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A link farm is a website with a high number of links to different websites with no relevance or category logic, grouping, organization, or relevance to the domain name.

If you land on a site and there are hundreds of links all over with many unrelated topics, you’ve probably landed on a link farm. Link farms ARE spam and will be considered as such by Search Engines. The key purpose of link farms are to easily and illegitimately send signals to search engines to assist in ranking.

A few important things to keep in mind when it comes to link farms:

1. If you’re using link farms in any way for your SEO, STOP! It will not serve your clients end goal to rank well and long.
2. If you take a client on or have a website where you find your website has somehow been included in a link farm take corrective action to be removed.
3. And most of all, remember that SEO is ALL ABOUT RELEVANCE. Links farms are the exact opposite of obtaining the correct relevance signals to rank organically. The best and most legitimate way to build an quality SEO marketing campaign is through legitimate digital marketing initiatives like guest blogging, public relations, high level directory link building, internal blogging and user generated content, social media and keeping your business at the forefront of news and minds so that natural links are acquired.

It’s important to do everything you can to diversify your link portfolio and make your links appear as natural as possible. This means having different types of relevant links coming from various different domains and IP addresses.

Every company would like to have the perfect online marketing team.  A team comprised of visionary, dedicated, motivated and driven employees.  The challenges come when trying to balance and mold the right qualities, skills and personalities into a team that is able to consistently move the needle in the right direction while also creating a fun and successful environment and company.  A common misconception I see among companies who manage their own organic search is that simply hiring an intern or a link builder as an SEO professional will suffice when looking to build their online brand or to rank higher in the search engines.  Ranking at the top of the search engines is more competitive than ever with no signs of slowing.  Companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars to ensure they own the top spots for relevant search terms.  Ensuring that your company is a player is more important than ever.  To address this I want to talk about positions in the SEO field that are ever important to grow a company.

SEO Director

A director may be one of the most important hiring decisions as far as online marketing personnel goes.  A talented SEO director can make or break an SEO strategy.  This individual is ultimately responsible for measuring and growing online marketing metrics.  Finding someone who has vision and is well-rounded is critical.  Look for a director who has experience in research, analytics and actually reports on metrics.  Experience writing and implementing SEO strategy along with other online verticals such as conversion optimization, paid search and lead generation are just a few skills you want to add to your check list.

SEO Specialist

A search engine optimization specialist is going to be your Director’s right-hand man.  Look for someone with a history in quality link building.  A good SEO specialist will have examples of past work success and will be able to give guidance when building a solid link building portfolio.  Someone with experience in customer relations or engaging in customer interaction will be important, especially in today’s online environment where social media is large part of any successful online marketing strategy.

Link Builder

A good link builder is worth their weight in gold.  Anyone can find links to sites with low page rank or domain authority.  A solid link builder will understand quality link building and how to build a link portfolio that looks natural to the search engines.  They should not be satisfied with just link building but link maintenance as well so that overall link quantity continues to rise year after year.  It is important to find someone with networking skills that will build relationships which will convert into .edu, .gov and other high value links.

Content and Copywriter

We have all heard that “content is king”.  While this remains true, that content must be unique and engaging.  Consumers are demanding a better surfing experience and the search engines are continuously updating their algorithms to look for content that is truly written around what searchers want to see.  A good copywriter can write onsite content, informative press releases, occasional industry blogging, and engage in social media updates.  Each of these tactics will only become more important as your online presence grows.  Critical skills also include someone is who is great at research, and can write quickly while remaining articulate and creative.

Outsourcing

As a final part of your SEO team consider hiring experts in the respective field.  Having someone analyze your strategy and link portfolio with fresh eyes, one who knows what to look for, will give you an advantage over your competition.  Keep in mind that there are many options for SEO agencies and consultants.  Look for an agency, like SEO.com, that rank for related search terms in the SEO industry, can provide good case studies of past successes, and can map how they are going to show you success metrics for your campaign.  An agency will typically have all of the above resources at your disposal, as well as tools and the capability to efficiently build links to your site that would otherwise be outside of your reach.

Recently a number of our clients have voiced a similar concern. With all the talk of the changing face of SEO, how do we adapt? How do we get those high quality, natural links that will determine if we thrive or die in a future where quality matters more than ever? It’s a challenge not all businesses are equipped to handle, but here’s one dead simple way you can embrace the changes and benefit.

Be Honest – Is Your Business Worth Talking About?

In the last six months, did your business create anything that caused people to turn their heads and take notice? I mean a product, a piece of content, a video series, a service, or anything else at all? If you can’t honestly answer yes, then why would anybody want to link to you? Duke Cannon is a perfect (but crass) example of a company that gets this, and boy are they getting links for it. Forgive me for getting so basic, but we have to get this out of the way. Natural links go to businesses that are making people talk. Do that.

Ok, that’s out of the way.

Go Find The People Talking About You

Assuming you create some kind of buzz with your products or content, you’ll come across people talking about you. If you’re big, invest in social media monitoring like Trackur to see what they’re saying and where they’re saying it. If you’re just getting going, set up a few Google Alerts around your brand name and keywords. Stay on top of what they’re saying because you might want to reach out to one of them (I’ll give you a good example of how to do this in a minute). And also, you should be where they are. If people talk about you on Twitter, you need to be there too.

Contact Those People

When you come across that glowing review of your new product, promptly contact the author. Tell them you’re grateful they wrote the review, and be generous with your praise. They may have even linked to you in their review, but if not, find a nice way to ask them to. They already love what you do, so they’ll probably support you if you tell them how much a link would help you.

Online video and YouTube have become synonymous for both producers and viewers. As we stop to think about other videos sites we remember all the others (Facebook, Bing, Vevo, Hulu, Ustream.tv, Daily Motion, Break.com, ESPN, Vimeo, etc. and so on) that serve up millions of videos daily.

That’s a lot of time spent watching moving pictures! YouTube currently receives 48 hours of video uploaded every minute and serves 3 billion videos per day.

Google+ Hangouts are changing who is producing videos and how they’re being used. Once Google lifts the restrictions on how many can join a hangout, which I suspect is coming with business pages, we’ll see more video content being created. More than just pranks and idiots filming evidence for their next arrest.

There are several things that can help your videos attain more visibility. First think about where visibility happens: on the search engine results pages (Universal Search), YouTube (or wherever you’ve uploaded your video), blog embeds, etc. To get a wide range interest you need to consider a ton of factors.

Video SEO Ranking Factors

• Keywords in title
• Number of views
• Number of comments
• Category & Tags
• +1/Shares/Tweets/Embeds
• Favorites
• Ratings
• Sentiment (Like/Dislike ratio)
• Channel views
• Number of subscribers
• Links
• Embeds
• Video Sitemap
• Channel login activity
• Speed & consistency of interest
• Quality description (click-thru factor)
• Flags (negative)

Keywords in Title

This example shows that a lot has been left on the table in terms of what other words should have been used to describe this video based on terms people would use to find the video. For example: theory, statistics, analysis, etc.

Category & Tags

The category here is probably misplaced since most people don’t find trend and variation as entertaining. For us nerds, maybe it’s properly categorized. However, the tags here do a better job at targeting words that users will be searching.

Pro tip: I always recommend multiple variations on spelling. For example: statistics & stats

Views, Ratings, Comments & Favorites

You’ll see there are over 34,000 video views so there’s some obvious interest by the public. This is important to show that it could become wildly popular vs. a similar video with 100 views.

Ratings are favorable with a few dislikes so the sentiment could be described as positive. Having a positive sentiment is not always the strongest indicator for rankings but generally the more people like a video, the better chance it has in obtaining each of the important ranking factors.

Comments are marginally active. With 34,000 views, many videos would demand a few thousand comments but this varies considerably.

Favorites are pretty good with 148. Much like comments, not everybody interacts the same way with video. Since there are more than a handful, it’s easy to see there is interest in sharing or saving this video for later reference.

Significant Discovery Events

Notice here that Event A and Event B created a large spike in views, comments, and favorites in the above chart? This is critical to understand who is going to help you get noticed and will naturally increase rankings as a result of video views, ratings, comments, favorites, etc.

Don’t be afraid to lookup what publishers are embedding videos and reach out to them to either (a) ask what videos they need for upcoming stories or (b) what types of characteristics they like to see in videos they’re planning to embed. Create a relationship and provide great video content to writers on a deadline.

Types of Videos to Produce

• Identify which keywords return video results in the universal results pages of the search engines
• Product videos
• Events
• Interviews
• Journalistic storytelling
• Screenshot (demo) videos
• Tutorials
• Production lines
• How things are made
• Announcements

Zappos product videos help consumers get a better description of the products they’re interested in buying. Along with images, there’s a very quick video where you can see products from every angle, as though you’re standing in the room having a discussion with a personal shopper. This comes as part of a Zappos strategy to launch 50,000 product videos in 2010.

Keyword Research for Video

• Standard keyword research using Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Related searches (both search engines and video sites)
• Suggest/Auto-Complete Terms (the terms that drop down as you’re typing a search query)
• YouTube Searches & Related
• Keywords from your social media friends
• Industry terms

Video XML Sitemaps

Customizing your video XML sitemap is going to require a little technical knowledge. Don’t be intimidated out of taking this important step. Hire help if you must. Research the basics, test and tweak as you go. Make sure you submit your video sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

Although it is important to consider ROI when developing a search marketing strategy, there are many other factors you should consider for long term success of a business. Typically in an SEO campaign, your first and most critical step is keyword research.  This sets the stage for your SEO efforts. Before you begin keyword research, it’s essential to understand your consumers and their decision making process. Being visible in critical stages of the consumer decision process will build brand awareness and ensure that you are at the top of searchers’ minds.

There is more to keyword research than just search volume and researching competitors. It is key to understand your customer base and their search behavior.  For example, there are many tools such as Google Insights and Google Trends that can help you better understand what’s trending and how searchers find your product or service. It may also be beneficial to conduct a survey to gain insight into how your customer makes a purchase decision.

As you are conducting keyword research and trying to find the best opportunities, there are some factors to consider when planning for long term success.  A search marketing strategy, like any business strategy should have both long and short term goals.  While every search marketing strategy should focus on profitability, there are other factors that help build the credibility of your brand. These factors are difficult to measure; however, if you consider the principles I’ve outlined below and take some time to better understand your consumer; it will greatly affect the results of your search marketing efforts.

Outlined here are the stages of the consumer research process when making a purchase decision.  The time from beginning to end of the cycle can vary greatly depending on the price and technicality of the product or service.

Awareness of a Need

This is the beginning of every purchase decision and can be stimulated by a need or want.  It could be as basic as being hungry and recognizing the need for food or could be created by an advertisement for the iPhone 4s.

Information Search

In this stage of the buyer decision process, it’s vital that your brand is at the forefront of your consumer’s minds, or at the forefront of where they will seek information (search engines).  This is the stage where consumers are doing the majority of their research. For example, if you are in the market to buy a point and shoot camera, you may conduct a general search for point and shoot cameras.  Conducting this search will help you in the information search phase and allow you to determine which brand of camera and what features are available.

Depending on your business and the resources available to you, you will want to develop a strategy to be visible for relevant search terms. This may include targeting keywords that will not generate a sale on the first visit.  Not only is it important to be visible for the keyword but it’s also important to understand where your customers go for information through searching Google or visiting review sites.

Evaluating Alternatives

At this stage your consumers are finished feeling out the market and have developed a consideration set.  Depending on the product and the industry, most consumers have a consideration set of about 3-5 different brands or products.

Purchase Decision 

Most SEO strategies try to catch consumers at this stage of the purchase process, as this represents the lowest hanging fruit.  However, if your business has not done due diligence up to this point, your brand or product will not be in the consideration set, therefore potentially ruining your chances of making a sale. To this point, if your brand has reached your consumer at each stage of the decision process your chances of making a sale are much higher.

Post Purchase 

At this stage of the decision process, you have the opportunity to continue your relationship with your customer. This is where your customers determine their satisfaction level of your product or service.  Here you have the opportunity to encourage your customers to write reviews on your business and turn them into repeat customers.  It is much easier to keep a customer than acquire a new one.

Once you’ve thought through the consumer research process for your business, it will help you better conduct keyword research, and help you determine the strategic moves you need to make to be visible to your consumer.  All stages of the purchase decision process are important, and it’s vital to have a strategy surrounding each stage of the process.  The majority of SEO strategies focus on the purchase decision phase, by the time the consumer is in that stage it may be too late. Your search marketing strategy can incorporate anything from retargeting, utilizing pay per click services, SEO or a combination.

As you can see, search marketing presents opportunities in all stages of the buying process. To have the most effective search marketing strategy that will lead to increased brand awareness and long term success of your business, it is advantageous to incorporate a wide range of keywords as well as other elements of search marketing that work best for your business.

