Rand Fishkin gives us eight ways to buy links without buying links. The post, sourced from his presentation at Pubcon, walks you through examples of valuable methods to leverage finances for link growth while dodging Google's webspam edicts. (The slides are available for download, too.) The examples Fishkin provides come from event sponsorships, charitable donations, Web site purchases, content acquisitions, advertising to viral traffic, bloggers product reviews, content partnership and blog incubation.

Charts filled with data are important. They provide C-level executives with metrics to determine where to allocate the quarterly budget for Web improvements. How much should they allocate to SEM? Aaron Wall's Firefox plug-in RankChecker makes creating charts a little easier, according to Frank Watson. The tool grabs positions for keywords in Google, Yahoo and MSN simultaneously and lets you export them into a spreadsheet. Watson suggests taking the keywords and creating a master sheet. Then pull in data that demonstrates the traffic each keyword brought in. With it, you can set up a spreadsheet that has the …

Optimize your tags based on a well-researched keyword strategy and look past algorithm-bait SEO tags, according to Marty Weintraub. Think about fundamental marketing processes because, when you strip away the onion skin, SEO is about writing rich and compelling organic advertisements. Keep the basics in mind and treat every tag and description similar to a PPC ad. "Anything less misses an important opportunity to raise your listing, bookmarks and all good things coming from tags above the fray," he writes. Watson believes you should think of title and description tags as the headline and the copy for …

Sure to put a smile on your face, this SEO post serves up a comical look at keyword stuffing, a practice that About.com defines as a "deceptive technique to try and elevate a Web site's search engine result ranking by hiding text, so it is unlikely to be seen by a visitor but will be visible to search engines." In the comic strip, Rosie asks Simon if he has been keyword stuffing after a conversation leads him to answer her questions with the same response in multiple ways. For example, Simon tells Rosie he is going to …

Here's a few words of wisdom from David Roth, who gives you a list of paid search tactics, and business strategies that support them, to get better results for your money. For example: Define ways to measure results such as return on ad spend or cost per acquisition. Remember that brand terms are typically more profitable. And, decide if you want to measure profit by ad group, campaign or keyword. Roth provides insight into managing an approach at Yahoo, as an example. "As you get ready for this economic rollercoaster ride, fasten your seatbelt and hang on …

Blogs are the most powerful link-building tool, writes Ann Smarty. She defines both "blog carnivals" and "writing projects," which provide creative ways to build links with blogs. Smart suggests starting carnivals on Monday. She believes they can bring in sold links when managed properly, and mentions a Web site that updates you on the most recent and popular carnivals to consider. While there is no need to limit your strategy to blog carnivals and writing projects, the two are the most popular networking methods, she writes.

In a video posted by Scott Willoughby, Rand Fishkin simplifies the benefits of PageRank, what it means, how to use the technique, and what the metrics reveal about your site, pages and links to help build keywords that improve rankings. Last week in Part I, Fishkin talked about global link popularity. This week in Part II, he discusses what the theory can tell you when applying it. For starters, it can tell you the pages earning link juice and the importance of those links. Rishkin says if you know certain pages earn lots of link juice, you can …

Baidu.com, a Chinese search engine company, now faces an antimonopoly lawsuit brought on by Qmyyw.com, a Web site established by a Hebei medicine company, according to Shilin Jia. Baidu, Google's top rival in China, had been accused of misusing SEM to manipulate search results and accepting 3 million RMB from Sanlu, a Chinese dairy products company, to remove search results of negative images. Jia draws on several posts, including a few written in Chinese and one that compares Google's and Baidu's SEO strategies, to encapsulate the news. He points to a post in Tianya, a popular Chinese Internet …

The number of pages linking to your site determines your popularity on the Web, which in turn affects your search engine rankings. So, how do you build the number of links connecting to your site? First, know what sites link to yours. A URL mentioned in this post provides a method to monitor your link popularity. The post also provides seven suggestions on growing your inbound links. Demonstrating your expertise is one way to establish your presence. Other pointers include writing a tool and providing it for free download, offering your articles to other sites for free publishing, …

Ann Smarty analyzes how much semantic HTML structure really matters. She poses questions related to page headings and multiple H1 tags on a page, before making a few educated "guesses" to answer the questions. "While the benefits for accessibility and usability are quite clear, there has never been any real evidence that there really is any benefit for rankings," Smarty writes. "Does Google pay any attention to the HTML markup?" She ties the topic of semantic HTML structure to prior posts that provide information on a few tools to analyze the structure on a page, review best practices …