Search Engine Optimization & Social Media Optimization Updates

Three ways a test crawl could uncover Hidden SEO dangers

2012-01-16T15:34:00.001+05:30

Three Ways a Test Crawl Could Uncover Hidden SEO Dangers

In November I wrote a post explaining how just one line of code could destroy your SEO. It underscored the fact that sometimes hidden dangers can kill your SEO efforts. In addition, it also explained how a thorough audit can reveal those issues and get your site back on track SEO-wise. Well, I’m back with a new post about audits and SEO gremlins. And as part of this post, I’m going to include information about one of my favorite tools (one that I’ve used for a long time – Xenu Link Sleuth).

n this post, I’m going to explain the power of a test crawl when auditing a web site. You can learn a lot by crawling a web site, and I’m going to focus on three hidden dangers that can be uncovered by using a tool like Xenu. And since the information is actionable, you just might be running to your development team once the crawl is done.

Xenu Link Sleuth – Free, Simple, and Powerful

I’m going to focus on Xenu Link Sleuth for running a test crawl, although Screaming Frog is another solution you can try (but it’s a paid solution). I’ve been using Xenu for years and it’s a great tool for spidering a website. There’s a wealth of information Xenu returns, including status codes, server errors, inbound links, external links, page metadata, etc. As part of the process of auditing a web site, it’s always a good idea to run a test crawl. You never know what you’re going to find.

Note, this post isn’t meant to be a deep Xenu tutorial that covers all of its functionality. Instead, my goal is to show you three things you can uncover during a test crawl that could be hurting your SEO efforts. Let’s take a look at what Xenu can find after you unleash it on your website.

3 SEO Dangers Xenu Can Uncover:

1. Server Errors

There are times I run Xenu on a medium to larger site and the report comes back with hundreds (or thousands) of server errors. As you can imagine, having Googlebot encounter thousands of server errors isn’t a good thing. The crazy part is that clients often don’t know this is happening, and that’s especially true with larger sites.

In addition, there are times those server errors are occurring on pages that the client didn’t even know existed. Confused? They were too. In a recent audit, the CMS being used was dynamically building URL’s based on a glitch. Those URL’s threw server errors. And Googlebot was finding them too. Not good.

2. 404’s

If you’re not familiar with header response codes, a 404 is “Page Not Found”. For SEO, you want to hunt down 404’s for several important reasons. For example, are powerful pages on your site throwing 404’s? Why is that happening? And how much search equity are you losing if they are throwing 404’s? A search engine will remove a page that 404’s from its index, and you could lose valuable inbound links that are pointing to those pages. As you can imagine, correcting pages that 404, that shouldn’t 404, is an important task for SEO.

On the flip side, if web pages have been removed correctly (and throwing 404’s), the last thing you want to do is to drive Googlebot to a “Page Not Found” via your own internal linking structure. That’s a waste of a link on your site (and it’s bad for usability as well). Using Xenu, you can easily view 404’s in the reporting, export that report, and then work with your developers on fixing navigation issues.

3. Weird (and Potentially Dangerous) Outbound Links

Let’s focus on a more sinister issue for a minute. Unfortunately, hackers are continually trying to infiltrate web sites, CMS packages, etc. to benefit their own web sites (or client web sites).

Here’s a simple question for you. Do you know all of the pages you are linking to from your website? Are you 100% sure you know? Are you hesitating? :)

For larger sites in particular, tracking down all outbound links isn’t a simple task. If your server or CMS package was infiltrated, and outbound links were injected into your site, it can be hard to manually find those links in a short period of time (if you’re even lucky enough to know this is going on).

There are times I run a test crawl and find some crazy outbound links to less-than-desirable web sites. And as you can guess, they contain rich anchor text that can boost the rankings of those sites. And worse, some web site owners have no idea this is going on. Xenu can pick up these external links and provide reporting that you can analyze.

Summary – Crawling To Action

Running a test a crawl on a web site is a smart task to complete on a regular basis. There are several actionable findings a tool like Xenu can uncover, and at a very low cost. Finding these simple, yet destructive problems can help webmasters improve the SEO health of their web sites. And that’s exactly the goal of an SEO Audit.

Again, I just covered a few insights you can glean from a test crawl. Try it out for yourself today. As I mentioned earlier, you never know what you’re going to find.

Curtsey @ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Search Engine Optimization and Page Rank

Sesame Seeds and SEO

2012-01-16T15:01:00.001+05:30

Why are our hamburgers square? Because we don’t cut
corners.”

– Dave Thomas

A long time ago I did an article on my personal blog comparing airline cuts to the fast food industry. I accused them of using something I call sesame seed economics. Three years later I’m still seeing that type of thought process used not only by the airlines but by fellow SEOs as well.
Sesame seed economics is more of a cautionary tale than proper economic theory, but it’s one that should be heeded by anybody making website decisions in an organization. I can’t remember where I first heard this analogy, but the story goes like this:

Every few years your local fast food chain hires a new MBA fresh out of college and tasks him with cutting costs. After several brainstorming sessions he comes up with a great idea. “If we only reduce the number of sesame seeds on our buns by 5% we could save a ton of money. It wouldn’t noticeably effect the quality of our product and hardly any of our customers would even realize it,” he says. It’s so brilliant and obvious that everybody buys in and the restaurant starts making similar changes. It works so well that the next year they cut the sesame seeds by another 5%. Fast forward a few years and suddenly the fast food chain is serving hamburgers on plain buns and nobody remembers when or why that changed but suddenly their quality scores aren’t what they used to be.

The airlines have certainly done their share of sesame seed cutting, but so have many of us on our SEO efforts. How many of the following sentences have you heard at one time or another?

“It’s only a small section of this page that’s in this iframe – it won’t matter.”
“Those terms only accounted for 3% of our search traffic, I guess it won’t hurt if they live in that ajax widget.”
“Who visits a site on their phone? We can use flash, we’re not alienating anybody.”
“Everybody uses IE – who cares if it loads in other browsers?”
“Page speed? It’s only a minor ranking factor.”
“Google’s not currently looking at social media, so why would we waste our efforts there?”
“Validation doesn’t matter – that much, just make sure it looks good.”

Sure none of these things will have much of an impact on your site by themselves, but when you add them all up you can quickly find yourself scratching your head wondering where all your traffic went. It’s really easy to give in to developers, IAs, and graphic designers – especially over things that seem minuscule at the time. Sometimes as SEOs we can get caught up in the big picture and lose focus of all the little things that can make our lives so much easier. Don’t be so quick to discredit the little things, because even the smallest seemingly inconsequential ones can be extremely powerful en masse – just ask Leiningen.

Courtesy @ http://www.searchenginejournal.com

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Seo Online Training Sessions

SEO Training

2012-01-14T14:18:00.002+05:30

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Courtesy @ http://www.v-empower.com/Services/seo/

Social Media Marketing in 3 minutes

2012-01-14T14:09:00.003+05:30

Social media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Social media is media for social interaction as a superset beyond social communication.

Courtesy @ http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Search Engine Marketing

Why Social Marketing is Better than Traditional Marketing

2012-01-14T14:07:00.003+05:30

Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Optimization (SMO) is an important – perhaps even critical – Internet marketing strategy. Time and time again marketers are unsure of how to approach marketing in the social networks or even if they should at all. Almost daily I’m asked by Marketing Managers and CMOs about how to get into the networks and what the benefits are. I’m amazed that they are not sure if they should do this. At some point, one must seriously investigate and take the plunge. The benefits of marketing in this arena are far too numerous to sit on the sidelines. So today I just wanted to go through a few of the up front benefits we see all the time

.

Courtesy @ http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Social networking

U.S. Coast Guard Uses Social Media to Protect Citizens

2012-01-14T14:06:00.000+05:30

Yahoo!site explorer is dead what are the alternatives?

2012-01-13T14:29:00.002+05:30

Yahoo site explorer is dead what are the alternatives

This post comes from our SEO channel sponsor Link Assistant

In the SEO world, November 21, 2011 was quite a day for many. In case you didn’t know, this is the day Yahoo! Site Explorer, a free and awesome backlink research service, ceased to exist.
Why was Yahoo! Site Explorer so immensely popular with SEO-optimizers? Well, first, it was free. Second, it offered one of the biggest backlink data sources on the Web. And third, it was very simple to use. So, now, with this one-of-a-kind backlink research tool gone, the game has changed, and there are several things to keep in mind:

- The amount of backlink data available for SEO analysis has decreased manifold (since Yahoo! Site Explorer had about the biggest index). As of now, there is hardly a database around that matches up to the scale of Yahoo!’s abolished databank.

- There is almost no such thing as free backlink data anymore. Whatever other backlink intelligence sources there are nowadays, for the most part, these would be paid.

- There are many SEO tools in the industry that used to rely on Yahoo! Site Explorer for backlink data. With that in mind, if the SEO tool you’ve been using is one of them, it’s probably time to switch to something else.

At the moment, many SEO-optimizers are desperately seeking for an alternative to Y!SE. Therefore, we decided to compare three industry-leading backlink checkers (worth the Y!SE alternative title) that:
Each use their own database of backlinks
Each offer a free and a paid version
Each allow for backlink data export

We wanted to see each SEO tool in action, that is, how many backlinks each of them returns, etc. So, we’re running the tests for multiple sites and will make the results available a bit later. As of now, we’d like to compare the SEO apps’ pricing and capacities, so that you can decide for yourselves which backlink checker has the optimum price/quality ratio.

As you see, each of the backlink checkers analyzed above has its pros and cons. We wanted to make our comparison table concise, therefore, we only included the most important characteristics about each SEO tool.

For more information, please, visit each SEO app, since SEO-optimizers have different needs, and what’s important for one SEO, may be of no relevance for another SEO, and vice versa.

Open Site Explorer

Majestic SEO

Link Assistant

And, your thoughts and ideas regarding these or other Yahoo! Site Explorer alternatives are welcome!

Courtesy @ http://www.marketingpilgrim.com

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Yahoo

The 6 modules of the SEO course

2012-01-13T12:48:00.001+05:30

The 6 modules of the SEO course cover all aspects of Search Engine Optimization to ensure marketers focus their efforts on what counts.

1.Keyword Research & Mapping

After completing this module, you will be able to:

Understand the universe of keywords
Ensure searchers can more effectively map your content

This is achieved through:

Consideration of several keyword tools
Review of techniques for keyword mapping and prioritization
Review of best practices

2.Fundamentals & Best Practices

This module will help you ensure your site is search friendly to encourage maximum number of visits through:

A review of how search engines work
An appreciation of the 4 fundamentals of SEO:
- Indexability (ensuring that all of the pages on your site are seen by search engines)
- Relevance (making sure your pages are relevant to the query through the appropriate use of keywords)
- Authority (the usefulness of links and how to successfully build them)
- Clickability (encouraging more clicks by ensuring that your SERP snippets are relevant)

The module concludes with a review of best practices for SEO.

