I consider myself a social kind of girl, especially online, so when I heard about SocialSpark the name alone was so cool I just HAD to check it out. After I started to surf the Spark, I began to realize there’s a ton of possibilities for bloggers that I really wasn’t even aware could exist.

For example, did you know you can make a good living from blogging? Or, that you can get your blog sponsored by a corporate entity?

Well you can, and that’s where David Chen, Vice President of Business Development for IZEA, comes in. IZEA is a company most well known for PayPerPost.com and RockStartUp.com, both really awesome ventures you should also check out. David was kind enough to answer some questions about their new social network and…some other things as well.

Thanks for chatting with me David. So tell us…what is SocialSpark?

SocialSpark is a marketplace where bloggers and advertisers connect to identify sponsorship opportunities. For bloggers, SocialSpark is a resource to help drive them more traffic and help them earn a higher return on their traffic. Bloggers can “shop” for sponsorship opportunities that fit their site and/or advertisers can target the bloggers directly. For advertisers, SocialSpark is a unique and scalable vehicle for marketing across social media. We offer Sponsored Post (sponsored content) as well as display advertising opportunities.

What is the Solutions Center?

The Solutions Center is a new area within SocialSpark to help our users find information and tools to improve their online experiences. The Solutions Center provides a directory of blogger and advertiser services ranging from web hosting providers, blog publishing tools, to content resources. We also present special offers to our users from select providers.

How can web hosting services benefit from SocialSpark and the Solutions Center?

Many of our users are setting up their blogs for the first time and/or looking to improve the infrastructure of their existing blogs. Web hosting services that support a range of blog publishing tools are a good fit for our users and the Solutions Center. Combined, we can offer a complete solution for their blog hosting and marketing needs.

Interested providers are welcome to contact us here.

In addition, web hosting services can join SocialSpark to match-up with bloggers who can become brand advocates for their web hosting services. You can join SocialSpark for free at http://socialspark.com. Once registered, you can develop free advertiser and blogger profiles and have full access to the SocialSpark suite of services. We also have a sales team to help develop campaigns.

How can web masters benefit from SocialSpark and the Solutions Center?

Whether a web master is just getting started or has been running a website/blog for years, we offer information and services to help them get started, enhance their existing site, and/or generate sponsorship fees.

How do I get in Social Spark and the Solutions Center?

You can access SocialSpark at http://socialspark.com. The Solutions Center is located at http://socialspark.com/solutions_center

Is there a code of ethics your bloggers and advertisers must follow?

Yes. We believe a free and open marketplace fosters the creativity for social marketing opportunities. We also believe participants in social media marketing should be accountable to their users. To maintain the balanced interests of bloggers, advertisers, and users, we’ve established a 4-point set of standards: 100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure, 100% Transparency, 100% Real Opinions, 100% Search Engine Friendly. You can learn more about our policy here http://socialspark.com/code_of_ethics

How much can you make, just by writing blogs?

The SocialSpark open marketplace sets the value for what a blogger can earn for writing Sponsored Posts by matching advertiser supply with blogger demand. Opportunity pay-outs can range from $5 to $100+ for a Sponsored Post. More involved posts, such as video posts, have higher pay-outs and bloggers have the opportunity to distinguish themselves to earn more. We provide guidelines for how often you can write Sponsored Posts, but we have bloggers earning more than a thousand dollars a month.

What are Blogger Bonuses and how do bloggers get them?

Some advertisers offer a monthly bonus to the blogger that performs best for them. Bloggers have the incentive to create posts that are most appealing to their users and most effective for the advertisers.

What are “props” and “drops”?

Props and drops are way of rating users, blogs, sponsorship opportunities, etc. in SocialSpark. You must be a registered user of SocialSpark in order to give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”

What are your future plans for SocialSpark?

We have a number of exciting new products and features in the works, including building some new tools to enhance targeting. We are also creating some very interesting products to help bloggers better interact with their users and other bloggers. We’ll be making some more announcements soon.
Tell us about the backend of SocialSpark? What platform is it running?

We use Ruby on Rails, Pylons, and a bit of PHP.

How many registered users do you have and what growth have you seen since you started?
We have 170,000+ bloggers and 17,000+ advertisers across the IZEA network and it continues to grow every day.

What is the benefit of installing a SocialSpark widget on your blog?

Bloggers can install the IZEA Toolkit (ITK) on their blog which provides free web statistics, including pageviews, unique visitors, and inbound linking information. The ITK also allows you to determine your IZEARank which makes you eligible for sponsorship opportunities in SocialSpark. You can make your traffic data public/private at your option, but we encourage sharing as much information with the community. The ITK allows you to also serve Blog Sponsorship ads without having to re-design your site. Again, all at the blogger’s option.

How did you come up with the name?

“SocialSpark” captures the essence of what we do: we help bloggers and brands initiate and manage conversations across social media.

Who are the people behind SocialSpark?

There’s an energetic team of almost fifty people helping run SocialSpark. IZEA was founded by Ted Murphy, a serial entrepreneur, with a background in interactive media. Our management team has a diverse set of technology and marketing experience from companies like MySpace, Yahoo!, AOL, American Express, Channel Intelligence, and Westgate Resorts. You can see a documentary of the development of IZEA at http://rockstartup.com

Can doing paid blog posts for advertisers on SocialSpark negatively affect SEO rankings?

SocialSpark is about matching those with content and distribution needs (advertisers) with content creators (bloggers). Sponsored content is intended to be relevant to both users and advertisers. SocialSpark is not an SEO play and we have instituted a policy where we require “no-follow” tags on any paid link. It’s up to each of the search engines to determine how they do that. That said, we’ve worked with the major search engines to develop a policy for SocialSpark that is “friendly” to their policies.

[amy] – Even Matt Cutts references SocialSpark on his blog! Now that is when you know you are a success!!

At the very end of the interview, I took the opportunity to send some props toward SocialSpark. As opposed to some services where paid posts pass PageRank, SocialSpark posts require nofollow so that any paid links don’t pass PageRank. If paid posts respect that requirement from SocialSpark, they’d be within our webmaster guidelines. I’ve noticed once or twice where an advertiser tried to get an extra nofollow’ed link in a SocialSpark post, but when I’ve mentioned those 1-2 examples, IZEA has taken action to correct that. So we’ll continue to keep an eye on things, but I wanted to mention the progress that I saw in SocialSpark.

How do most of your users find out about the service?

We’ve had most of our users find us through referrals. Also, like the rest of our advertisers, we run our own campaigns through Social Spark to create sponsorship opportunities to help get the word out. There are literally thousands of bloggers writing about SocialSpark, so that drives a lot of our traffic. It’s also great to have a chance to speak with industry leaders like yourself.

The SocialSpark mascot reminds us a little of a Treasure Troll doll, with its head on fire. Was this inspired by a childhood trauma or are we reading too much into it?

That’s funny.

If WordPress and Blogger got into a fistfight, who would win?

Blogger in a brawl, WordPress in a cage fight.

Admit it…you watch reality TV (everyone does). Which show is your must see?

Besides Rockstartup, I got a kick out of Bobby G: Adventure Capitalist.

What are three things you do when no one’s looking?

Check email, voicemail, and texts.

[amy] Wow.. I do ALL those things WHEN people are looking ;)

What’s the most exciting road trip you’ve ever been on?

Across the U.S. while a student.

Mac or Windows?

Mac (recent convert)

If you could be a contestant on any game show, which one would it be and why?

Price is Right. Haven’t seen the new show yet, but Drew Carey cracks me up.

If the internet suddenly disappeared, what would you do?

Write more letters.

Thanks David! It was uber cool to find out more about SocialSpark. We can’t wait to see the next innovation IZEA comes up with!

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Brian Prince is a digital marketing visionary, and he has been intimately involved with shaping the landscape of the Internet revolution since 1994. For some of us, that’s almost the olden days ;)

As CEO of Best of the Web, Brian Prince re-launched the original web awards portal as a best-of-class, human-edited web directory and search engine. Keeping up with the Internet’s dynamic growth, Prince orchestrated the creation of the Best of the Web Blog Directory, a robust, tag-driven and searchable directory of the best blogs available online. He also recently spearheaded the launch of Best of the Web Media, a proprietary collection of more than 20 niche subject matter blogs on topics including politics, food, health and activism.

He is also co-founder and president of Hotel Hotline.com LLC, and a heck of a nice guy ;)

[Amy gets out cyber microphone]

Amy: Brian.. Thanks for being so brave and agreeing to an interview. Past interviewees like Eric Meyer CSS Guru and Craig from Craig’s List are still recovering so I’ll try and be gentle, but let’s face it… We love controversy and public humiliation here at Lunartics ;)

We should start with those dreamy blue eyes. Meeting you in Vegas last year I can remember 2 things. Your eyes and Brandy commenting that my makeup was still looking good after 8 hours of conferencing. But what do YOU remember about me?

Brian: Good question. Although I was a bit banged up from the Vegas nightlife and not in top conference form when we met (sadly I rarely am), I vividly recall a jolt of energy from meeting and speaking with you – something akin to human caffeine. You came across to me as this sincere, engaging, fun-loving, to-the-point, speak-your-mind, intelligent-yet-sassy Aussie from down under – with just a twinkle of mischief in your eyes. My kind of gal…

[Amy: Yes it’s all about me]

Amy: Tell me some interesting stuff about yourself Brian

Brian: I am a left-handed Capricorn, which, from what little I know about horoscopes and cerebral analytics suggests that as a result of this rare combination I am at a significantly higher risk of suffering Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC for the medical crowd). So with that possibility ever-present, I try live every day to it’s fullest…..

[Amy: I actually Googled that.. totally gullible huh?]

Brian: I ride a Harley and have a private pilot’s license. It is alleged that I once flew under a bridge at night (a very unintelligent thing to try) but I don’t talk about those days anymore…

When I was 29 and just married, I was diagnosed with colon cancer and given a 70% chance of survival. I had great support from friends and family, beat the disease down, and today am a successful cancer survivor with a great wife, two awe-inspiring young sons, and two successful business ventures. Life is good. The greatest things I learned from this experience were the importance of friends, family, and health; and that a fighting spirit and perseverance to endure (both good and bad times) are a must to achieve your goals in life and business.

