LBB Readers, I am very excited to announce the addition of Neil and Cameron as regular contributors and TLA Evangelists!  More details on their role with TLA here.

Neil Patel is an Internet marketing consultant and the founder of ACS which was started in 2002. He has lead Internet marketing strategies for small and medium sized businesses as well as top companies such as Hewlett Packard and Samsung. His experiences include search engine marketing and social media marketing.

Currently Neil is involved with the web 2.0 and online marketing community. He regularly attends web 2.0 meetups as well as industry conferences such as Search Engine Strategies and Ad:Tech.

Cameron Olthuis is a web marketing strategist who specializes in social media marketing and search engine optimization. Cameron became a partner in the web marketing company, ACS in early 2006 as the Director of Marketing and is responsible for crafting the marketing strategies for both ACS’s clients and ACS’s own products.

Cameron has been involved in online marketing since 2000 when he started his own business that he eventually sold and then moved onto consulting roles and client-side positions. Cameron has worked with companies ranging in size from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

Cameron is actively involved in the online marketing community. He speaks regularly at industry conferences and seminars, participates in a number of organizations, and writes articles and blog posts for a variety of marketing publications.

Do you remember in High School there was this desire to be popular? Seems like web development is the same these days.  In web development there are so many things you have to do in order to be successful. Popularity shouldn’t have to be one of them. I mean you want to sit down and build the business your way and not have to worry about being popular. But that’s not the reality we live in. You have to have link popularity in order to survive.

In the past you’ve read about buying links in the Yahoo Directory. Think of this as building up your popularity with the ever so judgemental in-crowd. Because Google, Yahoo, and Live.com are just judgemental users who are trying their best to both make money and ’sell’ a quality product.

The deal is you have a product to, and I know I don’t have time to worry about being popular. I want to spend time building a great product. And so in the beginning I have no choice but to advertise because I’m in the Sandbox.

SEO doesn’t have to be secretive, or some huge mystery. It’s about building a quality product that is up to par on coding standards, and has good content. It’s then seasoned with bit of quality link building.

Link popularity is a result of hard work in building a great site, seasoning with a good link building campaign, and plain and simple good marketing.

Just like Ahmed Farooq said recently Building Great Content Just Ain’t Enough.  Sometimes you have to go the extra mile. The key thing is no matter what you aren’t going to get it done just sitting there.

Do it F*cking Now.