Here’s what you gotta do:

1. Set up your MTVMusic.com account – Think like a fan and create a name that doesn’t raise any flags with MTV.

2. Find a relevant video – i.e. Thriller by Michael Jackson

3. Comment on the video with an anchor text – i.e. “Wow, where do you think I can get those Halloween Costumes” – using html code that looks like this <a href=”http://www.domain.com”>KEYWORD</a>

That’s it! Again, I would recommend making everything relevant and not gaming the system. Just get some relevant links here and there and you’ll be good.

Click Here to Download Full Page Rank History Timeline

Don’t be lazy and not take the time to find a default tagline that is consistent with all the keywords in your group. This is a great time to set up an ad group just for your specific products. Also, don’t forget to leverage Alt Text for the high volume and generic keywords. Lastly, always “TEST! TEST! TEST” because what works for most people maybe not work for you. Compare your CTR of the ads with keyword insertion versus Ads that don’t have keyword insertion.

Soon after starting my job, I was sent along with Ms. Danielle down to San Diego for a Yahoo Conference highlighting their new pay per click program. During their presentation, they had times for questions and answers and I pretty much asked “how much do i have to spend to get a dedicated representative?” They yahoo reps there didn’t really want to answer that question in such a public venue, but I kept pushing to see “so does $10k a month do it?” . . still no answer . . . “$20k?” . . . . finally, they crack and say that they have a soft number of about $10,000 per month. That made me happy since my company spends more than that per month, so I met up with the customer service reps after the conference and they set me up with a dedicated team by the following monday. I really have to commend Yahoo for such great customer service as I never have experienced anything like that with Google.

What I wanted to do was use Yahoo’s resources to build a solid foundation of campaigns and in order to do that, I exported all my Google Adwords information and sent them over to my Yahoo Rep. Once they received the information, they had a team of analysts go over my landing pages, keywords and ad copies to see what they could do to maximize my unlimited budget. Overall, their suggestions were very text book, but the one thing they did for me that helped me tremendously was they reorganized my keywords based on high and low volume clicks.  If any of you have ever worked with Yahoo’s web based ppc system, you know it’s a pain in the ass to do mass changes.

So everything is set, but the time I have to constantly manage all the new keywords they set me up with is really short. My account rep tells me about their campaign optimizer which pretty much helps automate my bids to meet my preset goals.

First thing you want to do is select “Yes” and then set your monthly budget. If you’d like to see what Yahoo estimates your traffics going to be. Of course, this estimate is overly inflated, so don’t get too hyped.

Next, you’ll want to make sure you know your business because you will have to enter numbers that will guarantee you a positive return on your investment.

I used the Business Objective Target option because I have a good understand of my product’s metrics. The main metric I have to understand is the conversion rates of my landing pages. Once I have a good understanding of that, I will know what my cost per acquistion (Business Target Value) so that I could enter into the optimizer. The optimizer will do it’s best to divert more of the budget to high performing keywords and the adjust bids to acheive your target value.

Overall, the optimizer is great tool to add to the arsenal. I wouldn’t rely on it soley because they don’t control too many metrics, but it does save a little bit of time here and there.

Have any of you tried the optimizer? What are your impressions?

I have to admit that I probably have been dinged by google. Launching the Name in My Domain Link Train and the Technorati Faves Link Train, then doing my whole iPhone Giveaway contest, I can see why they would ding me. But still . . . they weren’t that bad, were they? muhahhaa

Just to let you know, I have done everything possible to make myself google friendly:

• Created my Sitemap.xml files
• Submitted my sitemap.xml files to Google Webmasters
• Made sure my robots.txt files were correct
• Made sure I had no 301 redirects that were penalizing my site
• Used “site:http://www.mrgarylee.com&#8221; to see that 239 pages of this blog are indexed
• Used “link:http://www.mrgarylee.com&#8221; to see that 301 sites are linked to this blog

Before I destroyed this site, I went to go ask some friends online to see what their opinions were – Nate Whitehill, Ms. Danielle, John Chow and Greg Morgan.

Nate Whitehill says “Screw Google . . . . . their traffic is garbage for a personal blog. The bounce rate is high and the page views per user are low”

John Chow says “Join the Club”

Ms. Danielle says “Oh man . . . . . you’ve been cursed since forever”

Greg Morgan says “It’s all about digg and stumble . . . . don’t worry about it man!”

So like Greg said, I’m not gonna worry about it and just worry about pumping out content and using the social network/bookmarking tools out there to try and increase my feed subscriptions.

So not to divulge all his secrets, I will just highlight one important lesson that’ll make you smack your forehead and say . . . “ahh dammit, i should have thought of that!” because that’s exactly what I did when I heard it!

First, open your Google Analytics for your website and go to your Traffic Sources overview. If you don’t have analytics installed, I don’t know what to do with you (that’s a hint to go install it NOW). Next, click on “Keywords” and a list of keywords will show up of search phrases people have been using to get to your site. Now export that list into excel by either copy and pasting or typing it out. Google sucks for not having an export feature, but at least they give you this.

Next, you’ll want to head over to wordtracker.com and buy a 1 week subscription for $30 USD or if you’re really short on cash, they have a free trial that gives you a limited search result. Wordtracker is a site that has tools that can help you generate thousands of relevant keywords based on ones you already have and is used by a lot of people in the industry.

