I have a question about back links. How do you get relavent back links without getting on link farms? I have been using twitter for a while and just started facebook. I was told to get a tinyurl and add a small fishing report on twitter and it would count as a backlink? I have written 5 articles on ezine but find that time consuming and did not help much.

I was curious as to why my banner ad reports don't match up with my google analytics visitors. For instance, my recent report shows 1200 clicks on banner ads, but the referring visits from the banners on GA only shows 500 visits.

Quick questions if you could please help when you get a chance. My questions are regarding what's better for the long run and our cost-effective for running multiple sites: Do you use dedicated IP's? If so, do you use only one for all your sites or do you use a dedicated IP for each domain?

Dave, I have heard that writing guest posts for other people's blogs is a good way to get more readers to my blog. Sounds good to me, but I am finding that it isn't easy to find bloggers who are willing to publish my stuff. Got any ideas that can help me?

I'm thinking about buying a domain from someone else and have no idea how to figure out what it's worth. Do you have any tips on whether $1000 is ridiculously expensive or a reasonable deal for it?

I am an HR person but right now I have given a task about marketing one of our websites for business. I am kinda new to it, I need to know what is pay per click and how website advertising works? Simply said, how do I market a website and make it sponsored link on Google, Yahoo and other search engines?

We're living in a noisy world. There a millions of blogs, and photos and radio shows and podcasts and websites, and… whew! There's a lot of stuff out there. So if you're just starting out, or even if you've been doing it for awhile, you probably wonder how you're going to get noticed.

The bad news is if it was easy, you'd be noticed already. The good news is that there's never been a greater time in the history of the world, than right now, to effectively get noticed without having to spend millions on advertising.

Hi Dave. I'm working on some publicity for my little company and have just learned about the importance of search engine optimization. My Mom tells me, however, that visibility comes through press releases, but I have a sense she's hopelessly old school. What's your take on this?

Like many people, I use Google Analytics to keep track of visitors and usage of my Web site. Very helpful, but I don't like having to remember to log in and check it every week. Is there some way to have the reports emailed to me automatically?

I've heard from a lot of people - including you, Dave - that interviews are a great way to add high-value content to your blogging efforts, and while I have a pretty good idea how to interview someone, I don't know how to find people to interview. Do you have any suggestions?

I have been diligently applying all the search engine optimization techniques you talk about, Dave, but I'm still unclear on one key technique: how do I have more people link to me?

Now, the big question: do you need to do this for your business to be more successful as we move into 2008 and beyond?

You know you do.

The problem is, who do you turn to for trustworthy, accurate and honest answers, advice that can help you rise above the noise of your marketplace?

And how the heck can you get a free holiday in Hawaii out of the deal?

My answer to you: The Aloha Social Media Summit.

I've been listening to a ton of different podcasts in the last few months and while most are lame, there are a couple of really good ones. Is there some way I can vote for the good ones or otherwise help promote them, ideally in Apple's iTunes Store?

I have a popular business podcast called Startup Story Radio that I produce every week - as you know, since you've been on the show! -- and want to extract the URL so I can have a simple "listen to us through iTunes" link, but every time I click on the button in the subscribe email, it switches immediately to iTunes itself and I can't see the URL. Help!

Well, mine is an online lingerie store. A healthy one, ok ?! My level of HTML is simple one... things like css, php, still don't know how to use.. What kind of contents of article should i have?

I have a quick question for you, Dave: I'm trying to bookmark a Web page at The Leaky Cauldron, a Harry Potter website, and Digg refuses to work with it. Does Digg just dislike Harry Potter, or what's going on?

With all the new technology coming fast and furious - RSS, video blogging, mobile advertising - is it wise for me to jump into any of these technologies for my affiliate site or should I wait for wide adoption of a strong few? In other words, do I need all that tech on my site?

I love selling things but am not that strong with numbers. Are there suggestions on ways to organize my SEO, cost per click and stuff, but is easy on my brain?

I am a total newbie to internet marketing and I am excited by the many opportunities I've found. Recently, I joined a new group through an affiliate link and when I paid, was given a list of 125,000 names and addresses. I want to send an affiliate marketing email to them. How should I start doing it without violating SPAM regulations? I need help, please!!

Is there a way I can use Web phenomena such as MySpace and YouTube to get more clicks on my affiliate site?

I hear local sites are proving popular. Should I build out separate sites for every local audience?

I want my own page but am unsure how to go about it. I have banners from Money4net, Dreammerchants, Popups from Money4net and popunders from Dreammerchants, casualmedia. I'm figuring that it all will pay $9.50 per thousand impressions, but am in need of someone who can help me install it all. Any suggestions?

