Wow, it has been almost two months since I posted. Why? I am not exactly sure. It must be summer. What have I been working on?
Well lots of stuff. But what have I been thinking about?
Home Improvement SEO
What I have been thinking about are Niches of SEO. We have multiple websites that focus on various niches, such as real estate, travel, food, and home improvement. Since I have these niche sites, I have decided to focus on these areas from an SEO perspective. So for example our home improvement site, which does have some home improvement articles and home improvement info, I will now focus on doing blog posts that put some SEO type info that include info on how other home improvement webmasters can optimize their sites to improve their results. So maybe some home improvement company owners will find some useful info, and realize how time consuming SEO is, and request a proposal for our Home Improvement SEO services. I have already started out contacting these types of sites via Twitter and Facebook.
Restaurant SEO
For our restaurant review site, I would like to be seen as an authority in the field of resaurant SEO, so I have started adding articles for restaurant owners that will help with their online marketing. Restaurants, much like Home Improvement contractors, should be more concerned with their local search results. Restaurants don’t necessarily need to rank in the natural listings, but do need to show up in the local listings. We can help them with that for sure.
Travel SEO
For our travel site, we will be positioning ourselves as an authority in the travel seo field. We are already getting some traffic for the term Travel SEO. The blog currently has some articles which are aimed at travel agents who would like to increase their marketing. But I believe I can do more than help travel agents. This SEO niche, would seem to be the one that has the most potential. Travel SEO clients could include hotels, airlines, restaurants at popular vacation destinations, destination travel bureaus, hospitality industry web advertising agencies that do not have in-house SEO staff, resorts, and more.
First, we have already positioned ourselves as a reputable SEO firm. Secondly, we have the sites, which we can use to focus on these other SEO niches. Third we need to spread the word and get more clients in the focus niches.
My efforts as the Social Media Director will be to make contacts with potential clients via Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, by using tactics such as those discussed by our former intern in Using LinkedIN, Twitter and Facebook to to find a Job.
I will be using the rule of 8 touches and tracking my efforts by noting dates and times of contact.
Next, I am in the process of creating landing pages on Baldydog.com for the three SEO Niches, and I will then build some links to the said landing pages, which should help them in the SERPs for these SEO terms which should be far less competitive than SEO terms such as SEO, SEO company, SEO contractor, SEO firm, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimization Company and the like.
So, what is your seo niche, and how can I help you?
You can check out this TechCrunch article which gives several methods for embedding links. If you decide to use Blackbird Pie, be sure not to use the https version of your tweet links. Also, you must click on the time link below the Tweet which says something like “about 1hr ago” and copy and paste that link into the Blackbird tool to get an embedded tweet like the one on this post.
Other Twitter Stuff
You do know that many of the search engines are using Twitter results for part of their real time search results right? Well tweets do often show up in the SERPs.
Something that makes me go hmm
As you may or may not know, as part of the Baldydog.com company, we not only do SEO, but I as the Social Media Director, do manage several other blogs.
In addition to all the blogs, as part of the Baldydog network, we have multiple sites to include directories such as Pixelheadonline, Online Legal Directory, Home Improvement Directory, and of course Alltravelsites.com to name just a few. If you want a complete list of our directories, leave a comment, and I will send you an email with the complete list of our directories.
Anyway, while reviewing and publishing travel site submissions on the travel directory, as part of the submission process, I usually send out several tweets about the newly added travel resource. I usually say something like the tweet below.
I also send out a tweet with the individual page for the listing and may include a direct link to the url of the listing if it is a short url.
Link Building Tip
What I have noticed is that links that I tweet, such as individual listing pages, will then be cached in Google. If I don’t Tweet them, they won’t get cached, and as you know, an un-cached page is as good as invisible to Google because it doesn’t know about the web page.
Does this mean you should go and send thousands of spam links to Twitter so they get cached? I wouldn’t recommend it. I think it is ok occasionally. What I try to do when I do these types of “resource addition” tweets, is to sandwich them between tweets that seek to share, communicate, rt, or be genuinely helpful.
Even these types of tweets, I feel are helpful and not spammy, as I am only tweeting about travel related resources, and most of the 2000+ followers have some sort of travel interest.
So How Can You Use Twitter for Link Buiding
Twitter links as you know are nofollow type links, so they really don’t count for much Google Juice, but they do serve to notify the search engines of your resource, which may otherwise have been uncached.
If you do link building as we do, when you get accepted into a directory, send out a Tweet for the actual listing page of your resource or the category page that your listing appears if it is not too heavily populated with other similar resources.
Try to get as many cached links pointing to your site as possible. Cached with PR is better, but cached at the very least.
So have you noticed similar results using Twitter, or do you think I am erroneous?