I have two full-time executive roles: I serve as the President of a hotel reservations network called Hotel Hotline as well as the CEO of Best of the Web. It’s a pretty exhausting task, but I dig the online industry, the great people that I get to interact with daily, and the energy of internet marketing so it keeps me driving passionately forward.

This is a picture my oldest son and I after his first ride on my Harley – notice the stunned look of disbelief after just experiencing sheer, raw, hair-raising horsepower for the first time…..

[Amy: I was too busy looking at the bike.. really]

Amy: So Vegas… Give us the down and dirty – what was the craziest thing you did there? Stupidest thing I did was gamble at Ballys. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a suckier paying Casino EVER!

Brian: Hmmm – Vegas. Fortunately for my ego, I have a pretty poor memory and I typically don’t remember most of the truly “stupid” things I do (in Vegas or elsewhere). Nevertheless, during the Affiliate Summit show in January I woke up one morning with no money left and thought I was pick pocketed or lost my money outright walking around the night before. I was quickly informed by my friends that I had indeed “lost” all my money – but not due to a pickpocket. Rather, it seems that I was playing Texas Hold ’em Poker at the Palms at 5am in the morning with my eyes closed and my head on the table. Not a good recipe for gambling success, and justice was swift and efficient.

A fool and his money are quickly parted as they say….

Amy: How old were you when you first ventured online? At this point, were you immediately enamored with the internet or a bit weirded out by it? And can you tell us a little about your first website creation? Is it still online?

Brian: In 1994 I was working for AT&T as a Director of Training for the Manhattan business sales force, and I was tasked with rolling out AT&T’s first business ISP and web hosting product called Easy-World-Wide-Web (EW3). It was anything but easy, and proved to be a monumental task to introduce as the internet was so new for commercial purposes that businesses saw very little benefit in going through all the trouble to create and set-up a website that was nothing more than a costly digital brochure or business card. So the first few sites I was involved with were helping these early adopters create and set-up these very exciting static brochure pages that did pretty much nothing. Good stuff. Fortunately, we’ve come a long way from those days and I would like to think that none of my early creations are still online today – in a perfect world they would have been taken out back and beaten down long, long ago……

Amy: Lunarpages was inspired by a Star Trek episode. What other names did you pick through before choosing Best of the Web? What about The Very Best Things You Could Ever Want to Search For and then Find On the World Wide Web? That one’s pretty snazzy.

Brian: Wow – talk about marketing prowess: “The Very Best Things You Could Ever Want to Search For and then Find On the World Wide Web” Where were you 15 years ago when we needed you Amy?!?

[Amy - I was only 6 years old ;)]

Brian: Actually, we did not have the honor of originally choosing the name Best of the Web as the project was first founded by a group of University of Buffalo professors in 1994 who were trying to create a social media site where the web community at large voted on the best sites on the web within a variety of categories. After 5 years as a ‘web awards’ portal in this model, the project was abandoned and we swooped in and purchased the business.

I do have to commend the founders marketing foresight though – “Best of the Web” has turned out to be a very marketable and memorable brand for us – and for that I thank them. I think we’ll pass on your suggestion Amy (albeit a great one!) and stick with what’s working for us :)

[Amy: Since you're going to pass I'll admit that was Tiara's suggestion]

Amy: For many web hosting newcomers, it’s a daunting task to design a website, put it up on the internet, and then get it to show up in the search engines so people can find it. What do you recommend for these fledgling web entrepreneurs? How did BOTW begin this process?

Brian: I agree that it is a daunting task just to create and design a quality website, let alone trying to get the site ranked and visible in the major search engines. If I’ve learned anything through the years, it’s that there truly aren’t any “shortcuts” in life that tend to work out. I’m a believer in the long-haul – meaning that new site owners and fledgling entrepreneurs can’t expect instant gratification. It’s a long process that takes time, attention to detail, and patience.

In terms of driving traffic in today’s online environment, a webmaster has 3 basic channels to consider: social media, pay-per-click, or organic search engine marketing. Each marketing initiative has advantages, disadvantages, and timelines, so my advice would be to consider a blend of all three and vary your expectations according to each particular channel. PPC marketing can bring instant site exposure, traffic and sales, but can be costly and onerous to maintain. Social media generation takes imagination and a bit of luck, but can be very effective for driving traffic and links, but typically not for sales conversions. And my favorite of the three, organic search engine marketing, can take years to pay dividends, but once your site starts showing in the organic search engine results, there is no sweeter tonic for low-cost customer acquisition.

So new entrepreneurs need to take the plunge, try different approaches, and create quality content that appeals to their target users. Without a good product, all the marketing in the world won’t help you in the long term, so make sure that both your product and business model is sound.

Amy: Who is your stylist?

Brian: Ha. If you only saw my “traditional” garb you would realize that the word ‘stylist’ is not really in my vocabulary. Outside of the occasional TV interview or two, you will rarely see me dressed in anything that doesn’t strongly conform to my rule of the “Three C’s” – Comfort, Convenience, and Cleanliness. And the third “C” is optional based upon circumstances ;-)

[Amy: My rule is the three J's - Jeans, Jammies (PJs) and Jay my hubby]

Amy: I’m sure you’ve answered your fair share of support or trouble tickets. We receive approximately 30k tickets per month and we have our regulars who send in their conspiracy theories. My favorite is Tin Foil Man and his perception that the FBI continually wipes his site content. What’s the worst or most creative or delusional one you’ve ever received?

Brian: We receive some beauties – particularly in the travel business. One of my all time favorites was a lady who booked a reservation but apparently did not realize that it was a pre-paid reservation and that she would be charged for the room at the time of booking, so she wrote to us and accused us of coming into her computer and taking her money. She claimed that she unplugged the computer to stop us, but somehow we still got in and took her money. I believe she also wanted to bring in the FBI to investigate…

[Amy: I feel sorry for the FBI sometimes]

Amy: In your experienced webmaster opinion what is the most important factor in choosing a web host? [The answer better mention Lunarpages and something bout us rockin’ or your reply will be buried in my trash folder ;)]

Brian: Ha – as IF there was a more rockin’ hosting company than Lunarpages…. As a hosting customer, and bit of a Don Juan when it comes to the hosting business (we get around and have tried them all), I can sincerely say that Lunarpages offers one of the best hosting experiences available online. There – I said it. How’s that for a testimonial, eh Amy?

[Amy: OMG good answer! If you had a better stylist we would use that testimonial and your photo on our website ;)]

Brian: As a business owner with hundreds of websites to monitor and maintain, the most important factor to me in choosing a web host is uptime reliability. If my sites aren’t up 100% of the time, everything else we do is for naught. To me – uptime reliability is the most important aspect for online business success. That would be closely followed by hosting support – both in means of having a robust hosting control panel that gives you freedom to customize your hosting needs online, as well as having well-trained support technicians available when you need it.

Amy: Does BOTW have local, regional, and/or international sections for various kinds of categories and businesses?

Brian: Yes – we have all of the above. Best of the Web‘s mission from the beginning has been to create a comprehensive general web directory that is constantly growing and evolving; currently there are more than 100, 000 categories in the directory. The largest branch in the directory is the regional branch, which gives us the opportunity to list sites not only in a relevant topical category like ‘health food’, but also in a regional category that matches the business’s physical location. This is a great plus for site owners interested in Local Search, as the search engines who spider our directory are able to glean physical location details from our regional site placement and this can help the engines rank a site for geo-related searches like ‘Uniondale Italian Restaurant.’

Within the regional branch are specific sub-categories that cater to various international markets as well, like the UK branch, Europe, and Canada. Each of these areas of the directory is regional in nature and helps us assist with categorizing sites worldwide.

We are also working hard on a new BOTW Local offering that will provide small business owners an opportunity to create a free business profile page on Best of the Web that includes lots of interesting local-specific information like hours of operation, credit cards accepted, driving directions, zip codes and regional areas served, return policies, phone numbers, etc. We’re pretty excited about the local product and opportunity and expect to launch it by mid-year – I’ll keep you posted.

Amy: Is there a greater advantage to listing your service/company deeper into the site, under more and more specific categories? Or are there times when companies should list under more general headings?

Brian: The best place for a site is in the most relevant topical and regional category that matches the sites content and physical location (if applicable). With that said, we do list some ‘deep content’ pages if the content is relevant, deep, and unique. For example CNN.com offers a wide variety of deep content, and as such, they have several hundred listings in the directory where the content relates to the topical category.

In my opinion, site owners should consider both approaches – marketing their site as a business entity, but also building good content and links internally to create deep content pages that rank for specific content-related queries. The more pathways into your site for visitors to find you, the better your odds will be to show in the search engines, which leads to traffic growth and ultimately the potential for a successful enterprise.

We have a motto around the office that goes something like this: “More More More More!”

Amy: Imagine overnight the internet is gone. OMG what would you do?!

Brian: This one got me to thinking a bit – it’s something I really take for granted today, but I surely would miss it should it disappear. When I think back to life before the internet, I vaguely recall that it was fun, but I can’t seem to recall specifically what was fun about it… it just seems kind of empty without the internet. Nonetheless, should the internet disappear overnight, I think I would fire up the Harley, throw my trusty snowboard on my back, and ride off to the Mountains in a nostalgic haze. From there, I envision a glorious career in the Senior Semi-Pro Snowboarding tour….

Amy: On your “BOTW Blog Directory” site, you have editors and the description reads: “the Blog Directory is an open project, where public editors can help in building the most comprehensive collection of blogs online.” Tell us a little bit about this offspring, what inspired it, and why editors are important to its success?

Brian: We launched the BOTW blog directory in mid-2005 when it became apparent that people were searching for ‘fresh’ blog content, and we were serving back a mix of static web sites and blog index pages. We realized that people wanted to retrieve specific blog posts and content, not just blog topics or index pages.

