"There is no doubt that link building is a huge factor in gaining search rankings," says John Ellis. "However, many Web marketers forget to practice quality link-building tactics on their own site." Before you go after the local high school, the Chamber of Commerce, or even a prominent blogger in your niche, make sure that your site is full of link-worthy content. This includes fresh, relevant text and images that are easy to navigate. Ellis also says that the way you draw attention to links--by highlighting logical keywords and not using a "click here" marker--can go …

The SEMPO Institute offers an online training program for search newbies and pros with a bit more experience, and Dana Larson reviews the trade organization's Advanced SEO Course. The course goes beyond the basics of SEO with lessons on keyword research, Web site construction and auditing, link building tactics and copywriting, as well as analytics. Advanced SEO is comprised of five chapters with three lessons in each, and students need to pass a 20-question test at the end of each lesson to move on. "The difficulty levels of the questions vary to make sure the reader pays attention …

Spokeo is the latest social search info aggregator/people search service--a new offering that the Pandia team has dubbed "the Big Brother of social networking" because of how thorough the engine is. Once a user submits the username and password from one of her e-mail accounts (from AOL, Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo) Spokeo gets to work digging up all sorts of publicly available info about her contacts. Available resources include movie rating sites like Flixter, Pandora playlists and Last.fm favorites, photos from Flickr, Twitter posts, StumbleUpon reviews, even Amazon wish lists--and the list goes on and on. And since …

Understanding that the search engines' spiders crawl a site page-by-page, and rank each page's content individually, is one of basic tenets of SEO. Bill Slawski says that the next phase may be about site-wide analysis and assessment, as evidenced by a patent Yahoo recently released a paper for (but actually filed for in mid-2006). With site-wide analysis, Yahoo's algorithm could consider factors like the keywords and meta data, in- and outbound links, as well as each page's topic and the way it's presented--all in aggregate, and all to develop a more accurate, comprehensive hierarchy. Slawski …

Consumers and consumer advocacy groups can create a Web site using a manufacturer's name or other branded term as part of the domain, even if it's to publish negative or positive reviews about the company or its products--as that has been legally deemed fair use on multiple occasions. But Tom Crandall questions whether it's still fair use if those sites are generating revenue from Google ads at the same time. "How can this be considered non-commercial when the unauthorized party is leveraging the IP assets of another entity, in a disparaging way, to generate revenue? There's a lot …

Talk about courage under fire. Greg Sterling notes that in the past few weeks since Microsoft's semi-hostile takeover bid, Yahoo has debuted seven new (or formerly incubated) initiatives, including Apex (a unified advertising platform), an open-source infrastructure for its search index, and the acquisition of Maven Networks. And let's not forget that the Web giant seriously trimmed some fat by laying off 1,000 employees. As CEO Jerry Yang said, Microsoft's unwanted bid has been a "galvanizing event for everyone at Yahoo." The company still faces major hurdles--including various shareholder lawsuits for refusing the deal, the threat of a …

Local review aggregator Yelp has snagged some $15 million in its fourth round of financing--for a total of $31 million since its founding in the summer of 2004. The San Francisco-based company has said that it will use the money to expand the service geographically, beef up the sales team, and open an office in New York City. The company shared internal Google Analytics stats with TechCrunch, including the 2.3 million reviews and 8.3 million monthly uniques--which blogger Henry Work found impressive. "Yelp is in a competitive space with Citysearch's Insider Pages and Yellowbot. The real competition, though, …