Yesterday I sat and listened to a webinar about keyword research from Freddie Brister and John Jaworski, a couple of Stompernet coaches. The broadcast lasted for a bit over 90 minutes with a short Q&A on Twitter afterward.

Brister is highly entertaining with his Ah-shucks down home delivery and seems to be genuinely excited about what he does and also seems to want people to succeed in their online business. And Stompernet has a very good reputation from all corners of the online world, a bit prone to hyperbole, but hey, that’s marketing, right?

Did I find a problem with the delivery, you bet I did. Slap dab in the middle of the program Jaworski made a 40 minute pitch for a Stompernet conference. Now no one expects these webinars to be free and without advertising, but 40 minutes straight and in the middle before the meat of the program has even gotten its stride. Too much and too long.

Was there any redeeming value for anyone but the beginner? The answer is a qualified maybe, it sure was entertaining and fun to listen to Brister but the information on keywords could have gone deeper if not for the unbelievable amount of time for pitching their wares, they could have given more meat on this bone. GRADE: C+ for content, GRADE: A for Brister’s delivery, he needs to be on the air more and GRADE: D for the 40 minute ad blast.

You can follow the Stompernet Coaches on Twitter to keep up with their activities, StomperNetCoach

Link building can be a long drawn out process and one that is expensive to boot. One option is to build mini sites with different topics and agenda’s. These mini sites are controled by you, updated by you and you and your clients reap the benifits.

1. Most people know about Squidoo.com but you may not have add pages (lenses on Squidoo) to benefit your own web presence or the presence of your clients.

2. Self-Improvement pages are hot right now and a good way to gain search exposure  for links on the page. A real simple example is hackyourself.org

3. Create a free e-book people can download just for their email address. This creates buzz and back links.

4. Adopt an animal shelter or shelters and place their info and pictures somewhere on your web site, let them know you like and support their work.

5. Develop a template you give away free for WordPress, Joomla or Drupal getting them listed on the free sites with a link to your name and website.

Satellite Websites orbiting around your main website have been in vogue for quite sometime. Everywhere you look SEO practitioners recommend ways to build-out a series of satellite websites to strengthen your main (branded) website.

So what is a satellite website and do I need one? First, a satellite website or website are a series of websites each built around one topic. If your main website is about writing then you might build 5 or 6 satellite websites each with its own topic but all relating to your main website. An example: fiction, short stories, journal writing, writing exercises and science fiction would each have its own 5+ page website with all of them pointing to your main website. Other then pointing to your main website they would only point to one other of the satellite sites, so A would point to B, B would point to C, C would point to D and d would point to A with all other external links have a rel=”nofollow” attribute so not to leak away Google Juice.

Why on earth would you go to all this trouble? Back-links are the life blood of ranking in search engines but they can be very time consuming to acquire and that time adds up to lots of money. Building-out a number of great content websites can can you an ongoing set of strong links. The sites you build are under your control.

Don’t get me wrong, not for a second am I suggesting you don’t need a robust back-link strategy to go along with the satellite program, you do, this is just a highly effective way that gives you one more weapon in your arsenal to get to the top of the rankings.

Some think having a blog that helps shape the views and services offered at your website and helps in promotion both to the public and the search engines is old hat. I’m not in that camp. Blogs can have real impact in traffic, rankings and perception of authority.

If you have been neglecting your blog it’s time to once again dust it off and let the world know what you have to say. The main caveat is, blog at least 4 times every week and keep it going otherwise you are wasting real valuable time for no real benefit.

Once you get the old blog cleaned up and back on track make sure you have it listed in lots of good blog directories that are part of your link strategy. Here are a few I think offer value. Of course there are many more places to list your blog, some cost and some are free. The trick in to jump in and experience success.

1. Best Of The Web  BOTW
2. EatonWeb Directory
3. Powered by WordPress Directory
4. Wingee Directory
5. Delightful Blogs Directory

Many of you have heard me talk about Squidoo.com and I expect some of you have actively invested time and effort into promoting your business or organization by building a couple of lenses at Squidoo. But just adding a couple of pages to a service like Squidoo or another free topic builder is not the end of the work.

In the last year I have built over 125 pages or lenses as they are called at Squidoo to test out what was possible, to test out what works and what doesn’t. Squidoo is a good source of back-links for your main website, it seems to get quick ranking and listing in search but unlink an authority site like Wikipedia it may not hold onto a high listing unless you are doing lots of regular updates to your lenses.

I recommend you create your Squidoo lenses in conjunction with your article marketing and satellite websites so that everything is traveling around your main website universe in a smooth orbit. Of course as with all subjects there is a wide latitude in what topics you choose when building lenses at Squidoo.

I’ll use some examples of lenses I recently add to Squidoo. First is my lens for Utterli which is a mobile service for publishing your social media bits. Second is Social Media Tips, a collection of things to do to expand your social media footprint. Third is my lens called Google Search Alternatives, thoughts and listings of search beyond Google. Forth is Micro Blogging and as the name says it is about the joys of Micro Blogging.

Each one of the lenses I list above is tied into SEO and this blog, I use them to add value to this blog and garner authority within search. As you can see the titles of the each lens fits nicely into my SEO universe but each can stand alone. Within this subject there are a multitude of articles I can write, pages I can build on my website and an equal number of external topic pages I can create at sites like Squidoo.

Populate your content universe with many views and colors of a topic, it will garner authority for your business and ranking for your organization.

Wednesday

A couple of blogs entries to take note of, over at John Battelle’s blog he let’s us know “Apparently Bill Gates is still engaged at Microsoft, at least on one issue: Search. From a piece covering the integration of Powerset into Microsoft’s search index:” Check it out.

Over at We as humans always want the best… the top… the supreme… but in link building, that doesn’t always matter. Yes, if you can get some good PR 6+ links, it’s going to help you out in a pretty tough niche. But, if you have a fairly uncompetitive niche, then go for any backlinks. Link Building Bible postulates some good common sense “We as humans always want the best… the top… the supreme… but in link building, that doesn’t always matter. Yes, if you can get some good PR 6+ links, it’s going to help you out in a pretty tough niche. But, if you have a fairly uncompetitive niche, then go for any backlinks.” Check It out.

Finally Arron Wall over at SEOBook.com shares some thoughts about being real and being polished. Check it out.

Finding links back to your business can sure seem like climbing a mountian. So as I travel around the web looking for the perfect links for myself and my clients I keep 2 lists. The first list is of links that are not all that hot but which I signed up with none the less. The second list is of strong links, these are the ones I will go back to time and time again to get backlinks for new clients.

Here are four strong websites that offer you an opportunity for strong backlinks. First is Plurk, it is a jazzy version of Twitter, second is Ziggs, it is a business profile website. Third is Mixx, it is a group site where you can list articles and sites you have found on the web and start your own community centered groups. And forth is a site I just found called Searchles, it is a bit like Mixx.

All four of the sites are “follow” links sites, at least they are when I write this.