3.Project Management

From this module you will learn how to:

Use direct marketing principles to integrate SEO into a marketing strategy and plan SEO programs through:
- Identification of projected revenue and costs
- Ability to prove to prove the usefulness
Make SEO operational, in particular how to:
- Monitor activity
- Use scorecards to motivate teamwork
- Select the right metrics to monitor
- Establish early warning systems when things go wrong
- Set up central teams to assist the extended teams in larger organizations
Differentiate between running SEO campaigns and using project management principles to:
- Align SEO into your strategy
- Plan out programs
- Use tactics to identify problem areas

4.Link Building

Upon completing this module, you will be able to:

Define links and appreciate their importance for SEO
Differentiate between internal, external and incoming links, as well as reciprocal, triangular and one-way links
Develop efficient link-building strategies through:
- Identification of why users should link to you
- Construction of an asset matrix of content to satisfy needs
- Construct an efficient content distribution strategy
Identify key link acquisition concepts and how to choose quality links
The steps in the SEO process

5.Research

In this module we consider the items that should be periodically reviewed in a search program to ensure it is being optimized, covering the key SEO diagnostics that you need. In particular, by the end of the module you will be able to answer the questions:

How are we doing and how to benchmark
How and what is my competition doing?
What opportunities am I missing?

This module provides you with the tools to be able to:

Understand your business goals
Baseline your current state and desired outcomes
Monitor performance against baseline
Develop "cost of not ranking" analysis
Develop missed opportunity analysis
Use multiple tools to monitor competition
Diagnose site performance

6.Optimized Copywriting

After this course, you will appreciate the fundamentals underlying website usability, including:

Understand the meaning of optimized copywriting and the benefits it will have for your online marketing strategy
Learn the three fundamentals of search engine optimization
Understand the value of good copywriting and how these set the law of attraction for websites, social media news and blogs
Know the importance of keywords and how these can be used in your copy to get the best results in a search
Understand how to use links and calls to action in your copy to increase traffic to your site
Have knowledge of the optimizing guidelines and how you can use these for effective copy
Understand how optimized copy can also be used across the social networks, specifically Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Courtesy @ http://www.clickzacademy.com

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Seo Online Training Sessions

The 12 modules of the Online Marketing

2012-01-12T14:39:00.002+05:30

The 12 modules of the Online Marketing Foundation course provide an introduction to online marketing, plus a detailed look at each discipline including SEO, Email, Online PR, Social Media and more.

1.SEO

This module will make sure your customers can find you using organic search:

Differences between SEO and SEM
The features of today's search results
The importance of the keyword
The steps in the SEO process
The importance of measurement and analytics

2.Web Analytics

This module shows you how to use the statistics that you have generated in relation to clicks, hits and visits to determine your strategy:

What web analytics means to you as a business owner
How data is collected and which method will work for you
How to decipher data and interpret it to meet your business objectives
How to set and track your goals, increase your conversion rate and your ROI
Tactics for tracking and interpreting online and offline visitors by:
- Tracking events
- Traffic sources
- Email campaigns
- Tracking links

Note: This module is also part of the Web Analytics course.

3.Demand Generation

After this module, you will be able to:

Define demand generation and define the key terms and acronyms used in this area
Differentiate between B2C and B2B tactics
Identify the 6 stages of the B2B scales cycle and the length of these cycles to conversion
List the key tactics for generating leads and appreciate their relative success vs. cost
Know several methods for optimizing conversion rates including:
- The use of A/B & MVT
- What to test and the quality of leads
Measure KPIs - leads, CPL, Sales, ROI
Appreciate some of the consideration in converting leads to sales
Sales cycles
Conversion funnel types

4.Pay Per Click

After this module, you will:

Understand the benefits of balancing SEO and PPC resource allocation to obtain marketing objectives
Understand the importance of relevant keywords and phrases to optimize the opportunity of each
Know how to optimize your quality score through a knowledge of the factors which go into Google's Quality Score and Ad Rank
Identify how to develop your AdGroups, and what you need to remember when structuring them
Appreciate post-click behaviors and optimizing around balance rates and stickiness
Identify the best strategies for optimizing retargeting opportunities as well as when not to retarget

5.Email

By the end of this module, you will:

Appreciate how useful email can be when used as part of your marketing mix
Know the importance of permission in email marketing and the 2 primary types there are to consider
Understand the importance of online calls to action when growing your email list
Understand the importance of the online registration page and know how this can be improved to best utilize your website's traffic
Know the different types of email and when it is best to use them
Understand why it is important to recognize the issues with email deliverability
Recognize the laws regarding email marketing and understand the general practices which make it easy to comply with the laws in almost every country
Know the importance of tracking opens and clicks and how to do this

6.Introduction to Usability

By the end of this module, you will:

Appreciate the fundamentals underlying website usability, including:
- How it is defined and measured in the context of tasks and goals
- Listing the 6 steps to website usability
- Explaining why usability is an important factor to make and save you money
Be able to list the key usability activities including usability testing and heuristic (expert) reviews and:
- Describe what usability testing includes
- Advantages and disadvantages of focus groups
Appreciate what usability professionals are measuring
Understand the myths and misconceptions regarding website usability, including:
- The best time to conduct usability tests on a website
- Whether you are testing the website of the users
- Whether a focus group is a usability test

7.Online PR

By the end of this module, you will:

Know the different topic areas that you can cover in an online press release
Appreciate who you are writing for and the different content
Understand that keyword research is required, that your chosen topic will dictate the keyword and how keyword tools work
Know the format for writing a press release and the best ways to make newsworthy and engaging content
Understand how multimedia such as images and videos can be used within a press release to optimize your online PR plan
Recognize the tools available that can be used to analyze and measure the distribution of your press release
Recognize how social media can be used to optimize SEO and understand how to build a special media content strategy to distribute content

Note: This module is also part of the Social Media course.

8.Content Marketing Strategy

By the end of this module, you will:

Understand how integrating your content marketing goals with your overall business goals will support your business development
Recognize the potential content areas across your organization and the various ways this can be reproduced in social media
Utilize user-generated content by working with online communities to generate feedback on your business
Recognize the importance of an editorial calendar and understand the factors you should consider when deciding what content to use and when
Identify how the metrics that already exist in your organization can be used to build up and support your content marketing strategy

9.Strategy

By the end of this module, you will:

Understand how approaching internet marketing strategically, by defining your goals and objectives, will increase the chances of success for your business online
Know the 8 stages of the social media plan and how these will benefit your business
Appreciate the value in including a relevant call to action to your online content and how to link this to the overall goals for your online marketing strategy
Understand how to measure your online success as a business value focused on a high return on the investment of time, money and resources that have been spent on your online strategy
Understand what it means to use a balanced approach to measure your online success and how it is important to tie this back to your overall business results

10.Social Media

The essentials of using social media as part of your online marketing strategy. By the end of this module, you will:

Understand that social media can be an efficient marketing channel and that using Twitter, Facebook and other channels is a good way to disseminate your content
Know the importance of planning your strategy when marketing in social media and that this must fit in with the business goals you hope to attain
Know who your audience is and where the communities are that you should engage with
Research how and why you should interact with your audience and how to get the most value of this relationship
Learn what you can look for to measure your campaign's success
Include details of your social media campaigns with your other marketing strategies to integrate your content, remembering that social media doesn't happen on its own

11.Information Retrieval

By the end of this program, you will:

Know the difference between data retrieval and information retrieval
Have learned about the history of the World Wide Web as a basis of understanding how search engines work by use of a Crawler, and what you can do to make your web page more responsive to search engines
Have knowledge of the highly complex vector space model developed by Professor Gerard Salton, and how the search engine index is created from this
Understand how connected marketing works, and how this new information exchange on social networks and in online communities has changed how brands and companies now respond to consumers
Understand the differences in user intent, whether informational, navigational or transactional, and the three-point taxonomy of search as well as how search engines record end user data

12.Mobile Marketing

By the end of this module, you will:

Understand the meaning of mobile marketing and the benefits it will have for your overall marketing strategy
Know the variety of options available within mobile marketing and the benefits these will have for your business, with a focus on SMS and email
Appreciate the value in the different mobile marketing media, including advertising, mobile phone apps and mobile video
Understand the important differences to consider when developing your website for a mobile market, and how to facilitate a smaller screen with a slower connection
Learn the 7 website must haves and the 10 mobile metrics of measuring your success

http://www.clickzacademy.com

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Online SEO Tutorial

The 10 modules of the Social Media course help you

2012-01-12T12:57:00.002+05:30

The 10 modules of the Social Media course help you understand how to engage with customers and prospects on social networks, learn about tools to better manage relationships and achieve business results.

1.Why Use Social Media

After this module, you will:

Understand that social media can be an efficient marketing channel and that using Twitter, Facebook and other channels is a free way to disseminate your content
Appreciate that marketing in social media requires a strategy that fits in with your business goals
Understand your audience and how social media has changed how they communicate, how they use and engage with information and how you can use this to make your business successful
Know that social media communities can help you engage one-on-one with your customer base on a more personal level and how to get the most value out of this relationship

2.Blogging

After this module, you will:

Understand the different approaches you can take to blogging, either as a blogger or engaging with bloggers and which will work best for you
Know the top 5 guidelines for successful blogging
Understand how to build relationships with other bloggers and learn how this community can make your blog become successful
Learn how blogs can be useful in alerting your audience to new content that can be found on your website or your other social network channels, and how new content will help with search engine optimization
Know what data you can use to measure the impact of your blog such as shared content via Twitter and Facebook and web traffic to your site
Appreciate how important it is to have a strategy when approaching your blog, understanding what your content will be about and who will write and edit this content

3.YouTube

An overview of how YouTube can be used as a central part of your video marketing. After this module, you will:

Understand how YouTube can work with your marketing strategy
Know the different ways that videos can be broadcast and identify the key demographics that they will appeal to and why
Understand how YouTube can be used to optimize your business' search engine results and increase your conversion rates
Learn how you can use tools to increase your video's success
Understand how to drive an audience to your video by utilizing your existing online presence, such as through your website and social media channels

4.Social Media Strategy

After this module, you will:

Understand your audience and how social media has changed how they use and engage with information, and how you can use this to develop a successful strategy
Know how to build a strategy based on your research, and understand the factors you will need to consider to help you achieve your goals
Know that social media communities can help you engage with your customer base, and how to get the most value out of this relationship
Appreciate the value of measuring your progress with metrics and what tools to use to recognize whether your strategy is right for you and whether it is worth your investment
Understand that social media can be an efficient marketing channel and that it is important to integrate your content with your other strategies to help you to engage with a wider audience

