OK, let’s be honest right off the bat: most press releases received by most media organizations go right into the recycling bin. But that doesn’t mean yours will. For one thing, the good press releases have a few things in common, and for another, “media” now includes bloggers, ezines, streaming content producers, and freelancers. Whoever you plan to send press releases to, do some research on them first and make sure that your press releases would be a good fit for their organization. It’s the 21st century version of the old “don’t send a dog article to a cat magazine” rule.

The press release is by no means dead, and is in fact very useful in many situations. Your press releases should be sent to news media for the purpose of letting the world know about company developments and newsworthy items. Concentrate on the word “newsworthy.” The number one reason journalists toss press releases is because they so often consist of self promotion dressed up to appear newsworthy.

So really, the first thing you should ask yourself when you’re thinking about sending a press release is “Should I be sending a press release? Or is this just an exercise in vanity or wishful thinking?” Use the “so what” test, because this is what journalists and publishers do. If your press release says, “XYZ Widgetry, Inc. recently hired Dr. Joan Thingity to be head of their engineering development department,” the first thing the journalist is going to think is, you guessed it, “So what?”

Ah, but if your next sentence tells about how she won a MacArthur genius grant for her work on desktop plasma widgetry (or whatever) and that she was at one time part of NASA’s astronaut corps, then you’ve got an answer for the “So what” question. If your press release cannot answer the “So what” question, then don’t send it. Wait until you have something meaty.

While a successful press release ought to be newsworthy, you may have to make the tie-in to the news yourself. Journalists are busy enough that they’re not going to automatically realize that the release of your new phone app coincides with the latest iPhone release. You’ll have to spell it out.

Press Release Tips

Here are some ways to make sure that your press release is newsworthy and therefore less likely to be chucked in the recycle bin.

• Explain its place in a current controversy, whether it’s net neutrality or censorship of search engine results in some foreign country.
• Make a skilled prediction: “By 2015, six million homes will have subscribed to our service, based on current trends.”
• Tie it in with an upcoming holiday: “Our widget is designed to cut the average holiday shopping time by 45%.”
• Adapt a national survey for local use: “Thirty million of those people ditching their landlines are expected to buy a smart phone within the next five years. Widgetry International releases an average of 12 smart phone apps per month across all platforms.”

You get the idea.

Some other possibilities for making your press release more appealing include:

• Including results of a survey or a poll in your press release.
• Hold a competition or a contest and announce it in your press release.
• Announce changes in prices (the downward kind, anyway).
• Write about a prestigious award one of your workers has won.
• Stage a debate or other special event and announce it
• Studies and surveys, which “create” news for you
• Lists that tie to your business: “Top Seven Smart Phone Apps in the Tri-County Area”
• “Hero” stories, such as the maintenance guy who rescued the litter of kittens living under the physical plant
• Relevant trends with pertinent facts and figures

In brief, your press release should include the following:

• A headline that is a very compact version of the key point of the press release
• An opening sentence that can grab the attention of even the most jaded editor
• An opening paragraph that covers the who, what, where, when, why, and how.
• A second paragraph that expands on the topic of the press release
• A third paragraph that includes relevant quotes from a spokesperson or other big wig at your company
• A fourth paragraph that tells a little more about what your company does
• A final paragraph that sums things up tidily, perhaps with a summary quote
• Contact information
• The universal “Here ends the press release” symbol of ### under the last line of the release

You may wonder why you should bother at all with press releases, since they have such a high chance of disappearing into the gaping maw that is the editor’s office, never to be seen again. But it’s all a part of your overall marketing strategy. SEO has a place, plain old advertising has a place, and media relations has a place too. Once you do get a press release or two picked up, consider contacting the editor or reporters you have traction with and offer to send them exclusives. If they know that they’re the only game in town getting your press releases, they may just take you up on it. But none of this can happen without first mastering the press release. You’ll get nowhere unless you have correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation, plus the compelling writing necessary to stand out from the rest of the herd.

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Fortunately, to have a great website today you don’t have to be an HTML wizard or have mad programming skills. There are plenty of technologies for web design that let you have a dynamic or interactive interface on your web pages. Four of those technologies are Ajax, Flash, PHP, and ASP.

Ajax is short for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a group of web development techniques that are used to create interactive web apps. Using Ajax, web applications can, for example, retrieve data from the server in the background without changing the display and behavior of the page the user is on. XML is not technically required, and the requests from the servers do not have to be asynchronous.

