Want effective proven techniques that will increase your placement on the search engines and your bottom line? … and don’t want to waste your time with theoretical concepts that ‘might’ work…give us a ring or email us and let’s talk about your web marketing needs and to see if what we have is a good fit for your business goals.

Need to hear some good words from a recent client of ours before you contact us?

As previously reported, Microsoft has made deals with both Facebook and Twitter, which will see Bing feature updates from both networks in real-time search efforts. To me, this says that social media just became an even bigger part of search engine marketing, particularly with Google also on board with Twitter and rumored to be talking to Facebook.

To read the full article click here.

The major interesting item that was mentioned there, is that Bing is weighting those users with more followers over those with less.  So what to do, what to do?  Produce great content, be active in the community and get followers!

It will be interesting to watch how this evolves over time.  I’m certain the criteria for ranking with adjust a bit as they refine this new ‘real time’ search feature.  Stay tuned.

Is this a good or bad thing?

What does nofollow mean anyways?

Glad you asked.

You should care because a lot of folks were trying to game the Google ranking system by link dropping their space junk onto Google using social bookmarking…of which Digg, is the king.

What’s social bookmarking?  Also glad you asked.  Social bookmarking are sites where people come together and share awesome links with eachother and they’re VERY popular.  …and Google at some point in the game decided that a few of them were interesting enough to provide a TON of PageRank to which made them big targets for SEOs & general link spammers. You could publish an article, a blog post, a video or whatever and go drop a link at Digg or one of the other social bookmarking sites and Google would give some weight and notice to that link placement.

Now that this game has been played out pretty heavily and abused to death, Digg decided to put the smack down of a ‘nofollow’ tag on external links to websites that they couldn’t verify as trustworthy or had some level of true ‘user popularity.’

See their post on it today here: http://blog.digg.com/?p=864

Anyways, this nofollow tag on links simply means that they’re going to tell Google to not worry with following those links unless they’re trustworthy.

Is this good or bad?

Bottom line it’s a GREAT thing for both SEOs, internet marketers AND users.  There won’t be such a rash of abuse coming from Diggs and Google’s bot won’t be instructed to follow any spamtastic links.

Ok to wrap up, what does nofollow mean anyways?  Years ago Google decided to allow webmasters to apply this little sniplet of code to their links

<a href=”http://somedomain.com/link-yada-yada/” rel=”nofollow”>text or image link</a>

This would allow the site owner or webmaster to tell Google to not be concerned with crawling that link.  This was useful so that site owners could post links but not waste quality outbound links on trivial stuff…and dilute their website’s Page Rank strength.

Hope that geek speak makes sense.

Anyways, Cheers to Digg for getting on board with helping to fight spam and also to apparently be applying some assistance to Google in determining what might be a quality outbound link and what isn’t.  In this statement it seemed clear it’d make it easy for Google to determine which links Digg thought might be worthy of crawling:

“while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content. We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.”

Take care and remember, focus on building quality content for users.  Link building schemes are just that…schemes.  Use them only when you are certain that your conent being published is truly link-drop-worthy and of benefit to your audience.

PLEASE… DO NOT CREATE SPACE JUNK

“What are you talking about?” is probably what you’re thinking right about now.

Let me explain.  Just recently I was doing some work for a client who wanted to promote his legal practice’s web site and while evaluating his competitor’s backlinks and anchor text it was discovered that there may be some directories he should try to be included in.

Well, not quite.

After reviewing one of these wonderful “SEO friendly” directories it was very evident that it was not so friendly and not such a good idea to get him listed there.  Why is that?  Let me back up a little here.

First off, building links for the sake of building links is frowned upon by Google for good reason.  They don’t want people gaming the system which makes total sense from both a user and marketing perspective.  If everyone could rank well quickly by littering the interwebs with space junk it’d not be fun or useful for anyone.  That being said if you have a quality site and want to get noticed, at least ’some’ attention should be placed on getting the word out about your web site, which includes getting links to your site…right?  No plants grow without seeds and water.

OK, now back to the point of the story.  If you are publishing high quality content, links will be built naturally over time by people passing around your information, but to get this done you need to ’seed and water’ the site a little bit.

So, when reviewing strategies to acquire those initial quality backlinks make sure you don’t accidentally list your site in a space-junk directory.

When I first viewed this one directory for my client, the top of the page was covered in pretty relevant material (other sites and good links)…  However after crawling deeper onto that page these were noticed:

The next thing noticed was that both the category listing and the main root of the site had this PageRank assigned to it:

So not only did this directory decide to litter it’s ‘legal company’ directory page with escort links and other nonsense, apparently Google noticed this and rewarded them accordingly with that lovely PageRank.

This made the decision to skip listing here very easy.

So, where are the quality directories to get listed on you ask?

Stick with the known good boys on the block:  dir.yahoo.com, dmoz.org, botw.org, business.com and maybe joeant.com

Why are these more important or considered trusted?  Simple.  Google has likely deemed these directories as trustworthy as not only is there a fee (except for dmoz) but also human review and editorial oversight as to who gets listed.  Just because you pay for a listing/review does not necessarily mean you’ll be accepted to the directory.  So then only quality sites ’should’ be listed there.  Makes sense doesn’t it?

