The Best Seo Blogs

Archive for October, 2009

The guys at Clicky recently wrote a post asking someone to re-develop their WordPress plugin. Since I have quite a bit of code lying around for what they needed, I emailed them and told them I’d be happy to build it. If you don’t know Clicky, you really should check it out, it’s a pretty solid analytics package with some cool realtime features, be warned though: their “Spy” feature is quite addictive…

For a 1.0, this plugin has a pretty decent feature set:

• Automatically adding your Clicky tracking code everywhere:
  • Option to ignore admins
  • Option to store names of commenters
  • Option to track posts & pages as goals and assign a revenue to that page or post
• An overview of your site’s statistics on your dashboard
• Integration with the Clicky.me Short URL service:
  • Automatically create a short link for each now post and page
  • Option to automatically tweet posts and pages on publish

It’s using my backend class for it’s admin UI, so it looks nice and clean (click for larger version):

And it adds a box to your edit post / edit page screen in which you can decide to Tweet the post or not if you’ve got those settings enabled and define the goal tracking variables:

We’re testing the plugin right now before we release it to everyone, go grab the beta version here.

Clicky Tracking for WordPress is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you’ll never have issues again!

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At HubSpot, we’re huge proponents of giving away quality content for free.  Why?  For the same reasons any business should.  Whether it be in the form of webinars, videos, eBooks or blog posts, creating useful, valuable content establishes your company as a thought leader in its industry and – yes – most importantly, it helps generate leads and sales that your business thrives on.  

Our top article featured on InboundMarketing.com this week explains yet another reason why it might be a good idea to start getting a little more generous … 

1. Why you should give away a lot of free stuff

Author: Andy Sernovitz of Damn! I Wish I’d Thought of That!

No – Andy’s not exactly talking about giving away free hugs (though who couldn’t use one every once in a while?).  In this brief article, he shares an anecdote about how giving away some of his free stuff landed him a nice little product placement on Ze Frank’s show on Time.com.

In this case, Andy had given away copies of his Word of Mouth Marketing book, but he’s really referring to anything — samples, handouts, shirts, stickers, toys, content — you name it!  Who knows – maybe the free eBook you created might just be interesting to that Wall Street Journal writer who stumbles upon it on Twitter!

Lesson: Free content really does have business value.

2. 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

Author: Barb Dybwad of Mashable

Launching a new business, eh?  Barb’s article gives entrepreneurs a nice little overview of some useful social media tools to help manage company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development.  

Among her recommendations are social media staples like Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook, but also included are customer support tools such as UserVoice and Get Satisfaction in addition to project management tools like Basecamp.  Her top-listed tool?  Google Apps for Domains.

Lesson: Social media offers a variety of tools to help you reach your business goals.

3. Social Media Accounts for 18% of Information Search Market

Author: Brian Solis of PR 2.0

Where do you go on the Web for information to help you make purchasing decisions?  Chances are, the majority if you are using search engines like Google.  However, Brian summarizes a recent study conducted by Nielsen, which reports that 18% of us are actually using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, blogs and Wikipedia to help us decide.

Interestingly enough, these social media sites actually outperform sites dedicated to publishing information specifically to help individuals find deeper analysis and details.  As Nielsen summarizes, “social Media is becoming a core product research channel.”  All the more reason to start vamping up your business’s social media efforts.

Lesson: Your customers are researching you via social media.  Are you there, too?  (You should be.)

4. Your Company May Own Your Tweets, Pokes, and YouTube Videos

Author: Jeremiah Owyang of Web Strategy

Who legally owns the content you create? Jeremiah explores this interesting and thought-provoking topic, enlisting the help of an attorney to investigate the issue of employer/employee content ownership.

One of Jeremiah’s main takeaways: “both personal and work lives are mixing online and off, creating blurry lines between ownership of content.”

Lesson: (in Jeremiah’s own words) “Understand the boundaries, risks and liability for [your] online activity.”

5. 9 Marketing Lessons From the Pink Ribbon Breast Cancer Campaign

Author: Rohit Bhargava of Influential Marketing Blog

The pink ribbon breast cancer campaign is probably the most recognizable cause marketing campaign since the RED campaign to fight AIDS.  For a campaign to be so successful, it must be doing things right.

Rohit’s article features a self-made slideshow that highlights several useful takeaways for marketers.  My favorites: focus on influencers of your target, make it easy for people to act, and be everywhere at once.

Lesson: Learn from others’ successes (and don’t repeat others’ failures either).  

Photo by Jesslee Cuizon 

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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month, without them there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

Clasione Directory – Quality directory for listing your business

Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

Check Out WordStream’s new Free Keyword Tool delivers thousands of niche keywords, fast. We index over a billion unique keywords to return more relevant suggestions at zero cost. Try it today for FREE!

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available find out more information.

Advertisement: WordStream’s new Free Keyword Tool delivers thousands of niche keywords, fast. We index over a billion unique keywords to return more relevant suggestions at zero cost. Try it today for FREE!

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Thanks to this Months Sponsors – October 2009

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1. Thanks to this Months Sponsors – July 2009 I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored…
2. Thanks to this Months Sponsors – August 2009 I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored…
3. Thanks to this Months Sponsors – September 2009 I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored…

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If you’re attempting to improve search rankings for your web pages, these days it’s no longer an option not to optimize digital assets. With search engines incorporating video, images and news into standard search results, marketers have the opportunity to achieve increased visibility by implementing video SEO principles.

These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos.

1. Optimize with keywords.
Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in:

• File name
• Title
• Tags
• URL
• Link text

Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You’ll improve the user experience and your search rankings.

2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites.
In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links. Remember these few points to maximize results:

• Don’t forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords
• YouTube channel pages — and those of other video-sharing sites — should be optimized, as well
• Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites

3. Implement a linking strategy.
Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include:

• Cross-linking to other videos
• Linking to videos from relevant web pages
• Linking to videos in blog posts
• Tweeting the video
• Linking to videos from social media pages
• Bookmarking the video

4. Encourage viewers to share your videos.
First thing is first — if you want users to share your videos, you must create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting, relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren’t likely to share it, let alone view it. From there:

• Allow and encourage users to comment on the video
• Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace
• Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed

5. Re-purpose your videos.
As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web:

• Embed videos in blog posts
• Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones
• Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages
• Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites
• Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your website

What basic video SEO tips do you find useful?

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. |
5 Basic Tips for Video Optimization |
2 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Posted by great scott!

When individuals or companies are new to SEO they often wonder if SEO is a one-time thing, or if it’s an ongoing process.  In order to stay on top of your game, you need to keep an eye on your rankings over time and adjust accordingly; but there is a lot of core SEO strategy that doesn’t change much and paying attention to these fundamentals (along with a little upkeep) can go a long way toward future-proofing your SEO strategy.

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over the key components of three major areas of any SEO strategy–Technical, Content, and Marketing–to show you where and how you can plan your efforts so they won’t be obsolete next month or next year.  Whether you’re just setting out to optimize your site, or you’re already working with an SEO strategy, this video will help you find places to tie-up loose ends and avoid potential frustration down the road.

PS – In the video Rand uses Hitwise as an example of a company that uses unique content effectively, referencing this post about Twitter traffic by Bill "Hold Me Closer Tiny" Tancer.

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Email is back!

Earlier in the week I mentioned that one of the emerging themes in the monetization sessions at Blog World Expo was the idea of membership sites as a way to make an income from a blog.

The other theme that emerged in a number of the sessions was that many bloggers were placing increased attention on the medium of email as a way to communicate with readers.

Email is back!

Actually email never really went away – but it’s back on the radar of many bloggers after a swing over the last few years away from it in favour of other mediums such as RSS.

RSS feeds are far from being dead as a way to communicate with readers but while some saw the advances in feeds and feed readers as an email killer many entrepreneurial bloggers are now realising that perhaps they should not have given up on email.

I shared on at least one of the panels that I was on at BWE how email on my photography blog is much more effective than RSS on a number of fronts:

1. The Numbers Speak for Themselves

On DPS I currently have a total of 340,784 subscribers. 223,081 of these subscribe via email – 117,703 of them subscribe via RSS. That’s a 2:1(ish) ratio. While this ratio will vary from site to site considerably (depending upon the niche) I’d guess that on most blogs it’d be similar – the exception possibly being sites with a more techy/social media focus.

2. Email Drives Great Traffic

The days I send out Newsletters are the biggest days of traffic on the site. I shared this graphic a few months ago but here’s the traffic to the blog area of my site on newsletter days (it’s pretty obvious which days the newsletters went out):

RSS certainly does drive traffic – however it is less – probably because most people read the content in their feed reader.

3. Email subscribers are monetizing better than other subscribers with onsite advertising

One of the interesting things that also happens on newsletter days is that the rate that people seem to click on ads also seems to go up slightly. This was a surprise to me when I first saw it because I would have thought that subscribers who visit the blog each week would become blind to the ads but the CTR (click through rate) on my AdSense ads goes up on newsletter days. Here’s a quick screen grab of total AdSense revenue on the DPS blog – again you can see the rises for newsletter days.

