Recently there was a biopic by the name of Walk the Line featuring Johnny Cash's life. The movie is so popular that the soundtrack and 2 of Johnny Cash's CDs are on the Amazon top 25 CDs list.

Johnny Cash's autobiography is a top 500 selling book on Amazon and yet the page had the following ads:

I thought AdSense was better at targeting than that? Especially for such currently commercially popular and in the news topics? Hmm.

That certainly shows Google still has a long way to go to improve their targeting and profits from contextual ads.

As a special bonus, if you like music you really ought to watch this video.

SEO Question: As a long time SEO myself, there is one thing that has me mystified. If you do a search in Google under "chocolate", Godiva comes up #1, Hershey comes up #2. Yet, if you look at their home pages, they have almost no text there. In fact, Godiva has no real text at all. Yes, they have PR6, but still, how is it that these "big boys" come up on top with a home page devoid of any SEO or real text? Is it all links?

SEO Answer: For competitive queries Google's relevancy algorithms are probably about 99% linkage data. Those brands are so strong that their linkage data means they do not need page copy to rank for general relevant terms. Should Starbucks rank for coffee? Few sites are more relevant.

Google does not aim to show the most optimized content. They want to list the most relevant content.

By having limited page copy they may end up missing out on ranking for longer related queries since it is a bit hard for search engines to make documents relevant for long multi word phrases that don't occur in the anchor text or page copy, but for general queries they can still do great.

This is not 100% bright here, but about a year ago I moved the host for one of my sites prior to fully uploading the site at the new location. The files were rather slow to upload and Google cached the home page while the site was not there and the site still ranked #6 for search engine marketing.

Sometimes you will hear some SEOs whine about the updates and others claim that their techniques are more effective because the clients see more stable results. In hyper competitive markets many times the result stability of a particular site has as much to do with client selection as the skill level of the SEO. The result stability in competitive markets has a lot to do with how strong the brand and traditional marketing a company has. Ultimately the search engines aim to emulate end users. Those brands that have significant mindshare in the real world should rank well in the search results as well unless the relevancy algorithms are crap.

A few tips for using flash (if you must use it):

• Create descriptive useful page titles and meta descriptions.

• Embed the flash into HTML pages and use regular text links on the page if possible.
• If it does not screw up the design too bad add HTML text to the page.
• Create textual representations of what is in the flash using noembed tags.
• Instead of including everything in one flash file it may make sense to break the content into different flash files so you can create different HTML pages around the different ideas contained in it.
• Macromedia has a search engine SDK, although I think most sites are still best off using texual representations of the flash files on the HTML content of pages
• Mike Knott also recommended this JavaScript plugin for flash detection. It is XHTML compliant, and, so long as you use it properly, it is better than the Noembed tag.

I added a bunch more SEO tools to the free SEO Tools page. Most of the new tools are geared toward beginners and are perhaps a bit boring, but
I like some of them, including:

• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

• typo generator
• Google Suggest Scraper Tool

Some of the tools could be quite a bit better, but I bought a bunch of them for cheap, almost just for the heck of it because they were cheap. Let me know if you find any of them useful. I already know some tweaks I want to make when time becomes available.

The next build of Backlink Analyzer is coming along slowly but surely. Am hoping to have a cross platform version of it with a few more features before the month is out.

Cory Doctorow covers a killer concept associated with Amazon's new author blogs:

Today there's the explosion of choice brought on by the Internet. All entertainments are approximately one click away. The search-cost of finding another artist whose music or books or movies are as interesting as yours is dropping through the floor, thanks to recommendation systems, search engines, and innumerable fan-recommendation sites like blogs and MySpaces. Your virtuosity is matched by someone else's, somewhere, and if you're to compete successfully with her, you need something more than charisma and virtuosity.

You need conversation. In practically every field of artistic endeavor, we see success stories grounded in artists who engage in some form of conversation with their audience.

It doesn't matter whether or not something is fair, it really only matters how the trends are changing and if you can adopt with how they change.

I sell a download-able ebook for $79. Is that too much to pay for a book? Maybe. It really depends on what you get out of it, but over the long haul the value is easier to justify and the sale is easier to make because there is topical engagement and conversation.

At times I absolutely screw things up, but mistakes usually teach me more than the things I do correctly. You have to try new things, and the more ways you allow your personality to be seen and connected with the easier it is to be successful being yourself.

