When is the best time to try your Digg article?
What kind of title attracts people and what spin do you put on your content to make it Digg worthy?
This article by my good friend Terry, from work, provides a little bit of information to get your feet wet on the practice of using social news sites to distribute your content.
What an honor!!! Yesterday, we were mentioned in Catherine Seda’s influential blog on Internet Marketing. Besides a veteran Internet Marketer, Catherine is the author of two great books on the topic, most recently “How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders“.
Her column this time focused on the use of Yahoo! Answers for helping develop your business and raising awareness for your on- and off-line initiatives. We have successfully been able to reach out to numerous new members of TuDiabetes.com through the good use of Yahoo! Answers.
Catherine:
Thanks for the privilege of letting us share our internet marketing success story with your readers and also thanks a lot for letting other people know about TuDiabetes.com -with 21 million people touched by it in the US and 246 diabetics worldwide, there’s SO MUCH to be done yet!
Where is your target audience hiding? How can you present yourself to them most efficiently?
Thanks to the multiple internet marketing tactics available, this is not such a difficult question to answer anymore. Enter Yahoo! Answers: since its launched in late 2005, it has grown into one of the most exciting properties of the Yahoo! spectrum: “over 90 million users worldwide with around 18 million users in the United States”, according to Search Engine Journal.
With those figures, it’s easy to imagine how you can target your message very specifically to the people you want to talk to. In my case, I took it upon myself to give it a shot, as a means to promote TuDiabetes.com, a community for people touched by diabetes that I had founded earlier in 2007. So, how to start?
The depth and breadth of the site is monumental, so there’s a very good chance that you will be able to find a niche category that very closely fits your target. That was my case: Home > Health > Diseases & Conditions > Diabetes sounded like a winner to me when I saw it.
Once I spotted the category, I just started looking for questions that I could answer. But I took it upon myself to go beyond a plain “Yes” or “No”, when answering questions: I made sure to always give a useful reply, much like I’ve done in the past with Amazon.com reviews, one that I personally would find useful myself, if I were in the shoes of the person asking the question. When you do a good job, you can get your answer selected as the best one, which earns you 10 points. If you do not earn that award, for answering alone, you earn 2 points. If you just vote for the best answer given to another question, you earn 1 point. And if you only show up, you earn 1 point for doing so, once a day.
So, how does it tie into your business? Answering a question earns you more than just a reputation based on points in the eyes of the community. To the individual getting the (useful) answer, it may make a profound difference. Now, if you can tie in your answer with a link back to your site, which contains even MORE information that will be of value to the person, even better: it’s a pretty safe bet that they will follow the link and land on your site.
Provided that you are for real, and not just trying to play “bait and switch” on people (unfortunately, there are more than just a few individuals with no ethics that will try to take advantage of innocent people clicking around on Yahoo! Answers too), you will have earned the person’s trust after that visit to your web site: and trust lies at the heart of your ability to earn and retain that person’s loyalty and/or business (if you are selling a product/service).
Before you head out and start answering people’s questions on Yahoo! Answers, make sure to read this very useful tutorial on how to do this in more detail.
A while back, I was thinking of writing a short post summarizing what is Link Popularity. After all, along with the concept of Search Engine Optimization, the development of Link Popularity is the other element that is critical in obtaining top results when users conduct searches using Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.
Today I encountered an amazing compilation of knowledge around the topic of PageRank in Smashing Magazine. Though PageRank basically is employed by Google to determine the ranking of your page (deep, huh?) the concepts outlined in the (very long) post about this topic apply across the board and should serve as a comprehensive reference of things to do and avoid, to accomplish higher Link Popularity.
If you are wondering what the Link Popularity for your site is like, try the Link Popularity Check tool from MarketLeap.
This week, another high profile purchase by Google was announced: they’ve picked up Feedburner for $100M.
Obviously that’s going to be good for Google, but also good for advertisers and blogs/sites on Google’s content search network, because more eyeballs will be exposed to Google Ads, which should obviously increase the clickthrough rate (Google cash machine making “PING!” here)… and hopefully result in more conversions for sites using AdWords. YEEPPEE!!! 
(by way of ALD)
I was reading about the Hot Trends product from Google. They display the hottest current searches in close to real time. This is combining the best of Google Zeitgest with Google Trends and taking them both for a spin.
I wish they offered this type of functionality for their AdWords Keyword Tool, but maybe that will come down the line. I guess the ability for us to effectively target tail terms in real time is not far away.
You bet they should!
I was reading this post by Andrew Faulkner in Fadtastic and couldn’t help to stop and share my two cents. Essentially, he’s wondering about the cases where “over-optimizing” a site for it to be Search Engine-friendly, which renders it almost unusable.
I agree with his point, but this is the case indeed of over-SEO’d sites (sites where so much emphasis is placed on Search Engine Optimization practices, that the user experience goes down the drain). However, like I commented on his blog, a site created with the user in mind, coupled with a solid link popularity, will do fine (in my experience) with Search Engine rankings. Over-SEO’d sites are simply not natural and therefore do not result in a user-friendly (usable) experience. So I do think that usability and SEO are not mutually exclusive.
As a matter of fact, I recall a Google Senior Engineering Manager (her name escapes me), at a Search Engines Strategies conference a couple of years ago, say that, for a given keyword, Google’s algorithm will rank higher sites designed with people in mind (meaning, sites that are text-rich, relevant to keyword being searched, with just about enough content -not too much, not too little-, etc.)
I am now heading down to Miami to deliver a Search Engine Marketing training session (more specifically on PPC). If you have a need to get up to speed with Search Engine Optimization, paid campaigns or any of these important topics to have your web site come up among the top choices when potential visitors search for your products or services on Google or Yahoo!, contact us.
I will be back on Sunday… most importantly, with the FAMILY!! They are coming back from their trip. I am beyond happy!
A while back, I wrote about making Flash web sites searcheable. At the time I wrote about this, I was unaware of a concept called SWF Objects.
As described by the creator of the idea, in essence what SWF Objects does is:
Prepare an HTML element that will hold our Flash movie. The content placed in the ‘holder’ element will be replaced by the Flash content, so users with the Flash plug-in installed will never see the content inside this element. This feature has the added bonus of letting search engines index your alternate content.
So there goes an incredibly Search Engine-friendly way to deal with Flash sites, besides the previously discussed tips.
See SWF Objects in action in the Schematic web site, where Geoff Stearns (the guy who posted about it and one of its creators) used to work until this week… he’s moving to San Fran to work with Google.
Google says so: it must be true! Right? Not so fast.
The most recent example of a so-called “Googlebomb” granted him this highly coveted status by having lots and lots of people link to this page using the words “Greatest Living American“.
Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan was surprised to see this happen, because a “fix” made to the Google Rank algorithm earlier in the year was supposed to have made this impossible for pages that weren’t relevant to the terms being linked, and Colbert’s page only contained the term “American” on it, but not the words “greatest” or “living”, which means it should have not ranked that well for the combination of the three terms. So it’s ranking indeed was fundamentally based solely on link popularity.
Not what everyone will tell you in Search Engine Optimization class, but… Who knows? It’s Google’s algorithm: maybe they love Colbert!