Today we published our latest inbound marketing e-book, the 2012 edition of Link Building Secrets Revealed. Available for download at no cost on the Pole Position Marketing website, the e-book is a compilation of helpful link-building tips from 10 of the industry’s leading link builders, including:

• Jim Boykin of Internet Marketing Ninjas
• Peter da Vanzo of GoFish Media Ltd.
• Michele Baldoni of MBWeb
• Peter van der Graaf of SearchSpecialist.nl
• Eric Ward of EricWard.com
• John Doherty of Distilled
• Jason Acidre of KaiserTheSage.com
• Garrett French of Citation Labs
• Melanie Nathan of CanadianSEO 
• Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures

The new link-building resource is one of several e-books offered by Pole Position Marketing, which include The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!, Keyword Research and Selection and Destination Search Engine Marketing – all authored by our CEO Stoney deGeyter.

Link Building Secrets Revealed 2012 is available in Pole Position Marketing’s online learning library.

It’s time again for Pole Position Marketing’s Final Lap! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 17.

Stoney deGeyter (@StoneyD)

SEOs Strike Out as Google Encrypts Signed-in Search Data
by Jonathan Allen

Google has made a major change to the way secure search works for signed in users of its services. If a user is signed into a Google account, any search performed will now be done on a secure socket layer (SSL) and will no longer pass the search term referrer data. However, Google have also said that search term referrer data will be passed to advertisers who use their pay-per-click product. The SEO community is crying foul…

HTML5 and SEO: New Strategies for Optimizing Code
by David Gould

The evolution of HTML has been a long transition away from how things look and toward what things mean. Gone are the days when web pages were cobbled together in HTML tables to compensate for limited layout controls. (Or, rather, those days should be gone. You know who you are.) Improvements in the language and the rise of CSS allowed web programmers to build pages that looked great for users and made better sense to search engines.

SEO Training Courses & SEO Certifications
by Dave Naylor

To save others from the time and hassle it took me to sort through all of the redundant courses to find the useful ones, I decided to do the decent ones and write a review on each. I also knew that just like reading a few different books on the same subject I would still learn at least something from each one, due to the different experiences, knowledge and perspectives of the course authors. A few more courses have come along since I found the first ones, therefore I’ve waited to do those so that they can be included here.

Mike Fleming (@mflem25)

INTEGRATING SEO & PPC: 3 AREAS TO STUDY
by Adam Audette

A plethora of articles have been written about the convergence of SEO and PPC, most of them fairly elementary. I think everyone understands that, at least from a keyword level, each channel can (and should) inform and reinforce the other. That idea of “reinforcement” is a bit tricky, however.

How To Take Your Keyword Research To A Higher Level
by Tom Schmitz

Keyword research is your time to understand the market you are competing in and how people search. It is your opportunity to comb through the competition and learn their keywords, content and link-building strategies. It is your opportunity to map out what you should track for your website, your market competitors and your keyword competitors. If you plan a months- or years-long relationship with a client or website, you owe several hours or days to get this right.

Five tricks our minds play on us and what marketers need to know
by Kelvin Newman

There’s a phenomena on the cusp between behavioral economics and psychology known as cognitive biases which are essentially scientifically documented tricks that our minds play on us. As all of us in the world of digital marketing are in the business of persuasion, understanding these often irrational tendencies can help us do a better job.

Annalisa Hilliard (@ahilliardm)

Check My Links Chrome Extension – A Link Builder’s Dream
by Jon R. Cooper

Not too long ago I was dead link building with the Mozilla Firefox LinkChecker Add-on. I started recommending it in a few posts, saying how great of an add-on it was, when in reality I had no idea there were other broken backlink checkers out there. But one day Ross Hudgens was kind enough to tweet about one of the greatest link building browser extensions known to man – Check My Links, a chrome extension. From that point on, I was fully converted to the Chrome toolbar, but arguing Firefox and Chrome is a topic for another time. In a nutshell, Check My Links will become your best friend for building some of the top links on the web for multiple reasons.

How to Get the Most out of Guest Blogging for Link Building
by Alan Grainger

Ever since Google came along and Panda-spanked article websites into oblivion, guest blogging has been the preferred choice for the internet marketer who is looking to squeeze a little more link juice from their articles. Guest blogging can be an effective way of getting a link, but could you get a lot more bang for your buck by making just a few small changes to your strategy? Here are a couple of tips to make sure that your efforts are not wasted.