5.Facebook

After this module, you will:

Understand the best ways to engage with consumers on Facebook through organic marketing, paid marketing, location-based marketing, gaming and applications
Learn about the opportunities open to you on Facebook, including Facebook Profiles and fan pages, events and groups
Know the tools available that make Facebook easier to use, from desktop apps that make it easier to post updates, to content delivery tools that will free up your time
Understand how to use Facebook Insights along with your own website analytics to measure your impact on Facebook
Think about the policies and contingency plans to put in place to ensure your content is compliant with your brand plan

6.Twitter

Using this messaging service as another channel for online marketing. After this module, you will:

Understand the importance of building your community on Twitter and what you can do to establish yourself as an authority for your industry
Use Twitter as a customer service channel and understand how you can use this as a tool to engage on a personal level with both loyal and new customers
Plan a strategy to ensure your company's profile is compliant with your brand plan, and put in place policies and contingency plans understanding how you will respond to any negative or abusive traffic you might face
Understand the language used in the Twitter universe and how to use it to connect with your audience
Know the tools available that will help you to disseminate your content simply, and what content delivery tools you can use to make the best use of your time
Measure your success on Twitter by analyzing how your audience is engaging with you and your content

7.LinkedIn

After this module, you will:

Establish whether LinkedIn is right for you and your audience
Consider the marketing options available and what can be achieved through both paid advertising and building relationships organically
Understand how participating in LinkedIn can build your brand awareness and industry authority in a very targeted way through the Q&A and Groups tools
Plan a strategy to ensure your company's profile will comply with your brand plan, and what policies and contingencies you'll need to put in place considering that LinkedIn is a professional network
Measure your success on LinkedIn by analyzing how your audience is engaging with you through the Q&A and Group Activity tools

8.Social Media ROI

Tracking and managing your campaign's success. After this module, you will:

Understand how to measure your social media success and what you should look at to consider if this is a good return on investment for your business
Examine what you consider your goals to be, as social media requires a different view to traditional business goals of buying and selling, and are also different from the metrics that track your progress online
Know the value of your community and recognize the evangelists and ambassadors for your business
Know the value of good content and ensure your resources are being used wisely

9.Social News Networks

Managing your brand and your offering using social news networks. After this module, you will:

Appreciate the importance of establishing a voice and style on your social news networks through a brand plan
Understand the factors that you should consider when developing your brand plan and how this should be developed to help achieve your goals
Use your brand plan and the knowledge of your audience to develop a strategy for each social media channel to benefit from the advantages of each
Understand the current social media trends that will help you be the most up-to-date source within your industry

10.Online PR

Creating press releases and optimizing exposure through online news engines and directories. After this module, you will:

Know the different topic areas that you can cover in an online press release
Appreciate who you are writing for and the different content
Understand that keyword research is required, that your chosen topic will dictate the keyword and how keyword tools work
Know the format for writing a press release and the best ways to make newsworthy and engaging content
Understand how multimedia such as images and videos can be used within a press release to optimize your online PR plan
Recognize the tools available that can be used to analyze and measure the distribution of your press release
Recognize how social media can be used to optimize SEO and understand how to build a special media content strategy to distribute content

http://www.clickzacademy.com

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Social%20networking

How to overcome debilitating nonprofit blogging challenges.

2012-01-11T14:50:00.002+05:30

Last week, nonprofit blogger Kivi Leroux Miller ran the results of a survey she conducted about the biggest content challenges facing nonprofit marketers. Unsurprisingly, time and money led the results with 31% of the responses. But a number of other challenges emerged as well. I had the opportunity to talk to a few nonprofits about the survey and asked them how they handle managing a successful blog amidst their multitude of other tasks. Here's what they said, along with a few tips from HubSpot's own blogging experiences. Each challenge is also followed by its difficulty rating from Kivi's study.

Lack of Time or Budget (31%)
It's no secret that nonprofit marketers often have to juggle an enormous workload. But the benefits of blogging on search engine optimization and community engagement are typically significant enough to validate finding the time. The question is, how? I talked with Brian Adams of United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley, who offered the following advice:

"Use your full network and staff to tell your stories. The informal nature of a blog means that there aren’t as many rules about what you post, provided it’s something that’s relevant to your audience."

By inviting your entire staff and your network of volunteers and donors to contribute posts, the workload gets distributed in a more sustainable way, and the blog benefits from diverse voices and outreach opportunities. To keep things organized, we advise that one person act as a central blog editor. If you're a nonprofit that deals with numerous causes, consider assigning different journalistic "beats" or topics to your bloggers and setting up a schedule that spreads out the posts evenly throughout the week and month. Christi Cahill of MyLifeLine.org Cancer Foundation echoes this. She writes:

"Plan in advance. Set an editorial calendar and stick to it! If you’re running low on content ideas, find people willing to guest blog for you."

Producing Content That Engages Supporters (27%)

Nonprofits have one of the most powerful sources for posts possible: the stories of their clients and participants. And though finding individual stories to highlight takes time, creating a channel for these voices gets to the heart of the mission and provides a direct line of sight to the impact donors and volunteers are trying to drive.
United Way's Adams writes:

"Our most widely read posts share several key aspects; they are connected to relevant news topics, they provide a look “behind the curtain” with anecdotes and emotions not shared elsewhere, they are written by leading experts, and the content is fresh yet linked to additional information that provides context and additional factoids."

One organization in Boston, The Crittenton Women's Union has taken a unique approach to this. They not only invite their staff and network to contribute to the blog, but also the families they serve. CWU's Kirsten Blocker elaborates:

"As the blog evolved, it became a broadcasting space for CWU program participants to use as a learning tool for their exposure to social media, especially as an advocacy outlet. This year, the blog will undergo yet another exciting expansion and will be transformed again to include the voices of our participants as well as keeping an active eye on anti-poverty reporting..."

It's important to remember that the blog audience does not need to be restricted to just donors. It can be an important resource for the people your organization is trying to help, as well.

Repurposing Content (7%)

One way to save time and give your content a larger reach is to repurpose content for your blog from other channels, and vice versa. When doing so, nonprofits should keep in mind that repurposing is not a simple cut-and-paste operation. Think in terms of editorial campaigns, and leveraging the blog as one of many ways to get the word out about a particular topic of the week or upcoming event. Take this example from United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley:

"We have had some success using the blog to preview content for an upcoming event. For example, our Women’s Initiative group held an educational panel about sexual exploitation, and we 'previewed' the content of the panel by featuring a guest blog post from each of the panelists in the week leading up to the event. It allowed those panelists some exposure on our blog (and hopefully gave us exposure through their networks) and also connected the on-the-ground marketing strategy with our online marketing strategy. During the event, we also shared quotes via Twitter and posted photos via Facebook.

Knowing Which Content to Use in Which Channels (7%)

To know which content to use in which channels, you really need to dive into your marketing analytics to get a sense for the role each channel plays in your overall marketing and communications program. Channel behavior often varies by audience segment. What channels do your donors typically use? How does that differ from your volunteers or your constituents/clients? Do some research on your most active channels and their characteristics before creating your outreach strategy. For example, it might make sense to share content on 'how to run a workplace fundraiser' on LinkedIn, while personal stories of impact may be better shared with your email subscribers.

What to Do Right Now to Help Your Nonprofit

The success of your blog will always depend on the quality and frequency of your posts. And while time can feel like a long lost luxury to nonprofit marketers, getting organized helps. As a final thought, here are a few things you can do this week to get started:

Create a recruitment list of staff, donors, volunteers, clients, and partners who would be good contributors to your blog.
Reach out to them with a first-time blogging assignment and due date. Having a topic to write about always seems less daunting than a blank page.
Examine your blog analytics to find your best channels for outreach.
Create an editorial calendar and stick to it. Start with 1-2 posts a week if you can.
Pick a date (several months out) to evaluate your progress and choose next steps.

Google results get more personal with search plus your world

2012-01-11T12:54:00.010+05:30

Google’s search results are undergoing their most radical transformation ever, as a new “Search Plus Your World” format begins rolling out today. It finds both content that’s been shared with you privately along with matches from the public web, all mixed into a single set of listings.

The change is live now, though not everyone will see it until it fully launches over the next few days. It’s only for those signed-in to Google.com and searching in English. You’ll know when it happens, because Google will alert you with a message like this above your search results:

The new system will perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search twice using two different systems.

However, Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy worries, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (it is not). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially intended.

The new format and features will also likely cause Google to come under renewed fire that it is leveraging its search engine to favor its own content and crowd out competitors.

Below, a detailed look at what’s involved with Search Plus Your World, from how it works to some of the issues it raises.

Before: Personalized & Social Search Results Separate

Google has had personalized results since June 2005, results from across the web that are given a ranking boost because they are deemed especially of interest to someone, based on their personal behavior and interests. Without the boost, these results might not have made it into the top listings for a particular search.

Personalized results were expanded and presented in a new way in February 2007. Then, in December 2009, you no longer had to opt-in to receive personalized results. They were enabled by default for everyone, to some degree, even if you weren’t signed-in to Google.

Separately, Google has had social search results since October 2009. These are also personalized listings but ones based on the people you know, rather than your personal behavior. They’ve also been given a ranking boost.

Initially segregated from “regular” listings, Google’s social search results were blended into regular results in Feburary 2011 and expanded to include not just content created by those you know but also content shared by them through a variety of social networks.

Now: Personal, Private, Public & Social United

With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. The view personalizes the listings you get based on both your own behavior and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the Google+ social network now also appears.

“The social search algorithm, and the personal search algorithm, and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful,” said Amit Singhal, who oversees Google’s ranking algorithms, when I talked with him about the new features.

You’ll know that personalized results are appearing when you see one or both of the indicators below:

The arrow on the left points to a message that, in this example, says that there are “50 personal results and 419,000 other results” that have been found. Some of those 50 results will be blended into the first page of results being shown.

The second arrow highlights a new toggle that Google has introduced, something that many of those who do search engine optimization have wanted for ages. It allows you to switch between personalized and unpersonalized results.

I’ll cover more about the toggle in a bit. When the button with a person icon is shown dark, that means results are being personalized.

Private Content In Your Web Results

To summarize, personalized results include:

Listings from the web
Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behavior
Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections
Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)
Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

The last line is the most radical change, that private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web. Here’s an example:

In this example provided by Google (complete with its arrow), you can see how one of the photos is showing

up with the note: “You shared this – Limited.”

