But to be honest, the type of video SEO project I truly enjoyed getting into was getting videos to index under our own top-level domains. Especially because it was so new and so few were actually setting up their stuff to be found in search engines that it became quite the race – as mentioned in the last post.

How to get videos to index in Google under your top level domain

There are two principles you have to remember :

1) One URL; one page – a standard SEO law. It’s the other one that’s a little pricy.

2) CDN – You’re going to need a CDN (Content Distribution Network) that will allow you to make permalinks that act as subpage on the TLD. This goes for videos as well. You’ll have to give a page for each video. For example:  if you have a video in the “yoururl.com/about-us” page and you want to index it, the video will need its own separate page such as “yoururl.com/about-us/video” or “.com/video/name-of-video.” If you try to claim the index page on your site and the video on the index page as well, the duplicate content filter will remove one.

Once your servers have these assets, then all you need is a 120×90px image of the video and you’re ready to begin making an xml video sitemap.

Parameters for a video XML Sitemap for Google

Whereas the regular Video XML sitemap for Google is easy to make and, if you have a static site, there’s a questionable need for the sitemap, Video sitemaps are of the utmost important. Since Googlebot can’t read the contents of the video (still), your sitemap has to fill in the gaps.

Google Video XML Sitemap Parameters include:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords
• (sound familiar?)
• Tags
• Category
• Content Location
• Video Location
• Publication Date
• Video Duration (length)

Once you create the video, make sure to upload it to your site and submit the path to your Google Webmaster account. And if you don’t have a Google Webmaster account, now would be a good time to get one.

For a template from which you can create your own Google Video XML Sitemap, check out the Google support section.

Were you able to index videos from your own sites? Let us know.

We’ve all been there. We’ve been given a task that we’re not sure how to handle and with limited resources to make it succeed. Increasing leads through a website is not a fad. It will continue to be big important factor in your overall marketing campaign. A problem you may not think about is proving the value of your efforts to maybe garner some budget money to expand your online efforts.

While this post won’t be about SEO on-the-fly, it will talk about maximizing the visibility of your efforts to the company’s brass.

1. Contact Forms

This is #1 for a reason. If I had only one item on this list, this would be it. If your website only has one contact form or just a clickable email hyperlink – you have some work to do. As you identify your web customers in different categories, you should have a different contact form for each “purpose.” For example, if you’re a local law firm, you should separate your site according to different clients that would come to your site. Each page that refers to hat client segment should have its own contact form. When the form is submitted, you know exactly which part of the website that lead came from and know the next step. You should also include a generic “Catch all” type of submission form on a contact us page. I use this on several sites to give people a chance to “vent” their problem. They don’t want to categorize themselves, they want to talk and let me categorize them later. I still also include an email hyperlink because I’ve found that some people like the feeling of “circumventing the system” altogether and type whatever they want. It’s another net that captures a different segment of people. Those that typed the most in the last two methods are actually investing their time with you already and conversion of a lead into a sale is more likely.

The major part of contact forms is having the ability of the form to be copied  automatically to other people in your company. Before launching an overhaul, I made sure that the CEO, COO, and Sales Manager were copied on all submission forms. I alerted them I would do this as a “…if you want” type of activity” so as to not make a big deal out of it and they agreed.

The payoff was when different marketing initiatives started bringing in very strong web leads.

2. Showing Conversion Ratios

Sales teams love talking about conversion rates. Conversion rates are usually the percentage of sales that come out of leads. For marketing, it’s the step before leads. It’s the amount of exposures of the message that convert to leads. A bare-bones way to use Google Analytics is to compare the number of web submission forms (don’t delete them! Ever!) and compare that to the number of unique visitors on that page for a specific period. Everyone always says that a good conversion rate is 1% for everything from traditional junk mail fliers to websites. I think a 10% or higher rate is achievable on pages targeted specifically for a certain clientele. It works! Once you set the stage of typical conversion rates, your rate will shine.

3. Coming under standard costs-per-lead

For every lead you bring in through your website, quantify your time spent on the site every month and multiply that by your pay rate. Divide that by the amount of leads generated and your have a “cost per lead.” Most businesses have a “cost per lead” number in mind in order to make decisions concerning advertising. One business figured a $240 cost per lead of a new customer. Yours will vary. Imagine if you were able to bring a cost per lead drastically below that number? You suddenly show value toward your efforts like you haven’t before!