3 HIGH QUALITY LINK BUILDING TECHNIQUES
by Matt Jackson

When it comes to link building schools of thought, there are those that opt purely for quantity, ignoring the quality and even relevance of the links received. However, and especially since recent Google algorithm updates, the onus in a link building campaign should be on quality for at least part of your monthly link work.

Jen Carroll (@martijen)

Are you placing too big of a bet on social media’s direct impact on SEO rankings?
by Stephen Chapman

You’ve heard it time-and-time again: social media has changed the SEO landscape. But just how much does social media actually impact rankings directly? Not as much as you might think…

Why the QR code is failing
by Sean X Cummings

They have become the standard violator appearing on advertising; in the corner of print ads, across billboards, on buses, or in pieces of direct mail — even peppered throughout this article. You’ve seen them; that little block of even littler squares. Unfortunately the technology behind QR codes was not invented for advertising and marketing; we are just co-opting its usage, and it shows.

Is Youtility the Future of Marketing?
by Jay Baer

What we’re trying to do with all forms of marketing is tie interests to actions. We assume that some percentage of the people seeing your smoke signal are indeed in the market for a new horse, and when we link interest and action to create a prospective customer, we call that “filling the top of the funnel.”

What’s the best thing about online marketing that you read this week? Leave us your comments.

On October 26 at Canton’s Cultural Center for the Arts, we’ll be sponsoring the Stark Business-to-Business Expo After Hours Networking event together with the Canton Charge, the Cleveland Cavalier’s new D-League team! The day-long expo, presented by the Canton Repository and the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce, offers area businesses an opportunity to showcase their products and services while participating in valuable networking and educational sessions. If you own a business in Northeast Ohio, this is one event you won’t want to miss.

Pole Position Marketing to Offer Free Website Usability Evaluations at Stark B2B Expo

We’ll have a booth at the Stark B2B Expo featuring free website usability evaluations and PPC, social media and content consultations. Stoney deGeyter (aka, the Prez) believes the B2B Expo is a unique opportunity for Stark County companies to generate awareness about their products and services.

He says, “Marketing in the B2B arena, as opposed to business-to-consumer, comes with its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to visibility. We’re pleased that our sponsorship will help support the Canton Chamber and Repository in their efforts to highlight local B2B companies.” (Excellent quote, Stoney!)

We’re also helping a local non-profit – The Soul Care Center – gain some visibility. Soul Care Center is a faith-based organization in Canton that offers counseling, coaching, training and other support programs. Founder Jim Roberts, CCMFT, CCPC, CCLC, will be offering a prayer ministry to those who attend. Whatever your personal or business needs, Jim will be happy to pray with you!

Stoney to Speak on Stark B2B Expo Panel on Social Media Marketing

Stoney, along with Peter Fierle of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Beth Kaboth from SiteLogic, will be part of a panel discussion, “Social Media: You’re doing it. What next?” The program begins at 10 am in the Cultural Center’s exhibition area.

Other event speakers include Ohio’s Lt. Governor Mary Taylor, Dr. William Draves, business futurist, and Sue Grabowski of Grabowski & Co. What a great line-up!

Like to learn more about integrating content, search and social from Stoney? We’ll be holding a live, half-day website marketing workshop on November 16 in North Canton.

The information here has been updated to include not only the check points but also the explanations of each, so you don’t have to keep referring back to the blog posts above. I’ve also added a few points here and there, but no major overhaul or anything.

Anyway, here you go: The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, PDF!

Searching a name as uncommon as Stoney deGeyter, you may not be surprised to find him in all of the top ten results, but each and every one of the top one hundred results are either articles Stoney has written himself or are about him. I stopped checking after page 10.

When searching for Pole Position Marketing (no quotes), the top 21 are all directly related to the company, with the results still very heavily relevant but starting to get more scattered after that.

If you don’t have a unique personal or company name, what can you do to promote your company in the search results? Join and become active in a variety of social media. Great examples are LinkedIn , FaceBook, and Twitter.

And when you’re interested in knowing what anyone else is saying about you or your company, you can use Google Alerts. It may be good to know when a YouTube video appears with you as the underdog!

I’m pretty happy about this, though interested in their choices. We have four main sections of our website and none of these pages are the top-level pages from those sections. But hey, who am I to complain?

I also like that our keyword research PDF is also showing up as an indented results!