When the first social bookmarking and social networking sites started to appear a couple of years ago, their creators hardly knew that these sites would become one of the most valuable tools for a SEO expert. Yes, social bookmarking and social networking sites were not intended to be used for promotion but as it turned out, they are a great way to drive traffic to one’s site and to improve one’s ranking with search engines.

In an interesting aside to the study I cited yesterday, The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/business/media/10drill.html?_r=2&ref=business) suggests that “visitors who get to retail sites through sponsored links are more likely to buy than those who click on organic results.” They also seem to spend more money. Jamie Smith, the chief of Engine Ready, feels as if shoppers may be turned off by the optimization done to make it show up at the top of the search engine results. We all know Google’s spiders are attracted to lots of relevant content and “when we’re optimizing for search engines, content is king,” Mr. Smith said, “but less is more when engaging a visitor.” So it seems as if sometimes what Google wants from the top listings is different from what visitors want. When someone wants to buy, they don’t want to read. They just want to go straight to the product and buy! This may be something to keep in mind when making a decision about one vs. the other.

Have you seen the Sponsored Links section at the top and sides of a search result? That is Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com/) (called Google Pay Per Click or PPC). PPC is a form of advertising where your business can be listed in the Sponsored Links section of the search results and you pay for each click someone makes. Google PPC is fast and fairly easy to set up, has a great knowledge base, and practically runs itself.

Google still sees linking as the greatest way that they can determine relevance and link-building will be around for awhile. Here are ways you may not have thought of to build some great links for your site:

Short post tonight as I'm just back from a short trip with Mystery Guest to celebrate our one year anniversary (which was awesome, BTW) and need to get caught up on lots of email.

Tonight I'm tackling a contentious, thorny issue and that's always a tough task. Thus, I'll ask, up front, for a bit of leeway in how my words are parsed and interpreted. I'm happy to make clarifications on specifics in the comments.

Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions (through Q+A as well as from clients and the SEO community) about the practice of buying links. A good number of folks have pointed out that, years ago, I endorsed several text/paid link brokers - companies that aggregate link ad inventory and sell it to those seeking to boost their rankings. This practice does violate Google's Quality Guidelines as well as other engines' desires, as do most of the direct forms of paying money to get a link that will assist with organic search rankings (I say "most" because the Yahoo! Directory and a few others like it may be exempt).