Nobody knows exactly how Google’s algorithm works. but alongside testing and much documentation online we are often able to second guess the ins and outs of it. As I am constantly explaining to people who ask, the vast majority if not all of it is common sense. when one determines how to go about link acquisition - be it for a small business website or a multinational company - one thing has to be considered initially:

- Google wants the Internet to work along natural, organic lines.

Whilst it should be pointed out that a diverse link campaign will broaden your company’s sphere of influence (and therefore your trust as well as how many keywords you will potentially rank for), the single main point for me as a link acquisition manager is that common sense demands that a ‘natural’ link profile will have a range of links using a large variety of anchor texts, spanning a diverse selection of websites.

Many people rationalise that to rank for a particular term, ones link building campaign should focus solely on building high powered links to the relevant URL, with that anchor text. This lack of understanding is often exasperated by a lack of resources (time and money), and the seemingly necessary ‘prioritising’ of what is most important.

The simple truth is that a diverse link building campaign is what will reap the most benefits, will enable you to rank higher for more terms, will support the term you most want to rank for, will ‘hedge your bets’ with regard to guessing how Google’s algorithm works and will work, and will ultimately ensure that your efforts are not flagged up as spam or ‘unnatural’.

For example, a diverse link campaign could include the acquisition of the following link types:

These links should be built with purpose, as part of a larger well thought out campaign. Rather than just pointing it all towards the homepage the above mix of links should be pointed into a range of pages making the campaign all the more diverse and natural.

Here’s some of what the Matan Media team have been reading this week:

SEO
SEO Management 101 - What Makes For A Good SEO Manager? - by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget
How To Be A Better SEO In 30 Minutes A Day - by SEO Contrarian
Illustrating The Long Tail - by randfish at SEOmoz
10 Link Building Tools For Tracking Inbound Links - by Michelle Bowles at Online Marketing Blog

Social Media
What’s Most Annoying About Twitter? - by Diana Adams at Bit Rebels
Just Married: Groom Changes Facebook Relationship Status At The Altar - by Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable
5 Things You Can Only Do On Google Wave - by Fernando Fonseca at Bit Rebels

Best Of The Rest
Wikipedia Shows Signs Of Stalling As Number Of Volunteers Falls Sharply - by Murad Ahmed at Times Online
Protecting Your Brand From Online Attacks - by Lisa Barone at Outspoken Media
10 Web Trends For 2010 - by Pete Cashmore at Mashable

Come back next week to learn more about what we have been reading and learning. Alternatively follow us on Twitter or Facebook for quicker, real-time updates!

Phew! What an awesome week we had in London. Me being the ‘token yank’ of Matan Media, it was my first significant amount of time in London. Despite fears of being frozen to death or affected by SAD due to lack of sunlight, we had an incredible time.

The Imagination Gallery - We were on the roof of this bad boy!

Marc chatting away during one of the breaks

The Audience - It may look male lopsided, but for an SEO conference there were a fair number of women in the audience - I’d say the ratio was 1:5 - photo credit: foliovision

The 5 stories we had to walk up and down - good to get the blood pumping between the many sessions. photo credit: foliovision

So much has been said about how professional, worthwhile, and smoothly the conference went. There have been tons of great reviews, specifically these two from foliovision, and this one (from within the walls of Microsoft!?!)  so I don’t want to compile all my notes from each session. Quite frankly, I’ve got tons of work to do after listening to some of the smartest folks in the industry. However, I thought of highlighting what I saw as some of the most significant take-aways from the entire two-day seminar. Granted each person or agency focuses on different areas - these seemed to be the most relevant and important to us.

1. Start becoming an Excel ninja. It was mentioned and demonstrated time and time again. Check out Richard Baxter’s tip of using tables as opposed to cell references when preparing data. Furthermore, start using pivot tables to combine useful data like search volume alongside your own rankings for awesome graphs.
2. I’m the Analytics monkey of Matan Media, so you can be sure I was delighted to see how much of it was covered at the seminar. My biggest take-aways are the Dafizilla Table2Clipboard Firefox plugin which allows you to properly copy and paste an html table (from Adwords or Analytics for example) directly into Excel. Another awesome tool is the Excellent Analytics Excel plugin, which allows you to pull in massive amounts of data at a time directly into Excel. From there you can pivot table, chart it, and compare multiple metrics at a time in manner impossible on the Analytics web platform itself.

   
   Excellent Analytics - Pull your analytics data into Excel

3. Start diversifying your page strength metrics. For all you link builders out there, you can pretty much forget about Page Rank. Dave Naylor pretty much flat out said that by January Google Page Rank (that evil little inconsistent, already-irrelevant and unreliable green bar) will be laid to rest for good.

