Link popularity, link building and link development are thrown about quite a bit in search-focused commentary, but do you know exactly what each of those terms mean? Angela Moore serves up concise definitions in her first post as an Intrapramote blogger. Link popularity is a metric used to describe both the quantity and quality of the links coming in to all the pages on a site. "It also measures how good the linking sites are by looking at things like how many links are pointing to that site, the quality of the content, the history of the …

Ann Smarty serves up another robust review of essential SEO tools--this time, focusing on applications that let Webmasters assess the usability of their sites. There are general page viewers and accessibility checkers like Wave, which shows features and red flags possible problems in graphical format; while Lynx viewer shows a text-only version of a page to ensure that it functions even if users turn off scripts like Java and CSS. You can use Image Analyser and Alt Text Checker to test whether your images have alt tags and are set at the right values, and there are also …

As the presidential candidates duke it out over the airwaves, Jonathan Mendez takes a look at their search strategies--specifically their landing pages and site optimization--to see who's ahead. "I conducted a heuristic evaluation using the scenario of a person looking for information on the energy plans of both candidates-- arguably one of the most important issues in the election," he says. And John McCain came out on top. A simple search for "McCain" turned up two pro-McCain PPC ads. A search for "Obama," on the other hand, turned up four ads, one of which was anti-Obama. While the …

Twitter has quickly emerged as one of the go-to tools for brand monitoring and reputation management, and as Miguel Cancino notes, it's becoming an SEO tool as well. While doing some "vanity Googling," Cancino found that his tweets (or the 140 character Twitter messages) comprised about 20% of the results on the first page. So imagine the potential branding benefits of a company's own tweets (or the tweets of its devoted customers) taking up that much SERP space. "It appears to me that the single biggest factor contributing to Twitter's impressive SEO is the fact that Twitter profiles/status …

Joshua Greenbaum digs into a new product coming out of Microsoft aimed at helping advertisers determine the ROI of all of their search campaigns, and explains how it might be the software giant's most powerful assault on Google thus far. "Here's what Microsoft and its CRM team are up to," Greenbaum says. "Coming to CRM Online this fall--and for the low, low price of 'free,' no less--is a new feature that lets Microsoft CRM customers track the success of their search word-based web marketing campaigns. The concept is simple: capture the leads as generated by your favorite search …

Andy Beal shoots the breeze with Bryan Eisenberg, multivariate testing expert and author of "Always Be Testing." Eisenberg offers examples of when multivariate testing might be a better choice than A/B testing, as well as the variables that a marketer might want to include in their test. "A/B testing techniques can work great when you are comparing the results of one page versus the results of a second page," Eisenberg says. "For example, which landing page from your radio commercial converts more customers, the one with the great copy and no pictures or the one with ok copy …

Mike Blumenthal pulls the best tidbits out of Eric Enge's interview with Yahoo local execs Frazier Miller and Shailesh Bhat (over at the Stone Temple Blog) to shed some light on the inner workings of Yahoo's local engine and how marketers should think about optimizing for it. For example, "Yahoo Local relies very heavily on the licensed feeds that they get through data providers like InfoUSA, Acxiom, and Localeze and these should be the primary sources for maintaing data accuracy in your Yahoo record," Blumenthal says. There's also quite a bit of human moderation going on--something …

While talks of a Google/Verizon search deal have simmered, Yahoo and AT&T launched a partnership that will give Yahoo oneSearch the default "on deck" search service for upcoming handsets. "This puts Yahoo!'s search and brand in front of a potential 70 million mobile AT&T users," Greg Sterling says. "The deal was announced earlier in the year and is part of the broader, long-term relationship between the companies." Of course, Yahoo will provide the mobile ads, while AT&T's own Yellowpages.com will deliver the local search listings. But Sterling says the bigger news is the potential market share Yahoo could …

"It's been a while since I've gone out on the hunt for links from quality directories, and the experience these past few days hasn't been good: There's a lot more junk out there than not," Matt McGee says. "This can be a problem for the small business owner who may struggle to know how to tell a quality directory from the rest." So he offers some tips for deciding whether a directory is even worth your time. The first red flag should go up if a directory requires a reciprocal link--as it means the company is likely more …