Article I Vipin Singh just wrote on our Free Blogs site @MyTypes

Here is a SEO blog we just wrote on our front page:

Google Webmaster Tools a must for SEO

I have been meaning to blog about some of the new features of Google Webmaster Tools. I just saw this article from Search Engine Land, and it basically covers it all, see below on Search Query and follow link to full article. If you are an SEO expert, or a Internet Marketing manager in a large company, you may use your analytics tool instead. That is fine, but you probably won’t find some of the rich data that is available in your GWT account. In my opinion GWT is one of the best SEO tools you will use, especially the Search Query Data. If you want to read more of our SEO blogs, don’t be afraid to go to our WordPress SEO blog templates site.

Here are the top reason for it’s SEO value:

1. Check your Index pages from your Sitemap, easy and tells you how many are indexed, the higher percentage the better.

2. Check for Crawl errors

3. Check for duplicate content issues

4. Search Query Volume is simply un beatable, it’s very hard to find this data.

5. Great Link data, who is linking to you and how many links to top pages

Excerpt form the Search Engine Land’s 9 Step SEO Checkup Article below:
5. Look At Rankings

Knowing what people type, and which searches get you clicks, is invaluable search intelligence. Use the Search queries report to gain great insight. Click Your site on the web::Search queries, and you’ll see a report like this:

Search queries report

Whoa. That’s a lot of data. Don’t panic! Break it down to what you really need:

* Impressions shows the number of times you appeared in a search result for that query.
* Clicks is the number of times folks clicked on your result for that query.
* CTR is clickthru rate: The number of clicks per impression.
* Average position is where you ranked.

Don’t treat this report as a benchmark for search performance. Rankings are a terrible benchmark, especially now that Google appears to be Bingifying their results pages. But you can look for easy improvements. For example, I think I should get more than 2% clickthru on ‘Google Analytics’. I click on that query and get a drill-down report:

Search queries drill down

The pages I see listed probably need better meta description tags, and maybe more compelling titles. By rewriting these to present a better call to action, I can potentially improve clickthru.

Our home page is ranked #2 on Google for the keyword “Free Blogs“, as of yesterday?  I Vipin Singh or anyone of our friends did not do anything to SEO the Marketing Book site?  So I wonder what it is that lead to this sudden rise in this ranking?  Did Google do any recent updates?  I don’t know, any SEO experts out there see any changes?

Though, I am writing this post and linking with proper anchor text Free Blogs and Create a blog to see if this will do anything.  It probably will, but who knows.  I guess, Anchor Text Links still the most widely recommended SEO Tip, besides having the main keyword in your Title Tag.

Vipin Singh

Just wrote this blog post on our main Marketing book blog:

I was refreshing my self on SEO and see if anything had changed in the last few weeks?  Nada.  Google still wants you to provide great content and have you get links from high Page Rank sites such a news papers.  So far so good, and of course you have to have proper page structure to make sure your content get’s indexed.  If you are on WordPress based website or blog, you have nothing to worry about.  Here are some of my musings about Tech, Social Media, Health Care etc..

So I am on the lookout for the business value of Twitter and how it can provide an ROI and/or traffic.  I have been blogging little about anything of value, but have read many more articles on the subject than I am quoting.  Remember these and other Internet marketing ideas are covered heavily in our Marketing book, so download for free. 

The one dimensional IM style live blogging of Twitter has gotten in the way for me.  But, I am starting to become a believer and many other online marketers and business people are definitly seeing similar evidence.  In fact some internet marketing people from Amex and Dell have seen an ROI on their Twitter efforts.  Check the link to the following article just published in Media post, below is an excerpt:

“My personal favorite example comes from American Express, specifically its OPEN Forum. The OPEN Web site combines professional editorial, consumer-generated content and product marketing. To tap Twitter, American Express co-opted the popularity of its guest bloggers like Seth Godin, John Battelle and, in particular, Guy Kawasaki, (who wrote about Twitter on the OPEN Forum site just last week ).

Analyzing the traffic patterns of the OPEN Forum Web site reveals some great data. Every time Kawasaki posts a blog to the site, traffic doubles. Looking at daily traffic patterns since the beginning of the year, nearly every peak in visitation to the site corresponds to a post from Kawasaki. This is significant for a site that is already averaging over two hundred thousand visits each month.

So how is American Express promoting this great content – banner ads? SEM? SEO? None of the above. Instead, the brand relies on Kawasaki’s existing Twitter celebrity, knowing that his tweets reach over 100,000 followers, who will then retweet the post to their followers. All of this activity drives traffic to the OPEN Forum Web site, where American Express can convert them into the right card product. One of the most telling statistics, however, is that Twitter is now the top-ranked traffic source for OPEN Forum – 11.7% of traffic to the site comes from Twitter versus 9.1% from Google and 4.5% from Guy’s personal blog, GuyKawasaki.com. The data show that American Express is cracking the code on getting hard ROI from Twitter.”  See more and visit full article from Mediapost.com

You notice that in the examples the website or communities talk about blogging and the onslaught of traffic after each post.  While Twitter and faceBook are hot ways to generate traffic.  The end result should still be providing great content and a destination for your community to visit and get value on a regular basis.  The more we focus our community to a specific niche of targeted content the better.  Fresh or current content is not only king or sticky as we use to stay in the earlier internet era, it equals community if provided via blogging or social marketing.   People often ask me how often should I blog or update content to my site, I say for blogs it’s optimal to blog 2-3 times a week, and once a week is paramount.  For websites, it’s important to update on a weekly basis, and it’s often made easier by adding summaries of blogs.  So keep blogging and you will always get customers and traffic.  The key is to do it with a smart SEO, Search and Social marketing focus.  For all the basics on everything you need to know and do on SEO, Search and social marketing, especially blogging, download our Marketing Book.

The world of SEM Tools is vast and can seem complex, so I wanted to simplify things for people.  Before I go in to my details, I think it’s important that we understand that the best three tools really are from Google Adwords and Google Analytics (especially because it’s free), Yahoo Search, and my recent favorite of MSN Ad Intelligence with Excel.  Go to the article from SearchEngineWatch.com if you want to go read their take on all the SEM tools.  But, I recommend reading the couple of paragraphs on what you need to know about SEM Tools.

I recently got a demo of MS adCenter Ad Intelligence tool’s new features coming soon.  It’s more robust and has some interesting features on keyword intelligence that are quite amazing.  I obviously can’t get in to the details, the features will be released in the upcoming adCenter release, just within a month or two.  It’s suppose to be one of the biggest releases for Microsoft’s adCenter.  If you have not downloaded the excel Add-In tool, you can go ahead and do that by Clicking Here Excel Add-In

One of the biggest problems with the tool was that it was previously not available for Excel 03, but that was fixed weeks ago.  The industry has largely hailed this tool and it’s integration with excel as the best keyword and user behavior tool out there.  Now if Microsoft just solves the search query problem, we would all be very happy! 

As far utilizing the tools the key thing is to remember, that Search Engine Marketing is all about understanding the search engines.  So you have to understand the basics of their algorithms, their user behavior, and how then rank ads.  Let’s not forget it’s all about keywords, keywords and more keywords.  For SEM Tools the most important first step is understanding search keywords and thier CTR’s, their volume, and obviously their price.  But what’s really important is to understand the back end conversion on your own site and how those search keywords are converting for your business. 

You would also be surprised how much search engines look at the landing pages of the Ads.  More and more relevancy of your ads text matching your keywords and your landing page content the better.  Of course, Google still looks at Landing page Title tag as the most important, and heading tags and content on or near the top of the page as possible.  They all look at it basically the same way, the more relevant the keyword match, the higher your ad shows up and lower your bid prices.  This was more of a myth in the past, but you really have to pay attention to keyword relevancy in your ads and in your landing page.  If you can automate as much of your keyword inserts from query as possible via variables the best.  

The article above mentions other great SEM tools for bid and budget management and better reporting.  Tools such as Overture’s, 360i.com, and eFrontier obviously have internal data insights not just their technology to enhance campaigns.  So for big spenders, these tools and SEM services go hand in hand and should be utilized and managed properly with every eye of details and trends through smart analytics work.

I started writing about blogging, Google and it’s power back in 2003.  At the time, I was blogging on Blogger and had a WordPress blog too, especially as it was the way to SEO your site.  Blogs are the key to SEO, but now it seems Social marketing via faceBook and Twitter are gaining prominance as source of organic traffic.  We have been spotting trends earlier than most, but may not be the case on social marketing, and it’s power for overall Internet Marketing.  To make a bold statement, I think faceBook could eclipse Google in it’s ability to help marketers in the future.   Blogs are already a great source for organic conversion and traffic, second only to Google and keyword search conversion.  Blogging is a well known SEO and marketing tool, and SEM is an integral part of it, see our marketing book for full impact of it all.

