<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.blogger.com/styles/atom.css" type="text/css"?><feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/' xmlns:blogger='http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008' xmlns:georss='http://www.georss.org/georss' xmlns:gd="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005" xmlns:thr='http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0'><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799</id><updated>2024-09-05T04:50:28.712-07:00</updated><category term="bSEOb"/><category term="Content"/><category term="Marketing"/><category term="Website"/><category term="About"/><category term="Google"/><category term="Information"/><category term="Search"/><category term="Services"/><category term="Update"/><category term="Advertising"/><category term="Analyst"/><category term="Approach"/><category term="Asking"/><category term="Audit"/><category term="Average"/><category term="Awesome"/><category term="Backlinks"/><category term="Better"/><category term="Bitly"/><category term="BlogPosts"/><category term="Brick"/><category term="Building"/><category term="Changes"/><category term="Choose"/><category term="Codes"/><category term="Company"/><category term="Conference"/><category term="Crawling"/><category term="Creative"/><category term="Custom"/><category term="Danger"/><category term="Definitive"/><category term="Diagnose"/><category term="Difference"/><category term="Drive"/><category term="EightfoldLogic"/><category term="Engine"/><category term="Exhibit"/><category term="Facts"/><category term="Favorite"/><category term="Fewer"/><category term="Footer"/><category term="Friday"/><category term="Generates"/><category term="Guide"/><category term="Hosting"/><category term="Improve"/><category term="Instant"/><category term="Integrated"/><category term="Interruptive"/><category term="Linkdomain"/><category term="Linkscape"/><category term="Media"/><category term="MyBlogGuest"/><category term="NewTwitter"/><category term="Niche"/><category term="Octobers"/><category term="Online"/><category term="Optimizing"/><category term="Overdoing"/><category term="Portrait"/><category term="Presentations"/><category term="Provider"/><category term="PubCon"/><category term="Questions"/><category term="Quotes"/><category term="Rankings"/><category term="Really"/><category term="Replace"/><category term="Resources"/><category term="Right"/><category term="Schmidt"/><category term="Selling"/><category term="Service"/><category term="Shortener"/><category term="Simple"/><category term="Social"/><category term="Speak"/><category term="Steps"/><category term="Through"/><category term="Traffic"/><category term="Truth"/><category term="Universal"/><category term="Utility"/><category term="Valuable"/><category term="Vegas"/><category term="Versus"/><category term="Whiteboard"/><category term="Whitespark"/><category term="Yahoo"/><category term="Yourself"/><category term="Zemanta"/><category term="companies"/><category term="expert"/><category term="small"/><title type='text'>SEO Marketing Made Simple</title><subtitle type='html'></subtitle><link rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default?redirect=false'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/'/><link rel='hub' href='http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/'/><link rel='next' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default?start-index=26&amp;max-results=25&amp;redirect=false'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><generator version='7.00' uri='http://www.blogger.com'>Blogger</generator><openSearch:totalResults>29</openSearch:totalResults><openSearch:startIndex>1</openSearch:startIndex><openSearch:itemsPerPage>25</openSearch:itemsPerPage><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-8650007616405238464</id><published>2010-12-14T13:12:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-12-14T13:12:00.238-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Company"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Marketing"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Niche"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Through"/><title type='text'>Niche Marketing Through An &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;Seo&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Company</title><content type='html'> Niche is the easiest way to become accepted in online business and appropriately abounding companies are alcove business with the advice of an SEO company. Niche business is actual important to accomplish in Internet business for the accumulated companies. Once the SEO aggregation has accomplished the targeted keywords that can fit into your called market, the website will be accessible for alcove business through seek engine optimization. &lt;P&gt;Niche marketing is a way of shifting the focus on the company&#39;s goal market. Once the SEO company has completed the specific keywords that can fit into the target market, the website will be ready for marketing the site through search engine optimization. Niche advertising is very important to achieve something in Internet marketing for commercial business.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;There are many effective ways an SEO company follows to help a company in Niche Marketing. &lt;/P&gt;An SEO company takes the necessary steps to ensure that the main keyword is used in the title of the website before submitting it to the web directories. They also help in using the keyword targeted links in the back links from other websites, which helps the company in niche marketing. Niche marketing through an SEO company is effective when the submitted article of a website has keyword targeted back links to the website which gives control on the keywords used and the pages which are linked to the website. All these important points will be taken care of by the SEO Company while niche marketing for a company. &lt;P&gt;Taking the suggestions of an SEO company can improve the visibility of their products, which will be seen by the client, and niche marketing of the company enhances this tremendously. &lt;/P&gt;Once the target market is known by the company can use niche marketing through SEO Company that can help you succeed. The changes that customers need or the kind of products they expect from the company can be found by the customer who visits the website. Niche marketing through SEO Company attracts the target audience. Niche marketing through SEO Company can increase profits. &lt;P&gt;Niche marketing through SEO Company helps businesses in many ways a home and helps them decide on their products. If the product is successful can be introduced into the market, which saves a lot of wealth for the company. Niche marketing through SEO Company always gives a chance for the company to test market new-manufactured goods. The company can introduce the new produce on the website before other competitors in the market and can take the comments of the product.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://business.ezinemark.com/niche-marketing-through-an-seo-company-319fa25e682.html&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=:s7:f1:v0:d2:i2:lt:e0:p0:t1288707681:&amp;cd=0fvutVSB1cQ&amp;usg=AFQjCNEyv6B-meywWh_r6fO6gpi2daIIGw&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/8650007616405238464/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/12/niche-marketing-through-company.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8650007616405238464'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8650007616405238464'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/12/niche-marketing-through-company.html' title='Niche Marketing Through An &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;Seo&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Company'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-4158569483122804889</id><published>2010-12-09T07:34:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-12-09T07:34:00.138-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="companies"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="small"/><title type='text'>News Top 7 &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Tips from small companies to work for &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; « Web &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Top 7 SEO News Tips from small companies to work for SEO &lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;For the last three weeks I have strong working exploring popular &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO Specialists &lt;/STRONG&gt;who worked for small businesses. Unlike major competitors, do not employees or small business ad budgets to market in today’s economy, but fortunately, none of these factors actually matter to online marketing because small business SEO is the best way to steal market share and Of course the level playing field. &lt;/P&gt;After exploring the most popular sources and communication with SEO experts, I realized that &lt;STRONG&gt;Organic SEO &lt;/STRONG&gt;is the best way to a small but targeted scope to keep. The following is the list of 7 Google SEO tips I have found necessary for small businesses to generate results and I hope this list helps new and inexperienced companies looking for top SEO News. &lt;STRONG&gt;create a site that is easy to load now &lt;/STRONG&gt;that Google has introduced to speed the search engine ranking algorithm, it is time to make sure that your website is easy to load. By improving your speed website that can also improve customer experience, which helps in converting your visitors into customers. Use tools like YSlow and Web Page Analyzer to verify that the problem behind the slow speed. Create a Google site that is SEO friendly and easy so you do not make users wait to buy your product manual. &lt;STRONG&gt;Optimizing for local search &lt;/STRONG&gt;Going Local, the best technique for small business enterprises. Approximately 70% local consumers use Google SEO Local lists information about nearby businesses seek. Check your local listings company like Yahoo Local, Google Local or Bing Places maximum profit. &lt;STRONG&gt;Connect with customers by adding a personal touch to your site &lt;/STRONG&gt;The big advantage that small businesses have been the opportunity to connect with customers by adding a personal voice. By your voice heard you just do not add confidence, but also presentation of your authority in the market. Add recommendations and reviews along with the functions of the product and how your services can benefit from the customers. &lt;STRONG&gt;Give importance to the content &lt;/STRONG&gt;content has always been the king of search engines and is still growing. Search engines give more importance to not only a unique search engine friendly content, but the better opportunities are given to users to find your products and services. Explain everything – services you offer, customers can get the advantage, feedback, improvements, anything that makes it easy for customers to build trust. &lt;STRONG&gt;Filter your internal links &lt;/STRONG&gt;Make sure your navigation system is getting all of your content. Internal links not only to add value to your website but also to customers and search engines happy. Develop a link between attitudes, thinking professionally about linking your website architecture, copy or use sites like &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/A&gt;ger on older posts link in your articles. You can also add sitemaps, older posts and related products, so your old, but informative content is viewed or linked. &lt;STRONG&gt;Not fuss about receiving no-follow links &lt;/STRONG&gt;Do not get carried away only by trying to get incoming links is missing feared no-follow. You can not control how search engines deal. Better service and customer satisfaction is your SEO guide. If you focus on good content, search engines will focus on various aspects of SEO itself. Better quality content attracts links and it is good for both SEO and customers at the same time. &lt;STRONG&gt;Content for people, not just search engines &lt;/STRONG&gt;If your only goal is to make the content to impress the search engines , you are missing on your business profits. As indicated in the Google SEO guide, a user can create content to help you more compared with just creating content for search engines. A user visits your website to see how your services can benefit him, but when he comes to your site and find a content that is confusing, he can leave and can not come back. Want more inbound links and business profits, make sure to subscribe to the customers, since the importance of search engines, they can not make your services! &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/EMBED&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;www.BeOnPage1ofGoogle.com – Did you know that Google monitors how fast your site loads up? And will penalize your rankings if it takes too long? Well, Brian Horn shows you how to use W3 Total Cache to load your site to improve speed and thus improve your site’s ranking in Google.&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://webhostingblog.us/2010/11/news-top-7-seo-tips-from-small-companies-to-work-for-seo/&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=CAcQARgAIAIoATAAOABAvIKO5wRIAlD__wFYAGIFZW4tVVM&amp;cd=yUpeJ4bgSf8&amp;usg=AFQjCNHbrIFsQyLxIBDiSgONtsiDwAA1fQ&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/4158569483122804889/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/12/news-top-7-tips-from-small-companies-to.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4158569483122804889'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4158569483122804889'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/12/news-top-7-tips-from-small-companies-to.html' title='News Top 7 &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Tips from small companies to work for &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; « Web &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-5463118562260033634</id><published>2010-11-23T12:57:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-11-23T12:57:00.767-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Choose"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="expert"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Information"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Provider"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Service"/><title type='text'>Choose an expert &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Service Provider | 4 U ALL Information</title><content type='html'>&lt;BR&gt;by floato&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Choose an expert SEO Service Provider&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;An accepted reality in the IT industry about SEO is that it is a constantly changing strategy. It takes a lot of keenness, enthusiasm and good amount of time to stay abreast with the new trends of SEO. As a result many web owners find it more reasonable to hire an &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO expert&lt;/STRONG&gt; than to be troubled by the demands of website optimization. However, soon they realize that not all SEO companies do as they promise. The money invested by web owners end up wasted because they did not pay much attention in choosing the best SEO service provider as soon as they start off with online website promotion.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;There are thousands of expert &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO service &lt;/STRONG&gt;providers in the market today who offer SEO services like improving the visibility of your website on the search engines as well diverting the right kind of traffic to your site who in turn convert into your potential customers. But how do you actually choose the best SEO expert for your online website promotion campaign? Well, the points below will help you to get the answer to this question:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Do Some Research&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This is particularly important and advantageous for you if you know a bit about SEO. Search online about this topic and try to get some information to determine the exact needs of your website. Doing research will also help you to carry out a technical discussion with your SEO company/expert.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Seek for testimonials from your SEO Company&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Ask for testimonials from the &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO Company&lt;/STRONG&gt; and see if they are genuine or just publicity. Contact the previous clients of the company and take their feedback regarding their experience with the company. Ask them if they have got back services worth their money. .&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Track the companies Experience &lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Try to judge how far the SEO company’s competence can help you with your SEO needs. Check if the work done by the SEO expert previously is related to what your current task is. .&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Set a discussion.&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Communication is very important for your optimization campaign to become successful. You need to have an open and honest discussion with your SEO expert. The manner in which the SEO expert engages with you in a conversation is a good cue of how far he can help you. If he listens to you meticulously and attentively besides going into the details of your project, you can be rest assured that you have someone who will provide you with personalized services.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;These recommended steps will definitely ensure that you hire a good and reliable SEO expert. Always remember that all of your action has direct &amp; big impact on your business. Therefore, willingly spend ample amount of time and attention to find an expert SEO service provider. You certainly do not want to link your business with any unknown person, so why to take lightly the matter of hiring a SEO expert?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;SEO Expert India- If you want to promote your website in search engines then hire an expert SEO Company. SEO India is an experts SEO Company India having more than 5 years experience in SEO Domain. They have an experienced team of professionals who are experts in various SEO Components like SMO, PPC, Keywords Research, Link Building and Search Engine Marketing. For more visit &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO.India-Designers.net&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Article from articlesbase.com&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/EMBED&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;go.tagjag.com – PCPitstop is one of those resources you need, but don’t realize it until you need it! These guys have been around for nearly a decade now, and their reputation is rock-solid. They have a feature called “Ask an Expert” – and they’ve asked me to answer one of the questions. Candace is wondering how she can speed up her computer. If you have an answer to this, please feel free to leave your thoughts in a follow-up comment to this video. geeks.pirillo.com – http&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Video Rating: 4 / 5&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Find More Ask An Expert Articles&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://www.4-u-all.com/business/business-ask-an-expert/choose-an-expert-seo-service-provider/&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=CAcQARgAIAIoATAAOABAvIKO5wRIAlD__wFYAGIFZW4tVVM&amp;cd=yUpeJ4bgSf8&amp;usg=AFQjCNHSFMOAaqA67WSnYWYU3k-jGFro0Q&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/5463118562260033634/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/choose-expert-service-provider-4-u-all.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5463118562260033634'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5463118562260033634'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/choose-expert-service-provider-4-u-all.html' title='Choose an expert &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Service Provider | 4 U ALL Information'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-5262529333846972164</id><published>2010-11-22T10:27:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-11-22T10:27:00.980-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Better"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Content"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Marketing"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Online"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Steps"/><title type='text'>10 Steps to Better Content Marketing &amp;amp;amp; &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; - Online Marketing Blog</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;How would you rate your content marketing efforts? How well are you incorporating SEO and &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/A&gt; Media? If you’re not sure or need to improve, read on.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;We’re big fans of content marketing as you probably know and there’s a presentation on Content Marketing Optimization that I’ve been doing at search conferences lately (SES SF, SES CHI, Pubcon and soon SES London) that has evolved each time I give it. See the bottom of this post for an embedded copy of the latest version from Pubcon.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;While there are an increasing number of definitions of what content marketing is, I tend to prefer:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;/BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;While the primary platforms for our application of this definition are online and more specifically, through search, &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/A&gt;, online PR, email and certain kinds of advertising, I think a timelessly relevant definition needs to be general.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Content Connects &lt;/STRONG&gt;- Consumer buying experiences increasingly involve interactions with content. Sales cycles are longer as consumers perform searches, read reviews, ask &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/A&gt; network contacts for suggestions and eventually buy. Content in that scenario is created by marketers, fans &amp; &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/A&gt; contacts as well as by consumers as they ask public questions and even share purchasing decisions or reviews of products they’ve purchased.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;For example: Imagine a consumer searching Google for “light bulbs” and finding an article, “5 Ways to Save Money with Light Bulbs” written by XYZ light bulbs. The consumer moves on the reviews written by other consumers and moves on to purchase. After the purchase, she shares on Facebook and/or Twitter that she’s found a great place to buy bulk, energy efficient light bulbs.  It’s easy to see how content connects the consumer with the merchant as well as other customers in this scenario.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The importance of the role of content in marketing and PR cannot be over-estimated. Marketing and Public Relations organizations whether consultant or internal, will need to not only become better content creators, but content curators, optimizers and promoters in the months and year ahead.