By creating a separate and distinct directory just for blogs, we were able to create a variety of blog search options, allowing users to search best-of-breed blog content multiple ways – by post content, by blog content, or by using specific ‘tags’ or keywords. This is a powerful combination of search technology that allows users to fine tune their search in a variety of different ways to find current and timely posts from the best blogs online on almost any subject available. Additionally, all blogs listed in the BOTW blog directory must have at least six months of posting history and show passion and expertise towards the subject matter. This helps eliminate many of the blog spam issues and MFA (Made for Adsense) blogs that clutter up many of the major blog search engines today.

Editors power everything we do at Best of the Web, and in regards to the blog directory, there is an even more synergistic connection between editors and blog content. Most bloggers are typically very niche-oriented and plugged into their particular topical community. They participate, they now each other, they share comments. Most blogs today also contain a ‘blogroll’ that is really just a list of similar web-related resources and blogs. This blogroll is in essence the same as a blog directory category, so there is clear synergy between bloggers and subject-matter expertise. These people know their topical categories, their peers in the space, and the best resources available on that particular subject – so who would be better to task with helping us to build a quality resource of the best blogs on the web then bloggers and volunteer subject matter experts?

Amy: What did you do before BOTW?

Brian: I attended University of Maryland, graduated with a degree in Business, moved to New York City, and started working for AT&T. From there I worked for WorldCom (before they imploded), and then Valueweb Hosting. After believing that I had enough management training to start my own business (I didn’t – but experience is the best teacher), I founded Hotel Hotline with my business partner Greg Hartnett. Once we got Hotel Hotline off the ground and into profitability, we looked to diversify our business and came across BOTW and purchased the business from the founders. From there we rebuilt Best of the Web from its roots as a pioneering, social media award site into a human-reviewed general web directory, and the rest, as they say, is history…..

Comment, clarify.. or simply choose one of the following [you have to... It is part of the “Interview with Amy game”]

Amy: Working for BOTW for the rest of your life or getting paid $1000/day to do nothing.

Brian: Working for BOTW for the rest of my life. $1000 a day for doing nothing sounds nice, but I have a bit of an affinity for the finer things in life and I’m afraid the $1000 a day wouldn’t cut it for too long….

[Amy: *GASP]

Amy: Lamborghini or Volkswagen (hippie style with rainbows and flowers)

Brian: Easy – Lamborghini. Although I dig hippies, I like fast cars even more :)

Amy: Dinner with Brandy from WMR or Shopping with Joan Rivers as your personal stylist

Brian: Another softball – dinner with Brandy of course. The beautiful Brandy will introduce me to at least 10 potential business partners during a typical meal, while Joan Rivers would just annoy me.

Amy: Lead Guitar or Bass

Brian: Lead Guitar

Amy: Inhale or exhale?

Brian: Both :)

Amy: Social Media or Google

Brian: Google (I know where my bread is buttered)

Amy: Spiderman or Cat Woman

Brian: If by Cat Woman , you mean Halle Berry dressed in a skin-tight leather cat suit – then definitely Cat Woman.

Amy: Disco or Break dancing

Brian: Break dancing. The Best of the Web crew is decidedly biased to break dancing, so much so that last year we had to have a dance off in order to crown the BOTW break dancing champion once and for all.

[Amy: WOW the guy in the red shirt is awesome!]

Amy: Spam or Pop ups

Brian: I suffer from such an intense overload of spam on an hourly basis and despise it so much that I would welcome a pop-up bonanza circa 1999 as a welcome trade-off if I could eliminate spam from my inbox for good.

Amy: Family Guy or The Simpsons

Brian: I love Family Guy, but am an even more fervent Simpsons fan – 18 years and going strong. I consider The Simpson’s to be the most culturally influencing show to air during my lifetime. Who can’t relate to Homer, Bart, Maggie, or Mr. Burns from time to time??

Amy: Lionel Richie or Barry Manilow

Brian: Lionel Richie reluctantly. I would have preferred ‘Peter Tosh or Jim Morrison’ – but that would be too difficult of a choice I think. My mind might explode…

Amy: What’s your fave made up word? Use it in a sentence.

Brian: Kajillion. Wow – we had over a kajillion hits to Best of the Web yesterday – great success!!

[Amy: We had Eleventy Billion™ so pfffft ;)]

Amy: Best undeveloped domain name you own?

Brian: Bestoftheweb.com We have been operating since 1994 as BOTW.org – the acronym for Best of the Web. Last fall, we were fortunate to finally purchase BestoftheWeb.com for a small fortune. The thinking was to grab the .com and add a memorable brand url to the company, but at current, we are operating a bi-polar existence and simply have the Bestoftheweb.com domain forwarding to BOTW.org. It’s on the list of dev projects for 2007, so hopefully that will be changing shortly and BestoftheWeb.com will become a showcase portal for all things Best of the Web.

Amy: If you could offer all Lunarpages Webmasters 40% off directory listings on BOTW.org would you?

[Amy: Ok.. You got me. This is a shameless way to promote that BOTW are offering all LP peeps big-time discounts and we love love love it]

Brian: 40% huh? That’s a pretty tall order that will most likely get me into some hot water with our CFO, but for the good folks at LP, why the heck not?

We hereby welcome any and all Lunarpages customers to submit their web sites to the Best of the Web web directory or blog directory and save 40% instantly

Simply login to your Lunarpages Customer Account Page to access the coupon code.

All Lunarpages customers using this code will receive an immediate 40% discount on all BOTW directory submissions, blog submissions, or category advertising sponsorships.

[Amy: Sheesh I would have settled for 15% .... suuuuuucker]

Amy: Why should our community list their sites on BOTW? Tell us the advantages.

Brian: A listing in Best of the Web has a variety of advantages. For one, we operate a proprietary database of human-reviewed sites, so by being included in the directory your site is exposed to millions of targeted users allowing a site owner to expand their audience and reach more visitors. Additionally, site owners have the option to choose from over 100,000 unique categories in the directory to precisely target their most relevant category and audience.

Lastly, a listing in Best of the Web can help your organic search engine marketing efforts. As a trusted source of human-reviewed web sites (our editors work off a set of quality-indicator guidelines), the major search engines value the links from the BOTW directory and use them to help evaluate and rank your site in their respective indexes.

Amy: OMG – Where is my BOTW t-shirt?

Brian: Check the mail – BOTW swag care package in route to Lunarpages as we speak. For any other site owners interested in scoring some free BOTW swag, please come visit us at an upcoming search conference and we will be happy to spread the wealth. Our 2007 conference tour includes the upcoming Search Engine Strategies NYC conference, AdTech San Francisco, Hostingcon, SES San Jose, and Webmasterworld’s Las Vegas Pubcon in November. We hope to see you at one or more of these great events!

[Amy: We'll take pics and post them on the blog]

Amy: Thanks Brian!

Brian: My pleasure – thanks for the opportunity, spotlight and creative questions. I look forward to seeing you soon!

Amy: Hmmmm HostingCon maybe?

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I recently had the opportunity to talk with Michael Jenson from Solo SEO. Solo SEO is one of the leading do-it-yourself SEO services online. Michaels product is very user friendly and I had a chance to test it out and I was impressed. I also love the missing mybloglog tools he has implemented into his site.

Michael and I talked about hosting accounts and what his feelings are on certain hosting options.

Joe: When you first started doing SEO do you remember what type of hosting account you started with and what type of hosting account would you recommend to new SEO/SEM’s and Internet Marketers?

Michael: I remember my first website, 13 years ago, was hosted on my ISP because that’s all I knew about. It had a tilde (~) with my username after it. Nowadays you have more options than you can imagine for web hosting. We run our own servers, and for us personally it has been more of an issue of what facility to put our boxes in. For that I have a few recommendations for co-location facilities:

1) Up-time. They can say 99.9%, but is it actually that. They should have various systems in place to notify you when the network is down, and even more important, be notified themselves when its down.

2) Access. You should have a contact at the facility that you can say, “Hey, can you go listen to the fan on this box and tell me if it sounds normal?”

3) Fast. Make sure your pipe is fast, real fast. If you don’t have your own server, there are many options for a web host. You can do shared or dedicated hosting depending on your budget and needs.

Joe: What do you look for in a hosting account/ web host?

Michael: Your own IP. Not required, but a nice benefit. If you share an IP with others and a site on your IP decides to do bad things, your IP can end up on blacklists or other lists that would affect your site and business.

Service. Your requests from point 3 should be quickly attended to. If you like the phone, make sure you can call and not just submit an online service request through their website. Many of the web hosts will let you try it out for 30 days or so, and make sure you try it out to the max and make sure it fits your needs.

Joe: Do you prefer Windows or Linux hosting and why?

Michael: Unix server. Not only do I not like Windows, but my experience with Windows servers has been awful. You can do a ton of things out-of-the-box with a Unix machine.

Michael was very busy and only able to talk for a moment but I thought it was more then worth posting. Thanks michael!

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Today I interviewed Aaron Wall who is going to be a speaker at Elite Retreat in March. This is my third interview in my Elite Retreat series. Aaron Wall is the creator of SEObook, PPC secret ebook and is a talented SEO guru.

Joe: What do you plan on speaking about specifically?

Aaron: Mostly organic search engine optimization, but I can answer most questions related to search marketing, link building, and blogging.

Joe: What real world value do you think your attendees will walk away with after your seminar?

Aaron: Last event we went through and pointed out marketing elements and conversion elements that could be improved to sharply increase the performance of the attendees sites. I think we can help people with anything from lead generation right on through to improving conversion rates and closing more sales.

Joe: You’re SEO book really catapulted you into being an SEO guru but would you place more emphasis on SMO or SEO these days?

Aaron: I think there was a time when SEO was harder because link acquisition was harder than it is today. If you are good at creating linkworthy ideas it shouldn’t be hard to get noticed in today’s marketplace. You can call that SEO or SMO but really it is just marketing…creating things people want to talk about and then leveraging that authority and market position for profit.

Joe: For our clients and viewers can you tell us the secret to success for making a site rank well?