One of the most important ways to enhance your link portfolio is through guest blog posts. Finding a relevant blog with an engaged audience can be a daunting task, but the return on investment is potentially significant. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the internet, but how do you create a relationship with a blogger for a quality link opportunity? What is the best way to make first contact? As a blogger who has both received requests and pitches, and one who has pitched other bloggers, I’d like to give a few tips for reaching out to bloggers.

Be informed:

Read the first few blog posts and the writer’s “about me” section. If the site has a search bar, see if the topics you are hoping to have posted about are in line with other content on the site. Be familiar enough with the blogger to personalize an email to them, and always address them by name. Nobody wants to get an email that begins with “Dear influential blogger” or “To whom it may concern.”

Make contact via email or social media:

Many bloggers work from home, and those with kids are not always in a position to take a phone call. Check the blogger’s “Contact Me” section, which should say their preferred method of contact. If a blogger doesn’t accept promotional content, it is often noted in this section. Some bloggers like contact initiated on Twitter or a Facebook fan page. Sending an email is often the most effective way to get a timely response.

Be concise:

Nobody likes to get a long-winded email, especially when it’s from somebody they don’t know. Be personal. Explain why your product or service is relevant to their blog’s topics/focus. Explain why you have specifically chosen this blogger to promote your product or service. Give a detailed explanation of what you are hoping to have the blogger post for you, and how soon you need it. If you plan to compensate the blogger with money or product trade, the initial email is a good time to do so.

Be prepared:

If you plan to ask a blogger to post guest content, have it ready to send. Don’t expect things to be done for free. Ask if they want to write their own content, or have it written for them. Create a contract that specifies what is expected of them, when it must be completed, and how they will be compensated.

Keep the door open:

Sometimes a blogger is very interested in the chance to connect with a brand or cause, but the specific pitch is not a good fit. If your pitch is declined, it’s appropriate to ask if they are interested in being contacted for other opportunities.  Because the bloggosphere is a tight-knit place, ask if they know another blogger who might be interested. There are many bloggers who are eager to begin creating a relationship with a brand, but just need an introduction.

With these tips in mind, create a base template for your first-contact email. I have a template that I begin almost every blog pitch with, and I add in details for the specific pitch and the recipient. The bloggers who respond and work with you often will be interested in future promotions. Approaching a blogger with a personal touch will yield the best results, and may lead to great guest blogging opportunities in the future.

For today’s keyword expansion process we will again be using Google Webmaster Tools. The idea will be the marrying of two keyword reports provided within the tool: top queries and top relevant phrases.

When going through this process, it is essential you have a specific focus in mind. For instance, if you were looking to expand a university’s web presence you may want to expand into one category of keywords that every degree could fall under, such as “online.” Meaning that instead of just targeting “business degree” or “information systems degree,” you need to locate all of the best phrases that combine those terms with “online” or other similar types.

Remember that even though we are using the example of a university campaign, this idea can work with any campaign.

First, go into Webmaster Tools and export your two pieces of data:

Top Queries:

This can be done by clicking on Your site on the web > Search Queries as shown here:

Download the table and it will appear similar to this image:

Top Relevant Keywords:

This can be done by clicking on Your site on the web > Keywords as shown here:

Download the table and it will appear similar to this:

From there we can begin combining the two pieces of data. Since we already have the focus of “online” in mind, the first task is filtering with Excel to pull only those top queries that contain the term “online” within the phrase.

With a list of “subject focused phrases” you can now begin your combination process with the “top relevant terms.” Select a single “subject focused phrase” like accelerated bachelors degree online, attach it to a “top relevant term” like university or course. Using that one phrase, expand it into a relevant cluster of terms using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

In doing this we accomplish our goal of establishing a list of phrases ideal in link building and content strategy, which helps create a stronger presence for the term “online.” The variation phrasing for each term like “accelerated bachelors degree,” will ensure that we are diverse in anchor text.

Overall Keyword Prioritization

Next, retrieve rankings for each term to begin prioritizing your campaign based on current marketing focuses and potential quick wins.

With a priority focus in place, create a short-term content and link building strategy (typically a three-to-six month strategy identifying types of links and content to target is best).

Previous Posts In The Series:

Post 1 - Building a Keyword List Based On Top Relevant Terms in Google Webmasters

Post 2 - Using Google Analytics for Long Tail Identification & Quick Wins

Next In The Series:

Post 4 – An Enterprise Approach To Keyword Prioritization & Targeting

Over the last several months, I’ve had the need to reach out to local businesses that perform a variety of home services.  Some of the interactions were very pleasant while some were horrendous, making me question how this person’s company was still in business.  One thing that became very apparent to me is that the style and method of communication by these business owners was more influential to me than their website, prices, customer reviews or just about any other piece of information you can gather from the company.

Response Time

Although I am an Internet junkie and my cell phone bill will easily show you I use much more data than phone minutes, there are certain types of businesses where people will naturally opt to call first like plumbers, taxi service, restaurants, etc.  If your business type falls into this category, you must have the ability to pick up the phone every time, whether it be yourself, your internal staff or even an outside call answering service.  If you don’t pick up the phone, it doesn’t matter how high your website ranks or how much you paid for that yellow page ad because most people will move down the list to your competitors.

Take a minute to think about and answer:

• Do your customers prefer to call or email? Whatever their preference, are you set up to respond immediately?
• What percent of phone calls do you currently answer?
• What is your follow up time on emails or voicemails?

Communication Style

Last summer, I did a lot of research on local landscapers. As mentioned earlier, I am an Internet junkie which directly correlates to my lack of handyman skills.  After contacting 10-15 different businesses, I was really amazed by the responses I received.  While a landscaper’s communication style may not necessarily reflect the quality of work they perform, I was easily turned off by businesses who took a week to respond or gave us an uninformative, barely literate one line response.  As a business owner, I’m sure it can be frustrating to spend a lot of time responding to inquiries with no guarantee of gaining business but it’s something you need to be prepared for and try to streamline as much as possible.  Someone who takes the time to contact you and ask detailed questions is further along in the buying process and if you take the time to address their needs, you have a great shot at landing their business.

Take a minute to think about and answer:

• Does your communication style match that of your target customer?
• Does the communication and content on your website lead someone to want to contact you? How does your website site you apart from the other 10 competitors? (Hint: It’s not just a flashy design.)
• If you receive commonly asked questions and don’t always have time to write detailed answers, do you have common answers that can be sent back?
• If you offer high ticket items, does the detail and grammar of your response or website content, match the expectations of your customer?

There isn’t a guide for each business type that explains how you should communicate with your customers but take into account how they currently try to communicate with you and be honest with yourself on how well you respond both in timeliness and quality.  If you’re not sure, just ask them. Write a short, 5 question survey about the pre-sales process and have your customers fill it out.

For a local business, the ringing phone or filled out contact form is a crucial piece to your sales funnel.  Increase your sales, appointments, etc. by converting those people who are already contacting you, not just by getting more leads.

When it comes to marketing your business online, many small businesses have no idea where to start. Chances are, they have heard of SEO, PPC, Social Media, etc, but it’s confusing and they just don’t have the time to learn how to do it. My post today is to show small business how to start marketing their business online for under five dollars per month and it all revolves around blogging.

Blogging is an amazing way for any business, large or small, to start to generate some visibility online. Take SEOmoz for example, although the roots of the company go way back to 1981 when Rand’s mother started a marketing business, SEOmoz got it’s start in 2004 when Rand started blogging about his “thoughts, struggles, and discoveries” in SEO. From there they started doing SEO consulting, then eventually transitioned into one of the greatest SEO toolsets you can find online. You too can get your start online just by starting a blog and writing/publishing great content on a regular basis. The whole process starts with picking a domain name, so let’s jump in.

Picking Your Domain Name

Picking your domain name should be pretty easy if you have already decided on your business name. I say “should” because if you are picking a domain name that is in line with your business name, you have pretty good chances that it is going to be available. I”m often asked the question, should I purchase a domain name that is rich with my target keywords? To be completely honest, three years ago, I would have answered heck yes! Today, not so much. I would pick a domain name that is one, easy to remember, and two, is brandable. So what’s the cost of a domain name? About $11.00 per year. Not too shabby.

Monthly Cost: $0.89

Finding A Web Host

Picking your web host is a little more difficult than picking a domain name, at least I think so. There are so many web hosts our there to choose from that it is hard to know which one is the best. I’m really scared to start listing web hosts in this post because there’s always going to be someone who has had a bad experience and will most likely comment negatively. Personally, I really like Host Monster, but it is a little more expensive if you are on a budget. If you are looking for a cheap web host, I would go with Name Cheap hosting. I’ve use them before, and they are pretty good for the price. Regardless of price, you will want to find a host that uses cPanel and has one click install for WordPress to keep things as simple as possible. Hosting through Name Cheap will cost you about $48.00 per year. Also, not to shabby.

Monthly Cost: $3.95

Installing WordPress

As I mentioned above, you will want to find a web host that offers a one click install for WordPress. I’m not the most technical person in the world and I’ll bet that most small business owners are not either, so this makes it really easy. The beautiful thing about using WordPress to run your blog is that is is FREE! No cost to you whatsoever! They also offer a huge support community to help you with any problems you might encounter along the way.

Monthly Cost: Free

Installing Your SEO & Social Plugins

WordPress out of the box is pretty SEO friendly, but there is always more you can do to make it more friendly to the search engines, especially for small businesses trying to do SEO. I’m not going to go into great detail about what plugins you should be installing to help you SEO or to make your blog more social because some of my colleagues have already written about it in previous posts. So, check out the linked posts below to get a better idea of which plugins you can install to get you going. One thing to keep in mind is that not all WordPress plugins are free, but most are. All of the plugins recommended in the posts below are free to the end user.

The Top Three SEO Plugins

The Top Eight SEO Plugins Used By SEO.com

Monthly Cost: Free

Picking A Theme

Just like plugins, there are many themes out there on the internet that are free. Honestly, a lot of the themes out there are pure crap, which is why I always purchase themes or have them built for me, but if you are on a budget, you can find a good theme or two by doing some research. If you don’t want to go the free route, you can check out WooThemes.com or StudioPress.com. I’ve used both and like them a lot. If you are going to go the free route, here are a few resources to help you get started.

Free Themes From WordPress.org

WordPress Theme Gallery

Free WP Themes

Monthly Cost: Free

Writing Your Content

Now that you have your domain, have a functioning blog that is pretty and optimized for the search engines, you need to start writing content. Obviously, the cost of writing your content is free, but it does take some time. When writing, make sure that you are including keywords that are being searched on by your potential customers. You can do some quick keyword research by heading over to The Google and simply start typing your target keywords in the search bar, for this example, I used they keyword wedding dresses.

As you can see in the image below, Google’s auto complete feature gives me some related searches to my keyword. If I sold wedding dresses online, I could blog about modest wedding dresses and make sure to use that keyword in the title of the post and throughout the content.

In my next image below, we are going to be looking at Google’s related searches feature. This can be accessed by clicking on related searches in the left sidebar. This gives me even more topic/keyword ideas to write about than auto complete. I could also write about designer wedding dresses, wedding dresses perfect for beach weddings, and many others also making sure to include the target keywords in the appropriate places mentioned above.

Monthly Cost: Free

As you can see, it is really easy (and affordable) to start building your online business through starting a blog. In my next post (probably next month), I’m going to talk about easy and affordable ways to start building links and driving traffic to your blog once you start pounding out some content. If you have any other additional resources that relate to this post, please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

Blogging is a great way to increase traffic to a website and help you rank better in the search engines.  When I suggest implementing a blog to clients, there is frequently some degree of skepticism and push-back on the importance and effectiveness of it.  I get a lot of questions like “What can I write about?” and “How do I blog and get the most out of it?”

These questions shed some light on why so many people don’t blog as they should.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of benefits that these companies are missing out on from not blogging. After some thought and research, here are 14 ways to leverage your blog to its fullest potential.

1. Title Tags

Create an informative title tag 60-70 characters in length, describing what your post is about.  If you want to rank a particular post for a particular keyword phrase, include it in the title of the page and title of the post.

2. Meta Descriptions

Provide a short description 160-170 characters in length to describe the post in the SERPs, including some sort of call to action at the end such as “Show your [industry] awareness by sharing with your friends”.

3. Social Share Buttons

When people read something they like or find beneficial, they like to share it with those around them.  Add social sharing buttons to every post to top social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, G+, StumbleUpon, Digg etc.), making it as easy for your viewers to share your posts with your friends.  This is a great way to acquire backlinks from readers that may not make the effort to link to you otherwise.

