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Allegedly, Tynt is a cool service for bloggers and other creators of written web content. Tynt provides a piece of Javascript that creates a backlink to your blog post or site when your content is copied and pasted by a third party into a content editor.

Below is an example of Tynt at work. Thanks to Patrick Altoft of Branded3 for noticing that the Daily Mail in the UK uses it, and blogging about it on BlogStorm. He wrote a great post that helped alert me to Tynt. His post was also so good that I impulsively scrolled my mouse over his text, hit “CTRL + C” on my keyboard, and hit “CTRL + V” on this blog post.

Tynt At Work

Tynt Insight monitors copy and paste behavior on billions of page loads per month across hundreds of thousands of web sites . Our data shows that up to 6% of page loads results in a user copying content! On a site that has 20 million page views per month – cont

Source: Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt

My Reaction To Tynt

Wait a second… where’s the link?!?!

When Tynt works its magic, the title of Patrick’s blog post on BlogStorm (Add links when people cut and paste your content with Tynt) should have been hyperlinked directly to his post. After all, I directly copied and pasted his content into my Wordpress editor – no Jedi mind tricks here.

So… where’s the link?

The Problem With Tynt

Turns out Tynt’s Javascript code inserts the link to your blog post the second someone copies and pastes your information into a WYSIWYG text editor.

In contrast, I use an HTML editor to create my blog posts, rendering Tynt’s magic useless. Also, because of the way Tynt’s script works, their attributions are very easy to remove. A novice web plagiarizer can easily take them out of a post once they have copied and pasted your content.

Tynt is promoted as a “provider of SEO benefits by generating more links back to your content that are search engine visible.” Read more: http://www.tynt.com/#ixzz0XnNAbeTL

See – even when HTTP code is used for link placement, it is still ineffective.

Is Tynt worth adding to your site to be an assistant to your link building efforts? Sure. But will it actually produce a quantity of links for you? No.

I get that bloggers and news sites are tired of having sites steal their content, and I 100% agree with your gripes. As an alternative to using Tynt for building links when your content is stolen, I would personally recommend Wordpress users check out Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer Plugin.

After reading over Michael Gray’s testing with this plugin, the RSS Footer Plugin seems much more effective at putting content bandits to work for your link building efforts than Tynt.

Well, my boys are rather picky and they weren’t in the mood for anything for dinner. So, I decided to get their attention and tell them that we were going to make the best sandwich EVER.

They got all excited about what it was going to be and will remember it forever. Here’s the video.

The “Toasted Triple Decker Peanut Butter, Jelly and Fruitloop Sandwich” is a remarkable thing for my boys.

What are you going to do with your website that’s remarkable enough to get your potential customers and/or link partners excited about what you have to offer and remember it forever?

Unlike its competitors who always seem to fail at adapting their service offerings quickly enough to match the constantly evolving landscape of social media/networking, Facebook has now added the ability to tag friends in status updates.

The ability to tag friends in updates isn’t particularly fascinating, especially for those who “tweet” regularly. But Twitter-tagging is limited in terms of effectiveness for online reputation management (ORM).

Why? Because anyone who has a unique username (“unique” = not the same name as your birth name) in Twitter loses out on ORM-benefit because the link text is irrelevant. When I have a Twitter conversation with “@bhawk988″ (known to his friends and family as Kevin Doory), the link at the beginning of my Twitter message to him doesn’t help his profile rank for the search “Kevin Doory” in Google.

However, when tagging a friend in a Facebook status message, placing the “@” symbol in front of the person’s name creates an anchor texted, SEO-friendly link from your profile to your friend’s profile. It also creates a similar internal link to your Facebook page on your own Facebook wall. Check out these images below for an example of this concept at play:

How Facebook Tagging Can Help Protect Your Online Reputation

There is plenty of documentation out there stressing the importance of managing online reputation. Facebook tagging helps manage online reputation because a user profile earns a quality, authoritative, internal link with each tag in a Facebook status.

Anyone who was part of the Facebook username rush back in June and managed to secure their own name is likely concerned with their online reputation. Getting these internal links from across the Facebook universe to a Facebook profile naturally increases the authority of that profile. Those same links also improve the chances that a Facebook profile indexes in the Google search results for a related search term (like my Facebook profile for my name, for example).

