The Kinks, “You Don’t Know My Name”

In my continuing series of email marketing blog posts, I’ve covered challenges, objectives and tactics, but to make things happen in the land of email marketing, you need email addresses.  Plain and simple.

And, the most effective email names are those that have opted-in. That’s one of the key elements to inbound marketing – after they find you, you want them to convert by giving you their info.  Simple, right?

Marketers usually ask for as much from their prospects as they can during the email data collection that takes place during a registration of some sort – registering for a webinar or white paper, subscribing to a newsletter, opting in for more information.

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, in addition to an email address, most companies ask for personal name, company name and lead source. After that, other information does not seem to be as important according to this chart.

At HubSpot, we ask for a fair amount of information since we are more concerned with determining the quality of the lead than amassing large numbers of email addresses.  But each company must select their own criteria for their form, based on their industry and sales pipeline requirements. More importantly, you need to test the forms so you can achieve the right balance of quantity and quality leads.

Figuring out how much information you need to establish a quality lead is the first step.  How many form fields do you feel are too many?

Free Download: Email in an Inbound Marketing World

Email is a critical element of your inbound marketing mix. But what exactly is its role?

Watch this webinar to learn about the role of email in the inbound marketing puzzle!

Connect with HubSpot:

1.  How Much Communication is Too Much?

HubSpot communicates actively with its leads as well as its customers post-sale. But is it too much or too little? Creating a visual, in this case a timeline, I was able to identify the means as well as the frequency and source of communication.

When you do this, you get a better picture of how intrusive or ‘spammy‘ your exchanges are, both pre and post-sale. For instance, you do not want three different departments sending three different emails to customers on the same day, with no other communication throughout the week. Inbound marketing best practices should carry over throughout the customer experience, from first touch to post-sale. Don’t beat them over the head with too much communication.

Recommendation:  Create a master central list of all regular and event-driven communication that your customers receive. 

2.  Evaluate Your Communications Channels

Looking back at my own audit, there were certainly times where communication could have been consolidated (ex. merging two weekly newsletters together). There were also channels that should have been preference-based but weren’t.  For example, when it comes to billing inquiries, you might want to offer your customers the options of being contacted by email, phone or fax.

Recommendation: Audit your various means of communication.

3.  Analyze How You Track Your Marketing

Analytic and lead nurturing tools, such as those offered by HubSpot are very useful in tracking inbound marketing leads, but with so much direct traffic coming to your site, it’s hard to track the entire lead cycle from generation (the point of first tracked interaction) to conversion into an opportunity. Landing pages and capture forms help to associate direct traffic with lead conversion from inbound content. There might also be some significant overlap between the marketing and sales process, such as when a salesperson gives a demo, or offers a trial. Making sure that sales and marketing are aligned creates more stable and controlled marketing communication.

Recommendation: Use analytics such as HubSpot’s Sources and Blog Analytics applications to make sure that the source of your leads are tracked as closely as possible. If you have lots of direct traffic but don’t know where it’s coming from, you should consider using more landing pages and conversion forms.

4. The Gaps in Your Sales Funnel

Perhaps the most startling and surprising realization were the large gaps between events. In one case, there was a six-month window between a lead filling out a form and first contact by a sales representative. Gaps can signal weaknesses in the sales funnel, or that you are missing something that has not been tracked. A gap can also indicate the unique sales cycle that your product or service has. Be aware of your gaps, and make adjustments to adapt to your unique cycle.

Recommendation: To figure out where the gaps lie, you will need to delve into your CRM system, pick a few sample customers, and run reports on all of the data that you have within your sales funnel, from lead to customer. If there are gaps or mysterious events (for example, a sales follow-up on a conversion event that you don’t have recorded), you will need to make sure that your CRM is correctly integrated with your lead flow.

5. What Data are you Missing?

Undoubtedly, there is communication that occurs between the company and customer that goes unrecorded or untracked. This missing data can be invaluable when evaluating your communication flow. But that’s just the beginning. Read case studies to find out how other companies are successfully communicating with their customers, and hold brainstorming sessions to improve your communications process. Try to understand what data you are missing and why.

Recommendation: Spend a day or two doing nothing but digging through your data warehouses, creating new dashboards and reports. You might be surprised what you’ll discover.

Photo by:  msandy

Free Download: 101 Marketing Charts and Graphs

Improve your decision making and long-term performance with marketing data for best practices.

Download these 101 charts today!

Connect with HubSpot:

However, that’s only the first step towards getting found, and if you stop there then it’s likely that you’re selling yourself short.  Getting on the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is a great first step, but as research has shown your placement on the page also has an incredible effect on the amount of traffic you drive to your site.  It has been measured that over a third of the traffic goes to the first search result and that traffic continues to decrease significantly as your place on the results page decreases.   Although boosting your ranking on the SERP is one way to increase traffic the meta description has also has an impact on driving traffic to your website. 

The Often Misunderstood Meta Description

The meta description is not something that is visible on your web page.  The short summary of the web page, which is usually included at the top of the pages source code in a  <meta description> tag is not used by the search engines for any SEO purposes.  What the meta description is used for is to provide the searcher with a short description of the page (<150 characters to be exact) beneath each result.  In fact, if a meta description is not included in the source code then the search engine will usually display part of the contents from the page in its place.  Since the meta description is not as well understood as other page elements there are some very common mistakes people make when creating their websites.

1. Missing Meta – The most obvious mistake is to forget to include one entirely.   As I mentioned earlier, if the meta description is omitted the search engine will simply take a part of the content from the web page.  Of course the piece of content that search engine uses usually isn’t a thoughtful succinct summary of your website and most likely will not give the searcher a good idea of whether your result is what they are looking for or not.  The search engines will also abruptly cut off any text longer than 150 characters, which can look sloppy and read awkwardly.

2. Keyword Stuffing – A lot of webmasters that don’t understand the purpose of the meta description see it as another opportunity to boost their SEO by jamming a bunch of keywords in there.  Since the meta description has no effect on SEO this will actually have a negative impact on the traffic your website will get.  Think about it for a second.  Which result are you more likely to click on? “Website Grader – Free SEO tool from HubSpot that provides an Internet Marketing Report for your website.” Or “Website Grader, SEO, Inbound Marketing, SEM, Internet Marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing.”  The first is easily read and provides a simple description of what the viewer can expect to find on the page.  The second just looks like what it is, a mish-mash of internet marketing keywords. 

3. Not Including Any Keywords – Although keyword stuffing should be avoided, carefully thinking about how to incorporate your keywords into your meta description should not be overlooked.   When someone searches for a keyword or keyword phrase in a search engine if those keywords are present in your meta description they will be bolded.  This draws more attention to your result and increases the likelihood that someone will click on your result.  It makes sense that the result that includes the keyword phrase in the meta description is more likely to be what the searcher is looking for than one that does not. 

I hope that these tips helped you to better understand the meta description and how it can be a very useful tool in increasing traffic to your website.  If I missed anything be sure to stop by the website optimization webinar and let me know. 

Free Download – Improving SEO: A Practical Guide

Use SEO to drive more visitors to your site.

Download this free eBook for tutorials on keyword research, on-page SEO, link-building, and tips for ongoing SEO improvement!

Connect with HubSpot:

The folks over at Pingdom compiled together some great statistics about the Internet’s growth. In case you don’t have time to look through their entire list, I have selected 11 stats that demonstrate the current state of the social Web.

11 Social Web Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

1. In 2010, 107 trillion emails were sent on the Internet. (Source)

2. At the current rate 36 billion photos will be uploaded to Facebook each year. (Source)

3. Each day 2 billion videos are watched on YouTube. (Source)

4. Each month 30 billion pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook. (Source)

5. In 2010, users sent 25 billion tweets. (Source)

6. Worldwide there are 1.97 billion Internet users. (Source)

7. At the end of 2010, there were 88.8 million – .COM domain names registered. (Source)

8. As of December 2010, there were 255 million websites. (Source)

9. Worldwide, there are 2.9 billion email accounts. (Source)

10. The average Internet user watched 186 online videos per month (USA). (Source)

11. Every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. (Source)

Which of these statistics was the most surprising to you?

Free Download: 101 Marketing Charts and Graphs

Improve your decision making and long-term performance with marketing data for best practices.

Download these 101 charts today!

Connect with HubSpot:

For a while, its been a pretty good secret how successful this whole process can be. Answer some common questions from you industry with blog posts, and suddenly you’re ranking better for critical long tail keywords, building inbound links, and authority for your site. You’ve got a couple of guides and whitepapers out there to offer in conjunction with your content, and now you’re converting some anonymous eyeballs into known visitors that you can nurture into a sales process.

This secret is starting to leak out. A few news outlets have been talking about a relatively new site on the internet, ManoftheHouse.com. Here’s the story over at Australia’s The Age. Man of the House is a content-heavy site, that focuses on being a better man, but unlike outlets such as Maxim and GQ, it’s geared towards the married man and the father. Oh yeah, it’s owned and operated by Procter & Gamble, fine makers of Gillete razors and Old Spice deodorant.

I must warn you, stalwart defenders of Inbound Marketing, that Goliath is figuring out how successful Inbound Marketing can be. While P&G has a historical record of being on the cutting edge (when it comes to advertising as a giant consumer manufacturer, at least), it won’t be long before other large companies in the B2C space start doing the same. Soon after that, companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM will realize that there are ways to adapt techniques that work B2C, and try them out with B2B sales.

So what’s the ONE thing you could do right now to prevent this?

Beat them to the punch. You’ve still got another year or two – maybe three – before the biggest B2B companies decide to stop producing yawn-inducing press releases and start trying to create remarkable content of their own.

Start creating your own content. These companies have more money than brains, which means they’ve got no problem hiring anyone they can find on the internet willing to write for them.  When they have an army cranking out blog posts, it will be extremely easy for them to capture any of the low-hanging fruit in terms of long-tail keywords.

You need to meet them with a well-entrenched beachhead. Meet them with a blog filled with hundreds of well-written, insightful, and helpful blog posts that have already gobbled up the low-hanging fruit. Meet them with article after article that has solve a process problem for your customers, as these are the kinds of content that you will build your empire with.

Start using your content to turn visitors into leads and customers, now while you have a head start.

Photo Credit: ~Twon~

Free Inbound Marketing Kit

Learn more about inbound marketing and how to combine blogging, SEO and social media for results. Download our inbound marketing kit.

Connect with HubSpot:

1. What is SEO? 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of making your website more appealing to search engine crawlers (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc), therefore moving your site higher up in the organic search results. SEO involves making the best use of keywords on your website pages and in your blog articles, as well as using some HTML behind the scenes to help search engines identify images and easily read your site. If you are interested in finding out how well your site is optimized for search engines, benchmark it against 3 million others by entering your URL in HubSpot’s Website Grader. This will give you a good idea of where you currently stand in terms of SEO best practices.

Why is this important to your business?  Organic search results are the unpaid results that you see when you conduct a search. Unpaid results are clicked on more often than the paid ads, so it’s important to be on the first page. Why the first page? Ask yourself, when was the last time you went to page 4 of a search? The answer is probably never, so optimize your site and blog for keywords and follow the best practices contained in this document.

2. What is a CRM? 

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com are some the most commonly known CRM systems. The purpose of a CRM is to automate and synchronize the activities of your sales, marketing and customer support teams. A CRM can support your business in a number of ways ranging from selling and fulfillment to identifying and rewarding loyal customers. 

How can a CRM help your business?  A CRM allows your sales team to see valuable qualifying information about prospective clients. It allows management to see what the sales team is up to and improve the way you maintain contact with customers and prospects.

3.  What is a CMS?

CMS is short for Content Management System.  A content management system is a collection of procedures designed to facilitate communication, improve reporting, share stored data and reduce repetitive content on a website. It also allows non-technical users the ability to create and manage content on their websites.

How a CMS can help your business?  A CMS will allow you to save money on costly changes done by outside web vendors because you will be able to do the bulk of the work in-house.  It also turns once time consuming redesigns into manageable shorter projects. 

4.  What is a blog? 

A blog is a website or a portion of a website that is dedicated to creating regular entries that can come in the form of text, video, audio and images. If you are reading this article, you have found one of HubSpot’s most valuable assets. Our blog provides a wealth of knowledge around inbound marketing as well as SEO. It has become a destination for our blog followers and has helped establish HubSpot as a thought leader.

Why is a blog important to my business?  A blog is considered an asset because it is an opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader, create a community around shared interests, encourage interactivity, create additional pages for your site and optimize for keywords. A blog should be updated regularly because the more often you publish, the more often the search engines will crawl your site and index your pages. All of this will contribute to you reaching the first page of organic search results.

5.  What is a social network? 

When I talk about social networks, I am more accurately referring to social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media networks have grown faster than either radio or even television did in popularity. That’s why for marketers social media monitoring isn’t an option. It is a must! If you aren’t part of the conversation, your brand may be falsely represented or your competitors may be gaining an advantage over you. Be active in the conversation and at the very least be listening to it. If you’re into a killer webinar on social media marketing, this link is for you.

Why is social media monitoring important to my business? Knowing what potential or current customers are saying is crucial to protecting your brand. Social media gives you an opportunity to respond to positive comments or criticism quickly and efficiently. Lastly, if you keep tabs on your competition, you’ll know what they are up to in real time. Knowledge is power and social networks are one of the most powerful tools out there to reach and interact with a large audience quickly.

Marketing Takeaway

Business today moves at a different pace than it did even 5 years ago. Being able to find information, gain knowledge around what is being said about your brand and nurturing existing leads and customers is critical to the success or failure of your business. The items mentioned in this installment of ‘what is?’ are tools that should be considered as part of your marketing strategy for 2011.  

Photo Credit: Marco Bellucci

Free Ebook: 13 Business Blogging Mistakes & Their Easy Fixes

Learn How To Correct Common Business Blogging Mistakes

Download this free 30 page blogging ebook today!

Connect with HubSpot:

John runs Inbound Zombie, a social media strategy firm, where he helps small businesses and nonprofits develop their social media strategy, specifically focusing on Facebook.

In the interview we discuss:

• How he built his business from the ground up through blogging and inbound marketing
• Facebook Fan Page Strategy – the dos and don’ts, How to grow your Facebook Fan Page and most importantly why you should!
• How to streamline your Facebook activities
• Additional Facebook resources
• A look into the future in 2011

Enter to win a custom Facebook Landing page tab

John is kind enough to give away a custom Facebook FBML landing page to one lucky winner! We will be picking the winner with a random number generator next Wednesday and there is no limit to the number of entries (i.e. the more you tweet the better chance you have to win)!

To Win the Custom FMBL Tab Simply:

• You must ReTweet this article AND like the Inbound Now Fan page
• “RT to Enter to win a custom Facebook Fan page tab from @johnhaydon & @Hubspot’s new show @InboundNow http://bit.ly/eWDcdV”;

If you just want the audio click here.

Building a Business Through Blogging and Inbound Marketing

John started his business through blogging. He has been working at it for a couple of years after he heard that people were genuinely making a living through blogging.

He researched the niche he was going for and aligned it with his passion for helping nonprofits and small businesses succeed with internet marketing.

His isn’t a story of overnight success, he hammered away for three years!  By consistently doing three blog posts a week, he is now reaping the SEO benefits, both by the number of inbound links he is generating and by dominating the top listings for keywords specific to his business.

The key for him was building content that is catered to specific needs of his target market (nonprofits and small businesses) and to address their pain points.

Now, he is generating half of his new business and leads via search and the other half through social media channels.

Jumping in Head First… Be Careful

Facebook is not a big huge email list for you to spam. Facebook is a platform to engage your fans.

Its about human to human connections and facilitating conversations that help the people who follow you.

50% of users on Facebook are daily active users. What are they doing while on Facebook? Sharing photos, web pages, and remarkable content.

Creating remarkable content for Facebook is very important, people don’t want to see just an RSS feed of your blog, they want something that they can share with their friends.

How to Organically Grow Your Facebook Reach

• Provide behind the scenes content.

• Give people a reason to like your page. What are they going to get here that they aren’t getting from you on Twitter, or your email newsletter.

• Use your current assets. Have an email list? Send them a message asking them to like your page, explain to people what they will get in doing so.
• Using your fan page wall for live chats.

John runs a series of webinars with CharityHowTo, the typical webinar consisted of the content and then a Q & A session at the end usually through the chat box.

They decided to take this discussion and point people to leave follow up questions on their Facebook Fan Page where John can follow up with them there. By making this simple change they have seen exponential growth in the page. Smart move!

How Can You Rock Out Your Facebook Page?

Optimizing your Facebook Fan Page-

• Page Name – Try and leverage the title of the page to let people know the business that is represented.
• Create a custom welcome tab with FBML
  • Setting as default landing page
  • Make it pretty, add a video, let them know why they are liking the page
  • Have call-to-action for them to like the page
  • Adding in a newsletter signup form can be a good idea

What Facebook Apps Do You Recommend?

• FMBL – Create Custom HTML Tabs
• Facebook Events
• The Wall- use the @ symbol to tag others in updates, this will show up on the walls of the people you are mentioning and is a great way to expand the reach of the update.
• Facebook’s video app – enables liking within the video frame.
• Audioboo.fm – enables you to record and post audio directly to your Facebook Fan Page that users can listen to directly on the wall.
• Using your custom email address of your fan page to send updates, pictures, or videos to your fan page can be super useful. (To find this go into your fan pages settings and click on mobile.)

Streamlining Your Facebook Activities

Use browser tools like Hootsuite, Sendible, Sharaholic to streamline social sharing.

Using scheduling tools can be a great way to space out content but be careful to not over use them. You need to be present when people respond to you.

You can never automate true engagement! Sorry to burst your bubble.

Additional Facebook Marketing Resources

• Dan Zarella has a new book out “The Facebook Marketing Book“
• Inside Facebook is a great blog that has a ton of updates on current Facebook trends
• Social media Examiner
• Hyperarts – they have a repository of FBML code samples.
• Facebook Showcase – Get some inspiration for your new custom landing page tab

What is Going Down in 2011?

• 2011 will be the year of businesses reexamining their “Facebook strategies”.
• Facebook places will be doing some cool stuff.

One of the main goals of a Facebook Fan Page is getting those people back into your site! Weave this into your Facebook strategy.

Give teasers and entice people back into your site where you can then convert them into a lead.

You can find John on twitter @JohnHaydon and also on Inbound Zombies Facebook page.

Past Episodes:

• Gauging Online Influence with Jason Keath of Social Fresh
• How to Market Smarter, Faster, and Cheaper with David Siteman Garland

Free Download: Facebook Marketing Guide

How should businesses create, manage, and grow their Facebook pages? Find out from industry experts and marketers!

Download the free 30-page complimentary Facebook Marketing Guide.

Connect with HubSpot:

The Yahoo search blog announced on January 13th, 2011, that the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance team is now serving in three new countries – Australia, Brazil and Mexico. Kartik Ramakrishnan, Vice President, Yahoo! Search Transition, commented on the blog, “As planned, we are…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

Making variations to the search results pages, Google has now announced the change in the appearance of the domain portion of the URLs. It will be now shown in lowercases.

For eg, if the display URL is Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory, it will appear as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory.

Read…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

Google has announced some new features for AdSense interface to enhance the user experience:

Home and Performance Report pages will now show page level metrics and ad unit CTR & other ad unit level metrics can be seen under Performance reports tab.

Read more on New Features On…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

Google has announced the update of appearance of the display URLs of all ads that appear on search results pages and also the arrival of negative keyword lists in the AdWords through two different blog posts. The former update is the result of Google's experiment with hundreds of subtle…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

Google appoints Rajan Anandan as the Vice President of India Sales and Operations to lead the Google India business. The appointment was announced on 11 January, 2011. Anandan is of Sri Lankan and Tamil descent and is the son of the Guinness World Records holder V.S. Kumar Anandan. He did his BSc…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

Larry Page, Google co-founder bought a 59m luxury superyacht for €35 million ($45 million) from Sir Douglas Myers, a New Zealand businessman. The deluxe yacht named Senses, is reported to have been bought last month after it was listed on a boat international website.

Read more on A…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

The January 4 announcement of Toyota Entune at the CES (Consumer Electronic Show) in Las Vegas has Bing in it. It gives Bing its maiden in-car search capabilities deal. Entune is Toyota's latest navigation system which will be featured in select Toyota models this year. Below are some…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

This Google legal tale is full of twists. As part of a lawsuit that involves Google’s AdSense for Domains and AdSense for Errors programs, Judge Howard R. Lloyd, a U.S. Magistrate has ordered Google to disclose the identities of four AdWords advertisers who were clients of the search engine…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

Has Google Bot gone on a long holiday?

Most of us have been on a holiday and back. But going by the cache dates of numerous websites, Google crawlers are still on a holiday, which decidedly is turning out to be a long one.

A large proportion of the sites we tested have a cache date of December…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers who have not yet moved their accounts to Microsoft adCenter should take note of this. The transition tool inside their YSM account will be permanently closed on January 5, 2011.

Read more on Yahoo! Transition Tool To Close Permanently on January 5…

Post…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

If you are aware of Google Realtime results and use it, you probably know about it and how it's done, to get your tweets listed in Google Realtime. However, for the ones who don't use the Google Realtime results and are not aware of this fact, here's how.

Read more on Get Your Tweets…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread, JohnMu from Google advised a webmaster that there should be no duplicate URLs or session ID based URLs listed in a Sitemap file. It is quite obvious a fact that in case if there is any duplicate content on your site which has not been blocked from Google, then…



Please visit PageTraffic Blog for the full article.

AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times. We’ll continue to update you here as we always have, but you may want to take note of our intended dates and times to help you plan for any scheduled downtimes further down the road.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

As you may already know, contextual targeting helps you reach potential customers as they read webpages related to your products or services. Now, with this tool, you can create contextually-targeted campaigns more easily and quickly, while generating more clicks and conversions for your campaigns.

What does the Contextual Targeting Tool do?
This tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show your ads on relevant webpages in the Google Display Network. Tightly-themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting, and with the Contextual Targeting Tool, you no longer have to build them manually. In minutes, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of keyword lists, scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting for your ads. This means you can get more clicks and conversions for your campaigns and you can do it more quickly.

How do I use it?
Let’s say you sell soccer equipment and gear. Normally, you’d have to build out separate ad groups for each of your product lines, like soccer gear, soccer balls, soccer cleats, etc. With the Contextual Targeting Tool, simply type each product category into the search box, and the tool will automatically generate tightly-themed keyword lists for you. For example, when you enter soccer gear into the tool, you get more specific ad groups, such as youth soccer gear, discount soccer gear, soccer uniforms, soccer bags, etc.

click for full size image

These new ad groups can help you get additional traffic and sales, as you may not think of creating them when manually building out your campaigns. Along with the new ad groups, the tool provides suggested bids and predicted placements to give you an idea of the types of sites in the Display Network where your ads can appear.

The Contextual Targeting Tool has been available to advertisers using AdWords Editor. This week, all advertisers will be able to access it from the Opportunities tab in their AdWords account. You’ll still need AdWords Editor to implement the ad groups in your account for now (download AdWords Editor). However, this requirement will be lifted and you’ll be able to implement new ad groups directly from your AdWords account in the coming months.

You can learn more about using the Contextual Targeting Tool by watching this video. We hope this tool will help you more easily and efficiently reach your goals with your Display Network campaigns.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

In this live course, we’ll cover ways to manage your budget through effective targeting and basic optimisation. We’ll first look at how you can improve targeting by adjusting location and network settings. This will be followed by a discussion of how good account structure, multiple ad variations, and effective keywords will help you get the most for your money.

This hour-long interactive course will be presented by AdWords Specialists at 3:00 pm GMT (7:00 am PST) on Wednesday, January 12th. At the end of the session, there will be time for Q&A.

Make sure you sign up now and visit the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) for additional live and on-demand courses.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

In addition to filtering out specific terms in the context of a single ad group or campaign, many advertisers maintain a set of core negative keywords across several campaigns. Examples of these terms might be free or trial — search terms that aren’t promising if you’re looking to sell products on your website. Negative keywords like these don’t require granular management on the campaign level, and we’ve heard from many of you that you’d like a more scalable way to manage these broadly-applicable sets of terms.

Now, we’re happy to introduce a new way to manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns: negative keyword lists. With these lists, you’ll be able to manage a group of negative keywords in your account’s Control Panel and Library and associate them with multiple campaigns.

(click for full size image)

For example, say you have a set of negative keywords you always add to any campaign running on the Search Network. Previously, you’d need to copy that set to every new search campaign you created in your account. Now, with shared lists, you can simply create a single negative keyword list and associate it with each search campaign. If there’s a new negative keyword you’d like to add to all of those campaigns, just add it to your list and it will automatically update across each campaign. Similarly, if you create a new campaign, you can add your negative keyword list to exclude all of the necessary terms with just a few clicks.

Visit our Help Center to learn more about how to get started with negative keyword lists.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Here are 10 of our favorite new ad innovations from 2010:

1. AdWords Campaign Experiments: Experiment with bid, keyword, ad group and placement changes, then measure how they impact your campaign performance.
2. Search Funnels: Understand the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.
3. Product Ads: Highlight your most relevant products with pictures and prices directly on the search results page with Product Listing Ads and Product Extensions.

Product Listing Ads


Product Extensions

4. AdWords Call Metrics: Include a Google Voice phone number in ads that appear on Google.com, and measure the number of phone calls generated by your AdWords campaigns.

Call Metrics
5. Click-to-call Phone Extensions: Make it easier for potential customers to reach you by including a clickable phone number in ads that appear on mobile phones with full Internet browsers.

Click-to-call phone extensions
6. Display Campaign Optimizer: Save time and increase conversions on the Google Display Network with this new automatic bidding and targeting tool.
7. Enhanced CPC: A bidding option that automatically adjusts the Max CPC bids that you’ve set based on the likelihood that your ad will convert, leading to more conversions and higher profit.
8. Broad Match Modifier: A keyword match type giving you more potential traffic than phrase match with comparable ROI.
9. AdWords Automated Rules: Save time by scheduling automatic changes to your AdWords account based on criteria that you specify.
10. Remarketing: Show your ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse sites across the Google Display Network.

You’ll always find the latest features at Google Ad Innovations, a place to explore new Google advertising technologies, watch short video demos, and try out select new tools. We have even more in store for 2011 and look forward to sharing these innovations with you soon!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

No need to fret, there’s still plenty of time left in the year. To become Google AdWords certified, you’ll need to pass the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam and one of the three advanced exams (Search Advertising, Reporting and Analysis, or Display). You can register for exams here, and take them from the comfort of your own office or home — the perfect activity to do while sitting in front of a cozy fire waiting for mysterious, magical home invaders to bring you gifts. As a bonus, you’ll be able to give your company the holiday gift of another certified individual to add to its profile page!

We’ve made it easy for you to prepare for the exams. The AdWords Learning Center offers text lessons (some with interactive modules) for each topic on the exam, which you can review at your own pace. In addition, if you can’t quite squeeze in training this year, we have numerous AdWords Seminars for Success in early 2011 in a number of major cities throughout the US.

For more information, please visit the Google AdWords Certification Program homepage.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times. We’ll continue to update you here as we always have, but you may want to take note of our intended dates and times to help you plan for any scheduled downtimes further down the road.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

As you may already know, contextual targeting helps you reach potential customers as they read webpages related to your products or services. Now, with this tool, you can create contextually-targeted campaigns more easily and quickly, while generating more clicks and conversions for your campaigns.

What does the Contextual Targeting Tool do?
This tool automatically builds keyword lists that can be used to show your ads on relevant webpages in the Google Display Network. Tightly-themed keyword lists are the basis of effective contextual targeting, and with the Contextual Targeting Tool, you no longer have to build them manually. In minutes, you can build dozens, even hundreds, of keyword lists, scaling your campaign performance while ensuring accurate targeting for your ads. This means you can get more clicks and conversions for your campaigns and you can do it more quickly.

How do I use it?
Let’s say you sell soccer equipment and gear. Normally, you’d have to build out separate ad groups for each of your product lines, like soccer gear, soccer balls, soccer cleats, etc. With the Contextual Targeting Tool, simply type each product category into the search box, and the tool will automatically generate tightly-themed keyword lists for you. For example, when you enter soccer gear into the tool, you get more specific ad groups, such as youth soccer gear, discount soccer gear, soccer uniforms, soccer bags, etc.

click for full size image

These new ad groups can help you get additional traffic and sales, as you may not think of creating them when manually building out your campaigns. Along with the new ad groups, the tool provides suggested bids and predicted placements to give you an idea of the types of sites in the Display Network where your ads can appear.

The Contextual Targeting Tool has been available to advertisers using AdWords Editor. This week, all advertisers will be able to access it from the Opportunities tab in their AdWords account. You’ll still need AdWords Editor to implement the ad groups in your account for now (download AdWords Editor). However, this requirement will be lifted and you’ll be able to implement new ad groups directly from your AdWords account in the coming months.

You can learn more about using the Contextual Targeting Tool by watching this video. We hope this tool will help you more easily and efficiently reach your goals with your Display Network campaigns.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew

In this live course, we’ll cover ways to manage your budget through effective targeting and basic optimisation. We’ll first look at how you can improve targeting by adjusting location and network settings. This will be followed by a discussion of how good account structure, multiple ad variations, and effective keywords will help you get the most for your money.

This hour-long interactive course will be presented by AdWords Specialists at 3:00 pm GMT (7:00 am PST) on Wednesday, January 12th. At the end of the session, there will be time for Q&A.

Make sure you sign up now and visit the AdWords Online Classroom (UK) for additional live and on-demand courses.

Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew

In addition to filtering out specific terms in the context of a single ad group or campaign, many advertisers maintain a set of core negative keywords across several campaigns. Examples of these terms might be free or trial — search terms that aren’t promising if you’re looking to sell products on your website. Negative keywords like these don’t require granular management on the campaign level, and we’ve heard from many of you that you’d like a more scalable way to manage these broadly-applicable sets of terms.

Now, we’re happy to introduce a new way to manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns: negative keyword lists. With these lists, you’ll be able to manage a group of negative keywords in your account’s Control Panel and Library and associate them with multiple campaigns.

(click for full size image)

For example, say you have a set of negative keywords you always add to any campaign running on the Search Network. Previously, you’d need to copy that set to every new search campaign you created in your account. Now, with shared lists, you can simply create a single negative keyword list and associate it with each search campaign. If there’s a new negative keyword you’d like to add to all of those campaigns, just add it to your list and it will automatically update across each campaign. Similarly, if you create a new campaign, you can add your negative keyword list to exclude all of the necessary terms with just a few clicks.

Visit our Help Center to learn more about how to get started with negative keyword lists.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Here are 10 of our favorite new ad innovations from 2010:

1. AdWords Campaign Experiments: Experiment with bid, keyword, ad group and placement changes, then measure how they impact your campaign performance.
2. Search Funnels: Understand the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.
3. Product Ads: Highlight your most relevant products with pictures and prices directly on the search results page with Product Listing Ads and Product Extensions.

Product Listing Ads


Product Extensions

4. AdWords Call Metrics: Include a Google Voice phone number in ads that appear on Google.com, and measure the number of phone calls generated by your AdWords campaigns.

Call Metrics
5. Click-to-call Phone Extensions: Make it easier for potential customers to reach you by including a clickable phone number in ads that appear on mobile phones with full Internet browsers.

Click-to-call phone extensions
6. Display Campaign Optimizer: Save time and increase conversions on the Google Display Network with this new automatic bidding and targeting tool.
7. Enhanced CPC: A bidding option that automatically adjusts the Max CPC bids that you’ve set based on the likelihood that your ad will convert, leading to more conversions and higher profit.
8. Broad Match Modifier: A keyword match type giving you more potential traffic than phrase match with comparable ROI.
9. AdWords Automated Rules: Save time by scheduling automatic changes to your AdWords account based on criteria that you specify.
10. Remarketing: Show your ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse sites across the Google Display Network.

You’ll always find the latest features at Google Ad Innovations, a place to explore new Google advertising technologies, watch short video demos, and try out select new tools. We have even more in store for 2011 and look forward to sharing these innovations with you soon!

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

No need to fret, there’s still plenty of time left in the year. To become Google AdWords certified, you’ll need to pass the Google Advertising Fundamentals Exam and one of the three advanced exams (Search Advertising, Reporting and Analysis, or Display). You can register for exams here, and take them from the comfort of your own office or home — the perfect activity to do while sitting in front of a cozy fire waiting for mysterious, magical home invaders to bring you gifts. As a bonus, you’ll be able to give your company the holiday gift of another certified individual to add to its profile page!

We’ve made it easy for you to prepare for the exams. The AdWords Learning Center offers text lessons (some with interactive modules) for each topic on the exam, which you can review at your own pace. In addition, if you can’t quite squeeze in training this year, we have numerous AdWords Seminars for Success in early 2011 in a number of major cities throughout the US.

For more information, please visit the Google AdWords Certification Program homepage.

Posted by Nathania Lozada, Inside AdWords crew

Some of this is generational. I am more comfortable firing up a search query than polling my Twitter followers or Facebook friends. But as social media activity increasingly has an impact on Bing and Google search results, it makes me wonder whether it will become an annoyance for me rather than something truly helpful, which mostly has to do with how I have approached social networks as a quasi-public person in what’s turning into a private networking world. The possibly logical assumption that Facebook friends are my actual friends is causing me to wonder whether I have missed the point of Facebook.

From the beginning of my Facebook experience, I decided to accept every friend request sent to me. I did so because I figured that I would have no way of knowing whether that person had read one of my books, or saw me speak, or is a regular newsletter or blog reader of mine, or something else. They might even be someone that I met or even worked with—my memory for people is not exactly stunning. As someone with a minor degree of notoriety, I didn’t know how to decide that I should block some people from my network when they might legitimately be interested in connecting with me.

Image via CrunchBase

And it’s not just Facebook. I’ve never blocked a Twitter follower. I’ve never turned down a LinkedIn request. I even joined Plaxo because someone asked me to. I have several distinct social networks full of people that I don’t know.

And what’s worse, I’ve only recently begun to invite other people to friend me. And I have made no attempt to invite Facebook friends to connect in LinkedIn or any other place. So, my current networks are full of people I don’t know that were bold enough to send me a friend request, and those same networks are simultaneously missing lots of people that I know and work with all the time.

I don’t think this is how Mark Z thought I would use his creation.

To show you how out-of-kilter this is, I have often had real friends ask me to pass along their requests to “friends” in my network, but the problem is that I don’t know these “friends” at all—so I am turning my real friends down. It’s a little embarrassing, to be honest. I am supposed to be a social media expert, but I have social networks that don’t reflect my real-life network.

So, I have had to live with the fact that my social networks aren’t that useful for me. I can tweet blog posts and ideas, but I can’t really use my networks to help me. I watch how my kids use their Facebook networks. They frequently ask their friends questions when searching doesn’t seem personal enough for the answer. They often want to know, “Which is the best for me?” not “Which is the best in general?” Facebook answers the first question and Google answers the second. I can’t really get that second answer from Facebook or anywhere else.

But all of this pales with what’s going on in search. No matter how much I might regret my approach to social networks that have removed all value for me, now I face the loss of value from search, too. Bing is already incorporating Facebook data into its search algorithm and Google is taking similar steps. As search engines become more personalized, they are increasingly taking activity from my networks into account, which I suspect does nothing but screw up my searches.

I’m not sure how to fix it now, but it has made me hesitant to join Foursquare or Gowalla. I don’t want to suddenly start turning down people from connecting with me, but I also don’t want to broadcast my location to almost perfect strangers. Some people have told me that I need a Facebook fan page, which strikes me as someone entirely too full of himself. I mean, I’m not Lady Gaga. (Really. I know that you mixed us up right up until that point.)

The more I think I know about social media, the less I think I actually know.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

At a recent Webinar on search marketing, I received a plaintive question from a participant. She had listened carefully to all my advice, but practically wailed into the phone, “My CEO does not believe in paid search. What can I do?” If you’ve run into this situation, you needn’t be as worried about it as she was. The first thing for us to do is to take away the mystique of paid search, or any marketing tactic, for that matter. There is no need for your CEO to “believe” in paid search. Paid search is a business idea, not a religion. Let’s break down what you do need from your CEO.

CEOs do believe in things. Mostly, they believe in money. If you’ve been trying to get your CEO to believe in paid search, that is an unnecessary abstraction. They don’t believe in abstractions such as supply chain management or clean stores either, except to the extent that they’ve come to believe that those things produce cash. Those abstractions might increase revenue or they might decrease costs, but somewhere, somehow, they equate to more money.

Image by Steven2358 via Flickr

That’s every CEO’s religion.

So instead of laboring to convert your CEO to your paid search beliefs, it’s so much easier for you to present paid search to CEOs as a natural rite of their own religion. Show the CEO how paid search makes money and suddenly your CEO will fervently believe in paid search.

And it’s not all that difficult. Just run a small experiment. It won’t cost very much–certainly not enough to bother the CEO for an approval–and see what happens. If you’ve thought a bit about what you are doing, you should be able to run a few small experiments with paid search until you start to see that you are making some sales. At that point, it should be relatively easy to convince your CEO to make a more substantial investment.

Now, you might be balking at this advice for a few reasons:

• You don’t believe in paid search all that much yourself. When put to the test, you’re not sure that paid search really can deliver cash all that quickly, at least not enough to divert from other investments that are more mature. If that’s true, you need to rethink whether this is the right thing to do at your company right now.
• You don’t know how to measure your results in money. If you have an offline sales business, you might have no way to track what people do on your Web site to the eventual sale. If that’s true, you have a much bigger problem than paid search. First, go back and figure out how to implement the right tracking for all your Web activity, so you can measure the sales results of any of it. Then do your paid search experiment.
• You really can’t spend any money at all. If you can’t spend even a few hundred dollars on an experiment, you have a few choices. You could go to someone with authority and explain your plan to run an experiment and request the money. You could spend the money out of your own pocket. You could sneak the money from some other place where you saved a few dollars. You could decide that you need to work somewhere else where these kinds of experiments are at least tolerated, if not welcomed.

Paid search needs to make business sense, just like every other investment a company makes. Stop expecting your CEO to believe and start showing everyone in your company, not just the CEO, how paid search makes business sense.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

In the last post, we explored five of the Top 10 Guidelines to Establishing Web Credibility, provided by Standford back in 2002. Still relevant today, here we’ll explore the remaining 5.

Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose.

First impressions are a killer. Within a fraction of a second, your visitors are making an evaluation of your credibility based on your site design alone. Just any old design won’t do anymore. Web surfers are growing accustomed to professional looking sites in just about every industry. Those that don’t “look professional” enough quickly get abandoned.

If your site has not undergone a major re-design in the past few years, it’s probably time. If your site looks like something that was built on a shoestring budget, you’re not giving your visitors much confidence in how you run your business.

While a more professional looking site may be in order, pay attention to what your industry is doing. Different industries require different styles. Don’t go with a corporate look if your competition is all artsy. Don’t create a mom and pop site when your competitors are high tech. Unless you are creating a new niche, you don’t want to vary too drastically from the “expectation” your visitors have from viewing other sites in your industry.

Make your site easy to use — and useful.

We’re squeezing two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.

Site usability is one of the most important factors in increasing (or decreasing) your conversion rates. When it comes to good usability, everything should be on the table: navigation, colors, product placement and display, headings, add to cart buttons, and more.

Be sure that all elements of your site work together to being a valuable and useful resource. Sometimes you need more than just products, such as descriptive content, to help sell the products. The text you use is what visitors will read to be convinced that you have what they want.

Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).

People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or reviewed.

The primary takeaway here is to keep your content fresh and relevant. Have you ever been to a website and you could just tell the content was old or outdated? Maybe it wasn’t obvious right away, but as you browse through the site, you find certain parts of the site that don’t quite match up with others. Or perhaps you see a “Valentine’s Day Special” six weeks AFTER Valentine’s day.

Small things like this can really turn visitors off. When a visitor sees this kind of irrelevant or outdated content, it conveys that you don’t care enough about them to keep your site relevant. This leaves open a question of whether they’ll get timely service from you as well.

RSS feeds are a great way to highlight new products and information and present them to your audience. Your most loyal audience will subscribe to this feed to ensure they receive your updates.

Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).

If possible, avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct, and sincere.

This recommendation really only applies to commercial sites, not informational sites. Displaying ads on your informational sites and blogs is perfectly fine and a great way to create an additional source of income. Of course, this only goes so far. Even informational sites can lose their credibility if you have too many ads that overpower the content.

On commercial sites, displaying ads that direct your visitors elsewhere are counter-intuitive and counterproductive. You might get a small stream of “additional” income from these ads, but undoubtedly it will be at your own expense in the long run.

Commercial sites should be focused on selling one thing… your own products or services. Anything on the site that pulls visitors away or interferes with that selling process is a bad marketing strategy.

Keep your audience in mind when writing content. Don’t write above your audiences head, and don’t talk down to them either. While you won’t be able to please everybody, knowing your primary target audience will ensure that you are not insulting the larger percentage of your audience.

Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.

I recently spent four hours fixing broken links on a client’s site that had just been redesigned by another developer. This is the epitome of incompetence. We all make mistakes, but lets hope it’s not to this magnitude of colossal ineptness.

Over time, pages we’ve linked to move or disappear, or we move things around on our own sites and miss a few links in all the hubbub. These can easily be corrected with a monthly broken link check. Find and fix both internal and external broken links.

You also want to check your site for spelling and grammar errors. Blogs have a little more leeway in that department, but for a professional site, there is little room for these kinds of issues before you’re looking like amateur hour.

Before publishing new content on your website, take a few extra minutes to run the content through a spell check program. Even if you’ve made a only few minor edits, don’t assume that you don’t need to double check your work.

Just like any other form of medium, it’s best to get a third party to proofread your site’s content. Undoubtedly, they’ll find something you missed, even after you’ve proofread it several times yourself.

Website credibility goes to the heart of being able to run a profitable business. Without credibility, you can implement all kinds of marketing strategies and drive hoards of traffic to your site, but in the end, you won’t have the impact you otherwise would.

Sure, you can find more ways to drive more traffic and eek out a few more sales, but doesn’t it make more sense to improve your credibility and increase your sales without having to pay to drive new traffic to your site?

You can read even more information on building a credible website by reading my series on Destination Search Engine Marketing where I cover how to develop a website that deserves top search engine rankings.

By taking the time to make sure your website is in a credible condition, your visitors will continue to drop in to explore what condition your condition is in.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Back in 2002, Stanford published their Top 10 Guidelines To Establishing Web Credibility. Amazingly, these conditions for creating a credible website are just as relevant today as they were back then. Isn’t it funny how, with all of the advancements in site development and marketing, it all still comes back to the basics?

Below are the first five guidelines. I’ve provided some of my own additional thoughts and commentary and would be interested in hearing yours as well.

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.

You can build website credibility by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you’ve shown confidence in your material.

A lot of what you find on the web is merely opinion. But, when you’re operating a business, opinion doesn’t always fly. We can state “facts” until we’re blue in the face, but if you’re claiming you “provide the best”, “offer the most”, or are “more successful”, you better be able to back that up.

If you can’t find an original source to back up your claim, look for those that are most credible and aren’t known for trying to pass opinion as fact. While the original source helps, you can always take the next best thing over nothing.

Sometimes you can be your own best source. If you are writing content about how satisfied your customers are, link to a testimonial page on your site. If you make the point of how well your product or service does, link to another page that backs that up with your own research.

Finally, don’t try to link to every possible resource or verification of your claims. Find a few of the most credible, and use those. Too much and you can cause your site to lose focus.

Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.

Showing that your website is for a legitimate organization will boost the site’s credibility. The easiest way to do this is by listing a physical address. Other features can also help, such as posting a photo of your offices or listing a membership with the Chamber of Commerce.

A pretty website isn’t enough. Online shoppers are still skeptical, and unless you can provide some kind of verification that you’re legit, you’ll be hard pressed to gain any kind of traction with your audience.

If possible, showcase your professional affiliations. If you belong to a local Chamber of Commerce or the Better Business Bureau, display this information on your site. This provides an additional avenue of legitimacy verification.

Answering your phone and emails can also go a long way to building credibility, while not answering them destroys it even faster. If your visitors don’t feel as if they can reach you they may question whether you’ll be able to provide them the help and support they need.

Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.

Do you have experts on your team? Are your contributors or service providers authorities? Be sure to give their credentials. Are you affiliated with a respected organization? Make that clear. Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

What sets you apart from your competition? Is it just lower prices, or do you have something substantially unique to offer? Sometimes you don’t even have to offer anything different, it’s just a matter of presenting it in a new or unique way.

Highlight whatever knowledge or experience you and your team have. By providing information on your particular experiences, you provide a way for your audience to see that you have a solid history of performance, and that you don’t just say you can… you’ve proven it.

Provide as much information as you can on your organization, industry experience, and even case-studies, as these all work together to bolster your credibility.

Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.

The first part of this guideline is to show there are real people behind the site and in the organization. Next, find a way to convey their trustworthiness through images or text. For example, some sites post employee bios that tell about family or hobbies.

This familiarity breeds trust and trust turns people into customers. As much as you need to provide information on your successes, you also need to provide what’s behind those successes: real people.

Anybody can talk a good game and even be knowledgeable in the product or service offered, but the people that make up your team can speak volumes about you. Even if nobody knows who you are, providing bios on the people that are your “authority team” gives your audience an opportunity to get to know them.

You don’t want to be a faceless corporation. You can avoid this by humanizing your self or your staff and giving people someone they can relate to. Don’t be “all business” in your bios. Show the personal side a bit. The more personable you are, the more genuine you appear.

People like to feel a connection to you which is also why it helps to tell about your family, your interests, or your hobbies. Your reader may have kids of the same age, which gives them something in common with you. Some might have similar interests or hobbies, or know someone who does, which again, helps them make that connection to you that is more than just someone out to make a quick buck at their expense.

If your visitors can be made to feel like you’re like them, then they are more apt to spend their money with you than some other faceless, nameless person or organization.

Make it easy to contact you.

A simple way to boost your site’s credibility is by making your contact information clear: phone number, physical address, and email address.

Simple things such as providing full and complete contact information, not just a web form, can go a long way to establishing your credibility. Give your visitors options on how to contact you in a variety of ways.

Every visitor has their own set of preferences in making contact. For some, a form is just fine. For others, they want to hear a voice. And still others will want to send off a quick email. By providing each of these options, you allow your visitors to contact you in a way they are most comfortable, and will likely establish the most trust.

I suggest that you make your phone number visible on every page. If you’re national, you need to have a toll free number.

Many visitors won’t engage with a site that doesn’t provide an “appropriate” way to be contacted. If this avenue isn’t readily available, your would-be customers may be going elsewhere.

This wraps up the first five! In my next post, we’ll cover the remaining five conditions for web credibility.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

In 2010, over 100 million users joined Twitter. It was by
far the fastest growing social media channel last year…the idea of Twitter and
its micro-blogging platform certainly will be an important tool going forward.

Likely you’ve seen Twitter in a lot of places over the last
couple of years – reality shows, sporting events and other venues people look
to for up-to-the-minute information are just a few. The quick micro-blogging
platform of Twitter is also used by many political dissidents in countries
where traditional media is heavily restricted.

In addition to these wonderful applications, many large
companies and small businesses are harnessing the power of micro-blogging and
Twitter to interact with customers online.

While you’ve probably heard of many companies like Best Buy,
Pepsi and others successfully using Twitter, you’re probably a little confused
as to how you can make it work for you. If you’re not too familiar with social
media, it may be a little intimidating.

No need to worry
though, Twitter, micro-blogging and social media in general are meant to be
fun!

To accomplish this, the first thing you need to consider is
the content of your ‘tweets.’ Don’t make them all about you and your business -
that’s the quickest way to get people to lose interest.

Provide interesting content that’s helpful and entertaining
and don’t simply use the platform to toot your own horn. Examples of content
include new blog posts, company news, new products, special discounts and so
forth.

Besides providing this informative content, be sure you
deliver it in a personable way. Give your content and the ‘tweets’ announcing it
some personality. If people see your content as boring, they will think your
company is boring.

Next are your followers as well as the people you follow on
Twitter. When becoming a follower of someone else, be sure it makes sense for
you and your company…it’s pretty likely they will follow you back at some
point, especially if you engage with them.

As far as your
followers, quality beats quantity every time.

Having a large number of followers who never engage with you
is not at all beneficial. It’s much better to have a smaller number of followers
who engage with you regularly. Success should be measured by the quality of
your relationships on Twitter, not necessarily the quantity.

But besides being a great tool to spread content around and
interact with customers and colleagues, Twitter is also being used as a
technical support/customer service venue. In addition to interacting with
prospective customers, many companies are using the micro-blogging tool to help
customers after the sale as well.

That’s certainly an innovative way to harness the power of
micro-blogging. Of course, each business is different so you have to decide
what works for you and what doesn’t.

No matter how you ultimately decide how best to
use Twitter to market your business online, be sure you provide valuable
content or advice and give people a reason to follow you.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

If you just read that headline and felt like singing, “CMS and SEO,
E-I-E-I-O,” you’re not alone. Sometimes digital marketing is an acronym
factory that feels like you need a secret decoder ring just to
understand what is going on. And even if you know that a “CMS” is a
content management system and that “SEO” is search engine optimization,
you might not know how they relate to each other. Many Web site owners
struggle with the question of whether a CMS is a step that they need to
take, and many more wonder whether adopting a CMS would magically boost
their search marketing.

The truth is that a CMS can be a fantastic thing for SEO, but only if it is done right. If you screw it up, it can take a high-ranking site and turn it into a search ghost town.

Image via Wikipedia

There are plenty of reasons to use a CMS that have nothing to do with SEO:

• To standardize the pages of the site
• To allow nontechnical people to update the site
• To provide version control for your content
• To implement an approval process workflow for every site change

These are but a few of the advantages of a CMS. Even looking at that list, you can see how SEO might be aided. Standardizing the pages of the site allows you to create the best template possible for SEO and use it on every page, and nontechnical people (writers) can update the site without screwing up the template. Version control allows you to roll back a change that messed up your SEO to the old version that worked. Your workflow can ensure that every site change is reviewed by the SEO person, so that mistakes in the use of keywords and other content can be caught before they go into production.

These are all great things, but there is a downside, too.

Many content management systems have perfectly awful default settings, when it comes to SEO. They don’t include description tags in the template, or they force all pages to have the same title, or they create dynamic URLs, or they block content from crawling, or they produce duplicate content, and 20 other problems.

So, when you make the decision to use a CMS, and it’s still a good decision for all the reasons above, take special care to have an expert configure your installation so that you avoid these SEO problems and instead reap the benefits.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Grinches, Scrooges and big, toothy sharks are out there in growing numbers, waiting to take the money of honest local business owners in return for very poor advice, promising Local SEO glory and delivering bad practices. In 2010, through my work as a Local SEO for my firm, as a Q&A forum consultant for SEOmoz, a Cre8asite moderator and writing articles here and elsewhere, it has become increasingly clear to me that some of the most important work legitimate Local SEOs do revolves around drawing lines in the sand for clients, steering them along the straight and narrow path while voices clamor to encourage detours that forsake the best interests of both owners and users.

In this article, I would like to identify what I have come to see as the areas of Local SEO that require the cleanest, clearest guidance in working with valued clients. Unsurprisingly, these are the very components of the industry that are suffering most from confusion, poor implementation and downright spam. In your work as a Local SEO in 2011, I hope having read these scenarios will help you to come across with the very best advice that will generate positive results for your clients and pride in your own business.

Identifying Local SEO Client Type

By the end of your first phone conversation with an incoming client, you will likely be able to categorize the business owner in one of three ways:

The Utter Neophyte
Whether this is the owner of Grandma’s Quilt Shop or the bewildered CEO of a major corporation, this client knows almost nothing about Local Search and may know little about the Internet or computers. He has never heard of Place Pages, may be fearful of user reviews and is likely running a completely unoptimized website, in terms of Local Search. If this client comes to you, ready to trust in your counsel, the work ahead of steering him along a good path should be relatively easy, provided he understands the value of Local.

You are basically starting with a clean slate because, apart from any unclaimed Local profiles that may have been automatically scraped by Google et al., nothing has been done to promote the business thus far. There is no problem here teaching the neophyte client good Local business practices and you can expect excellent results from your work with him.

The Halfway-There Client
This client is already aware of Local SEO and its value but is seeking professional advice because he isn’t sure whether he’s doing things correctly or whether he’s doing everything he can.

These clients tend to require more work than group one because, in their solo efforts to pursue Local rankings, they will have engaged in various tasks which may or may not have been done well. Very often, you will find innocent violations on their Google Place Pages. You will find a lack of local signals on their websites, creating a weak overall Local SEO total package. They may have a few reviews here and there, but haven’t responded to the negative ones and aren’t actively encouraging positive ones. And, most problematically, they may have gotten bad advice in the past that has caused them to take actions which could have very negative impacts on their standings.

In these cases, you, the Local SEO, must first decide if anything has been done that is so negative, you can’t see a good way to amend it. Hopefully that won’t be the case and you will have plenty of ways to help this client, teaching him all the while the difference between allowed and forbidden practices. In most cases, you will be able to expect good results and, perhaps most importantly, you will have taken a client who was halfway-there in his efforts to being totally current with best Local practices.

Little Horns On Their Heads
Business owners who have gone over to the dark side may make very poor choices for clients. If, in your initial consultation, it becomes apparent that the potential client has been buying reviews, has set up virtual offices across the country in order to appear Local when he isn’t, had created tons of Place Pages without reason or similar problematic practices, it’s time to step back and consider your options.

A good place to start is to figure out how the client got this way. Was he sold on these practices by a dubious marketer? Did he come up with these crazy ideas himself and thinks he’s a genius for doing so? And how deep is the damage? Sometimes, you will find yourself chatting with dyed-in-the-wool spammers who lack the moral compass to see that their manipulation is actually ruining the results for everyone, but more often, you may be hearing from business owners who have been misinformed, hoodwinked and scammed by unsavory marketers. They may even be coming to you because they’ve been penalized or have read something that has filled them with doubt about the tactics their marketer is using.

You will have to decide whether you can help. Whether you are speaking to a spammer or an owner who has been duped, telling it like it is is the first step. You need only point to Google’s Quality Guidelines to back up your explanation of why what they are doing violates the rules. Their reaction to this will likely help you establish whether you are dealing with a little devil or a victim of misinformation. Depending on their attitude and how deep the trouble is, you can determine whether this is a client you can take on, being fully transparent that the work ahead may or may not result in a cleaner profile and good rankings for the client.

Looking For Trouble

You may meet clients who don’t fit any of my three profiles, but my bet is that you have recognized most of your current clients within those descriptions. With that in mind, we’re ready to move on to the specific places in which trouble happens with local business owners. If you’ve been doing Local SEO for even a few months, you will doubtless recognize some of these, too:

Place Page Business Title. The legal business name, the whole legal business name and nothing but the legal business name. If the client’s pre-existent Place Page business title contains extraneous words, it will need to be edited to comply with the guidelines.

Categories. Has the Place Page got more than 5 categories? Prune them back to size. Spamming in this area generally occurs when the owner is putting multiple categories in each of the five fields, separated by commas.

Business Description. This has become a little iffy as of Google’s November update of their guidelines which previously forbid the repetition of keywords in the business title within the business description field. My friend and colleague, Linda Buquet, wrote an excellent piece citing the disappearance of this rather cumbersome, awkward historic rule. Is Google still penalizing for this? I have yet to see data one way or the other, but the statement is gone from the guidelines. Beyond this, making sure that the business description reads as a description and not a string of keywords will be important for you and your clients.

Duplicates. Definitely one of the most poorly understood factors. I recently wrote an article devoted solely to the number of Place Pages a business is allowed to have. The business model (single shop, franchise, multi-partner firm) dictates the answer. Whether the duplicates are intentional (made with the hope of ranking where the business doesn’t belong) or have happened accidentally as a result of Google’s wonky data aggregation process, dupes must be identified and, if possible, cleaned up.

Reviews. The writing is definitely on the wall that less-than-upstanding marketers have discovered a cash cow in making a commodity out of reviews. Don’t miss Mike Blumenthal’s most recent post about this, the latest in his ongoing reportage surrounding this truly problematic topic. Google forbids the purchase or incentivizing of reviews. So does the review giant, Yelp. So does your grandmother who always cast a dark eye on shakedowns and boondoggles. In 2011, you’ll have your hands full steering incoming clients away from monetized review schemes.

Poor On-Page Local SEO. With the recent rollout of Place Search, the health of clients’ websites is now irrefutably a major part of the work of Local SEOs. Business owners who are happy with terrible websites will make very poor clients, and if you can’t touch the site, chances are you can’t help the business. In many cases, your work as a Local SEO will begin with an audit of the client’s site and implementation of your list of recommendations for the optimization of all of the basic components of traditional SEO, with geo modifiers, plus the focus of special attention to contact information, contact pages and so-on. Your chances to teach well are awesome here, taking vague, un-optimized sites to a whole new level of local usefulness.

Copywriting. Critical to your work as a Local SEO will be determining whether your client or an employee in his office is capable of writing the content that appears on his website. If not, you will be doing the writing or at least the editing of all website copy. The power to rank, influence and call to action is embedded within the words on web pages and this is not a step that can be disregarded. Here, too, will be your chance to influence clients for good, in the common scenario of go-to-client business models wishing to rank for a variety of cities in which they serve. A lazy marketer might simply create a bunch of duplicate landing pages for the bevy of cities. A good one will encourage the client to write unique content for each of these city pages, content that really helps his community, or he will be doing the writing himself. This is such a major issue, it really merits an article of its own

Good Old Greed. This is where your mettle as a Local SEO will really be put to the test. Clients will come to you wanting to rank beyond the scope of their just deserts. They will be feeling tempted to bend the rules for their own gain. There are so many bugs, loopholes and grey areas, the temptation can be quite strong. This is the arena in which I have come to see that we Local SEOs can do our best work, drawing for our clients a line in the sand between what is legitimate and allowed, and what is greedy and devoid of civic-mindedness. This means you will be telling lawyers that they cannot have Place Pages for every different type of legal work their office does. It means saying ‘no’ to virtual offices and generic, duplicate content. It means acting to preserve what we, as Local SEOs, like about Local. I’m hoping your incoming clients will take your advice and walk a good path through this maze of choices, but if they don’t, you win anyway, avoiding the pitfalls of working with clients nobody sane would want.

Bringing Local Home

When I am looking for someplace to meet my in-laws for dinner, I want to see real reviews of restaurants. I don’t want to be swayed by phony praise. When I am looking for the nearest local attorney, I want to be able to go to his real nearby physical office; I don’t want to end up at a P.O. Box station. When I am looking at businesses by order of ranking to get the gist of Google’s opinion of the merits of various entities, I’d like that to be based on Google’s algorithm – not the gaming of it.

I use Local Search, and so do you. As Local SEOs, I think we have a unique opportunity to help make Local genuinely useful. Sure, there will always be spammers and unwitting business owners who serve as easy prey to fly-by-night salesmen, and the combination of this, coupled with Google’s mountain of bugs, will likely always degrade data quality. But I think of it this way: every client who comes to you or I equals one really good record and presence we are putting out there, and this excellent data is going to be helping our neighbors, friends and family to find answers to their needs.

In days gone by, city planners invested amazing amounts of time and money creating beautiful resources for community residents. A trip to San Francisco, California will show you a wealth of 19th – 20th century parks, museums, gardens, accessible beaches, fountains and paths – all created with the good of the citizen in mind. These days, with evidently changed priorities and money troubles, new neighborhoods are lucky to be given a Quick-e-Mart as a resource for better living.

I believe that, in a small way, Local SEOs are the city planners of the 21st century. What we do builds an infrastructure of resources in the form of data our communities need. While we may not enjoy the beaux-arts glory of erecting sculptures and pavilions, we are enabling our neighbors to find doctors, schools, libraries and merchants. We are fostering community interactions, commerce and social betterment. Because of this, I would like to encourage every marketer who takes on a Local client in 2011 to take the highest possible road in the process, happy in the knowledge that our work – and the methods of our work – really do matter.

Happy Holidays to all our valued readers, and best wishes for a great Local 2011!

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

I’ve been doing a lot of Information Architecture (IA) work for clients over the past few months, and each time, I can’t help but think, “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” Though I know the answer to that question before it’s even a twinkle in my brain’s fiber-optic nerve cell ending’s eye. It’s the same old song and dance, really.

The clients come to us and they just want to get optimized. They want rankings. They want action, not reports. So we give them what they want, optimize their pages and get results.

Some of these clients have been with us for years. So… why now? Why, after all this time, do we need to work on the site’s IA? If they are successful and happy, why change what ain’t broke?

Well, because it IS broke and we’ve succeeded despite that. There comes a time when you realize that the foundation (or lack thereof) that you have built upon is shoddy, at best, and it’s time to go back and fix it. This often requires a drastic new approach – like remapping their entire site.

Developing an IA plan on an existing site isn’t much more than taking a bird’s-eye view of all your site pages and arranging (or rearranging) them in a more user and search engine friendly format. Easy, in theory, but not always so easy in practice, depending on the size and disarray of the site.

Ideally, the IA is done before the site even enters the design phase. This allows you to build a navigation and categorization structure that is based on how people search. Start it right, build it right, SEO it right.

But, not everybody got that memo. Too many jump right into the site development and even the SEO before taking care of the foundation. So, if that’s you… what do you do?

Well, you go back to the beginning. Fortunately, the SEO work you’ve done doesn’t necessarily have to be lost, but you will need to be willing to walk away from a bad game plan if a better one comes up. If the IA aligns with optimization work completed, fantastic. If not, then let it go, man. Just let it go.

The great thing about IA is it lets you get a fresh perspective on your site. You have some keyword data and site analytics that can help you out. You can see how visitors have been navigating your site and improve visibility of important pages that aren’t getting enough traffic.

The IA lets you go back to the basics. You don’t have to throw everything out, but be willing to move categories, pages, and navigation items. The goal is to make everything easier to find and organized in a way that will give you additional search relevance.

So, how do you do IA for an existing site? One page at a time. I’ll generally run a spider through the site and get a list of all the URLs. Then, page by page, start working your way through them. As you do, you’ll find pages that should naturally be grouped together under a particular navigational heading.

As you work your way through, headings will change, pages you thought fit in one place will suddenly look better in another place, and you’ll create new navigational elements and remove old ones.

Consider each navigational position. Not just top, side, and bottom, but also the order in which they should be placed. What goes where can be important, not only for search, but for visitors.

You’ll also want to look for similar or duplicate content pages that can be merged and/or discarded. Cleaning out the clutter is as important to IA as arranging what remains. Also be on the lookout for pages and content that may be missing. Don’t have an “About Us” page? Add one. Missing a site map? Create one.

Take your time working through the IA and double check to make sure everything is right. Once you’ve done that, all that is left is implementing the new structure, redirecting moved pages and changed URLs, and checking your analytics to see customer engagement rise!

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

The simplest answer that question is no.

Any qualified search engine marketer knows that frames pose
big problems with rankings. Stand-alone frames with no modifications are not
crawlable by the search engines. Any content contained within the frames will
not be indexed and thus, not found.

While frames look pretty, what’s the point if they can’t be
found?

Fortunately though, there’s ways to have frames AND have the
content within them crawled by the search engines.

Before I explain how to do this, I should define what frames
are. Frames are HTML elements that pull content from one URL and directs to
another one of your choice. They copy everything on a page to mirror it on
another. There are many good reasons to have frames on your site – you just
have to be careful on how you use them to ensure the content within them gets
crawled and indexed by the search engines.

Ensure framed content
gets indexed by using specific tags in your HTML code

Content within a <frameset> tag is indexed differently
than other content. What search engines like Google and Bing do is crawl and
index framed and non-framed content and catalogue them as different pages. 

One way to look at frames is to view them as images. If you
must use frames, be sure to provide a keyword-rich description of the image in
case it fails to load. A <noframe> tag explains to users and search
engines what the framed content is if it doesn’t load. See the following
example:

<noframe>Put
keyword-rich content/description here</noframe>

If you use the <noframes> tag, remember these two
important points:

1.      
Place the tag as high as possible on the page.  This makes it easily readable by search
engines and older web browsers who don’t support frames.

2.      
Keep your <noframes> tag outside the
<frames> or <iframes> tag. If you don’t, the content within the tag
may not get indexed.

Another “frames” tag you can consider that’s gaining a lot
of popularity is the <iframes> tag, which is used to embed dynamic information
and a wide variety of widgets for outside sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Many who use the <iframe> tag though don’t realize
that it doesn’t provide a link back to your site, which is the reason many
people use it. Setting up your <iframe> tag in the following way though
ensures you get the content and any links indexed.

<iframe
src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php”
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″
style=”border:none; overflow:hidden;
width:150px; height:50px;”
allowTransparency=”true”>

Setting up
an <iframe> tag this way ensures content and links get indexed by most
engines as it is visible text on the page. Anything that is pulled in using the
iframe tag, will not get indexed with the page. So if you want your iframe
powered widgets to generate a link back to your site, make sure and include the
above code.

</iframe>

We avoid frames whenever possible since it’s hard to know whether
the content within the frames get indexed or not. However, you can include
frames on your site as long as you take the necessary precautions.

The biggest downfall of frames is that they prevent search engine
spiders from crawling and indexing a site. But if you use them properly, you
can place them on your site and not run into this problem.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

I’m Irish, so I am not often at a loss when someone asks a question, but I was a bit startled at a query I received while doing a recent Webinar: “How do I overcome search marketing’s lack of sexiness to convince my CMO to do it?” Now, I’ve been doing this marketing thing for many years now, and I well remember the days when marketing indeed was about the sizzle instead of the steak. Branding is sexy and sales are not. CLIO awards are exciting–ringing the cash register, not so much. But I really thought those days were LONG gone.

Image by Julia Roy via Flickr

Apparently, they aren’t gone everywhere.

So, I did my best to answer the questioner. I explained how we need to move past marketing as an attention-getter and move into marketing as the first step in the sales process. That instead of thinking of brand awareness as an end in itself, that we need to think of it as just the place where the conversation begins. And we need to stop seeing marketing as some island separated from the rest of the business where we have our own metrics and our own little religion that is divorced from the company’s bottom line.

I honestly thought that all the old-school CMOs had already been fired, but I guess there are still a few more out there. If you know one of them, let me know. I will be happy to help. I know how I convinced them 10 years ago when search marketing went mainstream and I would do the same thing today. I’d sit them down and ask them, “Can you describe for me the sexiest, most exciting, top attention-getting campaign you’ve ever been associated with?”

People love to talk about themselves, so you’ll get a rich, colorful answer to this question. It might have been a great TV ad, or a publicity stunt, or some kind of contest, or a billboard that people couldn’t stop talking about. Whatever it is, drink in the story. Let it wash over you. Ask questions. Get all the juicy details.

Then ask this question: “If you were able to pull off that kind of thing today at our company, what do you think the people exposed to that campaign would do first?”

Let your CMO ponder that one. If there are any neurons firing, you’ll witness a realization that they’d search for whatever it was in that campaign that caught their fancy. They might look for the TV ad in YouTube to show their friends. They might search for local news about the publicity stunt. They might search for the name of the contest so they could enter or see who won. They might Google a few words from the billboard to see what was behind the story.

Whatever it is that they do next, the overwhelming odds are that they will do it online. If your company has not followed up that sexy campaign with an equally important online presence, including search marketing, you’ve just wasted most of its value. And you’ve severed the chain of brand awareness that leads to a sale, for all but the most accessible and well-known products.

If Coke sponsors a live event, they can probably survive without having that event plugged on their Web site, because everyone knows what a Coke is and where to get one. But for the vast majority of companies, you can’t count on your ubiquitous reputation and distribution to make grabbing mere attention enough for you. You need to lead the customer from attention to purchase—the Web is the best way for most businesses to do that.

So, if your CMO thinks search marketing isn’t sexy, ask if money is sexy. Find out if having people talking online about our campaign is sexy. And ask one last thing, “Is keeping our jobs sexy?” Because if marketing doesn’t sell anything, companies don’t really need it.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

This is a guest post by Teicko Huber. Teicko is the founder of Focus To Grow, a sales and marketing development firm.

Since 2007, the social web has dramatically shifted power from sellers to buyers. Today’s buyers resist interacting with salespeople until they are good and ready.

So, why do we take our expensive salespeople and insist they must be good at “cold-calling” when the buyer doesn’t want anything to do with this? Don’t get me wrong. A salesperson needs to be able to communicate in an effective and compelling manner over the phone. The purpose, however, of the communication should not be getting the sale today, but finding potential customers.

Cold calling is an exercise in futility and the least efficient way to find potential customers. I’m absolutely amazed at how many pundits and sales consultants recommend this as a viable approach to sustainable demand creation.

I’m not saying it doesn’t work, but who would buy a product with the following traits:

• Doesn’t work 90.9% of the time  (Harvard Business Review)
• Costs at least 60% more per lead (HubSpot, The State of Inbound Marketing)
• Has a rate of less than 2% of phone calls resulting in a meeting (Leap Job)

These are horrible statistics for people whose salaries typically cost a company more than $60,000 per year.

Stop using your salespeople to find potential customers, and start making investments that will help create demand for your sales team and your company.

Regardless of your executive title, you must realize that the rapid rise of the social web has changed buyers’ expectations. The fact is they do not want to deal with salespeople until they are 70% down the path of the buying process.

Here are several practical ways to enable your the salesforce to create demand and eliminate the need to cold call:

1. Eliminate the lowest performers on your sales team and repurpose those resources at the early stages of the sales process to create demand for your company.
2. Invest in inbound marketing software, such as HubSpot, and build remarkable content that attracts buyers to your website.
3. Develop a strategic TED-like conference for your industry and feature your best and brightest staff and salespeople in a non-informercial way.
4. Invest in tools like Visible Gains to build educational video marketing apps that are not like infomercials.
5. Invest in making your top salespeople sought after speakers regarding industry issues. Investments might include enrolling them in the national speakers association training courses, or hiring someone to market your top salespeople as speakers.
6. Write a series of must-have industry guides your top salespeople can give away. 
7. Invest in crowd-sourced lists with detailed meta-data to target your marketing efforts on the phone and the web. One of my favorite list companies is NetProspex.

What other ways have you succesfully created demand for your sales team? What’s stopping you from being successful at demand creation?

Photo by: markhillary

Free Download: 101 Marketing Charts and Graphs

Improve your decision making and long-term performance with marketing data for best practices.

Download these 101 charts today!

Connect with HubSpot:

MeetUp.com has now made this interaction easier for local businesses. Last week, the global network for local meetups announced the launch of MeetUp Perks—a feature that connects local businesses with group organizers through deals and discounts.

How does it work?

Businesses and organizations offer ongoing deals, such as 20% off spa or 25% off dry cleaning. They extend these special promotions to select MeetUp Groups, based on topic or location. For example, if you are a yoga center, you want to reach out to local yoga enthusiasts and healing circles. After setting your criteria, MeetUp.com will notify group organizers if they qualify for your offer and let them opt into it.

So, how should you approach this opportunity? Find below some suggestions to get you started quickly.

Create Your Profile in 3 Steps

Creating your Sponsor profile is a simple three-step process that involves registering, creating your perk and adding payment information. The monthly cost for sponsoring a meetup is currently $5 per group. “We will offer your Perk to active Groups that match your criteria and only charge you for those that accept your Perk,” the MeetUp folks explain.

Come Up With a Great Offer

Think of a discount or deal that you could offer to MeetUp Groups on an ongoing basis. “Since it’s up to each MeetUp Group to choose whether they will accept your Perk, you need to make your offer really simple and compelling,” writes MeetUp expert Andrea. As your goal is to expose your product or service to maximum number of relevant groups, think carefully about what could appeal to them. These people are not just your regular consumers; they are web-savvy influencers in your industry and can become great brand evangelists.

Set the Right Criteria

Set the right criteria for what types of groups you want to make your offers available to. You can do that based on topics, such as “moms,” “hiking,” “road biking” and “cooking and baking.” You can also set the criteria by location. If you are a restaurant, for instance, you can choose to reach groups meeting up within 2 miles of your location. Once you select the criteria, the MeetUp system will find groups that match.

Experiment With It

As mentioned earlier, the cost associated with sponsoring one group monthly is only $5. That is not a high price to pay to experiment with this innovative marketing idea. Keep in mind that you will have an opportunity to tweak your experiment. As a sponsor, you can monitor the status of your offer, adjust your offer terms and change the number of groups you can sponsor.

Looking for more incentives to try this out? If you are among the first 5,000 businesses to extend an offer, you can get your Perk fees waived until March 15, 2011. Be quick.   

Free Download: Small Business Online Marketing Kit

Dig in to some of HubSpot’s best tutorials to help you successfully use online and inbound marketing tools to generate leads and sales for your small business.

Download the free Small Business Online Marketing Kit now!

Connect with HubSpot:

Don’t Write about Your Product

The most important thing about writing an ebook, David notes, is that you should focus on the people you want to reach, not your product or what you have to offer. Try to understand what challenges your audience is facing and figure out a way to address these problems.

Create a Topic that Solves a Problem

In finding a topic to tackle, focus on a question that your target audience is often asking or a challenge that they often encounter. Open your email inbox and select a few questions your customers have shared with you. If a number people have expressed interest in the same issue, it might be worth addressing it in an ebook. 

Leave Your Comfort Zone

“Before you even begin to write it, get out of your office, get up from your really comfortable chair,” says David. “Go out into the marketplace either virtually online or physically in person and have discussions with those people you are trying to reach, your potential customers.” That way you will have authentic conversations that can help you really understand the worries of your audience. Such type of interaction will direct your attention to creative content ideas.

What is the most successful ebook you have launched and how did you go about writing it?

New eBook: 11 Examples of Online Marketing Success

Draw ideas from successful marketers and see how you compare to others in your industry.

Download this eBook to read about the top marketing campaigns of 11 distinct organizations.

Connect with HubSpot:

I was just experiences then reading about recent issues with Yahoo’s Site Explorer not reporting the correct amount of backlinks (as if that exists lol). I still use it quite a bit, especially with a quick SEO Quake fix, so it’s good to know that the Yahoo team is working with the Bing team to bring it all back to working order. The good folks at Webmaster World definitely have a thread going, and Vanessa Fox already blogged about it so I won’t go into too much detail.

Basically, you can bet that Bing is working on integrating the data into their Webmaster center, and hopefully it gets a sprucing up. We all know Google’s tool is garbage for the most part…no surprise there though really. For now I always recommend Link Diagnosis to pull Yahoo’s data since the API version is still working normal. You can of course try out SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer or try out Majestic SEO. Here’s what the Yahoo team had to say officially;

We are working with the Microsoft team to ensure that webmasters can continue to use Yahoo! Site Explorer to view inlinks (a.k.a backlinks) to a given webpage or a website and to further be able to export them as CSV if desired.

Please note that this functionality will be available only through the Site Explorer UI and not through the Webservices API.

Hemant Minocha
Product Manager, Y! Site Explorer

Read more: http://suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=SiteExplorer&fid=217076

For those of you running your own consulting business online, here’s a tip to help bring in some more business, do a little more branding and even bring yourself a nice link. We of all people know that when you start to get really busy with clients, the less time you have to market your services to new potential businesses. This can eventually catch up to you so hopefully this site helps keeps things flowing and pushes a little extra branding for your services, and the company.

