When you start to market your business online depending on how much of a saturation point you reach you will slowly start to reach an exhaustion point and the act of thinking outside the box will be extremely important to keep things moving forward for your business. You can only get so far only doing the same efforts over and over and a viral video marketing campaign done the right way could significantly increase the power of your online business.

Here is a great video that I found about viral video by Mark Apsolon:

Viral marketing expert Mark Apsolon holds a YouTube channel where he offers free information and tips on how to promote a viral video the right way. Mark has years of experience promoting videos and knows just how to do it correctly. Putting a catchy video together surrounding your business could lead to massive amounts of targeted traffic landing on your website. As other bloggers and websites start to write about your video you start to create a viral energy spooling around the video and before you know it you have a successful viral marketing campaign that is really helping your search engine optimization efforts in a tremendous way. Mark Apsolon states that short quick bursts of information really getting to the point as quickly as possible is the way to go. Most people start to lose attention at a certain point so it is important to get to the point very quickly. Take a look at some of Mark’s past episodes to understand even more on how viral marketing can really help your business grow in a whole new direction.

I know the search engine optimization industry at times can get very confusing for people who might not eat, sleep and breath it like some of us do (myself included!) so that is why we write posts like this. If you have launched a blog or have one now that doesn’t get that much traffic some of these steps might help you with the construction of your blog posts. It is important to always optimize your blog posts especially if it is connected to your business site and you are trying to deliver traffic there for some reason or another.

Below are some helpful Blog SEO tips to consider when writing a blog post
(they are not in any particular order, but are all important):

1. Content – Content is going to be the most important aspect of your blog posts. Your content has to not only be good but compelling. It needs to give readers a reason to want to keep reading and to also come back to see what else you got for them. You always want to sprinkle some keywords throughout your text as well. This will get your post climbing in search results.

2. Title – The title of your post is very important. Depending on how your blog is set up will determine whether your title is being pulled into your meta information of your posts. There is a thin line between having a cute title and an SEO title that will actually work to your advantage over time.

3. Post Ending – Don’t be scared to leave your post open ended. Ask a question in the end to trigger some heavy comment action. The comments will only help with the blog posts rankings. It’s kind of like pouring fuel on the fire.

4. Use Lists – Using lists has been known to significantly increase the strength of a blog post. Try making a post that requires a lengthy list in the body and you will see over time that post move around in search results.

5. Paragraphs – Use smaller paragraphs frequently, this keeps the readers attention into a manageable thoughts.

6. Images – Incorporate some images throughout the post. This tremendously helps the user experience.

7. Videos – If you can please locate and include videos that are related to your blog post, sometimes this helps keep visitors longer on your website.

8. Link Building – Yes, you need to promote your blog posts, through your Twitter, Facebook accounts and any of the many good social bookmarking sites out there. Not only will they help spread the word about your great content, drive visitors to your blog, but will also provide a nice link to your blog post.

9. URL of Post – The URL of each post should be short and should reflect the content contained withing the blog post. Keep your blog post URLs short and relevant.

These are just a few main areas you should always consider when writing blog posts. SEO doesn’t just apply to websites but to blogs as well so if you want traffic apply these efforts to your posts once in a while.

Social media marketing has been the talk of the town for the last twelve months to the point that search engine marketing and optimization has almost become the forgotten brother. If social media marketing is working and delivering traffic – great. But wouldn’t it be even better if you could also harness the free traffic available through the search engines.

There is a place for both forms of marketing in most every type business. It is a matter of keeping everything in perspective and working in areas where your business is going to gain the most benefits. Traffic is not necessarily the key – sales or converting traffic is the only way you can hope to stay in business. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen companies that think that a certain social media marketing strategies are the end all be all…best thing for sliced bread. Really spend you time understanding the audiences of each social site to make sure they are a good fit for you company, before you start becoming active on a site. For instance, if you own a real estate company, why become active a social networking website for people outside the united states or a smaller demographic?

Late last month we published a list of the top websites presented by Compete. That list should tell you where best to focus your efforts. Are you spending all day on Twitter? Why? It only receives a small fraction of the traffic compared to the search engines, Facebook and YouTube. There are many businesses than can justify the time spent on Twitter through extra sales or conversions. Others are trying to pump up their business through Twitter when their efforts may be better focused in other areas.

One of the hardest tasks for any business looking to increase their visibility, visitors and sales from the web, is the ability to keep everything in perspective. Online marketing needs to address your businesses needs today, tomorrow and next week. Focus on what is working then look to other areas that offer the potential for growth. By keeping everything in perspective, you will at least maintain your current flow of traffic while waiting for new marketing strategies to bear fruit.

So this post has nothing really (directly anyway) to do with search engine optimization, but I thought it would make sense to spend a bit of time explaining some of the basic tips to help your business effectively use Twitter.