**note – to get the box around my tweets, I put the tweets into a table. <table border=”2″><tr><td>Tweet code</table></tr></td>
This year, as many believe, including myself, you are going to see a huge increase in the number of smart phones that, much like my iPhone, will be able to access the internet from the palm of your hand. New data plans are becoming available all the time that are well within the budget of many.
You know when you do a search in Google and you put in a location modifyer, and the local listings appear at the top of the page. These are the listings that will appear on the cell phone screen of the user looking for local businesses such as restaurants, shops, Chiropractors, gargages, etc..the idea is, you want to be sure to be on the Google map and as close to the top position on those listings as possible.
Tag Clouds, what the heck are tag clouds you might ask? Well if you look over in the sidebar you will see the tag cloud for this site.
Tag clouds are generally alphabetically ordered lists of tags that make a visual representation of the overall content on a a website. Words or tags that are represented more often on a site are listed with darker and larger text. Since many of my posts are about SEO, the SEO tag is the biggest and darkest.
When writing posts, each post is “tagged” with representative keywords. And the more often a tag is used, the bigger and darker that tag will become in the tag cloud.
On the way home from my recent trip to Amarillo TX, I discovered Cherry Mash, which is a very unique candy that is only available in the mid west at this point in time. I made the Cherry Mash video below to get the word out about the tasty candy that has an almos cult like following in the mid-west.
Thanks to Chris the Video Production intern for filming the video and whose video skills far out way my own. I am sure Chris was not satisfied with the quality of the video, but I have a policy of only doing my home made videos in one take, after all I am only an amatuer.
Cherry Mash Needs SEO
Looking at the CherryMash site, I realize the candy site is a bit dated, but I also noticed that they have a PR5 on the Cherry Mash History page, and they also rank well for a few of their target keywords.
CherryMash.com Stats
8.5 years old
96 backlinks showing
canocilization issues – no
cached pages with www- 35
cached pages without www- 35
Sample Keywords
Cherry Flavored Candy-Google (1) , 18,100 searches/mo …less than 110 searches /mo for this keyword phrase
Cherry Candy-Google (1 and 2)…around 18100 searches/mo for this phrase
Peanut Brittle- Google (NF +50) …appr. 49,500 searches/mo for this phrase
Why is CherryMash.com a good Candidate for SEO
Cherrymash.com is has a really high PR, and is somewhat of an authority in the candy industry, having somewhat of a cult following. It seems to be a candy that you either love it or hate it. Those who love it, it seems often have a hard time locating the cherry flavored candy. I read online that they often have recipes that involve Cherry Mash as the primary key ingriedent.
Since it does have such a high PR and is over 8 years old, it would respond well in the SERPs if it were to undergo an SEO campaign.
To get a larger portion of Candy market share, they should expand their internet influence to other keyword areas.
A great way to promote your online business is via article marketing. This involves writing articles to submit to article directories. Learning how to write articles to promote your internet based business will be an invaluable skill to have.
It’s a straight forward process. You write good articles on your niche and include a bio with a link or two back to your site in the resource box. Then you submit these articles to article directories.
The quality of your article will determine how much traffic you receive and whether Google and other search engines are impressed. It is recommended that the articles you submit to article directories are newly written. With other words avoid re-using the same articles from your site.
Although it is good to write articles on your particular topic or niche in which you are marketing, it is better to approach the articles you wish to submit using a more broader approach.
As an example, if your blog income is based on marketing a particular diet product your articles could be on the broader topic of living a healthy life. Your aim is to attract a larger readership base than just those who might be interested in the product you are selling.
Article directories have a stream of readers interested in a range of topics. Your articles end up being read a surprising number of times.
But what is even better than the number of readers it that it your articles are read over a long period of time. This is contrary to a blog where mostly the newest articles receive the immediate traffic. Thereafter articles are at the mercy of search engines to receive further air time.
Each time your article is read you have the chance that the reader might be interested enough to click on the link to your site which is shown in the resource box at the end of the article. This allows for a possible constant stream of traffic to your site.
Besides the regular readers who use article directories for information or entertainment, article directories are also used by non-writing website and blog owners to source articles for their sites.
They are allowed to use them on their own sites in exchange for including your bio with live links. As a source of links this can be invaluable. And it requires no further effort on behalf of the internet marketer.
However, probably the most valuable part of this exercise and what makes it really worthwhile for internet marketers to submit articles to directories is the backlink the directory itself provides to your own site.
Most of the well established article directories such as Ezinearticles or Go Articles have a high PageRank. Having a link back from their site to your blog or website has high value for you the internet marketer.
Learning how to write articles for submission to directories is an excellent marketing strategy for the internet marketer. As an article writers who is developing an online business with the aid of good content you will certainly miss out on a golden opportunity if you do not make this part of your marketing strategy. Read more at The Digital Archives.
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