Once you have this list of keywords, you can throw them back into your PPC campaigns and start bidding on them to see which ones start converting for you or which ones generate traffic for you to build a landing page for.

See how easy that was? How’s your forehead feeling?

It’s the final week before google releases their updated google page ranks and by reading some of the SEO forums I frequent, it looks like a lot of people are making one last ditch effort to get some high ranking quality links to bring their page rank averages up a few percentage points or maybe, they just want to get a few more entries into my iPhone giveaway contest!

For those of you unfamilar with Page Rank, it is a method of ranking website’s overall quality which grew from the minds of two Stanford University students by the name of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who coincidentally are the founders of the internet’s largest search engine, Google. The whole idea behind Page rank is that it factors in how many and what kind of links are linking to your site. The way I explain it to my clients is to think of the Web as one big party that you go to by yourself. Once you get to the party, your goal is to meet one person, then another . . . then another. Hopefully, you’ll be smart enough to meet people through your newfound friends to increase the chances of meeting more people of similar interests. As you increase the number of people know at the party and with more people saying good things about you or talking about your opinions, the more “authority” you will receive in what you are saying. So, what this translates too in the search engine world is that if you have a higher page rank than your competitor and if both of you write about the same topic, then most likely, you’ll get ranked higher than your competitor in the search results. You don’t have to be a genius to know that this can mean some serious cash in a highly competitve market!

So, for the past couple of months, I have been trying to learn and work the system by showing Google that I know lots of people and they know me as well. I’ve used a couple of link trains for my blogging buddies throughout the world. A good majority of them talk about blogging as a whole, so the relevant content is there. One link building method that just went down the tubes for me was WordPress’ decision to take down sponsored themes. I don’t believe it will be a long term problem, but for this upcoming update, it wasn’t the most ideal situation in the world. The last promotion I’ve been doing is the iPhone Give Away Contest that has been spreading around the world pretty quickly. This promotion is pretty much the equivalent of me providing the alcohol at the party and everyone being my friend because they want some free booze! The great thing is that I think the contest has revived my Technorati Faves Link Train since Danielle, Jeff Kee and I have noticed a lot more incoming links coming through our dashboard.

In any case, the links are still coming in right now and there’s less than a week left before Google releases the page rank. So for this week, I’m going to try and hook up some of my readers with some high quality link love.

Basic Rules: I’ll include your main website url or a post of your choice on these posts under these conditions:

1) You link to http://www.pinkdeals.net using the anchor text online coupon codes

After you’re done, just contact me and use the subject line – “Post Link Request” – so that my email filters know which folder to put your email in. Include the post that you mention the online coupon codes and let me know the link you’d like me to include and to which one of my posts. Once I receive your email, I’ll post your link asap since I know we’re running on a short clock here.

Here are 8 diverse posts you can choose from:

PR5 – How to Convert a Blogger to a Real Blog

PR5 – Why Desktop Computers Suck

PR4 – Quick SEO Checklist

PR4 – Because I don’t have enough iPods

PR4 – My First Full Month of Blogging

PR4 – This Week in Blogs II

PR4 – AppleTV getting ready to take over CableTV

PR4 – A Night with Kelly Hu

The last day for this will be this wednesday at midnight since I’m going to San Francisco for a wedding and a golf tournament. Good Luck with the Update!

As some of you know, the biggest trend in Search Engine Optimization is the building of backlinks to your website with specific anchor texts. We have seen a blogger like John Chow basically manipulate the system to rank No. 1 for the term “Make Money Online” with all his great (and evil) link bait schemes – Review Me, Wii Giveaway & Zune Giveaway (which is currently becoming virtual slut of the internet with Ms. Danielle‘s Zune Giveaway on her blog site). Even I’ve done my fair share of link baiting schemes with a couple of link trains, which have helped me crack the first page of Google for my own friggin’ name (but not number one just yet) and rank for some decent keywords in other search engines!

We’ve all seen these link bait systems replicated in one way or other and to be honest, it’s starting to get old. I’m still getting emails that ask me to participate in new link trains – Alexa Link Train, Do Follow Link Trains, Agloco Link Trains, etc! I know all of John’s link bait campaigns have been replicated to death.

So basically, I wanted to open up this post to all my readers – new and old – to see what kind of new ideas you can think of that can help you generate links to your site. Purchasing links doesn’t count since that’s way too easy. Ideas are like Avalanches – sometimes they need a little snowflake in the right place to get them going!

Since I don’t have the Do Follow links enabled in my comments section, I will promise to link you in a post if you write something worthy of reading. No “uh huhs, I agree, that’s such a great point” fluff comments will count, so nice try !

To start off . . . here’s my idea: Run a Link Telethon where you will donate 1 day of our time to your local homeless shelter for every 20 links you receive.

So, what do you think about that idea? Do you have another idea you would like to bounce off us? This isn’t called a Brainstorm for nothing!

In any case, I’ve been doing my research around the net about optimizing video, with embedded YouTube videos of particular interest. It seems that the process of optimizing video for the SERPs is not much different than it was before, where you were responsible for tagging the correct words to the video and then hope people embed your video onto their site for the backlink. There are some varying theories on what one can do to get their videos ranked but all they are right now are just theories.

What are your thoughts on the future of Video Clips in your Search Engine Results? What have you done to optimize video you’ve posted? Do you think this is the future of internet advertising? Do you think you’re going to voluntarily click on these commercials?