While creating these types of linkbait takes skill, originality, and creativity, it can be an almost sure-proof method to get more links to a website.

Widgets

Widgets work great because once they are launched, they can incorporate links back to the original website that created it. They are basically small programs that run within a frame or box, like a mortgage calculator or a body fat estimator. Users input values in order to get their customized result.

HTML widgets work best since Flash-based or Java widgets do not support links back to a website. However, Java and Flash-based widgets have more possibilities when it comes to design and function and HTML can always be worked around them. Nick Wilson of Search Engine Land says that compared to textual linkbaiting, widget linkbaiting (or, as he calls it, “widgetbait”) can be defined as “high risk, high reward.” This is because the cost to create them may be high and in turn, a widget designer cannot definitely promise that a widget will generate a large amount of incoming links.

Plugins

Plugins are a subset of widgets that are written for content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla. Stephan Spencer mentioned in his blog that his download plugin page on his company’s website is nearing the same page rank as their home page, which is a 7 or 8. Because these CMS’ are open source, any developer can create Plugins and submit them for approval and entry into the plugin directory.

Once a plugin is activated on a users site, it may include a link and credit to the developer’s site. Some plugins aren’t free and many developers offer them for sale on their own websites (free plugins are used mainly for linkbait and for promotion of a developer’s expertise in their field).

Infographics

Although not much “overlooked” anymore, infographics are a great type of linkbait that is becoming more popular. A great designer displays statistics and information about a subject on a large single graphic, which is then rapidly shared online. The statistics are usually higher than estimated and therefore makes users want to share. For example, an infographic titled “Facebook vs The United States” published in April 2010 on Mashable was shared over 4200 times in 4 months.

Quizzes and Badges

Quizzes were a big fad in the 1990s, but they can still popular today if they are used in the right context. Types of quizzes that remain popular are trivia (especially when it comes to sports, celebrities, or current events), personality/fun (i.e. “Are you an Introvert or an Extrovert?” or “Which cereal are you?”), and necessity (i.e. “What type of dishwasher/car/insurance is best for you?”). Other quiz-like online components are in-browser flash-based games that involve speed, knowledge, or accuracy. Many quizzes and games present the user with a badge that they can share on their website or blog. As Neil Patel from quicksprout.com states about using these methods to improve SEO, “Rewarding helps build content.” This is where the real value of these types of linkbait comes into play. The badges usually have a graphic which is hosted on the website’s directory, giving them a link once the user inputs the badge code onto their website.

Tying in Social Media

Rewarding not only helps build content, but also makes users want to share their results. Making the results and badges easy to share means more traffic back to the hosting website. As you can see, TheOatmeal.com (created by web developer Matthew Inman) makes quiz results easy to share by giving users options, along with an eye-catching graphic. He also made the options large and noticeable, with the applicable social media icons next to the share link.

Controversial Hidden Links

Any type of linkbait on the web wouldn’t be complete without some type of controversy. In this case, many SEO experts believe that widget developers may be using “black-hat” methods in order to place unaffiliated links inside a widget or quiz badge’s code. Matthew Inman, one of the co-founders of SEOMoz, was caught for this process in 2008. Soon he was called out by the Guardian for shady linking practices-

“It works like this. Inman devises a free quiz, which appears on some webpage. You take it – answering perhaps a dozen arcane questions about Star Trek. At the end, you’re presented with a badge or widget for your blog, website or social networking page; there’s also the option of some HTML code that can just be copied and pasted in to any page’s source.  But tucked away within the HTML code that puts the badge or widget on your site – and unseen by human readers of the blog, because the badge or widget obscures it – is a link to an entirely different site. Search engine spiders spot the link, see that many bloggers seem to be pointing towards it and raise its page rank, producing high search results for certain keywords (also in the HTML) such as “cash advance”.

Soon after this was published, Inman wrote a blog post on SEOMoz about the Guardian’s article and admitted to wrong-doing, but then highlighted the steps he has taken to incorporate ‘white-hat’ SEO processes into his linkbait.

Since the incident, Inman has become a full-time freelance developer and still posts cartoons and other viral content on his website, The Oatmeal. His cartoons get thousands of tweets, diggs, and posts on Facebook and he occasionally speaks at web networking events around the country.

