• We talk a lot about link building here at SEO Boy – it can be a time consuming, but definitely worthwhile if done properly. A few days ago, SEOmoz posted A Link Building Rule to Cut Out and Keep ^[1], and it’s a good one – “The most valuable links you can get, are those which your competitors will never be able to have.”
• Have you ever searched for something and the first result you get is a page that is absolutely terrible, or hasn’t been updated in 3 years. How is that at the top of the SERPs results? This is something I’ve wondered about for a while and Why Some Weak Sites Rank High in Google SERPS ^[2] tries to tackle the issue. I’m not sure the post offers a complete answer but it’s an interesting topic.
• Social media is a valuable and cost-effective component of SEO, but you have to do much more than simply create a profile. It needs to be cultivated and tended to for the best results – and here are 5 things you should avoid doing if you want to make the most of social media. ^[3]
• SEO Whitehats has a great post on the truths about black hat SEO ^[4]. Here they talk about specific techniques most people think are black hat but really are simply ‘old hat’ techniques.
• Yahoo Site Explorer is finally catching up to Google Webmaster Tools by providing users with a top search queries report ^[5] which is apparently in beta. You can view your top search queries for a particular day, week or month.
• Do you manage a site that uses dynamic parameters in its URLs? Does that make you sad? Google’s added a feature to Webmaster Tools that allows you to “suggest” whether they should crawl and index up to 15 dynamic parameters ^[6]…which could be a nice way to increase your site’s crawl efficiency in Google, but read Vanessa Fox’s writeup about the feature at Search Engine Land before you go rushing off and try to use it.
• If you are like many online marketers, you probably don’t get out much. Personal, face-to-face interaction is one of the most important networking tools out there. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses the importance of in-person networking for SEO’s ^[7].
• Matt McGee over at Small Business Search Marketing discusses the question, “Should a small business have a Wikipedia Article? ^[8]” He says that you should think twice before pursuing one. It may not be as simple as you think.

Jessica is an Account Supervisor at Hanapin Marketing ^[9], a search engine marketing firm focused on generating results through PPC and SEO.