Yes, Twitter might not be right for every business but that doesn’t give the excuse to not pulling up a chair to the dinner table and at least looking at what there is to offer. I don’t generate a huge amount of interaction on Twitter but you think I would when I look at the Google Analytics information. Just because people might not interact with your business on Twitter doesn’t mean they don’t make it over to your website through your profile.

Here are some things all businesses should be doing on Twitter every single day:

Follow: Every business out there must have some sort of competition. Whether immediate or loosely related it doesn’t matter. Sending follow requests to your competitors followers is very important. Some will see that you are following them and instantly follow you back so it is very important to find these people. They are about as targeted as you are ever going to get.

Post Links: I don’t recommend sitting there all day and just dropping links to your website but occasionally it is ok to post a link to a service page or a product page especially if you are running a special promotion or sale on something. Most people won’t mind if you do it tastefully. Don’t drop the link every hour all day long. This will get people turned off by your efforts. If you have a blog each blog post should always be posted into your Twitter account as well.

Retweet: If you see something particular to your industry someone posted I would recommend retweeting it. It will drive more eyeballs to your Twitter page and get that account that you just retweeted on your radar. Plus often times that person you just retweeted might return the favor down the road creating a win win situation all across the board.

Conversation: Reply to people’s posts you might think would be great for your business. Not everyone will respond to you but eventually you will start to build up some nice conversations and some could be the right type of conversations to get your business growing.

These are some efforts every Twitter account should be doing but over time you will find a patter or routine that works best for you. This is just the one that we chose to follow.

For the past 10 years Google has largely dictated the definition of authority for the rest of us. Sure, search engine optimization people may have expanded the definition (sometimes to suit their own purposes), but it was Google who gave us the idea to begin the discussion. It was, of course, all link-based. Your authority, today, is based on the quality of your own content and the quality of the links you attract, based in large part on the authority of the sites doing the linking.

But more and more, Google is swinging social. There’s the acquisition of such sites as YouTube, Picasa, and Blogger. And the startups like Orkut. And, of course, the expanded applications and new directions in search with such offerings as Friend Connect, Google Wave (in beta), personalization, mixed media SERPs, and real-time search. The changeover isn’t complete, but I think Google sees the writing on the wall. The Web is, by nature, social. It always has been. And Google’s mission all along has been to catalog the world’s information. But the big challenge – not just for Google, but all search companies – is in producing the technology that will help people find that information. Search technology has largely been successful, but it has its shortcomings. Social is slowly taking its place.

So the question is, When social media has replaced search completely, and search is largely a social enterprise rather than a robotic one and content driven one, what will authority be based on? Is today’s social proof model the basis of a new kind of authority or will link building still play a part? Are you engaged in the new social media marketing revolution? Do you believe social media and search will ever be inseparable? If so, what will be the basis of authority on the Web?

I personally believe that it comes down to excellent content, building highly relevant links over time (that generate visitors of course) and being social online. The reality is if your business is not connecting with your customers and potential new customers then you are missing out on an aspect…called marketing. Yes, marketing your website and business online I think will build a higher amount of authority and sales. Because really that is what search engine optimization, social media marketing and everything online related is all about, building your business!

In today’s online market place it is important for all business and entrepreneurs to realize that the playing field has changed quite drastically over the last few years. There are many new platforms and websites that businesses can eagerly leverage to drive new exposure, traffic and eye balls than there ever has been before. Social Media Marketing technology has made it much easier to become visible online and it is up to you as a business owner to take advantage of this technology.


Launching a blog and having an active Twitter and Facebook account go hand in hand. If you don’t understand why that is not important yet just realize that having both is the first step to building new qualified website visitors. At the very least make it a point to have both created as soon as possible and worry how to incorporate into your marketing strategy after, your audience is waiting. After you launch your blog there are many sure fire ways to build new networks of happy customers and potential clients. Twitter and Facebook will be a nice meeting place for them to join and meet but it will be the blog that gets them there. When you launch a blog and start writing new posts you will most likely have to get those blog posts out there a bit at first to start building up new loyal readers. Once you have your Facebook and Twitter accounts all built with nice little links and great profile images you can sync the Twitter account along with your Facebook fan page. What this will ultimately do is eliminate one step for yourself. As you drop your blog post link into your Facebook fan page it will automatically create a link in your Twitter account for you. This is one great and convenient way to not only drive targeted visitors to your website from a variety of Twitter users but also build up your Facebook fan page as well.

This takes time so it is important to start doing it now and be consistent with it. Online marketing takes time to grow like anything else. Over time you will slowly start to build up followers on your Twitter account and fans on your Facebook page. As the search engines evolve even more they will require an element of social interaction through all the various social platforms in order to really help your SEO efforts.

If you are a small local business owner and you are still contemplating if you should launch a blog for your business stop procrastinating and just launch it. The search engine optimization benefits will help you website a great deal at the very least. You have absolutely zero to loose and much to gain from launching a blog on your businesses website. A blog is not just for larger businesses anymore. They can be used for many different reasons. It is important to realize that a blog is a direct extension of your business and can act as the voice for your brand.

