Sphinn. It’s about a teenager named Chloe Spencer. Her dad, a search marketer, helped her start a blog about Neopets. Neopets are virtual pets that many teens love.Early last year, Chloe started doing keyword research on Neopets. She found that neopets cheats had a [...]