4. Social Profile Buttons

Make sure your social profile buttons and RSS feed sign-up are easy to find on the blog.  When people read blogs, they will often want to subscribe and connect with you through your other social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

5. Comments

Enable commenting on each blog post to help entice people to interact with the author of the post.  This is a great way to build relationships with people in your industry, and potential clients.  It also allows you to answer any additional questions that people may have after reading your post.

6. Pictures

“Pictures are worth a thousand words.”  Have at least one picture for every blog post that relates to what is being written in that post.  Users like to see pictures it helps entice them to read on and makes the users reading experience more enjoyable.

7. Use Links

Give users access to more information about your topic by linking to other pages of your site, and other trusted blogs and websites that can help shed more light on what you are talking about.

8. Titles

First impressions can make or break you.  The title of your blog post is your opportunity to make that first impression.  Create titles that are interesting to your viewing audience and that entice them to keep reading.

9. Content

In SEO, original and unique content is king.  Updating your blog on a consistent basis will entice visitors and search engines to continually come back to your site to read more.  Blogging frequently with high quality content will make you a reliable and creditable resource in your industry, ultimately helping you rank better in the SERPs, and can create a loyal following and clientele.  Write good posts that people want to link to, share, and that provide good usable information.  Below are some examples of what types of articles people love the most.

1. Create top ten lists – such as “10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here].”
2. Create resource lists for a specific topic.  Link to sources to go to get more information.
3. Create content that is easy to understand so everyone can understand and spread your message.
4. Talk about recent news that affects your industry.
5. Allow other authors to guest blog post on your blog.  This can help you get links from other industry related sites.
6. Share and create surveys and studies that help people interact with your blog
7. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few hundred-dollar prizes can result in thousands of dollars’ worth of editorial, quality links.
8. Write about topics and keyword phrases you want your site to rank for, then link to that page from your post.

10. Tags

Use appropriate and relevant tags on your blogs.  This can help you rank your post for those phrases in search engines.

11. Promote Your Content

Generate readership and build a following by promoting your posts on your own personal social platforms, inclucing Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.  Often, you can use social sharing widgets that give you a quick and easy way of seeing how many people are sharing your posts through those platforms.  You can also submit your blog to various blog directories.

12. URL Structure

Use the title of the post as part of the URL structure so it is easy for people to remember and link to.

• Example: www.seo.com/blog/title-of-blog-post/

13. Call To Action

Use calls to action at the end of your blog post, inviting readers to take a specific action.

For example:

1. “Let us know your opinion on the topic and leave us your comments below.
2. “Learn more about {topic} here (link to a page on your site).”

14. Have Fun with it!

Blogging is meant to entertain and provide useful information.  Don’t be afraid to use analogies and jokes to help people relate to what you are saying and endear them to you. Blog posts don’t always have to be serious.  Create articles purely for entertainment purposes from time to time.

Example:  Top 5 Villains You Never Make An Appointment With

Please share this post with your friends and let me know what you think of these tips in the comments section here or on Twitter.  Thanks for Reading

Many SEOs that I know eat, sleep, and breathe SEO. With technology today, we now can manage our search engine marketing campaigns from almost anywhere. For the iPad owners out there, I have compiled a short list of my favorite apps that help me manage my sites.

SERPs
SERPs, by Hans Schneider, is a very cool app that not only shows you where you rank, but it also shows you who is ranking for your targeted keywords. With this app, you also have the ability to manage multiple sites and multiple keywords and you can easily keep up with your competitors and their rankings.

SEO Search Ranking
Tracking the progress of your keywords and where they rank can be hard without the right tool. With SEO Search Ranking, by Leon Huang, you can track the progress of your keywords properly. Additionally, you get a historical background of where you were and how far you have come. Just like SERPS, you can track multiple sites and multiple keywords. This is a must-have app because after all, how do you know where you are if you don’t know where you have been?

Analytics for iPad
Analytics for iPad, by Mario Micklisch, brings your Google Analytics account to the palm of your hand. This tool gives you access to multiple accounts and you can run full reports. Analytics for iPad also allows you to compare reports so you can get the most comprehensive data. In fact, there isn’t much you can do in Google Analytics that you can’t do with this app.

SEO Manager
SEO Manager, by at2 GmbH, may be my favorite app on this list. With this app you can not only manage multiple sites and keywords, but it will also show you your top competitors for your keyword list. It is a very helpful tool for competitive analysis. Much like the SEO Ranking app, SEO Manager will also show you your historical ranking data of your keywords.

SEO & SEM Glossary
For those just starting out in the realm of SEO, SEO & SEM Glossary, by 138App.com, is a very helpful tool. Because many specialists seem to speak in code when they are talking about search engine optimization, you can easily keep up with the conversation by using this app to study different terms used in the industry.

SEO Course
One more great tool for novice SEOs is SEO Course, by Robert Costello. This app has several intuitive videos that will teach you the tricks of the trade including how to create the perfect keyword research and how to obtain backlinks. Don’t start your SEO campaign without at least looking at this app.

WordPress
Have you ever been out and about without your computer and the perfect blog post or idea for your site hit you, and by the time you made it back to the office you completely forgot the idea? With WordPress for iPad you will never have to miss out on an idea again because you can have complete editing access to your site on-the-go.

I hope this list is a good start for your iPad app collection. Of course there are several other apps that didn’t make the list that are also very useful. So tell me, what are some of your favorite SEO iPad apps?

Today is the largest online protest in history. Many notable sites are joining together to stop the internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA.

Why Protest?

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

What is SOPA?

If you don’t know, click here, here, or here to read all about it.

Who is Protesting?

A few notable websites that have confirmed their participation in the protest are:

• Google
• WordPress
• Wikipedia
• Reddit
• Flickr

What Can I Do?

To see a bigger list of sites that are participating and to learn how you can participate in the biggest online protest in history, visit sopastrike.com.

At the very least tweet about #SOPASTRIKE and/or visit Blackout SOPA to add “STOP SOPA” to your twitter profile picture like these guys:

@mattcutts

@dannysulllivan

@chrisbrogan

Let’s not let a couple of silly bills ruin our industry!

What’s your small business SEO strategy? If you’re like the many small business owners, you may be wondering how you can leverage the power of social media and online marketing to get ahead. In fact, only about 27 percent of small businesses have a current SEO plan, and when you combine that surprisingly low figure with fact that only about 40 percent of marketers are using mobile marketing tactics, it’s easy to see how sound search engine optimization practices could help you get a leg up on the competition.

Small business owners are an incredibly diverse group of people who know a lot about their chosen fields. Slightly less than half of all small businesses have more than one owner, and sixty percent of small business owners have worked in their industry for more than 20 years. That’s a lot of total combined experience. These owners are always looking for new ways to connect to their customers and clients and grow their businesses.

About 63 percent of small businesses find that social media is a good way to increase customer loyalty, and 27 percent plan to increase their investment in social media. When it comes to the impact of social media, 40 percent of small businesses find it helpful for customer reviews, 30 percent find useful for correcting problems brought up by customers, 18 percent find that it gives them a chance to defend against negative publicity, and only 5 percent feel that social media has hurt their image more than helped. If used correctly, it’s clear that social media generally has an overall positive effect on small businesses.

If your small business is one of the 52 percent that plan to increase their SEO budget, it’s important to make the most of your investment by implementing a sound small business SEO plan. You can do that with the assistance of an SEO company with lots of experience in managing successful small business SEO campaigns.

Embed this image on your site:

<a href="http://www.seo.com/blog/small-business-marketing-infographic"><img src="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Small-Business-and-Marketing-infographic.png" alt="Small Business and Marketing - Infographic "width="100%" border="0" /></a>

Sources:

• SEO Attachment: The State of Marketing 2011: Unica’s Annual Survey of Marketers
• SEO Attachment: 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report: SEO.com Takeaways
• SEO Attachment: The State of Marketing 2011: Unica’s Annual Survey of Marketers PPTX (survey based on 300 online & direct marketers)
• http://www.legalzoom.com/business-management/promoting-your-business/cost-marketing-what-is
• http://www.networksolutions.com/smallbusiness/wpcontent/files/Homepreneurs_A_Vital_Economic_Force.pdf?channelid=P99C425S627N0B142A1D38E0000V100
• http://www.thegrowblog.com/content/online-marketing-beats-offline-marketing-highest-roi
• http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/more-bad-news-for-yellow-pages/3679/

We are constantly asked what people can do to optimize their YouTube videos as well as their channel. In this post I am going to outline how to optimize and create titles.

I am not going to get into content creation, how to make videos in this post, or other optimization tips. I will be doing that at a later date. These tips will only work for videos which you feel people would like to watch and search for.

Optimize the Title – In order to optimize the title, you should decide which keywords you would like to optimize for. Previous to creating the video you should have check the Google Adwords keyword tool as well as have decided what phrases are pertinent to your industry. (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Let’s say we are experts in making potato chips. We sell books and other material on the subject.

Now it’s time to decide on a title. Use the YouTube suggested search as well to help you see what some of the searches are on YouTube for your keyword.

It is advisable to check out what some of these searches return before you use any of these keywords.

Use of your site’s analytics data can also be helpful to get some ideas.

After looking at a few videos, evaluating the keywords from Adwords, YouTube suggest, and analytics, it’s time to write a title. This is not science and you may or may not change this title multiple times to test your results.

My title example:

Make Homemade Potato Chips – Recipe and Video Guide by Mom’s Chips

The first part of this uses high volume keywords as well as some variation on suggested search in YouTube. The second part of this title gives the reader a sense of value before clicking. They already know that you will show them the recipe as well as the walkthrough of how to make the chips. The third part is a push towards branding. This may or may not work. If you have a video with an introduction that brands you, you may consider leaving this out.

I hope this helps those of you that are on YouTube already or are looking to get started. Title creation is one of the most important things you can do to optimize your videos. As I mentioned earlier, more tips and explanations will be appearing on our blog in the next few weeks.

We are constantly asked what people can do to optimize their YouTube videos as well as their channel. In this post I am going to outline how to optimize and create titles.

I am not going to get into content creation, how to make videos in this post, or other optimization tips. I will be doing that at a later date. These tips will only work for videos which you feel people would like to watch and search for.

Optimize the Title – In order to optimize the title, you should decide which keywords you would like to optimize for. Previous to creating the video you should have check the Google Adwords keyword tool as well as have decided what phrases are pertinent to your industry.  (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)

Let’s say we are experts in making potato chips. We sell books and other material on the subject.

Now it’s time to decide on a title. Use the YouTube suggested search as well to help you see what some of the searches are on YouTube for your keyword.

It is advisable to check out what some of these searches return before you use any of these keywords.

Use of your site’s analytics data can also be helpful to get some ideas.

After looking at a few videos, evaluating the keywords from Adwords, YouTube suggest,  and analytics, it’s time to write a title. This is not science and you may or may not change this title multiple times to test your results.

My title example:

Make Homemade Potato Chips – Recipe and Video Guide by Mom’s Chips

The first part of this uses high volume keywords as well as some variation on suggested search in YouTube. The second part of this title gives the reader a sense of value before clicking. They already know that you will show them the recipe as well as the walkthrough of how to make the chips. The third part is a push towards branding. This may or may not work. If you have a video with an introduction that brands you, you may consider leaving this out.

I hope this helps those of you that are on YouTube already or are looking to get started. Title creation is one of the most important things you can do to optimize your videos.  As I mentioned earlier, more tips and explanations will be appearing on our blog in the next few weeks.

Whatever your source for data, the healthier the amount the better. In our first post we looked to Google Webmaster Tools for our source to build from. Today we’ll use Google Analytics. Our goal will be to quickly identify long tail clusters of value.

Referring Keywords

If you are doing SEO right, your link building, content (both on-site and off), social media and other inbound marketing techniques will all have peripheral keyword advantage. This means that more than just those keywords you target will drive significant traffic. This is done through a comprehensive, intelligent and creative content strategy (rather than just a link-building strategy).

If that be the case, you can take advantage of this benefit and build upon it. The first step is to export your referring keyword data from Google Analytics. Depending on how much traffic the website of interest generates, your time frame should vary. Typically, I like to work with between three and six months:

Before exporting your data, be sure you are looking at both organic and paid keywords. There isn’t any point to only looking at one or the other as we are simply looking for overall keyword opportunities. With that done go ahead and export your data.

The next step is to gather your additional needed metrics to provide the ability to make comprehensive decisions. For this process those metrics should include:

1. Current Rankings / URLs:

As was mentioned in the first post, there are a number of great tools available for grabbing a high number of rankings. Once you have access to these tools the process of gathering rankings is fairly simple. You simply set up a campaign by dumping all of your keywords in. Allow for a day or so to gather the rankings, then run your export into an Excel file.