Here are some other articles about widgets on Blueglass.com:

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/5-options-for-your-site-or-blogs-sidebar

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/video-interview-with-matt-cutts-widgetbait-is-sooooo-2008

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/yahoo-goes-viral-with-a-link-badge-widget

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/ultimate-how-to-social-media-buttons-tools-and-badges-resource

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/social-search-and-why-we-should-care-a-chris-sherman-webcast

“What’s the use in a Facebook page? I created one, invited all my friends and it now has 300+ users but I see no traffic at all!”

My answer is obvious: commitment. You can’t expect your Facebook page to drive traffic and followers to your site unless you spend time daily making your page worth it. And the most important thing is to update it regularly and consistently.

Without updates and the interaction they foster, your Facebook page is just a brochure. The general advice (that works) is as follows:

1. Create a page update editorial (just like with your blog): make it a rule to post updates throughout the day. Also, plan the set time daily when you  visit to moderate and answer users’ comments and submissions. Automating and scheduling some of the Page wall updates will help a lot (below I will share a few ways to plan and schedule Facebook page updates).
2. Vary the content types you send to your page wall by posting links, videos and photos.  Moreover, play with various content styles: questions, polls, mini-contests and calls-to-action.
3. Spur and encourage discussion: always comment on what your fans post to your page wall.

Automate Posting to Wall from Your Blog Feed

The best way to share your blog updates on your Facebook page is still to do it manually, of course, for the simple reason that you can add an engaging notice to go with link: ask a question, invite comments or add a call to action.

However, by automating things we have more control over our timing: we are able to schedule updates even when we are away from the computer and cannot update our page “likers” manually. So in many cases automated updates are still the way to go.

There are many applications that import blog updates right to the page wall – one of the most useful ones is “Deliver it”. It offers a nice interface that allows you to choose which page you would like to post blog updates to:

Note: Another popular way to pull your blog RSS feed into your Facebook page is to use the “Networked Blog” application.

Post Smart Twitter Updates to Your Page Wall Automatically

“Smart Twitter for Pages” is a Facebook application that automatically updates your selected page with Tweets skipping all replies, hashtags or Retweets:

The application also has a nice dashboard that allows you to see all your pages, whether or not they have a matching Twitter account, and which exact updates have gone live through the application:

Note: If you’ve been researching the topic long enough, you might have seen many social media blogs recommending “Selective Tweets” app to post selected Twitter updates to a Facebook page. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to set the application to work with my pages, neither did many more people – so I guess those who recommend it never really tried using it for pages.

Schedule Wall Updates: Leverage Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the feature-rich social media marketing tool that (among many other options) can update and schedule updates to your Facebook page.

To add your Pages to HootSuite, go to Settings, select Social Networks, then click Add Social Network. You will notice an option indented underneath Facebook that says Pages. Click on this option, and you’ll go through the same steps you might have previously used to authenticate private Facebook profiles.

The cool things about using Hootsuite for updating your Facebook Fan pages are:

1. You can schedule your updates to make sure you post regularly (and stick to your editorial even though you may be away or offline)
2. You can update several pages simultaneously (or from the same dashboard)
3. You can choose the page thumbnail to go with the shared link and edit the pre-filled snippet:

Post to Your Facebook Page Wall from Your Browser

All the social media and bookmarking tools you are aware of are most likely to have a “Share on Facebook” option; the Facebook official toolbar does have it as well. However, none of them can send the update directly to your Facebook page (they are good only for updating your profile, not your page).

Luckily we have the Hootsuite FireFox addon. It installs a nice little button in your browser toolbar: whenever you feel like sharing anything online, click the button and it will grab the URL of the page, let you choose the page you want to share it to, and generate the snippet, page title and thumbnail. Obviously, you can schedule the update – which means you can schedule your Facebook page updates right from your browser!

Post and Schedule Page Wall Updates through Email

You can enable posting to your page wall via email by going to: Edit Page -> Mobile (click “Edit”) – be sure to keep this email address private:

Being able to update your fan page from email is great when you are away and can only use mobile phone. Note that the email subject will be used as your updated status if your email contains no photo or video – so if you want to send a link, include it in the email subject:

Note that this way you’ll end up with the update containing the “bald” link: no thumbnail or snippet – but this is still a great way to share news with your page users when you are away from the computer.

Besides, this method is perfect for sending photos and videos taken with your mobile while on a trip, conference, etc (imagine how easily you can “live stream” any industry event to your Facebook page using this method):

Moreover, with services like Letter Me Later you can schedule your Facebook page updates via email. Isn’t that great?

Give your Fans Exposure: Tag and Credit Members on the Page Wall

The fact that you know and appreciate every single one of your page “likers” will quickly increase your brand credibility and page engagement. It is easy: just make it a rule to share your fans’ links (that you received from Twitter or their blogs) and tag the users in the update:

Collect and Share Social Testimonials: Facebook Notes

While the built-in importing feature of Facebook is somewhat buggy ( for example, when you use it to automatically import your blog posts, there will be no links back to the original link source), you can still take advantage of it: use Facebook Notes RSS Import feature to collect and share your Twitter testimonials.

The first step will be to collect the positive feedback around Twitter related to your brand and “favorite” (i.e. star) those Tweets. Then, import them to Facebook:

Navigate: “Edit Page”, scroll down to the “Notes” application and click “Edit”. You will notice a tiny link on the right – “Edit import settings.” Click on it:

Provide your Twitter favorites RSS feed there:

You are done! From now on your page notes collect and share the positive reviews of your brand you find and favorite on Twitter. How sweet is that?

Do you have useful tips on how to update your Facebook page wall to achieve active interaction with your “likers”? Please share them in the comments!

Speaking of regularly updated Facebook pages, why don’t you join us at our BlueGlass Facebook page: we promise to regularly provide you with high-quality, relevant content!

For a short while you reveled in your prowess, much like a baseball hero celebrates knocking one out of the ballpark. Until you get up to bat again and wrestle with the fear of not being able to duplicate that win. There’s nothing worse than striking out after dominating the diamond.

If only you could read your audience’s mind, look over their shoulders to see what they want, what pains them, what piques their curiosity ….

What if I told you that you CAN do just that? Yep, sure can. With Google Insights for Search.

How You’ve Probably Heard of Using Google Insights

If you’ve been in Internet marketing for a little while, you’ve probably already heard about this power hitter of a tool, so I won’t cover the basics. If you’re not familiar with Google Insights, here are three videos Google put out to explain it. (Together they’re under five minutes.)

Traditionally marketers use Google Insights to compare relative search volumes of their target search terms. There are all kinds of ways marketers can find the best terms to optimize or bid on. It’s also a great competitive intelligence tool — and even a powerful predictor of market interest for different regions.

But this article is going to cater to bloggers. We’ll show you how you can use Google Insights to generate timely ideas for blog posts that will keep your blog relevant and competitive, regardless of your vertical.

Although an entire book could be written on all the different ways you can use the filters and comparison options to jumpstart your idea engine, we’re going to focus on the filters and cover some of the filter combinations you can take advantage of to find out what your audience is searching for. As our jumping-off point, we’ll tease out the search filters but include others as well in our examples.

You have four types of search filters to choose from: Web, Image, News, and Product. You can make your selection by clicking on the top filter in the top-right corner of the window.

Web Search

Okay, let’s say you have a blog that caters to those who are knee-deep in social media. It’s crunch time, and you just can’t bring yourself to blog one more time about Facebook and security. (The Interwebz thanks you.)

How do you know what’s hot? Well, one approach would be to choose the following options:

For this illustration, we narrowed our search to the U.S. — for the past 30 days alone (since social topics are as ephemeral as unicorn sightings) — and the Social Networks and Online Communities category. The secret sauce of this recipe is to click the Search button without putting any search terms in the Search terms field.

Hint: The more popular your topic, the more filters you can apply to narrow your range of search results. For this example, you can apply more filters because it’s a popular topic. But if you’re in a niche industry, you might need to pull up to a higher altitude to get enough results to choose from — for example, make the search worldwide, include more history, and/or choose a broader category.

Here are the results:

Of particular interest to a blogger especially is the Rising searches column. Those percentages refer to the increase in searches for those terms in comparison to the previous identical time period. Since we chose 30 days as our history filter, it will compare search volumes to the previous month. If we chose Last 7 days or Last 12 months, those percent increases would be referencing the previous week or year, respectively.

Image Search

Let’s pretend you’re an outdoor photographer, and you want to do a series for your blog on how to photograph various outdoor scenes. You have portfolio examples from all terrains, but you know you have a gravitational pull toward urban, beach, and mountain shots. Which series would be most popular?