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In order to be more effective at Content Marketing that incorporates SEO and &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/A&gt; Media, here are 10 steps:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Goals -&lt;/STRONG&gt; You can’t score if you don’t have a goal. Numerous business problems can be solved in part, through content marketing (besides increasing sales).  This includes everything from recruiting to public relations to customer service.&lt;STRONG&gt;Buyer Personas &lt;/STRONG&gt;- What characterizes the customers you’re trying to reach? Who are you trying to engage? Empathize with customer needs and think about how to meet them while meeting your own as the brand.&lt;STRONG&gt;Keywords &lt;/STRONG&gt;- What search and &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/A&gt; media keywords best represent demand for your products and services?&lt;STRONG&gt;Content &amp; Assets&lt;/STRONG&gt; – Inventory the content and digital assets you currently have available for keyword optimization and &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/A&gt; promotion. Map keywords to content so there’s accountability for keyword performance of content in search.&lt;STRONG&gt;Editorial Plan&lt;/STRONG&gt; – Your brand is now a publisher and that means an editorial calendar for content creation, optimization, promotion and measurement. If you understand how newsrooms work, you have an advantage here.&lt;STRONG&gt;Operationalize SEO &lt;/STRONG&gt;- Whoever is responsible or capable of content creation for the brand should have keyword glossaries available as well as SEO training on how to use them. SEO should be part of the content creation and publishing process.&lt;STRONG&gt;Develop Off-Site Content &lt;/STRONG&gt;- You’ve likely seen the hub and spoke publishing model we promote. Create content off of your web site to extend your reach and engage customers where they are.&lt;STRONG&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/A&gt;ize &lt;/STRONG&gt;- Connect with others and grow the &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/A&gt; networks that will extend your reach and ability to engage.&lt;STRONG&gt;Promote -&lt;/STRONG&gt; Make it part of the editorial plan and content marketing process to promote content on the &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/A&gt; networks and off site content destinations that you’ve created.&lt;STRONG&gt;Measure &amp; Refine &lt;/STRONG&gt;- Identify the key performance indicators that represent progress in engagement and reach. Track what’s working and what’s not, testing and making iterative improvements.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;There are many dimensions beyond these tips, especially when it comes to content curation and the planning of repurposing content.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you’re a B2B Marketer, how have you implemented content marketing in your online marketing mix?  What challenges have you encountered trying to implement SEO and &lt;A href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/A&gt; Media?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;BR clear=all&gt;&lt;BR clear=all&gt; Loading ... &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/11/content-marketing-seo/&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=CAcQARgAIAIoATAAOABAvIKO5wRIAlD__wFYAGIFZW4tVVM&amp;cd=yUpeJ4bgSf8&amp;usg=AFQjCNE5uzyAGqDiPQM3jDB83DJnmSs7-g&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/5262529333846972164/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/10-steps-to-better-content-marketing.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5262529333846972164'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5262529333846972164'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/10-steps-to-better-content-marketing.html' title='10 Steps to Better Content Marketing &amp;amp;amp; &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; - Online Marketing Blog'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-6322779434462661455</id><published>2010-11-19T23:45:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-11-19T23:45:00.751-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Approach"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Media"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Social"/><title type='text'>Social Media vs. &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;: My Approach</title><content type='html'> &lt;BODY readability=&quot;2&quot;&gt;Search Engine Optimization, &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/a&gt; Media &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The SEO vs. &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media debate is one that has been going on for a number of years now, and it hasn’t abated.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;A recent guest post here on Pro&lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt;ger titled Why &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/a&gt; Media is a Better Investment than SEO sparked some interesting commentary on Twitter after going live.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/a&gt; media fans spread it like crazy (with over 1000 ReTweets in less than 24 hours), and a number of SEO forums picked it up as an example of the closed-mindedness of &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media proponents. There were also some good &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; responses on the topic.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;A number of readers asked for my own opinion: which camp do I stand in?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;I’m going to annoy some people with this but the reality is that I’ve got a foot in both camps. Let me throw a few random thoughts out there in the hope that it’ll show why I’m a fan of both &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media and SEO.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;gers we’re all interested in being read. Traffic is important for most of us and, at a most basic level, it can be generated using both SEO and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Alexa ranks Google #1 in terms of size, and puts Facebook at #2. Look at similar sites, and you’ll find similar rankings. It makes sense to me to put some effort into being a part of both efforts.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;IMG height=193 alt=&quot;Screen shot 2010-11-09 at 10.01.51 AM.png&quot; src=&quot;/Screen-shot-2010-11-09-at-100151-AM.png&quot; width=540&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;For me, the answer to where you should direct your focus largely comes down to what you’re trying to achieve.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Not all traffic is the same and, depending upon your goals, you might want to look at different sources of traffic.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Example 1&lt;/STRONG&gt;: on my first photography site (which is no longer active) I relied much more heavily upon search engine traffic than &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media traffic to achieve my goals.&lt;/P&gt;The site aggregated reviews of cameras from around the web.Readers were there to research cameras that they were purchasing and rarely commented (so there was little community).The site was monetized largely with ads and affiliate programs (tied to camera purchases).Readers were very transient—they didn’t come back after they made their camera purchase.&lt;P&gt;The site wasn’t overly &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; (although I did try at times to make it more &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt;). Readers simply weren’t there to belong or interact—they visited with a different intent. As a result, &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media traffic didn’t really convert or make sense—but Google traffic did. People use Google to research purchases a lot! They also conduct research using &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media (I think this will happen increasingly) but at the time, search traffic was converting at a much, much higher rate.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;As a result, it made a lot of sense to invest quite a bit of time into learning about and implementing SEO. I dabbled with some &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media stuff too (it was embryonic back then) but it was never going to be a major focus of the site as it just didn’t connect with reader intent.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;These days, if I was still operating a review-type site, I’d certainly be trying to capitalize on the trend towards people researching purchases on &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media, but I suspect I’d also be primarily focused upon search traffic.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Example 2&lt;/STRONG&gt;: on my second photography site (and my main &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; today), things are remarkably different. I started it from day one with the idea of community and belonging in mind. It was always going to be more &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; and interactive, and attract repeat visitors.&lt;/P&gt;People come to dPS to connect with others with a similar passion.Readers like to show off their work and have it seen by others.The site aims to create a community for learning.The site builds trust with readers and aims to hook them into coming back time and time again.The site is monetized largely with the sale of ebooks, which do best with repeat visitors/loyal readers.&lt;P&gt;As a result, dPS is much better placed to benefit from &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media. Our Facebook page continues to grow fast and our interactions on Twitter have driven a lot of traffic to the site.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Having said that, I still set the site up with sound SEO principles in mind as search traffic is important to the site. In fact, Google traffic is still the #1 source of traffic on the site—although I have to say that that traffic doesn’t convert anywhere near as well when it comes to selling products to readers. The good thing about search traffic on dPS is that a certain percentage of those who arrive that way do become regular readers down the track.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Ultimately, whether you direct your focus toward SEO or &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media, or both, will depend upon the goals you have and the type of traffic you’re after. In the case of dPS it is both SEO and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media, but there was more, too…&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;If I had to identify the single best source of traffic on dPS, it wouldn’t be search traffic or &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media traffic. It’d be email.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Search and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media have been important elements in the mix, but truth be told, our biggest days of traffic occur when we send our emails out each week. The biggest days of discussion in our forums are newsletter days. The biggest days for ebook sales, ad revenue, voting in polls, retweets on articles, Likes on Facebook, and comments on &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; posts are all newsletter days.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The reality is that with dPS I spend more time on email than I do on either SEO or &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;As I look at dPS today it’s difficult to really split the different activities that I do into neat, discrete tasks. One thing tends to feed and grow the other.&lt;/P&gt;Search traffic grows our newsletter list.The newsletter promotes our Twitter and Facebook accounts.The sharing of our content on Twitter and Facebook accounts often generate links from other sites.The links on other sites send traffic which grows our SEO and newsletter signups.I suspect the search engines are paying more attention to what’s being shared on &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media in the way they rank sites.&lt;P&gt;This list could go on—every day, I see the pay off of all of our promotional and community-building activities in making other efforts more effective.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;This will only get more and more important: with Google now indexing tweets and presenting them in search results, we’re seeing &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; and search merging more and more. I can’t imagine that this trend will decline; increasingly we’ll probably see efforts in &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media helping SEO.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Something that struck me at an SEO conference that I attended last year was that a number of the people I met seemed a little different to the people I’d met at a &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;Social&lt;/a&gt; Media conference the week before.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;I don’t want that to sound offensive. To be fair, there was an overlap between people at both conferences (including me), but what I noticed was that quite a few of the SEOs I met that day were people who obviously paid a lot of attention to detail and really enjoyed the process of analyzing numbers of links, strategizing about keywords, and watching the impact that small changes in content and code have on search rankings.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;A number of times that day I felt my eyes glazing over at some of the presentations that were being lapped up by others. It struck me that perhaps some of us are hardwired to be SEOs, rather than &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media types.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;I’m sure some people are wired for a bit of both, but perhaps one’s personality type and style lends itself more to one discipline than others? I’m not saying that SEOs are anti-&lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; or incapable of holding a conversation, nor that &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media folk have no ability to think analytically (although that would have made for an attention-grabbing headline), but perhaps there’s something there for a psychologist to do some research into!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Let me sum up by saying that I think there’s plenty of room to move in thinking about this topic. Your situation, your style, and your goals will no doubt lead you to a unique mix of promotional activities.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;It’s okay to focus upon one above the others, however, in my opinion, you’d be something of a fool to completely close yourself off to the possibility that there might be potential in those things that you’re not doing.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Those that claim SEO is dead are just as deluded as those who claim &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media will never convert—but that doesn’t mean we all need to take exactly the same approach.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/11/15/social-media-vs-seo-my-approach/&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=CAcQARgAIAEoATAAOABAgY-P5wRIAlD__wFYAGIFZW4tVVM&amp;cd=eaikPZI2cnI&amp;usg=AFQjCNEE7IwD7XH4qlvU8s357ZNUgZyKwQ&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/6322779434462661455/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/social-media-vs-my-approach.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/6322779434462661455'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/6322779434462661455'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/social-media-vs-my-approach.html' title='Social Media vs. &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;: My Approach'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-4468305060105074813</id><published>2010-11-19T07:57:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-11-19T07:57:00.764-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Backlinks"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Difference"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Rankings"/><title type='text'>Why &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Backlinks Make A Big Difference In Page Rankings</title><content type='html'> &lt;BODY readability=&quot;2&quot;&gt;(EMAILWIRE.COM, November 17, 2010 ) Dallas, TX- Businesses looking for a way to get their websites noticed must turn to making SEO backlinks. What are they? A backlink is when a website links back to another site. This may not sound like much, but for experienced internet marketers, this paves the way to internet gold. Why? Because the search engine mega giant Google uses them to determine where a site can rank in their search engine. &lt;P&gt;Google is the number 1 search engine and the number 2 most visited site in the world most recently behind Facebook. Therefore, if a properly laid out execution strategy for seo backlinks gets Google?s rankings, it makes them that much more valuable for search engine optimization firms. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;?We pride ourselves in our ability to rank our clients for any given keyword on Google,? says Nicolas Samson, a web expert at sisaseo.com. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;That sentiment is reported by anyone who is in the business of getting page ranks, internet marketers, seo firms and small businesses everywhere look for ways and means to get in the fight for crucial market share. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;In these times of rising costs and dwindling profit margins, it helps to get the edge in what was a usually overlooked practice of search engine optimization. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;?Clients come to us now, that have had no intentions of getting their web presence intact are now realizing the benefit of a few coordinated efforts,? Samson said. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;When people look toward SEO, as opposed Pay Per Click, the return on the dollar in monumentally in favor of the search engine optimization efforts done by quality seo firms. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;To begin reaching more customers for your business or internet related project, visit sisaseo.com &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://www.emailwire.com/release/52081-Why-SEO-Backlinks-Make-A-Big-Difference-In-Page-Rankings.html&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=CAcQARgAIAAoATAAOABAz6iO5wRIAlD__wFYAGIFZW4tVVM&amp;cd=yLEJIP_COkA&amp;usg=AFQjCNH8eulbGXUdUQ7k3fSIzhp9DpFWSg&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/4468305060105074813/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-backlinks-make-big-difference-in.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4468305060105074813'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4468305060105074813'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-backlinks-make-big-difference-in.html' title='Why &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Backlinks Make A Big Difference In Page Rankings'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-8677940353585415733</id><published>2010-11-18T11:56:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-11-18T11:56:01.025-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="About"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Facts"/><title type='text'>Six Facts You Need To Know About &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;</title><content type='html'> &lt;P&gt;When considering getting involved in search engine optimisation for your business, there is a massive amount of information you need to learn and understand. This can be extremely intimidating and it can be difficult for online business owners to know where to begin. However, there are some basic facts which should be known by all of those considering running a search engine optimisation campaign.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The first SEO fact of great importance is that SEO is challenging. Some of those which are new to SEO view it as a magic solution to all of their problems. They believe they will just have to follow a few simple steps and then their business will be a huge success. This is not how SEO works. Search engine optimisation is a complicated process which can rely on the use of a number of SEO techniques. These methods can be difficult and an SEO campaign does require time, hard work and effort.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The second thing you need to know is that every company requires a unique &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO campaign&lt;/STRONG&gt;. Different businesses have different wants and needs and are in different circumstances. Only an SEO campaign designed to the specific requirements of a business will have any chance of success.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Only white hat search engine optimisation is helpful and acceptable. Some companies still use and encourage black hat SEO but the results of this can be disastrous. Using black hat SEO, you can severely damage your rankings and your reputation. You must only use ethical methods within your SEO campaign.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Another fact you need to know about SEO is that it does not have to cost a great deal. Many assume because SEO can be so effective that it must be expensive. This is not true. Results can be achieved with any budget. What is most important is that your SEO campaign is tailored to the needs of your business and the budget you have. Even small changes can make a difference and so are worthwhile.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The fifth SEO fact you need to know is that SEO is continuous. It can take a considerable amount of time for &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO techniques&lt;/STRONG&gt; to become effective and so you must be patient. Also, important variables within search which can affect your campaign are always changing. This means your SEO campaign needs to adapt to these changes if going to remain effective.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;The sixth SEO fact of great importance is that if you are not experienced and knowledgeable in SEO, you have to hire professional SEO consultants. A professional SEO campaign can make a significant difference to your chances of SEO success. SEO specialists know how to run an SEO campaign effectively and can do this for you.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;At &lt;STRONG&gt;SEO Consult&lt;/STRONG&gt;, we have an extensive knowledge of SEO and are highly experienced in the running of SEO campaigns. We can provide you with the information you need to develop your own understanding of SEO and so you can contribute to your campaign too. Let us run your SEO campaign and show you how effective SEO can be.&lt;/P&gt;Three Secrets Of Search Engine OptimizationThree things you don’t want to hear from your SEO companyHave You Chosen the Cheapest SEO Service You Could Find?Is SEO Too Much For You To Handle?Six Things You Need To Tell Your SEO Consultants&lt;P&gt;Tags: Search Engine Optimisation, SEO campaign, SEO Techniques&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you want to link to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.