Facebook tagging is likely to create a classic case of “he who has the most links wins” in search engine results for people and company names.

The implications of Facebook tagging don’t just end with the Google search results benefits, either. I don’t have confirmation on this, but look for Facebook tagging to begin to have an impact on internal searches within Facebook. If a searcher is looking for a certain “Jonathan Bentz” in Facebook, for example, the fact that I am tagged in more status messages than my co-Jonathan Bentz’s will likely cause me to rank higher than the others.

Achieving top rankings for high volume, highly competitive keywords is the top goal of every SEO services campaign we start at ProspectMX. However, top ranking for competitive keywords doesn’t normally come without long term strategies, like on-going link building and social media campaigns.

That doesn’t mean internet marketing can’t be measured for success in the short term. In order to gauge short term success, traffic and conversion increases generated by long tail keywords should be more closely considered than improvements in rankings for high competition keywords.

What are long tail keywords? Why do they matter?

Long tail keywords are more specific queries that help searchers pinpoint what they are looking for. Searching for “fried chicken recipe in deep fryer” over “fried chicken” or “fried chicken recipe,” for example.

Like children, websites have to crawl before they can walk. Long tail keywords are the search terms that get organic search engine traffic off the ground. Generally speaking, long tail keywords are easier to achieve high rankings for in a short time period. If on-page search engine optimization is done properly, websites undergoing the first phases of SEO should see traffic generated quickly by long tail keywords while other internet marketing services work to improve rankings for highly competitive terms.

How Long Tail Searches Immediately Impact Organic Search Engine Traffic

Consider the following charts as evidence that long tail keywords can immediately have a major impact on quickly generating organic search engine traffic. The three charts below were taken from website analytics of non-paid searches from three ProspectMX clients. The non-paid search volume includes searches of a client’s target keyword terms PLUS all long tail keywords associated with that term from February 1 to May 31, 2009.

CASE A

CASE B

CASE C

In all three cases above, a significant spike in traffic was achieved in as little as one month thanks to on-page SEO that targets a highly competitive keyword as well as its affiliated long tail keywords. As link building was conducted over the course of 90 days, organic search traffic generally continued to increase for each client.

The Moral Of The Study

The end goal of every internet marketing or search engine optimization campaign should be top rankings for a high volume, highly competitive, revenue generating keyword. While the work is being done to top your competition for top keywords, however, there are a lot of highly targeted customers searching for exactly what they want.

Customers that enter a site through long tail keyword phrases are often some of a site’s highest converting. Long tail searchers know exactly what they’re looking for and are ready to buy.

Companies can establish themselves or their particular brand as the industry leader through ranking for a highly competitive term. While this can be achieved through a long term internet marketing plan, there’s a lot of money to be made as the top ranking result for multiple long tail terms.

Don’t lose sight of short term success by focusing too hard on a long term goal.

For more information on long tail keyword searches in your industry and how they can benefit your bottom line, consult with one of our experts.

So, to be funny, I googled “world’s ugliest dog“… and BAM!

The reaction was great.

There are just SO MANY ways to build links… I just may have to do a “World’s Ugliest [whatever]” contest…

What “worlds ugliest” ideas do you have that could generate links for your site?

I have the CEO’s google “click here” to show them how Adobe’s download page for Reader is ranked number 1.  I then have them search for the term “miserable failure” in Yahoo and talk about the Bush Google Bomb that was created by many webmasters linking to the George W. Bush biography page, making it rank number 1 for the term.

So, in preparation for a meeting later today, I was getting my computer set up and noticed that a 301 redirect on the whitehouse.gov page has sent the George W. Bush Biography page to Barack Obama’s Biography page.

This, will of course now enable multiple teaching opportunites for me in my meetings.  I will be able to share how link building and 301 redirects work… so thank you, Yahoo!, for the teaching aides.

Oh… It looks like this was pointed out 12 hours ago on twitter by @rattyboy.  Also, Danny Sullivan predicted it here.  Need to make sure the cred’s out there.

Danny also wrote a post on it here.

Do you think that Yahoo will manually remove this from their index?

Running a link building contest and awarding a prize to your most active link builder can build buzz, drive traffic, and also provide the most important piece to the SEO equation – links!

Many companies with web sites should still consider typical internet marketing services to improve their positioning in Google. However, hosting a contest to generate interest in your website with the extra benefit of building links can certainly work.