Many people and companies fight the potential openness associated with some web based business models because they don't want the feedback or want to protect their rights and current business models.

My opinion is that if you consider markets as conversations and piracy a progressive taxation the way to have influence and create wealth is to spend far more time learning how to create additional value and distribution instead of focusing on how you are not getting your fair share.

The end goal is profit and satisfaction. While I am absolutely no good at many things I was stoked to see my site has been getting bookmarked in Del.icio.us almost daily recently and I got this killer feedback there:

Without a doubt the most interesting blog on search engine optimization I've found. His book is excellent, and his writing is clear and transparent. You feel like you know Aaron when you read his posts.

Of course there will be readers of various skill levels and knowledge levels. You really don't want to read too much into your own reviews because you are more likely to get feedback from the biased edges while the people in the middle sit quietly.

Recently I started posting a few Q and As to create more content for the beginer level SEOs, but I will likely need to balance that with other types of post to keep the blog interesting to more advanced readers.

My mom has recently started blogging and reading some of my sites as well, so she should keep me on the straight and narrow if I am posting things that confuse her. My mom thinks we encrypt Threadwatch, but she thinks my blog about blogging makes good sense. I believe this site is typically somewhere in between the two. As far as making marketing concepts simple and easy I think Seth does a great job of posting things beginners can understand. To some extent I think I would rather post original beginner level stuff than posting about the same thing be posted about everywhere. If you can relate other old ideas and concepts to what everyone else is talking about right now then you are at least one step ahead of the me too posting crowd I frequently find myself falling into when I am bored and uninspired.

It is rather amazing how well this blog has done because when I originally created it I did not define a specific market audience or skill level I was writing for and I still have not. It may not matter if 90% of the readers are bored by 90% of the posts so long as they can identify with the remaining ones.

SEO Question: When people talk about buying links and how they don't help you, does this mean if I were to buy a link on cnn.com it wouldn't help me. Or are they talking about the pages that have nothing but 1,000+ links?

SEO Answer: Most of the paid links on major news sites that are sold are probably discounted in Google as far as their direct effect on SEO.

Many link buyers buy from multiple sites that are obviously selling links. They further compound their problem by not doing things like mixing anchor text and not also building up a wide variety of link types.

Many link sellers sell many outbound links on the same page in a small block. Others sell links to anyone willing to buy them, perhaps even selling highly off topic.

Most people do not try to stay below the radar when buying links, and those link buys that are not below radar attract other link buyers and link selling activity. The end result is that many of the links will still be devalued.

Much like how you can compare hubs and authorities many paid links might be easy to view as a network.

Keep in mind that I do not think MSN and Yahoo! are as good at detecting paid links as Google is.

If you listen to Matt Cutts talk long enough you might want to avoid doing press releases, syndicating articles, submitting to too many directories, and buying links, but his posts are sometimes more about in an ideal world than in all actuality.

Keep in mind that all major large scale search engines sell links. Google proudly sells off topic links, links on WAREZ sites and links on sites they banned for being spam. On top of selling links in the Yahoo! Directory, for a great deal of time Yahoo!'s Yahoo! Shopping channel looked like it was one of the largest link buyers as well. You have to take their opinions and statements with a grain of salt.

Many smart link buys and marketing efforts drive direct traffic and have a viral effect to them as well, so you have to consider that something that may not provide much SEO value may still provide good value from direct traffic or social connections they create. Some of my press releases, articles, and ad buys have helped lead to further organic natural coverage. I also have recieved free secondary marketing worth thousands of dollars based on aggressive or creative ad buying techniques.

Those editorial links that may be created are hard for competing sites to reproduce, and help augment the value created in an ad spend.

One of my theories is that people are going to talk about someone or something. To the extent within my abilities I may as well make that someone be me. Exposure leads to more exposure. Keep in mind if you are doing things like buying hidden links on the Financial Times someone is going to find it.

Some link buys may also be great at hiding why you are ranking. If you are already ranking great and profitable in huge markets like online flowers, mortgages, or insurance those markets may provide enough profit margin that it may be worth buying links that you know will be discounted just to cloud up your backlink profile to make it harder for competitors to do competitive research. The Internet.com partner network does a great job of making competitive research hard.