Archive for July, 2009

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Viral Videos: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Friday, July 31st, 2009

How valuable is traffic to you? Let’s say, hypothetically, you received a million visitors to your site in a couple days. Could you benefit? Your answer is likely a resounding, YES! One of the avenues businesses are exploring to accomplish this feat is through the aid of viral video marketing. 

Recently Evian’s "Roller Babies" commercial was released with both US and UK versions, yielding 15 million+ views collectively on YouTube….in less than a month. With proper planning, marketing, and development they created an internet sensation. Their "Live Young" campaign has been a hit, and their dedicated website to this campaign is already a PR 3.

 

 

 
Businesses can profit from videos they don’t even produce or submit! Today on YouTube’s Biz Blog they mentioned the infamous "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" that has exploded on the web and the successes seen since the viral video’s launch on July 19th. They reported that the song featured in the video, Chris Brown’s "Forever", was claimed by the rights holders and utilized for monetization purposes. They placed Click-to-Buy links over the video, leading viewers to iTunes and Amazon to purchase the track. This has translated to a #4 spot on the iTunes singles chart and a #3 spot on Amazon’s best selling MP3 list, over a year after the songs original debut. By the way, the JK video has received over 12 million views in 11 days.

 

 

 
Businesses can also be hurt by viral videos, which is why brand management is so important. Take for example Dave Carroll’s video, "United Breaks Guitars". One day after the video was released United contacted Mr. Carroll, but it was too late. Within a short four days he had over a million views on YouTube, had the video featured on CNN, and had over 19,000 blog mentions. In this time span he successfully changed the SERPs for "United Airlines" in Google, taking over 7 of the first page slots.

 

 

 
Carroll and his band are said to be profiting quite nicely from the publicity received on the video, and others have taken advantage of the video as well. Worth noting is what Taylor Quality Guitars decided to do. They provided a video response to Carroll’s video, hopping on the bandwagon and receiving 100,000 views just simply by expressing their concern and giving a plug to their site that provides guitar travel care.

As you can see there are many good, bad, and ugly repercussions in regards to viral videos and many lessons to learn from the above videos. 1) Have good brand management, 2) content truly is king, and 3) unique ideas can and will flourish on the internet.

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Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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Posted in Video Marketing | 9 Comments »

Quality Link Building Page Hijacked!

Friday, July 24th, 2009

The Laziest SEO’s on Earth!

hijacking-hot-spotGetting spammed is something that isn’t new to us here at Vertical Measures (see our post from February "Search Engine Optimization Spam"). Spam is a big problem all over the web; how much is spam costing your company? One company provides an ROI calculator to figure out just that. Spam is not just those pesky e-mails telling you you’ve won the UK lottery, it can also come in the form of scraped content. 

Take for example one site that we found scraping our information, verbatim! This page seo-solution-delhi.blogspot.com/2009/07/quality-link-building.html is exactly how our page looks here: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/services/quality-link-building/. (Notice, we’re not linking to them, why give them extra juice?!) It appears they took our page that ranks #1 for the keywords "quality link building", and turned it into their own page. Funny thing is everything on the page still says Vertical Measures, not their company name!  But they did take the time to remove our links and insert theirs. That is about as lazy and scummy as it gets. You can tell they didn’t put much time into it: check out the SEO Service India icon on the right side of the page….with a picture of Italy?!? You’ll also be informed directly below that section that this page is protected by Copyscape….seriously.
 
missing-wheres-waldo-creative-commons-user-walknbostonSite scrapers are very common, but this was a very manual process. This lazy person basically surfed Google for the top ranking pages and scrapped them to build his site. If you cruise around the site a bit longer you’ll find that basically their whole site is stolen content. Are you one of the victims?  We found several link building & SEO companies that we know with their content posted on this site. Play a little SEO "Where’s Waldo" and see if your site’s content is getting hijacked. 
 
Google tells us just how bad duplicate content is, but what if you have no control over it? In a sense you do have some control. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not allow for copyright infringement. Google allows you to submit your information via mail or fax, and they will take it under consideration. It’s also suggested that you contact the site owner directly to ask to have the content taken down.
 

