We are happy to announce TLA’s newest hire: R. Marie Cox.  She will be doing web development/design work here at TLA.  No we didn’t really steal her from SEOMOZ but the cool part about Marie’s background is her own personal project, Side Job Track, won third place in the "Business, Money, Ecommerce" section on SEOMOZ’s Web 2.0 Awards. 

Marie will be working on some cool link bait projects as well that are destined to push Rand off the first page of Digg and Del.icio.us once and for all. 

Welcome aboard Marie!

Matt McGee put together a piece that did the impossible, made us laugh about bad seo jokes.  The sad part is so much of this list is true.  Some of my favorites:

"You giggle like a little girl every time you tell the butcher youâd like some pork Cuttlets."

"You feel uncomfortable and out of place at a minor league baseball game because you donât see a Text Link Ads advertisement on the outfield wall."

"When your daughter brings home a new boyfriend to meet you, your first thought is to check his backlinks."

Check out the full article here.

While ReviewMe isn’t exactly ‘product placement’, the theory behind the service is similar: get a relevant product into the content without annoying the readers (or viewers). I’m not surprised at all to hear that product placement growth is outpacing that of ‘traditional’ advertising; as users become more savvy (and ad-blind), smart marketers are evolving their strategies. From the report:

PQ Media forecasts that global paid product placement spending will grow at a compound annual rate of 27.9% in the 2005-2010 period to $7.55 billion, as product placement growth continues to significantly outpace that of traditional advertising and marketing. The overall value of the worldwide product placement market, says the report, including the barter/exposure value of non-paid placements, will increase 18.4% compounded annually to $13.96 billion in 2010.

Those are some pretty big numbers they’re throwing around!

In case you missed it, Jim Boykin wrote a great post this week, Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks. I think we all ocassionally tend to overcomplexify SEO and link building, focusing on numbers or other mostly meaningless data, when instead we should be focusing on macro-trends (in this case, the trend is quality over quantity).

I would also like to use this post as a time to start a little petition for one of Jim’s former projects that he canceled:

That is all, please resume your weekend relaxation.

Readers, if you wanted to read more about TLA, you might want to checkout an interview I did with James Martin of WorkBoxers.com  One thing I learned is James is loved by many bloggers and getting linked up by him got me all sorts of links.

You got to respect a man that has been "making money since 1891" like James has.

Interview here.

Yes, yes, yes — online reviews are very important. Heck, Web 2.0 sites seem to live or die by their TechCrunch review. The same phenomenon is observable many other industries on the Web.

Lest you doubt the importance of online feedback, Guy Kawasaki has written a post encouraging companies to embrace online reviews:

• Use reviews to improve your operations. Some negative reviews are off the mark, but most provide at least a kernel of truth about problems in your business. Take steps to fix these problems.
• Encourage your customers to post reviews. Mention these review sites to your regular customers, and tell them how much you would appreciate them posting an honest review about you.
• Use positive reviews in your marketing. Just like a Zagat’s write-up or a newspaper profile, a good online review can be posted in your shop window or on your Web site.

Hmm, I wish there was a company that specialized in these points… oh well…