As you build your website’s online campaign, remember to keep management in the loop with the value it is adding to the bottom line. You will bring a confidence to your efforts from their support like you never have seen. As one Operations Officer told me three weeks ago in a meeting. “I don’t use the internet, I don’t care for it, but it’s obviously important to our clients and so we must pay attention to it.”

You only translated one page of your site into another language.

You’re not really doing foreign-language or international SEO if only one page of your site is in French…Spanish…German, etc. But: if it is, it had better contain all of the information you’d most like to convey on that page. If you’re going to have only a single page in each foreign language, treat it like a landing page that’s designed to convert, don’t just translate your simple contact form. Create, test, and optimize. Or, ideally, create an expanded group of foreign-language pages to allow a more complete user experience for foreign visitors.

You directly translated your English copy, with your English keywords.

If you’re paying for translation, it’s worth it to take an extra step and do some keyword research. You don’t know what terms users in other countries and languages use, and maybe your translated term has terrible search volume and ranakability, or isn’t really going to target the same nuanced audience you’re looking for.

You’re cutting the wrong corners to save cost.

It is expensive to have a native foreign language speaker who also speaks your language very well write copy or translate yours in a way that makes sense both linguistically and conceptually. If you locate a go-to translator/editor who is willing to audit work produced by others, you can get work done more quickly and cheaply. Find students or other freelancers who can write or translate for you, and use a trusted expert to make sure what they’re producing is of good quality.

You’re wasting money where your market is not.

This can be tricky. If your site isn’t in French, and not appearing organically for people who are searching in France, how the heck can you know if your market is there? There are options. Many of our clients with long-standing international business understand the competitive landscape in their industry and know that some countries or regions just sell better than others. If you or your customer have this data, you can use it to determine where it will be wisest to allocate your translation and copy addition resources, as well as to gain an understanding of the type of information visitors in various regions will be looking for on your site.  In the absence of this knowledge, if you run a PPC campaign, you can use PPC data in conjunction with Google Analytics to determine your success rates in various countries and languages and choose targets.

You’re pretending you don’t need inbound links for your foreign language pages.

Linkbuild in the same language! Find local directories to which you can submit  your site, and proceed with link building in the same way as you would for your English-speaking audience. The trickiest part of this is again finding the same audiences you’d appeal to for English link-building. Making alliances with similar-industry partners in other countries can help you develop relationships, a community (and links!) in that country while helping your counterparts create the same in your country.

You’re tackling too much at once.

Be realistic about the time and finances you can commit to your international SEO efforts. If the potential customer base is large enough to justify it, begin an international SEO campaign with basic research and site optimization and continue expanding into wider efforts with conversion optimization, link building, and social media integration as you are ready to commit the resources they require.

You haven’t set targeted countries in Google Webmaster Tools.

It’s not feasible for a lot of people to host a separate site on a different domain in each targeted country. As such, a lot of us end up with subdomains or subdirectory specifications for different countries. If you have such a site, you can tell Google Webmaster Tools to target users in that country. As Google explains in Webmaster Tools help, unless you have a country-specific domain, it will use server IP address information to determine your site’s targeting, which will put you at a disadvantage should a user request to limit the scope of their searches to a particular country. Setting a language here will not stop you from appearing in other countries, it will simply allow your country-specific subdomain or subdirectory with a “generic” domain extension to appear in “country specific” search results if a user asks for them. As Google explains, this tool allows you to target geographically, not by language, so keep that in mind when setting your geographic target.

You’re not considering the internal linking structure between your languages.

Both for the sake of users and for crawlers, Google recommends you link each page to its other-language counterparts, so that users who arrive at a page in, for example, French can easily see its Spanish counterpart if that’s what they’d prefer. Remember this isn’t PPC, and you don’t get to control which such accuracy what a user will find in their organic search results.

You’re not considering search engines aside from Google and Yahoo.

If your customers are in a country where Google or Yahoo aren’t the predominantly used search engines, you’re going to have to figure out how to play nice with the boss there. We recently wrote about the challenges Baidu brings up in terms of offering our sites to 20% of the world’s population, and this is important to consider for anyone targeting China.

And that’s it! Well, not ALL of it. If you have more suggestions for easing the international SEO process, let me know!

Writing fresh SEO Copy can be great for your website organic search. But of course there’s a catch. It would be great if all you had to do was write fresh content to improve your organic search results. But before you turn your website into twitter, you need to take into account the keywords that you are using on your page. Gabriella Sannino from SEO Scoop provides a great guide to effective use of keywords and what a KEI is.