&lt;/P&gt;This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 9:28 am and is filed under About SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://www.seoconsult.co.uk/SEOBlog/about-seo/six-facts-you-need-to-know-about-seo.html&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=:s7:f1:v0:d2:i0:lt:e0:p0:t1288696618:&amp;cd=SRj6Grd1-IM&amp;usg=AFQjCNEN6VOJgYjDsweXPn8lptagCTmYxg&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/8677940353585415733/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/six-facts-you-need-to-know-about.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8677940353585415733'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8677940353585415733'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/six-facts-you-need-to-know-about.html' title='Six Facts You Need To Know About &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-601795853901168761</id><published>2010-11-17T07:53:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-11-17T07:53:00.966-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Hosting"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Information"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Search"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Services"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Utility"/><title type='text'>Utility &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Services Web Hosting Blog» | &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;Seo&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Information Search</title><content type='html'> &lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;SEO services utility&lt;/STRONG&gt; &lt;P&gt;It is a world of Internet, advertising and marketing. If you are a business and wish to promote their products to the Internet. On the Internet can bring their products and services for the maximum number of people. As computer and internet television has now taken from the public and human interest. Promotion as well on the Internet and advertise their products, because it can offer you some real benefits and can be sold as never before to improve.Therefore, the majority of internet marketing professionals know quietly that search engine optimization is required for the placing on the market. A collective discipline practices produce higher search engine ranking organic search engine optimization can be called. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;major search engines are the way to the information as you can see that 80% of Internet users use this information if necessary.Therefore automatically is important for any company to use this medium to make visible on él.Su company can be sufficiently greater as to make the concept of SEO and already has a number of tactics used to treat the SEO or your new company on the concept of SEO services, but it is always advisable that you should help to find a good SEO consultant and reputation service. A professional personal SEO can help you something new and effective internet add marketing campaign. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Search engine optimization can be said of Internet marketing investments more eficaz.Lo which is essential here is access to an SEO service which is a class apart. The main objective should be to achieve results through effective and ethical scientists, analytical, SEO practices to achieve. You should help their customers to create customized strategies and plans that will help you dramatically increase your search engine rankings to develop. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;A good and profitable way for these things is to outsource SEO services.In outsourcing work is done by professionals in countries where labour costs are low in cost compared with their países.Por therefore will be a very smart decision to an outsourcing company that your company will hire premium SEO services and also saves you money and, of course, your precious time.Manual free directory search and Web search is a slow, but it is one of the most crucial elements of SEO and so that this should be done at all.Thus, if you order SEO will be provided the service very fácilmente.puede be assured that the work efficiently and at a lower rate.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;There are two types of outsourcing.Las SEO services companies that full package of SEO services and other freelance professionals, SEO services to request. for some tasks, write articles and redesign its Web site, you can seek help from a professional operation, but for all the work done must be a SEO company give you a complete service.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;More SEO services articles&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;View the original article here&lt;/P&gt;This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 6:16 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://seofreeinfo.net/utility-seo-services-web-hosting-blog%25C2%25BB/&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=:s7:f1:v0:d2:i2:lt:e0:p0:t1288688446:&amp;cd=l0eILZGWiuc&amp;usg=AFQjCNFfmmfAkVM0S38sB3vD01fx7l2j7Q&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/601795853901168761/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/utility-services-web-hosting-blog.html#comment-form' title='1 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/601795853901168761'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/601795853901168761'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/utility-services-web-hosting-blog.html' title='Utility &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Services Web Hosting Blog» | &amp;lt;b&amp;gt;Seo&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; Information Search'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>1</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-5735110308638180185</id><published>2010-11-12T16:07:00.000-08:00</published><updated>2010-11-12T16:08:25.666-08:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="About"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="NewTwitter"/><title type='text'>What You Need to Know About the #NewTwitter</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;Well yesterday was a big day on Twitter, wasn&#39;t it? I don&#39;t know about you but I was glued to the live stream of the not-so top secret&lt;/EM&gt; Twitter press conference at exactly 3:30 pm and watched closely for an hour and a half while @Ev and @Biz told us all about the new &quot;bigger and better&quot; Twitter.com.  The founders outlined many of the recent achievements they have seen with the growth of their community and announced the release of a brand new interface for Twitter.com, which will be rolling out to all users over the new few weeks (it&#39;s important to note that currently only 1% of users have access to the redesign, that decision was not so&lt;/EM&gt; well received.)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The new  interface has a renewed focus on the user experience with in stream multi-media expansions, more search capabilities, and an all around sexier more fluid feeling. I went crazy yesterday playing with the new interface and wanted to share way too many screenshots and my thoughts on the new layout. I am excited to hear what you guys think all of these changes mean, so let&#39;s do this, shall we? What are the big changes to our beloved Twitter.com?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;1. Redirect users back to THEIR WEBSITE – Whoa!&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I have to admit I got a little fiesty yesterday when I saw my stream fill up with tweets that said things like &quot;that is it?!&quot; and &quot;its just a new interface, what&#39;s the big deal?!&quot; Twitter has over 160 million users, but as we all know many of those users use second party Twitter clients rather than the web interface itself. Ev noted yesterday at the conference that Twitter mobile users are up 250% year over year, which was the motivation for them to release their own mobile apps earlier this year. While this mobile surge has meant huge growth for the community it hasn&#39;t done as much for their on-site value. The announcement yesterday was important because it was their first real attempt to redirect those millions of users to a more compelling on-site experience. Whatever the long term goal is for Twitter.com the website, yesterday&#39;s announcement was a huge step toward a more united community of users. This.is.a.big.deal.folks.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; (The new Twitter.com... ohhh pretty!)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;2. A whole lot more space for .... uhmmmm advertisements?&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So now that we have refocused our attention and time back to Twitter.com what will they do with it? Well sell us things obviously. As you can see below there sure is a lot more space for Twitter to fill. You will notice the &quot;Sponsored Tweets&quot; and the &quot;Who to Follow&quot; elements are more prominent. In addition to that you will see some open areas (that look a lot like traditional ad space units) laced throughout the platform. In general I think its pretty clear that they used this UI redesign to give themselves more options for the up and coming advertising platform we keep hearing about.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;(Notice all that space they get to play with!)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;3. Focus on other tweets, searches…you know uhmmm NOT your tweet&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;During the press conference Ev mentioned specifically that Twitter is a unique community of users in that not everyone actually tweets. He noted plenty of people use it just to listen or research...very &quot;search enginey&quot; if you ask me (yes I just made that word up). The new design certainly focuses less on my actual tweet and more on the experience I am having as a Twitter user. You will see the &quot;search box&quot; was moved to top right, and has much more functionality than previously. I can see tweets with my searched word(s), &quot;tweets with links&quot; &amp; that word, &quot;tweets near me&quot; with that word, and see profiles or people that include that searched word. This is a far better experience all around if you ask me, again compelling users to stay on Twitter.com rather than leave and search elsewhere. Smart move people, smart move.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;(New search experience...man I love Pumpkin Spice lattes from Starbucks)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;4. Media, media, media oh my!&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This is probably the change you are hearing most about. The new platform has the ability to view pictures and video in stream, by expanding from the left column (your tweet stream) to the right column (now used more as an expanded view). In addition to seeing whatever multi media you clicked on you will also see people mentioned in the tweet you expanded, a brief history of that user&#39;s tweets, and the latest tweet that tweet may have been in response too. Uhmmm sound confusing? Basically the expanded view of any tweet is now much more of a comprehensive story of that tweet. No longer on the web client will you be clicking from profile to profile to read a full conversation and get context. This new layout has put the story of a tweet together for you in one place. It&#39;s smooth, trust me...you will like it!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;(The new platform when you expand an image... Hi Matt!)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;(The new platform with expanded video...ohhh puppy!)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;5. All sorts of other little things &lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;You are not losing your backgrounds (phew!). Atleast right now we still have them. Also you might want to revisit your right column profile color--it&#39;s bigger now.Direct messages are up in your navigation (quite seperate from the other functionality actually) and are much more streamlined in my opinion. You now click in and see the number of DM exchanges, and can expand to see them all clearly. I was happy to see this. However you no longer see a &quot;number&quot; which was the only way us web client users knew if we had a new DM (unless we got an email notification) so be careful not to miss those new DMs!The new platform still does not support multiple users, sorry folks!Retweets. I still don&#39;t really like them, so don&#39;t hate me when I say that I am stoked they made the ability to shut off retweets from someone so much easier! It&#39;s in there next to the option to get a user&#39;s tweets on your cell. Both options are right there and a simple click to change. Easy smeasy for sure.The new platform makes replying to multiple people challenging. No longer can you hit reply and aggregate user handles in one tweet, each &quot;reply&quot; click pulls up an individual tweet box. Ugh, yuck. I hope they change this soon. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;(When you hit reply a box pops-up...still a bit buggy right now) &lt;BR&gt;&quot;Trends&quot; have some serious face time. I think we will find a lot more focus as marketers on getting our topics on the &quot;trend&quot; list (organically or not maybe eventually purchased) as I can imagine this will be much like scoring first page Digg time...similar atleast. You can see they are now top right, whoa in your face!They are calling this a &quot;preview&quot; on the interface, and when you get it you will have a notification box where you must manually click into it. You can also (atleast right now, I guess its going away in a few weeks) chose to &quot;leave the preview&quot; and return to your old interface. I don&#39;t think you will want to, but to each their own ;)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;That about sums up the big changes I am seeing. As for what it all means? I think this is a renewed focus on Twitter.com - the site&lt;/EM&gt; not Twitter -  the company&lt;/EM&gt;. Both Evan and Biz alluded to lots of changes coming down the pipeline, and there is a clear energy of excitement in the stream. I don&#39;t know about you but I am certainly going to playing around more on the web interface both as a user and a marketer. I think we will have some interesting opportunities coming our way...uhmmm both as users and as marketers ;)&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Looking for other insights?&lt;BR&gt;Checked out @ev&#39;s stream from yesterday, he gave a play for play&lt;BR&gt;Read the official blog post about it&lt;BR&gt;Watch a video and learn more about it from Twitter&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6Tt16nSZjA8/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-newtwitter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/5735110308638180185/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-newtwitter.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5735110308638180185'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5735110308638180185'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-newtwitter.html' title='What You Need to Know About the #NewTwitter'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-2602822963603495606</id><published>2010-11-02T09:08:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-11-02T09:08:00.032-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Brick"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="bSEOb"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Exhibit"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Marketing"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="PubCon"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Speak"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Vegas"/><title type='text'>&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; and SEM Firm, Brick Marketing to Exhibit and Speak at PubCon Las Vegas</title><content type='html'> Boston, MA (PRWEB) November 2, 2010 &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Full service search engine optimization and search engine marketing company, Brick Marketing is proud to announce that their President and Founder, Nick Stamoulis will be a featured speaker and exhibitor at this years’ Webmaster World’s PubCon Las Vegas on November 8-11, 2010. The PubCon Las Vegas session that Nick Stamoulis will be a featured speaker at, will take place on Tuesday November 9, 2010 and is entitled, “Real World Tactics for Content Creation and Marketing”. This session will discuss how developing and following a strong content development strategy is the most basic and important thing you can do for long-term search engine optimization success. The hope of this session is to clarify the process of proper content creation and putting it to work in the search engines. Together with other experts in the field, they will answer attendee questions and put them on the road to successful content creation.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;As an exhibitor at this conference Brick Marketing hopes to meet readers of their SEO &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/bANq7Q&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; the Search Engine Optimization Journal as well as others, and spend some time with them and help in their SEO efforts.    Nick Stamoulis will be offering FREE 20 Minute SEO audits to attendees who feel they need some SEO help. During these free sessions, Nick will conduct a website review as well as give free SEO recommendations and answer questions that folks might have. Stop by the Brick Marketing PubCon Las Vegas booth number 115 to schedule your free session, or you can also sign up through the Brick Marketing Newsletter and through the newsletter, sign up to schedule your 1 on 1 session with Nick at Webmaster World’s PubCon Las Vegas.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;PubCon Las Vegas 2010 is supported by the industry&#39;s leading businesses, speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors involved in &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media, Internet marketing, search engines, and online advertising. Pub Con will offer a week-long look at the future of technology presented by many of the world&#39;s top speakers. The conference will be the biggest and most important gathering of search and &lt;a href=&quot;http://bit.ly/a1NMDR&quot;&gt;social&lt;/a&gt; media innovators ever assembled, offering an unrivaled highly-productive conference experience at cost-effective rates, and with the leading technology and online marketing visionaries who will be in Las Vegas there is no doubt that every attendee will come away with valuable new ideas and solutions for their businesses. &lt;BR&gt;Brick Marketing was founded by internet and search engine marketing expert, Nick Stamoulis. Boston based Brick Marketing provides a full range of SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) services combined with exemplary customer service. Through in-depth research and frequent communication, Brick Marketing gets to know the unique characteristics and challenges of your business and industry. With many years of expertise in the field, Brick Marketing develops comprehensive search engine marketing and SEO strategies that will strengthen company visibility, and increase sales, contributing to overall business success.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Brick Marketing is excited to be working in conjunction with Webmaster World in their PubCon event this year, and hopes to continue a great relationship for future events. For more information about Brick Marketing, please call Nick Stamoulis at 781-350-4365 or visit their company website at the following link: http://www.brickmarketing.com/ .&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;###&lt;/P&gt;&lt;BR clear=all&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&amp;q=http://www.prweb.com/releases/pubcon/lasvegas/prweb4700084.htm&amp;ct=ga&amp;cad=:s7:f1:v0:d2:i0:lt:e0:p0:t1288708798:&amp;cd=Pjg5C9PMyko&amp;usg=AFQjCNGVvFbvi5JJvd_LBaHogkQZofnUGQ&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/2602822963603495606/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/and-sem-firm-brick-marketing-to-exhibit.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/2602822963603495606'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/2602822963603495606'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/11/and-sem-firm-brick-marketing-to-exhibit.html' title='&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;SEO&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt; and SEM Firm, Brick Marketing to Exhibit and Speak at PubCon Las Vegas'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-4533666540250661411</id><published>2010-10-27T16:03:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-27T16:04:50.935-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Favorite"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Quotes"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Schmidt"/><title type='text'>Your Favorite Eric Schmidt Quotes?</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;Do you want Google to tell you what you should be doing? Mr. Schmidt thinks so:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;BLOCKQUOTE readability=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&quot;More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don&#39;t want Google to answer their questions,&quot; he elaborates. &quot;&lt;STRONG&gt;They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next&lt;/STRONG&gt;. ... serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.&quot;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;/BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Of course the problem with algorithms is they rely on prior experience to guide you. The won&#39;t tell you to do something unique &amp; original that can change the world, rather they will lead you down a well worn path.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;What are some of the most bland and most well worn paths in the world? Established brands:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;BLOCKQUOTE readability=&quot;14&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The internet is fast becoming a &quot;cesspool&quot; where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&quot;Brands are the solution, not the problem,&quot; Mr. Schmidt said. &quot;Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.&quot;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&quot;Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,&quot; he said. &quot;It is so fundamental to human existence that it&#39;s not going away. It must have a genetic component.&quot;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;/BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If Google is so smart then why the lazy reliance on brand? Why not show me something unique &amp; original &amp; world-changing?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Does brand affinity actually have a hard wired genetic component? Or is it that computers are stupid &amp; brands have many obvious signals associated with them: one of which typically being a large ad budget. And why has Google&#39;s leading search engineer complained about the problem of &quot;brand recognition&quot; recently?