The Friday Internet Marketing Roundup

Eric Brantner

SEO Writer

Starting today, we are going to have a new feature here on the Directory One blog. Every Friday will now include an Internet marketing roundup. These posts will include recaps of the week’s best blogs from both here at Directory One and around the web. In short, we hope this Friday roundup will serve to keep you on top of important Internet marketing news you may have missed. So, let’s get this show started.

On the D1 Blog

Here are some posts from this week you might have overlooked.

On Monday, April Hall wrote a great post explaining the benefits of guest blogging. In this article, she details how guest blogging can improve traffic and create a loyal base of readers. She also implores fellow bloggers to allow other authors to guest post on their blog. April explains that allowing someone else to post on your site will keep your readers engaged and establish your blog as an industry resource.

A couple of days later, yours truly posted an entry about 5 unique ways to research keywords. I wrote this post because I believe people rely too heavily on keyword research tools. While these tools are certainly important, I contend we should further our keyword research by thinking outside the box. Doing this will allow us to generate new keywords we may have overlooked in the past.

Around the Web

I spend quite a bit of time reading up on the latest Internet marketing news. Here are a few of my favorite recent posts from around the web.

his post actually goes back to last week, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz conducted a study comparing the search performance of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and Cuil. While I believe the test was highly subjective, he does have a lot of useful information in this post. Find out which one Rand believes is the best performing search engine.

In another post from last week, Ann Smarty discusses 3 ways to give your keywords prominence. She argues that keyword density is overrated, but using keyword prominence can improve your search rankings. I actually agree with this post as I’ve felt people place way too much emphasis on keyword density. Keyword prominence seems to be a much more effective way to make your site relevant for targeted keywords.

On August 6, 2008, Andrew Shotland created a post verifying what I already knew. He says that SEO is a quickly growing industry. His post uses graphs from Google Insight displaying the sharp increase SEO has seen in search volume over the past couple years. This is certainly not surprising as I believe more and more businesses will begin to see the necessity of having a sound SEO strategy.