But it’s the asynchronous aspect of Ajax that people love. In standard web apps, interaction has to happen on a step by step basis in a frustrating game of click and wait. But with Ajax, the JavaScript that’s loaded as the page loads handles data validation and manipulation without a trip to the server and back. While it’s changing the display based on a visitor click, it’s sending data back and forth to the server, but the data transfer doesn’t depend on the customer’s actions. The result: almost total elimination of the slow click-wait cycle.

Ajax uses a combination of HTML and CS for creating and styling information. It is, in short, used so that web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small quantities of data with the server while working in the background, so the web page doesn’t have to be reloaded whenever the user requests a change. This goes a long way to speed up the page and make it more user-friendly. That’s because instead of having entire applications posted back to a server, you can have only a small part of the page update independently of the rest of the page. Bottom line: visitors will hate you if you make it so the page has to reload every time they respond to an on-page interactive component.

Flash is used to add, well, flash to your website. It isn’t easy to learn to write good animations using Flash, so sometimes developers learn to use Flash and then feel like they have to use it everywhere to justify having spent so much time learning it. But you have to be careful with Flash because there are drawbacks to using it. For one thing, search engines have a hard time crawling websites that heavily use Flash graphics, so it’s hard to rank high with an all-Flash website. So it’s not a good idea to use Flash just because you can.

Whether using Flash is a good or bad choice depends on what your site is for. Flash is best suited as an animation tool, and it’s supported on almost all the web browsers that people use, so you can be pretty sure that if you build a site with a Flash plugin, visitors will see it as you intended it to be seen. Video is a good Flash application because it doesn’t require a plugin like Windows MediaPlayer, and Flash is good for games, because it has better browser support than Ajax. Also, vector graphics look prettier in Flash, and it allows image replacement for special fonts on a site.

On the other hand, unless Flash is optimized for a site, Flash applications can be big and take a long time to load. Sometimes the entire Flash site has to be loaded before it can even be used. People hate this. And frankly, that little graphical countdown clock is small consolation to those waiting to use a site.

Flash usually disables the browser’s “back” button. That means that if a user clicks it while deep in the bowels of a Flash site, they’re taken to the website they were on before they got to the Flash site. If they want to return to the Flash site, they have to re-navigate back to where they were on the Flash site. Face it: the average web surfer has the attention span of a gnat on crack and probably isn’t going to go to all that trouble twice.

PHP (which stands for hypertext preprocessor) is a scripting language that is open-source so that users have access to the source code and can build, extend, or otherwise customize it for their own use. PHP mostly works as a filter, as it takes input from a stream or a file containing text and / or PHP scripts and outputs another data stream. Usually the output is HTML. While it was originally designed to make dynamic web pages, PHP focuses mainly on server-side scripting now. This is basically a way of making web pages interactive. PHP is also popular in the development of frameworks that provide the structure for rapid application development in which apps are written as they are being planned, making it easier to crank apps out faster.

There are lots of other technologies for web design besides Ajax, Flash, and PHP, but these are three that are common. If you want to learn the basics of Ajax, go to http://www.learn-ajax-tutorial.com/. To learn more about Flash, go to http://www.w3schools.com/Flash/default.asp. If you’re interested in learning PHP, then try http://devzone.zend.com/article/627. While these are designed to make your site faster and more attractive and fun to visit, they aren’t the whole picture. Without content, the prettiest site in the world isn’t going to keep people coming back.

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Just over a year ago, Google made some changes in their algorithm that appeared to be giving weight to “brands.” Now, “brand” is a short word that’s loaded with a lot of meaning. When this change took place, there were plenty of people running around in circles waving their arms in the air thinking that the big, rich corporations were going to dominate the search engine rankings and the whole purpose of organic search would be lost forever (the purpose being bringing users relevant results that could be from anyone, anywhere if they were right on target).

Fortunately, the passage of time has let people make some more considered analyses of that change. To get up to speed, let’s take a quick look at some of the ancient history (dating back to 2003) in search engine technology.

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It seems that practically every webmaster understands (or has at least heard) that email marketing is important. The problem is, too many webmasters just stick an email newsletter signup form on their website and figure that they’ve got email marketing taken care of. Nothing could be further from the truth.

An email marketing campaign needs to be carefully planned, setup and optimized for maximum performance. There are many aspects of an email marketing campaign that need your serious attention – opt-ins, messages, deliverability, open rates, etc. This article will just cover one important aspect: email opt-in rate.