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;While Google is collecting your data and selling it off to marketers, they have also thought of other ways to monetize that data and deliver serendipity:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;BLOCKQUOTE readability=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&quot;One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market...&quot; Eric Schmidt continues, &quot;and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.&quot;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;/BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Any guess how that product might have added value to the world? On down days (or days when you search for &quot;debt help&quot;) would Google deliver more negatively biased ads &amp; play off fears more, while on up days selling more euphoric ads? Might that serendipity put you on the wrong side of almost every trade you make? After all, that is how the big names in that space make money - telling you to take the losing side of a trade with bogus &quot;research.&quot;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Eric Schmidt asks who you would rather give access to this data:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;BLOCKQUOTE readability=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;“All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”&lt;/P&gt;&lt;/BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;That exchange helped John Gruber give Eric Schmidt the label Creep Executive Officer, while asking: &quot;Maybe the question isn’t who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information.&quot;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;But Google has a moral conscience. They think quality score (AKA bid rigging) is illegal, except for when they are the ones doing it! &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;BLOCKQUOTE readability=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&quot;I think judgement matters. If you have something that you don&#39;t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn&#39;t be doing it in the first place,&quot; - Eric Schmidt&lt;/P&gt;&lt;/BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/EMBED&gt;&lt;BR&gt;Which is why the blog of a certain mistress disappeared from the web. And, of course, since this post is on a blog, it doesn&#39;t matter: &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;BLOCKQUOTE readability=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you&#39;re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That&#39;s all you need to see. - Eric Schmdit&lt;/P&gt;&lt;/BLOCKQUOTE&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Here is the thing I don&#39;t get about Google&#39;s rhetorical position on serendipity &amp; moral authority: if they are to be trusted to recommend what you do, then why do they recommend illegal activities like pirating copyright works via warez, keygens, cracks &amp; torrents?&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Serendipity ho!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Subscribe to our blog via email or RSS to get more great posts like this one!&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://www.seobook.com/eric-schmidt-quotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/4533666540250661411/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/your-favorite-eric-schmidt-quotes.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4533666540250661411'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4533666540250661411'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/your-favorite-eric-schmidt-quotes.html' title='Your Favorite Eric Schmidt Quotes?'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-2904612186180312981</id><published>2010-10-26T15:24:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-26T15:25:37.210-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Advertising"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Integrated"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Interruptive"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Versus"/><title type='text'>Integrated Versus Interruptive Advertising</title><content type='html'> By Michael Gray on September 16th, 2010 &lt;BR&gt;In Advertising  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;When I was first starting in Internet marketing, one of the first books I read was Permissive Marketing by Seth Godin. The point of this book was that customers who give you permission to market to them are more valuable than those you have to interrupt, and you shouldn’t abuse that trust. One of the second lessons came from adsense, which showed how ads that were integrated into the copy always performed better than those placed outside of the copy.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;While this is something I integrate into my projects, there are a lot of media companies that don’t. For example, here is a screen shot of the New York Times on the iPad. Notice the banner placed in the bottom of the page outside of the text.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;What happens with the app: during your second story, an interstitial ad appears (which was never clicked on), getting in the way of reading the desired story. This, I’m sure, results in a low engagement. Last week, they made a change. Although the banner is still at the bottom and you still get the interstitial, they added a new format embedded in the text … And, even though I wasn’t the target market, I clicked the ad …&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Interestingly, the ad directs you to an in app landing page with options…&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;…followed by a browser landing page where you could make a purchase.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So what is the takeaway from this?&lt;/P&gt;Use a service like Crazyegg (disclosure: they are an advertiser) or Google multi variant testing to experiment with ad placement.Try placements inside of the content at the top, middle, or bottom.Stay away from advertising that interrupts or blocks users from getting to the content they really want. How to Integrate Advertising into Your Blog So you’ve been blogging for a while, your getting some...Off Topic Advertising If you are involved in selling text links or “know...Review of Text Link Advertising Services A few weeks ago Nick over on Threadwatch blogged about...Advertising and Usability As the web matures and begins to displace, replace, or...Social Media Advertising Bill Flitter, Pheedo Marc Schiller, ElectronicArtists Nicole Bogas, BlogAds First...Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet&#39;s oldest directory.Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.Majestic SEO - Competitive back link intellegence for SEO AnalysisContent Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per weekGlass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard ReviewNeed an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting ServicesKnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.Tagged as: Advertising, lancome, new york times, Seth godin &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;See my disclaimer about advertising and affiliate links&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Wolf-howl/~3/41A9m8aY3Ag/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/2904612186180312981/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/integrated-versus-interruptive.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/2904612186180312981'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/2904612186180312981'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/integrated-versus-interruptive.html' title='Integrated Versus Interruptive Advertising'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-3850458081147490861</id><published>2010-10-25T14:52:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-25T14:53:23.005-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Linkscape"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Octobers"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Update"/><title type='text'>October&amp;#39;s Linkscape Update</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;As many of you likely noticed, Linkscape updated its index on Thursday night. New data is now available in the SEOmoz Firefox and Google Chrome toolbars, Open Site Explorer, the classic Linkscape tool and many of our other SEO tools.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This update was, sadly, just over 2 weeks off schedule, primarily due to some hardware failures at Amazon&#39;s EC2 where we run processing on our large link graph to produce the metrics and views for the API.  Although we&#39;ve encountered issues like this in the past, this was one of the larger failures and meant processing had to be restarted several times to update the index. You might be able to read more about the technical details in the near future on our nascent and geektacular Dev Blog.&lt;/P&gt;Pages: 41,219,038,886 (41 Billion)Subdomains: 436,693,488 (436 Million)Root Domains: 99,649,652 (99 Million)Links: 402,521,240,277 (402 Billion)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; I made some graphs showing a few interesting trends over the past few months in the web&#39;s adoption/use of certain protocols.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The chart above shows how using rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; on internal links is slowly becoming less popular (though it&#39;s still a majority of use).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This chart&#39;s telling us that rel canonical use has barely grown from June to October (as a percent). In this index, 5.42% of the pages we saw used rel=canonical tags. The datapoint from May (when rel=canonical was on 5.50% of pages we saw) is curious, but I suspect it has more to do with which pages we were choosing to crawl and index vs. an actual shift in usage. It&#39;s a good reminder, though, that unless we see large, sustained shifts across indices comprised of relatively similar URLs, we shouldn&#39;t jump to conclusions. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The next scheduled update for Linkscape is Nov. 12th (see the Linkscape Calendar page on our API Wiki) and we hope to be in much better shape with hitting that deadline.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Linkscape is also undergoing some serious upgrades over the next 3 months. With our web app launched (and regular upgrades on track), 4 of our 10 engineering folks (Phil, Chas, Bryce &amp; Ben) are going to be working to make Linkscape fresher, faster, more comprehensive and higher quality by January. Expect to see some incremental improvements between now and then, which we&#39;ll report here on the blog.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/-QCfW6QarsE/october-linkscape-update&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/3850458081147490861/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/october-linkscape-update.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/3850458081147490861'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/3850458081147490861'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/october-linkscape-update.html' title='October&amp;#39;s Linkscape Update'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-1223822384831930920</id><published>2010-10-24T13:59:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-24T14:00:52.493-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Really"/><title type='text'>What Is SEO, Really?</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Lisa Barone wrote an interesting piece entitled &quot;Are SEOs Responsible For Rankings Or Money?&quot;. At a recent SMX conference, Matt McGee posed the SEO myth &quot;SEO is about rankings”. Lisa was relieved when the panel concluded that SEO was really all about the money. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I agree, but then all business activity is ultimately about money. We could say car racing is all about money, but it&#39;s also about engineering. It&#39;s about skill, excitement, and winning the game. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So what is SEO these days, anyway? &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Back when SEO started, SEO wasn&#39;t called SEO. It was probably best described by those who did it as a form of hacking. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The first search engines weren&#39;t particularly clever, so it was relatively easy to figure out their sorting algorithms. There was a time when Infoseek&#39;s algorithm was almost entirely based on keyword density and keyword position. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Whilst this hacking was still ultimately about money, it was as much a game as anything else. I&#39;m sure many old school SEOs remember those days with a sense of nostalgia. It was more of a pure technical pursuit back then. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;As search engines got more sophisticated, and more money flowed online, the nature of the game changed. SEO moved beyond technical hacking to an exercise in making connections. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In Googles early days, you could buy a few high PR links - or beg for them - and that was enough to get you ranking top ten in most keyword areas. Buy a few more if you really wanted to go hard. Saturate the long tail with auto-gen, just like your competitors were doing, and it was game on. Some may say we haven&#39;t completely left this phase, but the sun is setting on this approach. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;These days, a more holistic approach is required. The search engines, Google in particular, have become more and more oblique, which means systematic technical approaches are less effective than they once were. This begs the question - what is a client hiring an SEO to do, exactly? &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;BTW: For those who want to read deeper on a history of SEO, check out this excellent Danny Sullivan interview. He knows more than most about the history of SEO. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Ever had trouble explaining to people what you do? &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I&#39;ve worked out a succinct answer that is easy for non-technical people to understand. When people ask me what I do, I tell them &quot;I&#39;m a drug dealer&quot;. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It isn&#39;t true, of course, but I just figure it&#39;s easier for people to grasp. If pushed, I&#39;ll launch into a detailed explanation of SEO, internet advertising and web publishing models - an explanation which is universally guaranteed to be met with the response &quot;huh&quot;?. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Often, they&#39;ll conclude: &quot;so you rank web sites in Google, then?&quot;. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;To which my reply is &quot;well, that&#39;s part of it&quot;. As I explain further, I&#39;m still not sure I&#39;m making any headway, so figure it&#39;s time everyone had another drink and talk about something else. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The SMX panel is right. SEO is not about just about ranking websites, it&#39;s about so much more. Some SEOs, myself included, use SEO as part of a business strategy, a strategy that is just as much about publishing, domain names, brand building, marketing and traffic acquisition. It involves metrics, tracking, conversions, split/run testing, adwords, adsense, writing, researching, managing and changing the light-bulb in the office when it blows. The commonality is that it is oriented around the search ecosystem. Except for the light-bulb. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Some SEOs focus on very specific areas. It is their job to take a site from nowhere in the search engines to achieving desirable rankings. Their job ends there. I suspect such a role is becoming less common as search companies like Google extend their tentacles into every corner of the web, and search consultants invariably follow. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Ask ten different SEOs what they do, and you&#39;ll probably get ten different answers. None of which the lay person will likely understand, unfortunately. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you&#39;re starting out in SEO now, I don&#39;t envy your challenge. If you&#39;re reading this, and you&#39;re an SEO veteran, please feel free to add your comments below. What is your advice to those starting out? &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Here&#39;s mine. ;)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It helps to understand the big picture first. The reason people engage in SEO is ultimately about making money. Even a non-profit may make money from SEO by saving money they would have spent on some other marketing channel. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;They want people to find their web site. They want people to connect with them, rather than their competitors. They want people to do this so they can convert these people to buyers, of their goods, their services, or their ideas. If a site were only to rank - say, on keyword terms no-one searched for, or that weren&#39;t directly applicable to the objectives of the business, then the SEO work is largely useless. It matters not if a site appears in Google&#39;s index. If no one visits via a search in Google, then all that&#39;s happened is the bandwidth costs have increased i.e. Google&#39;s spider visits and digests pages, and the ROI for the SEO spend looks dire. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So SEO isn&#39;t about rankings. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The rankings must translate to something tangible. In most cases, this means gaining qualified visitor traffic. To get this traffic, a site must do more than rank, a site must appeal to visitors. A visitor who clicks back isn&#39;t really a visitor. To appeal to visitors, the SEO must first understand them. What do they want? What problem do they have? &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Once the SEO understands visitor intent - and they can do this by getting clues from the search query itself, and testing pages against alternatives - they then direct that visitor around the site in order to turn the visitor into something else i.e. a buyer, a subscriber, a reader. Some might say this goes beyond the job description of an SEO, however whether an SEO works on this part or not, they do need to understand it. If the client doesn&#39;t see a positive benefit from an SEOs work, they are unlikely to keep paying for the services. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So, yes, SEO is about money. But it is also about the long process by which money is made.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Subscribe to our blog via email or RSS to get more great posts like this one!&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://www.seobook.com/what-seo-really&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/1223822384831930920/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-is-seo-really.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/1223822384831930920'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/1223822384831930920'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-is-seo-really.html' title='What Is SEO, Really?'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-7922935039775789979</id><published>2010-10-23T14:00:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-23T14:01:54.146-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Awesome"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Content"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Definitive"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Guide"/><title type='text'>The Definitive Guide to Awesome Web Content</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;What is it we SEOs do? Most of our answers probably boil down to this; we help webpages rank higher at search engines by improving each of the three cornerstones of SEO. The first aspect; technical problems - like indexable content, meta robots tags and URL structures - has been cracked by SEOmoz’s awesome web app. Suddenly we can get a complete dashboard of errors to go and sort - easy.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Then of course, then there’s the “trust” issue. Getting authoritative and relevant links; and with Open Site Explorer where advanced link analysis and data is now only a click away. And with the a huge range of link building tips, strategies, and tactics here, it’s fair to say that we’ve got the SEO ninja skills to go and create “trust-worthy” websites.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So that leaves content…&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Content is abstract. It’s irrational. It’s hard for CEOs, managers and influential decision-makers to get there heads around. It’s fantastic.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;What&#39;s the point in what you read?&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;We consume content to solve problems, be entertained and to satisfy curiosity. Based on where you are in a decision making process, you can divide ‘content’ into four different categories. This post is all about defining each category.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In an age of tweetdeck, rss, five sentence emails and the internet making us stupid, supposedly, who on earth is hanging around to read meaningful&lt;/EM&gt; stuff? I mean, it’s a bit over-rated when you’ve got to be checking your inbox every five minutes, keeping current with Twitter, and all these feeds, and then some...&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;IMAGE via: Geek and Poke&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;The reason such technology exists is so we can be on the edge of stuff. &lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;We can see and read the latest ideas, news and commentary. We can connect with people who share common interests and start a conversation. That kind of ‘content’ is a) meaningless to those who aren’t in the know and b) not particularly relevant a week or so down the line.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This is what is making the web at the moment - current conversation&lt;/EM&gt;. Everyone can chip-in on what other people have to say. We all have our own circles of influence where we can share and spread ideas. We’re all wittering away with our own little thoughts - it’s not cohesive and it’s unlikely to be useful to an outsider trying to figure it all out - at least on it’s own. I call this Blurb.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Blurb Content is conversation. &lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It’s two way. Blurb is exclusive in that it’s meaningless to those who don’t understand the community, who don’t know the secret handshake and who aren’t clued up on the topic - but for those who are “in the know”, blurb is where discussion, debates and drama define opinions and leads to decision making. Within the club, blurb is awesome.