There is so much year-end posting that absolutely blows my brains through the roof of my office. We’re talking rockets, sparks, explosions, and this is all before 10 AM. Crazy I know 
Here is a smattering of the posts that have caught my eye today, my first day of blogging in 2007. I hope you find these as mentally explosive as I did 
Building Trust is #1 for 2007
I deeply appreciated this recent post from Matt McGee of Small Business SEM in which he states “The No. 1 SEO and marketing tactic that you need to focus on in 2007 is trust.”
I appreciate this because I’ve been so focused on building links and driving traffic - both excellent occupations obviously - but second to this core of shimmering and nebulous business wonderment of trust.
Some key tactics - 1) Matt calls it Participation Marketing. I call it conversation marketing. Whatever you call it, get out there in your online communities and make a little positive noise.
12) Buy older, trusted domains. If all else fails you CAN pay for trust
Nice post Matt!
SEOmoz on what Organic Search Marketers must learn from PPC Marketers
I found this post this morning and realized what a gem it is for search marketers, especially those who must occasionally remind their clients that they are “scientists” if not “rocket scientists”
“One of these [logical conclusions of search marketing thought] is how we author title tags & meta descriptions. This has gone from a game of keyword stuffing and phrase manipulation to the art of writing headlines - an almost exact parallel with the PPC task of writing the ad title and description.”
Danny Sullivan Interviews Wikia’s Jimmy Wales
I wrote a post on Wikipedia’s new social/community based search engine Wikia last week.
This week Danny Sullivan got the chance to ask some questions of Jimmy Wales, none of which are particularly surprising if you’re familiar with social search.
Namely - what will you do about spammers and “why do this at all?” Good questions to be sure, and I’m glad he dug in with Mr. Wales. Most telling is Sullivan’s final take, “I’ve long wanted humans to be back in the role of reviewing queries and actually looking to see if they make sense, rather than so much reliance on algorithms. Maybe the mere concept of the Search Wikia project will encourage the major search engines to do more in this area.”
On Rand Fishkin and SEM Transparency
Rand’s transparency of numbers continues to inspire and somewhat scare me. As a recently self-employed marketer and writer it mostly inspires me, but as a former agency employee it’s scary - it points to an openness that is invigorating but akin to showing your hand at poker.
Rand’s apparently seeking to take the competition out of the SEM business and leans aggressively towards the exposure of his most sensitive information. From a psychology perspective there’s great power in this and I’m glad that Rand’s leading the way for us in discovering the small business power that lies here.
Come to think about it… publicly traded companies have been doing this for years. Anyways, kudos to Rand for being so bold.
More great stuff:
Investigating Craigslist Spam
Stuntdubl’s favorite SEM posts of 2006
PhraseRank?
Posted on January 2, 2007
