Vermont Search Engine Optimization – Using Videos to Add Value to Content

Dec 06 2010

Content marketing is the best way to market your business products and services. The basic idea of content marketing is offering your potential market bits of informative, useful and entertaining information. You are offering a valuable piece of information in exchange for their time and attention, and hopefully, for their efforts of sharing the created content with those of parallel interests.

Among all content marketing strategies, video marketing is the best because people are not only able to read, but see and hear your message. You are able to deliver a call to action in a unique way that is not possible with other types of content.

Video content marketing requires a strategy around your video distribution, and then, promote the video content you have established. And because video can offer sound and sight, this medium is able to content to viewers more and tap into their emotions. It can also be easily emebedded into blog posts, or even on twitter and facebook. There are numerous ways of sharing it.

Video Scarcity and Demand

When there is scarcity on a certain resource, that product or service is sure to succeed. This is the advantage that video has over text content. It is scarcity that creates demand. And, scarcity can also be created with videos. The key there is distribution. Distribute as widely as possible, and grow your audience. This way, the demand grows proportionally with your audience.

The line of attack here is, give them something that will make them want more. If you are selling information, it’s perfectly fine to create a video on what you are selling, and give it to anybody for free. This is because, if you can offer them really good stuff as shown by your video, they will always come back for more. If you have really bad stuff though, creating that video will certainly be just a waste of time. You need to have them hooked with good video content enough to pay for more.

Video Sites

There are thousands of video sites on the internet that are available for your video marketing. However, you do not need to dig through the entire world wide web to find them all. A good video marketing campaign does not necessarily mean submitting your video to as many sites possible. It can be easily outmatched by a distribution campaign that submits videos to 30 sites at maximum, given that these are the video sites that matter.

Here is a list of the Top 15 Video sites that your videos should be on:

1. YouTube

2. Hulu

3. DailyMotion

4. MegaVideo

5. Videos

6. Yahoo! Video

7. Vimeo

8. Break

9. Tv

10. Veoh

11. Fancast

12. Aol Television

13. LiveLeak

14. VEVO

There are a few important points before creating, distributing and optimizing your video content. First, you should establish your content marketing goals. What would you like to happen? Are they to buy your product right away, or just lead to your site. You should also identify your target audience, and create a video to suit them. Make sure your content is always relevant to your audience. It should be memorable, unpredictable and entertaining. This isn’t just another advertisement. Encourage that your video be shared online, and to do this, your video content should be optimized for sharing and searching.

Don’t start a vermont search engine optimization operation without getting all the information you need for progress. Learn more about the tools and techniques that should know before to starting your VT SEO operation.

Link to this post!

No responses yet

Social Bookmarking Nuts and Bolts

Oct 15 2010

On A Reader’s Point of View

What is Social Bookmarking?

Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as a method or Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources on line.

To put it simply, you like a website, and you want to go back to it again as well as share it with friends. But instead of bookmarking it on your computer, you save it on the web because it’s easier to share. There are several websites that offer social bookmarking services, and you can simply choose one that is most ideal for you and your friends.

What Can a Web Browser Enjoy From Bookmarking?

Aside from being able to save websites on your account, you can also send it to your friends easier than just emailing them links. Aside from this, you are also free to browse other people’s bookmarks to see what’s interesting for you to tag as well. Most bookmarking sites feature tags that are recently added and popular. They are also organized based on available categories such as sports, beauty, technology, humor and more.

Social bookmarking sites are also considered as intelligent search engines. You can search for a topic you are interested in, and it will provide you with links that have already been bookmarked by other people. This way, you can be sure the results are always valuable.

How Can Readers Benefit From Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarks are more targeted, and would allow readers more valuable content. If you are searching for something very specific, instead of using the search engine and having to dig through websites, you can use the social bookmarking sites and get specific articles on what you need.

Another reason for the popularity of social bookmarking sites is their display of recently added and popular links. This allows you to get current and quality information every time. For example, if you are interested on the best kindle model, and you get 3 results. The third has 300 votes, the 2nd, 400 votes and the first has 500 votes, you know for sure which article to read, and which has more credible information. This is so much easier than going to a search engine, and deciding for yourself which is the credible article when no feedback is available for you to see.

On a Social Marketer’s Point of View

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a way to increase the visibility and rankings of a website. It is most popular among marketers because this is one of the most effective ways to get back links, and to drive traffic towards their websites that would eventually increase earnings.
Without a doubt, one of the first ways to start promoting websites is through social bookmarking.

First of all, you should look for a social bookmarking site and register as a user. It would be best if you use the more popular sites like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, reddit and more.

The next step should be to get used to the different bookmarking sites. Different sites have different feels. And so, you should make sure that there are other people who would be interested in your website content aside from yourself. Look for a site that works with your niche.

The last step would be to study other bookmarked blogs and sites that rank high. This gives you a clear idea on what the audience likes. This is especially important if you are promoting specific programs or niche specific blogs.

What Should I Avoid Doing in Social Bookmarking Sites?

1.    Do not spam. Nobody likes a spammer, and this includes social bookmarking users. If you wish to promote your website or affiliate market, it is best to do it the more natural way. Instead of bookmarking on a sales page, you should bookmark sales copies that readers will actually want to read.

2.    Do not sell. When bookmarking, avoid Titles such as “product for sale”. The social bookmarking world focuses more on worthy news. Give them that and you’ll find the votes pile up as well. After which, you will find that if you start getting traffic to your site, sales will soon follow.

Social Bookmarking tricks

Aside from quality content, there are some tricks that you can follow in order to get the best results from bookmarking.
Always choose the best timing. Remember that articles or links that would get more than 25 votes within 15 minutes will rank higher than those that will get it within 2 weeks. So it’s best to present your topic with issues that are based on current events.

Do not open several accounts in one site. Even if the idea of votes may be attractive, voting your own article several times will do more damage than good.

Get help. The best way to promote your blog is when friends support you. The more help you have, the faster your pages will rank.
There are also some websites that make bookmarking easier for marketers. Sites like onlywire allow you to bookmark on several bookmarking sites faster and easier. All you have to do is register for the site, save the logins in the profile, and you can start fast bookmarking soon.

Link to this post!

4 responses so far

Mini-Nets, Simplifying the Web

Oct 05 2010

What is a Mini-net when it comes to creating backlinks? In order to fully understand what a mini-net is will take some time, but this should give you a good foundation.

It looks cool and complicated. But, it’s actually easier than you think. mini net sample

Here’s the concept, a mini-net is like when one friend tells you about a TV show he’s watching. And the next day, 4 other people tell you about how brilliant the same show is. And you think to yourself, wow, this show must really be good. What you don’t know is that these five people actually live in the same apartment that has only one television set.

This is actually what really happens with mini-nets.

When applied on your website, you are basically building a network of knowledge across multiple websites. For example John has a website on dog training. So, he creates different blogs on the same topic but on more specific niches like online dog training, dog training collars, dog training camps. So these blogs have specific keywords that they focus on.

Once the first level is established and linked together, a second level of chain is created. These also link together and also link to the first level, thus, creating a net.

Some mini-nets aren’t really as organized as the example. Actually a lot of them look really messed up. This happens when the planning stage came after the execution.

So when you see a mini-net that looks too complicated for words and think you can’t make one, chances are, you can make one better.

Link to this post!

No responses yet

SEO Basics: Off-Page Factors Cont.

Jul 05 2010

Getting links back to your website is the name of the game.

But, how do we get links to our site without running around posting on every forum we can find and submitting to every single directory?

Yeah, that doesn’t sound much fun.  Granted, we still need to do some of that type of work, but it isn’t the type of linking that’s going to be the highest leverage.

What we really want to do is very simple.

Marketing!

The absolute best way to get links on the internet is to develop good content in the form of articles, blogs, press releases, free software.  By simply creating something that your customers will find interesting.

Once we have this piece of killer content, we then need to go about marketing that content to article directories, news papers, and other blogs.

Since our article will have links back to our website in it, every time we get it picked up by another venue we are not only creating links to our site but also attracting new customers that read our content.

If we do our job properly, and the content is absolutely killer, you’ll also notice that it starts to get picked up by other venues across the internet.

With the development of social bookmarking, it’s entirely possible to have a single article that you have marketed to 15-20 websites generate hundreds of links to your site.

I’m currently in the process of testing several different submission services and directories, I’ll give you a list of my favorites once all my testing is done. :)

SBTMXQJ66C5X

Link to this post!

2 responses so far

SEO Basics – Off-Page Factors

Jun 19 2010

Basically, off-page factors can be boiled down to one main concept.

Backlinks

A backlink is any time a hyperlink from a page not inside your own domain points to one of the pages on your website.

Backlinks are what you’ll find so many SEO companies talking about. “We can get you 1000 links in a day!” Yeah, great… For those of you that have dabbled in SEO or are even reading this blog because you are looking to hire an SEO company, I have some important news.

Don’t fall for the bait!

While backlinking is extremely important, I need to take a moment to reshape what you may already know about getting links or make sure if you are new to links that you get some good information upfront.

Rule 1: All links to your pages are NOT created equal.