For this beleaguered blogger, let’s see what the Image Search can tell us. As always, there are multiple ways you can go about attacking this research. You can limit your search to a particular locale (if, for example, you also sell prints from your site and you don’t ship internationally) or a tighter time period, if you want to go for immediate interest and aren’t as interested in persistent searches over time.

For this example, we chose the following options and compared the search terms beach, mountains, and city. For these general terms to be effective, we filtered the category to only include searches for Photo & Video Sharing (under the Photo & Video category).

(Click the image to enlarge)

News Search

Switching gears, let’s say you have a website that sells educational toys, with a large selection of science toys. (Special shout out to Bill Nye the Science Guy and Magic School Bus for ALMOST making science cool!) And, of course, you have a blog because you know that’s what the search engines your audience wants.

You wonder to yourself if there’s anything hot going on that swings science, and you turn to Google Insights to find that out. (Good call!) Here’s what we searched for:

And the clear winner goes to ….

Of course, this illustration breaks down because the Perseid meteor shower has come and gone. So you’ll obviously have to make sure your opportunity didn’t pass you by. But you get the idea.

If you REALLY want to go all Chuck Norris on your competition, you could tie your high-interest topic to something from your online store. For this example, a savvy business owner could have created a landing page with all of the appropriate astronomy kits, telescopes, and star-gazing accoutrements. They could have dialed up the call to action with a special, discounted it on Groupon, or used a promo code propagated on coupon-sharing sites like RetailMeNot. If you do that, just don’t forget to optimize your landing page for the event and not just the toy name.

Product Search

Let’s bring everyone home with a product search filter example, whudduyasay? Now you’re a blogger for a tech site that offers reviews, comparisons, and various informational posts on gadgets that have captured the minds and imaginations of your readers. If you’ve ever been deluged with press releases for the latest and greatest consumer electronics, you know it can be challenging to winnow through it all and separate the wheat from the chaff.

So you could do a search like this one:

Which would yield these results:

Imagine the delight of the manufacturer when you ask for a demo copy of their product because they’re killing it on Google Insights. You might actually be able to KEEP the product!

Your Turn

Let us know how you’ve used Google Insights or COULD use it to generate great blogging ideas. We’d love to engage with you here,  banter on Twitter, or connect with you on Facebook. Or all of the above.

Annie has joined BlueGlass as the Director of Search Services and will be working directly under Dave Snyder.  She is responsible for maintaining quality customer service on all of our search marketing accounts, creating processes around auditing, consultation, analytics, and reporting, and will be a key contributor into strategy creation for our clients.  In short: making sure all of our client campaigns are meeting (and exceeding) their goals and helping to make our search offerings & reporting even stronger.

Before joining BlueGlass Annie ran a boutique search and social company. That experience helped her to understand the different business objectives and pain points that often precipitate the need for SEO services.  She is also an analytics whiz

Please join me in welcoming Annie to BlueGlass!

Use The Code Below to Embed This Infographic:

StumbleUpon released its first-ever mobile app last week, available on the iPhone and Android platforms. I must admit, I find it puzzling that sites such as SU and Digg and Reddit, which were so early in Web 2.0, have been so slow in the app revolution.

Digg’s app only came out in March and was extremely unstable at first, eventually settling down into a rather simple, yet usable app.

The puzzling thing about both the Digg and the SU app is this: You can’t actually submit anything using the app. With Digg, this means you still have to use the mobile site to submit; with SU – you’re just outta luck. Wait until you get home.

That said, the StumbleUpon app on the iPhone is a joy. It’s exceptionally simple to use but contains all the functionality of the site (except submissions), plus one huge bonus over the browser-based Stumble bar.

What’s that, you ask?

The ability to stumble random content without clearing out the shares in your share bar first.

Let me repeat that: You can use StumbleUpon the way it’s meant to be used, no matter how many pages friends have shared with you.

For those of us who spend a lot of time on StumbleUpon, it’s long been a problem. If you go a day or so (sometimes less) without clearing out shares on your Stumble bar, you can’t set about to stumbling randomly, which is the true joy of the site. If you’ve been on StumbleUpon for a while and have accepted friend and sharing requests with lots of people (let’s face it, it’s social media – that’s being social), that share number can creep up quickly.