Have you ever taken some bad advice? GabGoldenberg at Graywolf’s blog throws us a different opinion on the value of paid links from offtopic sites. This article might help you avoid some common advice that might not always be true. Sure we want our links (especially when we pay for them) to surrounded by juicy – relevant text on sites that are dedicated to our cause but there are links for sale that aren’t dedicated to our cause but do have that juicy text and a large reader base. There are some great examples mentioned to back up his claim.

Following up on one of last weeks Roundups we have another article on the Yahoo/Microsoft alliance. Lets face it, we all need to stay on top of this one. Frank Watson at Search Engine Watch prvides some great tidbits to help us work through the transition, most importantly focus on improving your Bing rankings. If your ads are performing better in Yahoo than Bing, you should expect to see a drop after the transition. Be prepared and do what you can ahead of time!

However, after taking a step back from all the hype behind social media, it does not take long to again realize what really drives the best social media sites. What would Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr, or Foursquare be without the ample amount of user-driven content? The social media sites are just the interfaces to a community of content sharers. Regardless of the medium where the message is delivered, it is essential for the content to be fresh and relevant to that community.

Therefore, for now, I will maintain to the more traditional Web and SEO motto to proudly say, “Content is king.” More specifically, fresh and relevant content is king.

Social Media Praise

Before I go any further, please don’t get me wrong. I am a believer in social media and anyone from the Hanapin Marketing team will quickly tell you that I am the loudest of social media advocates. Social media is a powerful, multi-faceted personal and business utility. It can be used for sharing, collaborating, and creating; as a broadcast, a conversation, and a news aggregator; or as a public relations soapbox, marketing strategy, or customer service platform – and these suggestions only begin to scratch the surface of social media’s potential.

Undoubtedly, social media is a necessary part of your overall marketing strategy, but it should only be one component of the overall plan. SEO is still crucial and social media will not serve as your saving grace for your SEO campaigns. If it helps, consider SEO like a hammer and social media like a screwdriver (or think of the two as a digital mullet).

The Internet Marketing Tool Belt

Both a hammer and a screwdriver are necessary on a tool belt. They both help in the process of building some kind of project like a tree house or a boat (please insert whatever people actually do build these days… I was never much for swinging a hammer or hitting a nail in straight). Last, you need nails and screws to hold everything together. Without the nails and screws, not too many people are going to be interested in seeing or using your creation. The new web world is really no different. Without quality content (nails and screws), no one is going to want to visit or link to your brand and website.

Below are some helpful guidelines further help to explain the social media landscape and how they can provide value to your SEO needs.

Nofollow, dofollow, and maybefollow

In HTML, the nofollow attribute is a value that tells search engine crawlers to do just that and not follow a link from their webpage. As a result, the nofollow value will significantly impact linkbuilding and overall search engine indexing efforts.

Now, I’m not here to elaborate too much on the follow or nofollow debate. Not today at least.  A number of discussions and tests have been conducted by SEOs to determine how search engines handle the nofollow HTML attribute for social media. To me, it seems like nofollow attributes do still carry some weight with search engines, as they will still follow the link and occasionally record backlinks at the very least. Sometimes it is just easier to refrain from trying to explain search algorithms and rather opt for what is essentially working for you and what ultimately feels right.

Why does all this matter? Most social media sites attach their outbound links with the nofollow tag. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and even Digg to name a few. Therefore, linking to your site from a social media service carries little weight for your traditional SEO efforts; however, linking to your site has a number of SEO benefits hidden just below the surface.

The Audience

What is the best component of social media for SEO? My vote goes towards friends. Friends, fans, followers, subscribers or whatever else you want to call them make for a marketer’s dream. Your social media “friends” are a built-in audience that is tapped into your product, service, or message at all times.

In SEO terms, this is incredibly useful as this audience stands as a direct link to share top quality. You can distribute press releases, new product callouts, promotions, and other miscellaneous content to thousands instantly. More importantly, social media friends make a habit of sharing, retweeting, or flagging favorites from the best content that comes their way, which unveils your link to a wide variety of secondary audiences and markets.

If all goes according to plan, you will certainly see a rise in traffic to your site through your link, both returning and unique visitors. Hopefully, you will start to begin positive conversation around your brand, service, or product throughout the social space. Particularly powerful, this will be a conversation you are aware of and able to both monitor and engage in it. And if you are really lucky, you find yourself in the middle of the linkbuilding process before you know it!

Who are your most valuable friends?

What are we looking for in a valuable friend? Basically, content creators – i.e. bloggers, webmasters, active and proactive fans, retweeters, reviewers, and respected authority in the area.

The best case scenario is someone takes your link and not only shares it with their social media audience, but places it on their (credible and high-quality) blog, resource page, or website. Thus, you will be riding the social media wave and find yourself in the middle of a linkbuilding campaign.

Plant Seeds and Grow Leads

So, what is your end goal with social media today? For now and until social/community votes, reviews, and conversations gain more significance in search indexing, consider social media a barren field. If left unkempt, it can provide no value to you or your business, and mostly likely, your lack of taming and participation in the open environment will cause negative backlash to go unanswered

Planting the seeds of quality content and building relationships with your customers and potential customers is the key to social media success. If approached the right way, your social media process will quickly start to complement your SEO.  Please note, I purposely wrote social media process and not social media project. Social media is not an area to enter lackluster and without a proper, well thought out strategy.

Anyway, whether you are building or planting (or doing any other analogies I made today), I wish you the best of luck in your SEO and social media efforts. If you have a time, please comment and let us know how you are using social media jointly with SEO.

Most of the sites I had under my control had their own video commercials that were integral parts of the user experience (if you could call it that). And before I knew it, the project became a race against competitors.

Now there are two types of Video SEO:

1. YouTube Optimization
2. SEO Optimization for the website

The first I’ll talk about is YouTube Optimization

A lot of common sense SEO Here. The best resource I found on this was from Reel SEO. Working for memory, here are some of the tips and tricks I use as a result of testing and some of the advice from Reel SEO.

1) You’ve done this type of onsite SEO before – Google will be the first one to tell you that the indexing principles in YouTube are the same as in indexing in the standard Google search engine.
2) Titles are that important – You’ve got little space in those titles, and like its older brother, those titles are important for targeting.
3) Description principles -The first principle is to put the full path URL in the beginning of the description. It helps with the CTA and makes it easier for the searcher to find your site and learn more about you. The second principle is to make use of the description space. If you have the transcript of the video, use it. But if you don’t, take the extra time to write a keyword rich description. And for the last principle: if there is more than one video in the series, link to the proceeding and preceding videos at the end of the description.
3) Tags work quite well – Remember when keywords were essential in indexing? Well, they still have an impact in the YouTube search engine.
4) Treat the video pages as pieces of content – ever seen a disparity in PageRank between videos? That’s because backlinks and trafficked videos can have a significant impact in rankings. 1 page; 1 URL. The same SEO principles apply. You can treat YouTube a user account like a website and the videos as pages of content.

Using these technique helped our websites get a significant boost in traffic. Of course, most of the videos also had significant TV push. But with some SEO, your videos can start ranking in Google searches (and YouTube searches).

This was the easy one of the two projects. Next week I’ll start to talk about the testing done with Video SEO Optimization on websites.

How?

There are theories to work from and a lot of ratios to share to generate leads, but I wanted to take the opportunity to ask an actual customer.

Actually, he couldn’t remember what it was but overall he preferred to call us. The site fit for what he wanted to do.

When I hear that type of statement, it tells me that the path was intuitive to the customer and it was very natural to use the site and continue down the conversion path. You don’t necessarily remember how you use stairs. You just do. If there’s stairs, you know how to go up them. You don’t think about the height of the step, which leg to lead with and what momentum you use to thrust yourself against gravity while heading forward to continue up the stairs. A website should aim to have that type of intuitive nature in usability.

For something to be intuitive it has to have a connection with a person’s problems not with the company itself.

For SEO purposes, it is the keywords that play into this type of web architecture. Keywords are the words the customer would use to describe their problem. Keyphrases are the most common sentences that people use to describe their situation.

Several companies seem to prefer to optimize on their company name. That type of thinking results from a lot of branding strategies. However, when people don’t know who you are, you are left with what you do.

So now your site speaks to your customer.

For SEO purposes, it is the conversion formthat speaks the value of your Internet marketing. If your website has just one way to contact your company, you need to put a form on every page you want to measure. This helps track all your efforts and how people use your site. You’ll be able to see how to change your site and enhance as more people use it … or don’t use it or still can’t find it.

Now your site is a tool for your customer.

