Link building is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization that you can undertake for your website.  The number and quality of inbound links to your website (your link profile) accounts for 7 out of 10 of the most important factors in determining your search engine rankings according to a report published by SEOmoz.

Here are the top 10 factors with the ones related to links highlighted:

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The December edition of Answers eMagazine arrives on virtual newstands today. This month’s cover story is, “Santa: Your Marketing Guru.” It’s a cute article written by a contributing author, but I’m not really digging the whole Santa-as-a-marketing-guru-thing.

I think Santa is really just a pawn in an evil plot designed by marketers all over the world to get our money.

Santa’s Rotten Kid Problem

How many parents go out and buy gifts in the name of “Santa” just so that their children will get exactly what they asked the fat guy for when they sat on his lap two weeks prior?

Especially parents who have rotten kids! You know… the one’s that deserve and get coal in their stockings.

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If you’re already selling anything online, this article is going to show you how to add extra revenue you didn’t even know you had “hiding” in your site without getting any more visitors.

Overlooked Way #1 – An Upsell:

If you’ve been in marketing for any time, you’ve probably heard of “upsells” or “bumps.” Car dealers are excellent at using this technique. Once you have agreed to buy a car you then go into the finance office. This finance guy is really another place where they try to extract as much money as possible from you; dealer financing, extended warranties, rust coating, a low-jack security system, etc. These additions will normally add as much, or more, profit to the dealer as the original sale.

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I’ve been doing some quasi-testing on different blog layout styles to see what kind of layout converts better. The two styles I’ve been testing are the “magazine” style layout like and the traditional style layout like the one that this blog uses.

I wanted to test out the magazine style layout because I liked the idea of a blog looking more like a traditional high-end website, while still being able to use the traditional wordpress content management. Wordpress makes it sooo easy to manage your content… I love that!

Before I get into the test results, I want to make it clear that I hadn’t really planned to test this because it didn’t occur to me that using either of these blog layouts would make THAT much difference. After all, both types were professionally designed and looked pretty good.

In fact, I didn’t expect there to be any difference at all… then I started comparing the site stats for each layout type over several different niches.

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The Black Friday incident at Walmart where a worker was trampled to death and several shoppers where injured was a major topic of discussion at my house, but probably not for the reason you think.

If you hear most people talk about it, they sound shocked and saddened by the whole ordeal… and it is very sad indeed.

But I’m not shocked at all. In fact, I believe that this kind of behavior is completely predictable. Before you start sending me hate mail, let me explain…
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