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;We’re lucky on blogs like this to have really great conversations, fleshing out theories and the results from experiments; it attracts intelligent two-way conversation. It’s why you might tweet about it more, because there’s so much value in the conversation. It’s why you’re more likely to take action, because you’ve heard it thrashed out by a handful of the industry brains. It’s why you&#39;re more likely to come back for more conversation.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Equally, there’s pretty useless blurb. “Great post” “really enjoyed it” or “tldr” which has no real value to other visitors, and therefore no real value to search engines either. The real power of blurb and UGC is things like this (YOUmoz), Threadless and - dare I say it? - Wikipedia. People have been empowered to go and create their own awesome corner of the web.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;The Rule of Blurb - Culture Valuable two-way Conversation.&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Conversation is the fuel of the web; and with hundreds of millions of us online, that’s the potential for a big conversation. The problem we face, both as SEOs and marketers in general is initiating that conversation.&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Who’s Gonna Break the Ice?&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;IMAGE: UrologyOnline&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;We can do this two ways:?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;1) Create content and ask for conversation (tweet this, leave a comment, let’s connect on facebook)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;2) Create a system where you encourage other people&lt;/EM&gt; to initiate conversation&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Which way do you think is harder to replicate, will be more scaleable and have more influence across the web in the long term? You said two, right? The question is - how. Let’s go back to the SEOmoz model (because most of us have had a good look around this site and know it well, so it’s doubly relevant):&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;What got you to the point of chipping into the conversation on here? What qualified you to know what you were talking about, and pitch in with something valuable? I bet that this blog post hasn’t taught you everything you know about SEO (and if it did, you’d probably reside to saying: “great post. really interesting stuff” anyways).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The reason why is because at some point in your SEO education, you’ve stumbled across someone or something with “the answers”. Something that answers your questions fully. Where somebody has simply communicated the concepts behind SEO to you in one or more pieces of content.&lt;/P&gt;A good book...An awesome video...A seminar...&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;The fundamental difference is it’s a one-way conversation. &lt;BR&gt;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Consider this scenario; your lost in an foreign city - you were supposed to be in an office meeting fifteen minutes ago. What do you do? You ask a local. They tell you how to get there. You listen and do what they say. They’re the expert, so you listen.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Example two. You have a medical problem. You go to your doctor. Your doctor examines you and tells you your problem, and prescribes a cure. Sometimes you might be reluctant, but you trust their skills and expertise so you do exactly what they say.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;You watch a talent show on TV and want to take up the guitar. You find a teacher and hang on their every word whilst trying to work out how to play chords. You may ask them to go over something again, but it’s still a one-way conversation.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This behaviour is typical of “newbies”. You’re mind is like a sponge, you&#39;re being entirely receptive to someone else&#39;s ideas and explanations and because of this you’ll be able to understand and talk about the problem and solution - i.e. you can engage in the conversation on the web. This kind of content focuses and concentrates attention on one specific problem.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;This is called Definitive Content.&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This brings up three things:&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;&lt;BR&gt;1) Definitive content cultures conversation and decision-making&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Definitive Content educates people so, with their expanded knowledge can engage in conversation and make informed decisions. This content is educational. People who are searching for information have already identified that they’re not comfortable making uninformed decisions. They’re looking for “the answer”&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;&lt;BR&gt;2) Definitive content must be remarkable + awesome + white-paper-worthy.&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In a world where attention is a scarce resource, your definitive content needs to stand out from the crowd and be worth the time spent consuming it. It must be remarkable in order to have conversation about it. It must also be jaw-droppingly awesome so reactions and remarks are positive. And it must be white-paper-worthy in order to address the problem fully without “selling” (that comes later).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;3) Blurb is frustrating for learners becuase &lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;it isn’t definitive &lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;That’s why bloggers teaching stuff bitterly frustrates me. Back to basics, a ‘web log’ was originally meant for journalism, commentary and personal tales, and yet the platform has been stretched over other uses. So people now create niche blogs and post about something specific, perhaps offering tips. So far, harmless blurb…&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Then they try writing something “definitive”…&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This doesn’t work for three main reasons:&lt;/P&gt;Bloggers are afraid of completing the article – they thrive from the conversations that evolve from a good blog post which doesn’t quite close all the doors.Bloggers are afraid of forcing their readers to spend too much time reading for fear they’ll get bored. Bloggers are dependent on ‘little and often’ readership.Bloggers are possibly even afraid of spending extra time on “definitive content” for fear that they won’t be able to produce enough posts so readers will lose interest.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;And what’s sad, is that after the first few days after the post is published, the traffic will drop down to a mere fraction of what it was, since your readership has simply “been there, done that”. Congratulations; you’re now in a business where your ‘product’ becomes worthless practically overnight.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Blogging is about the person, not the problem&lt;/STRONG&gt;.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Blogging has it’s place creating blurb content, not definitive content (when you confuse the two, you have a personal problem). In fact, blogging could be considered a response to definitive content; it’s the ultimate example of user-generated content, or rather... user-generated conversation&lt;/EM&gt;. The early days of SEOmoz saw Rand posting his commentary to SEO news.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Now, that’s not a stab at blogging - more a criticism of how people blog. Some of the best blogs about blogging use definitive content in order to bring newbies up to speed so their regular blurb is both relevant and newbies can talk about it. Darren Rowse’s Problogger is one of the biggest and best blogs about blogging, and even so Darren suggests buying the ProBlogger book in order to get all the details on starting up all in one place. And that makes sense, doesn’t it?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Everyone’s blogging like sheep, churning out loads of mediocre content. The world doesn’t need more content. It needs more remarkable, definitive content. Suddenly, those creating Definitive Content become somebody. Blogging has it’s place in it’s roots; a platform for commentary on news, personal affairs and creating conversation - not being manipulated out of place creating definitive pieces.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;(There was a really interesting article about the Death of the Boring Blog Post which essentially outlines this problem from a design perspective. Apparently the answer is &#39;blogazines&#39; - but this doesn&#39;t solve the fundamental problem of answering the problem people are typing in. Pretty is impressive but doesn&#39;t necessarily mean it&#39;s the best.)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Definitive content is the stuff which you reference, re-read, remember and in some cases - recite! Ever been in a position where you’ve been telling someone about an awesome book, or video that you’ve gotten a bit obsessed with? And what’s interesting, is even if it isn’t necessarily “current” or trending on Twitter, you’ll still reference it ‘cause it’s awesome&lt;/EM&gt;. Hence, &lt;STRONG&gt;Definitive Content is evergreen&lt;/STRONG&gt; - which means in the long run it’s a high effort-reward strategy.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Definitive Content Strategy&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Step 1) Find an in-demand niche within a niche. &lt;BR&gt;Step 2) Go be king.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In emerging industries, rarely have people launched with awesome definitive content. Instead, as the industry matures and begins to fragment - then the niche players can identify and distinguish themselves. A great example is looking at the search marketing industry:&lt;/P&gt;Cindy Krum created Rank-Mobile.com ~2007; a website selling her mobile marketing consultancy services. She’s established herself by being the go to girl for all things to do with mobile. She’s enforced this by literally writing the book on Mobile Marketing, and then supplementing this with her blog commentary on industry news- her blurb.David Mihm is ‘local search guy’. His collaboration to create the Local Search Ranking Factors (currently in it’s third volume) with other top brains in the industry helps not only define the fundamentals of search but also positions him and his website as experts. On top of this, he blurbs about local search all around the SEO space.Perry Marshall wrote the book on Google Adwords in 2006 as businesses began to wake up to Adwords and the program really began to take off. He offer expensive consulting-based direct marketing products to his email list which he’s also built up by offering freebie definitive content for signing up (email courses, PDFs, mp3s etc.)SEOmoz! Countless Definitive Content pieces like the Beginners Guide to SEO or the Search Engine Ranking Factors articles which get referenced by hundreds of SEO blogs and professionals. This is then supplemented with an the SEOmoz and YOUmoz blogs with the weekly Definitive &#39;Whiteboard Friday&#39; videos fueling the fire.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Timing is important with creating Definitive Content - I think there are two important factors:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;All three of these people followed these two principles and suddenly you’ve got four excellent examples where ‘content is king’. No one’s anointed these people as experts - instead they’ve written their way to the top and they were first to do it.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Definitive content is all well and good, but if no one know’s about you and it, then it’s not going to be of much benefit. This is where my earlier question of creating content asking for conversation vs. creating a system that asks for conversation comes into play.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;You’ve created your Definitive Content; now you’ve got to use your network, your social sphere of influence, your ‘leverage’ to promote it. Naturally, they use content - perhaps a review post, video, google ad - or even just a tweet - to introduce your Definitive Content. This is called Manifesto Content and this in itself is a behaviour search engines are also looking for.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Manifesto Content does the simple job of introducing the problem, introducing you, and introducing your way of answering that problem&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It pre-sells your Definitive Content. Think about the weight of links in this context; the origin of your inbound links will contain content of some sort (at least to provide value to a visitor) - that content is Manifesto Content. It&#39;s kinda like a CV for the Definitive Content, and the better the Manifesto Content, the better your first impression - and first impressions count.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;IMAGE: CartoonStock.com&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;Manifesto Content distribution is a better way to consider link building. Link building is a game about numbers; Manifesto Content distribution is about building unmeasurable things like trust and credibility - which shows up to search engines as “link getting”.&lt;/P&gt;Do link directories offer great introductory content to you and your website with just a title, few lines of text and dozens of other pieces of similar content around them?Do guest posts or interviews for relevant related blogs offer great introductory content to you and your website?Does a Twitter ‘win a widget’ competition asking for retweets offer great introductory content?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;As I said at the beginning, content is abstract, hence the philosophical-esque questions! However, this thinking is essential if you’re to come up with your own Manifesto Content   marketing strategy. Here’s a handful articles on getting your Manifesto Content shared:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The size, strength and distribution of your manifesto content will determine the overall strength of your web content, and of course good SEO practices of ensuring it gets indexed, it targets specific problem keywords and is “technically tidy”&lt;/EM&gt; to ensure your Manifesto Content gets targeted traffic and click-throughs.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Great. Now Show Me the Money.&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Now, you’ve been introduced as a credible source of information, you’ve educated them and cultured conversation-making abilities so they can engage in blurb. They’re now in an informed discussion about their problem, and likely, your solution if you target your blurb correctly - and all the while, you’ve been earning trust and credibility as someone who know’s what they’re talking about...&lt;BR&gt;&lt;BR&gt;Why wouldn’t they consider your solution you’re selling? &lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This removes the need to “hard sell”. You don’t need to be a copywriting jedi because you’ve already built a level of equity that can’t be copied, even by the best copywriters - they’ve already know you and trust you. To hard sell would simply be a sign of insecurity and stupidity. That said, you need to be able to write sales copy with confidence so you don’t fudge the important bit! Luckily, the brains at Copyblogger will teach you how to ‘sell without selling’ - here’s their best definitive article on writing sales letters (with part 2 and part 3)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Roundup&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;That’s rather a lot to take in; so a quick roundup. The best way to illustrate how content strategy works is by comparing it to a jet engine.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;A what...?!&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Bare with me on this. A jet engine, at it’s most basic, has four parts. A front fan, a compressor, an ignition stage and the back turbine with a nozel - or very simply; suck, squeeze, bang, blow (excuse the innuendoes) - and these exactly map onto our four-part content funnel.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It’s essential that they all work together in order to produce results, like this:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;Manifesto content is the Suck. It draws people into your content funnel.Definitive content is the Squeeze. It focuses attention and educates prospects.Blurb is the Bang. It’s where conversation and the magic happens.Copy is the Blow. It’s where decisions become actions and the whole thing moves forwards.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;What I like particularly about this analogy, is that the actual physics matches the real life SEO analogy:&lt;/P&gt;Most of the power of the engine comes from the front fan - the size, strength and distribution of your Manifesto Content will correlate to the overall output of your web content strategyWithout the compression stage, air doesn’t have nearly as much pressure for when it’s ignited - without Definitive Content, your content funnel doesn’t have nearly as much focus and attention to culture conversationThe burning reaction releases energy - conversation leads to decisions being made, opinions being formed and CHANGE.In a jet engine, “exploding” gas is only going to go backwards - highly targeted, focused prospects with a problem, who are educated about their options and are engaging in conversation about their problem - are likely to make decisions (and buy).The flow of fuel keeps the engine going round - the flow of conversation keeps the content funnel functioning and growing.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;What this also helps explain is why guerilla-content SEO is so much better than ‘traditional’ advertising which is more like a rocket. Create a reaction of advertising bucks and “targeted” prospects and point it in some direction is complicated (it’s rocket science) and not sustainable without continued effort.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This compares to the Manifesto &gt; Definitive &gt; Blurb &gt; Copy content strategy which is “evergreen” once you’ve created it. A ‘definitive’ piece of content will always be there, as will the articles linking to it. What it means is your web content strategy (including search) is dependent on how you culture conversation. Let me introduce the concept of Tribes -  Tribes are created when you connect people around a cause&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Seth’s talk on TED explains...&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;(If you haven’t come across Seth Godin before, you’re in for a treat Everyone who I’ve worked with who I’ve asked to watch this video has viewed it all the way through said it was awesome. Net result? We’ve both gotten more done.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So take just 17 minutes out and watch Seth’s talk to understand why Tribes will shape our future. If you really don’t have time now, keep this tab open and watch it over lunch or something.)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/EMBED&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Finished the video?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This is what I see SEO as - getting in the problem solving business... and not just solving your problems. “I’m not ranking number 1 - I’ll go and build some links”. Put that in context on Tribal SEO. “I’m not ranking number 1 - I’ll go and promote manifesto content”. Creating a tribe will drive your content. Tribes need to connect via blogs, online communities, social networks - in any case you need to be at the helm and leading.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;We have the responsibility to create awesomeness.&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;You’ve heard the ‘Voice of Google’, Matt Cutts, bangs on and on about creating content for visitors vs. creating content for search engines. He’s absolutely right - if you’re trying to make crummy content and webpages rank, just like trying to sell crummy products and services, then shame on you!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I’m gonna end with a couple of questions and an apology. I&#39;ve broken one of the cardinal unwritten rules of blogging (keep it short, stupid!) and you&#39;ve probably spent waaaay too much time reading and watching all this. Whoops...&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;But then again, does Defintive Content need a cap on the length. Shouldn&#39;t it be as long as it needs to be? Which begs the question, how would you classify this post based on the scale I’ve talked about?&lt;/P&gt;Is it Manifesto Content? Does it introduce you to new problems, people and answers?Is it Definitive Content? Sure, I introduce a few ideas and articulate them in a way you’ve perhaps not seen before - but I haven’t “written the book” on Tribal SEO so to speak. Heck, I’m just a kid - why would you share and bookmark this? So far this is just a hypothesis - I need to enlist help in defining and proving these principles, which leads me to...Blurb. Is this merely a topic for discussion, something that’ll be todays topic of conversation and yet will be forgotten by this time tomorrow?Or is it copy? Me, shamelessly trying to promote myself or the Mozzers in a bid for private gain!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Secondly, how do you see this Manifesto &gt; Definitive &gt; Blurb &gt; Copy content cycle fit in with this Whiteboard Friday concept of ‘The Path to Conversion’ and your business?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;And finally, do you think that ‘Tribes’ make an effective long-term SEO strategy in your business, or any other business that springs to mind?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Let’s chat.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/maDWTeJ-Mfs/the-definitive-guide-to-awesome-web-content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/7922935039775789979/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/definitive-guide-to-awesome-web-content.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/7922935039775789979'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/7922935039775789979'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/definitive-guide-to-awesome-web-content.html' title='The Definitive Guide to Awesome Web Content'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-5936674440584647011</id><published>2010-10-20T19:33:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-20T19:34:54.155-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Bitly"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Codes"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Generates"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Shortener"/><title type='text'>URL Shortener Bit.ly Now Generates QR Codes, Too</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;URL shortening service bit.ly announced Tuesday that users can now automatically generate QR codes that, when scanned with a mobile QR code reader, automatically direct users to shortened links.