In this article, I want to cover three keys to a high opt-in rate that every email marketer should constantly work to improve. (For the purposes of this article, it does not really matter if your campaign is primarily a newsletter or autoresponder.)

Key #1: The Offer

The first step to maximize email opt-ins is to offer website visitors a strong value in exchange for subscribing. In most cases, just offering a newsletter is not a strong enough offer – you need something with a much higher perceived value.

One of the best offers is to give a free ebook or whitepaper to subscribers. It does not have to be extensive – oftentimes a 5-10 page ebook that is filled with solid, valuable information will work very well. Make sure that the free gift that you offer subscribers will be appealing and offer value to each segment of traffic that visits your website (or as many of the segments as possible).

An example of a free ebook offer:

(Note how the free ebook in this case is actually relatively promotional in nature. In small, product-focused niches, this strategy often works well. In other markets, you’ll usually need to offer a more educational ebook.)

Key #2: The Opt-in Form

The opt-in form on your website should be crafted and optimized to convert as many visitors as possible into subscribers. The form should be:

• Prominent – Place the opt-in form above the fold on your website and ensure that it is easy to see. You should split test various locations, colors, and designs.
• Compelling – Typically, you will have a small space to present your offer and opt-in form. Take the time to craft compelling copy for your opt-in form. Split-test different headlines, images, submit button texts, etc.
• Easy – Make sure it is as easy as possible for visitors to opt-in. Do not ask for more fields than you need (usually just name and email address should be enough) and make sure each aspect of the opt-in form is easy to understand and use.

Example of a poor opt-in form:

Examples of strong opt-in forms:

Key #3: Getting Your Subscribers To Double-Opt

Note: If you aren’t already, you should be requiring subscribers double-opt in. (We’ll just assume that you are for the rest of this article.)

It is essential that you optimize your double opt-in process, since a poorly constructed process can “leak” a substantial number of subscribers. A well-constructed double opt-in process, though, could reasonably get 70-80% of subscribers to complete the opt-in. (While losing 20 to 30% of subscribers may sound bad, realize that a substantial portion of those are probably users who mistyped their email or intentionally submitted an incorrect e-mail.)

Here are several factors you should look at to improve your confirmed opt-in rate:

• Thank you page – the page that subscribers see after completing the single opt-in is pivotal. This page should make it blindingly clear that the opt-in process is not completed, and that they need to check their e-mail to complete the process and receive their free gift.Example of a strong than you page header: “Important: Please check your email for your confirmation message”
• Confirmation email – make sure that the subject line of the double-opt in email makes it very clear that the user’s response is required for them to get the free gift that they requested. In the body of the email, make it clear that the user will be able to instantly download the free gift as soon as they click the confirmation link.Example of a strong confirmation message subject: “Response Required: Please confirm your ebook download request – _______”
• Deliverability – it’s a factor that is easy to forget, but make sure that your confirmation emails are being delivered and that they’re not being caught by spam filters. An easy way to check this is to signup for your list using several free email addresses from the top providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.) and test deliverability yourself.

Summary

Achieving a high email opt-in rate is the starting point for a successful email marketing strategy. Hopefully the tips outlined in this article help you as you continually work to increase your email opt-in rate.

About The Author

Adam J Thompson is Senior Partner at RYP Marketing, providing search engine marketing, conversion rate optimization, and online marketing results to clients around the globe since 2006. You can follow Adam on RYP Marketing’s Facebook page.

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Education specialists will tell you that some of us learn more readily from reading, some from hearing, some from video, and some from doing. It only makes sense that when you conduct an internet search, you avail yourself of all the options when it comes to the information out there on the subject you’re interested in. That’s one reason why multimedia searching is a good idea.

Another reason is that sometimes the best information is something other than a written web page. For example, if you were to find a web page describing a newly discovered piece of music by one of the great composers of the past, the description would no doubt be interesting, but you could really appreciate it better if someone had posted a recording of someone playing the composition.

Likewise with video. While it can be thrilling to read a news story about a very close speed skating finish at the Olympics, you can experience it better if you watch a video of it.

When it comes to using multimedia to improve your search engine rankings, there are a number of ways to do it. You can post your own video content, or you can embed relevant video onto your page.