Besides, if you’re going to personally front money for a prize, why wouldn’t you want to receive a return on your investment?

A link building contest should probably have one of two outcomes for determining a winner:

• To acquire the greatest number of links
• To acquire the most relevant, highest powered link

A link that drives traffic to your website can also be used to determine a winner. However, if the end goal of the contest is true link building, traffic should be a secondary concern.

Acquiring the greatest number of links has its pros (quantity) but tends to yield lower value, less relevant links. You will also tend to get a lot of entrants with startup Wordpress and Blogspot sites including one blog post having a link pointing to your site. When the goal of the contest is to receive links based on relevancy, you will get a substantial amount less, but they should be more valuable.

Below are some tried and true ideas prize ideas to consider when building links hosting a contest on your site. The more involved the contest is for the user, the better the prize should be.

1. T-Shirts (bloggers love these, especially when they’re funny)
2. Anything for a Nintendo Wii
3. Any Apple product
4. A complimentary product that makes a job easier
5. A permanent, do follow link to the winners site of choice (a great idea for Google authority sites)

Anyone have great contest ideas or prize ideas they want to share? Would love to see some in the comment space below.

Now that I have encouraged you to stand in line at the polls, I guess I too need to step away from my desk and do my civic duty. Before I logout for the day and go stand in line with countless others getting their vote on, I thought it’d be nice to recap how the candidates used internet marketing in their campaigns.

I wasn’t THE first person to blog about this, but I did write a post here on the ProspectMX blog in September discussing 2008 Election Internet Marketing. If you’re into reading about election marketing, you might like to check it out.

Here’s some more reading on internet marketing and the election. Oh… and don’t try to decipher my vote by reading these posts. By no means should the links below be taken as an indicator of who I’m voting for. Thanks.

Now… onto the Link Love!

• Election Day Paid Search Comparison (Direct Online Marketing)
• Swing State Comparison for McCain and Obama (Hitwise)
• Obama McCain SEO – My 2008 Election Prediction (Portent Interactive)
• Obama McCain Keyphrases Used On Search Engines (Planet Chiropractic)
• Why Obama Kills It Online, McCain Not So Much (Stephen Espinosa)

SEOmoz Indexes The Web
Sorry, Mr. Gore… you could only hold them off for so long. SEOmoz discovered tons of cool information while indexing the web. Here are some of my favorites:

• 42% of all links are external (pointing off a webpage to another site)
• Under 2% of all links are “nofollow” (still around 2 billion links, however)
• The average webpage has 32 links pointing to it (both internal and external)

SEOmoz Releases Linkscape
Twelve months in the making, Linkscape provides “unparalleled link intelligence” to the internet marketing community. With Linkscape (and an SEOmoz PRO membership), a website and data on 30 BILLION other webpages can be analyzed to determine:

• mozRank (aka link popularity)
• mozTrust (trust level of a site to the eyes of a search engine)
• Full Lists of Links (ranked by importance)
• Anchor Text (a ranked and complete list of link text that points to a site)
• Domain Juice (an estimate of link popularity of all webpages inside a site)

Most of those tools can only be utilized by PRO members. The free version of Linkscape provides a snapshot of mozRank, mozTrust, external links to a URL and Google PageRank. The best data is clearly available to PRO members only.

For a more detailed explanation of Linkscape, check out SEOmoz’s Linkscape comic.

How does Linkscape help internet marketers?
It provides link building transparency between competitors. Search engines are very protective of the data they hold, and SEOmoz is out to get that information in front of all internet marketers.

The large number of pages SEOmoz has indexed and analyzed allows internet marketers to establish a side-by-side comparison of link building efforts for up to 5 websites. When trying to establish benchmarks for a link building campaign, this type of information is invaluable.

Anything Else?
Oh yeah… SEOmoz also unleashed a fresh new design on its users and new features for PRO membership. While we all appreciate this, Linkscape and the index were definitely the coolest developments of the day.

ProspectMX’s Dave Conklin and David Brown will be in attendance at SMX East this week. They both wear glasses and have brown, gelled hair. You can probably tell from my dome in my avatar that I am jealous of their hip, styled look.

If you run into them, shake their hand or give ‘em a high five. Tell ‘em Bentz sent you.