2. Phrase Length:

There are a lot of different ways to determine the difficulty of a keyword. Two common tools are the Keyword Difficulty Tool by SEOmoz and the competition metric provided in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. But for quick analysis on a large number of keywords one of the best ways to sort them by difficulty is to look at the length of the phrase. When working in Excel, drop this formula into a column to the right of your keyword list and you’ve got your difficulty metric:

=LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2),” “,”"))+1

In addition to the above metrics, your analytics export should contain the following:

• Visits
• Revenue (if eCommerce)
• Pages/Visit
• Average Time on Site
• Percentage of New Visits
• Bounce Rate

While we won’t incorporate every one of these metrics into our decision filtering, they are good to have available when considering any potential expansion.

With these in place your last step is to “Find & Replace” each of the non-ranking terms to show a value of “100″ rather than “0″ or “-”.

Identify Missed Opportunities

With all of your keywords and correlative data pulled into one, you’re ready to start manipulating. Remember, our goal for this process is to quickly create clusters of long tail phrases to target for quicker wins.

So let’s get into it.

First step is to sort your current data. Highlight all of your data and run a custom sort.  The two metrics you are including in the sort are the length of the phrase—looking at the longest first, and the current ranking—looking at the lowest first.

In this sort we identify the easiest terms (longest phrases in number of words) to target with the largest missed opportunities (ranking low in the index).

With the sort in place you will need to use your own judgment. For instance, it isn’t usually a common thing to target phrases more than 10 words long. However, pieces of that phrase may be of great value to you.

There will also be keywords that have brought in revenue that rank low and keywords that haven’t brought in any revenue. Typically a keyword ranking low yet still driving revenue should be valued above those that are not. This type of logic should be used when evaluating opportunities.

Typically I find myself looking in the middle of the phrase length spectrum and working from there.

Identify Relevant Clusters

Next, you will need to determine which of those top showing phrases are of priority to the website of interest.

Select one term at a time, then re-sort the list to show any other terms ranking for that same URL to identify potential clusters to work from in your optimization on-page and link building strategy.

The amount of what you are able to expand out and begin targeting should be determined by you and your team.

Choose your clusters based on relevance first. The ranking URL will be a great driving factor for that identification. But you can also look at the use of words within a phrase to identify any possible outliers not yet ranking at all.

From there you will want to look at each target page for on-page optimization needs then begin building out your external content and link-building strategy.

Previous Posts In The Series:

Post 1 – Building a Keyword List Based On Top Relevant Terms in Google Webmasters

Next Up In The Series:

Post 3 – Using Google Webmaster Tools To Locate New Terms & Build Strong Variations

Post 4 – An Enterprise Approach To Keyword Prioritization & Targeting

Most of my holiday vacation was spent resting, visiting with family, and reflecting on the past year. I thought about my accomplishments, failures, and intentions. I beat myself up for not blogging enough and wondered what changed from previous years.

Several reasons I didn’t blog:

1. A change in my responsibilities forced me to focus attention elsewhere
2. My travel schedule increased
3. I didn’t attend as many events
4. I didn’t feel like it
5. I stopped following RSS feeds
6. Twitter allowed me to get lazy in retweeting
7. The latest mobile social media apps (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) have terrible interfaces
8. My mobile has given me more headaches than solutions; I spend a lot of my mobile time reading and socializing
9. I fell out of touch with several online friends
10. Many of my favorite bloggers slowed/stopped blogging
11. I didn’t prioritize blogging

In the end, it’s just a lot of excuses.

The benefits of blogging

Even with all the benefits of blogging, I couldn’t get back on track with a regular writing schedule. This is something I’m going to change in 2012.

My blogging has dropped to almost nothing but if my first few posts this year are any indication, I’m going to be writing a lot more in the coming months.

The benefits of blogging haven’t changed from years past:

• Fresh content to promote your message to your audience
• Relevant information that relates to your keywords and industry terms
• Multiple content formats (text, images, video, audio, etc.) that help you rank well in the ever expanding indexes that search engines display to users
• Establishing yourself as an expert and staying current in your industry
• Creating a home for all your social media activities to tie back to
• Embedding images, video, audio, etc. while providing greater context for the media you’ve produced
• Attraction of links by other bloggers
• Comments and community-building
• Shares, Likes, and Retweets that naturally build exponential interest

Shortfalls of social media sites

When Google+ launched last year, I started to appreciate what Facebook had been working toward; groups, community, and multiple formats of content (photos, videos, status updates, etc.). I much prefer Google+ over Facebook. As I’ve added people to my circles and followed the streams of data, I realized that Twitter is actually lacking severely without photos & videos, 140 character limit, groups, filters, and other great features we’ve all dreamed about.

You can only have somewhat superficial conversations on Twitter and Facebook. Getting into deep discussions becomes visible to everyone following your feed and isn’t always what you want. For example: I may not want to follow 100 tweets between two of my friends while I’m trying to check in for the afternoon. Natural limitations keep your conversations splintered among multiple status updates and threads. Blogging allows you to keep an original post and each of the follow up comments together.

Twitter and Facebook can then help you get the word out that a conversation is happening on your blog.

Blogging is different. I realized I write because it’s fun; and an outlet. I write on different subject matters and publish them to different audiences to keep things organized and targeted. Facebook and Twitter are then used to promote posts to the masses, whether they want to read about my different blog categories or not. Google+ solves this problem better than any other platform but it’s far from perfect.

My top 5 list of blogging benefits I missed:

1. Author Authority – keeping and building my audience on several subjects
2. Backlinks – promotional and SEO benefits
3. Social shares – authority, promotional, and SEO benefits
4. Guest blogging opportunities – growing my audience as a result of writing on others’ blogs
5. Creating content in multiple formats that help me control the SERPs (search engine results pages) with pages, posts, videos, social influence, etc.

What did you miss last year and what are you going to change?

Not too long ago I needed to hire a lawyer. As I looked at different attorneys in the area I turned to Google Maps to find which ones had the most reviews and most positive reviews. Although I could have done a basic search in Google I find that when looking for local services a Maps search gives me a better list for consideration. I went to visit the lawyers in person that seemed credible from the reviews that I read. After visiting with the two different lawyers I found that the reviews online were a fair representation and decided to hire the lawyer that had more reviews than the other.

As we went through our business dealings with this lawyer (I am going to call him Chris from now on to simplify things) I noticed things he did to improve the amount of reviews he was getting online. Although Chris is a lawyer, I feel many of these same tips can be applied to any person or business that offers services locally.

1- Start Early and Look For Clues

During my first with Chris he wanted to know how I found out about him. This is a common practice for businesses because it helps identify what part of their marketing budget is working. I mentioned that I looked at online reviews during this discussion and Chris said he would greatly appreciate it if I would also provide a review when the services were provided.

While a sales person is trying to build rapport with a potential client it is easy to find out how technical an individual is. Once a sale is made to a tech savvy person you can plant the idea early on that it would be great if they would share their experience online through a review or social media.

2- Emphasize the Unique Value Proposition

When I was “sold” on going with Chris he emphasized his Unique Value Proposition (UVP). As I continued through the process with Chris I noticed him talking about his UVP, not in exact words usually but the same idea was expressed over and over. Chris was telling me what I could expect through the process and what he was doing to make sure that he delivered on what I was sold on. By doing this Chris was priming me to see the things that were unique to him and his practice.

3- Repeat it Often

Although my business with Chris was not a long and drawn out process I want to give some suggestions about how you can keep the review fresh in the minds of your clients even if your services stretch over a long period of time. Usually longer service contracts have bench marks or progress points where a client can assess the progress of the campaign. Every time you provide a win for the client, fulfill something you have promised them, or reach a goal be sure to inform them. With tact and preparation, the client-facing individuals in your company can get testimonials/reviews that can be used in sales material, website testimonials, or online reviews. When a client is happy with the progress on the project it is easy to ask them for permission to use what they say as a testimony. This can be as simple as: “Thanks. We try to provide great services here at XYZ. Although we are not done, I am seeing great success in this project. I like sharing successes stories with other clients in similar situations. Can I share part of what you have said to some of my other clients?” At this point you can identify what information can be shared and how many people it can be shared with.

4- Strike While the Iron is Hot

Chris was very helpful throughout the entire process. When we got done I was happy with the end results and so was Chris. Right as we were finishing up our business together Chris expressed his happiness with the results and he said something along the lines of: “I really would appreciate it if you would write a review about the great results we achieved. Can I send you an email with a link to a location where you can write a review?” There it was. He asked for a review right after we had experienced a win together.

5- Keep it Stupid Simple (That is right I switched Kiss to mean it needs to be stupidly simple)

When I got the email that he promised he would send I noticed several things.

• There was a live link to their Google Places page. I was already in my Gmail so I easily went and wrote a review.
• Chris re-emphasized the great results we had achieved together. None of this was new to me or something that had not been mentioned before, but it kept everything fresh in my mind so I did not need to search for things to say about the process.
• He included a brief set of directions on how to provide a review.
• I was thanked for my willingness to provide a review. This made me even happier to do so.

All of this was done in two short paragraphs because word economy is very important. If you have clients with a Yahoo email then send them a link to your Yahoo local listing. Likewise if you have someone with MSN or Hotmail accounts send them to your Bing local listing. If their email is some other type use your best guess. In any of these situations it would not hurt to provide the client with links to multiple locations where they could provide an online review or become a fan, follow, like, etc. These links could include Facebook Twitter or Yelp. Remember to make it as simple as absolutely possible.

Through this entire process I was able to learn how businesses can get better reviews for their sites. If you want more reviews or testimonials it is not always as simple as asking for these reviews. There are many things along the way that you can do as a business owner to encourage people to provide these reviews though the most important thing, of course, is to always provide a quality service.

Chris is an attorney not an online marketer yet he does things that really help out his online campaign. I am not sure that he even concisely did these things to encourage more interaction online. Once a company has a process for encouraging online interaction in place, implementing it could take just a few minutes each day yet have a huge impact in an online campaign.

To learn about how local search works in more detail, watch this webinar Learn the Secrets of Google’s Local Search

Link building is a critical part of most SEO campaigns. If you have a solid strategy to obtain legitimate links from relevant websites, you’re adding value to the web and typically, raising your rankings within the search engines in the process. On the other hand, if you’re link building to sketchy websites for the sheer purpose of manipulating the search engines without providing any value, it’s easy for the search engines to see your shady tactics and adjust your rankings accordingly.

However, what happens when you’re a legitimate business that unknowingly hires a spammy SEO company? Or, what if your competitors decide to sabotage your rankings by throwing some money and/or resources at a smear campaign, filled with massive amounts of unnatural links? Does a business owner’s website deserve the“Google slap” when they had no intention of violating Google’s policies?

Personally, I have received an over-optimization penalty from the search engines because of my own stupidity. It was one of those “life lessons” that I deserved because I knew better, but applying the same consequences to all webmasters is borderline unfair.

For example, I currently have a client who has had prior SEO campaigns from illegitimate, overseas companies that did more harm than good. Those companies got him 340,000 external links over the span of 18 months in the footer and sidebar of 90 different domains using their main keywords. They also had keywords with Chinese and other Asian characters. Oh, I almost forgot, there were porn sites in there too. Did this trusting website owner deserve a penalty from Google because his SEO company is engaging in wrongful strategies?

If you had an established company and you saw a competitor quickly coming up in the SERPs, how far would you go to stop them? After all, you want to stay at the top and dominate your niche. If you were experienced enough to understand that building an unnatural link profile to a website could result in penalties, would you? I wouldn’t, but that’s because I’m an honest person. I’m willing to bet, however, that most people would try and destroy their competitor’s rankings given the chance.

Google: Help us, Help you

This isn’t the first time somebody has suggested Google allow us to disassociate our websites with another linking website. Dr. Pete from SEOmoz already gave his modest proposal in an excellent blog post on 6 ways to recover from bad links. I’m sure others have covered it as well.

There are a few ways Google could allow us to help them combat webspam. One excellent way is to create a robots-only file on your website similar to a robots.txt, where you can specify what websites you want to disallow.

If that method doesn’t work, it could always be built into Google Webmaster Tools. This concept isn’t complex and I can’t imagine it being difficult for the search engines to execute, but it definitely would protect business owners from shady SEO firms and prevent unethical competitors from sabotaging your website.

Dr. Pete already did an excellent job with his suggestion, but if this blog post has any purpose, it’s to raise awareness of this problem. Being able to disassociate incoming links at the very least, would raise the standards and practices of SEO companies and prevent oblivious business owners from getting screwed.

To me, it would make sense for Google to allow webmasters to do this. At the very minimum, it would allow inexperienced site owners to quickly recover their losses after being duped by an illegitimate SEO firm. It would also protect new websites from being sabotaged by big competitors. However, what reasons do you think Google has for not doing this?