Getting 1000 links in a day can be entirely worthless. If you’ve been following along with my posts, you’ll know that getting links from pages that aren’t even indexed by the search engines can be largely useless. Every link pointing to your site does two things. It gives you Authority and/or Reputation.

Authority is when you have a link from a website that has a high amount of PageRank.  Reputation comes in the from what that link says in the anchor text.  Having good link reputation in both your on-page and off-page SEO can have a significant impact on your rankings.

That said, a link passing you no Authority (because the page it is on isn’t indexed) and no Reputation (because it just has www.example.com in the anchor) will be almost entirely useless for your ranking efforts.

Rule 2:  Be natural and be honest with your link building efforts.

Here’s a quote directly from the help documents from Google Webmaster Tools:

“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”

I’m sure you’ve thought; “What if I just make a bunch of websites about my market place and have them all link to me?” or “Isn’t there some automated link trading system I can use to just pass links back and forth with every other website?”

Let’s pause for a moment and think about what the internet is.

…

The internet is basically trillions upon trillions of links.  These links are the backbone of how we move around the internet, how we get from one page to another.  Wouldn’t it stand to reason that “messing” with the whole premise of the internet would be frowned upon?  You bet!

If you engage in excessive link trading, building external pages to just spam links on, or several other “black hat” methods.  You will ultimately be caught and slapped by Google and the other search engines.

It may not happen instantly, but our goal with SEO is to create traffic to our website in the hopes of building an actual business.  I’m not sure about you, but I would want all the hard work I’m going to put into my business to get crushed because I decided to take a less than desirable way to get my traffic.

If you develop good content and have good marketing, you can build links on the internet quickly, effectively, and naturally.  People will link to good, engaging, and relevant content.

These are what I consider to be the two main points to understand before starting any link building campaign for a new website.  These two simple rules can save you hours, days, and even years of time… not to mention the potential millions in lost sales you would experience from having your traffic basically disappear overnight.

Next time we’ll talk about a few other rules that I like to consider before starting my link building process, but that aren’t necessarily rules that would ruin your website if not followed.

Link to this post!

No responses yet

SEO Basics – On-Page Factors

Jun 17 2010

On-page factors when talking about SEO is much more than just what words appear on your page.

Let’s discuss.

I’m going to start by going through my basic check-list that I use when looking at a new website.  This is by no-means my complete list, but it’s what I use to gauge things initially.

1. Tracking – Make sure you have some sort of tracking installed on your website.  Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are a great start.  If you do not have a way to track your progress and results, then you are essentially going to be putting in lots of hard work without any way to know if it’s paying off.  You could spend weeks continuing to optimize a specific page or keyword and never know if what you are doing pays off.

2. Spider-ability – Are your pages causing the search engine spiders any problems?  You can find out easily through the Google Webmaster Tools… install it on your website, enough said.

3. Text Links – Do you have footer links at the end of your pages that point to the main category pages on your site?  These are extremely important in helping the search engines know what you feel is important on your own site.  Why should they think it’s important if you don’t.  You want to use text links to point to the pages you want to rank, and you want those links to use your keywords right in the link itself.

4. Title Tags – Do you have your keywords in the title tag?  Great, does the title make any sense for potential customers? Stuffing a bunch of great keywords into your title tags can really help your rankings, but what if the title just under yours is far more attractive and unique.  You’ll miss out on a lot of clicks by confusing the searchers with hard to read or sloppy titles.

5. Descriptions – Do your descriptions use your keywords and have a clear call to action?  This is your chance to really entice someone to choose your link over the ones around it.  Be unique!  You’ll also want to see if the search engines use your description, or make one up by pulling content from your site.

6. Javascript and Style Sheets – Make sure your javascript and style sheets are in external files.  Having all of that extra code on your page will cause the spiders to treat your content as less relevant because it appears further down the page.

7. H1, H2, and other text styles – By including your keywords in the actual headline tags and other styled text such as bold or italics. This is always a good idea for SEO.  However, be sure that your headlines are compelling.  You don’t want people to hit the back button, so make sure you are engaging your visitors.

8. Broken Links – Search engine spiders hate to run into broken links.  The entire internet is defined by links, it’s the only way to get from one place to another.  By having broken links on your website you are in essence slapping the entire internet in the face… so don’t do it.  Check your links often and be sure to fix broken ones as soon as possible.

That’s my basic checklist for getting started with on-page SEO.  As I said before, this is not an exhaustive list.  However, implementing these basic ideas on your website can often have tremendous effects in markets that aren’t very competitive.  I’ve seen pages that simply do those steps and jump from a page 8 listing to a page 1 listing in a few weeks.

That’s all for now!

Best,

Jeff

Link to this post!

No responses yet

Webpage Content – Duplicate Content

Jun 09 2010

Since it’s taking me a while to get my content together for my own website, I figured I would do a post on a very important concept when it comes to content.

Duplicate content is something that you may already have present on your website.  Don’t worry!  We’re going to talk about how to fix it right now.

First, there are two different types of duplicate content that I think you should know about.

1.  Exact Duplication – two pages on your website that are identical.

2.  Close Duplication – two pages that are so similar in content that only a few words or sentences are different.

There is also something called external duplication, but that really shouldn’t be a worry for you.  It only really becomes a problem when it gets to extreme points with hundreds of pages with the same content.

Close duplication is probably what you’ll run into most often.  On websites that have dynamically generated content for product pages or categories, it can often appear to be a duplicate page because you really haven’t gone in and developed each product or category to the point where the search engines can make sense of the difference between the actual product and your page templates.

Exact duplicates are generally caused when your website displays pages with the WWW at the front or not.  VTSearchMarketing.com goes to the same place as www.VTSearchMarketing.com.  This can be a problem, however there is a simple solution.

Jump over to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Once you install this on your website, you’ll then have a preference to let Google know to treat both versions as one.  Hence solving the duplicate content problem.

You’ll also want to be sure that all the links on your website link the same way.  You can link to your homepage by www.site.com or www.site.com/index.html (or default.aspx).  Both of those appear the same, but you can help the search engines by being consistent with your linking throughout your pages.

For near duplicate pages we have a couple of options.

By far the best option is to add relevant content to those pages.  Both the spiders and your website visitors will thank you for it.

The other option is to use the robots.txt option inside Google Webmaster Tools.

This file lets you tell Google what pages not to index.  You can remove single pages…

Disallow: /security.html

Or even whole folders on your site

Disallow: /images

Reducing the amount of duplicate content on your website can have give you a significant boost in rankings once the spiders have had time to crawl your site and notice all the clean-up you’ve done.

Since you ultimately have control over all of the links and content on your own website, the search engines take very seriously how well you manage those elements when deciding how to rank your pages.

Fix the pages that have duplicate content.

Google wants to help you with this.  The Webmaster Tools recently got an update that will show you which pages it considers to be duplicates.  Simply go to Diagnostics -> Crawl errors and you’ll be presented with a list of pages that Google isn’t too thrilled about.

Check back often, as sometimes it can take months or even several months for Google to post this information after crawling your website.

That’s all for now,

Jeff

Link to this post!

8 responses so far

Site Structure – A Living Example

May 28 2010

I’ve posted a living example of how to implement a site structure that focuses PageRank to your Tier 1 pages.  Use the link below.

Vermont Search Engine Optimization

Please note that I haven’t included any content yet so that you can see the layout in its most basic form.

All of the links at the top of the page are tagged with a “nofollow” so that the search engine spiders won’t pass page rank through those links.

All of the links at the bottom of the page do NOT have the “nofollow” tag.  As such, we are passing page rank to those pages.

Notice that the links at the bottom of the page use the keywords that we are trying to rank for as the link to the new page in the site structure.  This helps with our page reputation and helps the search engines understand what content is on the page.

Now, we have to go back through our pages and write content for each page.  Fun!

Next time we’ll have a brief discussion about content generation and some simple things you’ll need to get the most out of your copy writing.

Please feel free to post any questions.

Enjoy

-Jeff

Link to this post!

7 responses so far

Content Mapping – Attaching Keyword Groups to a Site Structure

May 21 2010

Today we’re going to connect our keyword groups with one of the site structures that we discussed previously.

There are hundreds of site structures that you can use to optimize your website for the search engines, but today I’m going to show you my favorite.

With this structure, we’ll used the concept of stacked pyramids and adjust the linking between the tiers for maximum effect on our keywords.

Start by arranging your keyword groups by theme.  With my keyword set I have 3 main themes that focus around “Optimization”, “Marketing”, and “SEO”

I start by taking the most competitive group from each theme and placing it under the home page to create our tier 1 pages.

Group 1 is around the them of Optimization, 2 – Marketing, 3 – SEO

Tier 1 of Site Structure

My home page will like to each of these groups using text that gives reputation to the page by including the main keyword or keywords as the actual hyperlink.

NOTE:  This site structure is for search engine spiders only.  There will be other links on the homepage that use a “nofollow” tag in the link for visitor navigation.

Notice that our Group 1-3 pages do NOT link back to the homepage.  Linking back to the home page will cause your PageRank to pool at the homepage.  If you have one set of HIGHLY competitive terms that you are trying to rank for, then place those on the homepage and return links from each page in your site structure back to the homepage.

Moving on, I’ll now take the less competitive terms from each theme and place them under the main grouping from that theme.

Tier 2

Now with this tier we will want to point links back to the most competitive group in each them to pool our PageRank on our tier 1 pages.

What we have here are 3 separate pyramid shapes under the home page.  The pyramids do NOT connect to each other preserving reputation and page rank in each individual theme.

If you remember back to our keyword groupings, I discussed creating a second group that switched the modifier terms with your main keywords.  What I do now, is take our structure and double it and then link the sub-group tier 1 pages to the main-group tier 2 pages and vice versa.  It ends up looking like this.

Final Structure

You can see that the tier 1 pages still do not link to each other, and likewise with the tier 2 pages.  We’ve just cross linked our tier 1 and 2 sub-group pages to each other.

Group 1 links to: G5, G5.5, G6, G6.5
Group 1.5 links to the same tier 2 pages.

Over the weekend I’ll work on implementing this site structure on my actual website so you’ll have a living example to look at shortly.

Link to this post!

No responses yet

Keyword Research – Organizing Landing Pages

May 19 2010

I’m assuming by now that you’ve completed the competition analysis from your keyword list generated by following the instructions in my previous posts on keyword research.

Now we need to organize this research into small groups of 3-5 keywords.  Each group will eventually become a webpage inside our website.

I usually start by making a new tab on my spreadsheet where I’ll begin to cut and paste keywords.  This allows me to keep my original data for later reference.

We’ll use this list of keywords as a working example:

[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont small business seo]
[vermont seo strategy]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine marketing service]
[vermont search engine submission service]
[vermont targeted website traffic]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

We want to start by looking for terms that share words.  In this case, “search engine optimization” seems to be common to the first few terms, so let’s break those out first:

Group 1

[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engines optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

Group 2

[small business seo]
[seo strategy]
[search engine marketing service]
[search engine submission service]
[targeted website traffic]

As you can see I took every term with “search engine optimization” and put it into Group 1 while leaving the remaining terms in Group 2.

Now we need to take a look at our competition.  Are our keywords highly competitive?  If so, we need to have a narrow focus on our groupings to target those terms.  If we are less competitive, we can pull the modifiers from the term and proceed forward.

In my example, the search terms are not highly competitive.  So I’ll continue by taking any words following “vermont search engine optimization” and tag them as modifiers for the group.

Group 1

Modifiers: firm, specialist, marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]

Now we’re left with one search term in our grouping.  This isn’t a bad thing.  Now I can go back and pick the most competitive modifiers and bring them back into the group.

Group 1

Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]

From here I like to write a potential title tag for my grouping.  Since Google only displays 65 characters of your title tag, it’s good to keep your title length to 65 characters.  If you don’t you’ll end up with annoying “…” following your title in the search results.

Title: Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist

Perfect, we come in at 59 characters.  I’ll explain later the art of writing title tags, but for now let’s move on with grouping our keywords into landing pages.  Keep not of your modifiers, you’ll want to be sure to include them in the content of your web pages as you build them.

Now, we have a group with 3 main keywords and 3 modifiers.  What if we make another group that switches the modifiers and the main keywords?

Have you ever seen those fancy indented listings on Google?  Those happen when a website has not one, but two pages on the SERP.  Regardless of rank for the second page, Google will slide it up under the highest ranked page on your site for that term.

This gives us an opportunity to not only focus in on our modifier terms, but possibly end up with enough ranking to have each page act as an indented listing for the other.

Group 1 – Vermont Search Engine Optimization Firm | VT SEO Specialist

Modifiers: marketing, consulting, expert

[vermont search engine optimization]
[vermont search engine optimization firm]
[vermont search engine optimization specialist]

Group 1.5 - Vermont Search Engine Optimization Consulting | Marketing Expert

Modifiers: firm, specialist

[vermont search engine optimization consulting]
[vermont search engine optimization marketing]
[vermont search engine optimization expert]

Continue through this exercise arranging your keywords into groups of 3-5 terms with accompanying modifiers and titles.

Tomorrow we’ll take our group of pages and arrange them into a working site structure and channel our PageRank appropriately.

[search engine optimization firm]
[search engine optimization specialist]
[search engine optimization marketing]
[small business seo]
[seo strategy]
[search engine optimization consulting]
[search engine marketing service]
[search engine submission service]
[targeted website traffic]
[search engines optimization]
[search engine optimization expert]
Link to this post!

No responses yet

Older posts »