I'm starting up some message boards (forums) for my Web sites. I expect a lot of junk (spam, flames, etc) and I'm only doing this because I will have an employee moderating the boards to try and keep them clean, happy and family friendly. Seems that there should be some site or book that collects wisdom from people who have had to moderate discussion boards and forums: what to look for, how to settle disputes, etc. But a search turned up nothing so far. Any suggestions?

If I place a link on my business' home page to my weblog and then make sure to update my weblog frequently, will the "Googlebot" come a-knockin' on my home page just as frequently as my blog?

The reason I ask is because in your book Growing Your Business with Google you indicate that Google cares about pages, not sites. This seems to suggest to me that if I update my blog frequently, Google will come to my blog page frequently, but not to my site.

I have several different ideas for web sites that are similar (in that they involve mathematics and statistics) but also very different in terms of topic area (for, example, sports, investing, health). Does it make sense to put all of these into a single web domain, with subdomains for each topic area? Or would it be better to have a separate domain name for each topic area? Which approach would seem more likely to be better business-wise, leading to more permanent visitors/customers for my content, more clicks on my Google-ads, and more income for me?

I've been reading everything I can about optimizing Web pages for both usability and ad traffic, and just recently came across the term "heat map", referring to some method of tracking what area on a page people look at, I guess? Can you tell me what it's all about and perhaps give me a clue about where I can find more information about how to apply heat map data to my own site design?

New to the web, paid a company back in March to register my new website with all the search engines. As I am now reading your book (Growing your Biz with Google) in August, I see that my website has a 0 page rank! does this mean that I am not even registered with "Google"? Did I get ripped off?

If you could check and see if I am even in existence with Google and Yahoo, that would be great. If not, please tell me how I can fix this problem as fast as possible, as I am currently working on a "review website" with Microsoft Front Page 2003, that I plan on using to load up with links back to my main website, and I would assume I am spinning my wheels if I am not even registered? If you can let me know if this tactic (creating a review website of various other home business opportunities) will work, I would be most appreciative! I have had my site up since March and it just sits stagnant!

Do you think this will breath some immediate life into the site? (ie: traffic?) Thanks in advance, Dave. Love the book so far! Also, when you agree to add other links to your website, where do you put them? Should I create an entire page just for links? And where is the best place to get into reciprocol linking when your site is relatively new? Does reciprocol linking work as well as building a review site? (ie: one way linking?) and lastly, how do you suggest registering a new website in the future so that I don't have this problem again?

Dave, I know that the NOFOLLOW attribute was introduced to prevent PageRank bleed through blog comment spam, but now that my site is automatically creating those NOFOLLOW links, I'm afraid that the search engines might assign some negative karma to the "linked to" domain, which would be my own. Is that something I should be worrying about? Thanks, Steve.

Dave, I want to design a website in two languages. But if search engines only let you submit one 'index.htm' on the same domain, how can I make sure both language versions of the site receive equal attention?

Okay, I said in my response, tell me how you would propose we accomplish this. Well, his second message with the details of the proposed exchange - to build traffic on both our sites and increase our mutual page ranks, of course - quite startled me...

Here's an email message that I received today, quite similar to email messages I receive at least a half-dozen times each day:

I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in real life debt because it looks like it's relevant to a site for which I am seeking links.

I admit it, a few years ago I was of the mindset that sitemaps were for Web sites that weren't well designed: after all, I reasoned, if the information layout made sense and the content was organized in a coherent and thoughtful way, you'd never need to visit a sitemap because you'd always be able to find what you were seeking directly through the site navigation.

Most of the time on my weblog Free Web Money I talk about proactive things you can do to improve your search engine findability, your site's relevance for a specific key word or key phrase. For example, keyword density and page titles have both been explored in depth in previous entries.

Instead, this time I thought it would be useful to talk about a couple of things that you really shouldn't be doing, things that will actually lower your Google pagerank and, quite likely, your relevance score for the other top search engines too.

One question that comes up again and again with online entrepreneurs is whether it's worthwhile to register new domain names for different projects, and if it is, how the heck do you find good domain names!?

First off, keyword-relevant domain names can be a nice boost to your relevance and page rank (as discussed in How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank.) because if it includes the key word or phrase you're using, it further reinforces that your Web site is relevant to that topic. That's why this Web site is called free-web-money.com not "daves-guide-to-adding-neat-stuff-to-your-site.com" or "spliffo.info" or similar.

A core question for anyone on the Web, and certainly a question you should be asking if you're trying to monetize your Web site, is how the heck does Google figure out what sites are more relevant to a given search than others?

To get the answer, let's go back in time a little bit and look at the research papers from a Stanford University project called "BackRub". You should certainly recognize the authors...

There are at least a million different ways to increase traffic to your Web site, but one of the most useful to the Internet community is to volunteer to be a category editor at DMOZ, an open source, public Web directory similar to how Yahoo! was in the early days before it became a media giant.