Category Archives: Inbound Marketing

Wearing the mask of a few classifications, Inbound Marketing is the art of getting found, converting and analyzing for lead generation. Still with all written it remains misunderstood in the realm of marketing. I hope to guide you to better understanding and solutions.

Creating a Competitor Advantage with Your Content

1- Decide what is the article’s primary “keyword theme” that you are targeting (as a basis of writing your article)
– write that down
– include secondary keywords or themes that are relative to the primary
– if you are stuck, use the “keyword planner tool” to help generate ideas
– keep these keywords and themes close as you contemplate your article. They should be included frequently without appearing “spammy”(recommendation: at least 3X)

Continue reading Creating a Competitor Advantage with Your Content

SEO your YouTube! 2013 – The Complete Guide

Welcome back, I’ve got a few tips on how the big boys make the best of their Youtube videos by providing plenty of SEO opportunities to each video. While the YouTube front is always changing, there are some basic areas that you can provide a pretty good round of SEO to each video to provide avenues for more traffic to your hub site.

Youtube has been listed as the second largest search engine. Which means you can potentially get more traffic from Youtube than Bing / Yahoo!

To start off, there is no better way to drive this idea home than YouTube’s own advice!
Check out the image from Youtube’s suggestion. If this isn’t a hint, I don’t know what is!

optimized

A great followup piece of advice also comes form Youtube’s advice on thumbnails! Continue reading SEO your YouTube! 2013 – The Complete Guide

Does Crowd Ignite Work? Do Traffic Exchanges Work?

I’ve been testing out different “traffic exchange” systems to monitor the results thru Google analytics. Now for those who are new to these things, “Crowd Ignite” is not the only player in town, but in my opinion, one of the better. I don’t run them on “this” site, but am running it on another.

How they work is that you include their widget on your site and it displays the type of content that you specify (thru settings etc…such movies, sports, politics, etc).

The thumbnails link to other sites that pass thru “Crowd Ignite” first. As you send traffic (people clicking on the thumbnail links), “Crowd Ignite” sends back a %150 to 700% referral return rate of click backs (it registers your pages and promotes them on other sites the same way).

This can also be monitored thru your account with them.
It can also be verified thru your Google analytics referrals

It’s worth nothing that it takes about 3-4 days before the return rate has ramped up. This is due to them flagging you in the system and including some of your pages .

Now the traffic that they send back can vary but you should expect tier 1 or tier 2 style traffic. Since its actual readers clicking on article links, its not shady like a “auto-surfing” site may be (also “auto surfing” referrals will get your Adsense account banned (no really…it will!)

I’ve done some testing with and without the widget activated to see how it would effect things. I did notice that quite a bit of referrals noted in Google Analytics were coming from “Crowd Ignite”. This is a good thing. (it was actually 2nd to Google itself) Continue reading Does Crowd Ignite Work? Do Traffic Exchanges Work?

SEO Over Optimization Warnings – Steps to Take in 2012


SEO continues to get more specific and a bit harder the case of SERPs and gaining leverage. In many respects its becoming the Web that we wished for, for so many years. Though as SEO’s that means we need to wear our hats a little differently and be willing to nut-up to the changes.

The titles continue to roll in:

OVER OPTIMIZATION TO BE PENALIZED IN FAVOR OF GREAT CONTENT

What does this mean, and what are the solutions? Well if you’ve been keeping to the MO that has been preached for years, this means that if you are a great content creator…and fill your pages with valuable, semantic, relative content….you should be just fine.

If you’ve been using shortcuts to implore clever SEO tactics in the effort to overshadow lousy or small inadequate content, then this article is for you. Let’s take a look at whats being said:

Google has announced that they will be cracking down harder on sites that use SEO to the extreme without really offering value. This change includes “penalty” targeting sites that over optimize. The stated purpose is to “level the playing field” Continue reading SEO Over Optimization Warnings – Steps to Take in 2012

The Death of 1 Page SEO Sites


Sure you know the scoop by now. Pick out your keywords, grab a handfull or more of keyword URL domains and plant your seed sites into ground. The MO for this was, by doing this you claim important keyword traffic with a site URL that is also called your target keyword. Makes Sense?

I believe the technical term for this approach is called “One-Page Doorway Domains

So here’s the skinny. That worked for awhile and on few instances still works to some level. Though this, like any SEO tactic stars to become oversaturated, predictable and less effective.

Why? Because the SERPS also make adjustments to demand more from their sites.

Matt Cutts of Google delivers what appears to be bad news for mini-sites

According to the post, Google is once again changing their algorithm to penalize sites that “don’t have much content “above-the-fold”.

“In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.” Continue reading The Death of 1 Page SEO Sites

SEO: How to Extract Common keywords from Google Analytics?

SEO – Extreme Keyword Analysis
Extracting phrases and common words to better format your pages

At some point, if you are a serious SEO your gonna want to dig a little deeper into data to see how your web page efforts are going.

The process I’ve used actually requires 2 bits of free software
01- Google Analytics account (with adequate amount of data to analyze)

02- A FREE piece of software called “Primitive Word Counter”

and Excel

Now I will say that upon looking for keyword extraction software I had almost given up. Though at the zero hour I found exactly what I needed to make a SEO overview of one of my clients sites.

So lets get into the process:

___________________________________

GOOGLE ANALYTICS PORTION:

01- Open your Google Analytics account (of website you are analyzing)
02- Go into “traffic sources–>Keywords
03- Change the date range to at least a year’s worth
(this will be under the drop down the upper right “date” are of GA)

Now at this point you’ll want to make note of how many total keywords were used- write this number down
04- Go to the top URL and change the portion that says Continue reading SEO: How to Extract Common keywords from Google Analytics?

Prepping HD Video (High Definition) for Facebook and Youtube:

There are few tutorials on the web, that give more detailed info on using software to prep HD video.
If you know how to use a video program such as “Premiere“, “AfterEffects” or “Final Cut Pro“, your really going to need the proper settings that are recognized by the social media sites.

In simple form, the output video should be:

– 1920 x 1080

– H.264 (codec compression)

– Audio 44 (AAC)

– Stereo

– size kept under 1 GB

Once you have this file formatted in this output, as you upload to YouTube of Face book, the site uploader will recognize your file as HD.

Usually this is also indicated by the pull downs on the video that show different sizes to play it by.
In YouTube….the 4 arrow icon should now default to HD on play (full screen)

In Face book…it has a similar operation but in essence it will automatically add that little [HD] symbol Continue reading Prepping HD Video (High Definition) for Facebook and Youtube: