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In some instances a site will gain so many natural links that little else matters in the grand scheme of ranking.  Let’s take a look at a handful of summer blockbuster movie sites to see what kind of attention, if any, was paid to their on-site SEO efforts.  And, more importantly, a close look at where they rank and if a lack of attention to on-site SEO matters much in the world of blockbuster movie sites. (more…)

Believe it or not, new people join the search marketing world every day.  Frankly, that scares me a little bit.  It’s not the competition or the potential loss of business that scares me, but the sources people are relying on to give them the “right” information.  That said, here are the top 6 most classic SEO articles that I suggest anyone new to the industry read.  And then read again.  Some things in SEO/SEM world haven’t changed much…and a refresher is always a good idea. (more…)

A personal brand used to be a luxury. It was for the Scobles of the world and something us normal folk didn’t need to worry about. Those days are gone. Today, building and protecting your personal brand is a necessity.

Your personal brand is your image on the Web. It’s the result of your established authority, attention, Google trust and the ever-so-slight manipulation on your part to ensure the best visions of you are getting the most attention. Building and protecting your personal brand is one of the most important things you can do to further your career and public persona. It’s even more important now that your Google Profile is ranking right up there with the one you created on LinkedIn. Thanks, Google.
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Analytics is a current hot topic among website owners.  Analytics provides measures or metrics to allow a website owner to evaluate the performance of their website.  When visitors move around the Internet they leave very detailed footprints.  With the right software you can analyze these footprints and understand better where the visitors have gone and what they did.

An immediate problem is that there is too much data on where visitors traveled to.  How can you ensure you use your time well on this potentially huge analysis?  A related problem is that analytics only produces data on visitors who arrive at your website.  Those who almost arrived but did not enter the website are not recorded.  This article will discuss the most effective way of using your time to spot problems with your website. (more…)

Everyone talks about using social media to connect with their customers and fans and engaging in deeper relationships and conversations. When meetings are done and it’s time to put the work, time, and energy where the buzzwords are, few companies are doing it, and even fewer are doing it well. One company who is doing it well is Starbucks. There are several elements to Starbucks strategy and in this article we’ll take a look at some of them. (more…)

Typically when building websites that target local markets most publishers, use population and income data to decide which areas to focus on. Getting access to this data is often very cumbersome and time consuming and will often miss important markets you might not have considered.
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No matter how much we can be frustrated with Digg nonexistent customer support and powered-by-few story selection, we can’t ignore the site.

Why? If you are an Internet marketer, you need to know what’s hot online. If you are a link baiter, you need to know what appeals to the public. If you are a blogger, you need constant stream of news and inspiration. And if you are a social media marketer, you need to be connected to power Diggers.

So accept this, Digg is still useful and monitoring it helps a lot (I wanted to say “is a must” but then thought many successful online marketers can still do without it, so not a must but very helpful).

With the huge number of stories submitted and categories to track it is not easy to monitor Digg and spend minimum time for that. So let me share just a few most useful tools that save time but allow you to keep an eye on Digg activity:

DiggTop

DiggTop (runs on Adobe AIR). What I really love about the tool is that:

• You can save time by not clicking through: you can get a summary of each story by clicking on it; you can also Digg the story and load associated images right within the tool.

• It has a plenty of options to configure for better monitoring and notifications:

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Twitter is recognized as one of the best viral marketing tools. So if you have a good post you think might go viral, Twitter is your best bet to attract people’s and ‘linkers’ attention to it.

One of the most important steps in turning Twitter into an effective viral marketing tool is to make the sharing process “smooth” – and a good Twitter button inviting nicely to spread the word can be highly effective.

Buttons That Encourage Readers to Tweet Your Posts

Wordpress Plugins

Tweet this! is a fairly popular WordPress plugin that lets users easily Tweet each post of the blog. It works like any social bookmarking button that allows to share a story with two clicks. It re-directs you to your Twitter home page and redirects a Tweet containing the post title and link; all you have to do is to click “Update”:

It also includes support for Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. (more…)

While there are plenty of paid tools out there that can be used to tackle a variety of SEO tasks, there are also a number of free tools that are useful, as well.  Many of the free tools have been developed by some of the best SEO minds in the industry and each has its own strengths and advantages.

Let’s start with some basics…these tools assess very basic aspects of on-site SEO and don’t require a lot of explanation. That said, the basics are still important and using the right tools to get a quick overview of a site’s on-site SEO is important.

Meta Tag Analyzer from SEOCentro – quick snapshot of a page’s META tag lengths, relevancy to page content, anchor text of links and other useful basics.

Keyword Density Analysis Tool from We Build Pages – while the importance of keyword density is hotly contested in SEO circles, it’s still a good idea to know the keyword density is of a page…if for no other reason than to know if you’re being “spammy”.

SEO Browser – see your site like the search engines see it…no layout, no graphics, just the down and dirty content that they can index.  Very useful.

Website Grader from HubSpot – a quick and very high level overview of a site’s overall search engine friendliness. It doesn’t provide much actionable information for SEO industry insiders, but for site owners it will provide a great snapshot and provide them with some valuable information regarding what goes into a search engine friendly website. (more…)

If you are an avid Twitterer, you must be using some third-party application to send and receive Tweets. However this doesn’t mean you don’t ever enter Twitter web interface. The following Twitter Greasemonkey plugins will encourage you to do that more often and will make your Twittering experience enjoyable.

Note: since Twitter redirects /home page to /timeline/home now, you will have to manually edit the URL of the scripts sometimes. For this right-click the Greasemonkey icon in the status bar, choose “Manage User Scripts”, choose the script that is supposed to work on your Twitter home page, select the URL and change it to /timeline/home*

Integrate:

Twitter Search Results on Google: this script displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are search for, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page:

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