Ning came out with a new app that will make your social network hum like a bee hive — Facebook integration. It will allow your network members at Ning to add their content to Facebook very easily, thus introducing your Ning network to all of their Facebook connections. That could be pretty sweet, especially if your Ning network is very active.
I just added the app to the Blogging4Boomers Ning network, and it’s a breeze. If you’re the Ning administrator, you just log in and go to Manage. You’ll quickly see a Facebook icon, and when you click on it, Facebook comes up. You fill in some basic information and you’re good to go!
A little while back Ning allowed administrators to connect to Twitter, as well.
Tying all of your content together through several social networks can be very powerful. You can Tweet something from your Ning site that invites your Twitter followers, people who may never have known about your social site at Ning, too.
Set up a social site for your niche at Ning. It’s free, and easy, and if your niche is one where there’s a lot of activity, you could come away with a pretty powerful social vehicle for traffic. The Blogging4Boomers Ning site was set up as a kind of forum for my members there, but anyone can join. You can see and join us at http://blogging4boomers.ning.com/
Ha… I didn’t invent that work, a couple of guys from Google named Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski did. In this video they answer some really good questions from users of Google Analytics. I’ll bet you learn something!
At Overcome Everything I work with some of the smartest people in the world of Internet marketing, and it’s an honor just to be part of that team. Each of the members of the staff are brilliant in their own ways, but I have to say that Kyle Battis, our marketing and affiliate manager, isn’t just a great guy, he’s really, really smart about marketing and I learn from him every single day. You should check out his stuff: Easy Traffic Steps (with Tellman and Mike Purvis) and My First Teleseminar are two of his products, and both are awesome!
But I’m not writing this to sell you his products (though if you buy them, of course I get some dough).
I’m writing to tell you about this really cool list that Kyle turned me on to. If you’ve been around the IM beat a while, you have undoubtedly heard of Marketing Sherpa, right? It’s an awesome site, so if you haven’t been there and want to learn some really, really cool stuff… go to http://MarketingSherpa.com and check it out.
Anne Holland, one of the founders of Marketing Sherpa, created another cool site and the list I mentioned above… continue reading »
Did you know that approximately 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE? Think about it… That’s a LOT of video. Talk about breaking the Web, eh? If anything can do it, video can. But that’s highly doubtful. And video is becoming the most popular form of surfing. From ten to ninety-seven, everyone seems to really love YouTube. When there’s nothing to do, or when you’re in a bad mood, finding some hilarious stuff on the site certainly changes your daily picture.
Remember, Americans love TV, and YouTube and video sites like it, have definitely changed the way we see the Web.
But how do you optimize video for search? Spiders can’t parse video yet, right? So, what can you do?
It’s basically the same as it would be for any web page. Have a KILLER title and description. That’s number one. Your title can be based on something that already gets a lot of views on YouTube or something you make up, but it should definitely have a keyword in it that people are searching for. And the title shouldn’t be too long. Remember that Google only shows 65 characters in your SERPs listing, so keeping your video title to 65 characters or less is a good rule of thumb. continue reading »
Just set up a free account using your Twitter ID and bingo! They do the rest. They take your followers, the people you follow, and your posts to Twitter and create the newspaper out of them. You don’t really have to do anything but send traffic.
Today, I was over at Digital Point, checking out what was going on and there’s a big discussion of a page rank update. People are complaining that their page ranks went up or down for no apparent reason, and it’s freaking them out.
But you know, … Does it really matter?
Here’s what matters: Your site showing up in the results pages. That’s what matters.
I’ve said this before: Page rank is a way for Google to play with your head.
If you have PR6, Google decides it hates paid linking and BOOM! PR0. Happened last year.
If you have a PR3, it’s better than a PR2… why? You have no more listings today than you did yesterday. Who cares?
What you should watch and care about are these things: continue reading »
I trusted my SEOQuake add-on for Firefox to tell me about Twitter. It was showing that I had links coming back from my profile and that they were “do follow” links, when ehhhhhhh…. (See http://ovblogger.com/1694/google-ranks-twitter-profiles/)
Someone questioned me on this, and so, I went into the page source for my Twitter profile page and there you see it [rel="nofollow"] right in the code.
