You bet your first place rankings they are! There are MANY people in the Internet marketing community that will tell you that paid links are dead and that it is merely a matter of time until all link buyers will get caught and penalized. Well I have news for you all, Google doesn’t and never will have the manpower necessary to stop paid links! And linking is such an integral part of their algorithm that they cannot change the importance of them. There I said it, and it feels goooooooooood.

If you look at the sites ranking for most competitive keywords and look into the backlink profiles using a tool like Yahoo! Siteexplorer you can easily see that they are most likely buying links. Whether it be a paid directory link from Yahoo! Directory or an internal page link on Forbes.com, they are buying links. I have seen the power of the paid link and I am a believer! Ahhh, that felt good too. I have seen paid links work really really well for people and I know their power. But you must do a good amount of research in order to determine what is a good paid link and what is not. I may reveal my honored and time tested paid link analysis techniques in a later post for you, so sign up for my RSS feed, or you might miss out on some really great advice!

I love it. A great post over at Cartoon Barry the other day about the recent announcement of ICANN and how they will be offering custom domain TLDs. He poses the question of who will get the .SEO and .SEM domain names. The new custom domain TLDs will cost anywhere from $100,000 on up and will probably result in a bidding process in the instance that two parties want the same TLD.

TLDs are the extensions on domains, like .com, .net, .uk, etc. Since the price will be so high to get one of these custom TLDs only the big fish will be able to take advantage of them. And this is something that I do not particularly like. Whenever there is a situation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer it rubs me the wrong way. But Barry suggests that the Internet marketing community ban together and all chip in to secure the .SEO, .SEM, and .SMO TLDs. He offers up that we should do this through a large industry organization like SEMPO. But my guess is that there will be many people who will want these TLDs and that with the bidding process the price will get VERY high!

Yes, there is! A 2006 study from Cornell University studaied the distribution of clicks on a SERP. How many more clicks does a #2 spot get over a #3 spot, etc.? They used eye-tracking to conduct the experiments, as well as a sample of undergraduate students performing 397 queries on various topics like music, movies, travel, local, politics, and trivia. Here are those results:

The results are staggering. But this organic SEO consultant already knew that the difference between #1 and #2 was gigagntic. I had a client that commanded the #1 spot for his main keyword for a very long time. Well he dropped to #2 and called me up freaking out, he said that he had lost about 40% of his business! Of course I got him back up there right away and he has been back at #1 since. I have many other stories from clients of just how much their business is affected. This study just solidifies, scientifically, what I have been preaching to clients all along. You can view the full story from SEO Researcher.

There are some valuable lessons to learn from this research and its results. When running an SEO campaign it is important to have focus. If the site you are working on has some existing rankings on pages1, 2, or even 3 and some of those terms carry some trafic with them then you need to work hard to get those terms to the top 3. Those terms are just on the cusp of seeing huge traffic gains. And it is much more reasonable to expect to move those terms to page 1 from 2 or 3 than it is to rank a term that the site is not even in the top 100 for. Focus on the terms that will bring good traffic that you can rank in the sortest amount of time. Then, once you have proven your self and provided the client with some gains and ROI, you can start to focus on the other terms.

Well, its all wide open now. In a huge announcement today from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) custom Internet domain suffixes have been approved. They have backed an initiative that will introduce an unlimited number of TLDs (top level domains). In the past they have approved such TLDs as .com, .net, and 249 country codes such as .ca for Canada and .it for Italy.

ICANN noted that they have spent $10 million in studying the new domain names and will spend another $10 million to implement them. Hey, why not, while you’re at it tack on a few extra mil for the organic SEO consultant! How the heck do you waste so much money researching a concept that is so obviously a good idea. It is a good idea because it will allow marketers and business people to better brand their domains. And it is good for ICANN and the rest of the domain registrars because it will net them an exponential amount of CASH. Of course the cost for registering one of these new custom TLDs will start at about $100,000 and will probably be a huge bidding war. I wonder who will get .searchengineoptimization?