Ann Smarty provides details on a "few highly effective, not yet overused" link-building techniques. For example: Link back to popular blogs that publish trackbacks and find sites and blogs that mention your site and develop relations with them because it's easier to find and build relationships with people who know you. Smarty suggests using the link provided in the post to search on your domain name for places that mention you but don't link back.

Rand Fishkin and crew want to share conclusions from some recent testing on internal links and anchor text in Google. Although not 100% proven, he writes, the findings could come in handy. Among the conclusions from Fishkin's SEO team: internal anchor text has little impact on the homepage; excessive internal anchor text linking and multiplication can trip an automated penalty on Google; and, adding more internal links to a page doesn't necessarily add more anchor text value.

Aaron Wall has posted an interview with social media guru Muhammad Saleem that provides a look into ways he stays actively involved on sites such as Twitter, along with a few insights on marketing strategies and what sometimes goes on behind closed doors such as payola. In the 1960s, payola was mostly associated with record labels and radio stations. "There is quite a bit of payola that goes on but fortunately that's all short-term because the sites and users get banned pretty quickly," Saleem told Wall in the interview. "I routinely get some pretty spammy emails about payola …

So, you had to cut your marketing budget back this year and want to tap into SEO to pick up the slack. Stoney deGeyter doesn't map your individual marketing plan in this post, but he does give you a foundation and useful guidelines on which to build. How do you optimize a campaign? Look toward site architecture, keyword research, usability, keyword optimization, and link building. In this post, deGeyter details each of these elements. Keep in mind, each Web site is different, so the path you take should remain flexible, he writes.

Large media brands may want to take heed. They typically have high Web site traffic, but "how's your traffic growth"? asks Erik Dafforn. He discusses ways to increase visibility and properly use assets you have likely spent years developing. Dafforn suggests paying attention to entire blocks of keywords, getting content indexed rapidly and spending time commenting on blog comments left by consumers and clients to show readers you are available for them any time. "Ensure that your comments have a dedicated RSS feed so your readers' input can be crawled and associated with the article's URL as quickly …

Brian Carter attempts to debunk five AdWords myths, including"AdWords is too expensive," and the all-too-famous one, "Google is out to get me." For example: Don't worry about landing in the No.1 spot on search engine query results. It's overrated. Instead, concentrate on improving key performance indicators (KPIs), which usually represent cost per lead (CPL) or return on ad spend (ROAS). "If getting the number one position increases your CPC too much, then your CPL skyrockets and your ROAS plummets. And that's bad," Carter writes.

Search engines don't see all types of links, so when building links for SEO focus on those that make a difference, writes Gyutae Park. He provides examples of three links that are invisible to engines, including Nofollow links created by Google, which allow webmasters to tell search engines when a link should not influence rankings. Park makes suggestions on tools to use, such as the SEO for Firefox extension, which highlights nofollow links on the page. This makes them easy to find. Other link types search engines cannot read and execute include Javascript code. "You might find …

Managing your online reputation has become a hot topic these days. (Unfortunately, it's also not uncommon to read about a CEO or two who has inflated the books to make the company look good.) Blog posts get picked up and tossed from one social media site like Twitter, to Facebook or MySpace -- "and we see companies rise and fall in hours as the social media hordes decide whether to worship or vilify the company of the moment," writes Jennifer Laycock, in part two of a six-part series exploring lessons you can learn from the classic story Pinocchio. …

Marty Weintraub thinks measuring income from AdSense and validating content and SEO investments are relatively straightforward. Leads are easy to count, PPC expenses simple to calculate. Evaluating a Web site's continual profitability, however, is not quite as cut and dried. So he serves up six less obvious cash-in-the-bank criteria by which to measure your site's hidden success. For example, a site is effective when it differentiates your products from competitors in search engine queries. Add details about your company and products so consumer can easily locate them in local and mobile search engine results. This will come …

An update on Yahoo's terms and conditions appears to give the search engine permission to "hijack" your search marketing campaigns, according to Nathania Johnson, who believes the verbiage in the T&Cs appears to suggest Yahoo can help to optimize accounts for those U.S. advertisers not bound by an insertion order. Bloggers commenting on the post admit Yahoo has gone in and "optimized" client accounts without their knowledge. "This is kind of like a fast food restaurant going into your burger after you've take a bite and removing or adding pickles, ketchup and cheese," Johnson writes. "Or your cable …