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Google, through its recent updates, has taken a definitive stance against poor quality search engine optimization techniques. Tactics such as forum profile links, blog comment links, and links from low quality ‘link farms’ have been getting many sites penalized and subsequently dropped in the search engine page results. Funny enough, even after these update and deliberate outreach by Google to make it known that these link will, in fact, hurt and not help their sites, many SEOs are still recommending using these search engine optimization techniques.

Nonetheless, some internet marketers have used this knowledge of Google’s link preferences and created a growing trend of web warfare against their competing sites. Instead of looking to building links to their sites, they are using negative SEO to bombard their competition’s link profiles with SPAMy links.

By doing this, they are hoping to push the competitors site down in the search rankings, which will make them one step closer to the top. This is a troublesome notion seeing as it will most likely be difficult for Google and other search engines to determine who posted certain links and the intent of the postings. Check out the infographic below regarding an interesting negative SEO study:

Google Webmaster Tools is a must-use for any internet marketer or website owner interested in increasing the amount of search traffic to their site. I am pretty sure that encompasses about 99.9% of people in those groups. The robust suite of tools offers unique insight into your websites performance. The data such as that in  Webmaster Tools  is hard to come by in a free application.

GWT is very easily installed and if you are running a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla there are plugins that make this process even easier. Even for the most un-tech savvy the installation process should only take around 5 minutes.

After installation you should let the GWT run for a little to set baseline data values to see where you are before use it to make SEO improvements to your site. After allowing it to monitor your sites performance on Google you can then begin to unlock the search engine optimization potential in a variety of ways.

So, just to get this out of the way: that’s a rhetorical question. You don’t really have to answer it. More to the point, the answer is yes! You can do an infographic and you can do one right now. It’s easier than you think. And unlike most uses (or misuses) or the word “rhetorical,” instead of just meaning “a question that you don’t need to answer,” we’re using it here to mean: “Sit down, we’re going to learn something!”

Small business owners may become envious of the sort of marketing budgets that are available to professionals working for large corporations. It seems like so much could be achieved if the right budget was made available.

It was once the case that the Internet was seen as offering a level playing field. Those massive budgets might allow big companies to run television ads and pay for product placements in stylish magazines, but they weren’t much use in the battle for search engine positioning. Or, so it seemed. Today, it’s clear that the big brands are dominating many of the most competitive search terms around.

How did this happen? The current scene reflects the fact that those big brands have been able to hire expensive SEO consultants. If you have large sums of money available to you, then you’re in a great position to attract talent.