This is a real life example of how personalized search is working for Singhal. He shared this photo of his dog,Chikoo, on Google+ in a limited manner, rather than with the entire world. The other photos of the dog that you can see, including one from his wife, Shilpa, were also privately shared.

Before today’s change, a Google search wouldn’t have found any of these photos when Singhal, his wife or anyone he’s shared them with searched for “chikoo,” which is a fruit. That’s because since the photos were private, Google couldn’t see them.

Instead, if Singhal or others with access to these photos wanted to find them, they would have had to use the completely separate Google+ Search.

The new feature will also work to find Google+ posts that have been shared in a limited manner, or for Google Picasa photos shared privately.

Slightly confusing, you can drill-down into the results to get what Google also calls “Personal Results,” which is a way to get just content from Google+ or Picasa. Remember this from above?

Clicking on the “personal results” link (or “Personal” in the options under “More Search Tools” in the left-column) brings back pure personal results.

No Content From Facebook Or Others, But Google Open To This

I’ve no doubt many people will find it useful to do one search to locate both private and public information at once. However, one of the biggest depositories of private information these days — if not the biggest — is Facebook.

Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”

Why are these others missing?

“Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal told me. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Perhaps Search Plus Your World will prove the carrot or stick that Google’s been after for years to get Facebook to share its data with Google. If the new feature takes off, searchers may wonder why they can’t find privately shared information from their Facebook friends easily on Google.

Then again, Facebook could decide to push back by beefing up its own search features. Currently, Facebook partners with Bing, allowing Bing to personalize its search results for searchers based on what their Facebook friends like.

However, only publicly shared content gets personalized like this. Potentially, Facebook and Bing could work more closely to come up with their own version of Search Plus Your World. That could happen on Bing, or it could happen within Facebook itself.

To date, Facebook’s not spent much time trying to refine its own search results. The primary reason seems to be that the company has repeatedly said that most of the Facebook-based searches it sees are to find people, not to find information about broad topics as happens at Google.

Only You & Those You Share With See Private Content

When Google first showed me Search Plus Your World, a part of me felt unsettled and uncomfortable. As I’ve thought about it more, I think it’s because it feels weird to see “private” content appearing in seems like Google’s “public” search results.

Of course, personalized results aren’t Google’s public results. They are results personalized just for the person viewing them. If private content has been shared with those people, that’s visible. If it hasn’t been, then it’s not.

Google’s also not making it possible to search for anything that you couldn’t already search for before. As I explained, private content shared on Google+ could be found with a Google+ search. Google’s really just making Google+ Search one of its Universal Search sources, in some ways.

In other words, you can search on Google and find matches from Google News, Google Images, Google Video and other Google search services without having to go to them individually. Google+ Search is now another one of those integrated services.

Will It Lead To Concerns?

As said, the ability to search for private content on Google+ isn’t new. However, I wonder if having it integrated into Google’s search results itself might cause some surprises and issues for both Google and its users.

Consider sites selling counterfeit goods. When Google links to these, it gets blamed for promoting counterfeiting, almost as if it created the sites. What’s really happening is that Google comes under fire for giving sites visibility.

Now Google’s going to give greater visibility to private information. Things that people may have forgotten sharing with others will begin to show up serendipitously through ordinary Google searches. Some might not like this, if material they’ve happily forgotten suddenly seems to reappear. Google might take the blame, even though the sharing was done by others.

It might be similar to some of the concerns that came up recently with Facebook Timeline. It’s not that the material Timeline lists wasn’t out there before. But by organizing it, forgotten things are brought back up, as this New York Times article explained well.

Another issue is that it’s very easy with Google+ (as it is with Facebook and Twitter) for someone with access to private content to reshare it publicly. Someone searching on Google, then coming across an unexpected photo or post from a friend, might reshare it to the world.

All this could happen without the search integration. Maybe none of it will be much of an issue at all. But these are concerns that come to mind.

One solution might be an option to exclude your shared content from being searchable. This is something that can be done with public content on the web. You can tell Google or other search engines not to include published material in their search listings. Perhaps Google needs to offer the same for private content, as well (it doesn’t currently).

Secure Search Protects Privacy; Referrers For Advertisers Does Not

Google’s been focused on a bigger concern. Mixing private content in with its search results means that anyone searching without a secure connection potentially exposes that private content to eavesdropping.

And now the full story about why Google rolled out secure search for signed-in users back in October can finally be told. It was necessary preparation to allow for Search Plus Your World to happen today.

“We’ve been working on it for a year, very hard to get it right,” Singhal said, of dealing with the security issues. “It’s just a hard technical problem that we bit off, and it was something that we could not launch until we had it right.”

The encryption that secure search provides means that any private material mixed in with your regular results is protected, seen only by your browser and Google, not by anyone somehow monitoring an internet connection you’re using.

Many publishers were upset about the encryption move last year because, as part of that, Google also stopped providing referrer data, information that shows what searches someone did on Google before visiting a web site.

Expect Google to point to today’s move as a further reason to justify the dropping of referrers. It’s a false justification. Indeed, the move might make things even worse, in terms of privacy, since referrer data is still being passed to advertisers.

Potentially, people are going to search for even more private things than they ever did before. Potentially, they’re going to click on ad links and pass these private search terms to advertisers.

Today’s change does nothing to change my view that Google needs to revisit the referrer blocking and either make it a block for everyone, including advertisers, or find a better way to filter search terms that get made visibile in various ways.

My post from Sunday explains this in more depth: 2011: The Year Google & Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

Opt-Out, Not Opt-In

Don’t like the idea of personalized search? Disappointingly, Google didn’t go the opt-in route. Instead, you have to deliberately opt-out.

“I think this is a much better experience, at the end of the day,” Singhal said, explaining why the default change was made.

You can opt-out permanently through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis using the aforementioned toggle. Click on the globe symbol, and you’ll see unpersonalized results.

This is nice. It’s the first time since December 2009 that people have been able to easily see “normal” results, if they want them.

Personalized Is The New “Normal”

Of course, it’s a mistake to assume that doing this really shows normal results. It will eliminate personalization factors such as your web browsing history (if you provide that to Google through its toolbar in Internet Explorer), your searching history or your social connections.

But geographic targeting — which can be really significant – will still happen. So will targeting by language. Google has begun calling these contextual signals rather than personal ones. Both can be overridden, for those who want. But doing so will still produce results that are still tailored, just to a different geographical location or language.

More important, with Google heading toward 100 million users on Google+, if a good number of those are active users, then they’re logged in to Google. That means the “normal” results they see are personalized. Personalized results are normal; non-personalized are not.

Google Profiles Get Big Push

Another big change as part of today’s release is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be much more heavily highlighted in Google search.

For those logged in, they’ll begin seeing their friends appear right within the search box, like this:

You can see how for Ben Smith, a little picture of him appears next to the search suggestion for his name, which in turn is a link to his Google+ profile, if it were selected.

This is very similar to how Google Direct Connect works for Google+ Business Pages. The results individuals see are biased toward people in their own social networks, similar to how Facebook works when you search for people there.

In other words, if you searched for a friend who had a common name, you should be shown your actual friend’s Google+ profile, rather than someone you don’t know.

In addition, the search results themselves will devote much more room to displaying material from a Google+ person (and actually have been doing so since November):

In the example above, you can see how Ben Smith’s Google+ profile is listed right within the results, with some of his recent posts shown. He’s a friend of Singhal’s, which is why posts with “Limited” sharing appear. The “Friends” circle on Google+ that Singhal has put him in is also shown.

“For me, it’s going to change my relationship on how I look at Google search,” Singhal told me. “It makes it much easier for me to get to what they [someone he knows or is interested in] were saying or if there are web results I should care about.”

What About Promoting Facebook Profiles Or Even Web Sites?

Still, it’s a lot of room devoted to Google+ profiles. While Facebook’s terms have prevented Google from getting some data, I can’t see any particular reason why the type of direct connect suggestion being shown above — as well as the deep display of content from a Facebook profile page — couldn’t also be done for Facebook, not to mention Twitter.

After all, if Google can do expanded sitelinks for social media profiles like at Quora or Twitter, then expanded profile listings showing some relevant posts from those profiles doesn’t seem that difficult.

Of course, it’s harder to do in the case above since the suggestion is made because Smith is known to be one of Singhal’s friends. But Google will be suggesting some celebrities and famous people even if the searcher hasn’t connected to them yet:

The example above shows how photographer Trey Ratcliff is being suggested, with a link to his Google+ profile, even though Singhal isn’t already connected to him.

That helps Ratcliff build his Google+ following. But what if he preferred that his Facebook profile be given a link? Or a link to his own web site? Google used to do this type of thing back in 2008 and 2009:

See how a search for New York Times used to bring up a link directly to the New York Times within the search box? That seems to have quietly disappeared.

Now something similar is turning up, something so tied to only Google+ that you can bet some of Google’s anti-trust critics are going to have a field day saying the company is pushing itself unfairly. And that’s a valid criticism.

People & Pages Suggestions

In fact, if the anti-trust critics need more ammunition, there’s the last component of what’s being rolled out today, suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow.

These will appear on the right-hand side of search results, when Google decides they are relevant. Below, what a search for “music” might show:

That’s nice promotion for Google+ (and it also underscores yet again why search marketers simply cannot ignore Google+). But there are still many more people on Twitter and Facebook versus Google Plus.

Google should be able to easily figure out what profiles on other social networks might be relevant to searches. That’s Google’s job as a search engine, if it’s going to make these type of recommendations. But only Google+ gets this type of treatment, and it doesn’t feel right.

Wrapping Up

Overall, I like the integration that allows for searching through private and public material. As I’ve said, I think many people will find it useful.

I do think there are some additional privacy controls that could be added, in particular, the ability for people to opt their content out of being found through search, if they want.

But really, more than anything, I’d like to see Google diligently work in the coming weeks to see how it can level the playing field for the other social networks.

Yes, there are things that Facebook or Twitter might not allow, not without Google cutting deals or agreeing to terms it may not want to. But there are also above-and-beyond things that I think Google probably could do to promote these other services in the way it’s doing for Google Plus. I’d like to see that happen.

http://searchengineland.com

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20Page%20Rank

Marketer's guide to getting pas email spam filters

2012-01-10T11:07:00.001+05:30

Marketers spend a lot of time drafting poignant email copy, designing wonderfully branded email templates, and crafting succinct and enticing email subject lines that get open and click-through rates skyrocketing. But before hitting send, have you considered if your subscribers will even get the opportunity to read your email? No matter how legitimate of an email marketer you are, there are a host of things you may not even know about that can prevent your email from ever reaching someone's inbox. And with more stringent laws and increasingly sophisticated spam filters, it's to your benefit to know everything that can affect your email's deliverability.