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;To create a QR code, visit bit.lybit.ly, write or paste in a URL address, click “Shorten,” and add .qr to the end of the generated bit.ly link (like so: http://bit.ly/9STstv.qr). Next, copy the modified bit.ly link into a new browser window to view the QR code, which you can then print out, send to your friends via e-mail, post on your blog, etc. I’ve included a QR code that links to my MashableMashable author page in the right-hand corner of this post.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;To scan the code, you’ll need an app like QR Scanner [iTunes link] for the iPhone and iPod touch, or ShopSavvy for AndroidAndroid devices.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The new QR code feature arrives just 12 days after GoogleGoogle&lt;IMG class=wp-smiley alt=Google src=&quot;/inline-face07.png&quot; width=14 height=14&gt; released its public URL shortener goo.gl to the public, which includes the ability to instantly generate QR codes in the same fashion as bit.ly.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;While the ability to create QR codes via URL shortening services isn’t revolutionary in any sense, it’s a fun feature that should increase interest and familiarity with QR codes, which continue to grow in popularity among marketers in the U.S.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;[via TheNextWeb&lt;/EM&gt;]&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/Mashable/~3/p-6YA6S13bM/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/5936674440584647011/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/url-shortener-bitly-now-generates-qr.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5936674440584647011'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5936674440584647011'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/url-shortener-bitly-now-generates-qr.html' title='URL Shortener Bit.ly Now Generates QR Codes, Too'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-2692422782007497516</id><published>2010-10-13T17:45:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-13T17:46:32.280-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Crawling"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Diagnose"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Improve"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Website"/><title type='text'>How to Diagnose and Improve Website Crawling</title><content type='html'> By Michael Gray on October 7th, 2010 &lt;BR&gt;In Featured, SEO  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;When you are reviewing a website, whether for your own projects or for a client project, one of the important areas to review is crawlability. In this post I’d like to talk about some of the ways you can look for and diagnose crawling issues.&lt;/P&gt;If your important pages aren’t within 2-3 pages of linking hubs on your website, you will have problems …The first step to diagnosing a crawling problem is to use a simple [site:example.com&lt;/EM&gt;] search and compare how many pages you really have with how many Google thinks you have. Now, bear in mind that this number is an estimate. What you are trying to do is get a rough estimate of how many pages Google knows about, as Matt Cutts recently discussed in a Webmaster Central Video: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you have several hundred or thousand pages but Google only shows 100, then you have a problem. Depending on how large the site is, anywhere from 10-30% accuracy would be a good rule of thumb.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The second thing you would want to look at would be Webmaster Central. If you submit a sitemap, Google tells you how many URLs you submitted and how many are in the index. The closer those numbers are, the better. Don’t worry if it’s not a 100% match because sometimes you include pages in your sitemap that get blocked at the page level with a robots meta tag. At this point, you are just concerned with gross numbers.&lt;/P&gt; Sitemap Statistics&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If things are radically out of whack, you can download a table of pages in the index from webmaster central and diagnose on a page by page level to see what is or or isn’t in the index.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Next, you want to try and do a full crawl of the website using something like Xenu. While it’s usually used to check for broken links, in the process it does crawl the website. If you have a large website, you are going to want to limit the crawling.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Another product that I like to use is Website Auditor. One of the interesting things about using Website Auditor is that you can specify crawling depth, which is  how deep you want a crawl to go. Start at the homepage and go only one level. Run it again, this time with 2 levels, then 3. Additionally use your Webmaster Central report on most linked pages (think of them as link hubs). If your important pages aren’t within 2-3 pages of linking hubs on your website, you will have problems. IMHO it’s more important than ever to cultivate deep linking and to use that deep linking to spread your link equity, inbound trust, and authority wisely around your website.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In recent years Google has done away with the term/classification “supplemental index.” IMHO this was more of a public relations move, as they just grew tired of hearing from people who were upset that any part of their site was in the supplemental index–but I digress. There are certain parts of your website that aren’t as important as others or, as in the case of say a privacy policy, are important to people but not for rankings. To help you understand what pages Google thinks are important, you need to look at last crawl date in the Google Cache.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Pages that have the most links are going to get crawled more frequently. Pages that have the most trust and authority are going to get crawled most often. Pages that are linked to from those linking hubs, or trusted and authoritative hubs, will get crawled next most frequently. At each step away from the linking hubs, or authority points, crawl frequency will decrease–think of it like a classic pagerank model.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Ideally, what you want to do is get a sample of pages from different levels and determine their crawl frequency rates. Programs like Website Auditor will do this for you; however, you are probably very likely to trip up the Google automated query blocker, which means that, if you are going to use it, you’ll have to have someone sit there and do captcha’s for a few hours. A secondary method is to use an outsourcing service (I use ODesk) and have them do it for you. Send them several hundred URLs in a spreadsheet and explain to them how to check the cache date and enter it in the spreadsheet. You should do some spot checking when it comes back and try to find a handful of people you can trust. Use them on a regular basis.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So how do you know you’re in trouble? Do your important pages have crawl dates older than 60 days? Are there entire sections that you think are important that aren’t getting crawled as frequently as you want?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you find that the site you are working on has crawling issues, look for ways to flatten out the site hierarchy. I talked about this in How do You Archive Posts on a High Volume Website. Look at your pages that are linking hubs: are you using them wisely by interlinking to other content? I talked about this in How to Silo Your Website: The Content and breadcrumbs are another key tactic for interlinking. Look into ways to rotate some of that older content onto your homepage (see how to make your homepage more dynamic). Lastly, look for ways to better use your link equity by performing a content audit and killing/removing/updating old, outdated, or unimportant sections.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So what are the takeaways from this post:&lt;/P&gt;Take a quick estimate of how well crawled your site isLook at the pages in the index using webmaster centralIdentify link hubs on your websiteTry test crawling to different depthsCheck cache dates across a section of URLs for your websiteIdentify trouble spots, flatten site architecture, improve interlinking, and trim down unimportant pages/sections Deep Crawling a Mini Site Part II After correcting some “errors” in my mini-site architecture (see Deep...How To Figure Out What Parts of Your Website Aren’t Being Crawled When Google took away the supplemental index last year, they...Superficial Crawling SEO Strategies On WebmasterWorld people are discussing big daddy strategies, and on...6 Tools &amp; Tips to Help You Improve Your Blog Posts I was having a a few conversations on twitter last...How To Silo Your Website: The Breadcrumb Trail In Part 1 we looked at How To Silo Your...Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet&#39;s oldest directory.Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.Majestic SEO - Competitive back link intellegence for SEO AnalysisContent Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per weekGlass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard ReviewNeed an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting ServicesKnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.Tagged as: crawling, SEO, technical seo &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;See my disclaimer about advertising and affiliate links&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Wolf-howl/~3/LI7YohYI6oo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/2692422782007497516/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-diagnose-and-improve-website.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/2692422782007497516'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/2692422782007497516'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-diagnose-and-improve-website.html' title='How to Diagnose and Improve Website Crawling'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-4222554142458007688</id><published>2010-10-11T14:40:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-11T14:41:17.987-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Building"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="EightfoldLogic"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="MyBlogGuest"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Services"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Valuable"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Whitespark"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Zemanta"/><title type='text'>4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic &amp;amp;amp; Whitespark)</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;In the last year, there&#39;s been a plethora of entrants to the field of link building services outside the traditional software basis of reversing competitors&#39; backlinks (like our Link Intersect, LAA or Open Site Explorer tools) and consulting/direct purchase. In this post, I&#39;ll try to cover some of the interesting major new services, as well as present some long-standing options that some SEOs may not have discovered.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I&#39;ve segmented the services below into unique sections to help differentiate the types of link building they offer. Some are more service-based, others are pure-software and the first section is more visibility-based than direct link  acquisition.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;One of the unique offerings in the last few years, Zemanta lets publishers submit a feed of content or images to them, which then appear in front of bloggers in the &quot;composition&quot; window (while they write their posts). These are labeled as &quot;related posts&quot; and have multiple benefits:&lt;/P&gt;They can improve branding amongst a blogging audience (as bloggers will see your site/brand name while they write)They can draw in direct links (if the blogger chooses to link to your work in the post or as a &quot;related post&quot; at the bottom - or through links from image references)They can attract direct traffic from the bloggers themselves, who are likely to click on links/content that appears to be interesting&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;You can try Zemanta&#39;s service via a &lt;/EM&gt;demo&lt;/EM&gt; on their site&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Zemanta has (according to their team) been approved by Google&#39;s search quality folks as a white-hat service (which makes sense since all they&#39;re doing is showing advertising content to writers, who then determine if they want to link or not) and is now included in Wordpress and Blogger.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;SEOmoz has been using them for over a year now (we started with a trial and continued on) and we&#39;ve seen good results - we tend to get a half dozen or so links to our content (the blog and YOUmoz) each month which can be seen through their reporting system (which has some upgrades in the works).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;*Other than our paid use of the service, SEOmoz does not have any affiliations with Zemanta or its founders&lt;/EM&gt;.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Founded by Ann Smarty, MyBlogGuest provides a platform for those seeking to write and receive guest posts. The service is relatively simple, but potentially quite powerful. If a reasonable number of quality blogs and sites participate in the marketplace, the opportunities for providing great posts and receiving traffic and links back are tremendous (as are the opportunities for those seeking more content and relationships).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Blogging is an inherently social field and while the links may be a primary driver for many interested in the site, Ann has made it clear that she hopes deeper relationships will emerge from the connections. The site&#39;s layout and signup process are impressive and compelling, though driving action once inside the platform could still use a bit more polish.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;The marketplace is currently based on a forum connections system&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;You can read more about the project in SearchEngineLand&#39;s interview with Ann from February.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I&#39;ll be surprised if some Silicon Valley style startups don&#39;t pop up to copy this model. Hopefully Ann can stay far enough ahead of the game through a network effect to remain competitive. It&#39;s a terrific idea that needs only enough branding and awareness in the space to take off.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;*SEOmoz does not have an affiliation with this site, though we have contracted Ann, personally, to do projects for us in the past.&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Originally known as Enquisite, EightFoldLogic, a software company with offices in Victoria BC and San Francisco has recently launched a marketplace of their own for website owners of all stripes called &quot;Linker.&quot; The premise is similar to MyBlogGuest, but the audience is wider and the interface more customized for creating one-to-one, private connections.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;Linker enables the creation of &quot;criteria&quot; much like personal ads for linking connections&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;Within a day of signing up in a single category, I had four potential &quot;matches&quot;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Linker&#39;s goal is to connect sites and marketers interested in partnerships or link relationships with one another. Since their service ends at the time of connection, the method of obtaining the link is up to the parties involved. This means plenty of white hat options, but also potential gray hat ones - however, EightFoldLogic&#39;s Richard Zwicky and the audience they&#39;ve traditionally attracted lean white hat, so I expect this won&#39;t be an issue unless the audience changes substantially.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The concept of marketplaces for link acquisition and connecting to site owners interested in links is a compelling one, but the key, as with MyBlogGuest above, will be achieving the critical mass of users necessary to make the service valuable. To that end, Linker&#39;s made their product completely free for the next couple months - you can sign up here.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;*SEOmoz provides link data via our API to EightFoldLogic but does not have a financial stake in the company or this product.&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about a tactic to grow your Google local/maps rankings that involved a similar principle to the automated tool built by Whitespark and Ontolo.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The concept is to find sites that are included in Google Local&#39;s &quot;sources&quot; for maps and local review data that link to or reference multiple sites that rank in the local results. It&#39;s a simple idea, but well executed and incredibly useful for those seeking to optimize their local listings. You can try the Local Citation Finder here - results take just a few minutes to be returned.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;BR&gt;Enter some data about your site/goals and the citation finder will email you potential sources for listings&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;As the local results grow in importance and competition, and as the value of having these consistent, multiple listings rises, I suspect this tool will be incredibly popular. I&#39;d love to see further productization around showing more data about the importance/value of particular local listing sites, and some opportunities to help control and manage those listings, but this first version is pretty exciting on its own.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;*SEOmoz does not have a financial or product relationship with either WhiteSpark or Ontolo, though we have been talking to the latter about use of our API in other products.&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;---------------&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Although there are dozens of other services I&#39;d love to cover, these are some of the most interesting to me, personally. As always, looking forward to your thoughts and recommendations, too!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/v2Bc8UGFdP4/4-valuable-link-building-services&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/4222554142458007688/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/4-valuable-link-building-services.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4222554142458007688'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4222554142458007688'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/4-valuable-link-building-services.html' title='4 Valuable Link Building Services (Zemanta, MyBlogGuest, EightfoldLogic &amp;amp;amp; Whitespark)'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-3149340452504370662</id><published>2010-10-10T14:35:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-10T14:36:05.069-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Conference"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Presentations"/><title type='text'>Why Most Conference Presentations Suck</title><content type='html'>The author&#39;s posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Normally, I tend towards the uncontroversial when I write. I haven&#39;t been the author of many posts that have caused debate.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;But I&#39;ve had enough. I need to speak up.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;There. I said it.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I remember being amazed (and, back then, pretty heartened) when I went to my first SEO conference and realised I already knew most of what was being said. Amazement turned to disappointment at my second conference, which was billed as &quot;Advanced&quot; and where the same old basics were trotted out by too many of the speakers.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Since then, I&#39;ve been to hundreds of presentations. I&#39;ve learnt a lot, but from a surprisingly small proportion of them. (&lt;STRONG&gt;Thank you&lt;/STRONG&gt; to those speakers who consistently turn out the excellent stuff!).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This is as much a criticism of myself as anyone else. Looking back, there are some presentations I&#39;ve given that make me cringe now (especially early ones). Early on in my speaking career, it wasn&#39;t necessarily that I phoned them in. I was suitably scared / motivated to do a good job - I think I just didn&#39;t know how. More recently, I think it&#39;s probably happened when I agreed to talk on a subject I didn&#39;t really know enough about. I&#39;m definitely trying to learn that lesson.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So before I go any further, if you&#39;ve had to sit through one of my presentations and learnt nothing, &lt;STRONG&gt;I&#39;m sorry&lt;/STRONG&gt;.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If it happens in future, &lt;STRONG&gt;email me and tell me&lt;/STRONG&gt; (my contact details are easy to find and always on my last slide).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I&#39;m a strong believer in the idea that you should &lt;STRONG&gt;praise in public and criticise in private&lt;/STRONG&gt; so I&#39;m not asking you to tear presentations apart on Twitter. I&#39;d love it if we saw more strong praise of great presentations, and more honest private feedback to speakers and organisers when they haven&#39;t delivered the goods.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Before I go any further, I wanted to point out that I am often called upon to give &quot;SEO 101&quot; type presentations and these wouldn&#39;t teach any of you anything. I hope this doesn&#39;t mean that they are bad presentations. It&#39;s all about knowing the level of the audience I guess. This rant is squarely aimed at &quot;advanced&quot; presentations of one form or another.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you start googling &quot;how to give a great presentation&quot;, you&#39;ll find masses of advice on slide design, how to speak at the right speed, the kind of opening line to use, what to wear etc. All of this stuff can help, but I would &lt;STRIKE&gt;urge&lt;/STRIKE&gt; implore you to work harder on the other axis. Make the content kick-ass and I&#39;ll listen to you even if you mumble at your feet in a monotone looking like a scarecrow. (Yes, I know I talk too quickly when I present. One day I&#39;ll fix that).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I &lt;STRONG&gt;do&lt;/STRONG&gt; like listening to great speakers and entertaining presentation does improve things, but there are better places than SEO conferences to go for stand-up comedy, so generally, I&#39;m there to learn things. You can get away with slightly&lt;/EM&gt; weaker content if your delivery is awesome but please remember this highly scientific chart:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;And you know what? I don&#39;t even care if it&#39;s a sales pitch if you are teaching me stuff. It sets the bar higher and I&#39;m more likely to criticise you if you pitch your own stuff without teaching me anything, but if you &lt;STRONG&gt;do&lt;/STRONG&gt; teach me stuff, you can bet I&#39;m going to check out whatever you&#39;re hawking.