Aaron: This question is so broad that it could take me 300 pages to answer it, but as a rough formula I would say create something the market wants, bake a unique marketing angle into your creation, participate in your market and get their feedback, and do things people would want to talk about (and thus link at). That is the basic process, and at the beginning you should do keyword research, market analysis, and plan out your information architecture. The process is also ongoing, where you use your current market feedback to evolve your marketing.

I also provide a free overview on Work.com

Joe: In your opinion what is the best formula to monetizing a site for maximum ROI?

Aaron: It depends on the vertical, the resources at hand, and the strengths of the site owner.

Joe: You have really been branded as an SEO guru but what other fields of search marketing do you excel at?

Aaron: I am pretty good at seeing the trends in how search will affect other markets. I also created a fairly well known brand in the SEO field, so I am probably pretty decent at branding and blogging.

Joe: How did you get involved with elite retreat?

Aaron: Lee asked me if I would like to be involved at a conference.

Thanks Aaron for giving me some time and talking to me about elite retreat.

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My second interview in my elite retreat interview series is with the well known social netowrking expert Lee Dodd who has achieved much success with sprint forums and is a current speaker at elite retreat San Fransisco in march. Lee’s expertise is essential for anyone considering creating and marketing a forum. Be sure to check out lee’s business bushido site to learn more about lee.

Joe: What do you plan on speaking about specifically?

Lee: I plan on speaking about the growth potential of online communities in the first segment. I will basically outline the benefits of online communities, how to monetize them, dive a bit into SEO, and give a solid picture of the growth and earnings potential. The second segment will be dedicated to my tactics of both buying and selling web real estate.

I have bought and sold more than 60 web properties (websites) over the past 2-3 years. I have spent $xxx,xxx in acquisitions yearly. I have learned much through all of these transactions and will show our attendees how to buy and sell effectively without getting burned. There is plenty of money to be made doing this very thing. You can read more about me and the other speaks here:

Joe: What kind of real world value can attendees take from YOUR seminar?

Lee: I think the attendees will walk away with a solid understanding and plan of attack that will help them achieve the very goals they came with. The leadership will guide them through the EXACT steps it will take them to get from their POINT A to their POINT B. They certainly won’t get fluff or sales pitches, just the hard facts they need to succeed in their business.

Joe: How did you make the sprint forum so popular?

Lee: The site really grew in popularity as I continually added free tools and resources for the users. We have a free upload tool, one of only 3 or so on the web for Sprint phones, we have a huge wallpaper gallery with free wallpapers to download, we provide custom graphic and ringtone creation for free, we have user blogs, and so much more. As I built the new fun content, growth continued at a steady pace. Things like SEO and branding really took care of itself at that point.

Joe: For our clients and viewers can you tell us the secret to success for making a forum popular?

Lee: I will continue to share that my main secret (and there are others which will be discussed at the Elite Retreat ) is creating useful and unique content. This doesn’t have to be written content necessarily, but rather tools, games, video, audio, or some other type of valuable content to your userbase. Having this in place will bring the traffic required to see your community grow.

Joe: Can you tell us about one of your most notable client’s and what you where able to do for them?

Lee: I have worked with a variety of clients and their forums. The first one that comes to mind is a woman that runs a large community that is health related. I was able in one session to give her a plan of attack that took her earnings from approximately $1,700 a month to more than $4,500 a month. It didn’t require much work either as it was something she had implemented in a matter of hours.

Joe: In your opinion what is the best formula to monetizing a site for maximum ROI?

Lee: Depending on the niche you are in, you will want to focus your monetization efforts in a specific area. For instance, if you are in the technology sector you would want to begin with monetizing your traffic through CPA offers and CPC (Adsense or YPN) networks. As traffic grows, you would want to build up your private advertisers as well. To maximize ROI, the key is to maximize eyeballs. Ask yourself if you are doing everything you can to bring in the most traffic to your site, and then once they arrive are you doing the best you can to convert them in to revenue.

Joe: Who is the best web hosting company in the world?

Lee: Lunar Pages of course! ;-)

Thanks for entertianing that question Lee. I have been very impressed with what you have done with sprint forums and spending 20 minutes speaking with you about social networking and marketing could truly increase someones online efforts and maximize their ROI. Have a great trip to San Fransisco.

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Elite Retreat is geared more towards the industry professional looking to learn the secret skill set from the professional super affiliate, SEO, SMO and venture capitalist. The speakers at elite retreat are highly qualified industry professionals who will be able to answer in depth questions which are posed by the attendee’s on a more in depth level then normal conventions. Elite retreat is going to have a one on one feel giving specialized attention to the individual’s who attend making this the first ever one on one convention in its field. This is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and small to large business owners attempting to gain momentum in the search field.

I will be doing a series of interviews with the leading speakers at Elite Retreat attempting to get some information on what they will be speaking about and how it can be beneficial for the attendees in a real world situation.

First up is a leading powerhouse in the search field and his name is Kris Jones of Pepperjamsearch.com.

Joe:What do you plan on speaking about specifically?

Kris: I will share my insights on how to make money online using a combination of search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing, and various alternative online media channels. Since my experiences cross both the affiliate (publisher) and advertiser (merchant) perspective, I’m likely to be responsive to the needs of the attendees and address their specific concerns. This is not a conference where we speak to the attendees – instead, we speak with them to address and optimize their businesses.

Joe: What can attendees expect from this conference?

Kris: Attendees can expect to come to the Elite Retreat with problems or ideas and have those problems or ideas addressed by very experienced, proven internet marketers. In addition, each attendee will have valuable one-on-one interaction with each speaker, including myself.

Joe: Why do you hire such attractive women? Is that your form of chickbait?

Kris: It just so happens that our approach has always been to hire the best and brightest employees we can find. In general, women are smarter than men. Being one of the fastest growing privately-held companies in the United States attracts smart people. Oh, ya, and there is a strong correlation between smart people, being female, and being attractive.

Joe: What is more important to you as a marketer, SEO or SMO?

Kris: I’m a strong believer in both SEO and SMO, but I have to admit that I’m fascinated by SMO. I’m a student (and in some cases a teacher) of different forms of buzz and viral marketing – not necessarily from the standpoint of just putting out (social media) content, but doing so in a way that entertains, while capturing imagination and gets people talking. Both SEO and SMO can help businesses capture market share, but only SMO can truly get people talking about your product or service in a way that makes them want to tell their best friend who tells their co-worker to take action. By the way, my company offers businesses management and consultation in both SEO and SMO.

Joe: Can you tell us about one of your most notable client’s and what you where able to do for them?

Kris: We have been the outsourced online marketing division of igourmet.com since 2000 – we perform all online marketing duties for igourmet, including SEM & SEO, affiliate marketing management (Linkshare), online media planning & management, partnership acquisition (i.e., Target.com, Overstock.com, Epicurious.com), etc. With our help igourmet has received numerous national awards, including designation by Consumer Reports (2006) as the #1 place to shop for gourmet food online, Internet Retailer as a Top 500 online retailer (2005 – 2006), and Forbes Magazine (2003 – 2006) as the #1 place to shop for gourmet food online. We’ve increased igourmet’s sales in each of the areas mentioned above by an average of 150% per year, every year.

Joe: Can you give some advice to our visitors and customers on how to effectively market their site.

Kris: (1) Start with paid (PPC) search-engine marketing. Hire a PPC expert (internal or outsource) outside of executive management who understands PPC and is committed to staying on top of the daily changes and opportunities that are emerging across all of the various seach-engines. Your PPC manager should not be responsible for multiple channels of online marketing – they should be dedicated to PPC. If done correctly, PPC should account for 20% or more of your online sales.

(2) Second, hire an SEO expert (internal or outsource) outside of executive management who understands SEO (especially on Google) and is committed to staying on top of the periodic changes and opportunities that are emerging across all of the various seach-engines. The goal here is to create some short, medium, and long-term goals for how you can represent your website as an authority to Google and the other engines – therefore, have patience, it will take time, but the committment will pay dividends many times over once your reputation is established and your website takes into consideration the basic and advanced tenants of SEO ( i.e., links and what those links say, tags, content, navigation, etc.).

(3) Third, evaluate the power of affiliate marketing. Does affiliate marketing provide an additional market share acquisition channel for your business? Regardless of your business model, chances are affiliate marketing can add an additional 15% or more to your bottom line. Hire an affiliate marketing expert (internal or outsource) with leverage into the affiliate marketing community. Since approximately 95% of your sales are likely to come from less than 5% of the affiliate community (the Super Affiliates) you’re going to need an affiliate manager with access to those 5% (leverage) – I call it leverage because affiliate marketing is really about building partnerships – your affiliate manager must be able to spend most of their time building relationships with the 5% of affiliates who drive the industry.

(4) Finally, evaluate alternative forms of online marketing, including social media, display advertising, contextual advertising, behavioral targeting / re-targeting, strategic partnership acquisition, buzz marketing, etc. Hire an online media expert (internal or outsource) with experience and insight into the aforementioned channels.

By the way, your online marketing efforts should not be structured for autopilot. Moreover, your executive team should not be responsible for online marketing efforts – if this is the case, you need to hire an expert and allow the executive to get back to what they should be doing. If you are not involved in all of the above channels you are missing out on market share that your competitors are likely enjoying.

Joe: How did you propel PepperJam to the forefront of the internet marketing field?

Thanks Kris and I wish you all the best at elite retreat and I know anyone attending your session is going to take away a life long value that cannot have a price put on it.

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Happy valentines day to one and all. Its a day of love and living. Its a celebration of loving your loved ones. It is important for us to show the ones we love just how much we care for them. Some say its only a commercial holiday and women some say its one of the best holiday’s in the world. I have been lucky enough to have some of the major players in search give us a little bit of insight into their valentines day holiday. It was very kind of them to give us a little bit of access to their personal life.

Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land): For Valentine’s Day, I’ll not so surprise my wife with flowers and a card and try to give a real gift, which would be ending work early and having a nice meal at home with her.

Darren Rowse (Problogger.net): It’s a fairly normal day really. We exchanged cards and took a mid morning stroll down to our local cafe where we had a coffee. The rest of the day will be normal work and tonight we’re off to church for our normal Wednesday night gathering.

Aaron Walls (seobook): I am going to help my girlfriend fix up her kitchen cabinetry website and then go to the city for a sweet yummie dinner.

Kris Jones (PepperJamSearch): I will be spending Valentine’s Day with my beautiful fiance Robyn. We are bracing for a large snow storm on the East Coast so after a romantic dinner we will probably spend some time with a bottle of Chianti and our 2-year old English Bulldog – Roxy – by the fireplace.

Bill Slawski (SEO by the SEA): Sad to say that nothing romantic is going on at SEO by the Sea tommorrow. Instead, we’re planning on battening down the hatches, and riding out a wintery storm that may or may not hit us with a lot of snow, sleet, freezing rain, and possible flooding. We do welcome valentines, to help get us through the rough weather

Adam Maywald (voasi.com): I am going to an anti-valentines day party with all girls.

Todd Austin (Worlds Best Designer):I am doing nothing. I am leading an organization against valentines day. Its a corporate holiday created by corporate commercial capitalists and although I respect their drive I hate the idea and that women all over the world have fallen for it and are making men’s life living hell.

Andrew Gerhart (Automotive.com): Tonight I’ll be taking my fiancé to one of our favorite local restaurants, starting a new tradition. Either that or cook her the meal I made her on our first date. We’ll see.

Lee dodd (LeeDodd.com): Our day is going to be a pretty normal Wednesday. We weren’t able to secure someone to watch our children after church tonight, so we had our Valentine’s Day on Monday. It was nice as we went out to dinner (delicious) and then a movie. I did get a card from my wife this morning at breakfast however, and plan to give her my gift tonight.

Amy and Jay Armitage (lunarpages.com): (amy) so yeah i’ll get home, we will prolly have a chat bout our day and a drink.. put the kids to bed.. I’ll make him watch my lame TV shows and guilt him out bout not sending me flowers (that I never wanted anyway). He will try get his leg over and we will spoon until I turn like a rotisserie chicken because I’m too hot.. We never have celebrated Valentine’s Day.. we just love on each other every day. (Jay) Gotta go she told me I aint getting any for a while if she doesn’t get flowers.

Andrea Schoemaker (planetandrea.com): I wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen this Valentine’s Day. This morning I woke up to a delivery of a dozen roses and a bag of my favorite chocolate (Peanut M&M’s) and I also have a dinner date later this evening! Should be fun. I also baked 2 dozen cupcakes and decorated them with hearts for all of my neighbor kids!
What are you doing for valentines day?

P.S. Here is what I am doing:

Joe Whyte (joe-whyte.com): I am not really into valentines day but considering this is the first valentines day I have spent with Marielle as my wife I wanted to make it special. I bought about 4 gifts and hid them around the house. I have notes or “clues” placed next to each item and then one near the door when she walks in. When she opens the first clue it will have a riddle she needs to decode to find her next gift. Each clue has a little love note in it.

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Last year my ego was crushed because Kaanon was raving about Eric Meyer who was the Keynote speaker at Webmaster Jam Session … and he didn’t notice that I was on the list of speakers too!

What’s so great about this CSS Guru? What makes so many people attend his conferences, visit and comment his blog daily, or buy his published books?

Chad and I were fortunate enough to meet Eric last year at WMJ and he was truly wonderful, gracious and kind. He even signed a menu from our dinner for Kaanon!

Along similar lines to Richie Cunningham’s determination to break a real story (in episode #101 of Happy Days) when he got a D on his paper about a burnt out stop light from Professor Garrity, I decided to hit up Eric for an interview, but not one filled with only the geekspeak that web designers and developers can relate to. This was going to be an investigative story.. asking the hard questions..

Eric Meyer has written SIX books!

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer’s Reference
CSS Pocket Reference
Eric Meyer On CSS
More Eric Meyer on CSS
CSS Web Site Design

Just as I’m fervent about web hosting and ensuring our hosting plans have a kind and loving owner who doesn’t abuse the server ;), Eric is well regarded and respected for his passionate advocacy when it comes to web standards, particularly Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

But what don’t we know about Eric?

Did you know that Eric detests the taste of chocolate and coffee, and can’t stand carbonated fluids? That’s right – his entire career, and indeed his life, has been conducted entirely without the use of highly or even moderately caffeinated beverages.

*gasp*

How can anyone function without 8 shots of coffee prior to 9am?

Or this?

Eric: “On a related note, I’m mildly infamous for being perpetually hungry and a prodigious consumer of food. Despite this and my total avoidance of exercise, it’s nearly impossible for me to gain weight, and entirely too easy to lose it.”

See? I can get to the bare bones of a story!

Did you know..

Eric had a weekly Big Band radio show for nine years, from 1996 – 2005
Eric lives in Cleveland; however, most people assume he lives in San Francisco, or at least New York City
Eric’s college degree is a B.A. in History, with minors in English, Astronomy, and Artificial Intelligence
Eric’s wife is actually far more credentialed than he is, having obtained a Doctorate of Nursing last fall.

I just hooked you didn’t I?

What if I told you that Eric confided a secret to me that hasn’t even been blogged by him yet? Yes a LunarScoop!

Eric: “I’m a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), having been inducted in late 2006. What’s great for me is that they did so knowing full well who I was and my role in the field, instead of just coming across my name on web designers’ sites and assuming I was a designer too (I’m not). The letter of welcome actually cites me for my work in promoting standards and advancing the use of web technologies. That was a really, really great feeling.”

If that tickles your fancy then keep on reading ;)

I contacted a few designers and developers I know (including Kaanon) and asked them what they would like to hear about from Eric Meyer.

Todd Austin (resident LP designer): With the upcoming Apple iPhone utilizing a full browser, what changes if any do you see coming regarding CSS and mobile?

Eric: To be honest, I’m not sure I see any, because I’m not sure that CSS is an appropriate tool for mobile devices. I know it’s meant to be medium-neutral, but it isn’t. It’s web-centric, which is totally understandable since the only user agents that supported CSS for years upon years were web browsers.

The more I think about the kinds of media coming available, from iPhones to 108-inch LCD displays, the less I believe that any human-readable presentation language will be sufficient to cover all those bases. I could be wrong, of course. We’ll see.

Todd: How can the industry help push universities to teach web standards, as I notice a lot of curricula is filled with old html/tables based teaching?

Eric: Stop hiring the people those curricula produce. That’s about the only thing that will work, and it’s hardly fair to the unhired, since it’s not their fault the instructors failed them so utterly. Still, and I know this probably sounds harsh, would engineering firms hire new graduates who’d been taught 18th-century engineering? Would a software company hire a new graduate who trained in COBOL? Would you do your taxes with an accountant who’d learned the tax code of the 1950s and nothing since?

Of course not. So I’m not sure why it should be different with web firms.

Beyond a hiring lockout, firms could communicate with universities that what they’re doing is outdated and needs to be fixed. Rolling in a “these students will not be ready for the workplace if you continue on your current path” might help, depending on the university.

Stefan Mischook (from killersites.com): Do you regret promoting the use of CSS hacks given the recent issues with IE7 – i.e. that it broke certain commonly used hacks?

Eric: No. I always did my best to be clear that hacks were, by their nature, fragile beasts, and could be broken by a future revision. At the same time, what else could we do? It was either hack around browser bugs, or abandon CSS as a layout tool. Neither was palatable, but the former was less unpalatable than the latter. What I regret is that the hacks were necessary at all.

Kaanon (Eric Meyer worshipper): In the beginning, inline HTML was the most commonly used way to change the way a page was displayed. CSS has now become the standard. What changes do you anticipate happening in the future?

Eric: It’s hard to say. Right now, there isn’t a lot of movement in presentational description for the web unless you count the Microsoft XAML/WPF work, which is intriguing but proprietary, not to mention more of a competitor with Flash than with XHTML/CSS/JS.

Actually, there’s not a whole lot of movement in any of the major web specifications. CSS, XHTML, and DOM have all ground to a near-halt. There are efforts to push some of them forward, but it remains to be seen how successful those efforts will be.

So I guess what I see coming is a grave risk of stagnation for the standards-based web. Mind you, I’ve had this feeling before, and so far it’s resisted obsolescence quite handily. If it does so again, then what I would anticipate is mostly gradual improvements with occasional leaps in capability. One example of the latter would be a robust layout language, whether that’s CSS Advanced Layout or some other approach. I don’t actually care so much what form it takes, so long as we get it.

Kaanon: CSS is a daunting language to learn, let alone master. Do you have any tips for web designers who have ideas in mind but have trouble learning how to implement them?

Eric: A good place to start is the css-discuss wiki, which is the distilled wisdom and experience of the css-discuss mailing list. You could always join the list itself, which is open to newcomers as well as to veterans, but it’s a high-volume list with a lifetime average of 50-60 messages per day. If you can handle the influx, it’s a great place to learn.

Failing those, there are a number of very good books on the market right now. I don’t want to play any favorites, but searching Amazon for “CSS” and reading some reviews should give you a good idea of which book might be best for you. Then, if you can, track down a copy in a local bookstore and riffle through it. If it looks like a winner, then buy it.

Kaanon: CSS is limited by how much browsers will support it. Is there a preferred browser that you use for development?

Eric: Firefox–not only for its excellent standards support, but also for extensions like the DOM Inspector, the Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug, HTML Tidy, and more. You can put together a really top-flight web development environment for free using nothing but Firefox and extensions.

Since someone will wonder, no, I don’t just code for Firefox. Once I’ve gotten things they way I want them in my development environment, I start testing in other browsers and working around any problems I find, the same as anyone else. What I don’t do is test as I go. That way lies madness.

Kaanon: In your book “More Eric Meyer on CSS” you have a review of a Cleveland restaurant “Matsu”. Does that place really exist?

Eric: Indeed it does! It’s one of the best sushi restaurants I know, and one of my favorite restaurants in the world. Everything I said in that review is true even today, three years after the book was published. The owners, Scott and Brenda Kim, are wonderful people and we’re fortunate enough to count them as friends, having gotten to know them over many years of wonderful dinners there. The only problem is that we don’t get there as often as we used to, or would like.