If steering clear of legal trouble isn't enough to convince you, squeezing more ROI out of your email marketing efforts certainly should. Take a look at the things you should absolutely never do in your email marketing if you want your messages to be successfully delivered, and the things you can proactively do to increase your rate of email deliverability.

14 Things Not to Do If You Want Your Emails to Land in Inboxes

Don't buy or rent lists. Yes, you can legally purchase lists of people who have agreed to email communications, but they aren't likely to actually want your emails, increasing the likelihood they will mark you as spam.
Don't scrape sites for email addresses. This is always illegal.
Don't use all caps anywhere in your email or its subject line.
Don't use video, Flash, or javascript within your email.
Don't forget to include alt text in emails with images so they can be easily read by all email clients.
Don't embed forms in your emails; send recipients to a landing page on your site instead.
Don't use spam trigger words like "free," "guarantee," and "no obligation" in your subject line or email body. A good rule of thumb is, if it sounds like something a used car salesman would say, it's probably a spam trigger word.
Don't use a red font when drafting your email. And not that a legitimate email marketer would, but also refrain from using a white font on top of a white background.
Don't use exclamation points!!!!!
Don't forget to use spell check; misspellings are yet another spam indicator in your email copy.
Don't jam pack your email copy with keywords.
Don't use tons of images, or very large images. And remember, all images should have associated alt text!
Don't email people who have bounced repeatedly; it can cause your IP address to be blacklisted.
Don't include attachments to your emails. Just as with landing pages, send recipients to a page on your site to download whatever it is you want to send.

15 Things You Can Do to Increase Your Email Deliver-ability Rate

Do reach out to inactive subscribers to see if they still want to be included on your list; doing so decreases the likelihood that they'll flag you as spam and keeps your list current.
Do ask for feedback from your inactive or infrequently active subscribers to see if you can re-engage them.
Do use double opt-in. This means after someone subscribes, you should send them an email with a confirmation link ensuring they want to receive email communications from you.
Do ask your subscribers to white list you. Spam filters are more aggressive than ever, and sometimes email people value still end up in spam boxes. By asking your subscribers to add you to their address book, it tells spam filters to back off.
Do include a clear unsubscribe link and a physical mailing address in your email footer.
Do use a familiar sender name to decrease the likelihood recipients won’t recognize you in their inbox.
Do include your recipient’s name in the To: field so spam filters know that you do, indeed, know your recipient.
Do offer both an HTML and a plain text version of your emails; it’s not only an indicator of legitimacy to ISPs, but it also makes your emails more reader friendly.
Do keep emails short; too much copy is another red flag for spam filters.
Do include the date somewhere in the body of your email to show your message is current.
Do test emails you send with the email clients your subscribers use to ensure they deliver successfully to all of them.
Do get email sender accreditation from a third party so ISPs know you are a trusted sender.
Do monitor your sender reputation. DNSstuff.com lets you check on whether you are a blacklisted sender, something many unlucky email marketers aren't even aware of.
Do honor unsubscribes; it’s not only good for you as a self-scrubbing mechanism, but it’s also illegal not to.
Do stay up to date on changes in email sending laws, ISP behavior, and spam filter technology. Email marketing is constantly evolving, and staying in the know helps ensure you’re always following best practices (and the law!).

How to revitalize evergreen content for a lead gen boost.

2012-01-10T10:49:00.003+05:30

Evergreen content refers to the content you've produced that stands the test of time. It's not a press release, a blog post commenting on a hot news item, or a snippet of product information that could change with your next round of updates. It's something people will always need to know, and because of its continued relevance, it often amasses quite a readership and can even land you in the top of search engines for your own place on Google history.

If you've created this type of timeless content, there are things you can do to make it work harder for you. And since we know marketers are all about squeezing as much ROI as possible out of existing collateral, we rounded up some ways that revitalizing your evergreen content can actually get you more leads. Combining just a few of these ideas will take very little time on your part, while giving you an impressive boost in your lead count.

Update Your Most Popular Content

If an older piece of content, say a blog post, was very popular upon its first launch, continue to update it as new information becomes available. If the content was successful a few years ago, it will probably still be interesting now. To squash any weird feelings you might have about doing this, remember that 1.) not everyone that would benefit from reading it has seen it yet, and 2.) truly evergreen content warrants more than one read. You can also add an introduction that tells your readers that the content originally appeared elsewhere on your site at a previous date, and has been updated to reflect a few industry changes. Be sure to also freshen up your call-to action and offer; unless your offer is equally evergreen, you've probably come up with something more relevant and successful in the past few years!

Link to New Content

If a piece of content is consistently doing well, you don't even have to update it to squeeze more leads from it. Just leverage its success by linking to new lead generation content you've created that you want to promote. The great performance of your evergreen content will help boost the success of other new content you link it to.

Change the Content Asset Type

If the angle with which you approached a particular topic was very popular, take advantage of the fact that not everyone consumes content in the same way. There's likely a segment of your audience that prefers podcasts to blogs, or videos to ebooks. Take the topic you've successfully created content around, and just recreate the content asset type in a new form to capture leads that would never have consumed your content in its original form.

Reformat Content Into an Offer

If people love certain pieces of content from you, they're probably willing to fill out a form to retrieve it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't keep the original piece up on your site for all to see; it just means you can reformat the content in that piece into a downloadable offer to feed your lead gen machine. For example, if you wrote a successful how-to post, take that post and turn it into a checklist or a step-by-step guide that people can download and refer back to time and time again. All it takes is a little reformatting with your WYSIWYG editor and you've created a relevant offer to attach to your evergreen content with a proven track record of success.

Make the Topic Relevant to Niche Audiences

The more specific you are, the more useful (and thus successful) your content. Take that best practice and apply it to your evergreen content. Let's use HubSpot as an example. Over the past few months, you may have noticed some of our ebooks changing a bit to target different levels of inbound marketing knowledge: introductory, intermediate, and advanced. You can create this level of personalization for your content, too. Take a piece of evergreen content that's rocking, and create other pieces of content around it targeted to things like skill level, industry, or job description. Promote them in segmented email campaigns with targeted landing pages and offers to see better conversion rates.

Re-Market It

Remember that not everyone finds you the same way. Say your evergreen content is being found in search engines due to a great long-tail search phrase with which it's associated; initiate a campaign to get it out on social networks and published on other sites so more people can find it. You can market it as old content, too. Say something like "Our CMO wrote this prediction post 1 year ago, and everything except #2 and #9 came true." You're opening your evergreen content to a whole new audience, and thus a whole new bunch of visitors you can convert into leads!

Optimize and Test

Maybe your evergreen content is performing well right now as a lead generation mechanism. But could it do better? Test different offers, offer copy, landing pages, and titles to see if any changes make it more effective. You should also take the opportunity to give its performance a jolt by doing some basic optimization. Audit your page title, header tags, image alt text, copy, and meta data for proper use of keywords, and see if there's anyone in your network from whom you can request an inbound link. If you do nothing else on this list, making sure your evergreen content is rocking harder than Springsteen is the most important and quickest way to improve its performance and generate more leads.

Search Engines- Winning the War on Content Farms

2012-01-09T11:58:00.004+05:30

This time last year, search industry eyes focussed on the general quality of search results eventually causing a storm of protest from all parts of the web regarding over optimized websites that offered little of value to the user - and too many ads. The trend which takes us into 2012 is that low quality websites have been falling off the top of the SERPs, largely as a result of Google’s Panda algorithm update.

University of Glasgow computer scientist Richard McCreadie, at the request of NewScientist magazine, examined 50 queries known as content farm targets in March and again in August. The results, according to NewScientest, are “striking.”

For the purpose of this study, McCreadie defined low quality results as “uninformative sites whose primary function appears to be displaying adverts.” He hired people to review the results on Google and Bing during the two given time frames.

Keep in mind that the first Panda update rolled out on February 24th and affected 11.8 percent of results, so some of the test queries were most likely already affected by the beginning of the initial test period. That further progress was seen throughout the year reinforces that subsequent Panda updates did as they were meant to do, according to Google: “reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts explained further how Panda sniffs out low quality sites, in a March interview with Wired:

Singhal:We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.

Singhal: And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality. In addition, we launched the Chrome Site Blocker [allowing users to specify sites they wanted blocked from their search results] earlier , and we didn’t use that data in this change. However, we compared and it was 84 percent overlap [between sites downloaded by the Chrome blocker and downgraded by the update]. So that said that we were in the right direction.

One of the queries McCreadie identified as attractive to content farmers was “how to train for a marathon.” In that example, sites with generic lists of tips were present in the March test, but had disappeared from the top 10 by the August test, replaced with higher quality results from reputable publications such as Runner’s World magazine. McCreadie reported to NewScientist that they had found similar trends across the 50 test queries.

Between the March and August test periods, Panda was updated five times:
April 11th, Panda 2.0 introduced signals such as user-blocked websites

May 9th, Panda 2.1, minor changes
June 16th to 20th, Panda 2.2, more minor changes
July 26th, Panda 2.3 acknowledged by Google
August 12th, Panda 2.4 rolled out the algorithmic changes globally

Late in April, Forbes took a look at early results to determine how top content farms had been affected by the first two incarnations of Panda. At that time, Demand Media’s Answerbag’s Google referrals were down 80 percent and eHow, another Demand Media property, saw its Google search visibility drop 42 percent. Overall, Demand Media traffic fell 40 percent, according to Experian Hitwise. Here are some other content farm traffic results in the wake of Panda, from around the web:

Since McCreadie’s study, Google has updated the algorithm a number of times, most notably with the September 28th Panda 2.5 update and the November 3rd Google Freshness update, which affected 35 percent of searches.

Over the course of the last year, we’ve heard loud cries of protest after each of the updates from smaller site owners who felt they’d been unfairly penalized by Panda. In retrospect though, as we’re heading into a new year, it does seem that Panda is accomplishing what it was meant to do.

Towards the end of 2011, on Webmaster Radio’s Webcology show, host Jim Hedger asked each of the Year in Review panelists what they felt the biggest search story of the year had been. Surprisingly, perhaps, Panda wasn’t really on the radar of some of the more recognized names in search as one of the bigger concerns of 2011. In the Webcology chatroom, it was generally agreed among industry vets including Jill Whalen that sites hit by Panda, whether they realized it or not, time and again were found to have areas in need of improvement that very well could have contributed to their being snagged in the updates: duplicate content, thin or shallow content, overwhelming ad placement.

The 2012 Successful Website Checklist

2012-01-09T11:17:00.000+05:30

Yep…it’s a new year, and everyone’s made their resolutions…

If you’re like many business owners, you’ve probably committed to improving your web presence in 2012 …and why wouldn’t you – it’s promising to be bigger and better online than ever before…

So to help you kick start your online resolutions – here’s a quick little check list to ensure your website’s more successful in 2012.

1. Content Review
When was the last time you updated the content on your website? Is it still telling the right story about your products and services?

It’s time to give your content a polish. Take down the old promos, add some new persuasive copy, converse with your audience and even make sure you have the current copyright at the bottom of your website (how many sites still have 1998 on them).

2. Image Makeover
Images tell a significant story about your business, products and services. Rather than keeping those grainy dark images from years ago or plastering your website with stock photos that every other website is using, invest in getting some clear bright and most importantly relevant image up.

3. There’s More to Media Than Pictures
It’s 2012 people. Yes images are great, but your audience expects to be wowed by other exciting interactive elements on your website.
Why not get started with a simple video about your business or products….or if you want to get tricky…there’s slideshows, podcasts, PDFs etc.

4. Get Social Already
It’s not new and and buzz isn’t dying anytime soon. Social media is here to stay whether you like it or not. More importantly, your customers are using it, so it’s now essential for your business.

At the very least you should have links to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin accounts on your website. But even better, use the tools available and integrate the conversations your having in social media on your website and encourage visitors to get involved.

5. Keep It Simple and Focused
As website’s evolve, they often expand and try to say too much. Bombarding visitors with a barrage of info irrespective of there they are in their journey through your site.

It’s important to give people the right information at the right time on your website. By removing the clutter and confusion you’ll do a better job of guiding them to where you need them to be.

6. Call for action
Visitors all too often they just need to be prodded. If you don’t ask them to do something, there’s a good chance they won’t.

Whether it’s buying your products, signing up for your newsletter or downloading your catalogue, make sure you make it obvious that action is required. Subtlety doesn’t work. Make your calls to action loud and proud.

7. Where’s the trust
There’s 100 billion trillion websites out there, and probably 100’s of competitors in your industry alone. So who should your visitors trust?

Unless you take the time to build trust, they’ll go elsewhere. Add trust builder like awards, certifications and safety/security affiliations to your website so they know straight away that you’re the people to trust.

8. Make it Snappy
Internet users are like fish…short attention spans. So they’re not forgiving of websites that take years to load. Almost everyone has access to fast internet, so the onus is on you to ensure your website loads fast and without errors.

Look at how your website is built, optimize the size of images/media and even reconsider your hosting. It often doesn’t take much to give your website a tune up.

9. No Rabbitholes
No one likes getting lost on a website, so your navigation is paramount. Make it obvious how to get to the bits of content your visitors want to find. And sometimes more importantly, how to get back to where they’ve been.

Some things to consider to improve useability include reviewing your main navigation menu, implementing breadcrumb navigation, sitemaps and even a website search function.

10. “Flash”iness??
Flash on website is soon going to be a thing of the past. Especially when we consider that more and more people are looking at your website from devices like iPhones and iPads.

There’s a range of new technology like HTML5 that does a great job of providing interactivity whilst still working on Apple devices. So if you site is covered in Flash…perhaps 2012 is time for a change.

11. Mobile is Now

Every man and his dog has a smartphone it seems. And they’re using them to view your website (well perhaps not the dogs).

So it’s important that you check your website renders properly on mobile devices. There’s many things you can do to improve the mobile readiness of your website without having to go down the path of creating mobile sites or apps.

And that’s a wrap. A short and sweet Website Success Checklist for 2012. My tip is to review your website with the checklist above and plan out the changes gradually over the coming months.

When you break the overhaul process into smaller pieces, you’re more likely to get it done.

And most importantly, don’t be one of those business owners that breaks their 2012 resolutions and neglects their website for another year.

An interesting talk by Mr. Allen, Mr. Adam & Mr. Parker

2011-05-23T19:20:00.003+05:30

Mr. Adam: Hello Optimizers! Wassup?

The other day I was wondering on what to go forward with, you know, I’m trying to optimize my website. So, what do you think about on-page-seo & off-page seo? And, Which SEO technique is more important to be successful? or d’u think that both are important?

Mr. Allen: Hello Adam! Basic point is that, On-page SEO requires skill and efforts from you where Off-page does not require much knowledge. On-page fully depends on HTML tags where Off-page is less technical. And I believe, On-page is hard to learn where Off-page is easy to learn… ha ha ha. So I’d go first with off-page.

What do you say Parker?

Mr. Parker: I think both techniques have its own strategy but as far as method is concerned, I think on-page is very effective. It requires some good skill and an expertise in this method. Yea! It definitely depends on some html tags.

Mr. Adam: So can you please label me important ON-page seo techniques, Allen? That would be really kind of you.

Mr. Allen: Of Course Adam! Do the basic on-page firsts like proper h1 h2 tags and implementing keywords and meta descriptions, meta tags, Alt tags, Anchor tags. That effort would help increase the count of index pages in search engines and majorly your effort into anchor tags would retain a visitor for longer periods.

Mr. Adam: Thank you for the information. If needed I will contact you on your email.

Mr. Allen: My pleasure. Anytime!

Mr. Parker: I agree with Allen completely. He definitely has good knowledge of ON-page Optimization, doesn’t he?

Mr. Adam: Yeah, he surely does! Well, now I'm really learning through these conversations… thanks so much for not charging though :-) ha ha ha. To be honest, I’m crazy about SMO; doesn’t it kick-start a business instantly?

Mr. Parker: True! Now-a-days everybody is crazy about social profiling which is directly linked to increase their business online. They want to be on WWW (World Wide Web) in one or the other form, may it be social profiling which comes for free, or using advertising programs which are majorly paid or go for organic search engine optimization processes, which are certainly long processes but long-time beneficial too.

Mr. Adam: Hey! What is this advertising program? It’s new to me… can you please explain?

Mr. Allen: O! It’s nothing very complex Adam! Simply refers to advertise your business or website using paid ads provided by Google or Yahoo or Bing or other commercial website. It goes to get more customers for your business. These adverts are visible to people searching on search engines and on similar websites and blogs. When compare to SEO, this ‘Paid Advertisement’ or call it Search Engine Marketing will generate you instant & more business... Why don’t you go for it?

Mr. Adam: kewl. I think when I start with any product I need to advertise on Google?

Mr. Parker: aah! It’s not necessary, however. If you are really interested to generate your business fast, you can go ahead with Google Ads; similarly you can advertise your products on Yahoo, Bing & Facebook.

Mr. Adam: Cool. Got it! Thanks buddy. What we see on facebook @ right side are nothing but advertisement for business, right?

Mr. Parker: Exactly! So now you’re getting the point.

Mr. Adam: Yeah! It’s really wonderful.

Mr. Parker: But let me tell you these are totally different from SEO.

Mr. Allen: I agree parker. @ Adam: But before you start advertising your product, make sure that your website is user-friendly, fast-accessible and attractive to your users and sure make your landing pages load fast – New visitors or old, Nobody likes waiting - Remember.

Mr. Adam: Another new term….. What you mean by landing pages?

Mr. Allen: Nothing but if you are advertising about your product page www.abc/product.html make sure that page should not take too much time to load. Better describe your product well in Ad itself so that a user should know about the product in detail so that automatically fetches more patience to him.

Mr. Parker: Good example Allen. I hope Adam is now very clear about the SEM, aren’t you Adam?

Mr. Adam: Oh Yes! Very clear, only about the advantages yet though. Can you sometime explain me the process of setting up Ad Campaigns online and in-detail Parker? It would really be great!

Mr. Parker: ‘Course!

Search Engine Optimization – Yahoo!

2009-12-17T11:27:00.007+05:30

~~~

Today's Inspirational Quote:

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."

-- Carl Jung

~~~

Search Engine Optimization – Yahoo!

No!

We aren’t going to optimize ‘Yahoo!’ – We’re trying to optimize our website for ‘Yahoo!’

Google’s Search Engine is obviously something that we mostly consider when dealing with SEO of any website and obviously again, Google is the one used by most of internet audiences, but this thought should not limit us in our optimizing processes. Indeed Google is top listed search engine around the world but ‘Yahoo!’ & ‘Bing’ too deserve attention, don’t you think so?

‘Grossly putting, almost 35% of internet population uses search engines other than Google!’

Yahoo is one of the best search engines after Google, so it is very important to ensure that Yahoo is giving your site a good rank, because a site that is well optimized for Yahoo will also rank well in other search engines.

Yahoo! is the second biggest of the three major engines and includes an enormous network of websites.

There are a few differences between Yahoo and other search engines – So, let’s dig out a little into dealing with ways to conquer Yahoo! Search…. Here we go!

To optimize and rank highly on Yahoo!, as with any of the major engines, specific areas need to be addressed. On Yahoo! the major areas are as follows:

The Factors

Keyword density (We’ve covered keyword concepts earlier, refer to them for details)

Let me get the links for you:

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/2009/12/seo-session-part-13.html

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/2009/11/important-of-quality-content-using.html

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/2009/12/seo-session-part-12.html

http://seo-vempower.blogspot.com/2009/11/tagsan-introduction.html

Note-Worthy Note: Research says that Google and MSN work on partial matching of keywords: this means that they recognize a "partial" keyword as well. Example: the word "cake" may also be listed when searched for the plural work "cakes", making no difference between singular or plural keywords. Or recognize the partial keyphrase in the word "cake" in the phrase "Cakes & Bakes".

Yahoo works on ‘exact match’ phenomenon: they recognize only an exact keyword or keyphrase – A plural or more words represent completely another match.

Site structure: On no other engine is site structure more important than on Yahoo! Arrange your pages in the order of priority!

Backlinks: Having a solid backlink count from relevant sites is a major factor on Yahoo!

Tags: For Yahoo Meta tags are very important… Don’t miss them.

Domain Demand: Register your domains for 2-5 years, not 1 year and get a domain with as less dashes as you can. Dashes are not adored by Yahoo!

Web links: Use search engine friendly URLs.

Content is the King again: Quality content is a MUST for Yahoo listing.

That’s all for today, thanks!

V-Empower Inc: Topic Today: Search Engine Optimization – Yahoo!

~**~

DoFollow WebPages

2009-12-16T11:53:00.010+05:30

Do follow:

Its’ perfectly plain English!

Yes, it does mean: ‘Follow me’ …you are right!

