We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Social media marketing or SMM is an important component to search engine optimization. By placing your quality content on social media websites you improve the chance of attracting new visitors and increase the number of links to your site. This is definitely a marketing win-win.

Social Content sites that allow you to freely submit user generated content or UGC and create mini websites

• WordPress.com
• Squidoo.com
• Ning.com
• www.blogHi.com
• www.Hubpages.com
• www.Xanga.com
• www.Gather.com
• www.Ziki.com

List of Web 2.0 and social bookmarking websites that allow you to tag, categorize and share websites. Many of these sites will show up in search engine results pages and drive direct search engine traffic to your website.

• del.icio.us, digg, reddit, stumbleupon.com, Technorati.com
• backflip, bibsonomy, blinklist, diigo, furl, spurl, ma.gnolia.com
• rawsugar, simpy, wink, de.lirio.is, del.icio.us, digg, reddit
• shoutwire, propeller, web2list, bloghop, blinkbits, fark, linkagogo
• wirefan, ka-boom-it, swik.net, faves.com, netvouz.com, mister-wong.com, jumptags
• danogo, buddymarks, lilisto.com, tagtooga, tellfriends.com

Active social media sites used by heavy web users and high profile UGC creators

• Twitter.com
• Clipmarks.com
• Bumpzee.com

By using online social networks to your advantage you can reach an otherwise overlooked market for your products and services. SMM also helps you obtain natural links from high quality, well trafficked websites.

Hitwise has released a blog post detailing the consequences of a google blacklist. The UK car insurance site gocompare.com was

Chart showing the demise of gocompare after it lost the #1 position for its top performing keyword in the UK search engine results pages

At this point I have no clear evidence of gocompares sins, but they appear to have been purchasing copious links. View backlinks in Yahoo.

I’m not sure what GoCompare did to spite the google gods, but they gave their competitors an early christmas gift. Other websites in the same sector saw mammoth traffic increases.

GoCompare received only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ during the week ending 9th February, which is an 87% decrease from week ending 26th Jan when it held the #1 natural position on Google… searches for ‘car insurance’ remained constant during this period.

Traffic from the term to Confused.com (direct competitor) has increased by 77% since the 26th January, while traffic to Comparethemarket.com has tripled over the same period.

At the end of January 2008 GoCompare was the number one site receiving traffic from the term ‘car insurance’, capturing 17.49% of the all search traffic from the term, even more than the branded term ‘go compare’.

chart displaying UK marketshare for car insurance

Read more of the hitwise case study of search engine optimization gone bad and how a Google penalty can sink an unprepared company.

Here are the top 10 web properties for February 2008 according to alexa.com

Global top 10 sites

1. Yahoo
2. you tube
3. google
4. windows live
5. MSN
6. myspace
7. facebook
8. hi5
9. wikipedia
10. orkut

US top 10 sites

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. myspace
4. youtube
5. facebook
6. windows live
7. ebay
8. wikipedia
9. MSN
10. craigslist

What is impressive about these sites is the forus on social interaction and collaboration. In addition to retrieving information (from search engines) users are now uploading information to reference websites such as Wikipedia and social sites such as facebook. Neither of these sites would exist without user generated content, unlike yahoo, google, MSN etc.

user generated video market growth

Video and social networking is huge. The web is becoming a place to interact with friends, make personal connections and keep in touch with contacts.
Video and user generated content is taking over. Web users are consuming online videos at an exponentially increasing rate. The market is forecast to grow at 52% in 2008, and reach 34 billion views. YouTube added 831,147 videos to its library in 2007.

To improve your chances of being noticed: blog, create videos, podcasts and continually update website content.

Graph from MarketingCharts.com.

Checkout the new book “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions”. This was written by Tim Ash from SiteTuners.com the search engine marketing firm. This book covers the strategy and tactics of optimizing for conversions from PPC. It examines the skill-sets necessary, as well as the internal company support needed to make conversion testing a success for paid search.
How much money are you losing because of poor landing page design? In this comprehensive step-by-step guide you will learn all of the skills necessary to dramatically improve your bottom line:

• Identify mission critical landing pages & their true economic value
• Gain insight on customer decisions & make your pages friction-free
• Uncover problems with your page & decide what elements to test
• Understand the power & limitations of common tuning approaches
• Develop an action plan & get buy-in from all key players
• Avoid common real-world pitfalls that can sabotage your test

With pages of case studies, practical strategies, a detailed review of Google Website Optimizer tool, this one-of-a-kind resource will help you make your landing pages more profitable. Get this book now.

Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Wiley Press – Sybex (January 29, 2008)
ISBN-10: 0470174625
ISBN-13: 978-0470174623

I rarely link to podcasts and radio shows, but this is a particularly illuminating podcast about public relations and how to get your business and brand name mentioned in top tier publications.

Basically you need to generate relationships with editors and writers at magazines/newspapers/blogs you wish to be featured in. How do you meet these influencers? Go to events, business functions, parties and shows the writers are likely to attend.

To summarize: PRweb.com has varying degrees of success, try prleap.com instead. PRleap is cheaper and has higher signal to noise content, while prweb is spammed mercilessly. There are so many poor quality psudo press releases on prweb most writers and editors tend to ignore this as a serious source of news.