I love that I have the option of either stumbling the shares or just randomly in any of my selected topics on the mobile app. Just wish they did that with the Stumble toolbar, too.

So, with that joy discovered, I set about to put the app through its paces, and it performed admirably.

First, the welcome page is simple enough. It gives you the options of what type of content you want to check out and the topics you selected as your interests, if you want to stumble through in just one particular area.

Once you hit “Start Stumbling,” you’ll get the bar across the top that allows you to thumb up or down, as well as click through your shares or Stumble randomly.

If you choose to stumble through your shares, another nice difference from the web-based SU: If you accidentally click past one share too quickly, you just hit the “back” arrow and you see not only the share, but who shared it with you and their note. You can get that info from the SU site, but not just from a simple touch of a button. A nice feature.

Here’s how the share looks, when it first comes up, when you click through to the message sent with it and when you click through to see reviews.

OK, so you’re done with shared items or just want StumbleUpon to serve you up some cool content. Say, something filed under news. You can see the site, the page views, those who gave it a thumbs up and read the reviews. You can also share it via SU, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter — whether or not you have Twitter/Facebook integration set up via su.pr on your account. (That’s especially nice for me, as SU seems to have had a glitch recently that’s kept many su.pr users from signing in for weeks. But that’s another story for another day. Note to self: Next blog post.)

Another nice change from the web-based SU to the mobile app is how you can Stumble through photos. You can choose to Stumble just Flickr submissions or other photos. I appreciated it for a couple of reasons.

First, the Flickr integration on the SU app is the same as it is for the Flickr mobile app. You can flip through other photos in the same set and you have all the other navigation tools you ordinarily do:

Also, Flickr tends to be a different kind of photographic experience than flipping through random photo blogs. Now, the photography that gets served to you randomly on SU tends to be of very high quality, but Flickr is heavy on exceptionally talented, professional photographers. It all depends on the type of experience you’re looking for.

Lastly, there’s videos. Again, the integration with YouTube is seamless. I would have liked a similar option for videos as there was for photos – YouTube and then everything else, as sites like TED and Vimeo and others tend to serve up very different types of videos than the random YouTube video. Not better, just different. And randomly stumbling YouTube can be, well, rather random.

The bottom line? The app was (almost) worth the wait. I had downloaded an app some time back that I’ve long since deleted – it purported to give the user the ability to Stumble and Digg and everything else social, but I didn’t find it very useful.

The only real improvements I would suggest for the time being would be the ability to discover something on SU and separating out the YouTube videos. Other than that, I’m quite pleasantly surprised to find features here that are improvements over the web experience. What do you think about StumbleUpon’s mobile app?

What do you get when you mix two cups of online editorial, three cups of microblogging and six cups of awesome?  Tumblr, no doubt. The popular blogging platform that has been around for a few years is becoming a popular content platform for business. Even though the platform has 39.3 Million users across the world, companies seem to be having a hard time adopting this culture of blogging.

Blogs have been writing about the benefits of Tumblr for years.  At first the niche community of artists, Tumblr has expanded not only to the masses but to brands. Some popular brands on Tumblr are; Travel Channel, Mashable,  The New Yorker, FourSquare and Life to name a few.  Memes are very popular on Tumblr and very popular ones have even grown to land book deals.

Why should Brands consider using Tumblr for their blog platform?

1. Themes can be created from scratch or picked from hundreds offered.

2. Users can post text, photos, quotes, links, dialogues, audio, video, slideshows and “Tumble” other posts.

3. Tumblr provides the option of custom domains.

4.  You can auto-syndicate to Facebook and Twitter.

5. Users can track stats with Google Analytics.

There are many other reasons why a brand or a person should consider using Tumblr.  Many brands shy away from joining another network and attracting a new community.  We find that with Tumblr, there is a community that absorbs it throughout the community and others who consume the content like any other blog or site through an RSS feed. Tumblr is easy to use with their simple dashboard and network.  This makes it easy for people in-house to be able to help and contribute.

When weighing out the pros and cons to using Tumblr as a social niche / micro-blogging platform, do the research.  Your company may have  little time and management for a blog – therefore, using a simple platform that has reach and audience is essential.  Many of Tumblr’s features are hidden; instead, the network has only become popular for the silly meme type blogs that are published on it.  Discovering Tumblr’s many features that facilitate a brand and their blogging efforts can help make blogging and micro-blogging across platforms simple.