Yesterday, we’ve been through the topic ‘No follow’ which actually dealt with the reverse concept – it is indeed the exact opposite term. You know how NoFollow works, who it affects and what all it does… pretty simple, wasn’t it? Well, today we’ll be studying this ‘do follow’ thing. And believe me when I say, ‘this is more than simple’ seriously.

~~~~~~~~~

Today's Inspirational Quote:

"Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught."

-- J.C. Watts

~~~~~~~~~

Do follow: Characteristic Features:

Search engines do follow all the posted links on a webpage.
Search engines do get influenced by the host’s PageRank when ranking the guests’ website page.
Search engines do index the link which apparently means ‘indexes the concerned website.’

Note-Worthy Notes:

Do follow has exactly the same characteristic features as a site would have if it hasn’t been assigned the ‘no follow’ attribute.
‘DoFollow’ is not an HTML attribute.

‘All websites who DO NOT have the attribute ‘NoFollow’ are ‘DoFollow’ by default.’

To put it plain: Either a website is honoring all its comments with links included by influencing its ranking by their own PageRank or disallowing it. If a website allows, it is defaultly doing the ‘DoFollow’ job. A page particularly assigned the ‘NoFollow’ attribute may allow indexing but disallows PageRank effect on its guest websites.

The Opposite Words: NoFollow X DoFollow

Find few interesting articles on NoFollow here... Read them all, you’ll just gain more understanding on the concept:

http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/do-follow/

http://www.utheguru.com/relnofollow-steals-from-the-good-do-follow-is-robin-hood

http://www.inlineseo.com/blog/2008/03/15/what-is-dofollow-what-is-nofollow-follow-along-and-see/

~~~~*********~~~~

Two blondes are walking down the road when one says 'Look at that dog with one eye!'

The other blonde covers one of her eyes and says 'Where?'

~~~~*********~~~~

If you want to post a blog or comment on a blog with an aim to gain through the host websites’ PageRank, search for the blog which DO NOT have the ‘NoFollow’ attirbute. It’s simple as I have already told. Go to Google.com and use these keywords: dofollow blog, do follow blog, dofollow blog list, do follow blog list, dofollow websites, etc

IMPORTANT: You may as well use your own brains and come up with keywords which can help us in our job – do post them to me as ‘comments’ to this blog for the benefit of all readers & me.

Also submit your blogs to ‘DoFollow’ directories like:

http://www.followlist.com/

http://www.dofollowblogs.com/

Find lists of DoFollow blogs, social networking websites, article submission websites, bookmarking sites & more @ http://www.squidoo.com/dofollow

Search for more online yourself… Good Luck!

V-Empower Inc: Topic Today: DoFollow

~*~

Doorway Pages

2009-12-15T13:11:00.018+05:30

Doorway Pages:

Yeah, you got me right!

These are sort of doors (available only online) directing you into ‘unwanted’ web pages!

‘Doorway pages are designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings.’

Talking technically doorway pages are web pages which are stuffed with keywords to rank top in search engine results BUT they aren’t worth using! Call them temporary web pages because the instant they appear, they start redirecting you to other page automatically or test your patience by requesting you to click to proceed!

Doorway webpages are basically created for spamdexing, i.e., for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page. Doorway pages are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages, etc.

‘Doorway pages use some form of cloaking, which is a big NO-NO in SEO.’

<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>~<>

Today's Inspirational Quote:

"Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new."

-- Brian Tracy

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Like say we did a search for "Wallpapers" and choose the top-most link from the search result result page – a click on the link will take you to the doorway page which has our ‘search term’ but doesn’t have any wallpapers – then we are automatically redirected (thanks to the fast meta refresh command) to a new website which isn’t something you want! (You may sometimes be requested to click somewhere to reach your target.)

As you’ve seen that users don't arrive at the goal page in the first go – there’s a gap between the entry and the goal page... that’s why these pages are called "bridge pages" or "jump pages" (from user’s point of view).

*Search engines DO NOT accept pages using fast Meta refresh and so doorway pages are referred as SPAM.

Note-worthy Notes:

Doorway pages are pages that have been designed for one purpose only: To rank high in the search engines for a particular keyword.

Usually their design is relatively simplistic and includes a lot of text, but contains very little graphics or other fancy effects. Their text often consists of the same phrase(s) being repeated over and over again to just rank high in search results.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of webmaster guidelines.

A search engines’ aim is to give its’ users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, they can’t tolerate practices that are designed to manipulate their techniques and eventually performing poorly in their sole responsibility.

A doorway page is no more than a one-page click-through advertisement for a website.

Doorway pages act as giant banner ads – They’re frustrating… An instant response would be to look up for the close button. Doorway pages an one-way street - you can arrive to a the website via them, but if you come to the site by using other entrances, you'd see no trace of the existence of these pages.

‘Doorway pages are, in a nutshell, BAD SEO.’

Reason to use doorway: Many sites base their designs on Flash, JavaScript and plenty of images which may surely please the eyes of the visitors, but technically talented search engines don’t understand them and so our so called ‘SEO Experts’ try to fool the Search engines by challenging their techniques.

Mind it: Getting blocked or banned (for an indefinite period) is the only punishment then, so better BEWARE!

The search engines initially tolerated this behavior, but as their databases started getting filled with doorway pages they realized that these pages would quickly conquer the top ranking spots replacing the deserving websites, apparently reducing the quality of their indices which eventually would lower the value of the search result itself, resulting in users abandoning the search engine!

So search engines started removing them!

Being an optimizer myself, I would recommend that you focus on optimizing your actual content pages instead of creating doorway pages. While doorway pages can only be used to attract traffic from the search engines, a well-optimized page that has good content can get visitors from the search engines AND make people spread the word about your site.

Thanks!

V-Empower Inc: Topic Today: Doorway Pages

Social networking: Advantages

2009-12-14T12:02:00.004+05:30

Advantages of Social networking:

Man is a social being in the natural world and so are websites – a social being in the web world – Very simple… isn’t it?

If you wanted to make yourself or your product or an event famous in the real world, you would prefer putting big-banners on the road-side, Television Ads, Newspaper advertisements, Radio announcements, pamphlet distribution, etc. These are the natural ways of letting people know that you exist! … Also suits to say that you have an ‘excellent idea to share’, a ‘new project’, ‘a new product’ and so on.

But, how if you’ve got an online site with excellent products or services in it?

How would you let the world know about your existence?

I’m pretty sure, it’s quite impossible for the whole world population to have a dream about it at once! Thinking positively and being optimistic is good but you’ll have to put in some efforts being you actually being ‘thinking’.

Coming to the point of popularizing your website, you may surely go ahead and follow the above mentioned ‘real world’ stuff and let people know about you, but that’s not what is recommended! Believe me, the online bugs rarely tune in to the radio, watch TV or read newspapers! (I don’t do that either.) So now, we’ll have to practically begin ‘Online Social Networking’, one of the ways which will popularize your website and it practically involves lots of blogging, bookmarking, tweeting & pinging.

You need to create your web profiles at as many famous social networking websites as possible. To name a few:

LinkedIn
MySpace
WordPress
Digg
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
ZoomInfo

There are millions of such websites available today and are purposely used for advertising!

Advantages of online social profiling:

These are available for FREE. (and so you can promote your site or business for FREE)
They are simple to set-up & easily customizable.
They promote free-flow of communication across multiple levels.
You get to have a space of your own on the internet…. (actually many spaces)
Maintenance is Flexible.
Conveys Information about the Businesses, offers, update, etc instantly
Allows for Customer Feedback

Other benefits include:

Social networking sites have proven themselves practical and effective forms of advertising.

Social networking sites allow businesses to connect with both customers and other associated businesses. (You understand? By linking to other businesses in the same or related fields, you have the opportunity to form mutually beneficial alliances and chances to cross promote.)

The biggest advantage of using social networking sites to promote your business is your ability to build a network of loyal clientele.

Moreover, your profile allows you to keep your customers up to date on events, specials and other useful information.

Social networking sites take “word of mouth” online, and businesses have much to gain by it.

The Internet never closes, so advertising through social networking sites has the potential to reach many more customers than using traditional forms of advertising. If you run an ad on the radio, it will only run as many times as you pay for it, but your profile can be viewed an infinite amount of times online. Businesses can also advertise on some social networking sites using traditional forms of Internet marketing such as pay per click, but you see – that’s a ‘paid’ one.

That’s all for today… See you t’rrow!

SEO: Topic Today: V-Empower Inc

~**~

SEO – Session Part - XV

2009-12-14T11:57:00.006+05:30

Hello People!

As decided, today we’ll test http://www.ezlistmailer.com/’s keyword competency in Google, Yahoo & MSN (Bing)… & also work on answering my last sessions’ question: How do you know who your competitor is?

Ezlistmailer.com’s keyword competency

Note-Worthy Note: If a Meta keyword is capable enough to list the website in initial 3 pages, it is a quality keyword or call it a competitive keyword. Also be very careful while choosing Meta keywords for your website: Choose only those which have high volume of global search (test them in Google Analytics first).

Take few (say, take first 3) keywords from EZL’s Meta keywords (I’m copying from the last session, you can get it right from the website too) and search them in the given search engines. If the keyword lists the website, http://www.ezlistmailer.com/, listed in the 1st page say ‘YES’ and if your website doesn’t get listed say ‘No’.

Google:

Keyword1: email marketing software : NO
Keyword2: bulk email software : YES
Keyword3: Email marketing tool : NO

Yahoo:

Keyword1: email marketing software : NO
Keyword2: bulk email software : NO
Keyword3: Email marketing tool : NO

Msn (Bing):

Keyword1: email marketing software : NO
Keyword2: bulk email software : NO
Keyword3: Email marketing tool : NO

Conclusion: EZL’s keyword competency is very poor. :(

Our website’s keywords were ‘email marketing software’, ‘bulk email software’ & ‘email marketing tool’, but unfortunately only ONE of them could list us in the first page of Google’s search. Rest aren’t good enough for this job yet! That’s indeed depressing!

*************

Life with a Wife:

A woman and her husband interrupted their vacation to go to the dentist.

"I want a tooth pulled, and I don't want Novocain because I'm in a big hurry," the woman said. "Just extract the tooth as quickly as possible, and we'll be on our way."

The dentist was quite impressed.
"You're certainly a courageous woman," he said. "Which tooth is it?"

The woman turned to her husband and said, "Show him your tooth, dear." :-O ha ha ha

*************

But this attempt wasn’t entirely saddening, we’ve achieved more than we wanted… think why? Any idea?
Hint: What was our second question to be solved today?

Yes! All the websites that rank TOP for our keywords are ‘Our Competitors’. So by this test now we who know EZListmailer’s competitors are! Test all the keywords to know their competency levels and also simultaneously know all your competitors. Pretty interesting, is it not?

Experiment: Most of the keywords show same websites at the top levels… test it! Good Luck!

Well, that’s all for the day people! See you in the next session.