Somebody shoot me.
Everything I wrote in that Twitter post is wrong. Don’t use your Twitter page for sending links anywhere because the spiders can’t follow them. So, it really doesn’t matter if your page is a PR10, it doesn’t help.
But here’s the thing that will be cool: The most visitors you get to your Twitter profile and the higher your page rank goes, the higher your profile page will go int the SERPs. You ‘ll get traffic to your links just because people want to find out more about you. So…
Tweet away. Don’t go nuts thinking that you’ll get link juice from Twitter, though, because it just ain’t going to happen.
Grr… SEOQuake. I really like that add-on, but if I have to go back and double check everything it tells me… ppfffftttt!!!
What’s the first thing you think when you hear Web 2.0? I’ll bet I can guess… It’s one of two things — Facebook or Twitter, right?
Well, those two sites are definitely at the forefront when it comes to Web 2.0 properties, and they’re totally worth the effort of maintaining presence in both places. But I have a very POWERFUL weapon in the Web 2.0-verse that you may not be thinking about — social content sites.
These are great places to pop some content into for various reasons:
Each place has a different audience of regulars, and so you’re meeting new people to further your brand
Each place provides a social element that the article directories just don’t have
Each place will give you links back to your website, even if they’re only linking back from your profile
… and each place is really worth working into your traffic routine. Maybe you can’t afford to submit to them constantly, and that makes sense. It’s too hard to do everything at once. But what about adding one article a month to each place? That’s totally doable, and will definitely help you with SEO.
I’ve done some advertising with Google AdWords, but it usually ended up being more expensive than it was worth. Oh sure, I got optins and sales, but they were either break-even or only marginally profitable. I don’t have that “special code,” I’m afraid. It takes a lot of trial and error to make it work really well than I have to spend at this point. I mean, I know I can make it if I focus on it and nothing else. But remember, I work for Tellman.
But…
Working for him has its perks. Well, lots of them actually, not to mention he’s a great guy. (In case you don’t know, he’s running across the country for Homeless Teens and well… in his bare feet. Pretty cool… go donate at http://RunTellmanRun.com. It’s a very worthy cause, and well… bare feet, people!)
Anyway… Tellman got me to go through Frank Kern and his cousin Trey’s “Screw Google” course, and I have to say that it’s great! It’s short enough to run through in a few hours, and the information inside is easy to follow and really spot on. It’s typical Frank Kern style, of course, and he’s one of the LEAST boring people to watch no matter what he’s doing. He just has that kind of personality that makes you smile. (It’s a no-brainer that he and Trey are cousins, either. They even sound alike. Both of them are good at teaching and keeping things light.)
The course is based on PPC advertising with Yahoo, and I have to tell you that after having worked the AdWords stuff for OE and myself, I find Yahoo to be 1) less anal and 2) far less expensive. My most expensive click to date has been around 12 cents. Plus, I’m getting tons of optins and I don’t have a mega keyword list, either. I have a very select group of keyword phrases that I’ve tested and know work for my & Tellman’s product, Spider Language, which (in case you don’t hang here regularly) is a basic course on SEO. continue reading »
You’d think that “perfect” things would be valued, right? But news flash! None of us is perfect, no matter how hard we try. Really.
And spiders know that about us wily humans. They have a filter in their algorithm that says… “Hey wait! This is too perfect and humans are nowhere near as smart as us, so Ehhh!!! This page is being manipulated to make us think humans can be perfect. As if that would ever happen.”
What classifies as over-optimization?
One thing that’s a dead giveaway is keyword stuffing. If your keyword density is unusually high, that’s just a red flag. Don’t let it get over about 2%, three at the very highest.
Something else that will get your site dropping like a stone in the results is duplicate content. If you put an article on the front of your site, and the same thing hidden somewhere inside and you see that your site took a nosedive in the SERPs (search engine results pages)… that’s the problem! Spiders sniff that stuff out like bad Limburger cheese — easily.
And never use hidden text to get every one of your 500 keywords into the page. Dumb move! Spiders can’t see color. They see your text that isn’t hidden to them and they’ll know that you just added a list of keywords that have no value. Duh.
