Welcome to another edition of “Top 3 Fridays”. Today I’m going to be talking about why an article syndication campaign is absolutely vital to any SEO campaign. In my opinion, having a high level, off-site, article campaign is a vital aspect of SEO. It’s not an optional aspect because it is part of the actual SEO process. Creating quality content that is relevant to your industry and then dispersing it to various websites across the net with links back to your site is of the utmost importance.

Here is an infographic with Facebook facts that are great to know and even better to use for impressing everyone else.


[Source: Online PhD Programs for MashableMashable.com]

The next time you log into Twitter, pay attention to the side bar. Under your stats, there'll be a white box with rounded corners, where there is a promotion for a Twitter-integrated website. Often, I find these promotions helpful, and it was one of these that turned me on to fantastic iPhone application called Twitterrific. Over the next few weeks, I will be reviewing the different websites that Twitter promotes.

The first of the aforementioned websites is Topsy, a search engine powered by Tweets. According to the website, "Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. When you search for something on Topsy, it finds snippets of conversations that match what you’re looking for. Topsy results are the things people link to, when they’re talking about your search terms."

That said, Topsy isn't shouldn't replace your default search engine, it isn't as powerful. A "honda accord" inquiry will return tweets that include a photo of a stolen Honda Accord, a Facebook note which describes a Honda Accord, and a how-to article on converting your Honda Accord to run on trash. Similarly an inquiry of "the big bang theory" will return tweets with links to torrents for the hit TV series The Big Bang Theory, news about the show, et cetera. What it will not give you is information on the Big Bang Theory, a scientific theory.

There is an upside to Topsy, and that is the search results are up-to-date. Because the service is based on conversations that are happening in the present, the results will change instantly.

Try it out for yourself.

In my 4 + years in the SEM industry I have noticed a very strong trend among many of the clients I have worked with: they are reluctant to put a blog on their website. There are usually two dominant reasons for this:

1.     They do not have anyone in-house that has the time to publish content

2.     They do not fully comprehend the benefit of having an on-site blog

As a result of this trend, I thought I’d publish a blog entry on the top 3 reasons to have an on-site blog. In my opinion, having a blog on your site should not be optional anymore…it should be a mandatory requirement punishable by imprisonment…okay, maybe that’s a little extreme but it think it paints a clear picture of how important I think blogs are.

1.     Site Authority

When you create an on-site blog and keep it updated with fresh, entertaining and quality information you establish yourself as an authority website. One of the most important things you can do is give people a reason to continue visiting your website on a regular basis, whether they are buying something from you every time or not.

The internet was established on the foundation of free information exchange. The more free information you give people (within reason), the more authoritative your website is. You will be building a brand for yourself online and giving people good reason to keep coming back to your site. People will also start talking about your site and referring friends to your site. Word of mouth spreads like wild fire.

Establishing your site as an authority also helps your search engine rankings tremendously. The search engines (especially Google) have a funny way of recognizing authority sites.

 

2.     Link building

The other day I was reading a blog entry about a site that received over 800 back links to just 1 blog entry. That is incredible! If you were to try and manually acquire 800 back links to your website, it would take you countless hours, days, weeks, and months. This site acquired all of those links from investing 2 hours in a quality blog entry. Those 800 links are in addition to all of their other inbound links. There link score goes up every time they publish a blog entry.

Obviously, 800 is a very high number and I would never tell a client to expect anything close to that on a per entry basis, however, it shows you what is possible if you just invest the time in creating a quality blog.

Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO. It is also one of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of SEO. Rather than going out and trying to manually acquire thousands of links, why not just give people a great reason to link to your site naturally?

3.     Your Customers Want You to Have a Blog

Let’s look at some numbers:

60% of Americans use social media

59% of those interact with companies on social media sites/blogs

93% of social media users believe companies should have a social media presence

85% of those believe companies should proactively interact with their customers via social media

Source: Cone Research

 

1 in 3 online Americans now read blogs at least once a month

18% of blog readers comment on blogs

In 2008 alone, blog readers as a whole grew by nearly 50%

 

In reason number 3, I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. In conclusion, these 3 reasons alone should be more than enough motivation to get started on a blog asap. That concludes this week’s “Top 3 Friday”. Please enjoy your weekend!