V-Empower Inc: SEO Training Session Part XV

~**~

V-Empower Inc - Topic Today

2009-12-12T15:16:00.013+05:30

V-Empower's Topic Today:

Topic Today: Links, links & links

Topic Today: Important of quality content using the right keywords

Topic Today: Tags

Topic Today: Site Map & its Importance

Topic Today: SEO Work-Flow-Process-Plan

Topic Today: Tweeting

Topic Today: Novel ways of Networking

Topic Today: Vending Videos with Video SiteMap

Topic Today: Blog & Blogging Tips to attract Traffic

Topic Today: Robot.txt and It's Importance

Topic Today: NoFollow Blogs

Topic Today: Advantages of Social Networking

Topic Today: Doorway Pages

Topic Today: DoFollow Websites/Webpages

Topic Today: Search Engine Optimization - Yahoo!

Connect with V-Empower Inc on Social Networking websites:

SEO – Session Part -14

2009-12-12T13:08:00.008+05:30

…continuing from yesterday, I must add…

There are many more keyword analysis tools available online for FREE but Google Analytics Tool is my most trusted one. What’s more – it requires no registration, No download and is FREE. Consider re-writing your site content by testing your keywords’ competency and make it more keyword-rich and ‘search-engine friendly’ – you’ll have wonderful results!

Well, enough of keyword analysis now, let’s move a little more further and see what comes next…

~*~*~

Today's Inspirational Quote:

"The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds... think Big anyway."

-- Kent M. Keith

~*~*~

Find & Analyze Meta Keywords:

So, let us learn how and where to find Meta Keywords.

Say, we’re working on optimizing a website called www.ezlistmailer.com. Now our first thought would be to show it appearing in the 1st page of search engine results. Let’s test it in Google, Yahoo & MSN… but how do we do that? What you gonna test it with? Right! You’ve got to test it with the website’s Meta keywords.

Another question… Where do you find Meta Keywords now?

Allow me to explain: Open the website www.ezlistmailer.com in your browser, now choose your browser type and follow the method mentioned:

Internet Explorer: Right-click on blank area of the page – select ‘view source’
Mozilla Firefox: Right-click on blank area – selected ‘view page source’
Google Chrome: Right click on any blank area – select ‘View Page Source’

NOTE: < META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="email marketing software…”> are your Meta Keywords.

*Current keywords of website www.ezlistmailer.com are:

email marketing software,bulk email software,Email marketing tool,Internet marketing company,Email marketing company,Internet marketing software,Email Marketing System,email marketing solution,email marketing business,email list marketing,Bulk email,can spam act 2003,Anti Spam,anti spam filter,Direct email marketing,Bulk Email Marketing Software,Html newsletter,email newsletter software,Create email newsletter,Business mailing lists,business marketing,email list manager,Email list hosting,web based email,Email list management,Email newsletter,Mailing lists,V-Empower

Meta Tag = 571 characters / 28 Keywords.

Note-Worthy Note: Hope you remember that Meta Keyword Tag should use 10 keywords (with up to 150 characters) or less but not more.

Did you get the same result? If Not, go back & try again.

Kwell! We’re done with the first question today…. Congratulations!!
(Q1. Where and how do we find a website’s Meta Keywords?)

Tomorrow we will go ahead with testing www.ezlistmailer.com’s keyword competency in Google, Yahoo & MSN…

Also, I have a question for you people, tell me…
How do you know who your competitor is (in terms on online business, of course! …don’t start naming your class or game score competitors… ha ha)?

If you have an answer, it is indeed well & good, I’m proud of you, and, if you do not have – I’ll get it to you, don’t worry!

Thanks & Bye!
V-Empower Inc: SEO Training Session Part XIV - 03-Dec

~*~

SEO – Session Part - XIII

2009-12-03T12:28:00.009+05:30

SEO – Session Part -13

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Today's Inspirational Quote:

"I've never seen a monument erected to a pessimist."

-- Paul Harvey

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KEYWORD ANALYSIS

Let me show you how to do ‘Keyword Analysis’ today – it’s very simple and interesting!

‘Google’s Keyword Tool’ is one the excellent analyzing tool where you can check a keyword’s competency easily. Follow this process:

Step1: Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Step2: Enter your keyword (or phrase)

Step3: Enter the code as given

Step4: Click on button ‘Get Keyword Ideas’

This is how the page looks:

Lets’ say we wanna do the Keyword analysis for this website’s keywords: http://www.ezlistmailer.com/.
If you know, or go through it once, you understand that emailing is the prime business here. So now let’s see how its keywords rank. Follow the above process and enter the keyword ‘email’ in the ‘Enter one keyword’ box.

Here’s how the result page will look:

The Google analysis tool will show the following:

1.         Our keyword and a list of ‘related keywords’

2.         Advertiser competition

3.         Local Search Volume (for a month)

4.         Global Search Volume.

*Consider the ‘Global Search Volume’ if your product is international and go for ‘Local’ if your search is for local audience.

**If you wanna see more columns, you can add or remove them using the ‘Choose columns to display’ option.

Result of the research shows that our keyword ‘email’ is the most searched term when compared to its related stuff. I suggest you go now & try it yourself for many keywords of your interest. If you find that the keyword you use is searched less that any of its related keywords then better replace yours with it.

Let me give you an example:

The keyword ‘Add to favorites’ has 18,100 searches where as keyword ‘Bookmark’ has 220,000 Searches… Got that? So better use ‘Bookmark’ instead of ‘Add to favorites’ for more traffic.
So get going now!

Check out the competency of your websites’ keywords!

That’s all for the day then… C ya t’rrow.

V-Empower Inc.: SEO Training Session Part XIII - 03-Dec

Important Note: Guys don't worry if you missed the sessions, by clicking the image below you can see all the training sessions from the Beginning.

That’s all for today folks!

V-Empower Inc. – SEO Training Session Part XIII
Share & Connect with V-Empower Inc. on Social Networking websites:

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The 6 modules of the SEO course cover all aspects of Search Engine Optimization to ensure marketers focus their efforts on what counts.

1.Keyword Research & Mapping After completing this module, you will be able to:

2.Fundamentals & Best Practices This module will help you ensure your site is search friendly to encourage maximum number of visits through:

3.Project Management From this module you will learn how to:

4.Link Building Upon completing this module, you will be able to:

5.Research In this module we consider the items that should be periodically reviewed in a search program to ensure it is being optimized, covering the key SEO diagnostics that you need. In particular, by the end of the module you will be able to answer the questions:

6.Optimized Copywriting After this course, you will appreciate the fundamentals underlying website usability, including:

The 12 modules of the Online Marketing

The 12 modules of the Online Marketing Foundation course provide an introduction to online marketing, plus a detailed look at each discipline including SEO, Email, Online PR, Social Media and more. 1.SEO This module will make sure your customers can find you using organic search:

2.Web Analytics This module shows you how to use the statistics that you have generated in relation to clicks, hits and visits to determine your strategy:

3.Demand Generation After this module, you will be able to:

4.Pay Per Click After this module, you will:

5.Email By the end of this module, you will:

6.Introduction to Usability By the end of this module, you will:

7.Online PR By the end of this module, you will:

8.Content Marketing Strategy By the end of this module, you will:

9.Strategy By the end of this module, you will:

10.Social Media The essentials of using social media as part of your online marketing strategy. By the end of this module, you will:

11.Information Retrieval By the end of this program, you will:

12.Mobile Marketing By the end of this module, you will:

The 10 modules of the Social Media course help you

The 10 modules of the Social Media course help you understand how to engage with customers and prospects on social networks, learn about tools to better manage relationships and achieve business results. 1.Why Use Social Media After this module, you will:

2.Blogging After this module, you will:

3.YouTube An overview of how YouTube can be used as a central part of your video marketing. After this module, you will:

4.Social Media Strategy After this module, you will:

5.Facebook After this module, you will:

6.Twitter Using this messaging service as another channel for online marketing. After this module, you will:

7.LinkedIn After this module, you will:

8.Social Media ROI Tracking and managing your campaign's success. After this module, you will:

9.Social News Networks Managing your brand and your offering using social news networks. After this module, you will:

10.Online PR Creating press releases and optimizing exposure through online news engines and directories. After this module, you will:

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3. Weird (and Potentially Dangerous) Outbound Links

Let’s focus on a more sinister issue for a minute. Unfortunately, hackers are continually trying to infiltrate web sites, CMS packages, etc. to benefit their own web sites (or client web sites).

1.Keyword Research & Mapping

After completing this module, you will be able to:

2.Fundamentals & Best Practices

This module will help you ensure your site is search friendly to encourage maximum number of visits through:

3.Project Management

From this module you will learn how to:

4.Link Building

Upon completing this module, you will be able to:

5.Research

In this module we consider the items that should be periodically reviewed in a search program to ensure it is being optimized, covering the key SEO diagnostics that you need. In particular, by the end of the module you will be able to answer the questions:

6.Optimized Copywriting

After this course, you will appreciate the fundamentals underlying website usability, including:

The 12 modules of the Online Marketing Foundation course provide an introduction to online marketing, plus a detailed look at each discipline including SEO, Email, Online PR, Social Media and more.

1.SEO

This module will make sure your customers can find you using organic search:

2.Web Analytics

This module shows you how to use the statistics that you have generated in relation to clicks, hits and visits to determine your strategy:

3.Demand Generation

After this module, you will be able to:

4.Pay Per Click

After this module, you will:

5.Email

By the end of this module, you will:

6.Introduction to Usability

By the end of this module, you will:

7.Online PR

By the end of this module, you will:

8.Content Marketing Strategy

By the end of this module, you will:

9.Strategy

By the end of this module, you will:

10.Social Media

The essentials of using social media as part of your online marketing strategy. By the end of this module, you will:

11.Information Retrieval

By the end of this program, you will:

12.Mobile Marketing

By the end of this module, you will:

The 10 modules of the Social Media course help you understand how to engage with customers and prospects on social networks, learn about tools to better manage relationships and achieve business results.

1.Why Use Social Media

After this module, you will:

2.Blogging

After this module, you will:

3.YouTube

An overview of how YouTube can be used as a central part of your video marketing. After this module, you will:

4.Social Media Strategy

After this module, you will:

5.Facebook

After this module, you will:

6.Twitter

Using this messaging service as another channel for online marketing. After this module, you will:

7.LinkedIn

After this module, you will:

8.Social Media ROI

Tracking and managing your campaign's success. After this module, you will:

9.Social News Networks

Managing your brand and your offering using social news networks. After this module, you will:

10.Online PR

Creating press releases and optimizing exposure through online news engines and directories. After this module, you will: