Internet Marketing SEO Training – Internet Marketing SEO Tips

5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix

From Facebook to Twitter to You Tube, there’s no limit to the number of social networking sites that can be leveraged to interact with customers and prospects, and build positive brand awareness. LinkedIn, however, stands apart from the crowd. The roots of popular sites like YouTube and Facebook are founded on the entertainment side of things. [...]

The Real Reason Google Dropped Youtube Support

So you’ve probably heard that Google has decided to drop IE6 support for Youtube. At first I just figured “Cool, we’ll get more people away from IE6.” But the real reason is that they want to promote Chrome:

That first Slot will get a majority of the clicks. Very clever Google. Evil. But Clever.

How Journalists Use Search & Social Media

TopRank ran a survey of journalists, reporters and editors on their use of search and social media in 2008. We found 91% use search engines like Google to do their job. 64% use social networks.  Published in Jan 2010, a George Washington University and Cision survey of journalists reports 89% use blogs and 65% use social [...]

Caste your vote on Facebook for GiveIndia, help educate a child

Owning a blog is a great feeling when you can use the blog to help the underprivileged. The web has been used very effectively as a medium to connect charities and missionary with the rest of the world. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December. In a

Web 2.0/Lib 2.0–What Is It? (If It’s Anything at All)

Serials Review, Vol. 33, No. 3. (September 2007), pp. 202-203.This article describes the concepts of Web 2.0 and Lib 2.0 and how they can be applied to libraries and in a library environment.Mark Needleman

Integrating Search, Part 2

Integration can be tricky, but stepping out of your comfort zone and embracing the larger world around you can mean the difference between winning a client and walking away empty-handed. …

Amazon Integrates Twitter with Affiliate Program. Is it Spam?

Amazon has introduced a feature on its Associates affiliate scheme which allows its members to tweet links with ease directly from its site. When browsing products, affiliates can now post links to Twitter by simply clicking a toolbar button at the top every page, similar to the way in which they might share an article via a “share this” button.

Of course, the same result was already possible by entering an affiliate link into a url shortener and posting it to Twitter, but the two-click functionality now makes that process easier and quicker.

Whether or not this is a good thing for Twitter users is another question entirely. The micro-blogging and networking service already experiences problems with spam accounts and unwanted marketing messages, so the introduction of similar functionality across other affiliate programs could well contribute to the growing amount of content many users consider spam.

SEOmoz 2009 Search Spam PubCon Party

Posted by jennita

This post really doesn’t need much of an introduction, so I’ll get right down to it. Pubcon is coming! Pubcon is cooommiiinnnnggggg! It seems like the whole industry might just shut down for a week while we take over Las Vegas (I hope they’re ready for us). This would probably be a great time for spammers to come in and take over our SERPs since we’ll be busy in sessions, going to parties, meeting new people… and gambling (DUDE! It’s Vegas).

SEOmoz will be representing in full force this year. Although we don’t have a booth, you’ll find us lurking in all corners of the event. Here’s a quick lowdown on who will be attending from the moz crew:

• Danny – Say "Danny Dover" ten times fast. What?! It’s funny. Really. (ok I’m tired)
• Scott – He’s coming out from behind the camera!
• Adam – Ping him if you’re interested in user testing some of our new products!
• Jen – Holla!
• Arden – You’ll recognize him by being the friendly one (unlike the rest of us meanies)
• Rand – You know, that guy who always wears those funny yellow shoes
• Gillian – She arrives just in time from her worldwide SEO tour
• Pete – As in Dr. Pete, apparently people only know him by that name.

Speaking of Dr. Pete, don’t forget to check out his post 7 Tips for Surviving PubCon to help you make it through the week.

Party Party Party!

I know I know, quit blabbing and get to the good stuff. SEOmoz will be hosting the 3rd Annual Search Spam / Werewolf party on Tuesday night. Tickets are unfortunately limited to 200 people and are for SEOmoz Pro members plus guests, so be sure to RSVP right away before they’re gone!

Here are the details:

Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 Time: 7-9pm Location: Wynn Hotel – Chambertin Room Drinks: 1 free drink ticket per person, cash bar after that

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Do Follow

Pros and cons of building links through blog comments. …

What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 2

Posted by chenry

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

What really makes a blog post worth linking to?  In my last post, What Makes a Link Worthy Post – Part 1, I took a look at the 3,800 blog posts on SEOmoz and did some analysis on a few different aspects of the posts and their affect on the number of in linking domains (ILDs).  Some of the results were very interesting to me and it made me want to push it further. 

I created a list of 40 SEO/SEM blogs that I read and feel are important to people in the industry and set those as my sample population.  I first crawled each website and collected a list of over 72,330 different blog posts from the 40 different websites.  Then over the course of the next few days, I crawled each post and collected the following information in my database:

• Blog Post Title
• Original URL
• # of Links from Root Domains (Via Linkscape API)
• # of ILDs (Via Linkscape API)
• If The Post Had Images, Lists, Or Videos
• Content of Post (No Comments or Other Text on Site)
• # of Words in Post

POSTS TITLE EFFECT ON ILDs

Does the length of the post’s title affect how many domains will link to it?  The data suggests that posts with a title length between 10 and 18 words are on average more linked to than those with less or more.  The data also suggests there may be a “sweet” spot around 14 to 16 words in length.  The chart below was created without removing stop words. 

This data proves to me that a descriptive title is what the linkerati is looking for.  Going overboard on the length of the title can prove to be a bad move also. 

EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS WITH TITLE LENGTH IN THE “SWEET SPOT”

• Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow
• Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
• What Makes a Good Web Directory, and Why Google Penalized Dozens of Bad Ones

POSTS LENGTH EFFECT ON ILDs

Post length is a long debated thing out there in the blogosphere.  Most bloggers will tell you that you should keep your posts around 500 to 900 words, and that might be stretching it.  When it comes to SEO/SEM blogs, longer more content filled posts are more linked to than those with limited amount of content. 

From the chart below you can see there is a word range that seems to collect more ILDs than other word ranges.  Based on the data, the ideal length of your posts should be around 2328 to 2618 words.  In my previous post, the ideal length for only SEOmoz’s post was between 1800 and 3000 words. 

The chart above shows posts only up to 2812 words, but accounts for over 99.55% of all the posts. Posts that were greater than 2812 words really had a low number of ILDs.  For this reason and for the display of the chart, they were removed.

EXAMPLES OF HIGHLY LINKED TO POSTS (BETWEEN 2328 AND 2618 WORDS)

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• SMX East: Give It Up
• Five Link Development Experts: A Group Interview

DEPTH OF POSTS EFFECT ON ILDs

Seos know that you want to keep your key content in as few subfolders as possible but does this affect the number of ILDs you receive?  The data suggests that the depth of your post doesn’t affect the number ILDs.  The graph below shows that just about half of the blogs out there place their content two subfolders deep, such as seomoz.org/blog/POST-TITLE. 

MEDIA’S EFFECT ON ILDs

What role does placing list, images, and/or videos in a post play on the number of ILDs?  The data shows that putting any one of the media’s in your post will increase the number of ILDs you receive.  Putting a list on your plain text post could double the number of ILDs you receive.  The results are even more outstanding when all three types of media are used.

Do I really believe that you can take any post, slap a picture in it and you will automatically receive more links?  No, but if you have decent content and media to support your post, it will appeal to more users and in turn increase the number of potential links.  I find it amazing that just by adding images and lists to your post could increase the number of ILDs by a large percent.  Images and lists are one of the easiest things to create and anyone can do it, so why aren’t they?  See the chart below for the full specs on adding media to your post.

TOP MEDIA POST EXAMPLES

So I’m sure you are all wondering what some good examples are of the different type of post along with the media.  Below are some links to some great posts that contain different types of media and have been successful.  Some of these posts should be your guide when creating new content for your site.

ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES

• Twitter Exploit Still Works
• The Paid Links Debate Rages On – SES San Jose 2007

ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS

• Google Caffeine
• Submitting to Web Directories to Build Your Link Profile

ONLY LISTS & IMAGES

• Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
• Canonical URL Tag – The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS

• You Can’t Be Everybody’s Friends
• FTC Going After Bloggers = Epic Fail

ONLY LISTS

• Filing a reinclusion request
• 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog

ONLY VIDEOS

• More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results
• Interview With Paul Sloan

ONLY IMAGES

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity
• The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

NONE

• Dashes vs. underscores
• 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

TOP DOMAINS FOR MEDIA TYPE

The data shows that there were certain domains that tended to use certain types of media in their posts.  Below I’ve put together two sites for each category so if you enjoy posts of a certain type you can visit their blog.

ALL 3 MEDIA TYPES

• 10e20.com
• bruceclay.com

ONLY LISTS & VIDEOS

• seobythesea.com
• seobook.com

ONLY LISTS & IMAGES

• outspokenmedia.com
• unstuckdigital.com

ONLY IMAGES & VIDEOS

• distilled.co.uk
• shoemoney.com

ONLY LISTS

• seobythesea.com 
• seobook.com

ONLY VIDEOS

• pronetadvertising.com
• shoemoney.com

ONLY IMAGES

• bloommedia.co.uk
• freshegg.com

NONE

• ericgoldman.org
• searchenginelowdown.com

AUTHORITIES EFFECT ON ILDs

What role does a blog authority play in the number of ILDs?  Seems like a simple question and the data seems to show that if your an authority in your niche, you will generate many more ILDs than someone who is not.  Look at the chart below and you can see that Matt Cutt’s blog generates almost twice as many as its closest competitor, sugarrae.com!

TOP TOPIC THAT ATTRACT LINKS

Unlike SEOmoz not every blog places their post into nice categories and if they do, those categories will not match across all the sites.  So how do we determine what topics are attracting the most links and are good topics to create posts about?  We crawl 72,300 posts, determine the ILDs, and then extract the most used words from those posts to create a “super” group of keywords that result in link worthy blog posts.

The first thing I wanted to do was extract all the text and find the words that are most used in all blog posts, I was curious, aren’t you?  After pulling out 27,658,728 million words and sorting them, five words came out on top: Search, Google, Yahoo, Site, and SEO.  Was I surprised, no but it’s interesting to know and a good starting point. 

Taking a look at the top 1% of all 72,330 posts, it was found that the words did change a little bit.  Some of the top words used were:  Search, Google, Site, Links, SEO, Content, People, and Social.   This data seems very similar to what was found in part one of this study, with the SEOmoz data.  Posts that are about link building are very popular but now we can conclude that they are attracting links.  When we look at a much smaller percentage say only the top 50 posts, you find that you are getting very similar words such as: Google, Search, Blog, Link, Pagerank, and Site. 

So what can you really take away from the content of the top 50 blog posts?  Stick with the major engines: Google, Yahoo, and maybe even Bing, on a good day.  The linkerati likes topics including Link Building, Pagerank, and Social Media.  As my disclaimer stated above, these are not the rules but just observations from a small sampling of the blogosphere.  If I knew the exact topic that the linkerati loves, I wouldn’t be writing here, I would be out making millions writing all day. 

 

BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS

• The data suggests that posts with title between 14 and 16 words attract more ILDs than those with longer or shorter titles.
• Contrary to belief, the data suggests that posts with more than 900 words are attracting more links than those with 900 words.  Shoot for post between 2328 and 2618 words.
• The data suggest the location/depth of your blog post doesn’t seem to have an effect on the number of ILDs you will receive but may affect your SEO work, so be cautious.
• If you’re interested in the top post with a certain type of media, check above.  Also if you’re interested in the blogs that tailor to a certain type of media, check above.
• Authority plays a major role in the number of ILDs that you will receive on your post.  Matt Cutt’s blog receives twice as many ILDs as the next closest blog.
• Hot topics that attract links include: Google, Search, Blogs, Link Building, Pagerank, SEO, and Social Media.

SUMMARY

In summary, the takeaways above are generalization about a small group of post from the blogosphere and should not be taken as rules but merely as a guide to help you create content that will have the possibility to generate links.  Work on the authority in your niche and become that place people come to receive great advise.  While you’re waiting for authority to grow, make sure that your posts included visual aids to help readers get the takeaways quickly.

SPECIAL THANKS

Special thanks to the SEOmoz team for the access to the Linkscape API.  Without the use of the API this post would have never been possible.

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24 Hours Without Privacy

Posted by Danny Dover

 Warning: This post has very little to do with SEO. It will apply to you and your work but not in the way that you are familiar with. It is an experiment for both of us.

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He wakes up at 7:31 AM just like the day before. With ignorance as his shield, he ventures out into a world without privacy.

The young man (a title given to him by his mother) sits submissively in his bed and idly scans e-mail on his phone. Another notice from his bank, a forwarded e-mail from his friend, five new e-mails from his co-workers, and an intimate message from a girl he met last weekend at a party. He suppresses a smirk, she is toying with him and he knows it.

Unbeknownst to him, four copies of his private e-mail are stored in locations around the world. The first is stored locally on his phone, a second on a search engine giant’s servers, a third on a consumer electronics company that he forwards his e-mail through and a fourth on the massive social network’s servers where the flirty message originated. Each of these copies are duplicated across servers for the safety of redundancy. Four separate corporations, run by people he will never meet, store his most private messages. A fifth corporation, a telecommunications conglomerate, logs the entire process and associates it with his account.

After checking his e-mail, he pulls himself out of bed, takes a shower, and eats a homemade breakfast burrito. Just wearing a towel, he glances over to see if his blinds are closed. He is most conscious of his privacy when he is alone.

He pulls his favorite shirt out of his closet (a medium sized black unlabeled t-shirt) and pulls it over his head. He leaves his apartment after double checking that he locked the deadbolt on his front door.

Unknown to him, he is video recorded as he leaves his home by his apartment’s security system. The resulting tape is scheduled to be stored in a permanent archive.

He walks the two blocks to his bus stop just in time to catch the 43. He sits down on his normal seat on the bus (between the middle door and the support pole) and puts in his headphones. For the entire 30 minute duration of the ride, none of the 23 people on the bus make eye contact with each other. The bus driver lazily and incoherently babbles into the onboard PA.

When he first got on the bus, he scanned his bus pass which logged his account identifier into the metro system. After doing so, he walked by an on-board microphone that was set to record the entire bus. At the same time he was recorded by two different video cameras on the ceiling of the bus. As he travels down the road, the GPS in the bus sends its coordinates back to the bus station.

Meanwhile 23 other GPS enabled devices sit in the pockets of the passengers. In any of those cell phones ring, they will enable microphones that would pick up and transmit the man’s voice. Even if the GPS features are disabled, the cell phones can still be triangulated via cell towers. In the off chance that both the GPS features and cell networks were disabled, the Internet enabled phones could still be geo-located when they accessed public WiFi routers. Together there are 70 different ways that the man sitting in his favorite seat on the bus could be tracked.

He sits calmly and listens to the Garden State Soundtrack for the 46th time.

Eventually he reaches his stop and steps off the bus and into the city. Adjusting his earphone, he starts the short hike to work. He nods at the police officer who is stopped at a red light. The cop doesn’t nod back.

As he walks the half mile from his bus stop to his office, he is recorded by 4 different video cameras. The first is in the police car, the second and third are intersection cameras and the final camera is in the ATM he walks by.

He eventually makes it to his office building and continues up the staircase. He says “hi” to the friendly man at front desk, grabs a glass of water and unpacks his laptop. He greets his co-workers and eventually settles at his desk.

As he entered the office building, he swiped his card and was identified as having opened the door. This action was stored in a remote database. He then walked into the office where he entered a room with 25 other cell phones. There are also 26 computers. Together there are over 50 different devices that can access the internet. Each of them identify their location and general details every time they connect to a server.

The privacy conflicts that the young man encountered in the offline world are nothing compared to those he will encounter later today in the online world.

He sits down at his desk and loads up all of his normal browser bookmarks to quickly skim the days news. He checks his e-mail again.

One of his friends sent him a link to an online video of a little kid singing a Beatles song. Having already seen it, he responds with a “lol” and switches tabs so he can skim the most popular articles on his favorite social news site. He clicks several of the corresponding links and is taken to some websites with various clever images and lists. The content is designed to be consumed quickly. He digests it like watching a flip book.

Around the office he hears erratic bursts of laughter as his coworkers click the same links. Noticing this "popcorn effect" for the first time, he shares his thought on a micro blogging service.

As soon as the young man opened his Internet browser, his operating system immediately began logging each website he visited. When his homepage loaded, the action was logged by the search giant. This record is owned by the same company that owns the second website he visited to watch the music video. Both actions are stored somewhere on an unknown server. The third site he visits, his favorite social network, logs every action he takes and associated it directly with his account. The same is done for all of his friends.

After leaving that closed garden, he shares his popcorn thought with his acquaintances on the micro blogging service. His message is dispersed through a massive API where an untold number of services permanently store it and associate it with his account.

He has a similar experience when he browses his favorite social news website. All of his actions on the domain are stored and associated with his account. Even after he leaves this domain to view the day’s funny pictures and top ten lists, his actions are tracked either by the search engine giant or a large Redmond based software company.

At one point he isn’t on a page that displays ads by these major ad networks, but is instead tracked by a specific online retailer who has its own ad network. The online retailer associates his page views with his shopping account. All of this data is stored permanently and mined to ensure that the online retailer is able to maximize profits.

He finishes his morning internet round by buying tickets on a movie ticket site. The popular site stores his zip code and credit card details.

Later, after finishing a long day at work, he stops by his local grocery store to pick up a six pack of beer. He goes straight to the back of the store and brings the drink back to the register. Despite his facial hair, the clerk requests to see his ID. He complies and pulls it out of his wallet. The young man keys in his phone number in absence of his grocery store loyalty card so that he can save $0.50. The cash register prints out a receipt and the cashier shoves it in a plastic bag along with the purchase. The man thanks the grocer and continues on his way home.

As soon as he stepped into the grocery store he was picked up by one of about 20 video cameras that continually record shoppers. As he approached the checkout stand he started a three tiered identification process that rivals that of getting a Passport.

The first method was via government ID and was paradoxically the least useful to the grocery store. The cashier ignored his picture and instead focused on typing his birthdate into the register computer as speedily as possible.

The second form of identification was via his phone number that was tied to his grocery card number. This allows the grocery store to log all of the young man’s purchases. This data is later analyzed to determine spending patterns of different demographics and to identify sale combinations that maximize profits.

The final form of identification underwent the most analysis. The man’s credit card required an autograph. This transaction was stored by four different companies. The first was stored locally at the point of sale by the grocery store. The second was stored on his credit card’s servers. The third was on his bank’s servers and the final copy was stored on the servers of his favorite personal finance website.

As he finally gets back to his apartment he grabs the package from his doormat and settles down for the evening. He orders in a pizza because he is too tired to cook for himself. The young man finishes his day by splitting the beers with his roommate and watching a movie.

The package on his doorstep hints at only the tip of two data icebergs. The first one is owned by the online retailer and the second one is owned by a worldwide shipping company. His address and name are stored in massive databases owned by the two corporations. He will never have access to his information stored in shipping database. Records of the contents of the package, along with his credit card information are stored by the online retailer so that it can show relevant suggestions when he visits the website.

His address, phone number, name and pizza preferences are stored by the pizza company when he places his order. This transaction is also stored by the pizza place, his bank, the credit card company and his personal finance website.

His movie selection is stored on the server’s of the consumer electronics manufacturer from earlier. Again his financial transaction is recorded by four corporations.

Back in his bed, he looks at the calendar, the date is November 3rd 2009. This is not some day off in the distant future, it is today. This is not some made up character, this is my life and it extends directly into yours.

The balance between privacy and convenience is fickle. It is unproven and the rules are uncertain. Just because something is free online does not mean you are not making a sacrifice when you use it.

That said, I do not believe that sharing personal data for convenience sake is evil. Many times it is economical and even beneficial. The fact that your pharmacy has access to all of your prescriptions gives them the ability to check for potentially lethal interactions. This is fundamentally good. Policies like these save lives. Information is not a scarce resource like oil or coal, it is bountiful and truly limitless. I believe it should be up to the individual to decide what they want to do with their person data. After all, a few of the corporations above were opt in.

At some point in the future, I plan to completely open source my life. By this I mean, putting all of my personal data online. This will include everything from my browsing history to my digitized DNA. I have been conducting research on the ramifications of this for a little over a year and this article  unveils some of the realizations I have had.

As you can see, the leap to throwing away my privacy is actually much smaller than I originally thought. In fact, both you and I are already almost all of the way there.

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The references to major corporations made above were all real. The actual corporations are listed below with some relevant facts.

"search giant" – Google Inc.: In addition to the data points listed above, Google is storing hundreds of other metrics about it’s users.

"consumer electronics" – Apple Inc.: Apple is rumored to be building a $1 billion data center so it is likely that more data like that mentioned in post will be stored in the future.

"massive social network" – Facebook Inc.: In total, 25 Terabytes of user activity data is stored daily by the online social networking service.

"telecommunications conglomerate" – AT&T Inc.: AT&T reported only has 20,268 servers. This is infantile compared to Google’s estimated 1,000,000 servers.

"micro blogging service" – Twitter Inc.: Twitter recently peaked at 5,000 messages a second following Michael Jackson’s death. Odds are one of them was yours.

"social news site" – Digg Inc.: Digg says that only about half of its server load is from visitors to its website. The other half is a mix of Digg buttons and API calls. This means a non-trivial amount of information that Digg collects is from people who are not even on the Digg domain.

"video provider" – YouTube Inc: Youtube serves over 1,000,000,000 (billion) views a day. Odds are you are one of them.

"credit card company" – Visa Inc.: The major credit card companies are now hiring psychologists and statisticians to mine your buying data and figuring out who is a liability.

"a large Redmond based software company" – Microsoft Corporation: Microsoft is in the process of finishing one of the world’s biggest data centers in anticipation of creating the world’s first mainstream cloud-based operating system, Microsoft Azure. In Microsoft’s eye, the future is in your data. (Google and I agree)

"online retailer" – Amazon.com, Inc.: Amazon has more 55 million active customer accounts.

"favorite personal finance website" - Mint Software, Inc: Mint Software was recently bought by Intuit Inc. making its combined collection of personal finance information one of the biggest in the world.

"worldwide shipping company" – United Parcel Service, Inc.: The United Parcel Service (UPS) can reach more than 4 billion of the earth’s 6.3 billion people to which it delivers more than 13.3 million packages each day.

"the pizza company" – Domino’s Pizza, Inc Each of the 40,000 systems in the company’s franchises are connected to their global network. Your pizza order is not alone.

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Social Media at a Fortune 10 Company: Ford’s Scott Monty

Kudos to MIMA for getting Ford’s Scott Monty to do a session at the MIMA Summit, “Social Media at a Fortune 10 Company”.  Scott will be keynoting the DMA International conference in San Diego with Martha Stewart later this month (10,000 attendees) and MIMA was able to get him to do a breakout session. The [...]

MIMA Summit: Jackie Huba (Church Of The Customer) Keynote

Jackie Huba, blogger at the popular Church of the Customer blog kicked off MIMA Summit 2009 with a moving presentation on the idea of 1%’ers – those influential people creating content on the web (similar to Jakob Nielson’s participation inequality). Through the democratization of publishing content, the vocal minority, those 1%’ers (”sneezers” as Seth Godin calls [...]

Review: YouTube and Video Marketing An Hour A Day

“Master Story Teller”, that’s how I would describe Greg Jarboe, someone I’ve known in the internet marketing and PR world for several years. Now he’s pioneered yet another essential digital marketing channel: online video. In YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour A Day, Greg has assembled a priceless collection of insights, examples and practical [...]