 

At the moment, I'm helping my friend set up his own blog on WordPress. As I was going through the settings, I came across one of the really neat features that WordPress provides for: permalinks. A permalink, according to Wikipedia, is "is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives."

For example, Corporate Search Optimization's permalinks look like this:

http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/blog/year/month/day/%postname%.aspx

Basically, it's the URL to the page of the blog entry.

There are a lot of other permalink structures, such as:

http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/?p=123
http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/year/month/day/sample-post/
http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/year/month/%postname%/
http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/archives/123

As a blogger (and as a web developer), what would be the best permalink structure to allow for efficient search engine optimization? The best would be to include a category, a date, and/or a post name in the URL. Put as much information in the permalink, so there appears more keywords for spiders.

http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/?p=123 tells the reader nothing about your post, whereas http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/seo-and-social-marketing/permalinks-and-seo/ or http://www.corporatesearchoptimization.com/2010/05/03/permalinks-and-seo/ gives the readers a pretty good idea what to expect within the post.

Most people are not aware of the scope of the work that is involved in search engine optimization. Of course, there are novice SEO’s that will just stuff a website with keywords and write pages and pages of irrelevant content in a pathetic attempt to achieve rankings. However, any seasoned professional knows that having a unique, well planned out strategy for SEO is a lot of work and very time consuming.

 

The 2 Categories of SEO

 

1.       On-Site Optimization

 

On-site optimization is anything that is done on your actual website to make it search engine friendly.  Some of these tactics are as follows:

 

·         Meta Data Optimization

·         URL Optimization

·         Content Optimization

·         Site Architecture Optimization

 

2.       Off-Site Optimization

 

As the name implies, this part of SEO includes anything that is done on other websites to establish your website as an authority site. Some of these strategies include the following:

 

·         Article Syndication

·         Guest Blogging

·         Video Optimization

·         Social Media Marketing

 

 

I’m not going to go into great detail here; however, what I am going to do is address the top 3 aspects on-site optimization.  Although all aspects of SEO are equally important in the big picture, every SEO campaign begins with the basics of on-site optimization.

 

 

 

1.       Met Data Optimization

 

Meta data optimization is vital to the success of any SEO campaign. Obviously, before you can optimize your meta data, you need to go through the process of keyword selection. Your keyword selection should be based on 2 metrics:

 

a)       Highest search volume

b)       Lowest competition

 

Once you have selected your keywords and assigned them to the appropriate pages on your site, its time to optimize your meta data. This does NOT mean that you just stuff the keywords in your meta tags as many times as you can, like some novice SEO’s do. There is a method to the madness and adhering to the method always delivers the most success.

 

2.       Content Optimization

 

As the saying goes, “content is king” in the world of online marketing. What else is there on the web? Everything is content on the web and the higher the quality of your on-site content, the better your site is going to rank in the search engines.

 

Much like meta data, optimizing your content is not about just throwing the keyword in there as many times as you can. Its always best to have an SEO veteran optimize your content for you. This insures that you are not doing anything that will harm your progress in the SERPs.

 

 

3.       Site Architecture

 

 

Having a website designed (or redesigned) in a way that makes for an easy crawling experience is vital. The architecture of your website can make or break the user experience and the way that the search engines crawl your site. If your site is difficult for the search engine’s spiders to crawl, you can bet that your site is not going to rank very well.

 

I’ve ranked the above listed on-site strategies as the top 3 most important; however, it is even more important to remember that this is only a small fraction of the pie. Successful search engine optimization requires the implementation of many tedious strategies, congruently. It is a lot of fun to see the results of SEO, but the time investment involved makes the acquisition of an outside agency worth your dollar.

 

That’s all for today!

There was a lot of talk for a while about the diminishing interpersonal interaction due to new technology. People walk down the street glued to their phones, plugged in to ipods or use the ATM instead of interacting with a bank teller; but doesn’t the interaction that occurs on these new gadgets still count? Interpersonal interaction has just moved from street addresses to a URL addresses.

It’s not uncommon to fear change and especially when you don’t know how to function all these new gizmos widgets and gadgets. Social media empowers people who may be skeptical or have questions and concerns. It allows you to engage with networks and communities that share your views and ideas or that can contribute to your company. Businesses that are not familiar with how to function Facebook or Twitter, or even which medium to choose should not let that be a barrier to adapting with the times. There is enough proof now that social media works and that you need to join the band wagon.

There was an interesting article today about schools integrating Google Apps into the curriculum to help educate and expose kids to multi-media so that they can evolve with the times. It’s never too late. If you don’t know where to start, or what social sites apply to your business that is when you seek out help. There are social media experts at NetScope, Inc. that can both educate you on how to do it yourself for your business and or can provide you with external services. Don’t shun the new, embrace it!

With the internet and new technology we have an abundance of resources that leave no excuse not to go green. These 5 things come to the top of my mind:

* E-books:

o For every 200 million e-books downloaded, three million and two hundred thousand (3,200,000) trees are saved

* iPhone:

o Applications: iRecycle, Measure your Carbon footprint, join online communities

o Paperless entertainment

o Transportable and easily accessible information

* Social Media:

o Twitter: Creates buzz and attains reach and impressions in mass quantities drives traffic to information source.

o Facebook: Allows us to reach billions and gain support in saving our earth through different networks and communities.

o LinkedIn: A professional niche outlet to reach and converse with people of stature with power to make change.

* Blogs:

o An easy access resource that empowers personal voice and helps people establish credibility

o A way to be heard and discovered by influential people

o A convenient medium to express yourself

* Youtube:

o Informative and/or entertaining videos that can be viewed and then shared (Sharing is Caring)

 

What do you think are the best E-ventions that contribute to save our planet?

Social Media Marketing has become a central topic to "talk about". This is the problem; we need less talk and more action. This article below that I read on www.socialmediatoday.com talks about how our hunger for information is keeping us from getting the real nutrients we could gain from actually applying what we learn…

Minimalist Marketing: Keep Your Learning Diet Simple
by Todd Schnick on 04/11/2010

Do any of the following scenarios apply to you?

1. You spend too much time on social media apps like Twitter and Facebook, telling yourself that you are “learning” from your community. When in fact, you are just horsing around, or broadcasting one-way…

2. Under the guise of research and learning, you read too many books, most of which don’t really apply to you, or what you do.

3. Or more likely, you read a lot of books with the intention of learning, and do not implement ANYTHING that you learn.

4. You subscribe to 250 blogs in your RSS reader, telling yourself that you need to know what others in your space are doing. And you spend hours sifting through clutter and don’t spend enough time actually reading, or learning.
Yeah. Me too.

DISCLOSURE: Let me make this clear. I am NOT suggesting that you stop reading – and learning – to improve your craft. I am suggesting you make more careful choices about what you read – and then take steps to implement things you learn – things that will have measurable impact.

In fact, you are a fool NOT to read more. Learn more. And apply what you learn. I just think too many of us do not practice good habits when we seek to learn (In fact, I could make the point that practicing minimalist marketing should free up valuable time to learn more…).
So, here are a few of my ideas on ways to simplify your learning, and get more out of the time investment:

Continue reading

Facebook - I really like the Facebook app. It's not perfect but it gets better and better with every upgrade. The app lets you chat with an interface similar to the iPhone's MMS messaging interface, you can view photos and status updates, and you can even sync your contacts photos in your iPhone contact book with the Facebook profile photos. Skype - Skype is a great way to voice chat with other people. For example, if you need to make a business call long distance and you know that your cellular company is going to charge you an arm and a leg, you can talk to the other person for free if you both have a Skype account. And once you're talking, you won't be able to tell the difference between an online call and a cellular call. MySpace Mobile - Since the dawn of Facebook, MySpace is definitely not as popular as it used to be. That said, it still has a decetly-sized following, ranking 5th on the top free paid apps under the Social Networking section of the App Store. As for the quality of the app, it takes a long time to load and isn't very user friendly. AIM - This is a really neat app. I like it beause I like to stay logged onto AIM on my home computer, but it's very inconvenient since I can't be there to get all of my messages when they come in. With the AIM app, you can select to stay logged in for 24 hours. Additionally, you can also have push notifications sent to your phone, so if someone IMs you, you'll be notified. Twitterific - This is the application that I use to manage all of my tweets. I like it a lot. You can add multiple accounts, you can do searches of nearly anything, you can @ reply, retweet, and send messages to other accounts. Another really neat thing about this app is that you can send emails with tweets in the body of the email. Extraordinary application.