MyTypes.com was reserved as a URL on Dec. 2005, as we wanted to create a social network for small business and professionals.  We were aware of faceBook, back in the fall of 2005 and MySpace was the real leader in social networking.  We played around with a lot of tools and technology, and chose WordPress and stick to blogging to promote businesses.  Now we think faceBook is the next big thing in Internet Marketing and it’s impact on driving organic traffic.  For smart marketers, we think that creating a faceBook fan page or a related faceBook group should be as important part of their marketing efforts.  If you want a full basics on our thoughts, do download our Marketing Book, especially it’s focus on blogging.

http://www.marketingvox.com/facebook-overtakes-google-referrals-on-some-sites-043476/

Facebook Eclipses Google Referrals on Some Sites

I have been blogging about faceBook for a long time, and have thought a number of posts to blog about.  This article today from Forbes is very interesting.  The slant is that faceBook has a long ways to go before it becomes profitable.  What get’s lost is that faceBook is a great medium for highly targeting cheap inventory for Advertisers to build a brand to a targeted audience.  I high recommend that if you are trying to get the word out about your product, and even get good conversions that you try faceBook advertising.  We have been doing it since last fall for a couple of our projects, but right now for MomBite.com my wife’s stay at home Moms book called Mommy’s Little Money$Maker.  Without giving away any secrets, she has done quite well with it.  Here is an excerpt from the Forbes article and a link to it, enjoy:

Facing Up To Facebook’s Value

Taylor Buley, 04.07.09, 06:00 AM EDT

It takes a lot of ads to make all those friendships pay off.

How many Facebook users does it take to make a profit? Based on the advertising rates Facebook proffers, the number would be hard to overstate.

As a social network, Facebook.com has been a remarkable success. The site is gearing up to announce its 200 million milestone, roughly two-thirds of whom come from outside the U.S. Its fastest-growing segment is not across younger demographics, as one might expect, but women 55 years and older.

Operating at such a large scale isn’t cheap. The social network has 11 offices worldwide and more than 800 employees. Outsiders have suggested that Facebook’s burn rate is north of $200 million a year, a point that Facebook executives won’t comment on. If the company’s burn rate is even half that–say a mere $100 million a year–then it would make sense that it’s seeking additional funding. A company spokesman tells Forbes that it is not actively seeking venture capital. But additional money could come from other sources.

In the meantime, here are some ways Facebook could raise $100 million:

–Show 34,100 ads to each U.S. woman on Facebook aged 35 and up, or convince all U.S. men aged 35 and up to click on 28 ads each.  CLICK HERE FOR REST OF ARTICLE

The simple answer is no, but they can be.  And there is a fine line that people are crossing, and Google has punished them for it.  The whole concept is one of pay per post or blogs that are written to endorse products or services.  Especially if they are not publicly disclosed, and a no-follow link has been placed.  The concept is regulated pretty heavily by Google, and violators are punished by loosing their organic rankings.  I think this holds true for both bloggers and advertisers.  So disclose publicly if you have any advertisers or endorsements.  For example, we don’t have any advertisers or endorsers, but we promote our own Marketing book and heaters on a different site.  And are always blogging about those relevant topics.  So I think we are OK.  A lot of this depends on how strick and far Google wants to take it.   This is another reason, why we should have a democratic search system, and why I am starting to support Live.com and It’s new name of Kumo.com, if that is it’s new name. 

The issue of No Follow Link and Blogging and Advertising gray line got highlighted last week when Forrester published a report on blogging and marketing.  See attached blog post to dwell in to the issue in detail:   http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/03/sponsored-con-1.html

When we blog about a particular subject, a news story or simply our thoughts; we often make a point by providing excerpts from news articles or original sources. I have been a little too lax as far as adding too much of excerpts, but I always provide a link back, thinking that is good enough.  Not true.  And, since I/we are blogging and giving the source of the article traffic; I justify it to myself.  Thinking that these people should be very excited that this great internet marketing book blog is giving them a link from a high Google Page Rank of 5 is linking them. 

If they were truely a web based company in the world of Internet Marketing, they would appreciate it.  But traditional media and journalists of big companies are not always compensated properly.  Hence lies the big issue, of why we need to not borrow their content.  We can always excerpt to help people, but lead them get more information the source.  As always if you find our marketing insights and this internet marketing book Here is a link to an article form CNBC that all blogging professionals should read:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29464102

Here is an excerpt from the article below, Bloggers be forwarned lawsuits for copyright infringement against bloggers are on rise.

When the popular New York business blog Silicon Alley Insider quoted a quarter of Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column in mid-February, the editor added a caveat at the end: “We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you.”

The editor added “in advance” because Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. The excerpt was published with the assumption that it would be permitted under the “fair use” statute of copyright law.

Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information.

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.

“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’ ” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “They think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”

Copyright infringement lawsuits directed at bloggers and other online publishers seem to be on the rise. David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, said his colleagues kept track of 16 such suits in 2007. In 2004 and 2005, it monitored three such suits each year. And newspapers sometimes send cease-and-desist orders to sites that they believe have crossed the line.