Has your brand embraced Tumblr? And what have been the results?

• Social media testimonials are verified: they enhance brand credibility by showing the real people using the product and discussing it;
• Social media testimonials give users more context around the brand’s approach to social media and engagement policy;
• Social media testimonials may even engage people by encouraging them to join the brand’s official accounts and helping promote its product online.

This post lists 4 actual examples business leverage Twitter for collecting and leveraging social media testimonials:

1. Windows “Social” Page

Windows has a really interactive “social” page which vividly (and completely transparently) demonstrates how actively the product is being discussed online. It pulls and displays content tagged with Windows 7 from various social networks including Twitter.

The social media page updates and moves in real time: you can adjust the speed of the update by using a cute little slide in the top left corner:

The page also clearly invites to share your social media feedback as well: it has a large “Join the conversation” button that describes how your Tweet can get to the testimonial stream on the site:

Twitter

Include these hash tags when you tweet something about Windows 7

General Windows 7 = #win7 or #Windows7

Purchase of Windows 7 = #igotwin7

Meetups and Launch Party attendees/hosts = #win7meetup

Sadly though, you have to leave the site or access Twitter online (or use your preferred tool) to actually Tweet anything: there is no link or button that would allow (and encourage) you to do that from the current page:

Lesson learned: Twitter testimonials can be highly engaging but there should a clear way to actually get the users engaged.

2. Perch: Our Customers Say…

GrabaPerch.com has a tiny (sitewide!) widget at the bottom of the page that shows a random Twitter testimonial each time the page loads. How they have selected the testimonials is described in this post: basically, they have just added nice Tweeted feedback to favorites and then grabbed the RSS from there.

Selected and designed this way the social media testimonials can be:

• Moderated (or carefully filtered / selected);
• Clutter-free;
• Available on each page of the site (no matter where the user lands for the first time).

There’s also no call to action – but probably, the widget is not meant to engage but to reassure the visitor to give the tool a try:

Lesson learned: Twitter testimonials may be both social and carefully selected.

3. Eventbrite: Testimonials

Eventbrite.com have the full page listing Twitter testimonials on top of static ones.

What Eventbrite has very smartly implemented is the way to leverage the power each Twitter user mentioning them has managed to build: notice the number of followers (as well as the location) shown after the linked username,

This way Eventbrite managed to:

• Reassure the visitor there is a real person behind the testimonial (with the name and physical location)
• Demonstrate there are power users among the service users (those that have solid following of their own):

Lesson learned: Twitter testimonials are (or should be) personalized – this is the most powerful advantage of them.

4. Trident’s Print Twitter Testimonials

Trident has transferred its Twitter success in the “offline” world by creating a print ad in USA Today. The color ad headlined “The People have Tweeted,” listed tweets from users who have talked about Trident Layers.

They say, all the 10 Tweets included in an ad are authentic (real and not sponsored) and approved by users for the publication in the ad ( Trident is said to have used Twitter to contact each user to secure their approval).

Lesson learned: Twitter testimonials may work wonders both in online and “offline” marketing campaign.

Have you even seen Twitter feedback smartly leveraged by brands? Please share your thoughts!

Speaking of Twitter, why don’t you follow us on Twitter to share your feedback any time!

How does SecondStep differ from other SEO Tools on the market?

Well first off it isn’t a tool. There are some amazing search tools out there, such as SEOmoz’s new web application, and in our mind there is no reason for us to enter a market that already has so many amazing products. Instead we have built a platform that utilizes workflow solutions, technology, and scalable labor to allow marketers to get jobs done that tools are just not equipped or built for.

A tool is a great item for a professional to use to do a quality job, however there are people that want to get involved in search marketing that simply need someone else to do parts or the entire job for them, that is who SecondStep is for. SecondStep allows the small business owner to get involved with quality search services at a scalable budget, and the enterprise level inhouse SEO to leverage a production team from the same platform. That is the level of scalability we are looking to tackle with SecondStep, and we feel it is something completely unique to the market.

