You want answers?
I think I’m entitled to them.

You want answers?
I want the truth!

You can’t handle the truth!

Chris Sherman from Search Engine Land just revealed 14 strategic truths about search marketing that are imperative for success.

1. You must set goals.
2. SEO is an ongoing process.
3. Competition is nasty, brutal, and long.
4. The long tail is your friend.
5. Both paid and natural SEM are crucial.
6. Strive to balance paid and natural results.
7. Tools simplify everything.
8. Being #1 isn’t everything.
9. Beware the brand trap.
10. Customers hear their language, not yours.
11. SEM complements other marketing efforts.
12. Traditional marketing complements SEM.
13. Searchers are desperate to reach you.
14. Let their fingers do the talking.

In conclusion, Chris Sherman suggests that search should be considered as an integral component of an overall marketing campaign. In addition, be prepared to spend time and money but have patience because search marketing really pays off.

Search Marketing Now offers free webcasts covering topics about search engine optimization, paid search advertising and search marketing in general. If you haven’t tuned in already, register now.

In a series of calculated steps, Marchex launched more than 100,000 local websites, providing more than one billion pages of local content today. Previously, Marchex was better known for their massive domain name portfolio including more than 200,000 domains and 96% of all ZIP Code areas nationwide, such as www.90210.com.

The newly launched sites feature more than 15 million business listings across all major yellow pages categories including tens of thousands of vertical, local and local-vertical websites.

Wow! Marchex must have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, drank a V8 and had their Wheaties this morning.

Local search just got a swift kick in the ass.

According to Search Engine Land, SEMPO just announced the Advanced Search Advertising course is now live. Topics include PPC Models, Advanced Keyword Strategy, Copywriting, Bidding & Ranking Methodology, Landing Pages, Success Metrics and more. In addition to the Advanced Search Advertising course, SEMPO also teaches the Fundamentals of Search Marketing and Advanced Search Engine Optimization.

The SEMPO courses are designed to keep you aloof of what’s going on in the fast growing search marketing arena, help you influence website traffic and introduce career options. SEMPO is a global non-profit organization serving the search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it.

Although you can enroll in any of the search marketing classes, the SEM Fundamentals is a prerequisite for both the advanced SEO and PPC courses.

Linkbaiting is the art of doing or saying anything that will get you a link back to your site. Linkbait that tends to work particularly well is what I like to call “toolbait”. Toolbaiting is simple. Create a cool tool, browser extension, next best ajax thing-a-ma-jig and make it available for free.

A couple weeks ago at SMX, for instance, Matt Cutts explained how to turn off personalized results without logging out. Great tip, but seriously… who really wants to manually add &pws=0 to the end of all their search queries? He also hinted that if someone could automate the process, there might be some potential link love involved.

Enter Joost de Valk, an SEO consultant and web designer from the Netherlands. Just a few days later, he spits out an OpenSearch plugin which adds &pws=0 to the query and shows you the clean results without having to log out of Google. Within a matter of days, the high class link love started pouring in.

What kind of linkbait do you use?

Graywolf dropped a list of essential WordPress plugins a while back entitled “SEO Plugins for WordPress”. Although a bit misleading, the article covers a variety of useful SEO plugins (some more so than others) that will do everything but tie your shoe. More recently, John Chow referenced an out of the box SEO solution which should also help you achieve better search engine results.

Meanwhile, I tend to fallback on the same WordPress plugins for all my optimization needs. In order from top to bottom, or rather header to footer, here they are:

Page Titles
SEO Title Tag – Super easy installation and highly configurable. Allows you to override page or post title tags with a custom ones.

META Tags
Head META Description – Upload and activate. Simple. Done.

Keywords
Ultimate Tag Warrior – Compatible with the page title plugin and works wonders for drawing Technorati traffic, not to mention reinforcing on-page keyword density.

Syndication
FeedSmith Plugin – Trick out your feed with all sorts of options including PingShot, a quick notification service that enables your feed to be updated in the widest variety of places as quickly as you add new content.

Sitemap
Google Sitemap Generator – Get a search engine compliant sitemap in seconds.

Common sense would also suggest you contain your core keywords in the post title since most WordPress themes typically wrap them in h1 or h2 tags. Furthermore, for maximum SEO impact, I recommend you read the definitive guide to semantic web markup for blogs.

Apparently, Blue Hat SEO is the only website on the Internet that is completely dedicated to the art of Advanced SEO. I mean, how else do you wrap your head around the idea of generating $25,000 USD (recurring) in 141 seconds?

Last week in my rss reader, Eli from Blue Hat SEO said he needed to get a “few quick announcements” out of the way. He wanted to do something that “directly makes people money and helps them become more successful“. Turns out Eli is offering a premium SEO whizbang tool that will do a-b-c and get you x-y-z for “pennies compared to what people actually get”. Oh, and you’ll need to act quickly if you want in on the action. Eli is only going to allow 100 250 members.

T-Minus 22 Hours. Over the weekend, Eli indicates the tool will be released in 22 hours along with a little surprise. “Tomorrow is the day we show the industry what real tools are”, he says.

Monday morning at approximately 9am PST Eli announces the tool is open for business.

This morning I read the tool sold out, in 2 minutes and 21 seconds no less. As Eli puts it, the “launch went crazy good”.

Moral of the story?

Competition in the search engine optimization sphere is fierce and it’s only getting more competitive. Everybody is looking for that edge and more than willing to pony up $100 bucks a month to get it. It also suggests that in addition to solidifying his “advanced SEO” claim to fame, Eli’s clearly demonstrated his marketing worthiness. Blue Hat Marketing anyone?

p.s. Just for kicks, I’m going to use Eli’s QUIT tool to seed this article.