Sure, Google may account for 70% of all search traffic, but that doesn’t mean it’s that high for your client and their target market. There are times when the search engine of choice for your customers will be Bing.

A client asked if it would be worth investing time and focusing efforts on increasing their Bing search results. After a little time in Analytics, I thought the answer was, without a doubt, YES!



Why?



The target demographic for this client was older people, 45 years of age and above. Based on ComScore’s survey from 2007, older demographics tend to use Internet Explorer. We decided to look at the analytics and see what we could find.



After looking at Analytics, we saw that a majority of their site’s visitors (over 58%) used Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer’s default search bar obviously employs Bing

The question is, does their organic traffic line up as well? 



The combined traffic from Yahoo and Bing is 8438. That is roughly 36% of the organic traffic to the site which is a little higher than average.

However, when we look at the organic rankings of this client, we can see that the average rankings for Bing are a lot lower than the average in Google.

Out of the 36 targeted keywords for this site, the average ranking in Google is position 11. In Bing the average position of the targeted keywords is 29. How much more traffic could the site receive by focusing a little more effort on the Bing side of search?

The trends:



After looking at other clients who target older demographics I found this trend was fairly consistent. 50-60% of their traffic used Internet Explorer. Yahoo and Bing organic traffic accounted for as much as 55% of their organic traffic, and Bing rankings were, on average, 20 positions behind.



Though Google may be our focus for a majority of our work, there are times, and clients that need to have Bing as a more central part of their SEO strategy.

Using everyday conversations to gain natural backlinks

In my career as a journalist, I’ve had the opportunity to cover breaking news events from around the state of Utah. In the summer of 2010, a major oil pipeline developed a leak, forcing more than 20,000 gallons of oil into Salt Lake City’s Red Butte Creek. It was a major catastrophe from both an environmental and economic standpoint. People wanted to find out how the oil leak affected them, the extent of the damage, the clean-up efforts, and what government and company officials were doing to rectify the situation.

The news business is not unlike other businesses. Many have their favorite station to watch, or their favorite radio frequency locked on their preset when they want to avoid a traffic jam. Often consumers will buy their groceries from the same store, and even show preference to one brand over another. Think Apple products versus Android. During the oil leak, and the many months of clean-up afterwards, residents wanted the latest information, and consumed that information through a variety of channels. They also had very high expectations from the station, and wouldn’t have been satisfied with a 2 or 3 line story about the oil leak or a regurgitated press release.

So, how does a major news event correspond with effective linkbait content? Think about what you do when you hear breaking news through the grapevine. Let’s say you arrive at work early, sit down at your desk and turn on your computer. Suddenly, you notice your coworkers huddled around the office television, and you look at the screen and see images and video of a building fire. After watching the TV for a few minutes, you turn around and type in the URL to your favorite news station’s website to see if they’re covering that breaking news.

What if your website became that instant source for information about your industry? It can! In fact, that’s what SEO.com strives to be in the search engine optimization industry, and it’s highly rewarding to see people link to our blog posts. I don’t mind tooting my company’s horn a little, because we’ve worked hard to become one of the leaders in the industry. There’s no reason why your website can’t do the same!

How to earn links naturally

You may have heard the phrase “Content is King”. In April 2011, my colleague Kevin Phelps challenged that belief, and offered some alternatives to content marketing, including traditional SEO, PPC and social media efforts to garner more traffic. While the written word is still incredibly valuable, there are many other ways to earn links naturally. Remember my example about the oil leak? There were many ways to get the latest information about that leak, including video, newspaper, radio and website content. In the linked story, there were links to external websites so readers could get even more information about the spill. There were photos, in depth interviews with government officials, helicopter footage of the damaged areas and social media buttons to help you share that story with your friends and family. They offered a comments section, so you could share your views and stories about how the spill affected you. There were different angles of the story, like how the oil leak affected local wildlife, and even numbers and email addresses to local resources.

Now, I understand that this is a news station which has hundreds of employees on the ground and behind the scenes working on the story. Not everyone has the time or resources to invest in making content like this. The point of this example is to show you ways to earn links naturally. Let’s say you own and operate a website that sells air fresheners. Not terribly exciting, is it?

One of the elements of SEO that I recommend is having a blog on your website. Search engines want to show fresh content in their results pages, and blogging is the best way to make sure these search engines keep coming back to your site. Sometimes you can even rank for long tail keywords placed within the blog posts.

You may be struggling to think of ways to write about air fresheners specifically. In this case, you should start thinking laterally. Take a moment and think about ways people use air fresheners. How about in their cars? People enjoy taking long road trips with their families, and often use a search engine to help figure out what they need to pack. This is a great opportunity to write a 50-point packing checklist for your blog. You could even add real check boxes instead of bullet points, and make the page print-friendly. REI’s “Expert Advice” section is a great example of this. Chances are, if people find your content useful, engaging and easy to use, they’re more likely to link to it. One hour writing a blog post or article like this could easily earn many links down the road. Is the time investment worth it? Of course it is!

Follow the trending topics

I use this strategy daily on a website I own about local news. A few weeks ago, Northern Utah experienced a strong wind storm that uprooted trees, snapped power lines and caused extensive damage. People immediately flocked to the Internet to view pictures and read about what was happening in their communities. I continuously wrote new content and provided pictures that people sent to me, and Google indexed my articles almost immediately. I saw a lot of unique visits from long tail keywords, and gained a large amount of natural backlinks. Besides the established news stations, I was one of the first local websites to break the story, and became part of the conversation. Social media networks are a great way to find out which topics are trending.

Let’s go back to my air freshener example. You probably think of those tree-shaped air fresheners that you can hang from your rear view mirror in your car, but “Febreze” is a brand that seems to be set on changing peoples’ perception of what an air freshener can do. Check out their page called “Breathe Happy”, which is filled with interesting statistics like “17% think crayons are the most recognizable childhood scent”. I’m not one who would hang out on a website about air fresheners, but this page is actually pretty interesting, and there’s lots of great stuff to explore!

During the holiday season, many people like to host parties at their homes. Often, it’s a chance for hosts to spray some type of holiday-scented air freshener before the guests arrive, or after the guests leave. Why not write a blog post about tips for hosting a holiday party, and include a tip for air fresheners?

The point here is to think outside of the box, and put yourself in the place of your customers. What are they talking about? What are the trending topics within your industry?

Please share your experiences with effective linkbait, and offer any suggestions in the comment section below!

As the new year begins and the economy continues its slump, we at SEO.com are grateful for the growth we experienced in 2011. Our growth is measured in various ways -revenue, client base, customer satisfaction, etc – but what really sets us apart are the awesome employees that contribute to our success.

Having jobs we love (heck, having jobs at all) makes it that much easier to work hard and provide our clients with the best in search engine optimization, technology and customer service. It also makes it possible to recognize those that are struggling and find ways to give back to our communities.

We are always looking for ways to help out those who have been hit hard by the economic downturn. Two years ago we held a contest for companies affected the most from the recession and were able to provide the winner with a 6-month contract of free SEO services to help them get back on their feet. This year we enlisted the help of our employees to provide new socks and underwear to needy children, collect food for the Utah Food Bank, and gather coats and other winter wear to donate at local shelters.

My favorite experience happened last month with our own version of an Angel Tree. I wasn’t sure if we would be able to pull it off since the needs of the family we were helping were so great, but when I saw all the gifts wrapped and ready for delivery my expectations were exceeded. I also may have shed a tear or two. As I said before, really awesome people work at SEO.com.

Individually, we can’t help everyone but together we can fight disease, homelessness, addiction, political issues, humanitarian relief and more. Make Change! Trust, an affiliated organization, uses the power of technology to help nonprofits market their charities online and create sustainable social advancement for those in need. Efforts like these help nonprofits reach more potential donors, which in turn allows others to feel the joy of giving.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy New Year from SEO.com!

"What's the best WordPress SEO plugin?"

I'm asked that question all the time, and recently took part in a debate discussing which plugin is best. I decided to draft a features list comparing the top three most downloaded SEO plugins to get a better picture of what each plugin has to offer, et voilà!

I'll be comparing and contrasting features of the All in one SEO Pack, vs WordPress SEO by Yoast, vs Platinum SEO. To be fair, there is no loser among the three because each plugin is impressive and will make your WordPress site much more search engine friendly. I'll talk about which plugin is my favorite in the conclusion, so you can review the features bias-free, and implement whichever plugin matches your specific set of needs.

If you know a developer – or anyone that would like their WordPress site to rank well in search engines – please help them out by sharing this review so that these plugins don't go unused. 

The plugins:

All in One SEO Pack
Downloads: 9,570,544
Author: Michael Torbert
Plugin page

WordPress SEO by Yoast
Downloads: 761,035
Author: Joost de Valk
Plugin Page

Platinum SEO Pack
Downloads: 656,205
Author: Techblissonline Dot Com (Rajesh)
Plugin Page

Honorable mention plugin: I can't leave out the oldie-but-still-goodie, SEO Ultimate.

Table of Contents

1. Setup and First Appearances
2. Plugin Features
3. Migration/Import/Export
4. Page-Level SEO Controls
5. XML Sitemaps
6. Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Open Graph Schema

1. Setup and First Appearances

2. Plugin Features

3. Migration/Import/Export

4. Page-Level SEO Controls

5. XML Sitemaps

6. Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Open Graph Schema

There you have it! I'll repeat myself in saying that all three plugins are fantastic and one of these three plugins should be active on every WordPress installation (that is intended to appear in search engines). With that being said, I'm a huge fan of Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin. It is by far the most complete and has the best looking user interface. I'm certain that it's only in second place in terms of downloads because it hasn't been around as long — but just give it some time.

So I started writing a post titled 4 Ways to a Worthwhile Keyword List and quickly realized it was far too lengthy. Thus, you are now embarking on post one of a four-part series. Each post will discuss different processes to locate valuable keywords and how to lay them out in a way that allows you to decide which are most worth incorporating. The final post will be a behemouth of a process discussing some of the most innovative ways to prioritize a large keyword list for big SEO campaigns.

Let's get started.

One of the best ways to make a decision about which keywords to target is to look at high performing (revenue, visits, relevance) phrases for your site that are under performing (low ranking) in the search engines. Ideally, you should gather a fairly large number of keywords and correlative metrics to make these comparisons, and come to a final target list. This first process focuses on relevance as a value indicator.

Top Relevant Keywords

Your first step is to dive into Google Webmaster Tools and retrieve your top relevant keywords. This can be done by clicking on Your site on the web > Keywords as shown here.

Download the table and it will appear similar to this image:

Now take these keywords and begin filtering. Those at the top are to be considered the most relevant. What I like to do is grab a list of 10 to 20 top terms not used in your current SEO campaign. This list is suprisingly ideal for identifying terms that don't necessarily come to mind in a typical keyword research process. For this particular campaign, a few terms not yet incorporated were "system," "new" and "company."

Once you have those keywords selected, it's time to single them out and create a cluster of relevant terms for each. Do this by going to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Include your most common keywords along with the new term.

This will give you a healthy list to filter through. In this case, once you have the document exported, to get rid of keywords you aren't looking for, filter out any phrase not using main keywords like "system" or "gaming." I prefer to keep these lists focused into groups of closely related keywords, so I filter down to between 10 and 20 phrases.

With this process, you will end up with a much narrower list than with the options we will cover in future posts.

The idea here is to take those terms Google has already identified as highly relevant, locate missed opportunities, and build upon them through common phrases related to your product or services.

This is one of the quickest ways I've found to expand a targeted keyword list for increased diversity.

Once you have established a cluster for each subject, it's important to gather some type of correlative metrics. We already have the estimated search volume from the Adwords Keyword Tool. In addition, I would recommend gathering at least your current rankings for each term in order to determine which are most worth targeting. A few common tools for doing this will be Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Advanced Web Ranking or Rank Checker.

Remember this process is based first on relevance as a factor. With this understanding we need not question whether the keyword is right for the website under review.

The next question to ask is which terms have the greatest potential for increase in rankings, traffic and revenue—and should be a point of focus in strategy. To do this use your ranking data. Sort your file to show those keywords ranking low but high in potential search volume and start making some decisions for your upcoming months content strategy.

This process is ideal when you are looking to build upon phrases already involved in regular strategy providing support to prior efforts through a diverse approach in both link building and content on-page.

Up Next In The Series:

Post 2 – Using Google Analytics for Long Tail Identification & Quick Wins

Post 3 – Using Google Webmaster Tools To Locate New Terms & Build Strong Variations

Post 4 – An Enterprise Approach To Keyword Prioritization & Targeting

A 404 page shows on a user's screen when they reach a page that doesn't exist on the website. This can happen when they reach a page that was deleted, clicking a broken link, or typing the wrong URL.