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Link building is still one of the most important factors in your search engine results page (SERP) rankings and in your Google PageRank and will be from the foreseeable future. Links are still the fundamental connectors on the web, and legitimate links are still a great way to judge importance of a site and just how trustworthy a site is. Google’s search algorithm has learned to devalue purchased or traded links and emphasizing trusted, genuine links. And when those links are further bolstered by the vintage of the domain, user data, and other factors that are hard to fake, that’s when SERP rankings rise.

15 Effective Link Building Methods

Here are 15 great ways to build up the kind of links that will increase your PageRank and your SERP position.

1. People love to link to lists. People like to Digg lists. So include lists. They have an air of authority, and they’re fairly easy to write in many contexts. If the top 10 how-tos have been done to death in your opinion, why not list the top 10 myths about your area of expertise?
2. Speaking of lists, you could create a list of top 10 gurus or authority sites. Sometimes this even results in the guru giving you a back link. Cool.
3. You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating until everyone gets it: write good content that is easy to understand, is spelled correctly, and is free of grammatical mistakes.
4. Give your site an understandable privacy policy and “about” section. This makes your site appear trustworthy, as does a mug shot of yourself. If you need help creating a privacy policy, the Better Business Bureau has easy to follow templates at http://www.bbbonline.org/Privacy/sample_privacy.asp
5. Consider using a pay-per-click ad campaign. It will get relevant traffic to your site, and regardless of how people find your site, if they like it they’ll at least come back, and may well link to you.
6. Syndicate articles at ezinearticles, eHow, GoArticles, and similar sites. Syndicate a press release and send it to some reasonably influential bloggers and journalists. But make sure that it’s a press release that’s actually about something newsworthy, or it will go straight to the circular file. If you track who picks up your press releases you can contact them directly to offer exclusive news.
7. Link to sites in the news in your niche. To find them, do a Google news search on your niche or keywords, as you can see in the screen shot for news searches on 401k investing.
8. Build local (geographical) links by joining the Better Business Bureau, asking for a link from the local chamber of commerce, or submitting your link to relevant government offices.
9. Answer (or ask) questions on Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups and provide links to resources that are relevant.
10. Create a Squidoo lens and link to expert documents and popular tools in your niche. You can also create a link back to your site.
11. If you participate in any forums, check which ones allow you to leave signature links or profile links. Don’t do this without asking first, or you’ll incur the entire forum’s wrath. But a high number of forums do allow signature links or profile links.
12. Write relevant product reviews or product lists on Amazon, mentioning your background in the niche and including a link in your reviewer profile, and review products on sites like ePinions.
13. If you really think you can keep it regularly updated with fresh content, start a blog, link to other blogs, and comment on other blogs. Also list it in some of the better blog directories, like bestoftheweb.org (http://blogs.botw.org/).
14. If you can afford $25 or $50 in prize money, hold a contest. Contests attract links and are a cheap form of advertising.
15. Use your face-to-face relationships to create linking relationships. Trade conferences are great places to find and talk to industry leaders, politicians, and the occasional celebrity. Sometimes the cost of a one-day registration can pay for itself in traction you’ll get from interviews and pictures.

What NOT to do

And for good measure, here’s another link: 5 really bad ways to get links.

1. Buy links. Once Google realizes what you’ve done, they’ll ban you, as will the other search engines. You’ll have to claw your way back into their good graces over a fairly long period of time to get indexed again.
2. Swap links. While not quite as blatantly dishonest as buying links, you’re still getting together with others to squeeze link juice from a stone. You’ll at least get penalized and at worst get de-listed by the search engines.
3. Spam every forum you can find with links, regardless of whether they allow signature links. The few links you get this way will not make up for the bad karma you sow by doing this.
4. Follow as many people as you’re allowed to on Twitter and flood the place with tweets about every tiny thing you can come up with all day long. Anyone dumb enough to follow you back will quickly realize their mistake.
5. Set up a fake “survey” site about what the best product is in your niche. Then, using a different IP address, write “reviews” rating your product the highest and containing links to your awesome site where you sell your awesome product.

You can’t get away from link building when it comes to getting traffic, moving upward in the SERP listings and increasing your PageRank. But don’t try to take the easy way out. The work you put in getting links legitimately will be well worth it over the long term, while ill-gotten links will sabotage your efforts very quickly.