Also, help the writers do their job. If a staff writer from the New York Times contacts you with questions about a story, do some of their work for them, research the topic and let them know the results. Nothing will keep you on the top of an editors mind better than making their job easier.

Discover the importance of utilizing media kits, and press releases for better exposure with Chris Winfield from 10e20.

Listen to shoemoney talk with chris winfield about successful PR:

Webmaster Radio
	Public Relations for Websites Show: Shoemoney Show

Super bonus: get free press release submissions on the largest news distribution network online.

The title of this post is a bit misleading – I’m not advocating overusing or abusing Yahoo! Answers. YA is a fantastic resource that is the number 2 online reference site behind Wikipedia.

Yahoo claims 95 million users and 350 million questions asked. That’s a lot of answers, something that would take more than 10 million Dear Abby’s to fulfill.

As a social site, YA offers these social features: add friends to grow your network, invite friends to join Y Answers, send individual questions to friends, vote on other peoples answers, and use the built in IM. Friends on your network, have their questions displayed on your profile page. Do not treat this like Myspace, you want to pick your friends with a modicum of discretion so that you are not in any unforeseen neighborhoods.
SBS has a great writeup about Yahoo! Answers and shows his success as a power question answerer.

Bad news for the pay per click industry – all those clicks you’re getting may be worthess.

Heavy Clickers Distort Reality of Display Advertising Click-Through Metrics – Starcom, Tacoda and comScore’s “Natural Born Clickers” findings suggest “the click is dead” as go-to measurement of effectiveness for brand-building display advertising campaigns

Approximately 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs based on the comScore search engine marketing study. Hold on advertisers, it gets even worse: these clickers are not representative of the general population, most have incomes under $40K, and their clicks are not related to any offline buying. The number of clicks on an ad campaign is also not strongly correlated with brand awareness for the ads’ subject, according to the study. Advertising-supported websites such as online newspapers and video sharing sites need to carefully consider their revenue models.

More about the “heavy clickers”

heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

What is missing from this marketing press release is a clear definition the content of the ads. The article does not specify if the ads are banners, flash/rich media ads, interstitials, or videos. The article only mentions generic display ads. This ambiguity is one reason to keep a healthy dose of skepticism for statistics.

The good news about the Comscore-Tacoda research project is they have likely coined a new phrase: Heavy Clickers.

#note: hardcore search engine optimization fans will notice that this is a dead end article, with no links back to the original site. This is a fantastic piece of linkbait that is drawing a lot of mentions, including from TC & slashdot, and the page is a link sink. Unless Starcom creates links back to their core website, much of this viral traffic spike will be lost.

This is a huge missed SEO opportunity for Starcom. Maybe a savvy SEO will pitch them on their optimization services.

Michael Robertson has created a wiki for companies that shows financing and deals for startup companies. This wiki allows users to enter venture capital financing rounds, company sales, IPO’s and mergers & acquisitions.

You can view a list of all startup companies and read press releases not created by corporate PR. Dealipedia lets you get facts on small companies without having to read through long winded text by written by eager marketing departments.
See where Mr. Robertson made $115 million from the sale of mp3.com.

US Flag and state of American support for the war in Iraq.

see more flags of Angola, Brazil, China, Colombia, European Union and more

Sky High Auctions is an Ebay auction education program that teaches e-bay sellers how to maximize online profits.
The Sky High Auctions JV Launch Page launches one of the most comprehensive guide to making money from eBay ever created.

This auction education program shows internet marketers how to use ebay as their private e-commerce shop. They have conducted exclusive interviews with eBay powersellers who show on video how to:

* Make money selling $2.99 ebooks
* Make backend sales from selling ebooks on eBay
* Use eBay marketplace research tools to uncover profitable markets which can be profitable in adsense and other affiliate markets.
* How to use eBay to sell affiliate products. One of the guys interviewed is good at setting up jvs with product owners and sells them and earns affiliate commissions.
* There are also bonus interviews with well known internet marketers -> Mark Joyner on time management, Mike Filsaime on email marketing and viral marketing, and Ewen Chia on making money in the “make money online” market.

Sky High Auctions will be launching on 6th March 2008 at 11am. The affiliate program is by invitation only and we will be paying $100 per sale you generate.
Why promote Sky High Auctions?

* Over 1,000,000 people earning a living on eBay.
* Sky High Auctions is one of the few courses (if not the ONLY course) teaching how to make a full-time living from eBay.
* Over 26 hours of video lessons, written notes, interviews with eBay powersellers, and more.
* As an invited JV Partner, you’ll receive a complimentary copy of Sky High Auctions so you can evaluate it yourself!
* Affiliates earn $100 per sale. The product sells for a very reasonable $167 (introductory price).

Launch Competition — $5000+ in cash prizes!

From the 6th March to 13th March, view the launch competition. Send traffic to Sky High Auctions and you could walk away with some extra cash in your pocket.

JV Leaderboard Prize Awards:
1st: $3000
2nd: $1500
3rd: $1000
4th: $700
5th: $500
6th: $200
7th: $200
8th: $200
9th: $200
10th: $200