Link Baiting – with the paid links debate clearing up, it’s clear that obvious link purchases will result in penalties to your site. Reciprocal linking holds very little weight too these days so alternatives must be suggested for a link building strategy. I won’t go into exact details of link baiting but even a simple piece of interesting information can result in hundreds of one way links to your website.

Blogs – That’s right, corporate and e-commerce websites should have a blog associated with the business name. It’s 2008 and blogs are bigger and stronger than ever online, creating and managing a blog will open up opportunities for one way links, returning traffic and updated fresh content (“yum yum” says Google). More companies are starting to do this as it’s also a nice experience to offer some sort of relationship to your customers. I know I’d prefer to buy a product from someone I had some degree of trust with, be it through brand recognitions or online relationship – writer to reader.

Social Media – I’ve been blogging about this for a while too so just to cover this briefly. Create profiles on all social media/bookmarking websites and hire someone to manage the accounts all day long. It’s an investment that should be considered for a long term strategy, branding, relationship building and link generation are all positive outcomes from investment.

On site optimization – Still a very important investment from an SEO point of view. Seomoz recently posted a great update on title tags, Meta data and URL structures. All traffic increasing methods and should be maintained to the highest standard.

Analytics and traffic analysis – In my honest opinion you don’t need to fork out for highly priced analytic programs. Google Analytics offers a very comprehensive package for the amazing price of…nothing. An investment should be made into setting up clear goals for your website and then using the data to optimise your site structure and content. An increase in sales or conversions will be a guarantee and a clear understanding of where your traffic originates can help producing domain traffic reports.

For those of you that have still not heard about this idea from Google, I’ll catch you up to speed.

Google plans to create a user generated content site, similar to Wiki, where by information can be collected and distributed accordingly. An interesting section of the announcement was this paragraph:

“Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”

It’s certainly a social approach to the Wiki and with revenue sharing available this will no doubt open up opportunities for people.

For more information on this visit the official Google Blog

Also check out the large screenshot of Google Knol

Well Facebook is once again making the headlines, once again involving one of the giants of the web.

• It has been reported, according to the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft are in talks with Facebook to buy a stake in the social media site.
• It is thought that Google are also interested in purchasing a steak in Facebook.
• Microsoft are believed to have valued Facebook in the region of $10 Billion dollars (wow)
• Microsoft already have a relationship with Facebook as they are the soul provider of online advertisements on Facebook.
• All parties have refused to comment about this.

Well I wouldn’t have expected Microsoft to do this if I’m going to be honest, lets see what happens over the next few days.