More than likely you've encountered a few humerous 404 pages in your web surfing days, but did you know a good 404 page is much more than just a placeholder?

SEO best practices suggest your site's 404 page should be a custom page to help visitors find the info they are looking for.

According to Google's Webmaster Tools help section, the page should:

• Advise visitors that the page they were searching for isn't found.
• Look the same as the rest of the site, and include a link to the home page.
• Include a search box to allow the visitor to narrow their search for the page they're looking for.
• Show a list of recommended pages or posts.

Check with your hosting provider for recommendations on how to display the 404 page properly.

This month I reached my official one year tenure as an employee of SEO.com. During the past year, there have been many notable and industry changing events, so much that I could go on for pages and pages. I have chosen 7 that have affected me and those around me. Included is a little flavor of what it is like working for a great SEO industry-leading company like SEO.com.

1. Google Plus

Launched in June of 2011, this is Google’s hand at a social networking site. Due to the fact that they do not have access to Facebook data nor the ability to crawl Facebook user profiles, it was time they created their own social network. With the launch of their network, first in beta, followed soon after by opening G+ to the public, they quickly went from 0 to hero and hit 50 million users in 88 days.

Some of the features within their network include: Circles, hangouts, messenger, ripples, stream, and instant upload for photos. I personally enjoy using Google+ and love the instant upload feature. Another thing I enjoy is being able to filter which content is in my stream based on categories I create and place people in.

Key takeaway: If you are not on Google+ yet, you are missing the boat!

2. Google + Business Pages

If your business is not on Google+ for business pages, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to help your business establish credibility. In November, Google rolled out G+ business pages to allow businesses to give an identity to their local business or place, product or brand, company or institution. For an example of a G+ business page, look at SEO.com on Google Plus.

The Google+ business page you create for your business or for your client’s business is very similar to the concept of a Facebook page for your business. Similar to a Facebook user "liking" your page/brand, users can +1 your G+ page/brand. Social sharing and brand interaction has an effect on the personalized search results of everyone that you are friends with on the web. Ex: Facebook, Twitter, Google Friend Connect, etc.

Key takeaway: Get your business on G+. Link it to your website. Link it to your other social profiles on the web. Build your online identity in every way you can.

3. Google Panda Update

How can we begin to talk about the seo and search marketing industry without talking about the Panda Update? Google launched a new algorithm update, called the ‘Panda’ Update, named after engineer Navneet Panda.  This heavily affected many sites that had low quality content.

This update seemed to focus more on an entire site and how the entire site ranks, versus individual pages or sections of the site. This update caused an uproar in the SEO community. Many SEOs were scrambling to help their clients recover from this unexpected blow.

Key takeaway: As the Google search algorithm continues to evolve, I feel it will continually move towards the overall user experience of a website and try to rank and sort websites based more heavily on user experience factors.

4. SEO.com Named #1 Top Search Marketing Agency by Website Magazine

Website Magazine published a post listing the Top 50 Search Marketing Agencies, and SEO.com came in at #1. While working here and serving clients, I have gained an appreciation for understanding a client niche, constantly testing for results, and being open to changing your ways and processes in order to compete in this competitive industry. Additionally, I am very impressed at the array of various SEM services that we are able to offer our clients.

Key takeaway: We work in a competitive industry. Spend the time to understand your client’s business, try to view the campaign through their eyes and their shoes once in awhile, and lastly continually adapt your processes to the changing landscape to stay out in front.

5. Pubcon Vegas 2011

Vegas, Baby, Vegas!!! Need I say more? This was my first time at Pubcon, which is the largest annual gathering of search and social media industry leaders in the world. Pubcon Vegas was such a fun experience, and I was flooded with practical and tactical information I can use to help my clients.

Some of the highlights for me included meeting some of the big dogs in the industry, including Tim Ash of SiteTuners, Tom Critchlow of Distilled, Matt Cutts of Google, and Arienne Holland of Raven Internet Marketing Tools. In addition to that, it was a blast hanging out with my fellow SEO.com associates and soaking in all of the expertise and theory from fellow search marketers and social media pioneers.

Key takeaway: Our industry is constantly changing, so always test theories and recognize the power of social search influence this coming year.

6. Google Freshness Update

Google found a way to make fresh content rank better for search terms. Although the rankings are not in chronological order of when the content was posted, the update is helping fresh content rank. This means good and bad news for us SEOs.

The good is that with positive content we can get relevant pages to rank quickly and get traffic which can equal revenue for our clients. The bad news is that, if there is any negative publicity about our clients, the news will rank quickly and if socially shared will ‘naturally’ stay in the top rankings for awhile.

Key takeaway: If your client has a blog, get them to blog! If they don’t have a blog, get them a blog! Get ‘fresh’ on the internet!

7. SEO.com Christmas Party

Wrapping up a phenomenal year of business and celebrating our successes and camaraderie as a company, we had our Casino Royale 007 Company Christmas Party. We were served prime rib and chicken cordon bleu followed by hours of fake money poker games. We were in a rented venue, and it was a night to remember. To end the night we had a raffle drawing and had prize giveaways including gift cards to Subway, Wal-Mart, Visa, Amazon, as well as an iPad 2, PS3, and a 42" flat screen TV.  

Key takeaway: We had a great year and are all looking forward to a fantastic year in 2012!!
 

SEO and PPC should be considered children of the same parent: search marketing. Their strategies should be considered together for best results.

There is some debate in the industry if running PPC and SEO can cause cannibalization of traffic; and there have been studies suggest both a positive and a negative result. You should, therefore, monitor both initiatives closely to prevent cannibalization if present.

There are some great benefits however, including:

• Shared keyword data. Data from your PPC campaigns can help you identify your best converting keywords which can be applied to your overall strategy.
• Informed content strategy. As with keyword data, converting content from PPC may also convert well for your SEO campaign.
• More comprehensive ecommerce data. Ecommerce landing pages can also be used in your PPC campaign to move visitors directly the page where they can purchase a product.

Again, if you do run PPC and SEO programs together, monitor them closely to assure positive results from both. Using both programs can enable you to share data between campaigns making both more effective.

2011 was a big year for social media. We saw continued growth of sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as the introduction of Google+. Many businesses continued the adoption of using social media as part of their marketing strategies, and now we are seeing the the early stages of what the social graph in search results within Google and Bing look like.

2012 will be undoubtedly be another year of huge growth in social media, and if you have not embraced it in your business, or if you dipped your toes in the water and gave up, now is the time to roll up your sleeves and get moving in the right direction.

Here are a few ideas to ponder as you get ready for 2012.

Invest A Proper Amount Of Time – Don't Short Change Your Efforts:

The biggest investment you will make into your social media efforts is TIME. Stop looking for the easy button when it comes to social media… there isn't one. You MUST put the time in to achieve the results you want. PERIOD!

Create Your Goals – Achieve Your Goals:

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, so go into social media with a roadmap, and plan on how to achieve your goal. Do you want more followers, leads, sales, site visits, white paper downloads, likes, replies or newsletter signups? No matter what the goals are, if you do not plan for them now, you will lose your way and find yourself not getting what you want out of social media, and possibly giving up on it altogether. Sure, you may find yourself adjusting your goals along the way, and that is OK… but start somewhere.

Create A Content Calendar – Plan Your Content In Advance:

Set up a calendar and plan your content. Each month decide what type of content you will be posting. Will you be blogging, if so how many times per week? How will you engage your audience, will you maybe run a contest on your Facebook page, how about a poll, or a question of the day? How about creating a video each week? Does your company have a particular marketing message for the year that you should sync up with? In the end you want to create content that people will engage with, share with their friends, and provide value to all involved. 

Side note: Keep in mind that people do not care to be advertised to… so use the simple 80/20 rule. Talk/share interesting things, or engage your audience 80% of the time, and talk about yourself (self promotion (20%) of the time.

Track And Measure Your Posts:

If you use Google Analytics on your site, use the Google Analytics URL builder tool and create campaigns. Track all links going to your site from all the social networks you post on. You can test what social sites work best, what time of day is best to post, and what type of content resonates best with your audience. Obviously you will be able to track ROI of your efforts here as well. Everything has some sort of value, whether it is a lead, a fan or follower, or an actual sale, you can attribute a dollar amount to almost any action on your website. Make your time investment in social media pay for itself!

The Best Social Media Tool Is You:

While I was at SMX in Arizona earlier this month, there were many presentations on different tools you can use for social media. Anything from automation, to tracking and engagement tools… but at the end of the day, we all agreed that the best tool is you. You, as in THE HUMAN ELEMENT. At the end of the day, I am not a fan of automation for the sake of automation. But, if you choose to automate anything, just be sure you are available to answer any replies people may leave. No one likes to follow an account that does not reply or engage.

In future posts I will break down each one of these ideas into more detail, as well as have additional information, as these ideas are just the tip of the iceberg to get you thinking about social media in 2012 and beyond.

Please leave your comments below as I would love to hear from you. And if there is anything in particular you would like me to cover in future posts about social media marketing, please leave those in the comments as well.

Until next time… Doc

PS… Be sure to follow SEO.com on Twitter, friend us Facebook, circle us on Google+ and join us in the conversations.

Social bookmarking is a way for people to tag, share, organize, store, and search for useful links online. Instead of saving sites as bookmarks or favorites in your browser, you compile them online into a website you can reach from any computer. These bookmarks reference noteworthy links and can be private, public, or shared within a specified group.

Bookmarks are tagged for ease of search; for instance, you can tag a recipe site with "food," and bookmarks set to public can be searched by other readers. Once a site is bookmarked, the item can be voted upon with a like, thumbs up or thumbs down, or other voting criteria. Each different site has a unique community element to it, with nicknames for their users, such as a "Redditor" on Reddit.

Bookmarking can be used as a search engine optimization tool, making the website where the article appeared more visible. Some sites pass on link juice, others use noFollow attribute .Social tagging, also known as folksonomy, is a process by which users add metadata and keywords to shared content. Social bookmarking sites are often a target of spam, which makes tagging a valuable step for weeding through the poor quality content. Social bookmarking sites have helped many lesser known sites become discoverable to a larger audience, particularly when bookmarks are shared on other social media sites.

Depending on the website, you can bookmark articles, news, images, video, or other miscellaneous content. Some of the most popular social bookmarking websites are Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Xydo, and Pinterest.

Blogging on a regular basis is vital in helping to develop a strong online presence. With some effort and well researched blog posts, you can take your blog from zero to hero. One of my great friends, Dan Bischoff from Lendio, wrote a great post over on the Raven Blog on how he took their company blog from 500 views to 20,000 views in just eight weeks. I've been told that it's now at about 30,000+ a month. It’s a brilliant post and one you should definitely read if you haven’t, but it’s a testimony of how blogging can help grow and strengthen your presence online.

Topic Generation

There’s all sorts of talk in the SEO/SEM space about ways to generate blog post ideas. Most of them revolve around doing competitive research to help guide your efforts. Most recently, at Pubcon Las Vegas, Arnie Kuenn, President of link building agency Vertical Measures spoke about using Open Site Explorer to find which pieces of content your competitors have that have attracted the most links. Once you know this, you can build a similar piece of content for your own site in hopes that it will attract some interest and links as well. He also suggested that you do some manual outreach to the sites that linked to your competitors content asking them to link to yours as well. Brilliant, huh?

There are lots of different ways to come up with blog post topics, online and offline. I wanted to write this post because I've been doing a lot of offline research that has helped me grow my blog content and I wanted to share with everyone what I’ve been up to.

Offline Blog Research

As I mentioned above, there's a lot of talk about ways to research blog topics online, however, there isn’t a lot of talk about researching blog ideas offline. A few months ago, I was sitting around the house flipping through one of my wife’s magazines (I don’t want to say which one in fear that I will be ridiculed by my co-workers and peers), but as I was scanning some of the content, I thought to myself, some of this content would be interesting to my readers and if I got it up quick enough, would probably attract some natural backlinks as well.

The more I thought about it, it really made a lot of sense to build a blogging strategy around content published offline. When you think about it, most of the content found in popular magazines is content that is well researched by a professional journalist and is most likely content that people are very interested in right now. Take Kim Kardashian’s divorce, bloggers are all over that and getting loads of traffic and links because of it. Most of the work is done for you. All you have to do is come up with some unique content and a different take on the story and you have a rocking blog post.

Scalability

My next thought was, how do I get a lot of ideas without having to subscribe to dozens of magazines each month. It just doesn’t make sense to spend $2-3 per issue just to get blogging ideas. Well, maybe it does if you are a hard-core blogger, but for someone who blogs in his/her spare time, it doesn’t.  A few days after my idea of using magazine content for blog ideas, I was at Target with my daughter looking at some children’s books. While there, I saw the big magazine rack and I realized that by spending 30 minutes a week in a store like Target, Wal-Mart, Barns and Noble, or even the library, that I could get a months worth of blogging ideas without paying anything at all. So I decided to build a process to help me be as efficient as possible.

Process

Identification: I first had to identify which type of magazines related to my business or blog. If you sell wedding dresses online, then you might consider all of the bridal magazines. You might also consider magazines like People which talk about celebrities getting engaged or married. I typically like to do this before I arrive at the magazine stand.

Pulling: Once I get to the magazine stand, I find the targeted magazines, pull all of them, and head to a table or nice clean spot on the floor. Whatever you do, don't sit on the floor at Wal-Mart… they aren't that clean.

Scanning: After I have my stack, I glance at the cover and the table of contents to see if anything sounds interesting to me. If so, I flip to the page, whip out my iPhone and start snapping pictures of headlines. I don’t want to use the content, but I do want to use the topic.

Organization: Once I have all my pictures taken, I put the magazines back, and head home to dump the pictures on my computer and organize them. What I am looking for here is level of interest. If something is time sensitive, I will typically move it closer to the top of my list. If something is more interesting, I move it up. If it is less interesting, I move it down. You get the idea.

Research: As I mentioned above, I generally don’t want to use the content found in these magazine articles. I like to do some research on my own (or outsource it) to build my content. This ensures that I am not blatantly copying the content and that it’s a fresh take on the topic.

Creation & Publishing: If you are a blogger, both of these steps are pretty straightforward. You can either write the content yourself, or job it out to someone on Elance or oDesk. Once you have the content, you optimize and publish it.

Results

The first time I put my process to the test, I spent twenty minutes at Barnes and Noble and found 42 different blog topic ideas. I spent an additional fifteen minutes organizing the topics and another twenty getting them all jobbed out to one of my writers for research and creation. If I publish one piece every business day, I have approximately eight and a half weeks of content ideas in just under an hour. Pretty decent if you ask me.

One thing that you need to remember is, as with anything we do in SEO, these numbers can and will fluctuate depending on the person, niche of the site, number of magazine you need/want to go through, and other factors. Don't get discouraged if you come out with just a dozen ideas the first time. It was still a worth while activity!

So, how do you come up with blogging ideas? If you have processes outside the norm, please add to the conversation by commenting below.

Hi SEO.com followers,  My name is Ty Kilgore and today I’m going to be answering the question;  How do I Rank in Local Search or how do I rank in maps? Local SEO is that something that has really taken off in the last year to year in a half.  The search engines are putting more emphasis on the users to fill out the information than ever before. So I am going to be talking about 5 different things that you can do to help you to rank in Local SEO. 

1. First thing is that you want to make sure that if you want to show up for localized terms that you have a business address and phone number that is local. For instance if I wanted to show up for terms in Lawrenceville, Georgia I would need to make sure that my business was located in Lawrenceville, Georgia and that I also had a phone number that was local to the area. 
2. Next, you will want to build out citations.  You can build these citations on the many different popular citations sites out there. For example:

• Yelp
• CitySearch
• Yellow Book
• Insider Pages
• Super Pages

And the list goes on. Essentially what you want to do is make sure that you have local citations built out and that you have all the correct information for your business listed there. 

3. The third thing that you want to do is claim you local business on Google Places or Bing. An owner verified listing will rank higher than a non owner verified listing so it’s important that you claim that listing.  To verify the listing you will need to fill out the proper information on Google or Bing using information they will send you by phone or mail to confirm that you own that place.
4. The fourth bullet point that I’ll talk about is link building. You want to link build especially to the local listings on Google or Bing so that you have different things that are pointing back to that actual page.
5. The fifth thing that I’ll talk about is getting reviews. We live in an age where everybody wants to find out what everyone else thought about a product or service and nowhere is that more important than in local search.  If you have customers that are satisfied and enjoy your product encourage them to go online to fill out a review about their experience that will also help people that come to your site to learn more about what other people think. 

Hopefully these five things will help you in your local SEO marketing campaign.

The web is comprised of information; or content. Every web page online is a living document of information that contains a specific piece of information with an intended purpose. Search engines crawl and index pages that are unique and provide value to their visitors. For example: a publisher writes content for a user (or audience) and users are often searching to solve a problem or answer a question.

Content comes in many forms including text, audio, video, images, and other formats. This is ever changing and requires a little initiative to produce content in the format users are expecting. Music videos are a perfect opportunity to reach your audience in video format because you've already produced that content. Detailed instruction manuals may be delivered via PDF or a web page with a Flash embed to interact with while building something.

Search engines have been providing multiple forms of content for the last few years (particularly Google) through universal search engine results pages (SERPs) that include links to other web pages, videos, news results, blog posts, PDF files, images, retail store information (Google Places), shopping for products online, etc.

Content is produced for many reasons including:

• Introducing concepts
• Providing messaging to engage customers
• Associating your content with other like content on the web

For example: a sporting goods store should write content that discusses sporting goods products (baseball bats & gloves) vs. information that discusses software (Windows/Mac & minimum computer requirements).

This is important to improve rankings and visibility online because you begin to look like other sporting goods stores online and the search engines use this information to segment what pages, blogs, news, videos, etc. to deliver to their users when they're searching for answers or solutions to their problems.

The great thing about creating content is that it's completely within your control. You know your products and audience, you have pictures or video, product information, marketing messaging, etc. that can be compiled into an informative piece of content. You can also create sales content, support and customer service content, knowledge bases, forums, blogs, etc. This is critical to engage further with your audience and create an active site that search engines will crawl and index for their users.

Take this opportunity to make yourself attractive for incoming links and increase the indexability of your pages. Search engines will crawl your site more frequently, your chances of ranking higher will increase, click-thru rates will improve, your audience will engage further with your brand, and you'll be building a resource online that will drive additional visitors and potential customers.

A few examples of how to create content include:

• Writing content on your blog, product, or other web pages
• Publish white papers or ebooks for download
• Create videos or podcasts to engage your audience
• Publish slidedecks of higher level concepts
• Upload detailed schematics in PDF form or with a link to interactive portions of your site
• Launch a contest whereby the winner(s) receive free product

For more SEO tips, check out the SEO.com YouTube Channel

Bing Webmasters Tools are a set of tools made available to a site’s webmaster by Bing, allowing you to see how Bing sees your website.   

Bing Webmaster Tools provides you access to the following data:

1. How often Bing has crawled your site
2. Problems Bing found while crawling your site such as
   1. Malware found on your site
   2. 404 errors
   3. How many 302 and 301 redirects are in place
3. How many pages on your site Bing has indexed
4. How many links Bing has found going to your site
5. How much traffic Bing is sending to your site
6. What keywords are bringing traffic to your site from the search engines.

Bing Webmaster Tools also allows you to submit your xml sitemap so Bing can crawl your site more efficiently and effectively.

If you want evidence of the way the internet is pervading every aspect of our lives, you need look no further than its effect on education. The internet and social media have dramatically changed both teaching and learning.

In fact, most students’ (an incredible 93 percent) first instinct when confronted with a research problem is to turn to Google or Bing to get information rather than going to the library, and despite the best efforts of faculty to discourage its use, Wikipedia is the research resource that is used most often. It’s not only students that are turning to the web, however. A whopping 90 percent of faculty uses social media in the courses they’re teaching, and 8 in 10 have used online video in class. In addition, colleges and universities are reaching out to students in a way they never could before—85 percent of admissions offices use some sort of social media, from video blogging to social networking.

The internet has also had a strong influence on the how, where, and what students are studying. Right now, more than 6 million students are taking at least one online course, and 11 universities across the country offer some sort of search engine optimization or search engine marketing curriculum.

Even with online learning being as widespread as it is, however, as many as one in three academic leaders consider it to be inferior to face-to-face instruction. As these online-trained students continue to enter the workforce, time will tell whether internet education can compete with traditional learning models.

Embed this image on your site:

<a href="http://www.seo.com/blog/internet-changed-education-infographic"><img src="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/How-has-the-internet-changed-education-Infographic.png" alt="How Has The Internet Changed Education? "width="100%" border="0" /></a></p> <p>

Sources: 
http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/going_distance_2011
http://www.pearsonlearningsolutions.com/educators/pearson-social-media-survey-2011-bw.pdf
http://www.slideshare.net/leighhouse/social-media-higher-ed
http://www.varsityoutreach.com/pagetracker/directory/topten.aspx
http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2008f/UR_191308_REGION1.html
http://www.nsba.org/Services/TLN/BenefitsofMembership/Publications/Creating-and-Connecting.pdf
http://thesmt.com/sem-seo-courses-coming-to-portland-oregon-campuses/
http://www.thebestcolleges.org/the-10-best-e-commerce-e-business-degree-programs/
http://www.fastweb.com/college-search/articles/43-ten-majors-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/01/14/careers-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago/
http://old.diglib.org/use/whitepaper.htm http://www.alea.edu.au/documents/item/180

A deep link is when you link to a page on the site other than the site's home page. For example, Google.com is the homepage of Google. Linking to Google.com/trends would be a deep link. If you see text after a / on a website, like in the case of Google.com/trends, you are looking at a deep link. For more SEO tips, check out SEO.com's YouTube channel.

How do I write SEO Friendly Content?

1. The first step is to use a catchy title and use the keyword in the title. Make someone want to read the article.
2. The second thing is use subheadings in your articles. Include relevant keywords in the subheadings, also known as an H2 or H3 tag.
3. The third thing is that you want a minimum of 300 words of content on the page or article that you are working on.
4. The fourth thing is to include the keyword a few times in the beginning of the article. Don't keyword stuff or create spammy content.
5. The very last thing is to use synonyms or related phrases in your content. For example, if you are a photographer, use synonyms such as family pictures or family portraits to change up the keywords on your page. 

These five tips are a great way to get started with your web content strategy. Improved content on your site can help you improve your rankings.

Google loves original content.  Original content is something that you wrote that you did not pull from any other source.  There are a number of places where good content can be added to a site.  Some options include:

• Blog posts
• Reviews
• Content on site
• Text on pages of site

 What kinds of content do not provide value?

Doorway pages are pages that are created specifically for the search engines in order to get rankings.  Once the user has clicked through the search results, they are brought to a different page on the site. 

Auto-generated content is content that has been created automatically and stuffed with keywords.  This content is generally useless to readers and discounted by the search engines.

Content scraping, or taking content from another source and pasting it on your site, does not qualify as original content.  Developing quality, user friendly content is the only way to achieve original content.

You may be just getting used to the new black menu bar that Google launched in June, but don’t get attached. According to Google, the menu bar is going through another redesign and the black bar you have been seeing for the past few months is about to disappear, and it could happen at any time.

I’m not seeing it yet, but Google was nice enough to include a picture of what the new bar will look like in their blog post.

The new Google bar will sit in the same place as the black bar did but links to various services will appear in a new drop-down menu. If the service you need does not appear in the menu, simply hover over the “More” link at the bottom of the list.

What do you think about Google's latest rounds of design changes? Are they an improvement over the way Google products used to look?

To learn more about the new menu, Google has released the following video or visit their Help Center.

Video by SEO.com

Share this Video<p><cke:object width="560" height="315"><cke:param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Rli6ZeizoFE?version=3&hl=en_US"></cke:param><cke:param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></cke:param><cke:param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></cke:param><cke:embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Rli6ZeizoFE?version=3&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" height="315" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></cke:embed></cke:object><br/> Video by<br /> <a data-cke-saved-href=”http://www.youtube.com/user/seocom” href=”http://www.youtube.com/user/seocom”>SEO.com</a></p> <p>

Initially the Panda update was called the farmer update by the search engine marketing industry because it seemed to be targeting content farms and low quality sites that were spamming the search results. It was originally launched in February 2011 and was credited with affecting up to 12% of all search results pages. The purpose behind Google Panda was to identify low quality content vs. high quality content and was named after one of Google’s lead engineers, Navneet Panda. He instituted machine learning into the algorithm to find patterns through low quality sites and high quality sites such as how much advertising is on a site, how much duplicate content is present, how much unique content is located on a site, analytical information and page load speed. If you feel your site has been negatively affected by the Panda update, it is important to look at the content found on each page of your website. First, see if your content is unique to your site or whether it is scraped from another site. Make sure that your content is unique as possible. Look at all the content on your site and remove those which are not unique. It is important to understand that Panda is a series of updates and Google is always updating the algorithm or the ranking search factors. If you haven’t seen effects from Panda on your site yet, there is a good chance that you might see them in the future. A good content review is a great way to be sure that your site remains Panda friendly.

The days immediately following Thanksgiving kick of the beginning of the holiday shopping season and are some of the busiest days of the year for retail sales.  Retailers offer some of their best deals of the year in order to lure in shoppers and shoppers often camp out for hours to score the most popular items. 

Embed Code:

<a href="http://www.seo.com/blog/black-friday-cyber-monday-shopping-infographic"><img src="http://www.seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Black-Friday-and-Cyber-Monday-Infographic.jpg" alt="Black Friday and Cyber Monday Shopping Infographic" width="100%" border="0" /></a>

The term Black Friday was coined in 1966 and has come to be recognized as the day that many retailers become profitable for the year. Steadily growing in popularity, Black Friday has been the busiest shopping day of the year since 2005.

Black Friday falls the day after Thanksgiving when many non-retail employees are off work.  Deals generally start long before dawn and are now being increasingly offered starting at midnight as well.  It is estimated that 212 million shoppers visited stores on Black Friday in 2010 spending $45 billion dollars- an average of $365 per shopper. Spending increased 6% in 2010 and has doubled since 2005.Gift related items such as toys, clothing, electronics, multimedia, sporting goods, jewelry, and gift cards are the most popular items to purchase on Black Friday.

The introduction of Cyber Monday is more recent, named in 2005. Cyber Monday shoppers hit online stores the Monday after Thanksgiving once they have returned to work, often purchasing items they saw and liked on Black Friday. Last year, Cyber Monday brought in a billion dollars in revenue, growing 13% over 2009.  

A few of these tools also qualify as resources or guides, but every one of these tools has made my life just a little bit easier this year. To all of you in this list, and to those I've missed or forgotten but who have offered free tools in 2011, THANK YOU!

If you're thankful for any other new free SEO tools, please give a shout out and begin a discussion about them in the comments section below.

1. GA Data Fetch Tool for Google Docs

This is a handy tool I’ve been using quite a bit recently to pull Google Analytics metrics into Google Spreadsheets.

Thanks to Jamie Steven of SEOmoz and Mikael Thuneberg of AutomateAnalytics.com.

2. Schema Creator

Raven Tools published built this with impressive speed after the announcement of Schema.org.

3. Excel for SEO

This is part tutorial, part tool, generously made available by Distilled and @MikeCP.

4. SEOmoz Toolbar for Chrome

The on- and off-page metrics provided in this toolbar are incredibly handy on the fly in an agency setting, and let’s not forget their Firefox toolbar. Here is more information about SEOmoz's Chrome Extension - thanks to SEOmoz for this tool.

5. Chrome Scraper Extension

Thanks to Justin Briggs putting this tool on my radar. Here is his summary on the tool and how it can be used for data extraction and SEO.

I’ve already found this tool useful for extracting data from a website for a redesign, and for gathering current on-page elements for analysis such as title tags, heading tags, etc. from a group of pages.

6. Competitive SERPs Analysis in Google Docs

Thanks to Tom Anthony for posting, and SEOmoz for hosting.

Very useful for competitive analysis, keyword research, and beyond (e.g. identifying competitors for on-page analysis and link opportunities, etc.).

7. Search Volume in Excel

Thanks to Richard Baxter for posting, and SEOmoz for hosting.

8. Bing Webmaster Tools Improvements

If you haven’t used Bing’s improved WMT suite, it’s time to start! Aside from tool improvements and multiple-user access, these updates are proof of Bing’s willingness to take feedback and listen to users and webmasters.

A large set of improvements were announced and launched in June, and even more updates were announced earlier this month.

9. Open Site Explorer Improvements

Open Site Explorer is better looking, more user-friendly, and sports some reporting upgrades that are more than worth a mention (and a thank you to SEOmoz for making this tool available for free).

10. Google+

I had no choice not to list Google+, because of its influence on search and communication in our industry this year. I’m a big Google+ fan btw – my Facebook use has remained the same but I’m never on Twitter anymore.

11. Google Analytics v5

Watching the new version of Google Analytics (v5) evolve over the past year has been a fun ride.

A few improvements worth noting:

• Multi-Channel Funnel visualizations
• It measures Site Speed
• Custom Dashboards
• It's prettier
• Webmaster Tools integration 

12. Future Rank

In-house and agency SEO professionals alike have been able to use this tool since April 1st to shock supervisors, get promotions, and land giant deals by predicting ranking improvements more accurately than ever before.

* If you haven’t heard of Future Rank, pay close attention to that launch date.

This is a guest post from Kaila Strong, Account Manager at Vertical Measures

Internet Marketing Infographic by Vertical Measures

Other than revenue, a website's success can be measured by the amount of targeted visitors that it receives. More targeted traffic often translates to more revenue. To achieve this objective the site must rank highly in the SERPs for keywords that your target group is actually using to search. The only way to enjoy a websites continued success is by retaining this high number of targeted visitors month in and month out. Listed here are five tasks to help achieve this, in no particular order.

Content

A constant flow of fresh content is the main objective for any website to maintain a consistent following of readers. A well written search engine optimized article involves the proper placement of just the right keywords, an engaging headline, and often a creative or interesting writing style to make the piece stand out from the rest.

The subject matter of content, and the way it’s delivered are of the utmost importance. When an article is written strictly with SEO in mind and no thought is given to the article's continuity, the piece is likely to be a flop – no shares, no links to it, and probably very little traffic to the page which equals little help to building your domain authority. Sure, it is important to write articles that are search engine optimized; however, it's equally important to keep the readers interested.

So what type of content should you provide? A variety of media can act to facilitate the process of building authority through content. Here are five of them: 

#1 Video

An effective tool at your disposal is video. In May of this year alone, Google reported that YouTube reached a whopping 14.6 billion internet video views and that's only 43 percent of the total online views for that month. That’s 34 billion videos viewed on the internet in one month!

Drive traffic, leads and business through the use of video marketing and optimization. A recent webinar discussed this very topic and gave great tips such as:

• Start with keyword research and other market research to determine the best topic your audience will love
• Try informational keywords and long tail terms
• Optimize videos for search engines: Have compelling titles, add a description, add tags, make sure it’s high quality resolution, pick the best thumbnail image, have a video sitemap on your site, include a transcript on the page where your video is embedded, use microdata, and limit it to 1 video per page.

#2 Infographics

An interesting and creative Infographic can be used to build site authority when done correctly and executed well too. You’re able to show your site visitors an interesting and unique take on a set of data, helping them to connect to the piece on a sensory level.

Coming up with a creative concept, working with a designer to execute your idea, and then promoting the Infographic may seem easy on the surface but require a bit of strategy and planning. A few tips:

• Have a brainstorm session with your team to come up with possible topic ideas.
• Conduct market research and keyword research too
• Any sources you want to use – verify them first before you develop the graphic!
• Stick to a simple layout
• Include SEO rich copy on the page where your Infographic resides
• Include an embed code on the page
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#3 Webinars

Just about any industry could use webinars to help build their site authority. Using presentation software, like PowerPoint, and presenting to a group of users through webinar software or even a video sharing program can help build notoriety for your brand, can be leveraged for links, and be added as content to your site. A few pointers:

• Conduct market research to see what topics you should cover in your webinar. Do a bit of keyword research too.
• Record your webinars and upload to video sites. Pay careful attention to their terms of service however, to ensure your content won’t get reported and taken down.
• Use slide decks on sites like SlideShare. Opt to have the notes section of the slides added to the upload.
• Embed webinars on a site on your page – sticking to one video or slide deck per page.
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#4 Blog Posts

Regular old blog posts are of course a great way to get down on virtual paper what you think your readers are interested in seeing. Whether it’s a top 10 post, an editorial, a post on a controversial subject, or any one of these 50 corporate blogging topics, the use of blog posts to help you build site authority can be effective. A few more tips:

• Don’t just limit yourself to blogging on your own site. Try out guest blogging on a few of your favorite industry blogs and become a regular writer!
• Optimize your posts for search engines paying special attention to H1s, adding custom meta titles and descriptions, and custom tags to the post as well.
• Link to others and let them know about it. They might just help you promote the post when it’s live.
• Add a plugin like Zemanta to help you build relevant backlinks from other blogs.

#5 White Paper or Free Guide

Have an industry expert at your company who likes to write? Have them develop a white paper or free guide. If you don’t have the resources, try sourcing it out to a freelancer who has a knack for writing educational pieces. White papers and free guides aren’t just great for lead capture; they’re also great for building site authority. If it’s useful and interesting, more people will be willing to read it, share it and link to it. A few tips:

• Decide whether you want your guide to be free to all or if you want it to be available for users who give you some information (such as e-mail, name, phone number, etc…).
• Conduct research to see if there is enough information to provide on the topic for your guide.
• Optimize your guide for search engines by paying attention to SEO PDF best practices.

Simply put, building your sites authority in any niche is a matter of making that website popular and growing its following through any and all means available. You want engaging content that will keep users on the site, get shares through social channels, be found by search engines, and receive lots of backlinks. By diversifying the types of content you develop you’re sure to find a method that your audience appeals to and that can aid in the pursuit of building your sites authority. Check out the below infographic to view a few other ways you can use content to build the authority of your site.

What type of content have you found works best for your target demographic?

Many companies regularly use humor in their marketing efforts.  Old Spice comes to mind, with their ridiculously funny spots featuring Isaiah Mustafa, and recently Fabio (although I’d contest the latter isn’t as funny as the originals were, but I digress…) Since Google dominates the search engine market in America, it’s a good bet that when they change up their home page with a doodle, or add a couple of Easter eggs in the mix, people will notice.

Even though these tricks provide no real value for web SEO, they’re fun to play around with, talk about, and especially blog about!

FEELING LUCKY TRICKS

1. Google Gravity

A site created by web developer Ricardo Cabello.  At first glance, it looks like the familiar Google home page, but suddenly all the elements of the page fall down.

2. Google Sphere

Here’s another one from Cabello.  The Google logo and search bar are in the center of the page, and all the other elements are orbiting around them.

As Pubcon 2011 wraps up, it's difficult to reflect on the past 72 hours on so few hours of sleep. Wednesday, we attended Alan Bleiweiss' #EpicDinner with 120 attendees. It was fantastic. He did an incredible job. Afterward, we went to karaoke and watched several of our own rock the mic and the dance floor.

Content & Link Building

Focus on generating content (interviews, videos, promotional, humorous, etc.) that can attract natural links from multiple domains. Not all pieces of content should be expected to received hundreds or thousands of links.

• Content generation idea #1 – search your competitors top linked pages in Open Site Explorer (OSE) and review why the content was impressive enough to demand a link
• Content generation idea #2 – Browse the Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers, Quora, etc. for the most frequently asked questions and discussions that you can bring insight, process, or direct answers through content created on your site

Wikipedia ranks for 92% of the 100 most searched terms on Google. Imagine if you ranked in the top listings for 92% of your industry terms. – Matt Tuens

Competitive Analysis

Mat Siltala shared the following 10 things you should track when researching competitors:

1. Domain Authority
2. Total Links
3. Social Media Activity
4. LinkedIn Connections
5. Blog Activity
6. Identify Promotional Pages
7. Affiliate Programs
8. Shopping Cart Spying – look for remarketing and other competitive advantages
9. SpyFu
10. ReverseInternet.com

Jane Copland shared the following points that were extremely interesting:

• Never try to copy someone else's backlink portfolio — get creative with "your" opportunities
• Pay attention to the number of C-class IP's in your competitor's backlink profiles
• Look at "why" they have those links, not the links themselves
• Relationship links are not paid links
• Track links/rankings over time — you should never be surprised by a competitor

Resources

• Outwit Firefox Plugin
• RavenTools Competitor Analysis Checklist

Data & Intelligence are Central To Qualified Marketing

Data and intelligence is only as smart as the interpreter. Gathering data is barely a step in the process of doing qualified marketing but it is one still missed by many.

The key to using data is:

• Regular and comprehensive tracking. (For instance in links – tracking not just C-Class IPs but also B and Hosted to look are variants overall and overtime)
• Knowing what can be tracked and just how to do it; there are still many metrics not yet built out by tools or available to all of us. Discover these metrics and develop them.
• Track not only results (analytics) but measure what you can control. (For instance, how much content you put out, time spent on creating content, redevelopment frequencies of your own site and competitors etc.)
• Evaluate relationships. Just as there is a lot you can learn from watching a husband and wife interact and recognizing they’re married – they is similar immediate knowledge to be gained from knowing who is related to your clients business and competitors businesses and how, what and why.

Quotes:

• “If someone else can get that same information it really isn't a true inforgraphic” – Tom Critchlow
• Competitive intelligence is not about copying. It's about knowing what you're up against.” – Jane Copland