While, in this instance, we aren’t going to spend too much time trying to get the content down, it does beg the question: How far would you go to protect your content, and call out those that don’t play by the rules? 

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Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 12 Comments »

Are Your Link Building Efforts Localized?

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

When’s the last time you checked to see if your site was listed in local search engines? Hopefully it wasn’t long ago. It seems that many online businesses don’t feel like they can benefit from some local search marketing efforts, but you really can! You don’t have to live in big cities like New York or L.A. to work the community for business. Utilizing local search engines, directories, and sites like Twitter will help you grow traffic to your site, while also performing a bit of link building. 

One study shows that in 2008 local search marketing rose by 58%, reaching a whopping 15.7 billion searches for the year. Internet yellow pages are most frequently used, along with online business directories and sites that feed through information from yellow pages (like Google Maps). More and more consumers are using these sites to find products, services, and information they are looking for at the local level.
 
An important first step to getting localized is to make sure your website is set up to naturally receive localized traffic. Lisa Barone’s article "Small Business SEO: How To Launch That Web site" offers some great advice for onsite efforts. She suggests inserting ‘trust and location cues within your content’. This can be done on your home page, in your about us page, on a press page, and also on a contact us page.
 
Claiming your listing, or submitting a new listing for your location on local search engines is key. Below is a list of some great local search sites you should have your information listed on:  
 
Local.Yahoo.com: With over 13 million site visitors per month, Yahoo Local is a great place to get your site listed. Approval for most listings is very quick, about 2-4 business days.
 
Maps.Google.com: An obvious choice, Google Maps receives almost 40 million site visitors a month. Getting an approved listing will require you to wait a few days for a post card with your verification code, unless you choose to verify your listing on the phone.
 
local-search-icons1Other sites include:
AboutUs.org
CitySearch.com
SuperPages.com
Yelp.com
Maps.Bing.com
MerchantCircle.com
YellowBook.com
CitySquares.com
BOTW.org
GetListed.org
InsiderPages.com
 
It’s also a great idea to get listed on local BBB sites, your local chamber of commerce, or make a donation/sponsor a local charity. It’s often not free to submit your information to sites, but you might just get lucky and find some that are. Local directories are another place you might look to place your listing. Just recently Vertical Measures was listed on Local First Arizona and Best of the Web.
 
Sunday in the Arizona Republic there was an interesting article by Justin Doom regarding Twitter and its uses locally, as well as blogging for local exposure. If you haven’t hopped on the blogging or Twitter bandwagon yet this article might just make you change your mind. Real Estate agent Dru Bloomfield utilizes Twitter for her listings here in the Phoenix Metro area. She has gotten clients from the site, along with Realtor Nick Bastian. Bastian’s blog posts on the recent light rail expansion prompted one Colorado investor to contact him about potentially purchasing $2.5 million in apartment buildings near the expanded track. He also says that about 70% of his business comes from online marketing activities on Twitter and his blog. It really does work!
 
Using tools like Twilert to get notified when people in your area are looking for the product or service you offer is a great way to stay on top of conversations on Twitter, as well as building up and interacting with your followers. You can also do a simple search at http://Search.Twitter.com anytime to find out who is asking a question you can answer, or looking for a product/service you offer.
 

Don’t forget about doing a little local search marketing, whether through directories, local search engines, or on social networking sites like Twitter. Try to integrate it into your overall link building campaign so your site can be found through a variety of ways.

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

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Posted in Local Search | 8 Comments »

Inaugural AZIMA Meeting Was a Hit! Next Up: Facebook

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

speakerLast night was AZIMA‘s inaugural meeting, and nine of us here at Vertical Measures attended. Hosted at the Tempe Mission Palms, we enjoyed a nice social hour accompanied by a pasta bar and informative presentation by Chris Murch, from wsRadio.com. 

azima1Worth noting are several upcoming events including an education webinar by Howie Jacobson, PhD, author of AdWords For Dummies, on Tuesday July 21st.  Howie will be discussing Top Tips for Improving Poor Performing Paid Search Campaigns.
 
Another event we’re excited about is the next AZIMA evening event, "How To Effectively Engage Others On Social Networks" on August 11th. Mark Wallrap, Scott Iden, and Rick Eisen from Facebook will be presenting some need-to-know information.
 