Take the first step and launch the blog directly on your website and get one post per week just to get things started. If you already have a list of targeted keywords for your business over time you can start to target blog posts around specific keywords and really start to generate some quality traffic. Small business owners need to realize that there are no rules to launching a blog. You can write about anything and everything you want. Some people use their blog to let their audience know what type of company they are. You can write about everything from what happens in the office all the way to specific resources that your audience can use each day. It is entirely up to you. Over time you will figure out how to structure your blog posts and what to write about to keep visitors on your website. The advantage of building your blog on your website is that you get the visitors landing on your website so you can add elements to create a sense of urgency to get website visitors to submit their information for a lead to make a purchase or come directly to your physical or online store. It all depends on your business goals.

Launching a business blog does not have to be difficult. You don’t have to get scared that something won’t work out how you planned. Half the battle is simply getting up and doing it. Once you have the blog it might be wise to schedule out your blog posts. If you plan on being conservative with your frequency you could very well come up with small handful of topics you could write about for that particular month. You don’t have to write everyday when you first start. You very well could if you want but just getting some new material in the blog on a monthly basis is a good start regardless.

When you set up your blog RSS feed you’ll have to decide whether you want that feed to publish as a full text feed or a summary. The full text will publish your entire blog post within the RSS feed while the summary will post just a couple of paragraphs and link back to your blog post. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. RSS feeds that offer summaries tend to receive more click throughs back to the website, but that’s really the only major benefit – and it may not be a benefit at all if a high click through rate means a lower overall readership.

Here is a video that I found (an older one but still very good!) about RSS Feeds:

Anyway, continuing the tips regarding full text feeds will likely lead to more subscribers. This increases your overall readership and gives you wider distribution of your blog content. Plus, you are more likely to get links from your readers. Also, full text RSS feeds get republished in full, which means any links within those blog posts have greater potential to pass link juice back to you as part of your off site search engine optimziation efforts (aka. link building) Some blog lists and feed directories are picky about partial lists and may leave you out if you deliver your RSS feeds in summary.

Finally, potential re-publishers like full text feeds because it allows them to keep visitors on their site. That means more potential inbound links for you. Should you publish your feeds as full text or summary? It depends. Do you want to increase your SEO advantages? If so then publish the full text. If you value more click throughs back to your blog from those feeds then publish your feeds in summary.

YouTube now has a way for webmasters to allow site visitors to upload YouTube videos directly to their websites. But the program is designed for news sites like CNN.com and Huffington Post. That doesn’t mean that bloggers can’t participate, however. I think the program will likely be available to most websites in some sense.

But what is YouTube Direct? YouTube Direct is a platform that gives webmasters the ability to get user generated video content without developing their own application.

Here is a video that clearly explains YouTube Direct:

There are some advantages to being able to do this. First, you can keep your site visitors on your site a little longer. But, even better than that, you can have videos uploaded directly to your website instead of you going to YouTube and embedding videos, which can be a time consuming process. The big question is, will YouTube Direct provide webmasters and marketers with any search engine optimization benefits.

I think so, possibly. If videos are uploaded to your website then it’s possible that the search engines will index those versions of the videos. The videos will still exist on YouTube’s servers, but if you use Google Customized Search then visitors will be able to search your website to find video content. And, more importantly, searchers using the search engines to search for video content related to your niche may find it in the SERPs. That’s a huge ‘may’.

The other possibility is that searchers looking for video content will find those videos on YouTube and will have to click over to your site from there. It remains to be seen just how many SEO benefits webmasters will receive from YouTube Direct. Even without SEO benefits, however, it looks like a good deal. I’m just hoping for the best.

So what’s the fastest growing demographic on Facebook? It’s not the college crowd. And it’s not high schoolers or teenie boppers. Thirtysomething? Nope. Not them either.

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is actually 55 years and older. Them’s the old guys! (sorry I had to say it

Well, they’re baby boomers. Aren’t they supposed to be technology challenged? If they are, it’s not evident because they’re flocking to Facebook and hanging out there, either to look cool in front of their children or because they have a genuine interest in social media. I’m guessing it’s the latter because we all know their children don’t think they’re cool.

Here is some great Facebook demographic information from Mashable from this past July:

But here’s the deal. They’re going there and so should you. Especially if your target market is 45 plus. Or if your target market is the 20-30 year old group. Why 20-30? Because that group consists of the children of the 45 plus group and if you get the parents you’ll get the children. It is social media, after all.

Social media, and that includes Facebook, is more than just a big social networking party with old friends and colleagues. There are also search engine optimization benefits to do business through Facebook and other social media sites such as building search engine and visitor trust over time. But the real benefit is branding and strategic marketing. Savvy marketers are learning how to use all online media to their advantage. Start now and when the next generation becomes consumers, it will be commonplace. You’ll already know how to play the game.