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And you thought the web would allow you to hide in your mom’s basement and run a business to fund your beer and gamer laptop obsession without having to experience direct sunlight or interact with others. Silly you. Being sociable on the web isn’t just neighborly, it’s downright required for running your website or e-business successfully. Fortunately, there are enough tricks and tips today that you can do a lot of it from the privacy of your own office, cubicle, or sofa. Here are five steps to making sure you’re not left behind by the social media tsunami.

1. Go Old School.

This means developing actual face-to-face relationships with real human beings. It can be daunting if you’re the shy type, but the investment of time and occasionally money will pay off in a big way. Attend trade shows, business expos, and other events in your community. Even grant-writing workshops can be great opportunities for building up your flesh-and-blood network. Many communities have business clubs just for people who run their own businesses with the sole purpose of trading information and leads. Try it.

2. Prepare and Plan.

Social media sites help bring together individuals. Keep an eye on the proceedings and get a sense of what people in your field are talking about. Follow people in your industry on Twitter. Get a feeling for the general vibe. Are these deadly serious interactions? Or are they more casual and non-intimidating. Know the climate you’re entering.

You should also know whether you are interested in connecting with marketing experts, product developers, designers, or just plain customers and seek these people out. If you have employees develop a social media policy with guidelines on appropriate ways to engage in social media marketing online. While the attractive redhead in product development might attract plenty of attention with pictures of herself leaning over a copier, you won’t be seen as a serious enterprise (unless you’re a producer of adult content). Get everyone in your firm on the same page when it comes to social media marketing.

Start small. Participate in one or two social media platforms at first, and build your strategy from there. While social media marketing is increasing in performance it doesn’t mean you have to tackle every single platform all at once. Doing so is a recipe for miscommunication and potentially marketing disaster, particularly if you don’t have a social media policy in place.

3. Listen twice as much as you talk.

Know what conversations you’re entering before you enter them. Barging into a conversation with a horribly tone-deaf statement will be something you’ll have to make up for an will cost you valuable social media marketing time. There are several ways you can monitor conversations and social media content to get an idea of the general zeitgeist.

Try Social Media Firehose (http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose) to track a niche or brand across a large range of social media sites. As you can see in the first screen shot, I’ve chosen to track “Nexus One phone.” I don’t care to filter by location, and I’m not interested in filtering out certain domains or URLs (such as my own Tweets on the subject). Once I click on “Run Pipe,” after a minute or two I can look at a map or a list of the latest chatter about the Nexus One phone. The second screen shot shows part of the list of results I got. I can click on any of those and find out the latest of what people are saying on social media about the Nexus One phone.

4. Interact with people.

It’s best to start out small: leave comments on blogs, build a Twitter community, or upload images to Flickr. Create a Facebook page. Generally speaking, the more sociable you are (without being stalky or annoying) the more positive interaction you’ll get and the better your company will look from the social media universe. If you’re prone to “forget” to interact, or if you’re prone to never stop interacting once you stop, it’s a good idea to structure time into your schedule to participate. Maybe you could block out the first half hour after lunch to interact on social media sites. It’s long enough to make your presence known, but it doesn’t blow the entire afternoon.

5. Stop and reevaluate.

It may be worth meeting with staff weekly to discuss the things you’ve learned from your social media marketing activity. Have you learned anything new about your customers and potential customers? Did you get any product or company feedback? Are you managing the company’s reputation well? Do customers know you better now? Has there been an up-tick in sales, leads, or site visits?
Social media marketing is here for the foreseeable future, so you might as well make the most of it. If you do it right, you can get a lot in return for your investment of time. While there will continue to be trends and fads about which sites are the hottest and which are so-five-minutes-ago, it doesn’t look like social media marketing is going to go away. If your competition hasn’t already started using social media marketing, being the first is awesome. If they have, then you’ll just have to be both different and better at it. It’s like any marketing strategy: you’ll invest time, energy, and money (whatever that time is worth), and in the end, you hope to build up your brand and get more customers. Don’t pin every hope you have on social media marketing, but don’t sit it out either. The opportunities in it are too big to ignore.

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Depending on who’s doing the talking, Google’s new Enhanced Local Listings (currently available only in Houston, Texas and San Jose, California) are either a boon to small businesses with small advertising budgets or the end of organic search as we know it. Here is what all the heated discussion is about.

The Google Lat Long Blog describes it as “a new ads feature in local search that allows business owners to enhance their listings.” Apparently, it is not a matter of “buying position” on the SERP: “When the listing shows up in your Google.com or Google Maps search results, the enhancement also appears alongside it.”