Facebook is the largest social networking site on the web. Yesterday Facebook announced on their blog that there are now 250 million Facebook users worldwide. Just three and a half months ago (98 days to be exact) Facebook reported 200 million Facebook users. That’s a rate of roughly 510,204 signups a day, about 350 a minute, and 5.5 per second, give or take a few.
 
iStrategyLabs.com reports that in the last six months alone the 55 year olds and up have flocked to Facebook in massive numbers, increasing that overall demographic by 513%! Surprisingly, the report alsofacebook1 states that students, both high school and college, have decreased by 20%. They chalked this up to more and more adults flocking to the site causing an alienation of the younger groups. Not so cool to have your parents on the same social networking site? Guess not. It could, in part, have something to do with the fact that many seniors graduated in May and June as well, but those items don’t seem to have been factored into the report.
 
Fan boxes have been added to Facebook, another great tool for business owners, celebrities, and the like. These embeddable widgets can be placed on your website, updating your site visitors with the valuable information contained in your Facebook news feed. Celebs like Lance Armstrong have already implemented this feature onto their site.  

Lots of exciting news about Facebook! Don’t miss out on the AZIMA event, August 11th at 6:00 p.m. Early registration will be available soon, so check back often to secure your seat at the next social event and while your waiting join AZIMA and be apart of a great new interactive marketing association in Arizona.

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Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

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Posted in Social Media | 3 Comments »

PageRank Sculpting or Link Consolidation: The Debate Continues

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

During SMX-Advanced in Seattle and WordCamp in San Francisco this year Matt Cutts revealed some interesting information about PageRank sculpting, causing a firestorm of debate between professionals in the industry. Let’s first discuss what PageRank sculpting is, and then get into the details about the big debate. 

Sculpting your PageRank involves manipulating the PageRank flow within existing pages of your site. There are a few ways to do this, which include adding rel=nofollow attribute designations to some pages to force the flow of ‘juice’ to pages you’d like more PageRank on. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin gives a good bit more information on sculpting PageRank in an old post.
 
Cutts’ doesn’t recommend utilizing rel=nofollow tags, except on login pages or other customizable pages where robots won’t actually be logging in. What he does recommend, however, is being choosy about what pages to link to from your homepage, thereby sculpting PageRank to a certain degree. At SMX-Advanced he alluded to the fact that rel=nofollow tags, utilized for PageRank sculpting, don’t work the way we may think. Many thought this meant a change to Google had been made, and we all know how well "changes" go over in the SEO community.
 
It seems, whenever Cutts alludes to information he leaves a lot to the imagination. I don’t know about you, but when I don’t get a straight answer I often start to think which can often lead to confusion, doubt, and sometimes even mass hysteria. The ambiguities in Cutts’ statements have led many to come up with their own hypotheses as to what will work as far as PageRank sculpting goes. The only clear answer given is that the former way of PageRank sculpting is something Google frowns upon.
 
Rand Fishkin’s recent post, Link Consolidation: The New PageRank Sculpting, details his interpretation and how one might consolidate their pages so as to restrict and control the flow of PR. Check out the comments on this post, quite a bit of debate and discussion thrown around. Worth noting is the dialogue between Rand and Michael Martinez.
 
Michael Martinez wrote about his views on PageRank sculpting in his post, SEO Myths and the Power of Repetition. "Frankly, since you cannot measure PageRank, you have no hope of controlling or sculpting it. This will never be a fundamental SEO principle — rather, it’s just fundamental nonsense". Do you tend to agree or disagree? Can you really control/sculpt/manipulate something without knowing how it is measured/developed?

Most tend to agree with Rand, and his link consolidation methodology. The concept is simple: create a site that is easy to navigate for both bots and human eyes. If this involves consolidating your pages, then by all means do so. If you end up consolidating your pages, you are in essence sculpting your PR, but that should be just a side benefit. The debate continues, but one thing is for sure: the process of PageRank sculpting is becoming a thing of the past, and more emphasis is being placed on usability.

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

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Posted in On-Site SEO | 6 Comments »

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