Christian Henning – (findmyhost.com): How can I utilize CSS on my web site for search engine optimization purposes?

Eric: Directly speaking, you really can’t. I know there are black-hat SEOs who use CSS to position search-engine spam text offscreen or turn it invisible, but that’s not optimization as I think of it (and it’s a practice that can get your site banned outright from search engines). There are real indirect benefits, however. If you use CSS for layout, you can arrange the document source so the most important text comes first in the document, regardless of where you actually place it. There’s a much higher ratio of text to markup than with table-based sites, and you also get to use semantic elements like h1 and so forth. All those small little boosts add up to SEO.

The other benefit is that by having a leaner site, you have a faster and more responsive site, which makes people more likely to link to it if they like the content. Inbound links are the biggest search engine boost known to man.

Zac Armitage (9 years old): What was the first web site you ever made about? Is it still online?

Eric: Rather than my first site, I can point you to my very first HTML document: the “Incomplete Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode Guide” As you can see from the “last updated” date, I wrote it in late 1993. I was a big fan of the show, and took some text files that were available via Usenet to turn into a big old web page.

From early 1994 until early 2000, I was in charge of cwru.edu. That probably counts as my first site, even though I only did parts of it. It’s still online but looks nothing like it did, so while it’s still online, it’s not really the site I directed.

And now some questions from me (amy):

Amy: For budding webmasters.. What are the worst colors you can combine in website design?

Eric: Whichever two are most popular on MySpace right now. No, I kid! I think the answer is probably lime and fuchsia.

[Amy: Uh oh.. does that include ban ners?]

Eric: No, not unless you put them together on the same page.

Amy: When you started out and were examining web hosts closely, what were the major factors that influenced your choice of web host?

Eric: I never examined web hosts closely. I’ve just drifted from one to another as chance has dictated, soaring like a leaf on the wind.

[Amy: Awwwww *sigh*]

Amy: I’ve been known to audibly react to ugly sites I come across. When you visit websites that don’t comply with web standards what emotion does it evoke from you?

Eric: A rueful, regretful shake of the head. I always wonder why that person hasn’t gotten the message, and what could have been done to make sure they did. It doesn’t feel like a personal failure, but it does kind of feel like a collective failure.

Amy: What is your favorite font and size? Why?

Eric: New Century Schoolbook, 11 point, because it’s a very nice serif font at a clean size. Of course, very few people have that font, so I never use it online. One day I’d like to convince a publisher to do a book in that typeface.

Amy: We recently launched a new site design and our focus was on usability, simplicity and complying with web standards. What do you think of the new design?

Eric: It’s Web 2.0-tastic.

Under the hood, it’s fairly decent. One can always quibble over class names and specific markup structures and so on, but it degrades relatively well in a non-CSS environment and has a good content-to-markup ratio.

Amy: When I was at Webmaster Jam last year I noted a groupie reaction to you from many webmasters and also on your site. You seem to have an active and loyal community, all of whom adore and respect you. Similar to rock stars on stage having flowers and underwear hurled at them, when you are speaking at an event, what type of stuff is thrown at you? (Laptops, PDAs, notepads)

Eric: Questions, if I’ve done my job right. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything tangible thrown at me onstage, not even rotten tomatoes—those get saved for the feedback forms. No flowers, no room keys, nothing along those lines. Maybe one of these days I’ll do a rock opera based on margin collapsing and see if that changes the landscape.

Of course, if anyone wants to throw a new top-of-the-line fully decked out MacBook Pro at me onstage, I’m all for it; just make sure it’s well padded, yeah? I’d hate to have it break on landing.

[Amy: lol]

Some fluff questions (because an interview can be geeky yet entertaining at the same time):

Amy: Imagine overnight the internet is gone. OMG what would you do?! (Really.. the thought even freaks me out).

Eric: Immediately join the worldwide effort to rebuild it.

In a “no internet again, ever” world, I’d probably fall back to programming, which I used to do. If I decided to leave behind computers as the sole focus of my work, I’d have trouble choosing between a variety of interests. I might go back to school to study any of the following: meteorology, airline piloting, architectural modeling, or political science. I’d probably also devote some time to learning sumi-e and doing all of the interesting projects in Make: magazine.

Amy: Approx how many hours a day are you on your computer and does your wife ever resent how much time you’re online?

Eric: It varies wildly these days, but a good average is probably 6-8 hours. There’s occasional resentment, but not really very much. She understands that this is how I make my living.

[Amy: wow...only 6-8 hours??!]

Amy: If you’re familiar with the show Friends, Chandler is consistently being asked what it is he does for a living. My family is the same and after 6 years my father still says “What it is exactly you do?” Do you get the same line of questions when you are interacting with non-geeks you are related to or friends with?

Eric: Not any more, really. Partly that’s because I can gloss over the details and say, “I help clients improve their web sites, I write books to help individuals, and I speak at conferences”. Also, now that a lot of what I do is organizing my own conferences, that’s easy to explain.

When they ask me about the details of what I write and talk about, and I actually decide to answer, that’s when the eyes start to glaze over.

Amy: Was her name really Lola?

Eric: I deny everything, including the rumors that I met her in a club down in old SoHo.

[Amy: But just who shot who?]

Amy: You once said “In private and around people I know really well, I have a tendency to swear to an extent that would probably shock regular readers”. What is your favorite f*ck#ng curse word and why?

Eric: Well, we have to be clear about what is meant by “favorite”. The most common and satisfying one is the good old f-bomb and variations thereof, because it releases the most tension in one syllable, but it isn’t my favorite. My favorites aren’t actual cuss words, but creative substitutes I’ve picked up here and there. A few examples: “fargin’ bastige”, “son of a biscuit” and “mother pus bucket”. I think my current favorite, though, is “sweet fancy Moses!”.

Also, “what the blinking font?” is kind of a favorite, but that’s partly because I came up with it.

Amy: What about made up words? Do you have one you really like and what does it mean?

Eric: Not really, no, unless you count the swear-word substitutions I just mentioned. I do take a weird joy in appending –tastic and –rific and –licious to words, so I’ll say things like “Web 2.0-tastic” or “Flickrrific”, but I don’t do it all the time. I also enjoy mashing words together or creating pun-based alternatives to words. But I can’t think of any made-up words that I regularly use or keep as favorites.

Amy: Who is your hero?

Eric: Carl Sagan. He made complex topics understandable and interesting, and that’s something I’ve always tried to emulate in my work.

Amy: Who who who is the best web host?

Eric: The web host that has the plan which best fits your needs. How’s that for a total wuss-out?

[Amy: Eric secretly told me “off the record” it is Lunarpages ;)]

Eric: I deny everything.

Amy: Play a game with me. You HAVE to choose one of the following …

.com or .org?
Eric: .org. What can I say? I’m an old-school info-hippie at heart.

Swim with killer sharks or swim with crocodiles?
Eric: Sharks. They’re marginally more discouragable and might be induced to eat each other instead of me

Jazz music or hard rock?
Eric: Hard rock, although I love Big Band jazz and blues.

Xbox or Playstation?
Eric: Xbox. Halo. ‘nuff sed.

Deserted Island or Japanese Subway?
Eric: For a day or three, the island. For the rest of my life, I think the subway. Maybe.

FBI or CIA Agent?
Eric: FBI, because I wouldn’t have to move

Windows or Linux?
Eric: Linux. It would have more overlap with the tools I’m used to from OS X.

IE6 or IE7?
Eric: IE7 — because of the better standards support, natch

Cry or Scream?
Eric: Scream. Not sure why, though.

PHP or HTML?
Eric: PHP, because I can use it to generate HTML, so I get both.

Indianna Jones or Batman?
Eric: Batman. Cooler gadgets and fewer split lips, plus he’s insanely wealthy.

Go to Church or visit a serial killer?
Eric: Kind of depends on the church. In most cases, I’d rather the church, but there would be definite exceptions.

View source or view porn?
Eric: Tough choice, but I think view source. I’d have a higher chance of learning something.

Lose your vision or your hands?
Eric: I guess I’d lose the hands, since I want to see my children as they grow up. Also, there are decent bionic hands becoming available, whereas artificial vision systems are still fairly primitive.

Give up your computer or your TV?
Eric: No contest: give up my TV. Even if that choice meant I were also unable to watch TV shows via the computer, I’d still give up the TV without hesitation.

BestBuy or Home Depot?
Eric: Best Buy. They have cooler gadgets.

Euthanasia or painful slow death?
Eric: Euthanasia, as long as I get to choose when.

28 children or NONE?
Eric: 28 children, assuming I could afford it

Kill a dog or a cat?
Eric: Kill a cat. There’d better be a damned good reason for it, though.

Amy: Last one (I promise): Finish this sentence:

The internet is…

Eric: …the ultimate zócalo.

Amy: Thank you Eric! You are such a warm and generous person and we appreciate you taking the time to brighten up our little place in cyberspace ;)

Eric: Thank you, Amy! I had a great time.

Amy: Omg me too! Plus I learned some cool new expressions I can use on ICQ to psyche out my staff like WTBF you mother pus bucket! ;)

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Author: Joe Whyte

I had a chance to speak with Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney Media Group about affiliate marketing yesterday. Since Jeremy is a “super affiliate” making MORE then a living online he was a perfect candidate and resource for this post! Also since Lunarpages.com’s marketing team will be meeting up with him at Affiliate Summit I thought it would be a good idea to introduce us before hand ;-).

Ok, so you have purchased your new hosting account with 250GB of storage and 2500GB of data transfer with the ability to host 11 sites on one hosting account all for only $6.95. You have purchased your domain names that are keyword rich and you have gotten your Quality templates from Flash-Template-Design.com. You are almost all ready to start but you need to join your affiliate sites.