For SEO purposes, your site should be a part of a group of websites of similar industries or groups supporting a cause you work toward. Linking to and from websites that support each other help establish credibility as well as bringing each other higher in the search engine results pages.

Now your site establishes a sense of security for the customer.

Keeping your site in a very usable form for your visitors will make your site increasingly relevant against your competition and will naturally bring your site higher in position over time.

When you go on a vacation to another country, you know it’s important to speak in their language, consider their cultural preferences and communicate with them as carefully as you would with someone back at home. Christian Arno reminds us, when taking your business into overseas markets, it’s essential to adapt your website linguistically and technically to the target market. The potential benefits can be substantial: a higher conversion rate, traffic volume, and a better web experience for you visitors.

China is a big country with a lot of people using social media. Sounds like a SEM dream right?  New market research shows that unlike their western counterpart, Chinese Internet users welcome product ads. Even better is that there are a high percentages of users who have influence over what their peers like and dislike. These new type of user are called “Fands” according to Cynthia Boris from Marketing Pilgrim. Its no secret that China is an emerging market so the next step is to attract some “Frands.”

Michael Gray had an interesting perspective article on the future of advertising and usability. He relates many of the things we think about when mapping our SEO strategy to other web aspects like paid advertising, usability, and even mobile data plans. See what the future potentially holds and get some ideas for staying ahead of the curve while optimizing your site. Note: this isn’t a map for success but might get you thinking outside the box.

Oh the joy!

The situation:

This client is wanting to build a niche site on his pet photography business. As a professional photographer on several topics, he was wondering what niche generated the most revenue. He had decided that the pet industry was lucrative.  If dog costumes have a thriving industry, then photographing them is right behind it.

This client is also an avid Apple product consumer. Any iProduct is bought at time of release and thoroughly broken-in before the general populace reads about it online. Because of this, he was willing to adapt his life to the iPad, but there proved to be a problem.

He has his site built in Flash. He told me “I know you don’t like flash, but…” I countered saying that I actually like Flash. It’s fun! But Apple hates Flash. Google doesn’t crawl flash. That’s two heavyweights against one.

All it took was to see that tiny little blue box in the middle of his new productivity tool to see that he wasn’t going to get a visitors.

If you want to see how Google sees your site, type in your url in the search box, hit enter and click “cache.” You’ll see the latest snapshot of what Google sees. A flash site will show up a gleaming blank white.

So now the redesign begins, but how do you design that capitalizes off your SEO campaign?

First, there is something every company needs to consider. One site cannot be everything to everyone. Having multiple sites with different focuses will help, but if you just want one site, lets look at some best practices.

1. The F
People tend to read in an “F” pattern as they scan a website. This means, the top left corner is a prime spot. Some people put a click-able logo that always leads to the home page, but why not a very succinct call-to-action with the logo: “Download Now” “Schedule Now” “Get Fixed Today” “$25 off coupon!” It’s a prime piece of real estate to not utilize.  The “F” is probably the most important part of this list.

2. User-focused content
Your site’s main purpose is to generate leads and sales. It is not to tell people your story. A story doesn’t pay the bills, a sale does.

3. Horizontal Navigation
Main navigation across the top makes it easy for your site to be used.

4. Three columns of content or large quick links
Again, user-focused content comes to play here. Instead of “who we are” and “where we came from” and “where we are going” have “Problem X? Solution X!” “Problem Y? Try Solution Y!” “Problem Z? Solution Z!”

5. Vertical Navigation
I call this “Expert Navigation” I would use for more long-worded solutions that are common to your clientele like:
- Spring Tips for your Home
- Freeware Alternatives to Commercial Software
- Solution Y Testimonials
- Solution X Student Discounts

6. Header and Footer Optimization
A header and footer of your site are consistent across every page. Think about what you want to be known for in there and you’ll help it index correctly.

7. Every link goes to its own content
If you have a link about car stereos, then that page needs to be all about car stereos. It doesn’t need to mention other accessories. Keep each page hyper-focused.

8. Entry forms on every page
Every page should have a form for a visitor to fill out. The home page, the content pages, even the about us page. You’ll see very quickly how people respond on which page.

9. Don’t go too deep
It’s astounding to me that sites I have measured have 50+ pages and yet those pages are rarely seen. The conversion forms from item #3 and the contact us form are the biggest converters on one client’s site. In fact, the people who don’t necessarily fit into the “3 main categories” go to the “contact us” where i have less required information and a big enough text area for them to spill out their problem.

Keep the customer in mind, make it easy for them to contact you, make it pleasing to their eye motion and you’re on your way to building a great lead generation site.

“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

So, essentially the information collecting is the same, but speed with which Google uses that information (bringing it to the SERPs) has increased dramatically. I4U News wanted to test the indexing to see just how fast it was. In a post about the Caffeine update, the made-up word ‘Cyberreblaus’, was included in the post’s title, “Google Caffeine Index launched, How fast ca it Index this Cyberreblaus?”

The results? According to post author, Luigi Lugmayr,

“It took over a minute before this page was searchable with the term ‘Cyberreblaus’. Twitter had indexed the story faster than Google, but of course Twitter just has to deal with the short title. From an end user perspective the Caffeine is still not the real time web, but close enough.”

What does Caffeine mean for your site’s content?

Underline it, highlight it in your favorite color, and draw three stars around it – ** *fresh content is more important than ever!*** In a world of real-time results brought to Internet users from Facebook, Twitter, etc., Google has to pay attention to providing most up to date results, especially if they want to stay atop the two social media giants. In the past couple of days, I’ve noticed a few examples of how Facebook and Twitter are challenging Google’s lead.

It started when I was looking for someone on Facebook and the website’s search function provided me with Bing results for a non-Facebook related article on that person. It was a news article from a local paper and I clicked on it straight from the Facebook results page and went to the paper’s website. This was interesting to me as I am on Facebook all the time and if I could start searching from my profile page for non-Facebook related pages, I’d have no reason to visit Google (except for Gmail). I don’t really anticipate that this will happen in the near future, but if the quality and capacity of Facebook’s search results ever came close to Google’s – Checkmate, Google’s game would be over.

The second incident was when I wanted to know who won the World Cup, I turned to Twitter for the most up to date information.  Now, I know Google incorporates real-time results with headlines and twitter feeds, but you can’t always rely on them being there and I sometimes have to weed through old news in order to get what I want. When it comes to breaking news, I generally check Twitter first.

Still not convinced? Just this weekend I saw a commercial for matchmaking site (I really don’t remember if it was eHarmony, or one of the other ones but we’ll just say that it was), and instead of directing the viewers to eHarmony.com, the commercial directed viewers to Facebook.com/eHarmony. They actually wanted people to go to their Facebook page, instead of their homepage. If that commercial is not a testament to the rising influence of Facebook, then I’m not really sure what is.

My point to all of this: The Caffeine update really seems to be a move for Google to help keep its reign as the leading search engine, which is why fresh content is more important than ever.

Ok, now what about Caffeine and your rankings?

We kept a close eye on our clients’ rankings before and after the update to measure the impact of Caffeine. We found that many of our e-commerce clients benefited from the update, while other rankings seemed to have sunk a bit. One reason for this might be that e-commerce sites are regularly updated. Sales, new products, and promotions force e-commerce owners to pay more attention to their sites’ content, while a non e-commerce site could sit for months or even years without an update.

Here are a few things to pay attention to in light of Caffeine:

• Sitemaps – As Google more frequently indexes information, make sure you’re updating and resubmitting your sitemap. For en e-commerce client who regularly adds products to their site, I like to generate a map 2x a month.
• New Content – I can’t stress this point enough. The more unique, fresh, and relevant content you have on your site, the better you’re going to perform in search. Managing a website is not easy. If you want to be an authority on a topic or product, and thereby rank better, you have to prove your worth with great content. There is no such thing as setting up a site and sitting back while the rewards roll in.
• More Activity: Not only will you need to generate more content on your website, but in order to succeed in the world of Caffeine, you’ll need to be active on the real-time sites as well, which means Twitter, Facebook, etc.

This last point leads me to think that Caffeine could actually make some larger splashes on the SEM industry as a whole. Not too long ago, a client asked me about some new content ideas for her website. As I thought about the SEO reasons for implementing the ideas, Caffeine was on my mind and the need to incorporate these new ideas into our social network sites. Now, normally there is not much overlap between our SEO clients and Social Media. We don’t manage social media for most of our SEO clients but I can’t help but wonder how the two can really excel without one another. Some firms do both SEO and Social, but for the most part there are SEM Firms, which typically include SEO and PPC and there are Social Media firms. I can’t help but think that Caffeine will somehow change that.

For those who outsource your SEO and Social Media efforts – would you rather one firm manage both, or are there perks to keeping the two separate?