Step 1: Auditing

What we have created with our auditing product is something that we think is completely unique in the search space. It’s a mixture of crawl technology, competitive analysis, and automated best practice recommendations. Where the product really differs from others on the market is how we scale human interaction with these audits. A free user can come into SecondStep and receive everything I noted above, but a paid user can expand this automated audit into a truly customized report that tells them step by step how to make changes to their search campaign that are going to have meaningful impacts. Beyond that enterprise level users can take it even beyond that auditing and work with our team to create customized crawls, reports, and receive a level of insight into their site that is basically unavailable in any other web based search tool today.

Step 2: Add Tasks

The most interesting thing we are doing with SecondStep is offering its full project management capabilities at no cost to users. Project management is the foundation of the SecondStep system, but it is by no means the core of its uniqueness, and we feel that every marketer can benefit from a free tool such as this.

Within our project management tool you can take your audit and utilize it to plan tasks either for your internal staff or our scalable staffing solution.  You can assign priorities to tasks, message team members, and see all tasks displayed on a calendar.

Your team can easily check their task load via SecondStep’s dashboard every time they log in. It is a great tool for search campaign and team management.

Step 3: Keyword Research

A lot of companies offer keyword research within their toolset, but the way we utilize keyword research is totally unique in the organic search platform space. In fact, if you were to equate our utilization of keyword research to anything it would be to the way that Adwords allows marketers to make campaign decisions within their system based on their keyword tool.

A marketer can do analysis of phrase match and related keywords, and then make some early decisions on the keyword based on values such as volume, cpc, the relative competitiveness of the term, and overall perceived market value of the term. From here, the marketer can directly add the keyword into their SecondStep campaign and begin the true unique interaction that the platforms offers to users.

Step 4: Assign Keywords

Once you have added your keywords to you campaign you can receive micro-audits of the competitive nature of the space and the overall value it can bring to your campaign. This allows you to make budgetary decisions about your campaign, and also help assign your keywords to the correct pages on your website, build title tags, and optimized meta information for the keyword.

Step 5: Build Content

What kind of impact would an infinitely scalable original content source have on your web based business? With SecondStep you can find out. SecondStep allows you to work with our CopyPress system directly from your backend, which means you can differentiat content that meets your need on the keyword level.

Do you have an 8,000 product ecommerce site? No problem. You can find the keywords that will funnel traffic to each product the best and build unique content for each and every product, then work with our team to have a single XML feed create to make inclusion of the content seamless.

Have a 10 page website for your locally owned pizza place? No worries we can create content each of your 10 pages at a cost and ease that will make the process painless.

Step 6: Build Links

The core of any successful search campaign has a focus on how links interact with the target site. Links are large part of what the search engines use to find the relevance of your web page in a set of documents. A search campaign without a focus on links is only a campaign to assure inclusion in the search index, not one to dominate it.

What is so special about our linkbuilding is that it is based on our LinkQuest system that utilizes organic linkbuilding methods, our QA software, and other tools to target and acquire links that will help you move the needle for your organic campaign.

We are not a review based platform or a text link advertising system, we offer you budgets based on a keyword level for what it will take to rank competitively .  This allows you to shape your budget based on keyword focus, and means that the person with only a few hundred dollars a month available to rank for geo specific small business terms can receive the same linkbuilding quality as a fortune 50 inhouse SEO.

Step 7: Monitor via Reports

We handle monitoring in a much different way than traditional organic tools.  We feel that since users are making keyword level marketing decisions that it only makes sense to monitor and grade performance on this same level. The more granular the better. We sync with your Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Central, and Bing Webmaster Tools account, as well as offer your standard ranking reports, but allow you to pull the data for each keyword in your campaign.

We don’t feel there is a better way to measure success than at the most granular level possible, allowing you to make exact changes that will show true ROI.

What’s the SecondStep for us?

Private beta is obviously the first step in a long journey for the BlueGlass team. We are looking to collect user information and shape a product for a public 2011 launch that will reshape the face of organic search marketing. In our development pipeline right now we are looking at adding in:

1. Private search consult service  via a token based system, i.e. receiving professional search insight directly in your user backend.
2. Google Apps and Outlook integration
3. A local search optimization tool kit
4. Open access to LinkQuest to allow people to create linkbuilding target reports, utilize our SPAM detection tools, and utilize our inventory tool to manage their linkbuilding in a way only BlueGlass is able to.

SecondStep demo from BlueGlass Interactive on Vimeo.