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In the past, just to avoid embarrassing myself, I have:&lt;/P&gt;Learnt new things (this was about how to do first touch tracking in Google Analytics):&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;Carried out research (this slide shows a correlation I established between search volume for the 2006 world cup and the 2010 world cup before this year&#39;s competition started - it was part of a methodology for forecasting search volumes that haven&#39;t happened yet):&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;And published data (this is actually one of Tom&#39;s slides):&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;That&#39;s what Google is for. Give me the ideas and the data that I couldn&#39;t get anywhere else. If there&#39;s terminology I&#39;m not familiar with or you skip over something too quickly, I can easily do my own research. But please don&#39;t spend half an hour telling a room full of experts what Google Insights is.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;At the Seattle mozinar, I gave a presentation on &quot;how to pitch SEO&quot;. One of my core themes was that the best way to win business is to avoid competitive pitches by giving yourself an unfair advantage. Being known for being smart is one of those advantages. If people get to know you through learning from your presentations, you will find yourself in a disproportionate number of uncompetitive pitches... Just sayin&#39;.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;At Distilled, I have been thrilled to see great first-time presentations from our guys - this isn&#39;t something that only&lt;/EM&gt; comes with experience. For example, Sam&#39;s Advanced Keyword Research presentation at SMX London was more highly rated than those of many more experienced speakers including mine. In advance of the show, Sam asked Tom and I to run through our secret recipe. It&#39;s actually pretty simple - just follow these steps:&lt;/P&gt;Only agree to speak if you actually know the subject &lt;STRONG&gt;and have something new to say&lt;/STRONG&gt;Ask yourself what you can give away in your talk that will be new for the majority of the audienceWhat &lt;STRONG&gt;action &lt;/STRONG&gt;can people take as a result of your talk?Be prepared to do work / research to discover or demonstrate your new stuffUnless you are an incredibly gifted public speaker, &lt;STRONG&gt;practice&lt;/STRONG&gt; before the event. There&#39;s a huge difference between preparing the slides and giving a great talk. Although I truly believe that content &gt; delivery, it&#39;s worth working on the delivery at least a bit! Check out Lisa Barone&#39;s post last week about How To Rock Your Presentation for more great presentation delivery recommendations.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you need a little bit more incentive to be awesome, I&#39;ve found that having a head to head competition and then a vote at the end of your session (thanks Rand!) is a good way to make you up your game.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This rant is mainly aimed at speakers, who I think are the primary culprits, but for organisers, while I realise that larger conferences especially don&#39;t want to micro-manage every session the way Rand and I have been for the Pro training seminars, can I beg for one small thing?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Don&#39;t invite speakers back if they didn&#39;t add value last time&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Everyone runs those follow-up surveys and knows which speakers were loved by the audiences and who phoned it in. Please stop inviting people back if they don&#39;t want to teach things to the attendees. [Rand wrote a whole post a while back with his thoughts on this from an organiser&#39;s perspective].&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;[UPDATE: following a bunch of conversations in the comments and offline, I wanted to clarify two things here:&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;I was probably too harsh with my statement above - if everyone took that literally, there&#39;s a good chance I wouldn&#39;t still be speaking at shows today. I want to encourage new speakers and with that goes a lot of mentoring, feedback and encouragement. &lt;STRONG&gt;Do&lt;/STRONG&gt; give people a second chance, &lt;STRONG&gt;do &lt;/STRONG&gt;give them support and feedback and &lt;STRONG&gt;definitely do&lt;/STRONG&gt; encourage new and unknown speakers. Rephrased, I think I mean &quot;don&#39;t invite speakers back if they repeatedly fail to add value and don&#39;t invite them back at all unless you are prepared to coach them&quot;&lt;/EM&gt;This isn&#39;t a new discovery - ironically, this whole post is more of a rant than it is likely to tell people things they didn&#39;t know - and there are many shows that take this seriously. This post is really aimed at speakers not organisers]&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Rand and I actually tend to harangue our speakers with instructions a little bit like those above asking them to bring their &#39;A&#39; games. Beyond a certain point, it hopefully gathers momentum because no-one wants to be the guy giving the sales pitch when everyone else&#39;s presentation is rocking. At the beginning of September (almost two months before the show), I had a call with every speaker for the London Pro seminar to help shape what they were going to talk about and make sure that they are bringing their secrets. It&#39;s not too late to get in on the action and see the result of all that hard work:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It&#39;s lucky that we have a bigger venue this year. We passed last year&#39;s total (sold out) sales a few weeks ago and unfortunately all the VIP breakfast tickets are gone, but there &lt;STRONG&gt;are &lt;/STRONG&gt;still tickets left at the time of writing. Like last year, we anticipate that there will be a rush of bookings as the date approaches so it is likely that we will sell out. If you are wanting to come and see me put my money where my mouth is (yes, I&#39;m feeling the pressure a little bit after writing this) don&#39;t leave it too late to book:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;The Details&lt;/STRONG&gt;:&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Where&lt;/STRONG&gt;: The Congress Centre in London&#39;s West End&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;When&lt;/STRONG&gt;: October 25th and 26th&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Price&lt;/STRONG&gt;: £699 +VAT&lt;BR&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Book: &lt;/STRONG&gt;now!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you are an SEOmoz PRO member, you can get access to special pricing by using the code in the discount store - making it a steal at &lt;STRONG&gt;£499 +VAT&lt;/STRONG&gt; / person.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;You can read a sneak preview of the event that I wrote a few weeks ago to get an idea of the kinds of things that you will see there.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6ic7l9bXukU/why-most-conference-presentations-suck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/3149340452504370662/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-most-conference-presentations-suck.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/3149340452504370662'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/3149340452504370662'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-most-conference-presentations-suck.html' title='Why Most Conference Presentations Suck'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-5275621974199354143</id><published>2010-10-09T00:35:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-09T00:36:05.487-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Custom"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Engine"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Google"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Linkdomain"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Replace"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Search"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Yahoo"/><title type='text'>Replace Yahoo Linkdomain with Google Custom Search Engine</title><content type='html'>The author&#39;s posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Hey everyone! My name is Justin Briggs, and I&#39;m an SEO consultant at Distilled. A few weeks ago, I packed up and moved across the country to come to Seattle. Some of you might know me better as &quot;seozombie&quot; on Twitter. This is my first post on SEOmoz, but you can expect to see more from me here and on our blog at Distilled.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;With the transition of Yahoo! to Microsoft’s Bing backend, webmasters have lost the ability to perform advanced searches using the link: and linkdomain: parameters. Rand Fishkin wrote a post about replacing the Yahoo! linkdomain: data with other data sources. Although Linkscape and Open Site Explorer provide a great data source, there is some functionality that Yahoo! had that isn&#39;t present in other tools yet. The primary functionality I missed was the ability to perform searches against page content; not just page title, URL, and anchor text.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;These link searches can help you identify link opportunities from other websites&#39; (such as competitors) backlinks.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;To solve this problem, I setup a Google Custom Search Engine using data from Open Site Explorer. There are two exports of data you can use, which are links and linking domains. I’ll briefly go over the pros and cons of each as a data source in GCSE.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Linking URLs&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Pros&lt;/P&gt;Only search content that has linksLess noise&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Cons&lt;/P&gt;Limited to top linksLimited to 25 URLs per domainMultiple links per domain reduces domain diversityLimited content (5,000 annotations = 5,000 URLS)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Linking Domains&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Pros&lt;/P&gt;Search all indexed content on a linking domainFind linking sources not included in OSE exportGreater domain diversityMore content (5,000 annotations = 5,000 domains of content)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Cons&lt;/P&gt;More noiseLarge linking domains like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com have subdomains (lots of noise)Results that don’t have link&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Setup of your custom search engine is very easy. For this example, I’m going to use linking domains from OSE.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;1) Perform search in Open Site Explorer&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;2) Pull linking domains for all pages on the root domain,  export to CSV&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;3) Get list from Excel&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I used Find &amp; Replace to add a * to the end of all URLs, for matching. You can sort by DA or linking domains. Google Custom Search Engine only allows 5,000 annotations, so only copy up to 5,000 domains.&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;4) Create Custom Search Engine&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Go to Google Custom Search Engine.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;5) Perform your searches&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So here are the pages on domains that link to distilled.co.uk, that include “link building” in the content and “resources” in the title.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This solution gives you a new way to mine for backlinks opportunities using your competitor&#39;s backlinks. You can also include linking domains from multiple competitors at the same time. However, you can only include up to 5,000 annotations at a time, so you might want to use some Excel filters to remove noise and duplicate entries.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Here are a few quick tips to speed things up.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Remove massive domains&lt;/STRONG&gt; – Large domains like wordpress.com and blogspot.com can produce a lot of noise.&lt;STRONG&gt;Use the –site:  search to reduce noise&lt;/STRONG&gt; – If a particular domain is creating a lot of noise in your search, use a negative site search to remove it.&lt;STRONG&gt;Search brand mentions&lt;/STRONG&gt; – A search for the brand can help find the linking pages on these domains.&lt;STRONG&gt;Search top anchors from OSE&lt;/STRONG&gt; – Find the pages that include the anchors the site is targeting.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;&quot;powered by wordpress&quot; &quot;distilled&quot;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Find pages that mention the brand “Distilled” and include “Powered by Wordpress”. This is an easy way to find the blogs linking to Distilled.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;“guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column” -site:blogspot.com -site:wordpress.com -wordpress.org&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Find guest blogging opportunities, but filter out domains that may create a significant amount of noise.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;&quot;powered by vbulletin&quot; AND seo&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Find vBulletin powered forums mentioning SEO.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;“link building” intitle:resources&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Find link building resource pages.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;A few queries to try:&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&quot;top seo tools&quot;&lt;BR&gt;“link building” intitle:resources&lt;BR&gt;&quot;open site explorer&quot; &quot;powered by wordpress&quot;&lt;BR&gt;allinurl:seomoz&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Go ahead, try it, you know you want to!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I removed linking domains with a DA greater than 90, just to remove some noise from larger domains. (Selecting this value to filter by was completely arbitrary and is just to make the example easier to use.)&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Long List of Link Searches (SEOmoz)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;74 B2B Link Building Queries&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;106 Sponsorship-Based Link Building Queries&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I hope this helps everyone replace some of the functionality of the Yahoo! linkdomain command. If you&#39;ve got more link searches or ideas to add, please share.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/NVU45qVvW8I/replace-yahoo-linkdomain-with-google-custom-search-engine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/5275621974199354143/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/replace-yahoo-linkdomain-with-google.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5275621974199354143'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/5275621974199354143'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/replace-yahoo-linkdomain-with-google.html' title='Replace Yahoo Linkdomain with Google Custom Search Engine'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-8526632510900161732</id><published>2010-10-08T04:05:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-08T04:06:16.889-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Audit"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Content"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Website"/><title type='text'>How to Do A Content Audit of Your Website</title><content type='html'> By Michael Gray on September 28th, 2010 &lt;BR&gt;In Featured, SEO  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you have a website that’s been around for a few years and you’re looking for ways to make some improvements, one of the tactics I recommend is doing a content audit. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;When you do a content audit you have a few goals in mind:&lt;/P&gt;Get rid of any low quality or unimportant pagesLook for pages or sections that can be improved or updatedImprove your rankings by more effectively using your link equity, internal anchor text, and interlinking your contentyour inbound link equity can only support a certain number of pages …The first thing you need to do is to get an understanding of where your website currently stands. You’ll need a list of the pages of your website, the number of inbound links, and amount of visitors your page receives. If you are using Webmaster central, you can export a spreadsheet of all the pages with the number of links. The next thing you have to do is add a column for page views. I like to use a timeframe between a year and year and half. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Depending on the number of pages your website has, it could take a while to get all this data. This is the perfect task for an intern or outsourced labor from a place like ODesk. I recently performed this task on a website that has 1800 URL’s. It cost me $75, and I had the data back in just over 24 hours.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;The two primary factors I like to look at are how many links does a post/page have and how much traffic did it generate in the past 18 months. Any page that generated less than 100 page views is a candidate for deletion. Additionally, any page that generated less than 25 links is also a candidate for deletion.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;At this point you’ll have a list of pages that generated minimal links and/or traffic and are therefore candidates for deletion or revision. This is where it requires some decision making. If a page generated a lot of links but not much traffic, I’m probably going to keep it intact. The same is true for pages with high traffic but a low number of links. When pages are low on links and low on traffic, you have to use your judgment. In some cases, the post was a throwaway post–important at the time but not important now. Those are easy to justify deleting. In other cases, you’ll want to keep them.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;At the very least I would suggest looking at the pages to see if you can improve them. In some cases the information is outdated and needs a complete rewrite. In other cases it just requires a little updating. One of the tools I’ve found to be helpful is Scribe SEO (see my  Scribe SEO review). It gives you a quick overview and can sometimes make a few quick easy suggestions to improve a page. A third option is creating a living URL style page. When you rewrite or revise pages you really want to look for ways to maximize your internal anchor text and linkage whenever possible.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;When I talk about this practice, a lot of people wonder why would you bother deleting pages. After all, there’s no harm in keeping them around and you’ve already spent the time and energy having them created. For the answer, we need to look at the concept of link equity. Each website only has a certain amount of links, trust, and authority coming into it … this concept is called link equity. That link equity can only support a certain number of pages. For example a brand new website with few links won’t be able to have thousands of pages in the index: the search engines simply don’t have enough signals of quality to support anything more than superficial crawling.  Additionally IMHO ever since the “mayday update” the days of “infinite websites” have come to an end.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;When I mention deleting old posts, sometimes bloggers look like they are going to break down in tears, as if I asked them to abandon a puppy with no food or water outside in a freezing snowstorm. If you’re the type of person who has a deep emotional attachment to your posts, you aren’t running a business website. You are creating Aunt Millie’s Christmas Letter.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Before you delete a single post make sure you have multiple backups of all of your posts. You want the ability to bring your posts back if you delete one by accident. If you use WordPress, you can trash a page/post and it’s deleted from public view, but it lingers in limbo for 30 days and is easy to bring back. If any of the pages have more than a handful of links you should set up a redirection. Try to redirect to a similar-themed post or revised post if possible. If not then the homepage, the sitemap, or archives page. A controversial step is to redirect to a different commercial page or to create a link hub somewhere else. Let your conscience be your guide to your approach.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Lastly, you want to trap for 404 errors and redirect anything you might have missed. Again, if you use WordPress, the redirection plugin takes care of the 404 and redirections in one spot.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;What are the takeaways in this post:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Make a list of all your pages with inbound links and traffic stats from the past yearIdentify and isolate the worst performing pagesSubdivide the list into pages to delete or pages to revise/rewriteBackup pages before deletingSet up redirections for any pages that are deletedMonitor 404 errors for any deletions or redirections you missed&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; How to Silo Your Website: The Content The following is part of the series How To Silo...Putting a Content Based Website Together We’ve covered long term content and short term content, information...How Do You Archive Pages on a High Post Volume Website Today’s post is an answer to a question I took...How To Silo Your Website:The Sidebar The following post is part of a series on How...How To Figure Out What Parts of Your Website Aren’t Being Crawled When Google took away the supplemental index last year, they...Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet&#39;s oldest directory.Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.Majestic SEO - Competitive back link intellegence for SEO AnalysisContent Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per weekGlass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard ReviewNeed an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting ServicesKnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.Tagged as: content, SEO &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;See my disclaimer about advertising and affiliate links&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Wolf-howl/~3/Ttc60kccRpw/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/8526632510900161732/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-do-content-audit-of-your-website.