Ok, now you know what’s up with quality backlinks, bad neighborhoods and why it’s not a good idea to try and spread space junk around.

Go Fight Win…and be good. :)

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Here’s some more great stuff to read on the topic of link building:

10 Link Building & Tracking Tools for SEO – Online Marketing Blog
Link building for seo » SEO Articles Now
Best SEO Blog » Blog Archive » Why link building may not wor..

Today while browsing the web looking at a variety of information on social media, I ran into a blog that also had some other topics that were interesting.  Anyway, the owner of the blog had asked some market research questions so I offered up one of the sources I refer to clients when requested:  marketresearch.com

While they have a volume of material, some of their reports are quite pricey…but if you’re serious about your niche industry or market research sometimes it’s worth spending those dollars.  That being said, let me inform you, I have no commercial relationship to marketresearch.com…I just know they have a volume of information there.

Here are two other links I found but also appear to be either less extensive in material in the first case, and pricey again in the second ref:

http://www.export.gov/mrktresearch/ and http://www.researchandmarkets.com/

So, what are your favorite market research web sites or print publications?

For internet business related issues I often refer to comscore.com…would love to hear from you if you have other hot resources.

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That being said, if you are publishing good content and want users to find your “stuff” you need to get found.  This is likely how you came to hear about this thing called SEO (search engine optimization).

The question of how much content do you want to publish is quite simple.

As much content as is needed to appropriately cover your topic well.

There is no set number of words or paragraphs, however, I’m guessing you want some actionable information now right?

Ok, so if we’re going to get into this topic then we need to get specific on what we’re talking about.  Here are some of the various types of content you can be publishing:

1. Text content
2. Video content
3. Audio content

Each of these are great mediums in which to publish from however for the purpose of this article we’re going to talk about text and ‘page building’ or ‘page additions’ onto a website, as that is generally what people are asking about.

In general if you are publishing blog posts anything in the 250-400 word range is fine as they are generally casual in nature and sometimes just quick updates on this or that with a link to a resource, article, etc.   That being said, the more the better in regards to content, but be sure to use the ‘post splitting’ feature in your Wordpress admin panel (if you are publishing from this type of platform) so you can avoid some potential on-site duplicate content issues.  You’ll see this “Read more…” function being used on a number of professional blogs for good reason.

With articles, keeping them in the 500-800 word range seems to be the ingredient list most people like to stick to.  Again let me reiterate and paraphrase what Matt mentioned…do not get hung up on these details.   There is no exact measuring stick used on how much content you should create and publish.  Keep it real, be authentic, and cover the topic well.

Now another element of content publishing on your website that some people ask about is…

How many pages should I add to my site?

A lot of them at once, or slowly over time?

Again, do what’s natural and makes sense.  Google DOES love active sites that update with quality content regularly so if you can put out a piece of publishing daily…go for it.  That being said if you go into robot mode and produce exactly one article every day of exactly 700 words, do you think that looks and smells real?  Mix it up, have fun, and do what would seem like natural growth.

Ok, so there are some cases where it would be somewhat normal to need to mount a volume of pages quickly.  Example being a very large product based website where you have a huge inventory of products.  How is this best handled?  Let me show you a video where The Horses Mouth (yeh, you guess it – Matt again) gives his take on the topic at about 2:08min into this video:

So, in summary I think you should now know that publishing often (daily if possible) with great content is a perfect scenario.  However don’t be a robot, don’t stick to imaginary number/requirements and be authentic with your publishing methods and schedule.

That’s it for now.

“Twitter attracted 11 million visitors from Europe, 7 million from Asia Pacific, and 4 million from Latin America — a total 22 million uniques from those three regions, up from about 2 million the year before. (Note that this shows Web traffic to Twitter.com, and doesn’t include traffic via mobile phones, text messaging, etc. In other words, it’s not a direct measurement of Twitter’s membership. But it should be directionally correct.)”

Read the rest of the story at businessinsider.com

We’ll be doing a piece on using twitter to gain positioning on the first page of Google pretty soon…

Keep your eyes peeled for that one, it’ll be fun!

Once you’ve had the appropriate keyword research accomplished it’s time to look closer at  your top competitors on the search engines with Google as the main focus as they are still the 400lb Gorilla on the block, controlling well over 50% of the current market share.

So, what are the elements you need to evaluate when studying your competition?

Here are just a few:

• Age of their domain

• Number and Quality of Backlinks (links pointing to their site from other websites)
• Number of pages on their website (how developed and active are they)

There are many more things to consider but those are some of the biggies.  Also there are many sub-levels of detail on those items listed that we won’t get into here.

Once you’ve compiled  your competition’s data and analyzed it, it’s time to build your action plan to ‘match and beat’ the competition.  Taking massive action without doing this competitive analysis is like throwing spaghetti on a wall.  Another way of looking at this is that you would not expect to build a beautiful house or even a structurally sound house without a blueprint.  You should not consider building your plan of action to dominate  your market space online without a solid plan either.

Get in touch with us to begin this process and ask any questions you may have regarding this process and how it can get you more exposure and customers.