Deciding to pick the “right” affiliate:
How does one pick the right affiliate? To start you could always start with a company/product that you are familiar with and that you use. This will help you build out content and your affiliate site much faster (at least for your first site). One of the main things to look for would be how notable a product/service is based on brand awareness. For example, if you where to choose a service that no-one has ever heard of the chances of getting a good CTR and ROI is going to be much smaller then if you are promoting a product with mass appeal and brand awareness. One of the last things to look at when considering an affiliate is the commission rate. The commission rate is very important when considering an affiliate because it is truely the “bottom line” but to be successful you need to look at all aspects to determine your over-all potential ROI. In a recent interview with Jeremy Shoemaker “Super Affiliate” this is what he said when I asked him:

Joe: What are the top things you look for when considering an affiliate?
Jeremy: Reputation is #1 you can learn a lot from others experiences. Payout #2

How to setup the right Affiliate Marketing Strategy:
Some general rules you might want to consider when setting up an affiliate site is to first prepare yourself that its going to be a lot of work to be successful. Examine your competition and see what your competition is doing. A way to find your competition is to do a “Google” search for a product or service you are marketing. Are they utilizing PPC? Are they ranking in the SERP’s? How long has this site been around? How many inbound links does the site have? How many pages do they have and is the content original or duplicate? After examining these points you can successfuly create your strategy. If gaining position in the serps is going to take to long to monetize your site then definitely try PPC through mulitiple PPC venues. Remember traffic is the key!

Joe: What is your strategy when putting up an affiliate site?
Jeremy: To start I focus on volume and then dial it in after time with a lot of testing. If I can break even the first week of a new campaign I consider that a success. If I am not at 800%++ ROI within a month I consider it a failure.

How do you start generating affiliate sales?
So we know that first you need traffic in order to get sales. The more traffic comes into your site the better chance you have for getting affiliate sales on your site. I asked Jeremy “super affiliate” this question and he responded with a short but powerful answer!

Joe: how do you start generating affiliate sales?
Jeremy: PPC!!!

One of the best ways to increase sales, drive traffic and create brand awareness is going to be PPC. You gain top position is the SERP’s and your name and your product are going to be visible to a large percentage of searches ultimately creating a good platform for some viral marketing. Jeremy says that “Almost all of my sites are either ppc or get traffic directly from word of mouth“. A great way to boost your viral marketing is to start offering something free on your site. Lets say you have a “web hosting” affiliate. You could offer a free ebook about web hosting troubleshooting and load balancing or give away an informative newsletter that keeps people up to date with what your affiliate is offering and tips and tricks to help them manage their hosting account. By offering your viewers something useful and FREE they will tell others about it and you can start seeing your affiliate site grow by leaps and bounds!

Some other ways to generate traffic:

Digg.com
Reddit.com
Netscape.com
StumbleUpon.com
Myspace.com
Shoutwire.com
Craigslist.com

Monetizing your site even MORE!
Affiliate sales is a great way to make money but what about the people who visit your site but DO NOT purchase anything. How can you make money off of them? I will talk about 2 way’s to do this.

1) Contextual Advertising: Once you have a good amount of inbound links and your site has some PageRank you will be able to sell some text links on your site. The higher your PageRank the more money you will make. This is a great way to keep steady income coming in from your site each month because literally your site will just sit there without you touching it and you will be getting paid from letting people advertise on your site. Use sites like Text-Link-Ads.com, TextLinkBrokers.com and Performancing.com (there are others but these are some of the best) to setup this money making opportunity.

2)Adsense: this is the best way to capitalize of your visitors who DO NOT purchase a product via your site. If they do not find what they are looking for then most likely a link on your site via “adsense” will! Depending on the product and marketplace for these terms the price per click will vary. Jeremy mentions where he likes to place his adsense:

Jeremy: ‘I run it on some of them but pretty low on the page or use adlinks where navigation would be”.

Joe: How long do you usually spend creating and optimizing your affiliate site?

Jeremy: tons of time. They can always be improved

Joe: What is the biggest piece of advice you can give our affiliates?

Jeremy: TEST TEST TEST TEST look at what other people in your space are doing and learn from it.
Thanks Jeremy and I look forward to seeing you at affiliate summit!!!

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Social marketing is all the rage right now and after joining MyBlogLog I met a guy named Aaron Ponce who is creating a new community and it’s really cool.  I asked him some questions about the project and figured I’d give it a mention on the blog..

About MSP..

MySiteProfile.com is a search engine friendly, online community and social network for bloggers, web designers, developers and various types of artists. It gives its members the opportunity to brand themselves through a personalized profile page in which they can promote their businesses or services, as well as their talents and interests, while gaining recognition amongst other like minds. Although MySiteProfile.com was intended to be used by web marketing professionals, we welcome all persons interested in the offerings of this site.

MySiteProfile allows members to actively participate in the networking and self- promotion process through various features.

Some of the features of MSP?

* Personal Profile Pages with member’s descriptions, live links, logos or images, various design choices and a personalized messaging system
* Galleries to upload web snapshots, photos, images, artwork, etc.
* Biweekly Design Contests with unique categories
* Blogs that are continuously updated on the community home page
* Specific Groups that can be originally created or subscribed to
* Community Forums for ongoing support, current announcements and postings

Upcoming Features:

* Flash Animation section where members can submit flash movies
* Video and Music Upload tool
* Built in RSS Aggregator where members can sink their favorite feeds to their profile section

MySiteProfile.com Inspiration?

After numerous attempts of finding a free directory to promote my websites, I just kept coming up with spam in my email and no traffic results. Even with legitimate directories, there was no opportunity to visually present the site I was submitting, resulting in a needle in a haystack effect.

What makes MySiteProfile.com different than other online communities?

Unlike myspace, the community’s focus is networking on a professional level while targeting web geeks (and I mean that with the utmost respect). Its features give its members the chance to support each other and give valuable feedback on things such as site design, SEO, and marketing techniques. I also notice that my pioneer members are enjoying the commonalities that they share while becoming friends in a niche web society.

What’s your background?

I have a degree in Multimedia Arts with a focus in Web design. Over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in PHP Programming and SEO/Search Engine Marketing. I am currently employed by Lawinfo.com in the Web Design and Programming/ SEO departments.

What’s up with the CRACK?

I make a reference to crack in my slogan because my wife constantly tells me that I’m addicted to my work. I tell her, “At least its not crack.” Plus I’m usually up until 3am like a crack head hacking away at my websites.

Is Tom from MySpace really your friend?

I guess you could call him my friend since he’s on my personal myspace friend’s list. Although, I wonder sometimes if he’s even a real person.

Who is the best web host?

Hmmm, I would have to say Lunarpages Hosting. The representatives from Lunar have been very active on MySiteProfile.com and I highly recommend their services.

WOW.. GOOOOOOOD answer ;)

Thanks Aaron!!

Check out mysiteprofile.com and look for Aaron and Todd, Tiara, Joe, Mike and me!!!

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Author:  Amy Armitage

There are certain personalities who have created a name for themselves in CyberLand and beyond who have my respect and admiration.  One of these people is Craig Newmark creator of the infamous Craig’s List!  Yes.. that’s right.. we talk ;)

*snaps fingers over shoulder

When I replied to his email this morning [he was seeking my advice about how to create a multi billion dollar empire] I hit him up with some confronting and hard hitting questions..

He chose to ignore those and went for the fluff option, and it is with great pride and pleasure that I welcome Craig to Lunartics.

How many servers are used to run Craig’s List and for the geeky readers, tell us about the OS you use, coding languages you use or prefer.

Around 120 generic pc servers running suse linux, mysql, apache, and modPerl

I was at a conference last year where Craigslist.com was mentioned as an example of an ugly website, yet it is hugely popular and successful. Do you get upset when you hear this said about Craig’s List?

Some described our look as the visual equivalent of a pipe wrench, intended and taken as a compliment.

There are some people who make judgements, not knowing much about usability, etc., no big deal.

What’s more important in your opinion?  Usability or design?

Usability.

Is Craig’s List designed with SEO or user experience in mind?

Not SEO, but very much usability: keeping things simple.

I was reading an interview with you where you mentioned your role in customer service consistently.  Do you still work in a customer service role at Craig’s List on a daily basis?  Why do you love it so much?

I do full time customer service, and more.  Needs to be done, and I owe it to our community.

I also noted you moderate and manage your forum community.  What are the biggest challenges you have faced running busy community forums?

When people bicker constantly and get nasty, particularly regarding animal sales.

Social marketing seems to have a lot of influence over the last 12 months on natural search engine rankings.  Blogs particularly seem to be a wonderful resource to communicate and get indexed ;)  I noticed you have a personal blog.  Do you write this for SEO, to keep in touch with your community or for another reason?

To connect with community, and to indulge myself.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I don’t plan to grow up.

Your music interests range from Leonard Cohen to Kinky Friedman.  If you were locked in a room with no electronic stimulation and only a choice of listening to Marilyn Manson or Hansen (mmm bop) which would you choose?

Probably Manson.

For our budding webmasters out there, what’s the best advice you can give them on running a profitable and high traffic web site?

Treat people like you want to be treated.

When you started out and were examining web hosts closely, what were the major factors that influenced your choice of web host?

Do they support user CGI? (big issue back then)

Customer service?

Imagine overnight the internet is gone.  OMG what would you do?!

You’ve blown my mind.

* Yes.. a lot a lot of people say that to me Craig ;)

Of all the people you correspond with online, if you had to choose 1 person only you could keep in touch with.  Who would it be and why?

Maybe Jimmy Wales, wikipedia, or Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation.

Imagine all the spammers in the world were in one [massive] room and you could choose the best punishment or death for them.  What would it be?

They could only read their own stuff.

What’s your favorite made up word?

kweejibo

Damnit I should have asked him what kweejibo means..

Thanks Craig!!  You are so awesome :D

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Last week I sent off interview questions to Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin. I was lucky enough to get a reply from them both!

Aaron Wall author of SEO Book and is one of the first 100 Google qualified professionals in the world. He operates a well-known SEO news blog for SEO experts, [Threadwatch] and is a frequent speaker at the Search Engine Strategies, and Pubcon conferences.