   
   Tweets quoting Dave Naylor’s assessment on Page Rank

   
   Dave Naylor vs. Matt Cutts on Page Rank - Ripped from the guys at Fuze Optimisation - (Don’t be upset I stole it from your site, … your link bait is working!!)

   Whether or not Dave’s claim is true - the point is we all know it’s become increasingly unreliable and that its accuracy is questionable at best. Why not start migrating to a different metric like SEOMoz’s MozRank. Now it’s not perfect, but once you get used to it, I have a feeling it’s accuracy will provide with you some great results. Heck, I’ve just written a nifty php script that uses their free API which  automated a massive amount of domain analysis. Switch now, or you’ll have your link building team and your clients wondering how to measure the quality of your links!

4. Google’s Vince and Caffeine updates have gotten people speaking about Vertical and Universal search more than ever before. While it doesn’t mean you should go into hysterics, understanding how and why certain pictures, news results, blogs, videos and forum posts get included into the SERPS is vital. Now while I won’t give away all the secrets from Patrick Altoft at Branded 3, but I will tell you the following.
   **XML Video Sitemaps hosted on your own site can provide incredible results in getting your own domain to rank a specific keyword, display the thumbnail of your choice, and link back to the content of your choice (even if that video/swf/flash file doesn’t really exist where you say it does). Now while this does seem to be very black-hat, if implemented properly and ethically, I think it is a golden technique for indexing video on your own domain and driving traffic to your site instead of youtube, break, google video, etc. Try out Video Sitemap Pro - for Mac & PC - it seems to do the trick without a massive dev team.

   
   If you don’t have a dev team at your beck and call, try Video Sitemap Generator to create your properly formatted XML video sitemap and then submit through Google Webmaster Tools

   **Consider sponsoring the top ranking images for your competitive keywords. It may be an unaware blogger who has an image ranking for a top term. Slapping your website’s logo on there for a nominal price may prove worthwhile. Granted it takes the extra step of someone typing in that domain manually - but for a high volume search term you might be surprised!
   **Get yourself in Google News if you have a blog. Follow the guidelines properly, and you’ll be surprised by the traffic you can get from universal search news results.

5. Leveraging your client’s USP - Unique Selling Point - to gain links can be huge. Whilst a lot of the link building techniques we saw are already employed at Matan Media, watching how Tom Critchlow thinks about link sources gave me huge amounts of ideas: including sponsoring events related to the sector, developing useful and simple widgets, product giveaways, and implementing your link building strategy into other areas of the client’s business.

Well that about does it. Obviously there were tons of other tips and tricks given away. I wanted to focus on some of the most actionable things I think can lead to great results and insights into your campaigns. That and I have a $%#& load of work to get through! We had such a bloody brilliant time, that I can safely say with my worst british accent, we’ll be back next year, mate! :).

Here are a few shots of us at the pub during the second after party - this was where the real SEO conversations went down!

Where the REAL SEO work gets done! (photo from this YouMoz post)

Marc and Ian having a drink at the LondonSEO after party. I was feeling sick, so I got myself a Hot Toddy - you Britts are good for something!

By the way, It was great meeting so man you at the conference and at the bars. Here are some shoutouts:

@matanmedia: Thanks for being a great company- flying me out to London, sending me to the Pro Series conference, and letting me spend quality time with my girlfriend who’s studying at LSE!

@gustavobacchin: Gustavo! Tudo Bem? Nice to meet you in the flesh. We had some good coffee breaks standing around in an awkward man-circle. hahaha.

@Searchpanda: Great talking to you - Not sure what it was we spoke about for a long time, those jack and cokes and hot toddys make for some interesting conversation!

@jaamit: Only met you for a sec, but great tweets during the seminar.

@randfish: Was awesome to meet you in person after watching 100’s of whiteboard fridays. Glad I got to thank you in person for helping out with a Q&A on seomoz.org - your advice worked after a few months and helped me keep my job

@everywhereist: Great to meet the beauty behind the beast! Was great talking to you about your roots - really incredible stories. You’re welcome to do an exposé on Tel Aviv for your travel blog at any time - we’ll take you guys around!

@coplandmj: Wonderful meeting you. It was nice meeting someone who deals with the same competitive sector - sorry for putting that Yankee American pressure on you to spill who your clients were! Loved your presentation on Penalties/Filters - great stuff.

Here’s some of what Matan Media have been reading this week:

SEO
Rand Fishkin talks about the evolution of search results
Mike at Mind Valley Labs talks about getting traffic from Web 2.0 sites

Social Media
Pete Cashmore discusses how to do almost anything with social media
Venture Beat discuss Twitter’s business model and making money through the platform

Link Building
Michael Gray talks about whether social media links translate in organic rankings
Gyutae Park talks about making every link count for  your SEO
Jeff Quibb gives away his best link building techniques of 2008
Jim Boykin talks about hot fudge