So, today the boys had a “Jammie Day”. These are days when my wife, Jodi let’s the boys stay in their jammies all day while they play games and stuff. They had a pretty healthy lunch and Jodi was away for dinner.

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?

Because the site’s 122 million+ monthly visitors (according to July ’09 Compete stats) needed one more reason to use the social network, Facebook can now help its users in the fight to manage their online reputation.

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.

At ProspectMX, we typically hold a review with our clients every 3-months to show campaign progress and provide recommendations on the project’s next steps.

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.

Jodi (my wife) asked me tonight if there were any new pictures from the breeder we’re purchasing our dog from. The dog was born on New Years Eve and we are picking him up in February, so we like to get photo updates.

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?

In almost every meeting that I have with clients, I use three examples to explain how links to your website are one of the most important ways to get your site ranking for a term.

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?