The “enhancement” as you can see in the screen shot is a little yellow flag. Your listing will also have “sponsored” next to it. The enhancement is something you can click on to go to the business’s website, pictures, menu, or coupon. On the screen shot you can see that the flag will take you to the company’s website.

This service costs $25 per month and according to Google, it does not affect your search engine rankings. It only shows up beside your listing where your listing would appear anyway. So what are the pluses and minuses of this program? Forums have been thrashing it out the past couple of days. The two main arguments are: 1) It could help small businesses who don’t have $1000 or so a month for an effective AdWords account and 2) Just you wait: this will result in purchasing rank eventually and organic search as we know it on Google will be over. Let’s take the arguments in turn.

OK, if you’re a small business, you probably don’t have the money or the time to plan and execute a competitive ad plan on AdWords, and the return on investment of a smaller AdWords account isn’t always worth the trouble or cost. And even small businesses can fork over $25 to highlight their ad and include a link to a coupon, menu, photos, or just the website. Maybe it would be good to run for a month while they had a special promotion going on. There’s little question that Google’s bottom line will benefit. According to a Chantilly, Va. local business advertising company called BIA / Kelsey, advertising for small businesses is a $29 billion market. Those $25 flags will add up fast if Google rolls the program out nationwide.

Google says that it is thinking about taking the program nationally, but they don’t know exactly when. Businesses in San Jose and Houston can get into the program and get an enhanced listing with a little yellow flag and link for free for the rest of February. In March, it will start costing $25 per month. Businesses that don’t rank won’t really get anything for their $25, so local SEO will still be important.

If you have a small business who’s claimed the local Google listing for your site, whether you buy an enhanced listing or not you get something called dashboard analytics that will tell you when a visitor hits your local maps-based listing where they go: to your website, directions to your place, or your Google Maps record.

There are plenty of people, though, who see this as a slippery slope to paid rankings. Some of them believe that as the program grows, it will become competitive (like AdWords), and the position will be determined by the highest bids. Others think that if the program is nationwide, everyone will pay $25 per month and the enhanced listings will no longer stand out in a sea of little yellow flags.

Then there are those who believe that now Google has its big toe in the door, eventually there will be a more complex structure for price and what it gets you and after people get used to it, paying for real estate on page 1 of the SERPs will have worked its way into the mix without anyone thinking its any big deal. Boom: the end of Google’s organic search results. With AdWords already putting a price on 10 to 20% of the space on each SERP, Google will eventually want the other 80 to 90% to be monetized too. Other conjecture for Google’s nefarious plan include offering something like number one placement with purchase of a “premium” package.

The most likely scenario is that the program will roll out nationwide, everyone will pay $25 for a flag, and therefore nobody’s listing will stand out (except, ironically, maybe the oddball who ranks and doesn’t buy the enhanced listing). Pay for rank? I don’t know. It seems as if Google has an awful lot to lose by doing that. I suppose it is possible that Google thinks it’s so big and dominates search engines so thoroughly that they could pretty much do what they want and get away with it.

But if that were the case, it would make the time ripe for a new or open-source search engine to bust out due to its simple interface and truly organic listings. Or else Google could separate their search into something like “New Coke” (where businesses can buy rank) and “Classic Coke” (where the results are pure and ads are either gone or could be turned off). That would allow those who actually care about relevance and quality to do their thing while the ones that were OK with buying ranking could have their own search universe too.

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2004 Google Chief Engineer Craig Neville-Manning insisted that Google maintained a strict separation between the search index part of Google and the paid advertising part. Sometimes this separation was referred to as a “Chinese Wall” between organic search engine results and paid search engine results, but this terminology fell out of favor once Google started trying to gain suction in the harshly competitive market in China, and the recent Google in China drama has definitely kept the term buried, but that’s another whole story.

The question is, does Google still live up to this separation between paid and organic results? They insist that Adwords is totally separated from organic search engine placement, that the two are in parallel channels and as such will never meet. What exactly does this mean in practice?

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Ideally, building up great text links should be a long term process. You may have heard the joke about the American tourist in England asking how they get their lawns so beautiful. The Englishman answers, “It’s quite a straightforward process. Just plant it, cut it, roll it, and water it for 400 years.” Links tended to in a long term fashion will turn out to be valuable, but most webmasters don’t have the web equivalent of 400 years (which is probably about two years) to cultivate all those links.

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