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8526632510900161732'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8526632510900161732'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-do-content-audit-of-your-website.html' title='How to Do A Content Audit of Your Website'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-265914837523629304</id><published>2010-10-07T04:20:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-07T04:21:10.148-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Average"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Changes"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Fewer"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Google"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Instant"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Update"/><title type='text'>Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;Ugh... Part of me just wants to link to this old blog post and leave it at that.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;But, since there&#39;s actually a bit of data to share helping to show that (at least so far) Google Instant changes less than your average algorithmic rankings update, let&#39;s share.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Conductor released some nice research from anonymized data of sites on their software platform making a compelling case:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;IMG alt=&quot;Search Term Keyword Length for Visits Post-Google-Instant&quot; src=&quot;/Research-visits-search-term-length-500x267.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;BR&gt;If Conductor keeps putting out this kind of stuff, they&#39;ll be a &quot;must-read&quot; in no time&lt;/EM&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Hmm... Looks pretty darn similar to me. A tiny increase in 4, 5 and 6 word phrases would seem to go against many of the prognostications and fears that this move would decimate the long tail (though, to be fair, plenty of savvier search folks predicted a slight increase as Google&#39;s &quot;Suggest&quot; function would be more obvious/visible to searchers and push them to perform more specific queries).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Matt Bennett at MEC blogged some data from 5 sites in his purvue representing about 10,000 searches. He shared this excellent graph (similar to the one above):&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;That&#39;s more evidence to suggest this is a very subtle change (if there&#39;s any at all) in keyword demand.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;While I don&#39;t have as much data to share as Conductor, I can show you some tidbits from SEOmoz.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Here&#39;s SEOmoz.org&#39;s traffic from Google in the past week compared to the week prior:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;And here&#39;s a similar look at OpenSiteExplorer&#39;s Google traffic:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;There&#39;s a suspiciously small amount of change in the keyword demand, and although these are certainly un-representative of the broader web, we can be relatively confident that lots and lots of folks in our industry, performing queries that might lead them to these two sites, have awareness of and are using Google Instant.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;One change that did catch my eye (thanks to some Tweets on the topic) is that Google&#39;s Suggest itself seems to have changed a bit:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Hard to complain about that :-)&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;I was a bit dismayed to see so many in the SEO field taking this as a serious threat or even touting the massive &quot;changes&quot; that would be coming soon to SEO best practices or even search query demand. We&#39;re usually pretty good about shrugging off Google&#39;s pressbait around technical changes that don&#39;t have much of an impact, but this one seemed to have more legs than usual.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;That said, there are a few pieces I think warrant a read-through (or at least, knowledge of):&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Very much looking forward to the discussion, but I&#39;m leaving for Social Media Week Milan and will be hard pressed to contribute at normal levels until my return next week. Until then - Buona notte!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;p.s. If you have data to share on how Instant has or hasn&#39;t impacted your traffic-driving queries, that would be awesome. If you blog/upload it, we&#39;ll be happy to update the post with links.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/m4PodHPkP0A/google-instant-fewer-changes-to-seo-than-the-average-algo-update&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/265914837523629304/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-instant-fewer-changes-to-seo.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/265914837523629304'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/265914837523629304'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-instant-fewer-changes-to-seo.html' title='Google Instant: Fewer Changes to SEO than the Average Algo Update'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-7258170188841687050</id><published>2010-10-05T15:48:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-05T15:49:48.107-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Selling"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Simple"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Truth"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Universal"/><title type='text'>Universal Truth Of Selling On The Web: Easy &amp;amp; Simple Wins</title><content type='html'> &lt;BODY readability=&quot;0&quot;&gt;&lt;P&gt;The following is a guest post by Jim Kukral.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Google knows this. Now you do as well. Easy always wins. Take a moment and picture your website or your blog or your product or service in your head right now. Now, think of Google’s. Which one is easier? No, you&#39;re not a search engine, you&#39;re probably a small business owner with a variety of products services, entrepreneur with a business idea, or blogger . But the comparison remains because regardless of what it is you do easy will always win. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;So keep thinking about your Web business. Is what you’re selling easy to buy? By that I mean; when somebody comes to buy from you, or to simply get information from you like a phone number or to download a white paper… is it easy to do? Or are you making it too hard? &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Picture Google.com again in your head. It&#39;s pretty darn easy, no? There&#39;s a logo and a big input box underneath it. You put in what you&#39;re looking to find, and hit search and boom, you find it. Easy. Google understands that customers use them for one reason, to have a problem solved, and therefore, that’s what they deliver, without all the frills that other search portals like Aol or Yahoo! try to offer. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Your opportunity right now is to figure out the main one or two reasons people visit your website, because despite what you might think, your customers probably have only those one or two things on their mind when they visit you. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you visit the home page of Orbtiz.com, you’re probably there to do one of a few things only. Book a flight, find a car, or make a hotel reservation. Possibly all three at once. But honestly, that’s pretty much it, right? I would bet that 99% of their traffic is trying to do one of those things. The same goes for you and your website, blog, membership site or anything you produce online. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;What exactly are your customers looking for? You need to find out and find out right now! Check your analytics (I recommend Google Analytics, it&#39;s free! www.Google.com/Analytics) to find out things like the most viewed pages of your website, as well as the most exited pages too. You may find out that 90% of your visitors are focusing on the free white paper download page and ignoring the other pages you thought were important. That’s great news! Now, you at least know what your customers want. And now you can make it easier for them to get it. You may also find out that a large percentage of your visitors always leave your website on one specific page, giving you the insight that perhaps they aren&#39;t finding what they&#39;re looking for, getting frustrated, and surfing away. That&#39;s bad. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;So what should you do with that knowledge to make things easier for your visitor, and better for your business? If you&#39;re getting a lot of traffic to your free white paper download, go ahead and take that download information and make it stand out on your home page. If done right, you&#39;ll make it as easy as possible for your visitors to get what they were looking for, and you’ll see even more downloads, and happier visitors because you didn’t make them work so hard. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Now, you may also find out that the page you really wanted your visitors to see is not being viewed enough. This could be the specials page on your e-commerce site, or the packages page on your consulting site or maybe your customer support contact information page. Whatever it may be, once you know what it is, that page obviously needs to be viewed more, and while you can’t force it down your visitors digital throats, you can redesign your page so that it limits the other choices that can distract your visitor. &lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;Make it easy and simple, then win!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;For over 15-years, Jim Kukral has helped small businesses and large companies like Fedex, Sherwin Williams, Ernst &amp; Young and Progressive Auto Insurance understand how find success on the Web. Jim is the author of the book, &quot;Attention! This Book Will Make You Money&quot;, as well as a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant. Find out more by visiting www.JimKukral.com. You can also follow Jim on Twitter @JimKukral.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Subscribe to our blog via email or RSS to get more great posts like this one!&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seobook.com/universal-truth-selling-web-easy-simple-wins&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/7258170188841687050/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/universal-truth-of-selling-on-web-easy.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/7258170188841687050'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/7258170188841687050'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/universal-truth-of-selling-on-web-easy.html' title='Universal Truth Of Selling On The Web: Easy &amp;amp; Simple Wins'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-4449558720350809793</id><published>2010-10-02T14:31:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-02T14:32:44.683-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Danger"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Overdoing"/><title type='text'>The Danger of Overdoing SEO</title><content type='html'>&lt;P&gt;During my first few years in the SEO field, half of the sites I&#39;d visit - those my SEO brethren in the forums or over email owned - were what today we&#39;d probably call &quot;over-optimized.&quot; They tended to have features like:&lt;/P&gt;Keyword after keyword stuffed into the title element of every pageOverly-lengthy and keyword rich URL stringsPage filled with &quot;SEO&#39;d&quot; content that was never intended to be a focus for visitorsBacklink profiles that lacked a single high-quality, &quot;editorial&quot; link&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;At its best, our profession is about making amazing things that people are asking to see (via their search queries in the engines) and then marketing it in the most optimal ways. At its worst (excluding the crap-hat junk that doesn&#39;t even deserve to be called &quot;SEO&quot;), it looks like this:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;There&#39;s a gigantic gap between this type of &quot;SEO&quot; and the industry&#39;s best practices, but the individual recommendations and changes are so subtle that it&#39;s not surprising many practitioners go a bit overboard. After all, the process of starting SEO often looks like:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Week 1: &lt;/STRONG&gt;Notice in your analytics that search sends awesome traffic and start optimizing some meta tags (since you heard that&#39;s what SEO is about) by putting more keywords in them&lt;STRONG&gt;Week 2:&lt;/STRONG&gt; See that those changes have had no effect, so begin doing some light reading on the topic&lt;STRONG&gt;Week 3: &lt;/STRONG&gt;After you&#39;ve glossed over a few SEO resources (perhaps not necessarily the best ones), start &quot;optimizing&quot; pages by filling the tags you&#39;ve heard were important with your keywords, changing your internal links to be keyword-rich, placing more keywords on your pages in every conceivable tag and location, maybe even optimizing for some wholly bunk metric like the average keyword density of the top 10 ranking pages&lt;STRONG&gt;Week 4:&lt;/STRONG&gt; Possibly see a bump in some rankings and, tragically, inheriting confirmation bias, convincing yourself that the strategy has worked and that it needs to be repeated.&lt;STRONG&gt;Week 5-20: &lt;/STRONG&gt;Struggle with and eventually give up on SEO, or skate by on the fringes with equally poor quality linking practices that get many/most of your pages penalized but maintain rankings on a few&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This pattern (or some similar variation) has played itself out in 9/10 stories I hear about folks who&#39;ve jumped into the waters of SEO haphazardly - and honestly, it&#39;s hard to blame them. The engines provide just enough information to keep webmasters curious but unsatisfied. Many of the sites and pages that rank well do actually employ pretty spammy SEO tactics, making it hard for those trying to learn SEO by reversing their competition&#39;s success (temporary though it may be).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;This doesn&#39;t just apply in the on-page world&lt;/STRONG&gt;.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;If you haven&#39;t yet read it, this thread from Reddit - My Job Was to Game Digg - and this one on Hacker News about it, are excellent examples of the perception problem that social media pushes for SEO have caused. This comment, in particular, stood out to me:&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt; &lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;As you can see, the web&#39;s social voters and contributors have a passing tolerance for the &quot;right&quot; kinds of optimization, but a zealous abhorrence for those that violate their sense of propriety. Even if Google doesn&#39;t worry about &quot;off-topic&quot; linkbait, linkbaiters themselves should have cause for concern.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;The engines aren&#39;t going to take it.&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;More and more, though, the engines are fighting back against this through changes like the Vince update (and subsequent focusing on brands as a way to sort out the web&#39;s &quot;cesspool&quot;). We&#39;ve also recently seen a dramatic increase in the aggressiveness with which Google will change your titles, descriptions and negatively alter the rankings/visibility of sites that step over this line.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;In the long run, it&#39;s hard to imagine Google allowing poor results to flourish - especially those who garnered rankings through manipulation. Those sites and pages that follow every single optimization tactic, from internal links to massive keyword focus to &quot;perfect&quot; anchor text in their off-site link building are going to stand out like sore thumbs to the engines. Sites that build pages designed to attract links with little to no relation to the host site will struggle against the biases in the social media world.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;And sites/pages that abuse these practices (both on and off-page) are going to have a terrifically hard time earning &quot;natural&quot; links. The organic sectors of the web tend not to link out to those types of sites/pages if they can help it.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It might sound ironic, but there&#39;s an art to under-&quot;optimizing&quot; in order to achieve true &quot;optimization.&quot;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;p.s. Some folks noted they were hoping for a link to some good &quot;best practices for on-page optimization&quot; - here you go!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/qZTM6Itso4k/the-danger-of-overdoing-seo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/4449558720350809793/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/danger-of-overdoing-seo.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4449558720350809793'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/4449558720350809793'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/danger-of-overdoing-seo.html' title='The Danger of Overdoing SEO'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry><entry><id>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1412025532712038799.post-8946318822908374405</id><published>2010-10-01T04:06:00.000-07:00</published><updated>2010-10-01T04:07:54.853-07:00</updated><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Footer"/><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="Website"/><title type='text'>How To Silo Your Website: The Footer</title><content type='html'> By Michael Gray on September 7th, 2010 &lt;BR&gt;In Featured, SEO  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;This post is part of a series on How to Silo Your Website. The other parts in the series are: How to Silo Your Website: The Masthead, How to Silo Your Website, The Breadcrumb , How to Silo Your Website: The Content, and How to Silo Your Website: The Sidebar. For this last part, we’ll be looking at the footer.&lt;/P&gt;Another strategy I’ve seen used that often has good results is the dynamic footer …Ah…the website footer. Aside from meta keywords and descriptions, it’s hard to think of an area that’s been more abused. A common spot for selling run of site links, turning into a link brothel (looks in the direction of you Lendingtree), or for stuffing content below the copyright information that you can’t even argue is for bots not humans (looks at you Match.com). &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;It’s hard to resist the temptation to abuse the footer, which IMHO is why links in the footer possess so little value compared to links in the sidebar, masthead, and content sections. So how can a site owner use the footer to their advantage?&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;First, let’s look at usability. All of those service links that I said you should remove from the masthead and sidebar: this is where they should go. Over the years, people have learned to look here if they need information. However, sometimes the amount of links can make the area look … well … excessively linky. If that’s a problem, I suggest checking out this post on beautiful footers to get some ideas about how to keep it looking good and easy to use.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;Another strategy I’ve seen used that often has good results is the dynamic footer, first popularized by Weblogs Inc (the company Jason Calacanis sold to AOL for 25 million). The basic concept is to keep the links in the footer changing and pointing to new or updated content (for Weblogs Inc it was used to show links to new posts all from multiple sites across the network. See divester for an example). While this tactic isn’t as effective as it once was, keeping the footer dynamic is still a good idea worth trying (see How to Make Your Homepage More Dynamic for tips on how and what to include).&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;So what are the takeaways from this post:&lt;/P&gt;Put all of the service links you removed from other sections here.Look for ways to keep it usable and visually appealing.Try to include as much dynamic content as possible.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;While there are still some subtleties to siloing a website, hopefully this series has pointed you in the right direction. If you have any questions or followup posts you would like to see, drop me a tweet and let me know @Graywolf.&lt;BR&gt;&lt;IMG alt=&quot;Creative Commons License&quot; src=&quot;/cc.png&quot; width=16 height=16&gt; photo credit: twicepix&lt;/P&gt; How To Silo Your Website:The Sidebar The following post is part of a series on How...How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead One of the more powerful tools an SEO can use...How To Silo Your Website: The Breadcrumb Trail In Part 1 we looked at How To Silo Your...How to Silo Your Website: The Content The following is part of the series How To Silo...Tip for the Keyword &amp; Link Footer Stuffers If you’re going to stuff your footer with #EEFFFF (very...Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet&#39;s oldest directory.Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!Page1Hosting - Class C IP Hosting starting at $2.99.Directory Journal - List your website in our growing web directory today.Majestic SEO - Competitive back link intellegence for SEO AnalysisContent Customs - Unique and high quality SEO writing services, providing webmasters with hundreds of SEO articles per weekGlass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard ReviewNeed an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting ServicesKnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.Tagged as: information architecture, SEO, siloing &lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;See my disclaimer about advertising and affiliate links&lt;/P&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href=&quot;http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Wolf-howl/~3/gXvgRuiXYAY/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;View the original article here&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;</content><link rel='replies' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/feeds/8946318822908374405/comments/default' title='Post Comments'/><link rel='replies' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-silo-your-website-footer.html#comment-form' title='0 Comments'/><link rel='edit' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8946318822908374405'/><link rel='self' type='application/atom+xml' href='http://www.blogger.com/feeds/1412025532712038799/posts/default/8946318822908374405'/><link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='http://seomarketingmadesimple.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-silo-your-website-footer.html' title='How To Silo Your Website: The Footer'/><author><name>Stephanie P</name><uri>http://www.blogger.com/profile/08292156436389246856</uri><email>noreply@blogger.com</email><gd:image rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail' width='24' height='32' src='//blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggTWwwUQNtmxblGzZ5c2D5zE7LIfna8uUXh60wO1YKopmA_qSm_FalfK5HZnX1QrU_2-xDCC8wcZNWKO0elJUgohasNNDyPDphZheNo0HUiA2Mj9AUiaS6QPVni430wFk/s220/n20908296_38172554_8119994.jpg'/></author><thr:total>0</thr:total></entry></feed>