Superscout.com provides both employers and employees a social network for brand and job growth. While you can get a company link, that shouldn`t be the main focus of use. Remember that I`ve toned down my public link releases just because the majority of people on the interwebs spam. So put the site to good use by taking advantage by putting up your company profile, add your latest jobs and keep in touch with job applicants who you connect with.

For consultants like myself, you can get quick and easy access to all the jobs and employers all the while keeping track of what`s going on. The one really interesting factor from an employee`s end of things is the real contact with companies I`ve experienced on here. Superscout.com does a great job and keeping companies coming back and active, so take advantage while the getting is good!

The first Foursquare check-in from space was completed by astronaut Douglas Wheelock just the other day. In a world of PR and viral marketing it has become quite a bit harder to get heard, so when you can blast a message from space you know the world will tune in. While Foursquare battles the location based check-in war, it seems they just got a massive PR spike thanks to this interesting event. Gizmodo broke the news for most and it has struck up enough interest to really make me step back and analyze this whole event from a marketing perspective.

I really think this will help out Foursquare more than anything, but NASA surely doesn’t mind the extra buzz since they’ve been trying to capture the attention of the nation. I imagine it will be a while before we see another check in from space, but I am quite excited for the first Moon check-in, and then eventually other planets like Mars!

I just thought I’d check up and see what has been going on with Tequila Avion since I last blogged about the sheer marketing genius going on. The Tequila has been mentioned on just about every celebrity blog, across multiple Tequila only websites as well as a plethora of high quality blogs. Their social media presence hit the ground running, and they’re still in the lead. I mentioned in my last post that it would take a while to crack the top 10 for the keyword Tequila, but it seems that things are looking brilliant for the company.

This marketing strategy has propelled them to spot #39 for the keyword Tequila ( according to Scroogle ), but I imagine you might see different results depending on where you live. I mentioned in my previous post that I didn’t expect them to get there that quick, and with more and more people talking about it, they should see some more movement. Keep in mind they’ve been doing a great job when they launch in a new city which alone nets them Liquor store links, as well a ton of local Twitter mentions. You can see there latest launch in Texas got some attention from the greatest Tequila blogs, and with flying sky banners you can’t go wrong.

I didn’t plan on an update this early so it will be really interesting to see how things continue on now until the end of the next season. I have no idea how hard they’re going to push Avion again, but I imagine it will be dominant throughout the season. I’d love to hear what you guys think about their marketing tactics, and what outcome you think might unfold.

Read the original post: http://www.linkbuildr.com/tequila-avion-entourage-big-brand-linkbait/

Yahoo recently announced that the UK/IE section of their directory will be closing down come November 18th, 2010. While this directory has been going strong for a decade, Yahoo has given you users options. You can now handle submissions to the UK/IE section that is under the main Yahoo directory. While it should be linked off the main site, you’ll have to dig a little deeper to find the announcement.

You may continue to maintain your listing through the US based Directory Submit program. Your site will remain listed in the Directory as it is now, and the applicable annual fee will apply on your anniversary date. No further action on your behalf would be required.

I’m not sure if we’ll see further closures within the Yahoo Directory regions, or if this is a sign of the whole thing slowing down. While I don’t think these directories pass anywhere near the same amount of link juice as they once did, I’d still want to be linked under my region from a domain like this. DMOZ is still worth it if you can somehow get a link, but you pretty much need a magical wand to make that happen. If you want to get in on the discussion, you can find us in this Webmaster World thread.

Here’s a wicked 45 minute lecture on small business branding during the 2010 CenPhoCamp conference which was held in downtown Phoenix. Kevin Spidel does a great job covering what’s hot and not, as well how do build your small business in these tough times. Everyone here at Linkbuildr has built this company from the ground up and love to share information. This is the kind of lectures I wish I could get out and do, so for now I’ll stick to the awesome people out there doing it large. Kevin Spidel should be a known name to most of you marketers, but if not check out his bio and see the amazing work he’s been involved in.

With the Holiday season upon us, companies vamping up their marketing efforts, it’s time to rethink your press release strategy. Our company does a lot of PR for people not only for links, in fact usually they’re not first in mind, but to build the overall brand through exposure.

There’s nothing wrong or negative about the usual process, I just like to do things a little bit different..a little more ninja like. We can definitely get more out of the resources available to we the people, you just have to dig a little deeper.

As of late, Google has really been putting emphasis on building your brand. This could be through social media, the links you build and other citations. This is good news for companies and brands because this adds more fuel to the fire.

Social media is also an important aspect of a typical PR these days, so this can be used to your advantage. How many social media sites pick up these news stories? I can tell you now, getting a extra link or two from the likes of Squidoo, Topix.net and others isn’t too difficult.

One last thing before we get into it. I know that the search engines are not giving amazing link juice from each news site, on the same topic. So throw out any thoughts of targeted anchor text in your release. For one, it looks cleaner, and secondly, you’re putting these efforts towards your brand/site overall. You can obviously used targeted anchor text, I would however leave PR power to go towards just building up the root domain.

Part 1: Mixing up the sites you use to send a PR

There are many press release sites to choose from, and picking the right one will make the difference. The first advice I like to give clients is to utilize different PR sites for your news. You might as well spread it out and get some nice and easy links from their homepage. PRWeb releases tend to stay indexed easily, as well rank quite easily for long tail terms.

I’m going to list 5 PR sites I like to use, as well the ones I think that have retained the most link authority and brand status. These sites usually don’t push junk news, so you can rest assured you’re not getting garbage.

PRWeb.com – We’ll start with the biggest, most networked and one of the most trusted news distribution services around today. PRWeb combines their large news network with not only newsrooms, but blog sources as well as its social media connections. Prices range from $150 USD up to $350 and beyond.

24-7pressrelease.com – These folks are another big player and they have a couple good things going on. First, their network is quite large and has a lot of top niches in its arsenal. The prices for a PR here are really affordable, and if the second point is that they have a company/business directory. That directoriy itself has held up its quality and is well worth the review process.

MarketWire.com – Another large PR network that has a huge business network. I’ve had a lot of success releasing normal PR’s for my clients, and personally. You can see a list of each indsutry contact resource beforehand, so this feature plays into the next section for this post.

URLWire.com – All you SEO consultants are most likely well awre of Eric Ward’s news wire. It’s highly recommended by me, not because I’m brown nosing, but due to Eric’s style. Again, this isn’t a place you can go to submit junk news and expect the world. URLWire works to network your news with the most related sites in your industry. Release prices start at around $500 USD and I’ve seen some of the most successful news campaigns launched from here.

PR.com – Another PR service you are most likely familiar with. This news network also boasts a lot of connections within its distribution network. PR.com also happens to have their own business/company directory in which you ca get into.

Part 2: Press Release Link Analysis

Link analysis on a press release you say? Hell yea and why not?! Before picking any service I highly recommend you start snooping on the competition. Open up the link builders beloved Excel and start off a spreadsheet for me. Next, hit up the 5 press release sites linked above and try and find your competitors releases. If you cannot find any, take a look at what other companies are doing PR’s within your industry.

Ok, so now what? When you find a press release or two within your niche, turn on SEO Quake, Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO or any backlink analyzer that does individual pages. All I ask you to do is see which news releases got picked up where. This will give you an idea of what to expect from your news. Obviously this isn’t fool proof, but I like a little more tactical application in my process.

Next, go back to news that’s 6 months or older and do the same thing. I’d take account of which PR sites do better at keeping that release indexed. As well, see if that release is ranking well for any long tail keywords associated.

This ain’t rocket science, but it is a little link science I guess. Even though I wasn’t a boy scout, they’re slogan certainly applies nicely to this industry. Just remember to look at the tags used and make sure those are on your list. That should help you target the news sites looking for your content.

Part 3: Build Links to Your PR

Some releases you put out are going to fall flat, sorry to say. Even with careful planning there are certain aspects that are just out of anyone’s control.

If you already have a network of blogs, social media profiles and other websites then you can do your part. Linking back to your news release from these areas is relevant, and will help keep that news alive and kicking.

Some companies even have a newsroom on their site, and from what I’ve seen it doesn’t cost you any dupe problems and helps keep things indexed. It’s all relevant to your company, so there is nothing black/grey hat going on here.

Final Thoughts:

While you’ll not notice a huge amount of traction from your first optimized release, keep at it, mixing things up. After half, or even a full year you’ll have a great diverse link set from all sorts of news sites.

I’d also keep in mind that these releases are spread across so many different sites. Google is obviously not giving “max link juice” through heavily syndicated content. Then again, prove me wrong by keeping meticulous statistics and track the movement yourself.

I hope this inspires businesses to take their PR campaigns to a new level. Let me know if anyone else out there has been implementing something similar, and if it is working for you.

In a recent interview I caught on Business Insider with Google’s Eric Schmidt talking about what he see’s as the Biggest threat to Google’s market share. With the partnership Bing has setup with Facebook, I’d be worried too. Top that all off with the recent Mayday updates and I see a wounded Google who finally may have someone to fight with…and that’s a good thing! I really don’t like having my eggs, or my clients, all in one basket so look forward to garnering more traffic from the Bing/Facebook side, especially those who got “raped” last May.

We all knew it was coming! Facebook Places is taking aim at Foursquare (and the other guys) with its new feature that is not at all original, but they have the user base so might as well. Of all the location based applications, this one will most likely give the Foursquare crew a run for its money depending on what else they do with it. One extra, cooler, better, faster, hard stronger ( sorry Daft Punk ) feature should be enough to leverage a lot of usage from the Facebook mob. For now I find myself not overly excited about this feature yet, and since I keep my Facebook profile on lock down, I don’t think I’ll use it much anywho. I do see the need for crucial integration of this feature into Facebook Pages though, and hopefully this helps brands and companies target their customers even more. Regardless, here’s a promo video that hypes it up a little more despite how lame it was done…all that money and this is the kind of production you put forth? LOLZ.

I end up watching a few shows here and there in my downtime and always enjoy Entourage for its blatant but workable product plugs. There has been a lot of talk lately about building brand links, and I thought we could dig a little deeper into that using the show. If you’ve been following the latest season, Turtle has been trying to make his next business venture with Tequila Avion. It’s a new luxury brand on the market, and has been a heavy set feature of the entire season. I took a look at the company after watching the final season and learned that it’s still in its infancy which makes it a great case study waiting to happen. Apparently, the owners are friends with show producer Doug Ellin and didn’t have to pay a dime for any marketing…makes you rethink your social networking tactics eh?

Avion Tequila LLC was formed by a group of entrepreneurs and beverage industry professionals with the sole purpose of creating and developing a tequila that defines a new standard of quality and taste. The announcement was made by Ken Austin, Founder and Chairman of Tequila Avion.

A Brand Going Viral

Breaking into the Tequila market won’t be an easy task, but done right the Avion investors should be sitting pretty. Since they’re a company with a virgin backlink profile, and a viral snowball effect that is currently hurtling towards success, I’d keep my eye on them as a shining example. Companies in the position to utilize these types of marketing channels will win big online without having to steer down a blackhat path.

If you have SEOQuake installed, load it up and take a quick look at the natural links obtained from the whole process. If you take a look at Google Blog search you’ll also see tons of sites spreading the good word. So you know that most backlink tools haven’t even caught up with the viral link effect, and I’m quite excited to check back in a month from now to see how the growth is going…so nerdy and sad, I know. No wonder my friends say I need to get out more.

Of course you’ll find this social media savvy company on Twitter and is doing a good job growing the brand from there. While everyone tends to want followed anchor text friendly links these days, they’re not all the rage anymore. URL shortening and social media networks have proven that there is more than one type of link on the block. Do a search at any given minute and you’ll see fans of the show and brand tweeting about where they got the product, that they’re drinking it now and uploading tons of their own media. You really cannot ask for a more when it comes to marketing these days. We’ll see if I’m right, and we’ll put Google Trends on my side as well..just to make me feel better.

Since blogging, social networks and apps you can bet that Avion will be featured on just about every luxury, drink, food and celebrity blog. So how is this going to really make a dent within say, the Google organic results? Well first of all, their brand name has their target keyword in the name. So this means the domain, and on-page SEO will pretty much take care of itself. There will be no need for a company like this to need targeted anchor text links…but don’t get me wrong, those links wouldn’t hurt either. As it currently stands, Tequila Avion isn’t ranking well at all for the keyword Tequila, but it’s really too early to tell. I imagine with the final season of Entourage the company will enjoy enough of a push to obtain a strong enough link profile to rank.

I’ll do my best to make the time to bring you more unique brands taking advantage of what’s going on right now in marketing. I still see so much cheesy, lame and downright terrible marketing efforts taking place these days..it’s sad really. I’ll also do my best to update this post later on, so if you see my slacking don’t hesitate to get in touch with me or send me a menacing tweet.

Read a follow up to their marketing: http://www.linkbuildr.com/tequila-avion-brand-update/

I think everyone heard about top paying Google Adsense Keywords or most expensive keywords. Sometimes finding the right keyword is not easy for website. You can use Adwards Keyword Tool to find out more details such as search volume, related keywords of your niche. Finding the right niche is the most important thing. If you select a niche which doesnt have follower, you will not get visitors and clicks.

Recenly i have done some research on top paying and average paying google adsense keywords, here is the list below:

MAX($)   AVG($)  KEYWORDS

520.52     97.44   domains yahoo 
418.63     79.81   domain name yahoo 
145.71     68.91   dc hair laser removal washington 
119.63     66.15   law lemon wisconsin 
135.94     51.14   hair removal washington dc 
493.73     41.97   domain registration yahoo 
262.02     40.36   benchmark lending 
438.23     38.05   domain yahoo 
330.50     37.86   yahoo web hosting 
121.86     37.29   hair laser removal virginia 
121.27     36.59   peritoneal mesothelioma 
46.38       36.55   ca lemon law 
81.58       34.13   best buy gift card 
96.87       31.10   adverse credit remortgage 
234.33     30.98   mesothelioma information 
48.68       29.77   law lemon ohio 
54.31       29.34   att call conference 
83.22       29.10   insurance medical temporary 
82.33       28.95   illinois law lemon 
82.33       28.78   mesothelioma symptoms 
60.86       28.51   angeles drug los rehab 
36.88       28.26   personal injury solicitor 
101.30     28.23   att go 
61.47       28.03   accident car florida lawyer 
159.00     27.11   google affiliate 
90.48       27.11   at t wireless 
172.60     26.31   100 home equity loan 
46.72       26.28   mcsa boot camp 
40.18       26.19   anti spam appliance 
93.12       26.17   adverse remortgage 
37.33       26.00   chicago hair laser removal 
53.70       25.98   att conference 
101.26     25.84   at and t 
102.52     25.45   laser hair removal maryland 
123.04     25.15   mesothelioma 
74.66       24.88   buy gift card 
114.88     24.80   mesotheloma 
41.70       24.52   student loan consolidation program 
58.70       24.45   california law lemon 
112.22     24.30   event management security 
129.13     24.15   canada personals yahoo 
62.11       24.15   orlando criminal attorney 
41.59       23.78   uk homeowner loans 
48.65       23.71   vioxx lawsuit 
27.80       23.55   compare life assurance 
73.41       23.34   criminal defense federal lawyer 
141.00     23.29   american singles 
73.70       23.09   federal criminal defense attorney 
34.61       23.07   laser hair removal manhattan 
102.69     23.03   att prepaid wireless 
170.89     23.00   fortis health insurance temporary 
39.31       22.93   miami personal injury lawyer 
37.79       22.75   hair removal chicago 
69.09       22.74   at and t cell phones 
37.59       22.61   refinance with bad credit 
103.19     22.47   malignant mesothelioma 
63.95       22.45   lease management software 
169.05     22.34   primary pulmonary hypertension 
37.77       22.27   miami personal injury attorney 
53.88       22.24   anti spam lotus notes 
31.56       22.23   life insurance quotes 
105.05     21.91   egg credit 
39.25       21.80   anti spam exchange server 
65.98       21.77   lemon law 
193.39     21.67   google adsense
33.09       21.67   best consolidation loan student 
34.22       21.63   refinance with poor credit 
77.44       21.49   employee leasing 
34.61       21.36   student loan consolidation center 
40.45       21.35   buyer mortgage note 
57.49       21.34   federal student loan consolidation 
55.24       21.33   symptoms of mesothelioma 
30.51       21.31   city hair laser new removal york 
133.02     21.20   att wireless com 
30.03       21.15   san diego dui lawyer 
66.79       21.14   indiana law lemon 
58.27       21.10   law lemon michigan 
70.76       20.80   angeles criminal defense los 
46.34       19.41   mesothelioma prognosis 
53.36       19.29   second mortgages 
31.54       19.26   21 auto century insurance 
64.73       19.25   employee florida leasing 
52.18       19.21   federal consolidation loan 
101.30     19.17   equity loan 
27.88       19.14   personal injury attorney colorado 
52.56       19.03   accident lawyer michigan 
30.22       19.02   refinancing with bad credit 
28.78       19.02   home equity line of credit rates 
45.11       19.01   federal consolidation 
62.95       18.96   non profit debt consolidation 
61.58       18.95   pay per click affiliate 
47.84       18.86   city hair new removal york 
107.72     18.85  acid reflux disease diet 
52.63       18.77  refinance poor credit 
36.45       18.75  equity loans 
36.00       18.73  student loan consolidate 
32.77       18.60  consolidate loans 
33.40       18.51  secured loans 
30.78       18.49  criminal lawyer new york 
51.00       18.43  affiliate per click 
33.06       18.29  chicago personal injury lawyer 
25.19       18.29  los angeles dui lawyer 
110.73     18.19  att prepaid 
63.95       18.10  angeles criminal defense lawyer los 
27.37       18.04  critical illness insurance life 
40.00       18.03  irs lawyer tax 
33.77       18.03  laser hair removal new york 
66.00       18.02  comcast high speed 
240.78     17.98  personal yahoo 
57.77       17.78  san diego dui attorney 
60.49       17.77  michigan personal injury 
36.93       17.73  automobile law lemon 
33.22       17.66  cheap insurance life term 
45.38       17.52  home loans refinancing 
30.44       17.51  consolidate college loans 
39.22       17.45  cheap life insurance 
32.06       17.38  vioxx law suit 
38.36       17.32  student loan refinance 
62.47       17.30  car hire alicante spain 
57.56       17.28  tax attorney 
31.37       17.28  refinancing my home 
51.18       17.24  criminal dallas lawyer 
31.46       17.24  line of credit home equity 
26.44       17.23  litigation vioxx 
56.43       17.20  at and t phones 
44.22       17.15  criminal defense attorney los angeles 
25.86       17.14  commodity online trading 
26.48       17.13  home equity rates 
190.41     17.12  adsense 
36.81       17.12  law lemon mass 
65.76       17.11  equity home 
39.70       17.10  arizona law lemon 
40.84       17.09  child molestation attorney 
31.40       17.09  home line of credit 
54.56       17.06  alicante car rental spain 
70.37       17.03  attorney defense federal 
53.29       17.02  san diego criminal attorney 
42.50       16.79  injury lawyer new york 
37.52       16.78  attorney injury new personal york 
89.97       16.77  at and t mobile 
104.55     16.72  pleural mesothelioma 
80.62       16.61  augmentation breast diego san 
56.20       16.61  home equity poor credit 
83.55       16.60  health insurance temporary 
62.43       16.60  compensation mesothelioma 
33.00       16.60  21st century insurance 
47.65       16.52  cheap insurance medical 
53.95       16.51  angeles criminal lawyer los 
31.65       16.49  low cost term life insurance 
37.43       16.48  home refinance loans 
48.20       16.45  eloan 
33.93       16.44  life insurance quote 
25.06       16.39  cheap life assurance 
46.13       16.33  125 equity loan 
32.22       16.32  anti spam exchange 
32.09       16.31  credit equity home line 
103.44     16.30  att go phone 
46.72       16.30  dui florida lawyer 
37.97       16.27  hair removal new york 
20.14       16.22  vioxx class action suit 
31.32       16.14  merchant account international 
25.98       16.11  vioxx class action 
48.31       16.10  125 home equity loan 
44.40       16.10  life insurance quote online 
47.36       16.09  consolidation loan 
32.15       16.04  equity line of credit 
26.31       16.02  carolina law lemon north 
25.97       16.02  equity rates 
52.70       15.87  direct home insurance line 
30.84       15.86  angeles attorney los tax 
35.29       15.85  credit home line 
35.04       15.81  term insurance 
34.93       15.81  auto insurances 
61.54       15.80  debtfreedirect 
27.77       15.80  refinance comparison 
49.97       15.77  acid reflux treatment 
46.72       15.77  bad credit mortgage refinance 
42.56       15.73  college loan refinance 
27.42       20.80  refinancing with poor credit 
106.26     20.64  home equity loan 
41.31       20.64  action class lawsuit vioxx 
32.65       20.49  term life assurance 
42.74       20.47  e loan 
63.54       20.46  celebrex lawyer 
71.38       20.37  vasectomy reversal 
56.24       20.36  mortgage rates refinancing 
47.61       20.28  attorney law lemon 
36.13       20.28  consolidate student loans 
36.88       20.17  home equity loans 
50.75       20.11  mesothilioma 
43.02       19.99  new york personal injury lawyer 
27.42       19.98  home equity loan rates 
32.22       19.97  auto insurance quotes
64.02       19.93  georgia law lemon 
37.31       19.90  homeowner loans 
27.03       19.73  equity loan rates 
61.52       19.68  administration lease software 
100.26     19.63  egg credit card 
31.75       19.58  student consolidation loans 
65.83       19.55  microsoft anti spam 
136.53     15.66  mesothelioma lawsuits 
50.97       15.66  criminal diego lawyer san 
35.86       15.58  equity line 
37.11       15.54  credit equity home line rate 
44.22       15.53  attorney criminal miami 
35.93       15.52  equity home line 
35.31       15.51  florida medical malpractice lawyer 
26.04       15.51  california car cheap insurance 
103.88     15.49  law lemon virginia 
36.36       15.46  injury law new personal york 
34.45       15.46  auto law lemon 
34.25       15.44  refinancing rates 
32.72       15.43  cheap insurance term 
61.61       15.40  houston criminal attorney 
51.27       15.40  lexington law 
37.54       15.40  best equity home loan rate 
27.14       15.40  mortgage life assurance 
23.32       15.36  online help desk software 
70.97       15.35  phoenix criminal attorney 
73.47       15.34  federal criminal defense 
44.13       15.33  student loan refinancing 
20.86       15.33  angeles attorney dui los 
38.50       15.32  level term life insurance 
60.04       15.31  criminal lawyer phoenix 
30.69       15.31  critical illness insurance 
25.02       15.24  fx online trading 
92.95       15.23  att cingular 
35.40       15.20  equity credit line 
37.77       15.19  criminal dallas defense 
18.90       15.13  hair island laser long removal 
33.40      15.08  health insurance international
30.25      15.04  refinance rates 
20.44      15.03  debt cosolidation 
47.25      14.99  www eloan com 
35.49      14.99  law lemon pa 
43.88      14.95  2nd mortgage 
23.12      14.93  consolidate private student loans 
48.81      14.90  angeles attorney criminal los 
30.45      14.88  accident car lawyer new york 
27.80      14.81  student loans refinancing 
20.20      14.81  debt consolidation leads 
43.00      14.80  fortis health insurance 
22.23      14.80  hair laser nyc removal 
42.59      14.76  direct insurance life 
64.08      14.73  comcast broadband 
29.52      14.73  domain name availability 
57.63      14.69  cancer mesothelioma 
31.37      14.65  refinancing equity loans 
115.01    14.64  distance education degree online 
52.52      14.63  criminal attorneys 
31.80      14.63  consolidations loan student 
60.59      14.57  celebrex attorney 
41.00      14.57  refinance bad credit 
44.97      14.55  cancer asbestos 
36.34      14.50  car century insurance 
37.95      14.49  1031 tic 
44.22      14.47  adult merchant account 
25.78      14.47  arizona criminal lawyer 
20.60      14.47  home equity line of credit rate 
38.84      14.46  vioxx lawyer 
24.87      14.46  consolidation loans 
127.16    14.44  com personals yahoo 
48.22      14.44  at t com 
39.65      14.42  litigation funding 
27.56      14.38  commercial credit counseling 
40.41      14.34  no cost refinancing 
37.70      14.33  student consolidation 
62.02      14.25  insurance medical short term 
28.50      14.25  line of credit rates 
27.71      14.18  american relief tax 
23.80      14.18  currency online trading 
53.13      14.17  best home equity loan 
51.72      14.15  fortis insurance short term 
27.85      14.13  life assurance online 
24.86      14.12  consolidate my debt 
29.61      14.11  life insurance uk 
53.52      14.09  affordable term life insurance 
39.86      14.08  life assurance quote 
26.54      14.08  christian credit counseling 
22.82      14.08  hair jersey laser new removal 
46.70      14.06  accident attorney michigan 
49.61      14.03  att store wireless 
32.54      14.02  interest rate refinance 
29.54      14.01  company health insurance life mega 
31.23      14.00  arizona criminal attorney 
34.86      13.98  term life insurance 
25.35      13.98  home loans poor credit 
29.47      13.92  private loan consolidation 
27.37      13.92  cover critical illness insurance 
37.97      13.90  home equity credit 
38.00      13.85  student loan consolidation 
26.09      13.83  ca health in insurance 
59.29      13.82  criminal houston lawyer 
34.70      13.82  attorney california tax 
21.35      13.81  car insurance philadelphia 
29.88      13.80  recall vioxx 
42.66      13.79  alicante car in rental 
50.18      13.78  dallas criminal attorney 
59.11      13.77  attorney irs tax 
26.70      13.77  equity home line rate 
22.69      13.74  mortgage rates refinance 
36.65      13.73  lombard direct 
35.00      13.73  law lemon state 
35.74      13.72  low interest refinance 
33.38      13.71  mega life and health insurance company 
26.62      13.70  insurance quote term 
64.58      13.69  at and t cellular 
39.11      13.69  wells fargo home equity 
28.89      13.69  consumer credit consolidation 
47.29      13.68  ca insurance medical 
36.11      13.66  car law lemon 
35.52      13.65  21 car century insurance 
31.97      13.57  refinance student loans 
46.81      13.48  click affiliate 
81.23      13.47  hyip investment 
48.65      13.46  law lemon missouri 
35.70      13.44  christian counseling debt 
38.27      13.42  insurance online term 
19.25      13.41  home equity lines of credit 
19.60      13.40  equity lines of credit 
51.95      13.38  law lemon maryland 
28.39      13.38  law lemon ma 
68.70      13.37  care ge insurance long term 
68.11      13.36  comcast high speed internet 
28.09      13.36  critical illness cover 
45.56      13.35  discount term life insurance 
43.77      13.31  what is mesothelioma 
25.39      13.28  california dui attorney 
19.94      13.26  home equity line of credit loans 
47.04      13.23  criminal federal lawyer 
34.54      13.23  compare equity home loan 
29.72      13.23  online forex trading 
26.82      13.21  law lemon new york 
18.79      13.21  debit consolidation 
52.70      13.20  arizona divorce lawyer 
28.77      13.20  health life mega 
51.34      13.17  cal vet 
29.73      13.17  attack heart vioxx 
53.13      13.15  non profit debt 
37.31      13.15  home refinance rates 
23.51      13.14  desk help it software 
24.46      13.13  low interest home loans 
22.47      13.09  drug florida in rehab 
33.93      13.08  software anti spam 
21.51      13.08  litigation finance 
44.41      13.07  consolidating student loan 
218.38    13.05  yahoo personal ads 
35.31      13.05  vioxx attorney 
51.06      13.04  eloan com 
25.87      13.03  vioxx stroke 
18.85      13.02  debt consolidation programs 
84.91      13.01  masters degree education online 
53.56      12.99  law lemon new state york 
22.26      12.99  hair ny removal 
25.18      12.97  fixed home equity loan 
23.05      12.97  low interest refinancing 
63.77      12.96  personal injury solicitors 
42.54      12.95  harvard business review magazine 
40.43      12.95  new york personal injury 
29.05      12.95  125 home equity 
39.86      12.94  minnesota mortgage refinance 
25.88      12.94  law lemon rv 
65.87      12.93  florida law lemon 
41.43      12.93  homeowner loan 
86.48      12.91  acid reflux syndrome 
36.11      12.91  ford law lemon 
25.26      12.91  no closing cost refinancing 
25.64      12.90  car diego insurance san 
60.40      12.89  back hair laser removal 
74.91      12.88  attorney dui florida 
32.24      12.88  computer hire uk 
21.54      12.88  home equity lines 
49.36      12.87  anti spam lotus 
65.66      12.86  loan settlement 
29.60      12.86  high internet minnesota speed 
47.22      12.85  facial laser hair removal 
26.55      12.84  antispam exchange 
93.90      12.83  florida criminal defense attorney 
31.85      12.83  insurance online quote term 
55.68      12.82  careone 
46.58      12.82  life insurance online 
46.13      12.82  home refinance 
24.93      12.81  purchase domain name 
35.06      12.80  anti spam solutions 
36.29      12.79  refinancing loans 
41.75      12.78  dedicated windows hosting 
18.61      12.78  mortgages for people with bad credit 
93.02      12.77  comcast cable modem 
19.29      12.76  hair laser ny removal 
40.25      12.75  dedicated server hosting 
27.56      12.75  vioxx claim 
21.93      12.73  refinance interest rates 
110.18    12.71  mesothelioma treatment 
38.02      12.71  debt irs tax 
21.95      12.71  colorado hair laser removal 
25.22      12.68  term life insurance quote 
22.53      12.68  anti spam exchange 5.5 
53.56      12.67  tampa criminal attorney 
79.48      12.64  at and t cell 
42.72      12.62  dedicated hosting linux
27.27      12.62  125 second mortgage 
22.32      12.62  auto insurance quote 
131.11    12.61  online education master degree 
56.75      12.59  mesothelioma support 
25.35      12.59  criminal lawyer toronto 
22.78      12.59  arts degree liberal online 
26.10      12.58  refinance my mortgage 
26.69      12.55  medicine vioxx 
216.94    12.54  yahoo personals 
43.72      12.53  california criminal lawyer 
49.74      12.52  home loan preapproved 
35.00      12.52  best insurance life term 
19.86      12.50  life insurance no medical exam 
33.56      12.48  consolidate loan 
27.04      12.46  comparison insurance life 
33.93      12.42  car law lemon used 
17.18      12.42  refinance leads 
28.27      12.41  lending tree com 
24.65      12.36  christian drug rehab 
23.62      12.36  refinancing your home 
17.87      12.36  christian credit counselors 
19.48      12.35  equity lines 
29.28      12.32  law lawyer lemon 
40.33      12.31  domain name search 
38.40      12.30  best refinance rates 
84.31      12.27  rental computer 
31.77      12.26  insurance mortgage protection 
21.96      12.22  closing cost no refinance 
18.44      12.22  closing cost loan no 
25.21      12.21  auto cheap insurance 
45.84      12.20  health insurance for the self employed 
39.43      12.19  best hosting service web 
23.59      12.18  mortgage plan protection 
27.23      12.17  lowest refinancing rates 
19.79      12.17  angeles car insurance los 
37.25      12.15  refinance credit 
68.47      12.14  outsource help desk 
21.12      12.14  anti service spam 
19.60      12.14  fixed rate home equity loan 
32.41      12.13  consolidations loan 
21.72      12.13  ca health insurance 
20.95      12.13  refinance companies 
48.29      12.12  gophone 
46.43      12.12  mortgage refinance 
28.87      12.11  insurance life term uk 
34.45      12.09  treatments for prostate cancer 
33.95      12.08  equity home interest loan low 
27.59      12.08  hair laser male removal 
22.77      12.07  refinance my home 
65.66      12.06  direct insurance line pet 
24.89      12.06  refinance second mortgage 
30.94      12.05  bad credit refinancing 
27.45      12.05  consolidation loans uk 
22.90      12.05  debt consolidators 
25.67      12.02  online forex 
26.54      12.01  mega life and health insurance 
56.59      12.00  high speed internet deal 
48.84      11.98  college health insurance student 
18.15      11.96  car insurance seattle 
38.04      11.95  phone conferencing 
24.11      11.95  insurance medical private 
23.44      11.93  consolidating debt 
23.80      11.89  home refinancing rates 
35.54      11.88  anti server software spam 
21.62      11.88  medical billing software 
47.81      11.86  projector rental 
32.93      11.86  refinancing cost 
29.15      11.86  software help desk 
22.20      11.86  car insurance ny 
27.53      11.85  mega life and health 
18.55      11.85  hair laser removal tampa 
19.35      11.84  college online phoenix 
37.38      11.83  accident lawyer new york 
28.87      11.81  home equity interest 
31.04      11.79  refinance mortage 
31.06      11.78  vioxx 
59.36      11.77  personal injury lawyer michigan 
18.43      11.77  hair laser nj removal 
16.35      11.76  boston hair laser removal 
15.68      11.76  home loans for people with bad credit 
15.22      11.76  auto buy insurance online 
28.90      11.75  treatment for prostate cancer 
27.50      11.75  drug rehab residential 
16.28      11.75  norton finance 
27.43      11.72  no closing cost 
68.55      11.69  at t wireless service 
35.52      11.69  computer rental uk 

Similar Posts:

• Top Most Expensive Google Adsense Keywords List for 2010
• Highest and top Paying Google AdSense Keywords List 2009
• Top Most Expensive Vs Most Profitable Google Adsense Keywords
• So many affiliate programs around! Which one is right for you?
• Good Adbrite Paying Keywords that Make Money

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

1. Applying high dense of keyword and bunching them can give negative impact on your website which is known as SPAM. So when you distribute keywords in the content use common sense, make sure your content makes sense and it looks natural to search engine. If you dump bunch of keywords without any meaning it will be considered as SPAM and it will bring negative effect on your website.

2. Poor quality and lack of content both are very common problem. If you try to use all your keywords in such little content, it will seem you are trying to staff your keyword. The result is poor quality content. You can improve your content by re-writing, that can give content more natural look to search engine bots and visitors.

3. Highly competitive keywords can often expensive to target. For an example imagine the business you do not directly deal with very generic keywords, ‘buy cloths’, because it is very expensive to reach and your customer is focused on boutique dresses or boutique clothing. Does it mean you have to give up? Certainly not but where can you fit those keywords which make sense and keep the content natural? ‘FAQ’ and ‘About’ pages you cannot ignore. Using generic keywords on them properly will help you more to define product and they also represents valuable resource for internal link building.

4. Using long-tail keywords gear-up your website visitor. Place long-tail keywords in main body as well as post titles, distributed PR and relevant image alt tags allowing your site to appear for alternatives. Use variation of long-tail keywords.

5. Once you break down website structure and go deep into site, you can use keywords across the different facets. Make sure your site has keywords in http://increasetraffic.co.nz/7-tips-to-drive-more-traffic-from-facebook-to-your-website-or-blog/ http://increasetraffic.co.nz/7-tips-to-drive-more-traffic-from-facebook-to-your-website-or-blog/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:58:28 +0000 increasetraffic http://increasetraffic.co.nz/7-tips-to-drive-more-traffic-from-facebook-to-your-website-or-blog/ Facebook is the largest social network site at this moment which gained much popularity in last few years. There were many social network sites before but none of them could reach that much popularity like Facebook . Today Facebook has become most acceptable social media to people. People using Facebook for promoting products or services, pursuing clients or even driving traffic to blogs or websites. In this article you will get clear idea about how to target visitors from Facebook and drive them to your blog or website.

Building a complete and organize profile is very important. You also have to consider building a good network, building a social group or you can also use Facebook social ads. I have listed few steps that will show you how to drive more traffic using Facebook to your website or blog.

Create a great profile page: First of all make a good profile, tell people more about you, write a good bio, interest, your background and talk about your product as well. Put some good content in it which will grow peoples interest about your or your product. Use your picture which will make your profile more acceptable to people.

Build a network: Friends are the most important thing in social networking site. If you create your page and forget about it then it is not going to bring anything for you. So invite your friends, partners, people you know or similar interests. Make sure you never spam, this is not the way to encourage people to join your network. Try to make conversation with people.

You have to post regularly: Posting regularly is the best recipe for success on Facebook. You need to understand that if you don’t publish new content regularly, the traffic to your Facebook profile and correspondingly the traffic to your website will automatically get slow and may affect the traffic. The chances are very high that you may not be able to post on a daily basis, so the best thing that you can do is try to do it as frequently as you can. If nothing else then you may also try to update your status regularly.

You can also start a group: Start a group about something related to your business and invite people to join it. Following this method has a great advantage as this approach is the simplest way of getting the targeted visitors who are only interested in your profile, product or your services, etc.

You can also use Facebook social ads: If you are unable to get target visitors the most appropriate and effective way you can get the traffic is by using Facebook Social ads. These are just like PPC ads and starting a campaign is similar to an AdWords campaign.

Give away free stuff.Everyone likes free stuff like: free plugins , free reviews or even free backlinks .It doesn’t have to be big. Anything that is helpful and related to your niche will be greatly appreciated by your friends.

Use the Notes and Events features.Sending notes and events are great ways at gaining more exposure in your business.If your friends like that note, they could forward it to their friends.It’s a win-win situation.

Similar Posts:

• 10 ways to drive massive traffic to your blog
• Off-Page SEO: 21 ways to build search engine ranking
• Tips for using affiliate programs and affiliate marketing on blog
• Twitter auto following tools and script for automation and marketing
• SEO Keyword Tips

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

Here’s three items on the list of checklist to ensure that your site is able to capture users for long term benefits. The three simple ways to dramatically improve your website are as follows:

Mental Note 1 – Get them Hooked

The internet has changed since the old days back in 2004, there are a lot of things happening on screen that distracts your users’ attention. Browsers with multiple tabs also then to fight for attention, apart from this you still have real world distractions to compete with like answering phone calls, etc. Before long your user forgets what they have been reading or the site they were visiting. I bet this happens too many of us.

Provide tools to allow visitors to bookmark your article or site easily. The best place is to have it position near the top of the article. Also note that you should only display 3 bookmark links and an option to select others so as to not let the bookmarking tool snatch attention away from the page content. You can try out tools like addthis helps websites add a simple bookmarking tool

Mental Note 2 – Show the Visitor What They Want

You manage to attract visitors to your site and they feel complied to click through to your inner pages. Your site is content rich, however they can’t find the content that they are looking for. This isn’t good as it is commonly known when you present users with too much choice they tend not to make any decisions.

So to tackle this, make sure your site layout and content structure is properly sorted out. You would need to have clear navigation menus or breadcrumbs to allow users to navigate across the entire site. Having a HTML sitemap is also an essential item as this provides visitors with a bird’s eye view of your site structure.

Mental Note 3 – Use Nice Smoothing Colours

Ever been to a site that turns you offer visually upon arrival? In the past, there were many badly made websites. This has since changed, however there are still some design mistakes made by designers or site owners that do turn off users visually.

As a rule of thumb, always use web safe colours like white background, with dark font colours. Make sure the font size is also within an acceptable height and width. I normally use 11 pixel points for most of my sites. That’s the font size that works best for me. However do ask your readers if that’s the best size for them.

Do you have another mental note on how to dramatically improve your website’s performance, why not share a tip or so here – Drop a comment or contact me

3. Don’t Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You

If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to read the content of your homepage – never mind create an email from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in touch with you – all they need to do is pop in their name, email address and tick a few boxes and that’s it.

Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn’t the only reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can get some information back from each person that fills in the form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which other websites they like to visit – you can ask them anything! Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more about who they are and more about what will make them buy from you. You think they would tell you all this if they were creating an email from scratch? No – of course they wouldn’t! That’s why you need a form.Similar Posts:

• SEO Traffic Vs Blogging Traffic Generation for Website
• 15 Video SEO Tips for Video Search Optimization
• Free Email Marketing Website
• Simple steps to increase page views on your blog
• 15 effective ways to make your blog comments more noticeable

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

So if you want to inspire your blog readers to comment more on your post follow the points:

Regular posting on blog: Post your blog regularly. If you make three post in a week or post daily one topic, stick with your schedule. It is very important to post regular on your blog.

Do Follow your blog comment: Come on guys! its not end of the world! Remove your no follow evil tag from your blog and let your user know about it. It is certain that your comment will increase overnight. You can use do follow plugin for wordpress. Do follow plugin for wordpress.

Replay readers comments: As a blogger, your active participation encourage your blogger to involve in more conversation and end of the result your will get more comments.

Ask your user feedback: Leave a not end of your post like “Please leave your feedback” or “We would love to hear from you”.

Praise or highlight good comments: You can encourage your user by rewarding them. Highlight good comments and you can use show top commentators or you can use linking good posts from top commenter’s blogs. You don’t have to worry about so much about it. If you are wordpress blogger you will find lots of plug-in around. CommentLuv is a very good wp plugin for it.

Make the comment easy: I leave lot of comment on blogs in a week but sometimes i don’t leave comment on deserving post. The reason is few sites comment policy seems hard for me such as registration for comment is really hard for me. You must thinking i am lazy but if you do not open your comment for guest user your comment will drop rapidly. So open your comment for your blog user.

Notify user of new comments: if you have a wordpress blog, you can install this plugin Subscribe to comments . It gives user an option to subscribe them to your comments.

Hope it is useful to you. Thanks for reading my blog..Similar Posts:

• 15 effective ways to make your blog comments more noticeable
• How to find nofollow blogs and why you should avoid nofollow blogs?
• Simple steps to increase page views on your blog
• Link-building Tips: Tips on using Dofollow Blogs to Build Backlinks
• SEO Tips: Avoid seo mistakes in wordpress blog

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

These past few weeks I’ve watched how things played out in the blogosphere after breaking the story of Google’s new “unavailable_after” tag. I have to say that what I learned was extremely interesting and educational to me! I have been writing articles for the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and other publications for many years and have seen bits and pieces of my work get picked up in various places; however, it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame when you break an important news story.

Sharing What I Learned
As with most of my more popular newsletter articles, requests for republishing started coming in soon after it was published. What made this one different was that many of the more popular bloggers in the search marketing space picked up the news quickly — and then things really went crazy.

A Google search this past weekend for “unavailable_after” brought up 93,000 results! I don’t know for sure, but I imagine there weren’t any results for this phrase previously, or at least very few. 93,000 pages all mentioning unavailable_after and, presumably, my original article. Pretty cool, eh? Unfortunately, it’s not as cool as it appears at first glance.

The Rankings Letdown
For one thing, I kind of expected that my original article would be showing at the top of the search results, but it wasn’t even close! Although, when I looked at it with my SEO eye, I had to smack myself because there were good reasons why it wasn’t in the top. For one, the unavailable_after tag wasn’t the focus of my article since it was a synopsis of everything Dan Crow had discussed at the SEMNE event. For another, “unavailable_after” wasn’t even in my article’s Title tag, again, because it wasn’t the focus.

But What About the Links?
I did think that all the links pointing to the original article should have given it more “oomph” to rank for that phrase despite the fact that the article wasn’t optimized for it, but apparently they didn’t. The good news is that the article does rank #1 for “getting into Google” as one would expect, which in the long run is probably much more important!

My SEO Efforts
I was still intrigued (and slightly annoyed) about not ranking for “unavailable_after,” so I added it to my Title tag and the top headline to see if that would have any effect. As of today, Google hasn’t re-indexed the page, so the jury is still out on that one. I also began reviewing the pages that were showing up before mine in the search results. What I found was an enlightening look at the SEO blogosphere. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always pretty, and at the end of my review I was pretty disgusted with some bloggers.

The 10 Types of Bloggers
Here are the results of my review and the 10 types of bloggers I found. You’ll notice that they range from good to bad to sleazy.

1. Good: People who ask permission to reprint your article and add a bio with links back as requested.
These are people who are generally looking to add some content to their own sites. They usually republish the article in full, and are happy to add whatever bio and links you specify.

2. Good: People who republish without asking permission but at least link back to the original article.
I don’t really have a problem with the folks who haven’t asked permission if they at least have the courtesy of linking back to the original article. Sure, it’s not as great as controlling what the links say in a bio, but it’s generally fine.

3. Good: People who blog about something you wrote and who link to your original article, providing their own unique commentary or spin to go with it.
This is the best type of blog post as it isn’t a complete dupe of yours, and it gives credit where credit is due. Watch out, however, as sometimes these types of blog posts are critical of what you’re written. Personally, I have no problem whether people agree or disagree as that’s the foundation for blogging.

4. Okay: People who blog about what some other blogger blogged about, and link to both the original article and the blogger’s commentary.

I probably should put this one in the “good” category — as it really is fine — but it still is irksome when the secondary blogger’s post seems to get more credit than the original piece.

5. Bad: People who blog about what some other blogger blogged about it (as in #4 above), but who link back only to the blogger and not the original.

I was surprised at how prevalent this one was. I don’t think that most people intend to snub the original author, but it happens a lot! Sure, you could say it’s okay because the post they DO link to posts that link back to the original, but that’s just not good enough. I strongly believe that the original writer should get credit where credit is due in a more direct manner.

6. Bad: People who blog on the topic and then Digg their OWN post instead of the original.
I almost put this in the “sleazy” category, but I guess it’s sort of borderline. It seems to me if the topic is Digg-worthy, it should be the original article or post that gets Digged. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case.

7. Sleazy:People who don’t ask to republish but do it anyway, and don’t even link back!
When they don’t even put the original author’s name on it, I believe it’s copyright infringement. If they do mention the author’s name, but never link back to them in some manner, it’s pretty sleazy in my book.

8. Sleazy: Scrapers who link or don’t link, but add contextual link ads and other crap to the content.
Unfortunately, this is extremely prevalent these days. I would guess that a good portion of those 93,000 results in Google fall into this category. I can’t imagine those pages actually get any traffic, so I’m not sure what the point is.

The next 2 don’t quite fit into the good, bad, or sleazy categories, but were additional types I noted:

9. Strange: People who blog but somehow get their facts wrong.

One post got the name of the organization (SEMNE) wrong and called it SEMPO. I’m not sure why or how, as it was right there in black and white. I don’t believe there was any malicious intent going on, but it was strange nonetheless. (It was corrected immediately upon notification, so that was good!)

10. Dumbasses:People who just blog it cuz everyone else is.

Good blog posts are good for a reason. Simply writing about something because everyone else has is not a good blog post. ‘Nuff said!

And on that note, I implore you to look at your own blogging practices to see if you fit in any of the categories above. If so, here’s hoping it’s one of the good ones!

—
Jill Whalen is the CEO of High Rankings, a Boston SEO Consulting Agency.Similar Posts:

• Quick tips to make your blog seo friendly
• 8 quick tips for blog seo
• Five common SEO mistakes a webmaster can make
• 5 ways to get indexed by google in one day
• Image SEO Tips – Add Alt and Title Attributes to Images

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

You’ll discover:

* Why SEO Copywriting Still Matters
* How Search Engines Work
* Why You Have to Spoon Feed Search Engines
* The 5 Essential Elements of Keyword Research
* How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves
* Five Link Building Strategies That Work
* Five Areas to Focus On for Effective SEO Copywriting
* Why Writing for People Works for Search Engines
* How to Make SEO Copywriting Simple

Instant Download Link

A post from http://scribeseo.com about content writing.Similar Posts:

• How can squidoo boost your website traffic and build links?
• Link-building Tips: Tips on using Dofollow Blogs to Build Backlinks
• Maximize your Adsense Income with Keyword Country
• Tips and tricks for affiliate marketers
• Google Backlink Building Tips: 11 Ways to Fast Indexed & Start Building Backlinks by Google

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

1. Buzzom is a nice free online service to mass follow and unfollow Twitter users. Apart from this, Buzzom also lets you mass unfollow those who are not following you back, or mass follow those who you are not following. All this for free. login with your twitter id and click on “Twitter Account Management” to mange your twitter account. You can find your targeted followers by keywords. Buzzom is really worth going twitter account management tools.

2. FlashTweetFlashTweet is a mass follow tool that simplifies the process of adding your twitter friends. You can see who you are following that is following you back, mass follow users based on search terms and even unfollow multiple friends at once.

3. Refollow
Refollow helps you discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle. Refollow calls itself a “Twitter Relationship Manager”. Some of its features includes:

* Manage Your Friends and Followers
* Sort by Relationship
* Discover Relevant Users
* Batch Follow/Unfollow
* Lock Relationships

It is a very simple and user friendly application. I have personally started using it for @TwitdomUpdates to determine whom to follow.

4. Doesfollow
DoesFollow is a simply Twitter application that tells you if a particular Twitter user is following another Twitter user. You need to enter both the Twitter user Ids and it will respond back with a “Yup” or a “Nope”!

5. Twittangle
TwitTangle is a free service that helps you untangle the mess of having too many friends on twitter.

6. Tweeter Tags
Tweeter Tags makes it easy to declare your interests and find new, like-minded friends.

7. MrTweet
Helping you find great people and followers relevant to your interests.

8. Twalala
Using twalala, you can filter tweets out of your stream by keywords and phrases or mute individuals who get a bit too chatty.

9. Twitnest
Interesting visualization of your followers and their followers.

10. Twittersnooze
It’s a good tool to avoid a blast of tweets from a conference you are not attending… just snooze the conference goers for a few days.

11. Twimailer

Tired of shallow e-mails from Twitter when someone follows you? Want to know more about the people who are following you? Twimailer is a free service that delivers that information right to your inbox!

12. MyCleener is yet another tool that will help us automatically unfollow all the inactive accounts based on when their last tweet was, and help you save your follow number.

13. Twitter Karma
Bulk management of followers and those you are following.

14. Tweepler
Tweepler Is an easy, more enjoyable way of processing your New Twitter Followers.

15. TweetSum
TweetSum does one thing and does it well: we show you at a glance who’s following you, give you the tools you need to decide whether you should follow them back or not.

16. Twitoria
Twitoria finds your friends that haven’t tweeted in a long time so you can give them the boot!

17. Mutuality
Mutuality is a simple service which allow you to make bulk operations with your account.

18. TweetEffect

Find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you. Simply enter your Twitter ID in the following form.

19. TweepMe
TweepMe is the 100% opt-in group of Twitter users who all chose to follow each other on Twitter.

20. TwitterLess

Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views.

21. TwitterRatio

Your Twitter Ratio is the ratio of your followers to friends (or people who you follow). It is measured with the TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio).

22. FriendOrFollow

Who are you following that’s not following you back? Who’s following you that you’re not following back? Find out!

23. TweepDiff
Compare Twitter friends and followers.

24. Twollo
Find and Follow Twitterers with similar interests to you.

25. Twitter100

With Twitter100, you can see your followers at a glance (up to 100).

26. iFollowBack

Follow back people.

27. Twtrfrnd

A new follower? Should you follow back? Find out if you have common followings with them, and which people you follow that follow them.

28. FriendMePlease

Everyone wants more friends. We just make it easy.

29. TwitHive
Monitor and Interact with the Twitter Hive Mind.

30. Foller.Me
Before you follow.

31. FollowLists

Create and share lists of your Twitter friends.

32. Tweepi is a simple collection of Twitter tools; each tool is designed to make a certain aspect of your Twitter experience and interactions simpler and more enjoyable! Follow Utility, Flush Utility, Reciprocate Utility, Cleanup Utility.

34. Twitter Follower is a Twitter application launched by John Chow that allows you to mass follow/unfollow users from their database.

35. InstaFollow is a free application that allows you to follow people with similar interests as you. Just Enter your Twitter username and password and you will be logged into your twitter account through InstaFollow. Enter your interests and InstaFollow will search the Twittersphere and hand pick users to follow based on your interests!

36. TwitterBatcher is a Twitter mashup that allow you to easily follow many people in 3 simple steps.

37. Tweet Flock is an easy to use online tool to manage multiple Twitter accounts. A simple registration process is required to access the features. Some of the features that it supports:
Easily manage your followers, Easily manage users that you are following, Find new friends, Update tweet status for multiple twitter accounts, Delete direct messages from a specific user, Follow followers (every 12 hours), Scheduled tweets (every hour and every day), Delete spam from direct messages (every hour)

38. Taweet is a free Twitter application that allows people and businesses to streamline promotional scheduling for events, product launches, lifecasting and more! Taweet is focused on promoting the topics of your Future Tweets (FT) up until they occur to create buzz or to share with friends. Taweet offers a familiar user interface where you can create and manage your Future Tweets and also view your Twitter stream, replies and messages.

39. Untweeps is one of the best ones out there. It lets you find out the tweeps out of your followers who have not updated within a specified number of days (you can decide how many days is it) and lets you unfollow them. Extremely helpful when it comes to keeping your followers group healthy.

40. Twittaquitta , Use Twittaquitta to catch all people who stopped following you on Twitter. This service aims to let you take care of catching people who stopped following you by sending out a notification email when someone has stopped following you. You sign in with your Twitter screen name and provide an email, and from that point onwards you will be notified on the spot.
when someone deserts you.

Bonuse
JustUnfollow is a Twitter tools that allows you to unfollow those users who do not follow you back. It does not give you an option to do bulk unfollows. You need to unfollow each user separately.

Similar Posts:

• Twitter auto following tools and script for automation and marketing
• Twitter SEO Tips, Top ten SEO and Traffic Tips for twitter
• Free Email Marketing Website
• 3 Simple Ways To Rapidly Improve Website
• 11 best free seo tools for your daily use

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

9 website keyword research and analysis tools for webmasters below

1. The Google keywords tool
My experience with this tool has been all over the map. At times it has proven to be balls on accurate and other times it seems to have seriously flawed data both in the competitive nature of search terms and the traffic currently being seen within Google. Once you log in to the tool you can fire when ready, everyone knows for the most part what their select few targeted keywords might be, so this is where you should start. Enter you top 5-10 keywords that you think would be good (do not forget to use both singular and plural). Google will suggest related terms. Google helps you gather your keyword list, which is not surprising as it is in Google’s best interest for websites to be prepared to optimize their websites for the appropriate keywords as this will make their job much easier.

2. Keywordspy
Keyword Spy has software tools designed to help you improve your own pay-per-click campaign by getting a look at those of your competitors. Within seconds you can review what keywords they are bidding on, the bid amount and a whole host of other information. The theory is that your top competitors know which keywords work and which ones don’t. You can then export those same keywords to drive traffic to your own site.

3. Wordtracker
You don’t realize it yet, but in the next 2 minutes you’re going to learn how wordtracker keyword research tool will help you discover profitable market for your business. This keyword research software program is a very useful tool that will help you identify appropriate keyword and key phrases to help you target your customers in both your search engine optimization and pay per click search engine marketing. Effective keyword research is at the core of online marketing and can mean the difference between your success and failure. So if you seriously want to win the search engine game, then this is an essential tool to have. Wordtracker offers a massive 340 million keyword database with tools that makes mining the information easy.

4. Spyfu
SpyFu is the tool for you to spy on your online competitors and find out where you can make more money than they are which h niches you can compete and which keywords are better not to pay for. Using the SpyFu system will allows you to know better about the competition you face when you upload a PPC campaign or trying to rank for certain keywords, and to have better calculation of your investments and revenue from each. The best thing you can do, using the SpyFu program is to learn more about your competitors in each and every market you face.

5. Keyworddiscovery
Keyword Discovery gives you all kinds of great information as it collects keyword data from over 180 search engines worldwide  and compiles a range of search related statistics. With a database of over 32 billion searches tracked over 12 months, Keyword Discovery is one of the most comprehensive keyword research services available. It can help you identify the keyword that your customers are using, related keywords you need to look at, common spelling mistakes as well as how your industry keywords are impacted by seasonal search trends.

6. Wordze
WordZe is quite simply one of the most popular, effective choices in such software available on the market today.

7. Seodigger
SEODigger is a brilliant new SEO Keyword Selection and Keyword Competition tool that shaves literally hours off the time it takes to perform extensive keyword research for SEO/SEM uses. Not only is it incredibly powerful, it’s free! SEODigger has a clean, simple interface and provides an incredible amount of keyword data with minimal effort on your behalf. Simply enter the URI of a domain or link into the query field and SEO Digger will report all individual keyword phrase for which the address has a top 20 Google ranking.

8. Keywordcountry
Keyword Country is an interesting service that has taken a very serious approach to maximizing your profits from AdSense. There are quite a few keyword lists that claim to give you the highest paying AdSense keywords. Many of these tend to top out at about 100,000 keywords, don’t provide much of an interface to search on and become stale very quickly. Keyword Country has gone the extra metaphorical mile and has a huge list that is 60 times bigger than many other guys’ with over 6.52 million keywords and growing. Quite a feat! They say they are constantly expanding.

9. Keyword Suggestion Tools
This keyword suggestion tool will help you with the choosing of the right keywords for your website. You can see which keyword combination’s are more popular and also get ideas for more keyword combination’s. Those keyword popularity results are extracted from two sources – Keyword Discovery and Overture. Now you can check both databases in one go.

Hope it is useful to you, thanks for reading this blog.Similar Posts:

• Maximize your Adsense Income with Keyword Country
• Affordable Internet marketing Solution
• Tips to find most cost effective pay per click advertising
• Tips and tricks for affiliate marketers
• 11 best free seo tools for your daily use

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

http://buzznet.com/
Buzznet.com is a photo, journal, and video-sharing social media network. Like other social networking sites, Buzznet is a place for members to share content based on their personal interests. Unlike classic social networks, which focus primarily on messaging and profile pages, Buzznet members participate in communities that are created around ideas, events and interests; most predominantly, music, celebrities and the media.

http://www.flixya.com/
Flixya is a social network that puts 100% ad revenue in your pocket. We’ve built the tools for you to share your videos, photos, and blogs. Your place to make friends, earn money, network and more.

http://www.gofish.com/
Go Fish is a largish hosting site which helps you promote your directorial skills. The primary objective of this site is to give you your 15 minutes of fame. Documentaries, comedies, spoofs, pranks, and even episodic dramas – all are welcome here. The interface is pretty dense (and dark) and will particularly appeal to the gamers. It’s pretty easy to use though. If you’re seeking a wide exposure for your work, this could be the host for you.

http://www.video.google.com/
Google Videos is a free video sharing website and also a video search engine from Google Inc. Google Videos allows selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provides the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube. This allows for websites to host large amounts of video remotely on Google Videos without running into bandwidth or storage capacity issues.

http://www.youtube.com
This is the big boy for Internet video hosting – How to upload your videos to YouTube. Youtube uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos.  Unregistered users can watch the videos, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos.

http://www.photobucket.com
Photobucket was just a image hosting site before but now they have included video uploading and sharing feature.Photobucket offers image hosting, free photo sharing and video sharing. Upload your photos, host your videos, and share them with friends and family.

http://www.videojug.com
1000s of how videos and articles. You can upload your own videos and take part in the busy discussion forums by posting questions and responding to other users’ questions, either by using text or your webcam.

http://blip.tv
blip.tv is a free videoblogging, podcasting and video sharing service. If you don’t have a blog, they will give you one, and if already have one, they will help make it a show. BlipTV is another IVM fave rave. Highly rated by PC World and Business 2.0 magazines this site syndicates its content with the likes of AOL Video, Yahoo! Video, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MSN Video, Google Video etc. thus effectively multiplying your reach by millions. If you’ve got what it takes to create a great show, it may even get broadcast on this TV channel that blip.tv owns. And if your show’s a hit, they allow you to pick your own advertisers and earn revenue. Flash, QuickTime, DivX, 3gp – more or less all major formats are supported.

http://www.metacafe.com/
Metacafe is of the world’s largest video sites, serving a vast smorgasbord of best videos, funniest movies and clips.

http://www.veoh.com/
Veoh provides free access to all of the great TV and film studio content, independent productions, and user-generated videos on the Web

http://www.atom.com/
AtomFilms was one of the first Internet Video hosting and distribution services – it is still one of the best. Successful user video uploads at Atom reach a huge audience, earn money, and can gain distribution across the Web, on phones, and even on Comedy Central.

http://dailymotion.com
DailyMotion collects the latest music videos, short movies, TV shows, funny and extreme videos from a  variety of web sites in addition to creating their own original content. You can also upload, share, and embed your videos

http://www.collegehumor.com
CollegeHumor showcases hilarious original videos, articles, contests, and interactive features, as well as pictures and videos submitted by fans like you. Humor is not for kids….

http://www.howcast.com
Are you an expert? Howcast welcomes experts from across the web to share their how-to videos with interested viewers on Howcast.com, the Howcast Distribution Network, and Howcast Mobile.

http://www.brightcove.com/en/
Brightcove lets you build and launch your own internet TV station. You can have your channel up and running within minutes and retain full control over the program schedule. Videos uploaded by other users can be incorporated into your shows too. Your channel is syndicated with other major players on the net and you can earn revenue through advertising as well as video sales. Features a pretty eye-candy interface.

http://www.clipshack.com/
ClipShack is a community for videophiles – a place for sharing your videos with the world. Its run by Reality Digital, Inc. – a company with years of experience in catering to the multimedia needs of the corporate sector. Pretty basic interface.

http://www.flicklife.com
FlickLife counts among the handful of revenue sharing hosts that there are. You get to broadcast your own videos to the world at no cost at all and yet get some moollah in return. Features buddy lists. FlickLife is a privately owned company based in Columbus, Ohio.

http://lulu.tv
Lulu boasts an array of high class editors, designers, writers and marketers who have worked in the publishing industry and are dedicated to ensuring your book meets and exceeds industry standards. Whether you choose a publishing or marketing pack or an individual service like cover design, you can be assured your manuscript will be handled with care and professionalism.

http://www.flukiest.com/
Flukiest is an interactive community for sharing and managing digital media by artists, photographers, designers, musicians, writers, directors, producers, and technologists – which in other words mean it’s a photo and video hosting service. There seems to be a tagging engine at large judging from the humongous tag-cloud you encounter on the front page. Other services include email, buddy list, forums, blog and a separate music video section.

http://www.flurl.com/
FLURL allows you to upload and share videos under a set of pre-existing categories. Their rating system consists of a meter that displays the FLURL or HURL rating of a video. Adult content can be found profusely (there’s a separate above 18 section). Adult Filtering options are available but turned off by default for any new visitors.

http://www.kewego.de/
This is a German service and the interface language is Deutsch. However, the registration process and controls are pretty similar to any of the common video hosts – so you shouldn’t find it too difficult to make your way around this one, even if you don’t know the language. Incidentally, there is a small link right at the bottom of the page that allows you to switch to the English version. Keep in mind though – majority of the audience is German.

http://www.livedigital.com/
A community based video sharing service with specialised channels where you can upload related videos. Consequently jumping channels brings up a horde of thematic videos. Permitted uploads include photos, audio tracks and videos. Features nearly unlimited (?) uploads – which in other words mean that they probably have paid, high-storage plans as well. There’s an inbuilt social networking feature in this and hence they allow you to deck up your profile in your own way using an advanced template creator. Drag & drop functionality for quick setup of photo / video journals.

http://www.livevideo.com/
Channels, Favorites, Subscriptions, Videos, Photos – nothing out of the place that can make this service really stand out. It’s got a good blend of general features including a Hit or Miss rating system. However, it’s probably one of the very few which offer direct recording from webcams (see Viddler and VideoEgg).

http://www.myubo.com/
Myubo comes in four linguistic flavours – Czech, Deutsch, English and Slovak. It sports a mechanism to upload, view and share live and pre-recorded video via mobile 2.5G and 3G networks such as GPRS, EDGE, CDMA or UMTS, web and fixed IP networks. Pretty much covers the whole consumer wireless spectrum. Among offered features are channel based organisation, Mobile TV and user communities.

http://revver.com/revver/
Revver has a clever mechanism that helps it track and monetize the uploaded videos as they spread virally across the internet – so “no matter where your creativity travels, you benefit“. Your uploaded video is paired with a targeted advertisement and the revenue is split 50/50 with you. Those who share and spread the videos get to keep part of the spoils too. 20% of the ad revenue is handed to them. Of particular interest to the developers is the Revver API, which allows one to build a video-sharing site complete with user accounts, uploading, sharing tools and access to the full Revver library of videos. The bandwidth is covered by Revver and the ad revenue is split three ways – you, Revver and the content creator.

http://www.selfcasttv.com/
A basic hosting service with standard features and channel-based organisation. Allows adult content and has a SafeSearch filter in place. One upper it has compared to other services is that it allows for direct mobile based uploads through MMS (currently in UK & Europe only).

http://www.soapbox.msn.com/
This is one service that I probably don’t have much to talk about. It’s part of the reknowned MSN Suite of online applications. Offers all the standard bookmarking, commenting, tagging, rating and sharing features and has it’s own flash-based player.

http://www.spike.com/
A service by iFILM that has an extensive library of movie clips, music videos, short films, video game trailers, action sports and its popular ‘viral videos’ collection. Since October 2005, it’s a part of the Viacom network – so one can definitely trust this one. Of course you can expect all the latest and hottest of the videos here and can upload your own too. Has clips of daily TV shows from around the world.

http://www.divx.com/stage6/
A video hosting service by DivX for people who love videos. DivX, if you remember, is the group which came up with a similarly named format of video encoding for online distribution. DivX videos can be of pretty high quality and are rendered through a custom player which is available as a plug-in for most famous browsers. According to the Stage6 team, “Anyone can become a publisher, anyone can build an audience and every video available on Stage6 is compatible with over 70 million consumer electronics devices from every major manufacturer, making it easy to play back Stage6 videos on your television or portable device.“

http://www.uvouch.com/
Another site that offers all the standard features – video sharing & organisation, social networking, discussion groups, playlists, customisable profiles etc. There’s rating system in place with which you can vouch for other’s content. Allow for direct importing of videos from other hosting sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Grouper, Myspace etc. Has a couple of widgets & gadgets for your site / blog.

http://www.videoegg.com/
VideoEgg features one of the slickest interfaces I’ve come across and offers a bag of really useful online video manipulation tools (cropping, resizing, direct recording etc.). Allows sharing through email, direct HTML embedding and Permalinks. The videos are displayed through their own interactive embeddable flash-based player. High-end sites with > 1 million visitors per month can sign-up for a revenue sharing partnership where ads are displayed beside each video and the revenue handed down to the partner. Employs content-filtering to weed out inappropriate videos.

http://www.vimeo.com/
Another cool video hosting service that has been around since end 2004 and reflects the Web 2.0 genre of web-design. They share helpful pointers with you in case you’re lacking ideas regarding creation of unique video content. In action are a bunch of highly configurable privacy options with which you can create fine-grained access control lists to allow only select group of people to view your videos. In short, you choose who exactly sees which of your videos. Has
personalised homepage where you can neatly arrange all of your favorite videos. Allows tagging of videos.

http://zeec.de/
Zeec is another German video hosting service that you won’t find so difficult to navigate around. This one too allows you to directly record / update videos off your webcam. The interface follows the Web 2.0 ideal and has a vague resemblance to the Last.FM music cum social networking site.

http://www.zippyvideos.com/
This one offers your own sub-domain under ZippyVideos to host your profile (e.g. profile.zippyvideos.com). Unlimited uploads are permitted pertaining to the fact that no single upload is greater than 20MB. Privacy options, video organisation and social networking are an integral part of the package.

http://www.zoopy.com/
Zoopy proudly presents itself as South Africa’s first video and photo sharing social network. It’s a pretty basic service with an easy-going note that can be spotted all over the site. There’s a standing challenge that attempts to coax the hidden director in you to come out into the limelight.

if you have more video hosting websites please add this on comment, publish your video on different video hosting sites and drive more traffic on your website. Hope it would be useful, cheers..Similar Posts:

• Video Marketing: Submit videos and Video RSS/MRSS Feeds
• Basic SEO Guideline for Optimizing Video Content for Search Engine
• 5 Basic Tips for Video SEO
• 15 Video SEO Tips for Video Search Optimization
• High PR social bookmarking dofollow sites for link building

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

Google Webmaster Tools

This free google SEO tool gives me valuable insights into my visibility in the SERPs and key performance metrics. The two features I use the most are the organic click-through-rates of my top 100 pages and the internal links analysis, so I can discover and track which pages on my site are pointing to one another. Google Webmaster Tools also publishes your inbound links too, but Yahoo Link Domain does a more thorough analysis, while Majestic SEO is the most comprehensive in my opinion. Also, Google, if you’re listening, the ability to identify nofollow inbound links and filter them out of results would be a bonus.

Google Alerts

I use Google Alerts as an SEO tool to monitor anyone talking about my target keywords or anyone writing or posting about competitors. Anytime I see a post on my target SEO keyword, I see it as an opportunity to reach out to the blogger and put WordStream on their radar, which creates opportunities for future posts about us because experience has shown that if the author likes writing about our niche or our competitors, chances are that person will write about us. And where there’s content, there are back links.

Ping.fm

Tired of waiting for your new content to get indexed? Ping.fm gets new content indexed fast. The platform is actually meant for posting a single message to more than 40 different social networking sites at once. But I use it primarily to push new content to social sites because they’re constantly getting crawled, which means my content gets found much faster and indexed by the engines often in a matter of hours rather than days. And the faster your content gets indexed, the faster it ranks. Sure it’s a little spammy, but my intentions are good. Twitter purists, don’t fret. I never use Ping.fm for mass Tweeting.

The FREE Keyword Tool

This free SEO tool we use every day is our own FREE Keyword Tool, which is the fastest, most accurate, most comprehensive keyword suggestion tool available. The FREE Keyword Tool aggregates over 1 billion unique keywords, representing over a trillion search queries, and hundreds of millions of related terms from diverse keyword sources. You can get thousands of long tail keywords suggested, determine keyword competition with the relative volume feature, and it’s always completely free.

SEO for Firefox

This SEO tool has become ingrained in my daily routine. So much so, that I forget it’s even a plug-in because it integrates so seamlessly with Google SERPs. I use it mostly as my private SERP data lab, to check SEO metrics like toolbar PageRank, site and page links, and twitter mentions in the SERPs. SEO for Firefox also displays on-page nofollow links too, which is a time saver for link building and analysis. You get to see social bookmarking instances, Alexa rank, cache date, Wikipedia mentions and a host of other cool factors too.

Majestic SEO

I’m a big fan of Majestic SEO, which quickly has become an invaluable SEO tool for measuring link acquisition. One of my favorite features is the “daily update,” which updates you each day with a journal of new inbound links. The only downside to this is Majestic also discovers every paid link in your sponsored campaigns, so you’ll be sifting through a lot of transient, garbage links. Other notable features include some pro tools for charting link discovery, so you can impress clients with fancy bar charts. Also, the Majestic SEO site just got a face lift, which looks much slicker than the previous skin. Nice work, guys!

Rank Checker

Are you obsessed with where you site ranks in engines? Hey, me too! Well, with SEO Book’s Rank Checker you can get your daily rank fix from the Big Three (Google, Yahoo, Bing) simultaneously. This free SEO tool then lets you export the results to Excel and incorporate them into a keyword ranking report. What’s also nice is Rank Checker gives you the ability to add multiple keywords in a data dump and save the reports as presets, so you don’t have to enter in your keywords each time.

iGoogle

Did you know you can customize your iGoogle dashboard and create a fantastic brand monitoring tool? Check out the screenshot below where you’ll see I’ve set my iGoogle to capture brand mentions from the Twitter search feed, any forum mentions and blog references. How does this help SEO you ask? Besides the all important reputation monitoring, my customized iGoogle dashboard also serves as another link finder. You see, where there are brand mentions, there are often links, or even new link opportunities.

Yahoo Link Domain

I typically access Yahoo Link Domain through the SEO for Firefox display and use it primarily to analyze inbound links to deep pages on my sites, as I’m manually checking keyword rankings. The other way I use Yahoo Link Domain is to look at SERP competitor link profiles to find linking patterns, trends and more so to uncover linking opportunities for my own sites. If you’re looking to take your site analysis even further, Bruce Clay has a fantastic list of advanced search operators for Yahoo that you should check out. Bonus tip: with the SEO for Firefox plugin enabled, you can export these Yahoo Link Domain results into Excel by clicking the “100″ link, then the “CSV” link in the screenshot below and sort by PageRank, if you’re so inclined.

Foxyrank

This is a pretty new add-on for Firefox, but a great free SEO tool nonetheless. With a click, Foxyrank evaluates the webpage you’re on and presents PageRank, valid links (internal and external), and most importantly (for me anyway) how much “juice” each link on page is passing. Foxyrank also gives you the option to mark (highlight) all the valid external and internal links on page. I love it because it’s a great way to evaluate potential targets for link building and determine (hypothetically) which PR 4 page is passing more juice, so I can really refine and better qualify potential link targets.

Twaitter

Twaitter is a free service for sending out scheduled or recurring Tweets (I know repeat tweeting is blasphemy, but hear me out). You can set it to distribute your message daily, weekly or monthly at the exact minute you want it published, which is a big time saver. I use it mainly to send out Tweets that bear repeating. For example, I use Twaitter to repeat Tweet job postings, contest announcements or recurring events, like the one in the screenshot below for my buddies at SEM Synergy on Webmaster Radio. So how is this relevant to SEO and a free SEO tool? Well, promoting other people’s events and material is a pretty nice thing to do and being nice can often get you a link or two .

Hope free seo tools would be useful to you, Cheers…Similar Posts:

• 9 keyword research and analysis tools for webmasters
• Successful Link Exchange Tips – 5 Things to Consider Before Link Exchange
• Maximize your Adsense Income with Keyword Country
• 55 Quick and Easy Search Engine Optimization Tips for beginner
• Video Marketing: Submit videos and Video RSS/MRSS Feeds

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

Calculating PageRank
Google uses an equation to calculate PageRank. This equation is as below:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)

In that equation, the values t1 and tn are pages that are linked to the page whose rank is being calculated. The value C represents all outbound links on that page while‘d’ is the damping factor. This is normally calculated as a standard 0.85. Google also uses the term ‘share’ to calculate the final PageRank of a page. This is done by dividing the PageRank value by the outbound links that are on that page. This is the ‘vote’ that other pages have helped cast on the page to increase the rank. Therefore, Google shares out the number of ‘votes’ on that page for all pages that have ‘voted’ for that page so that they all get a point towards their PageRank. Therefore, the less outbound links there are on a page the higher that page will rank and that ‘vote’ will be valued more when linked to other pages.

According to many experts, Google uses an algorithm to calculate PageRank. This algorithm is not known by people other than Google. Like all algorithms, moving from level 1 to 2 will be much easier than moving from level 2 to 3. When calculating PageRank, previous positions do not count in that all other information is discarded and PageRank calculated afresh. If two pages without any other links ‘vote’ for each other, their PageRank values will be calculated based on each others PageRanks. Therefore, one of them will have inaccurate information as it was calculated based on the other’s PageRank, which had not been calculated yet. This will consequently lead to the second one having inaccurate information because it will also be calculated based on inaccurate data.

In order to get to a more accurate PageRank value, Google uses the newly calculated PageRank values to calculate slightly more accurate PageRank values. After repeating the calculations about fifty times, the difference between the results starts becoming negligible and Google gets its values at that point. However, based on this algorithm, it is almost impossible to have 100% accuracy rates for PageRank values. This is because the initial information used was not accurate and subsequent calculations were based on that information. This long process is the reason why PageRank updates take as long as they do.

source: http://www.paggu.comSimilar Posts:

• How to use of H1 tags in search engine optimization
• 8 quick tips for blog seo
• How building backlinks generates traffic for targeted website
• How can squidoo boost your website traffic and build links?
• Off-Page SEO: 21 ways to build search engine ranking

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

The wordpress plubin makes the work easier to make your website seo friendly. There are a myriad of plug ins which can improve SEO for blogs. Here are 5 best SEO plug ins to facilitate optimization of post titles, choose the right tags and instruct search engines on what to work on.

Plug-in #1: Simple Tags – this is one popular plug in which gives attention in helping blog users to choose the most appropriate tags for a post by offering suggestions. This plug in has auto-completion capability of tags as you type in, mass tag editing, AJAX admin interface and a lot more.

Plug-in #2: Sitemap Generator – This plug in is a more customizable sitemap generator. This has options to support multi-level pages and categories, permalink support, category/page exclusion, options to show number of comments , choices on what to display and a lot more.

Plug-in #3: TGFI. Net SEO WordPress Plugin – This plugin will accomplish a lot when compared to the usual SEO work of optimizing keywords and titles. It can add a unique change on how it will mainly direct people who are using WordPress as a CMS.

Plug-in #4: SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog is one of the best ways on how to drive traffic to your site. It is time consuming and tedious to manually interlink the blog. SEO smart Links is a plug in which does the interlinking to specific URLs.

Plug-in #5: SEO Tag Cloud Widget – A lot of bloggers are using tag clouds for their blogs. This plug in converts tags into SEO-friendly HTML mark up which can be indexed bysearch engines.

Use these plug-ins an make your website more SEO friendly, Cheers.Similar Posts:

• How to protect wordpress blog content from stealing by using plugins
• 7 ways to inspire user to get more comments on your blog
• SEO Tips: Avoid seo mistakes in wordpress blog
• WordPress SEO Plugins – Ten Useful Plugings for Blogs, Website
• Quick tips to make your blog seo friendly

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

It’s not enough to write or post content on website, you should be aware of protect your content. Every webmaster or website owner should think about website content protection before its being theft. If you can’t protect your website or blog content someone would become the owner of your content and that would be really pain!!
There is another article on this blog “How to protect blog post from being copied” but now this article shows you how to protect your wordpress blog content by using simple plugins.

People use bots to copy content from other website without even seeing it. I have no idea how the bot works but what i know is how to protect myself. Once you protect your blog, you don’t have to spend time to concern about its content protection anymore.

Here is two very important issue i am going to discuss.
1. Copyright Decliaration
2. Copyright Protection

1. Copyright Decliaration
When you are publishing any content or article on your website you need to put a clear copyright notice on your blog post to declare who is the right owner of the content.

I found few plugins for wordpress blogs, which can declare your copyright message autometically

Simple Feed Copyright
Simple Feed Copyright is a wordpress plugin that will add a simple copyright notice at end of full text articles in your atom / RSS feed. A notice gets attached at the bottom of feed articles – “Copyright Year. BlogName. All Rights Reserved”. The BlogName is linked to your blog url.

wp-copyrighted-post
Adds copyright notice in the end of each post of your blog.
Available admin page languages:
English
Russian
Belarus
Simplified Chinese
If you have created your own language pack, or have an update of an existing one, you can send .po and .mo files to me so that I can bundle it into wp-copyrighted-post. By minimus.

Get Custom Field Values
Use widgets or template tags to easily retrieve and control the display of any custom field values/meta data for posts or pages.

The power of custom fields gives this plugin the potential to be dozens of plugins all rolled into one.
This plugin allows you to harness the power of custom fields/meta data. Use the “Get Custom Field” widget, the [custom_field] shortcode (which has a sidebar widget to help you build the shortcode), or one of six template tags to retrieve and display custom fields. Find a custom field for the current post, a
specified post, a recent post, or randomly. And for the custom field values found by the plugin, you may optionally specify text or HTML to appear before and after the results. If nothing is found, then nothing is display (unless you define text to appear when no results are found). If multiple results are found,
only the first will be displayed unless you specify a string to be used to join the results together (such as “,”), in which case all will be returned. Visit the Examples section to see how this plugin can be cast in dozens of different ways.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/text-replace/">Text Replace
Replace text with other text in posts, pages, etc. Very handy to create shortcuts to commonly-typed and/or lengthy text/HTML, or for smilies.

Random File
Retrieve the name, path, or link to a randomly chosen file in a specified directory.
Useful for displaying random images/logos or including text from random files onto your site (writing excerpts, multi-line quotes, etc).

2. Copyright Protection
The second issue is protecting your published content. People says “Prevention is better then cure”!. So you can put some restriction on your website to protect content. I found some plugins which is really good for protecting contents.
Copyright Protected Plugins for your wordpress blog

WP-CopyRightPro
Author: Andres Perea V
WP-CopyRightPro is a plug-in that prevents the copying of texts and images from your blog, if you install this plug-in, your content of wordpress will be protected.

Wp-CopyrightPro is a plug-in developed by Andres Perea V. in order to minimize the copying of your website content. This is not a complete solution, but it will avoid 90% of attempts to copy its contents.
This plug-in will
* Disable selection of text
* Disable right click on your WordPress
* Protects from iframes
* Protects from drag and drop images
* WP-CopyRightPro doesn’t have problems with search engines

**Wp-CopyrightPro is very easy to use. Just install and protect your blog!

WP-Content Protector
Author: Anurag
PLUGIN NO MORE SUPPORTED BY THE AUTHER. DEPRECATED FOR IMPROVED PLUGIN Wp-CopyProtect RECOMMENDED TO USE IT.

Use your suitable plugin and protect your blog content from being copied. Please suggest other plugin if you found any to protect content. Thanks, Cheers Similar Posts:

• WordPress SEO Plugins – Ten Useful Plugings for Blogs, Website
• SEO Tips: Avoid seo mistakes in wordpress blog
• Quick tips to make your blog seo friendly
• 7 ways to inspire user to get more comments on your blog
• Top five search engine optimization wordpress plugins to make your site seo friendly

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

Email markeitng is not so cheap though but they have cheaper plan. You will get some free email marketing sites but they give trial for a limited time and limited email to subscriber. You can find various email marketing sites on the internet. For a small site, opting for a free membership might be a better solution while for a large site, they could opt for the paid version of these e-mail marketing companies.

Email marketing service also allow you to track down your traffic you are getting from email marketing, you can create a schedule for whole week and it will work automatically. I found some email marketing website and listed some good sites below which can be benefited for your email campaign.

MailChimp –  MailChimp offers a maximum of 500 subscribers as well as 2000 emails to be sent monthly through its free membership plan. They are used by various corporate companies such as Mozilla, Canon, Intel and many more. Their paid plans can be as cheap as $30 per month to as expensive as $230 per month.

StreamSend – StreamSend isn’t actually free but they offer a 30 day free trials to all new users. Unlike MailChimp which offers by the number of users, StreamSend offers by the number of emails sent. Plans here can cost as low as $19.90 per month to as high as $159.99 per month. Larger volumes can also be purchased as well.

Comm100 – This is another great free solution for sites of any sizes. They offer an unlimited solution for both users and the amount of emails that can be sent. Definitely great for sites that are less capable financially.

BenchMarkEmail – Benchmarkemail is actually not free service also. If you register for trial account, you will get access for 30 days free. They have $9.95(600 emails) to $ 500(150k emails) plans per month.

Consider email marketing part of your SEO campaign and drive more traffic for you website.

This article has written and posted by our guest writter Frank Boros(SEO & SEM consultant). Frank Boros is working as an SEO expert for seven years.

Similar Posts:

• 3 Simple Ways To Rapidly Improve Website
• Good Adbrite Paying Keywords that Make Money
• Top 36 free video hosting sites for video marketing
• Step by Step How to Become a Professional SEO
• 8 effective steps to index your website

© 2010, PromotePoint – Google SEO Tips, Internet Marketing Tips. All rights reserved.

I was just experiences then reading about recent issues with Yahoo’s Site Explorer not reporting the correct amount of backlinks (as if that exists lol). I still use it quite a bit, especially with a quick SEO Quake fix, so it’s good to know that the Yahoo team is working with the Bing team to bring it all back to working order. The good folks at Webmaster World definitely have a thread going, and Vanessa Fox already blogged about it so I won’t go into too much detail.

Basically, you can bet that Bing is working on integrating the data into their Webmaster center, and hopefully it gets a sprucing up. We all know Google’s tool is garbage for the most part…no surprise there though really. For now I always recommend Link Diagnosis to pull Yahoo’s data since the API version is still working normal. You can of course try out SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer or try out Majestic SEO. Here’s what the Yahoo team had to say officially;

We are working with the Microsoft team to ensure that webmasters can continue to use Yahoo! Site Explorer to view inlinks (a.k.a backlinks) to a given webpage or a website and to further be able to export them as CSV if desired.

Please note that this functionality will be available only through the Site Explorer UI and not through the Webservices API.

Hemant Minocha
Product Manager, Y! Site Explorer

Read more: http://suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=SiteExplorer&fid=217076

For those of you running your own consulting business online, here’s a tip to help bring in some more business, do a little more branding and even bring yourself a nice link. We of all people know that when you start to get really busy with clients, the less time you have to market your services to new potential businesses. This can eventually catch up to you so hopefully this site helps keeps things flowing and pushes a little extra branding for your services, and the company.

Superscout.com provides both employers and employees a social network for brand and job growth. While you can get a company link, that shouldn`t be the main focus of use. Remember that I`ve toned down my public link releases just because the majority of people on the interwebs spam. So put the site to good use by taking advantage by putting up your company profile, add your latest jobs and keep in touch with job applicants who you connect with.

For consultants like myself, you can get quick and easy access to all the jobs and employers all the while keeping track of what`s going on. The one really interesting factor from an employee`s end of things is the real contact with companies I`ve experienced on here. Superscout.com does a great job and keeping companies coming back and active, so take advantage while the getting is good!

The first Foursquare check-in from space was completed by astronaut Douglas Wheelock just the other day. In a world of PR and viral marketing it has become quite a bit harder to get heard, so when you can blast a message from space you know the world will tune in. While Foursquare battles the location based check-in war, it seems they just got a massive PR spike thanks to this interesting event. Gizmodo broke the news for most and it has struck up enough interest to really make me step back and analyze this whole event from a marketing perspective.

I really think this will help out Foursquare more than anything, but NASA surely doesn’t mind the extra buzz since they’ve been trying to capture the attention of the nation. I imagine it will be a while before we see another check in from space, but I am quite excited for the first Moon check-in, and then eventually other planets like Mars!

I just thought I’d check up and see what has been going on with Tequila Avion since I last blogged about the sheer marketing genius going on. The Tequila has been mentioned on just about every celebrity blog, across multiple Tequila only websites as well as a plethora of high quality blogs. Their social media presence hit the ground running, and they’re still in the lead. I mentioned in my last post that it would take a while to crack the top 10 for the keyword Tequila, but it seems that things are looking brilliant for the company.

This marketing strategy has propelled them to spot #39 for the keyword Tequila ( according to Scroogle ), but I imagine you might see different results depending on where you live. I mentioned in my previous post that I didn’t expect them to get there that quick, and with more and more people talking about it, they should see some more movement. Keep in mind they’ve been doing a great job when they launch in a new city which alone nets them Liquor store links, as well a ton of local Twitter mentions. You can see there latest launch in Texas got some attention from the greatest Tequila blogs, and with flying sky banners you can’t go wrong.

I didn’t plan on an update this early so it will be really interesting to see how things continue on now until the end of the next season. I have no idea how hard they’re going to push Avion again, but I imagine it will be dominant throughout the season. I’d love to hear what you guys think about their marketing tactics, and what outcome you think might unfold.

Read the original post: http://www.linkbuildr.com/tequila-avion-entourage-big-brand-linkbait/

Yahoo recently announced that the UK/IE section of their directory will be closing down come November 18th, 2010. While this directory has been going strong for a decade, Yahoo has given you users options. You can now handle submissions to the UK/IE section that is under the main Yahoo directory. While it should be linked off the main site, you’ll have to dig a little deeper to find the announcement.

You may continue to maintain your listing through the US based Directory Submit program. Your site will remain listed in the Directory as it is now, and the applicable annual fee will apply on your anniversary date. No further action on your behalf would be required.

I’m not sure if we’ll see further closures within the Yahoo Directory regions, or if this is a sign of the whole thing slowing down. While I don’t think these directories pass anywhere near the same amount of link juice as they once did, I’d still want to be linked under my region from a domain like this. DMOZ is still worth it if you can somehow get a link, but you pretty much need a magical wand to make that happen. If you want to get in on the discussion, you can find us in this Webmaster World thread.

Here’s a wicked 45 minute lecture on small business branding during the 2010 CenPhoCamp conference which was held in downtown Phoenix. Kevin Spidel does a great job covering what’s hot and not, as well how do build your small business in these tough times. Everyone here at Linkbuildr has built this company from the ground up and love to share information. This is the kind of lectures I wish I could get out and do, so for now I’ll stick to the awesome people out there doing it large. Kevin Spidel should be a known name to most of you marketers, but if not check out his bio and see the amazing work he’s been involved in.

With the Holiday season upon us, companies vamping up their marketing efforts, it’s time to rethink your press release strategy. Our company does a lot of PR for people not only for links, in fact usually they’re not first in mind, but to build the overall brand through exposure.

There’s nothing wrong or negative about the usual process, I just like to do things a little bit different..a little more ninja like. We can definitely get more out of the resources available to we the people, you just have to dig a little deeper.

As of late, Google has really been putting emphasis on building your brand. This could be through social media, the links you build and other citations. This is good news for companies and brands because this adds more fuel to the fire.

Social media is also an important aspect of a typical PR these days, so this can be used to your advantage. How many social media sites pick up these news stories? I can tell you now, getting a extra link or two from the likes of Squidoo, Topix.net and others isn’t too difficult.

One last thing before we get into it. I know that the search engines are not giving amazing link juice from each news site, on the same topic. So throw out any thoughts of targeted anchor text in your release. For one, it looks cleaner, and secondly, you’re putting these efforts towards your brand/site overall. You can obviously used targeted anchor text, I would however leave PR power to go towards just building up the root domain.

Part 1: Mixing up the sites you use to send a PR

There are many press release sites to choose from, and picking the right one will make the difference. The first advice I like to give clients is to utilize different PR sites for your news. You might as well spread it out and get some nice and easy links from their homepage. PRWeb releases tend to stay indexed easily, as well rank quite easily for long tail terms.

I’m going to list 5 PR sites I like to use, as well the ones I think that have retained the most link authority and brand status. These sites usually don’t push junk news, so you can rest assured you’re not getting garbage.

PRWeb.com – We’ll start with the biggest, most networked and one of the most trusted news distribution services around today. PRWeb combines their large news network with not only newsrooms, but blog sources as well as its social media connections. Prices range from $150 USD up to $350 and beyond.

24-7pressrelease.com – These folks are another big player and they have a couple good things going on. First, their network is quite large and has a lot of top niches in its arsenal. The prices for a PR here are really affordable, and if the second point is that they have a company/business directory. That directoriy itself has held up its quality and is well worth the review process.

MarketWire.com – Another large PR network that has a huge business network. I’ve had a lot of success releasing normal PR’s for my clients, and personally. You can see a list of each indsutry contact resource beforehand, so this feature plays into the next section for this post.

URLWire.com – All you SEO consultants are most likely well awre of Eric Ward’s news wire. It’s highly recommended by me, not because I’m brown nosing, but due to Eric’s style. Again, this isn’t a place you can go to submit junk news and expect the world. URLWire works to network your news with the most related sites in your industry. Release prices start at around $500 USD and I’ve seen some of the most successful news campaigns launched from here.

PR.com – Another PR service you are most likely familiar with. This news network also boasts a lot of connections within its distribution network. PR.com also happens to have their own business/company directory in which you ca get into.

Part 2: Press Release Link Analysis

Link analysis on a press release you say? Hell yea and why not?! Before picking any service I highly recommend you start snooping on the competition. Open up the link builders beloved Excel and start off a spreadsheet for me. Next, hit up the 5 press release sites linked above and try and find your competitors releases. If you cannot find any, take a look at what other companies are doing PR’s within your industry.

Ok, so now what? When you find a press release or two within your niche, turn on SEO Quake, Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO or any backlink analyzer that does individual pages. All I ask you to do is see which news releases got picked up where. This will give you an idea of what to expect from your news. Obviously this isn’t fool proof, but I like a little more tactical application in my process.

Next, go back to news that’s 6 months or older and do the same thing. I’d take account of which PR sites do better at keeping that release indexed. As well, see if that release is ranking well for any long tail keywords associated.

This ain’t rocket science, but it is a little link science I guess. Even though I wasn’t a boy scout, they’re slogan certainly applies nicely to this industry. Just remember to look at the tags used and make sure those are on your list. That should help you target the news sites looking for your content.

Part 3: Build Links to Your PR

Some releases you put out are going to fall flat, sorry to say. Even with careful planning there are certain aspects that are just out of anyone’s control.

If you already have a network of blogs, social media profiles and other websites then you can do your part. Linking back to your news release from these areas is relevant, and will help keep that news alive and kicking.

Some companies even have a newsroom on their site, and from what I’ve seen it doesn’t cost you any dupe problems and helps keep things indexed. It’s all relevant to your company, so there is nothing black/grey hat going on here.

Final Thoughts:

While you’ll not notice a huge amount of traction from your first optimized release, keep at it, mixing things up. After half, or even a full year you’ll have a great diverse link set from all sorts of news sites.

I’d also keep in mind that these releases are spread across so many different sites. Google is obviously not giving “max link juice” through heavily syndicated content. Then again, prove me wrong by keeping meticulous statistics and track the movement yourself.

I hope this inspires businesses to take their PR campaigns to a new level. Let me know if anyone else out there has been implementing something similar, and if it is working for you.

In a recent interview I caught on Business Insider with Google’s Eric Schmidt talking about what he see’s as the Biggest threat to Google’s market share. With the partnership Bing has setup with Facebook, I’d be worried too. Top that all off with the recent Mayday updates and I see a wounded Google who finally may have someone to fight with…and that’s a good thing! I really don’t like having my eggs, or my clients, all in one basket so look forward to garnering more traffic from the Bing/Facebook side, especially those who got “raped” last May.

We all knew it was coming! Facebook Places is taking aim at Foursquare (and the other guys) with its new feature that is not at all original, but they have the user base so might as well. Of all the location based applications, this one will most likely give the Foursquare crew a run for its money depending on what else they do with it. One extra, cooler, better, faster, hard stronger ( sorry Daft Punk ) feature should be enough to leverage a lot of usage from the Facebook mob. For now I find myself not overly excited about this feature yet, and since I keep my Facebook profile on lock down, I don’t think I’ll use it much anywho. I do see the need for crucial integration of this feature into Facebook Pages though, and hopefully this helps brands and companies target their customers even more. Regardless, here’s a promo video that hypes it up a little more despite how lame it was done…all that money and this is the kind of production you put forth? LOLZ.

I end up watching a few shows here and there in my downtime and always enjoy Entourage for its blatant but workable product plugs. There has been a lot of talk lately about building brand links, and I thought we could dig a little deeper into that using the show. If you’ve been following the latest season, Turtle has been trying to make his next business venture with Tequila Avion. It’s a new luxury brand on the market, and has been a heavy set feature of the entire season. I took a look at the company after watching the final season and learned that it’s still in its infancy which makes it a great case study waiting to happen. Apparently, the owners are friends with show producer Doug Ellin and didn’t have to pay a dime for any marketing…makes you rethink your social networking tactics eh?

Avion Tequila LLC was formed by a group of entrepreneurs and beverage industry professionals with the sole purpose of creating and developing a tequila that defines a new standard of quality and taste. The announcement was made by Ken Austin, Founder and Chairman of Tequila Avion.

A Brand Going Viral

Breaking into the Tequila market won’t be an easy task, but done right the Avion investors should be sitting pretty. Since they’re a company with a virgin backlink profile, and a viral snowball effect that is currently hurtling towards success, I’d keep my eye on them as a shining example. Companies in the position to utilize these types of marketing channels will win big online without having to steer down a blackhat path.

If you have SEOQuake installed, load it up and take a quick look at the natural links obtained from the whole process. If you take a look at Google Blog search you’ll also see tons of sites spreading the good word. So you know that most backlink tools haven’t even caught up with the viral link effect, and I’m quite excited to check back in a month from now to see how the growth is going…so nerdy and sad, I know. No wonder my friends say I need to get out more.

Of course you’ll find this social media savvy company on Twitter and is doing a good job growing the brand from there. While everyone tends to want followed anchor text friendly links these days, they’re not all the rage anymore. URL shortening and social media networks have proven that there is more than one type of link on the block. Do a search at any given minute and you’ll see fans of the show and brand tweeting about where they got the product, that they’re drinking it now and uploading tons of their own media. You really cannot ask for a more when it comes to marketing these days. We’ll see if I’m right, and we’ll put Google Trends on my side as well..just to make me feel better.

Since blogging, social networks and apps you can bet that Avion will be featured on just about every luxury, drink, food and celebrity blog. So how is this going to really make a dent within say, the Google organic results? Well first of all, their brand name has their target keyword in the name. So this means the domain, and on-page SEO will pretty much take care of itself. There will be no need for a company like this to need targeted anchor text links…but don’t get me wrong, those links wouldn’t hurt either. As it currently stands, Tequila Avion isn’t ranking well at all for the keyword Tequila, but it’s really too early to tell. I imagine with the final season of Entourage the company will enjoy enough of a push to obtain a strong enough link profile to rank.

I’ll do my best to make the time to bring you more unique brands taking advantage of what’s going on right now in marketing. I still see so much cheesy, lame and downright terrible marketing efforts taking place these days..it’s sad really. I’ll also do my best to update this post later on, so if you see my slacking don’t hesitate to get in touch with me or send me a menacing tweet.

Read a follow up to their marketing: http://www.linkbuildr.com/tequila-avion-brand-update/

From the many Website Optimization Webinars I’ve done over the past six months, I’ve signed up for many Facebook company pages, and I follow tons of people on Twitter. I realize there are those companies – or people – that overkill on the posting and those that I never hear from. The over-killers tend to post information about themselves, and to be honest, after a while I don’t even read their content. Then there are those whose information is consistently valuable. I may not have time to read everything they send, but whenever I do, I’m rewarded.

It always comes back to content – valuable content that’s either interesting on its own or that helps me. I have to believe that these organizations that consistently provide insight and useful information don’t just come up with it on the spot. They plan ahead and create an editorial calendar.

Some people do it a month at a time, and others plan for the whole year. Certainly print magazines plan at least a year in advance, and that’s the model I might use when plotting out your social media calendar.  We do something similar here at HubSpot.

The real advantage of making an editorial or content calendar is that you can create a framework that shows how much and where you’re planning to interact socially.  Furthermore you can see how the content posting supports your social marketing objectives.

It also helps you in repurposing existing or evergreen content. It’s hard coming up with fresh content and when you do, you want to make the most of it. Planning out your distribution will show when to write that blog post and when to promote it through your various social channels.  And, if that content totally rocks, when to send it out again.

Also, if you create a white paper, you might want to break up its information into bite-size nuggets of wisdom and scatter them out throughout the following few to many months. A calendar will quickly show you how best to spread the information and line up various communication channels to support the distribution.  Things like podcasts, videos, charts, and other supporting marketing materials that makes your content more valuable.

We’ve been able to develop a Social Media Posting Schedule with our friends at Demand Metric that allows you fill in all the dates, themes, topics, keywords and more. Plus after you fill it out, it automatically gives you a social media activities summary.  If you want to use the 2011 version, you can download Demand Metric’s Social Media 5-Pack for free, courtesy of HubSpot.

Free Download: The Social Media Tools 5-Pack

Strategize, Schedule, Track & Measure Your Social Media Program

Download this pack to graduate from sporadic social media success to thinking about your social media marketing strategically

Connect with HubSpot:

Tools For Content Creation

1. bit.ly  - Twitter is considered a microblog.  The posts are called ‘tweets’ and they are a maximum of 140 characters in length.  What if your URL has more than 140 characters and you want to share it via Twitter?  Simple fix is to pop it in bit.ly’s shortening tool and see it shrink down to a size that you can tweet.  Bit.ly is a utility that allows you to shorten a long URL, share it and then analyze the resulting usage of the link.  If you want to track the usage of your link, put a + sign at the end of the URL.

 2. Jing – Content is always king when trying to drive traffic to your site.  It’s a fact that video and images help you create excitement and interest.  Jing is a tool that allows you to simply and easily capture images or create a short video of what you see on your computer screen to enhance your written content.  Jing can also be utilized to share content via email, IM, Twitter or your blog. 

3. Google Labs Browser Sizing Tool – When you create great content, you want to ensure that the important parts of the page’s user interface are visible to your entire audience.  As Google defines it, it is a visualization of browser window sizes.  When you look at the example, Google Browser size, it will show you what visitors can and cannot see on your page depending upon their screen size.  This is a critical item when putting calls-to-action or forms on your site.  This tool will help you ensure that those critical items are above the fold.

4. Wonder Wheel – Putting yourself in the ‘searchers’ shoes can be difficult sometimes, so creating solid long tail keywords can be a challenge.  Google produced a tool that is a pre-defined mind mapper which pulls all the related search results into a wheel.

Insert a keyword into the middle of the wheel and Google spits out several new keywords.  This will help you produce a large number of keywords that you can then narrow down for your business.  This would be ideal when optimizing your website or coming up with long tail keywords to use in your blog articles. If you are looking at more advanced help in keywords selection then be sure to check out Hubspot’s Keyword Grader tool.

5.  CaptionTube – Make cool videos using this tool from YouTube.  This is a utility to add captions to your YouTube videos after you have imported the content.  When you are finished, you can export the captions and upload to YouTube.  The ability to have a precise timeline is what makes this beta tool superior to editing your captions in a text editor.  This is a one-stop shop for this type of editing.  Video makes for interesting content and this is yet another way to produce it for your site easily and at a low cost.

What other tools do you use to make your content awesome?

Check Out HubSpot’s Online Marketing Tools!

Generate Leads With HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Software

Request a free demo to learn how to master your marketing metrics and successfully create killer content.

Connect with HubSpot:

Even for charities, direct marketing appeals started falling since 2008. The Internet has long become the channel for sparking product interest and building relationships with prospects. This is the lesson Beacon Hill Athletic Clubs, a chain of New England area health clubs, learned when they eliminated print advertising. “We stopped doing all of our direct mail,” said Lee Crabb, BHAC’s PR and marketing specialist. Her company dropped the production of 15,000-25,000 pieces of direct mail that were distributed every season. “And we really haven’t seen any decrease in new members, which is huge for us,” she noted. This success story demonstrates the need for improved online presence rather than ineffective outbound techniques.

Businesses Can’t Measure Direct Mail

If you hear the argument that direct mail is still an indispensable part of one’s marketing strategy, ask to see measurable results. Did somebody open that envelope you mailed for a new promo? Did the recipient take any action? Can they give you real-time feedback? These are the types of questions you won’t be able to answer through traditional marketing. You will need a much more advanced system to tackle them.

Measure Success by Traffic & Leads

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, can provide you with the right metrics to track results. By following the traffic growth and lead volume stemming from specific marketing campaigns, you will be able to determine which offers are truly effective. Instead of investing in disposable resources used for direct mail, you can invest in remarkable content that leads to long-term results.

BHAC, for instance, focused on the creation of landing pages which show views, form submissions and conversion rates. Such data helps the company develop smarter marketing and successfully transition to modern marketing.

Are you planning on dropping direct mail in your new marketing iniaitves?

Disclosure: Beacon Hill Athletic Clubs is a HubSpot customer.

Learn How To Measure Your Online Marketing

Learn About HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Software

Request a free demo to learn how to master your marketing metrics and successfully create killer content.

Connect with HubSpot:

Every company is different when it comes to marketing reporting. Some senior executives can report you to death, leaving you no time to actually do the work. Others don’t want to or don’t have time to see anything, but when they do three months later, they riddle you with questions.

So what’s the best way to report your social media marketing stats? You can approach it two ways. One is to create from scratch a bunch of reports, using your excel and other analysis tools. Another is to look for off the shelf reporting templates. For example, in Demand Metric’s Social Media 5-Pack, you can use the Social Media Program Metrics Dashboard.

It’s a good place to start. It’s clean and easy to follow – something that CEOs and CMOs really like. Put your numbers in and they automatically translate into a graphic dashboard. You can show upper management actual numbers against goal, as well as show them growth trends.

It is also set up for monthly figures, which gets me back to the right balance of reporting.  I’ve found that showing your metrics monthly gives you plenty of time to do your other work while providing upper management with timely information.

Free Download: The Social Media Tools 5-Pack

Strategize, Schedule, Track & Measure Your Social Media Program

Download this pack to graduate from sporadic social media success to thinking about your social media marketing strategically

Connect with HubSpot:

You learned a lot from the 9 Worst Ways to use Twitter for Business, so here are 9 Facebook for business strategies to avoid, as well as how to steer back in the right direction.

1. Duplicate your Twitter Strategy on Facebook

Twitter is another great place to converse with your audience, but it’s a completely different platform, and should be treated as such. Although you’ll want to tweet several times a day to get noticed in people’s overloaded Twitter streams, applying the same frequency to Facebook could annoy your fans and lead to them hiding your updates. Additionally, you don’t want to duplicate the same exact content you use on Twitter for Facebook. Not only will fans following you on both networks notice, but you have much more than 140 characters to work with on Facebook. Take advantage of the extra space! You can even repurpose the same concepts as your tweets; just rework them to fit Facebook.

2. Post Only Plain-Text Status Updates

Just posting standard text updates gets boring after a while. You have several different ways to share content on Facebook. In addition to your standard status update, you can also post links, upload photos, upload videos, or post a question (which non-fans can also see). Just like you’d want to vary the content type in your blog to keep readers interested, mix up the content type on your Facebook page to make your wall look fun and interesting.

3. Don’t Allow Fans to Share Content

Not letting your fans post to your wall defeats half the purpose of having a Facebook page. Not only do you want to share your updates with fans, but you want to allow fans to share their thoughts, opinions, feedback, and even pictures and videos with you. Don’t you want fans sharing pictures of them using your product for the rest of your Facebook audience to see? Or hear what sort of product ideas your fans wish you’d add to your product line? To make sure the share settings are turned on, go to wall settings and make sure all the boxes are checked.

4. Don’t Comment on Your Fans’ Content

If your fans have started posting on your wall and sharing pictures on your page, don’t ignore them. Comment on what they’ve posted, even if it’s just a simple “Thanks for sharing!” or click of the like button. Not only will it encourage them to post even more content, but new fans will see that you care about what your audience has to say, and they’ll start sharing content with you as well.

5. Don’t Share Your Fans’ Content

As someone who works at, well, any business, you’re probably really busy. Coming up with content to post on Facebook and Twitter probably takes up a fair bit of your very valuable time. So why not share some of that user generated content? If someone shares a great photo of your product in action, click the share button and say “Check out this great photo Joe Smith posted!”  Not only do fans love other fan photos, but you’ll make Joe Smith awfully happy.

6. Don’t use Facebook Questions to Find More Fans

Facebook recently launched Questions, an application that allows anyone, including Fan Pages, to ask and answer questions from the Facebook community. Just like LinkedIn Answers, Facebook Questions is a great place to establish yourself as an industry knowledge leader. It’s also one of the only ways that pages can go out and reach out to non-fan Facebook members for free, so take advantage of it!

7. Use a Profile Image That has a Poor Thumbnail

When you upload a new profile image, Facebook automatically sizes it down to fit the thumbnail size that appears in users’ news feeds and your wall. On your fan page, your brand’s logo could be cut off in the thumbnail, and this is bad for brand recognition. Here are some fan pages that still haven’t gotten it quite right:

So make sure you get the dimensions of your Facebook profile image right for the thumbnail resize. A profile image will be 200 px wide, so make sure that your desired thumbnail is within a 12 pixel border.

8. Don’t Share Your Facebook Page on Your Website

Don’t keep your Facebook page a secret from your website visitors, who are the people most likely to actually like your page and become a fan. Facebook provides pages with a Facebook like box, formally called a fan box, which you can add to your website so that people can like your page without ever leaving your website. It’s just a matter of copy/pasting a bit of code.

9. Don’t Develop a Personality

Your company Facebook page shouldn’t have a corporate, stuffy tone. Facebook is a place where users go to connect with their friends. They don’t want to go to Facebook to get your sales pitch. You can still maintain a professional presence and have a casual tone. Just take a look at the Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Skittles Facebook pages; these are three of the top product pages on Facebook, and have established fun yet professional personalities on their pages.

What would be your #10? Let me know in the comments below!

Free Download: 2010 Facebook Marketing Guide

How should businesses create, manage, and grow their Facebook pages? Find out from industry experts and marketers!

Download the free 30-page complimentary Facebook Marketing Guide.

Connect with HubSpot:

A very early adopter of online content, Yankee Magazine, the 75-year-old magazine has been publishing a favorite feature from its archives on its website every weekday.

The magazine, which also publishes the Old Farmer’s Almanac, boasts 350,000 subscribers.  While the number represents just about one-third of the subscribers 25 years ago, their business model of relying upon subscription revenue instead of advertising dollars, has allowed Yankee to stay solvent while other publishers struggle to stay afloat. 

Jamie Trowbridge, Yankee Publishing CEO, says, “People are always saying print is dead. In fact, it hasn’t declined much. What is declining is advertising support.’’

Years ago, Yankee made some choices to stay relevant in an age when readers are more likely to browse a publication than read it cover to cover.  They dropped from 12 to six issues a year, added more service-oriented features and changed the publication format from its “digest” style to its current standard-size magazine.

Jud Hale, Yankee’s editor-in-chief, delivers a monthly podcast, which began in 2000, and is credited as the first offered by a consumer magazine.  He says, “The publishing industry changes are mostly in the delivery system. The editorial meetings are the same as they were 40 years ago,’’ he continued. “Do we want to run a piece about this-and-so? Content is the key.’’

Delivering relevant content, taking advantage of new channels of content distribution such as video, changing formats to meet the needs of the reader – all of these efforts continue to make Yankee magazine viable in a struggling industry.

As a marketer, what types of new channels for your remarkable content could you employ?  Adam Singer, author of The Future Buzz, says in a recent blog post, “Your content development process needs to be as agile as possible…Let’s face it, most business content is boring and published too infrequently to be effective.  Solve these two simple issues and it’s shocking how quickly you can leap ahead of competitors.  Almost no one fixes these two seemingly basic problems which spells opportunity for you.”

As a marketer, what types of new content distribution channels could you employ?  Are you publishing content frequently?  And, are you creating remarkable content?  HubSpot customers are able to participate in a weekly Content Creation Camp that helps to frame out blog posts, subject lines, and effective publishing methods. 

What are you doing to stay viable in your industry?

Learn How To Leverage Content For Online Marketing

Learn About HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Software

Request a free demo to learn how to master your marketing metrics and successfully create killer content.

Connect with HubSpot:

Recently, a University of Colorado Denver Business School student revealed the top reasons for Facebook unfriending, who is unfriended and how they react to being unfriended.

“Researchers spend a lot of time examining how people form friendships online but little is known on how those relationships end,” said Christopher Sibona, a PhD student in the Computer Science and Information Systems program whose research will be published January by the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. “Perhaps this will help us develop a theory of the entire cycle of friending and unfriending.”

1. Don’t be boring. After surveying more than 1,500 Facebook users,  Sibona found the top reason for unfriending is frequent, unimportant posts.  “The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,” he said.

2. Don’t rant. The second reason was posting about polarizing topics like religion and politics.  Sibona added, “”They say not to talk about religion or politics at office parties and the same thing is true online.”

3. Don’t be rude. Inappropriate posts, such as crude or racist comments, were the third reason for being unfriended.

Hardly rocket science here, but let’s think about these three reasons for unfriending might be applied towards marketing tactics and content creation. 

1. Don’t be boring.  Sending the 99th email about your product without the “what’s in it for me?” component, is sure to be a great turn-off.  And, is incredibly boring.  Creating remarkable content that your readers look forward to is a sure way to be considered less than boring.

2. Don’t rant.  As a marketer you need to be on topic and communicate information that is relevant to your prospects. Ranting is selfish. Talking off topic in your marketing materials or on your blog is a quick way to lose the attention of your prospects.

3. Don’t be rude.   We all get those “Well, if you aren’t going to listen to me, then you aren’t important to me or my sales funnel” emails…and they are rude.  Do you know why a sales person would consider engaging in a conversation with a prospect in such a manner?  I would relish the 100th “break up” or “unfriend” email after such an engagement.

What do you think?  Do prospects “unfriend” companies because of the marketing tactics employed? 

Free Download: 2010 Online Marketing Blueprint

Learn how to create an online marketing strategy for your business.

Download this free eBook for tutorials in website optimization, lead nurturing, social media marketing and more!

Connect with HubSpot:

Bid goodbye(hopefully) to the days of boring tech-demos. Demo Slam is here. It is supposed to pep up those boring demos and to generate interest among users.

Users can think of  any topic and then create and upload the video to the slam. There are already a few slams, making people laugh.

You may watch the slams and choose a winner every week. This seems to be great for drawing the people most in need (read Mums and Grandmums…)

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Slams Begin With Google Demo Slam!

Google has made its search results more social, probably as an answer to the Bing – Facebook joint effort. The main search result page will show real time results, which would show how many times any article has been shared or the number of times a topic has been mentioned on social networks.

When the shared by link is clicked, the user is taken to Real Time Search Section.

For some of the popular topics, a message will appear mentioning the recent updates from Twitter, MySpace, Facebook.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Hits Back With “Shared By” Social Search Results

Soon a “change location” link will be added to the left panel of the Google search results pages. Thus helping the users to find the local businesses and to provide the accurate location setting.

"We're moving your location setting to the left-hand panel of the results page to make it easier for you to see and control your preferences," said Mack Lu, Product Manager.

Though users could always change the location, this step only simplifies the process. The feature will be available in 40 languages soon. However there would be no compromise on the privacy policy because the way the location information is used will remain the same.
 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Simplified Local Search Control By Google

In the latest post on adCenter Blog MS has asked all the Yahoo! advertisers to move their accounts to the adCenter platform, to avoid any loss in traffic.

Here are a few things to to be kept in mind:

• Since this is the pre-holiday season, make sure you don't miss on the traffic. MS anticipates 50-60% transfer of Yahoo! Search Traffic to adCenter by this weekend.
• It is suggested that by 25th october , the accounts are funded with full budget to support the traffic from  Yahoo! Search and Bing.
• If there is a confusions regarding the budget, it is advised to allocate 1/3rd to adCenter.
• Keep a close watch on the bids, since the transition may cause some initial fluctuations.

For any help, there are various options:

• There are a plenty of useful tips and advice on blogs and discussion forums.
• Take help from Microsoft adExcellence tutorials.
• Tweet question to @adCenter on Twitter.

Last but no the least. Provide your feedback and ideas to the adCenter Feedback Thread.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Get Ready – Yahoo! Begins Shifting The Ads to MS adCenter

“Links To Your Website” in Google Webmaster Tools will now inform you about the domains that link to your website, besides the other updations. The overview page will now show three main sections:

Domains which link most to your site.

When you click on “More >>” , it gives a list of the doamins that link the most to your website.

Further, “More >>” link under each domain gives a list of the pages linked by that domain and at the top of the page you can find the total number of links from that domain.

Pages on the website that have been linked the most.

Here you can find out the most linked pages on your website, including the link count for each page. This also includes the link redirected using 301 or 302 HHTP redirects.

In "More >>", you may find all domains linking to that page. Each domain that has been listed shows the list of all pages from that domain linking to your the particular URL.

Anchor Text Sample

Last but not the least, you can also find the sample of the anchor text being used by external websites to link to your site.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Updates “Links To Your Website” Feature

Bing and Facebook have joined hands to provide a more personalized touch to the search experience of the users. Based on the Likes of their Facebook friends, this would be a whole new experience for the users.

There would be a “Like By Your Friends”module to the search results. If you are also logged in your Facebook account while searching on Bing, depending upon your seacrh query, you may see the liking of your friends for the same.

This module will be seen at the bottom/top of the page. The rankings will purely be based on relevancy.

Bing Results

Bing & Facebook Results

Statistically above 4% of the search queries aim at find people. But hardly do we get any relevant results.Now if while searching for an old friend on Bing, you are also logged in your Facebook account, your search results will be based upon your friend's list.

Privacy Control

To address the concerns of the users about the same, Bing says that no information on searches will be shared with Facebook. And only the people who are in your Facebook network will be taken into consideration while answering the search queries.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

New Personalized Search By Bing, Based On Facebook Likes

Search marketing software provider WordStream has just released a new suite of Quality Score management tools for AdWords advertisers. These tools, which are now incorporated into the company's flagship PPC product, are designed to help you boost Quality Scores while lowering overall PPC costs. These tools should make it much easier for AdWords users to develop more cost-efficient and effective campaigns whatever their experience level.

AdWords Quality Score is a "grade" assigned by Google, based on demonstrated relevancy and click-through rates, that has a big impact on how successful your campaigns are. WordStream's new Quality Score tools help marketers strengthen their campaign structures according to proven best practices that raise both CTR and Quality Score, which equates to:

• More exposure in the search results for lower costs
• More traffic, better qualified leads, and higher sales

The new Quality Score tools have been added to WordStream's existing keyword management technology, along with tighter AdWords integration.

The new features include:

• AdWords Campaign Organization Tools – These grouping tools are useful for quickly creating tightly related ad groups and strategically organized campaign structures.

• Negative Keyword Tools – WordStream already had some great tools to help identify and set negative keywords, but these are now easier to use and have been improved to further reduce irrelevant impressions and wasteful ad spend.

• Long-Tail Keyword Expansion Tools – Again, keywords are WordStream's specialty. The new keyword expansion tools provide thousands of highly targeted long-tail keyword suggestions tailored to your product or service niche.

If you want to learn more, you can sign up to try WordStream's new Quality Score tools free.
 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

WordStream Releases Quality Score Management Software

Google, adding to its ever-growing portfolio of mobile search ads, has now introduced a new hyper-local ads feature for mobiles. The new feature indicates users on the move, about the exact distance between them and an advertiser’s business location, on their mobiles.
 
The blue push-pins on the page denote the ad units and feature click-to-call besides an expandable map. On the location accuracy front, the new hyper-local units go down to “the block level.” As the marker on the map indicates the distance between the user and the advertiser's business location, it becomes easier for the user to reach to the advertiser's business location. This means that using this feature advertiser's can now attract more traffic to their store and generate better revenue, as a result.

The hyper-local distance information automatically gets enabled for location extensions and does not involve any additional configurations. This allows the advertiser's to perform hyper-local advertising with their existing location extensions, with relative ease. This ad format is only available on the Google search network and in those countries that support location extensions ad formats. In this case, the advertisers are billed only when users click to visit the website or on the contact number displayed in the ad.

In order to take advantage of this new feature advertisers are required to possess location extensions set up. On the other hand, the users need to share their location with Google to avail this service.

The feature has great potential to lead people to the point of purchase. It gives an real-time dimension to the ads that did not exist before prominently.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Rolls-Out “Hyper-Local” Search Ads Feature For Mobile

After announcing the Updated Keyword tool to be in the final stages of the beta phase last month, Google has now fully launched it

The Updated Keyword tool has the best features of the previous two keyword tools, i.e., the Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool. Both the previous versions has been removed from AdWords and what now remains on AdWords is solely the Updated Keyword Tool.

Core Benefits of the Updated Keyword Tool

• Better Search Options: The keyword tool users can now search with any combination of keyword, website/URL, and category and get a single set of results.
• Easy Keyword Refinement: It gives the option of filtering results by word or keyword match types.
•  Negative Keywords: It has made it easy to select the negative keywords right from the keyword list.
• Advanced Options: It gives the option of viewing statistics for mobile search. Further, it helps to use the data filters based on local searches, search and ad share.

In addition, Google has made some changes to Global Monthly Searches and Local Monthly Searches. The statistics in these columns, would now be based on Google.com search traffic only. Previously, it included traffic from other search partners also. This change has been made, based on the feedback from advertisers.

The new tool can be accessed without signing in, though Google recommends to use it, while signed in on AdWords.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google's Updated Keyword Tool Comes Out of Beta Phase

Two years after publishing its first Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, Google has now come up with a new updated version of it. The guide outlines the best SEO practices, using which webmasters can optimize their sites, thus helping the search engines to crawl, index, and understand the site's content in a better way.

New features in the updated version are:

• A glossary to define terms in the guide

• More example images for better understanding of the content

• Different ways to optimize a site for mobile devices

• Clearer words for better readability

The guide includes information and tips on optimizing: title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text site structure, etc. In this version too, the Googlebot provides some great SEO tips.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Brings Out a New Updated Version of the SEO Starter Guide

In an announcement, Bing said that it has made few updates to Bing Mobile iPhone and iPod Touch apps. The updated versions are most likely to be available in Mobile iPhone App at App Store quite soon.

The updated travel feature gives, a Bing user the advantage to make use of Bing flight price predictions on the iPhone. The price predictions helps to determine, whether the person should purchase or wait to buy a specific airline ticket.

The second update has made maps readability easy on the iPhone app. After the addition, the backdrop information now pops up, while the the font size has been increased, plus there is an feature for easy map switching as well.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

New Bing Updates for Mobile iPhone and iPod Touch Apps

In a recent blog, Google made an announcement, that with the use of Rich Snippets, web pages with a reference to a particular place, are more likely to get displayed in the search results, when a user makes a search query on that specific location.

Google says, “The Internet is teeming with useful information about local places and points of interest, and we do our best to deliver relevant search results that help shed light on locations all across the globe.”

The Rich Snippets help Google users to find those web pages that may be referencing to a specific place or location. Hence, by using structured HTML formats such as hCard, to markup an organization or business described on a page, websites can assist Google to properly classify a site, recognize and understand that its content is about a definite place, and thus making it available to users on Place pages.

Google points that, a search result snippet with more information helps users to decide whether a page is relevant to their search or not. Further it says, by using rich snippets, sites such as review sites or business listings, that contain structured content can label their content aptly. This will make it distinctly clear that, each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data.

However, by providing this information, there is no impact on the representation of the content on the web pages, but it certainly helps Google to understand and present information from a web page in a better way. Right now, Google only supports the following information types – people profiles, reviews, business listings, and events.

“Though this markup does not guarantee that your site will be shown in search results, we’re excited to expand support for making the web better organized around real world places” said Google.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Rich Snippets Can Influence Local Search Listings

On September 27th, Google celebrated its 12th birthday. To celebrate this special day, they chose a cake designed by an 89 year old artist, Wayne Thiebaud, famous for his paintings and drawings of cakes and other food items.

In 1996, Google co-founders – Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then Stanford graduation students had started working on BackRub, which later become Google .

PageTraffic wishes Google a very happy birthday!

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Turns 12!

Google has introduced new SEO attributes – rel=”alternate” and hreflang=”x”, for better handling of multi-lingual pages and content. This feature is predominantly for websites, that contain:

• Template (side navigation, footer) which can be machine-translated into various languages.
• Unchanged main content, even with the change in template, leading to increase in duplicate pages and for those sites, that direct users to wrong language pages.

When used in the source code of the files, it should look something like this:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”a-different-language” href=”http://url-of-the-different-language-page” />

Step 1: Once the canonical is selected, either rel=”canonical” or a 301 (permanent redirect) from the various localized pages to the canonical URL, can be used.

Step 2: On the canonical URL, the need is to specify the language-specific duplicated content with the different boilerplate via the rel=”alternate” link tag, by using its hreflang attribute. When rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” will be included in conjunction with rel=”canonical” or 301s, Google's indexing and linking properties will get more accurate. It will also help Google to serve the users, with the URL of their preferred language.

This new solution from Google might not be appropriate for multilingual sites that completely translate the content on each page. This feature can basically improve the situation where the template might be localized but the main content remains as it is, across language/country variants.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google Introduces New SEO Specific Attributes For Handling Multi-lingual Pages and Content

As a leading search company, Google believes in developing scalable solutions to problems. Google says, that it has always tried to be prompt in answering to the queries, put forward by Webmasters. According to Google, Webmaster Tools were actually developed to provide relevant information to Websmasters about their own sites, so that, they could themselves handle issues related to the sites.

Google says, it tries to help site owners with their queries on various platforms like help forums, blogs, articles, and industry events. It believes that there are many areas, where their as well as site owners' interests converge. This actually gives them an opportunity to understand the problems in a better way and thus helping them to come up with effective solutions. They firmly believe that people can get the answer to their queries quickly, if they follow few tips given by them. They are:

• Ask publicly – Google recommends people to post their questions on public forums. This is because, it allows Google to answer to the questions there itself. The benefit it gives is that, the same post might be useful to someone, who has the same query. “We have a very strong preference for answering questions publicly (in a forum, on a blog, at a conference, in a video…) so that many people can benefit from the answer” says Google.

• Do thorough research – According to Google, a lot of effort goes behind in producing the content for their articles, blog posts and FAQs to educate people about search and site-building. Thus, they strongly advise people to search their Help Center, blog and help forum for answers before making a query to them. The answers to the most of the questions asked by people are generally available at the Help Center. So, if someone is not satisfied with answer, the person can post the question on a forum, sighting the resources, where the answer could not be found. This would help Google to update their documents with the missing details on the said matter.

• Try to be specific – Google says, it is important to ask specific questions rather than vague ones. The more details an user can give, the more detailed and relevant answer Google will be able to provide.

• Ask question that may relevant to others as well - Google advises people to ask questions that would be relevant and helpful to other users as well. This will allow Google to help many people at a time.

• Stay with the topic – Google explains that, it is important people to understand that not every Googler is familiar with every product, that Google offers. So, if someone has a query related to say Google Analytics will get the answer only from the Analytics team. Seeking help from other teams like iGoogle or WebSearch for that particular query, will not bear any result.

• Stay calm – Google advises people that, in order to get help from others, one needs to be calm to explain the situation, sighting details, and by being clear about the exact requirement.

• Every information is vital – Google says, there are times when people get disgruntled, when they are not satisfied with the answer provided. However, it merely does not mean that the answer is wrong. There are many areas of SEO and website design, that are quite diverse and giving a conclusive answer on them is not always possible. Though every bit of information provided by Google is geared to help people in a better and effective manner.

Finally, Google also points, that their Webmaster Help Forums are available in 18 languages excluding English, for people who are not so comfortable with the English language

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google's Tips for Getting Help on SEO and Site-Building