Aaron Wall believes SEO is the most "explosive" form of search engine marketing that has the highest return, especially for successful companies already in the game. Wall identifies site attributes that can make or break an SEO project. For example, new sites typically don't have that competitive advantage, so owners might want to consider letting it age a bit by doing some of the SEO marketing in-house before seeking professional help, he writes.

Rand Fishkin notes that no matter how prolific you are online, it's important to network in person with people in online marketing because "a little face time with like-minded folks can build important bonds that far surpass what can be accomplished online." In-person networking can improve knowledge, connections, and personal and company branding. Getting the practical experience and hearing firsthand stories about projects that work can help SEO professionals become more successful. Attending events allow SEO professionals to meet others in the field, who are typically more than willing to help when they can.

The season to start thinking about marketing and media budgets for next year is upon us, according to Jeff Campbell. So, he serves up a quick reference guide to the most popular agency fee models in hopes of giving a little guidance. The three most popular fee models are Percentage of Media, Retainer/Dedicated Staff, and CPA/Performance. He defines and lists the pros and cons for each. For example, the CPA/Performance-based model handcuffs the agency to the client's site content, potentially causing some conflict between partners when one is investing resources and the other isn't, he writes.

Knowledge on a variety of topics, creativity, task-oriented behavior, attention to detail and ability to multitask are five skills that successful link marketers possess. That's according to Justilien Gaspard, who believes not every link marketer will excel at all five. However, the more proficient they are, the more likely they will succeed, he writes. Gaspard explains these five skills are just a few important qualities to consider when searching for an SEO marketer to build links. It's important to find the correct person that will offer balance to your team of employees, as well as fit in with …

Richard Baxter discusses whether Web site owners really need large numbers of relevant links to get a site to rank for top keywords. He writes, "No. As long you've built links on reasonably trusted, authoritative domains, and you've thrown in some (sometimes over) optimized anchor text for good measure, you can still rank." Baxter provides supporting evidence to prove his point with an example. He starts by gathering data from Yahoo Site Explorer and Linkscape. Then he adds the usual metrics, along with an additional series of percentage calculations and counts of inbound link relevancy by profiling …

Last week Ywitter released new terms of service that include a clause on advertising. So Aaron Goldman discusses four ad formats that he believes could become "quite successful" for Twitter. These formats are in-text, contextual in-stream, contextual on-site and sponsored hash tags. Goldman describes each, adding that each suggestion coincides with marketing lessons learned from Google he laid out in his recent MediaPost Search Insider column.

If you're looking to increase productivity, buy a productivity book, according to Matt Cutts. Any book will do because you probably won't read it, he writes. By the way, Cutts uses a book titled "The Now Habit." Now that you've bought the book, next step is to tell yourself, "if I don't get X done, I'm going to have to read that productivity book." Staring at the book could give you as much motivation as actually reading it, he writes.

Are you looking for successful link builders? Melanie Nathan lists the top 18 link builders found on Twitter in a post describing what's typically considered the SEO's least favorite task. Link building tends to be tedious, time consuming and mind numbingly hard, but many of these professionals make the task look fun and easy, she writes. Some of the link building experts Nathan highlights includes @wiep, @debramastaler, @wilreynolds, @gabgoldenberg, @will_crithclow. (By the way, the post racked up 130 tweets as of 10:30 PST on Wednesday.)

It's not easy to get rid of hundreds of expired pages, but Ann Smarty walks you through the task. The problem needs attention because Google allocates a limited amount of time to crawl each Web site, taking several factors into account. For starters, hundreds of low-quality pages takes precious time and could prevent it from looking for other, more important pages, she writes. Then consider too many pages with almost no content and outdated data will result in wasted link juice. And, people taken to those pages will see outdated information that results in a bad experience. …

Rand Fishkin explains that there's a "large contingent of folks doing SEO who are a little confused" about how search engines crawl and index content. It's not just a simple in and out process, he explains. Search engines crawl the Web and choose pages to index based on a variety of metrics. An illustration provides insight into the different levels. Fishkin explains that the information can help educate "SEO outsiders" on why pages may not draw traffic, though metrics appearing in XML sitemaps show in Google Blogsearch queries.