After a Danny Sullivan presentation on search marketing Aaron created search-marketing.info. Around the time of the Florida update Aaron wrote an article that got him a lot of acknowledgement in the industry. After this article tons of people asked him to do SEO work for them. As a result his clients referred him to a few friends, who also liked what he did and Aaron had enough success and clients to do SEO for a living.

We actually purchased a copy of Aaron’s book here at Lunarpages and we have learned some incredable stuff.

As a professional Search Engine Marketer, what is the FIRST thing you look for when YOU are considering a hosting company? What are the MUST have features?

Most of the time I host sites with hosts recommended by trusted friends. As far as service goes, phone support or fast email support is a must, I like to ensure the bandwidth and disk space are reasonable. I also consider being able to use things like PHP, MySQL databases, and custom .htaccess files a must.

What is more important when considering a web host? Customer Service, Reliability or Reputation?

I usually use hosts recommended by friends. So that solves the reputation part for me, but that reputation is built off of reliability and customer service. I don’t think you can say just one of them is important. If you are creating a serious business website you need them all.

Do you prefer Windows or Linux hosting and why?

Linux. Programmers (and programs) are generally more affordable and more accessible.

When you first started doing SEO do you remember what type of hosting account you started with and what type of hosting account would you recommend to new SEO/SEM’s and Internet Marketers?

I still have many sites on shared hosting accounts. For mission critical sites I would recommend using a dedicated host.

Can you give a little SEO advice to our 100,000 clients about how they can get better results?

Here are a few general pointers for my SEO and online marketing theory:

• It is best to do market analysis and consider SEO before designing your site.

• Own a niche, people who own a small market will find their market position more self reinforcing and have more price control when compared to people grabbing a smaller share of a larger market

• What about your site is remarkable or comment worthy? What could you add to your site to make other people want to talk about you?

• Guide people to the desired goals in the active content portion of the page.

• Structure your site to place emphasis on important pages and topics.

• Add content to your site that people will link at to help boost your overall link authority.

• Try pay per click. If you can’t afford it, that may mean that your business model is bad, your site does not convert, or that you may need to build a strong brand to compete in the organic results.

If you want a bit more SEO information, I wrote a free beginner guide to SEO on Work.com and I also wrote SEO Book. Some people also learn a bunch from reading SEO forums and SEO blogs

Do you think Digg will officially ban SEO related articles and domain names?

If they do they are dumb. Doing such a thing would only alert more SEOs to the value of manipulating Digg, and get more people to game them.

Do you think Wiki search will be a strong competitor for social search in 2007?

I am not sure how much social search matters outside of how it is represented in the general search databases, such as Google. Wikipedia already ranks for everything in Google, but if it is tied to a profit model that may undermine the perceived legitimacy of Wikipedia, and thus its content quality, linkworthiness, link equity, and rankings.

Do you like Web Positions Gold or WebCEO?

Not really. I think most SEO software gets you focused on things that are unimportant. For example, many SEO software programs measure keyword density when relevancy has moved beyond that more toward semantics. The only SEO tools I use regularly are SEO for Firefox, Roboform, and a few keyword research tools.

What is the best way to draw traffic for 2007?

Create things that people want to talk about. If people are talking about it then eventually the engines will think it is good.

How do you feel about foreign search engine optimization?

Some site architecture issues can be solved without knowing the local market, but you have to know the local culture and local language if you want to compete in the local market.

Thanks Aaron!

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When I wrote to Rand Fishkin I didn’t expect a response let alone such a detailed interview. I ran into Amy’s office like I just had won the lottery “OMG Rand replied!”

She stared at me blankly and said “Who is Rand?”

I almost fell to the floor. Let me tell you who Rand is..

Rand is the founder and CEO of SEOmoz, a search marketing consulting firm based in Seattle, WA. Rand’s best known for his work on the SEOmoz.org website, a resource that serves tens of thousands each month in the field of SEO/M. Like all good businessmen, Rand dropped out of the Univ. of Washington’s business school to pursue his dream of running a small company and has never looked back.

1. As a professional Search Engine Marketer, what is the FIRST thing you look for when YOU are considering a hosting company? What are the MUST have features?

• 24-hour customer service via phone to someone who can work directly on the server. I’m happy to pay for the time if they need to reboot the box or trouble-shoot or diagnose problems, but uptime is the biggest issue – going down when your site is getting hammered is a terrible problem, because it’s the time when you have the best opportunity to pick up new links. Your 15 minutes of fame on the web (whether via a site like Digg or Slashdot or through other media) only lasts 15 minutes and if you’re server can’t support the traffic, you’ve wasted much of your marketing efforts

• Notification of downtime in advance. If the box or network will be down for 15 minutes late on a Sunday night, I need to know on Friday morning or before.

• Root access – for my staff, it’s critical that they can access the root to install kernels, updates, etc.

• Hardware quality – running lots of tools and applications means eating up a lot of RAM and processing power; the box has to be able to undergo some serious tasks while interfacing with databases, fetching and delivering web pages.

• Geography – believe it or not, with developers, being within 500-1000 miles of our Seattle, WA office actually makes a difference in the time delay during site creation and testing. A few extra 10ths of a second on every upload, save and test can save hours (and developer frustration, as they’re notoriously impatient) over the course of a development timeline.

• Relationship – I need to have a hosting company that knows us personally, answers emails quickly and has staff who recognize our site and our names. The personal connection is what influenced my last two hosting moves and I haven’t been disappointed. Once we had VPs and CEOs who I’d met in person (and whose cellphones were in my cardfile), the quality of service we received was incomparable.

2. What is more important when considering a web host? Customer Service, Reliability or Reputation?

I’d put customer service first, reliability second and reputation last. A bad reputation might be from a few particularly noisy customers who had a bad experience, rather than a true indication of quality. Reliability is very important, but I’d say it’s outweighed by customer service – being in touch and available is the biggest priority among the three to my mind.

3. Do you prefer Windows or Linux hosting and why?

We’ve always used Linux because my developers are familiar with it. I do like the fact that Linux has such a huge development community toiling away to make it better for free. Windows is probably better for some enterprise-level organizations, but for us, saving the extra licensing fees makes Linux the obvious choice.

4. When you first started doing SEO do you remember what type of hosting account you started with and what type of hosting account would you recommend to new SEO/SEM’s and Internet Marketers?

It’s really more about the type of site you’re running, the traffic levels you expect to get and the level of customer service you need. If you have a web-based business in the affiliate sphere and are seeking out small levels of profit, high-price, high-level service hosting doesn’t make great sense. There are plenty of packages for under $50/month that can work (with a managed service and control panel). Once you have a larger, more important, business critical site, it pays to have your own box and a high level of customer service. We have fantastic plans that are around $150-200 per month, and for such a small extra fee, it really makes sense for almost every non-entry level business to upgrade.

5. Can you give a little SEO advice to our 100,000 clients about how they can get better results?

The best SEO advice I can give is to tell folks to do a bit of homework on the field. You can learn a lot of the basics by visiting SEOmoz beginner’s guide (we’ll be releasing an updated version in the next 30-40 days). If you don’t have time for even that, I’d recommend you at least pay attention to the basics of SEO, which are:

• Research your keywords – use Google, Yahoo!, Wordtracker and others to see what people are searching for in your field, and incorporate those keywords in your title tags, meta description tags and H1 tags.

• Ignore keyword density – the search engines haven’t used it in years and it always looks like spam when sites cram keyword after keyword onto a page

• Make friendly, crawlable URLs – see 11 best practices for URLs

• Make sure that you target only one or two keywords per page – you don’t want to compete against your own site in the listings.

• Create a great looking site – the kind that people love to visit, are impressed by and show off to their friends; this kind of viral marketing will have a remarkable impact on your SEO efforts.

• As with looks, go for functionality, too – high quality content that people want to read, tools they want to use, anything that makes a person jump into their email and tell 3 friends about your site is what you’re looking for.

• Don’t ignore usability – read Steve Krug’s book; Don’t Make Me Think. It should be mandatory reading for everyone who develops on the web.

There’s a ton of more intricate, complicated parts to the practice of SEO, but starting with the basics will give you, at least, a solid footing.

Do you think Digg.com will officially ban SEO related articles and domain names?

Digg probably won’t “officially” ban any type of content (except adult-themed material), but they will certainly ban domain names (I wouldn’t be surprised to see SEOmoz go on their list, as lots of our readers submit our blog posts and articles). Digg is, by nature, anti-marketing and very anti-SEO. They think that everyone who calls themselves and SEO is out to spam them, and with all the evidence they have, it’s going to be tough for those of us who are legitimate to convince them otherwise.

Do you think Wiki search will be a strong competitor for social search in 2007?

No – wiki search will not be a strong contender. I really don’t think people realize how incredibly hard it is to build a great search engine. Microsoft has incredible resources, very, very smart people and a fiery drive to get up to speed, but even after two years, they’re way behind Google. It’s not about the approach, either, Google (and to a slightly lesser degree, Yahoo!) really have done almost unbelievable things to get where they are in terms of providing a good search experience.

Do you like Web Positions Gold or WebCEO?

Nope. I build my own stuff to get data from the engines – it’s far more customizable and valuable for anyone who’s a professional in the space. I also found that the accuracy of the programs was frequently intolerably poor.

What is the best way to draw traffic for 2007?

It will probably continue to be the major social web portals and news aggregators. It’s hard to beat 25,000 visits from Digg, 30,000 from Slashdot, 10,000 from TechCrunch and a few thousand more from del.icio.us and reddit. Many companies who’ve launched this year have done exactly that, and in my opinion, it remains the best tactic.

How do you feel about foreign search engine optimization?

Google has said it’s cracking down on web spam in Europe, but for now, the kind of spammy link building tactics that were effective 4-5 years ago in the US are still highly effective in most non-english language engines. In the next 4-5 years, I expect these markets to mature, search to become more popular, and spam to become less effective. The trends will most likely mirror a lot of what has happened in the US, with some regional quirks. Asia in particular will be very interesting, as places like Taiwan and Korea have a chance to use search far, far differently than what the English-language world has done (more social, more web2.0, more interactive and with far more user options).

Thanks Rand!

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