Archive for blogging
The Logic Of Internal Linking – 15 SEO Steps to Web Design Heaven
Credit: AlbertoSantander
Live Internet Marketing recently hosted a short presentation by Rez Sarmadi, one of their resident Marketing Gurus, and Co-Founder of Sarbro Solutions about methods of internal ranking that will greatly help your Google Rankings. I was very excited to hear Rez’s presentation, and it delivered well beyond expectation.
1) Begin Your Internal Link Strategy When You Design the Site - According to Rez, Internal linking doesn’t start once the site is created, but rather is a part of the actual site design. The best time to begin internal linking is during the planning stage of the website.
Using Wordpress to Manage PDF’s
This is a quick post about how to use wordpress to share documents with other people. A friend of mine told me that they wanted to be able to share the application documents for their Jewish Soccer League in Los Angeles. I told them that it would be easy to do using a domain + a wordpress installation.
Below you can watch the quick tutorial I set up to show him how to use the “add media button” on your wordpress post to attach documents.
The 3 Series Punch to Marketing your website and Blog
3 Steps - Credit to #freelance
Many people want to just start their online marketing campaign - be it SEO, Paid search or Social Media Marketing, without doing any previous marketing analysis. However it’s much more important to have your business plan down pat when you are marketing online, over when you are doing offline marketing.
To give you an understanding why, I’ll give you 3 different “case studies” with a lawyer who is trying to grow their business. They are an experienced attorney.
The Online Marketing 101 to Web Analytics - 3 Basic Ways to Use Web Analytics Tools
Web Analytics is a critical tool to understanding your online business. Whether you are simply running a blog, trying to generate leads from your website, or doing ecommerce, web analytics tools are critical to your success. So what can web analytics do for you?
- It can tell you what keywords the search engines find relevant to your website. This is a pretty basic way of using web analytics, and that is to see what keywords are driving traffic to your website. You can then decide whether to continue focusing on those topics that are driving traffic to your site, or you can decide to focus on other more relevant topics.
8 Ways To Market Your Music Online
- Credit To Jrossol
Being a musician - even an established label during the digital age can be a big challenge. When alot of music is being streamed online, or given away - or downloaded on torrents, you would think it’s even more challenging.
However, the opposite is true. There are many more ways to allow other people to listen and buy your music without having been already signed. You can sell your music digitally, and get up to 95% of what the revenue is. Your cost to create an album and distribute it is much lower. You can engage with users, and create fans without having an expensive PR team.
In short, it’s a great time. Although there is alot of opportunity, it can be overwhelming at times to create your online marketing strategy. So we’ve decided to give you one.
9 Firefox Plugins for an Online Marketer
Firefox is Hot
Firefox is a very useful tool for anyone who does online marketing. You can do alot of things within the browser, as well as get alot of information using these plugins. Some of the things I use Firefox Addons for:
- Post directly to Twitter from twitterfox
- Write blog posts
- Do Competitive research (learn how many pages a site has, how many visitors a website has, and more)
The List of Essential Firefox Plugins:
The 12 Most Useful Social Bookmarking & Autoposting Tools for Your Blog
As bloggers, we’re always trying to encourage our readers to post our blogs to one of the many social bookmarking services… be it digg, delicious, mixx, reddit, stumbleupon or one of the myriad others. There are many different wordpress plugins for different social sites. The problem is that your blog ends up cluttered with all of those buttons, and it really gets annoying.
The solution has been the plugins that allow you to post to any or many of the social networks. Here’s an overview of all of the ones that I’ve found (with some of my lovely comments to boot). One of the most popular players - sharethis, has received $15 million dollars in funding!
Online Video for Small Businesses - Can I afford it?
It all started with Youtube and Viral marketing. It spread to personal multimedia on websites. It continued with Rovion… For $3,000 you could have a professional nudge on your site bugging all your repeat visitors (but it looks cool). Microsoft’s bought it, and servicemagic has as well. The problem is that it’s really expensive. But, we’re nice people, and we want small business owners to benefit as well.
Want to put video on your site? Here’s a couple of resources:
Do You Follow the Nofollow? Get the Story - and The Linkjuice!
The dofollow - nofollow debate has been a topic that was beaten into the dirt… Here’s a little rerun of some of the story.
Issue:
The concept of Google’s page-rank algorithm is based on the structure used to rank the authority of academic articles. The assumption is that any academic article that is quoted by other sites is more authoritative. Google applies that to websites, and assumes that the more links coming in to a site, the more relevant it is to the keywords that it’s linked into with.
Say What?
Mark Cook over at Digerati Marketing compares the internet to a flower show.
USA Today’s Steve Strauss Encourages Small Business Owners to have Blogs
John Janstch alerted me to an article in the USA Today online that adresses whether business owners should have blogs.
