The title of this article is designed to prove (in an SEO kind of way) the very point that Dale Carnegie was making when he wrote one of the most influential business books of all times, “How To Win Friends And Influence People” (arguably one of the best business books ever written as well). In the titling of his book Mr. Carnegie was trying to do two things:

1.Write a title that captures everything that people want in order to sell more books.

2. Tie two important things together that are related but often viewed as different. In the case of the book it was winning friends and influencing people which he points out are essentially based on the same core traits and actions. Similarly, in our title here we are capturing two of the key areas people interested in SEO are looking to read about and thus we will show the essential tie between winning links and the influence it will have on your search engine rankings. We will also discuss methods for actually winning them as opposed to settling for second-rate links rather like winning friends as opposed to settling for tolerable acquaintances.

Link bait: Link bait is any content put on a website with the primary function of attracting links to that page or to another page on the site.

Link building is an essential ingredient in ranking your website highly on the major search engines. There, now that we've got that brilliant grasp of the obvious out of the way let's move on to what you can do to actually create them. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty of link building, no beginners guide would be complete without a brief explanation as to why links are important and the different elements of them. Being a beginners guide this won't be an entirely complete list but it will be enough to get you going on the right path. Understanding what you're trying to do will help you do it better and more importantly, understanding the "why" of the situation will help you stretch your tactics outside of this and other articles on link building.

I was sad to see some people who claim to be search experts actually syndicate that John Dvorak article stating that it was good. Of course there are some scammers in every piece of the marketing industry because anywhere where there is demand for a marketing service opportunistic people will look to take advantage of people, but not all SEO techniques are seedy or shifty. In fact, most are not.

One area that is worth looking at for SEO in 2009 (for me at least) is page segmentation. Now this approach really isn’t new and I came across papers as far back as 1997 and beyond. But unsurprisingly most IR methods don’t just appear over night. The big three, (of search) have each had various research papers and patents dating back as far as 2003-4. It just seems to have some traction and is sensible as well.

Essentially page segmentation is when a search engine looks to break a given web page down into its component parts. They could analyze a web page and assign various relevance or importance scoring for different regions of a page. Some of the methods include fixed-length page segmentation (FixedPS), DOM, (DomPS) and location based and white spaces (vision based or VIPS) and even a combined approach (CombPS).


As with many IR methodologies they try to improve the signal to noise ratio. In this case by hopefully identify the noisy segments; resources can be focused on the relevant areas of a web page. Furthermore most people do tend to understand web pages in a segmented or structured view. When you arrived at this page did you instinctively know where to find the main content? Aware of common locations for navigation and other elements? Banner blindness? You get the idea.

Another question we received recently from the SEOBook.com community was: What qualities are common in Aaron Wall, DaveN, Bob Massa, Jason Duke, SugarRae, et al, that new SEOs can adopt, to come closer to people like these in expertise. Where do most new SEOs go wrong when they set learning priorities?

I’ve asked these people to provide their views, which I’ll get to shortly.

It’s a great question, because the avalanche of SEO information that confronts the beginner can be overwhelming. How do you know what information is important? What aspects do you really need to spend you time on, and what information do you need to reject? What are the qualities that make for a good SEO?