4. Email Also Monetizes Better with other Income Streams

Not only does AdSense income increase on newsletter days but I’m finding that other monetization strategies also work well in the newsletter. Three come to mind:

• Affiliate promotions have worked really well in newsletter for me. I’ve tested this a number of times by posting a blog post about a product I’m promoting and sending an email about the product. In every instance that I’ve tested it the newsletter wins hands down. The best performing affiliate promotions actually work best where you do a blog post AND an email promotion – but without the email component I find I’m definitely leaving money on the table every time.
• Product Launches - if you have your own product to launch I find that in a similar way to how affiliate promotions work best in emails – so too does selling your own stuff. Again – posting both on your blog and via email (and in other places like twitter) can help increase sales further but email is crucial in driving sales.
• Direct Ad Sales – lastly the few times that I’ve sold ads in my newsletter to direct advertisers I’ve had very good feedback from the advertisers. We ran a big promotion both on our blog and in our newsletter earlier in the year for a big computer brand and the feedback we got was that the campaign was most effective on newsletter day from clicks from within the email.

5. Email is Personal and Builds Community

There is something about a regular email newsletter that just seems to make people feel more connected to you. I find it hard to put my finger why but there’s something about receiving a good email that just seems more powerful than reading a good blog post via an RSS feed. It just seems a little more personal, more special.

Perhaps it is because RSS is generally read in an RSS feed reader where there are hundreds of competing posts to be read or perhaps it is because an email is delivered into an inbox filled with more personal communications or perhaps it is because when someone signs up for an email they have to give you something personal – their address – whereas with RSS they don’t have to reveal anything about themselves.

I’m not sure WHY it is the case – but every week I get people emailing me to thank me for the emails I send them. I’ve never had anyone thank me for my RSS feed….

The newsletters I send do more than drive traffic and make money – they seem to make people feel as though they belong. To get an email someone has to sign up – they become a member of sorts and this is reflected in the emails that they send me that talk about ‘our site’.

6. Email is more Accessible

I only really started to experiment with email because someone in my family asked me how they could get updates from my photography blog. When I told them about RSS they stared back at me with a blank face. I added an email option and they immediately subscribed.

If you only offer RSS as a way to access your site’s information you’re excluding my family member and probably a lot of other people too.

For this reason I advise giving people a variety of ways to get updates whether it be RSS, daily emails, weekly emails, Twitter updates…. whatever is relevant for your audience.

Don’t Forget about RSS

I don’t want this post to be seen as writing off RSS. It’s an amazing technology and is still really important to my own sites. It too drives traffic, makes money, reinforces brand etc – all I guess I’m arguing is that bloggers take a 2nd look at email.

My personal approach is to have multiple points of connection with readers which reinforces what I’m doing on my sites and maximise the impression that I’m able to make upon them.

How I Use Email

Tomorrow I want to continue this focus upon email to talk about how I use email newsletters to achieve some of the above things. While you can set up tools to just automatically send out emails at predefined intervals to those that subscribe to your blog you can actually take it to the next level and set up a system that is much much more effective.

Tomorrow I’ll walk you through the emails that I send to my newsletter list and share with you some of the techniques that I’ve found that work to drive traffic and make money.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

6 Reasons Why You Need to Consider Email as a Communication Strategy on Your Blog

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This is a reminder that registration for Yaro Starak’s Membership Site Mastermind course will be closing on Friday at midnight EST (9PM PST). If you haven’t registered yet, you have a few hours left to do so (see the exact time above). After tonight, registration will be closed and I have no idea when or if Yaro will open it again.

$1,000 Bonus Offer

For those who are still sitting on the fence, I have a great bonus offer that will allow you to get Membership Site Mastermind for better than free. If you order Membership Site Mastermind through my link, I will give you two free $500 reviews to help you promote your membership site when it’s ready. The first review will help you kick it off with a bang (like what was done for Opportunity.com). The second review will follow a short time later to close those who are still on the fence (kinda like what I’m doing right now).

Membership Site Mastermind cost $297 per month for three months. If you order through me, you will get two free reviews worth $1,000 to help launch and promote your site. Add it up and not only did you get Membership Site Mastermind for free, but you’re ahead of the game by $109!

However, you must use my link or you won’t show up in my control panel. If you don’t show up, I can’t give you the free reviews. You may want to clear all your browser cookies before clicking the link to make sure it register correctly.

Add Blog Mastermind for Only $297

Yaro’s Blog Mastermind program normally sells for $497. However, if you sign up for Membership Site Mastermind, you’ll have the opportunity to add Blog Masetermind to your order for only $297. So, for four monthly payments of $297, you’ll get Membership Site Mastermind, Blog Mastermind and two reviews worth $1,000 for free. Your net cost for everything will only be $188!

Lifetime Money Back Guarantee

Yaro covers Membership Site Mastermind with a lifetime money back guarantee. If for any reason, and at anytime, you feel that you didn’t get your money’s worth, send Yaro an email and he’ll refund your money, no questions asked. If you’re a really evil person, you can buy the course, get the free reviews to launch your site and then ask for a refund. This is a risk Yaro and I will take because we have that much confident in the product. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. But time is running out. You have less than 4 hours to take advantage of this amazing deal. Better get on it.

Register for Membership Site Mastermind and Get Two $500 Reviews for FREE

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Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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WordPress 2 iPhone app has just been released. I had a quick look and I like it. It is a perfect iPhone application for mobile blogging.

It is very simple to log in to your WordPress blogs (both .com and .org). Blog URL, username and password are all the things you need.

WordPress iPhone app now features a very easy to use navigation on the bottom of the screen with “Comments”, “Posts” and “Pages” . This  navigation allows you to easily switch between these areas.

WordPress 2 iPhone comments area

Comments area lets you review comments, approve, unapprove, delete and mark as spam.

Comments area looks very nice now as you can see the avatars of your readers and also their website URL’s.

Is it just me or is there no way to reply to a comment via the app itself?

Posts section of the iPhone blogging app

Posts area lets you view your published posts, your drafts and lets you add a new post.

If you go into “add a new post”, you get a post writing navigation menu which features “Write” where you can insert the title, tags, categories, the status (draft, private, published etc.) of the post and it is also here that you write the post itself.

Second tab in the post writing navigation is “Photos” which lets you add photos from your iPhone library or take a new photo with your iPhone camera.

The third tab is Preview and it allows you to see a preview of your post. Photos will be attached to the bottom of the post when you publish it.

Last tab is Settings and it allows you to schedule the publish date, set a password-protected post, and an automatic resize of photos option which results in faster publishing but smaller photos.

Pages area lets you see all your WordPress blog pages and you can also create a new page. It is also possible to add photos to your page, just like you do in a post.

Few more screenshots of WordPress application

WordPress mission accomplished

According to WordPress, the focus of WordPress 2 iPhone app was on better user experience and on eliminating the bugs and it seems that they have accomplished what they wanted. It is easy to use, it runs fast, what more can you wish for when you are on the go and have to publish something.

It is not possible to style the post in a visual editor, position the pictures, add H3 tags and similar yet, but if you are on the go, I do not think you need that anyway. It is all about getting the message across quickly.

See more:

1. Why You Should Upgrade To WordPress 2.7
2. Use WordPress TimeStamp to improve blogging productivity
3. Why you should consider Thesis Theme design for your blog
4. Thesis Theme 1.6 Video Review – See what Thesis can do now
5. Improve Blog SEO With Internal Linking Structure

Thanks for reading HowToMakeMyBlog.com

My name is Marko Saric, I am a blog consultant and I help bloggers succeed. Subscribe to HowToMakeMyBlog RSS feed for more free blogging tips.

You can also fan me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

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by Paul Jahn

A few days ago in the Twittersphere, it’s been mentioned that Google
Analytics is now starting to add the number of “goals” to 20 (four groups of five), up from four only.
For some, this may not be a big deal. For others, it’s just fantastic
and the possibilities are almost endless.

For many companies, a couple goals fit just fine. If you’re generating leads, you may have goals set up for both a long and short form for people to fill out, giving you information about their needs. That’s it.

What if you want to get more
granular? Maybe you have a new service or product and want to set goals on how many users get to these pages. You can test these goals for the number of pages you want people to visit or even how long you want users on your site.

Or, if
you’re an e-commerce site 20 goals still may not be enough. That’s probably a different discussion.

Let’s take a look. Here’s how part of your goals page may look now.

Any of you test these new possibilities yet? More robust tools out there that already have this and more, but the popularity of Google Analytics along with its price (free) makes this new for many.

Check out our small business news site.

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If you’re attempting to improve search rankings for your web pages, these days it’s no longer an option not to optimize digital assets. With search engines incorporating video, images and news into standard search results, marketers have the opportunity to achieve increased visibility by implementing video SEO principles.

These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos.

1. Optimize with keywords.
Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in:

• File name
• Title
• Tags
• URL
• Link text

Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You’ll improve the user experience and your search rankings.

2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites.
In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links. Remember these few points to maximize results:

• Don’t forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords
• YouTube channel pages — and those of other video-sharing sites — should be optimized, as well
• Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites

3. Implement a linking strategy.
Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include:

• Cross-linking to other videos
• Linking to videos from relevant web pages
• Linking to videos in blog posts
• Tweeting the video
• Linking to videos from social media pages
• Bookmarking the video

4. Encourage viewers to share your videos.
First thing is first — if you want users to share your videos, you must create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting, relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren’t likely to share it, let alone view it. From there:

• Allow and encourage users to comment on the video
• Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace
• Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed

5. Re-purpose your videos.
As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web:

• Embed videos in blog posts
• Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones
• Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages
• Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites
• Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your website

What basic video SEO tips do you find useful?

            Subscribe to this Feed

© Online Marketing Blog, 2009. |
5 Basic Tips for Video SEO |
No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

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