Steve Strauss gives 5 reasons a small business owner should have a blog:
- You help build a sense of community - in other words, you build a relationship with the customer, so they see you as a real person… not just a webpage
- They allow you to plug products
- They help with SEO - I use the blog here solely for SEO (as well as to get new clients - I’ll get to the plug at the end
)
17 Useful Wordpress SEO and other plugins
- All in One SEO Pack - This is an absolutely vital plugin for every blog that you have. This allows you to change your Title, description and keyword metatags on each blog post to make them unique, as well as to make a default home page title and description. I credit this plugin with about 30% of the credit for my rankings on some of my keywords.
- AutoMeta - This tag kind of conflicts with the All-in-one SEO packplugin, as it automatically creates the titles and descriptions. I still have to see how this works with All-in-One SEO pack
Blogging for Yourself, the User and the Search Engine - a 2008 resolution
As you may or may not know, I am a big believer in blogging. It is a valuable way of
1)expressing your personality,
2)creating a connection with your users, and
3)getting valuable SE ranking.
The question is which one comes first? You might think this is a trivial question. It’s not.When I started blogging on About Results Marketing, I had merely bought a cool expiring domain for something I had wanted to do in the future - consulting in SEO, SEM and online marketing.
Why is Clever Hack Outranking Yahoo for “hack yahoo fantasy football”?
Joy over at Clever Hack is curious why she is ranking number one for “hack yahoo fantasy football“.
I just did a little research, and I saw that not only is she #1, but number two and three and five are websites that just took her RSS feed!
Getting a little jealous - (hey I want number two and three for my keywords to be filled with my own RSS feeds), I promptly decided to sign up with the same sites that show up for number two and three and five -
Get Rid Of Duplicate Content on your Blog - Gain Ranking
Two weeks ago I went to a conference put on by Jeremy and Anik from PPC Classroom. It was a great networking opportunity. I bumped into Rian Brooklyn, who mentioned an issue of having duplicate content on your home page.
If you have Wordpress in default mode, then you have all of the contents of your first couple of posts on your home page, which makes those pages duplicate content. Not a good thing.
So I looked at how my site is indexed in Google. It wasn’t pretty. Almost none of my individual posts were indexed. Instead, only my categories were indexed. e.g. aboutresultsmarketing.com/marketing_blog/category/google/.
Los Angeles Writers Guild Strike Analysis
Can’t resist putting up a post about this. I live four blocks away from CBS, and see the strikers in front of the studio daily. Especially since Joe Marchesse had to make a post about it on Mediapost.
Here was Joe’s take about the effect of the strike on the industry.
- This would accelerate the search for monetization methods of digital content (OK, I didn’t think of that!)
- Less New TV content - I did think of this one as the big drawback for studios
- Surplus of digital media talent - I’ll pretend I thought of that.
Should an Ecommerce Website Have a Blog?
(Disclaimer: I am extremely biased towards blogs. I have already come to the conclusion that blogs are always beneficial. Consider yourself warned!)
Here are the issues:
- What are the pro’s and con’s of having a blog on your ecommerce site (The Theory)
- What are the other experts in the field saying about having blogs on your ecommerce site
- What are the big guys doing?
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What are the Pro’s and Con’s of having a Blog on your Ecommerce site?
Is the LA Times Getting Closer to “Getting It”?
This is a follow up to my first post on the LA Times’s efforts to go “Web 2.0″, after meeting with Eric Ulken at a blogger’s event.
First off, a little disclaimer… My site is ugly, doesn’t convert, and definitely is not “cool”. So I really should have no right to criticize other companies’ efforts to “get it”. Especially since the LA Time site isn’t to badly designed. It has a pretty minimalist design, and very easy to find links.
The Importance of Local Optimization for Small Businesses
I’m currently doing some consulting work for some clients - as well as for my day job… creating and implementing a plan of action for local search. I’m realizing how much I’ve underutilized it. In the next couple of days I will be creating a guide outlining the steps you need to take to market your business locally.
In the meantime, here is an important resource from Frank Fuchs, a “Yahoo” who seems to have no qualms about stating his impressions of the company publicly. He lists all of the Local Places to submit your business to.
Market Your Business Through Referrals, John Jantsch
“I
get at least a hundred times the referrals now as I did before I had a
referral
plan.”
~ Scott Hensley - Affordable Concrete Cutting
Today
I want to share with you, in it’s entirety, a copy of a letter I
received from a small business owner who implemented a number of
suggestions I gave him in the Duct Tape Marketing book.
I chose to share this not to point out how brilliant I am - writing this stuff is the easy part sometimes
- but to showcase how acting on what you read - the really hard part - can payhuge dividends.
LA Times Getting Social Media? Candid Discussion with Eric Ulken
Today I happened on the Mashable “Top 10 Blogger Events Post“. I noticed that BarCamp is having an event in LA today. Oops, good timing! I figured, what the heck, I’ll check it out.
I came down, and found an interesting setup. The goal is to have a conversation with the crowd instead of having presenter’s merely talk to the crowd. In other words, the focus of the sessions were wherever the participants took it.
The session that I found really valuable was the one from Eric Ulken from latimes.com. He was hosting a presentation on mashups - how layering data together can create a valuable experience for users. Eric identified three parts of a mashup: