Happy Hall-SEO-Ween to all of our freakishly awesome and ghoulishly white hat SEO’s and SEM’s out there. In the spirit of the holiday we wanted to share some great Halloween inspired SEO finds with our readers, as well as some photos of our team dressed up.

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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I’m your typical alternative conscious tech guy. I start my day with some Yoga and meditation, I ride my bike to work (almost every day), and we even started recycling in our office.  Before I lived close enough to start riding my bike, I’m the guy who advocated for a carpool with my co-workers (and we did it). So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’d be writing about opportunities to create a green marketing strategy for your business.

Why a Green Marketing Strategy?

Well, I’ve noticed a growing trend on the Internet. It’s probably been there for a while, so forgive me if this isn’t news to you. But there are a lot of websites dedicated to green, eco-friendly businesses. There are green websites, green directories, and green businesses…and they all offer opportunities for you to demonstrate your commitment to green initiatives while building links to your website.  But it only works if you’re green. So the question to ask yourself is: "Is there an eco-friendly side to our business?" and "How do we make green part of our marketing strategy?" Once you have your ‘green’ marketing strategy, it’s time to use it to get create some exposure for your company, and some inbound links.

Green Communities

There are many websites that are dedicated to green living, and they’d love for you to participate and include some content about your eco-friendly business.

• Ethipedia
• Greenopolis
• Carbon Rally
• Zero Footprint
• Celsias
• Change.org
• Care 2 Make a Difference
• 2 People

Green Causes

Donate to a green cause and they’ll often include your business on their sponsors page.

• 1% for the planet
• 1 laptop per child

Green Directories

Directories are a great source for links, and you can only get into these by meeting their ‘green’ standard.

• Green America
• Best Green Blogs
• Green People
• Eco Business Links
• One Green Globe
• Solutions for Green

Business Niches Built Around Green

Don’t just fake it. Here are two examples of businesses that have built a nice niche around a green marketing strategy. Creative Slice is a green website design firm. What does that mean exactly? Well, I’m not entirely sure myself. But you can see a list of all the green choices they make. But wait? Don’t laugh yet. The keyword, "green web design" gets 2400 searches each month on Google. Hmmm…you could base an entire business on that if you ranked in the top search results. And if you look, Creative Slice does. Dreamhost offers green hosting. Sure, it sounds simple. But realize that over 8,000 people search ‘green hosting’ every month. And close to 3,000 people search for "green web hosting." Once again, that’s a nice little niche they’ve got there. Go search Google’s Keyword Tool and see if anyone’s searching ‘green’ keywords in your industry. Need help? Consider using our website marketing services.

Other Opportunities for Green

There are lots of ways to make your business green. The most important thing is to make sure you demonstrate what you’re doing, so it becomes part of your public image and part of your marketing strategy.

• Participate in green energy initiatives like Green Watts Program or APS Green Choice. If your local energy company doesn’t have this, consider purchasing green energy credits from a national company.
• Start an office recycling program.
• Develop in-house company initiatives like carpooling, bike riding, etc.
• Adopt a highway.
• Find other green causes and participate in them.

It’s just too bad that ‘green SEO’ isn’t a term that gets many searches… Oh wait…! 480 searches isn’t bad.  Maybe there’s a niche in there for us, too.

What’s one way your company is green? Leave it in a comment, and…GET YOUR FIRST GREEN LINK.

Ralphm

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I’m obsessed with real time search! and I don’t think it’s just me (Google just announced social search), and in my last article, I talked about Twitter real time search and trends.  Of course, some people have their doubts about the viability of social search, but I believe real time search is only going to get bigger, and better. The primary basis for this belief is the fact that I see countless contenders battling for real time search dominance.  Consequently, I’ve been exploring different real time search options, and trying to figure out what the best tools are for managing real time conversations, particularly in regard to the website marketing services we offer clients.  Last week I was introduced to an interesting option I’d like to share: uberVU metrics and analytics.

What is uberVU?

Have you ever found yourself using social media and feeling a bit isolated from the conversation? Especially with Twitter.  You can see half the conversation, right? But often, you can’t see what other people are saying. That experience sometimes leaves me feeling empty.  Not to mention that half the conversations are taking place not just on Twitter, but on blogs and forums.  Well, uberVU is really trying to eliminate that empty feeling experience by bringing the full conversation into perspective.  Simply stated, and in their own words, uberVU lets you "find out what people are saying about brands, stories or events. And follow the comments all over the social web."

Real Time Search Interface

uberVU’s real time search uinterface is slick. A simple search allows you to see how many people are talking about a particular topic, and a nice little pie chart shows you where those conversations are taking place. Below that, a graph shows you exactly when the conversations were posted, allowing you to put it all into a time reference.  This feature will allow businesses to determine the relevance of the conversation to their marketing campaigns of today and tomorrow.

By creating an account and linking it to your social media accounts, you don’t have to leave uberVU to participate in the conversation, and I really like that. It’s a big time saver not having to click on a link, find the spot to comment, etc, etc.  All you have to do is hit reply in uberVU, enter your comment, and submit!  Wicked awesome!

The only drawback, if you can call it that, is the free account is going to brand your messages with a link to uberVU, a small price to pay for an awesome service. But if it’s a real concern of yours, all you have to do is upgrade your account to remove their branding.

uberVU Features

• Reply to Twitter users, blog comments, FriendFeed and more from within uberVU, and they send your message back on the right platform.
• Track conversations within a particular niche "community" (or multiple communites with an upgraded account) and receive email alerts.
• The uberVU widget lets you aggregate the conversations about your blog from all over the web, right there on your blog! How cool is that?
• Use the uberVU bookmarklet to track stories and converstations as you find them.
• Pricing – The free uberVU account comes with one community you can track, no exports and links to uberVU.com each time you use the reply functionality. The paid services range from $20-$150/month depending on what features you want.

I still want to know what you’re using for real time search.  So leave it in a comment!

Ralphm

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Knowing how to get found on Google is easy to understand but in practice can sometimes become hard to implement. Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with USAToday.com to reiterate some of the basics, the video is embedded below. 

What other words of advice do you have to those that aren’t familiar with how to get found on Google?

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

Recently, Robert Scoble expressed his surprise as to how no one had done a real-time Twitter search and trends for just the people you are following. Within 30 minutes, many people had commented on his remark with similar surprise. But one person stood out and shared the information we all wanted, and we owe a special thanks to Mike Lizun of Gregory FCA for tipping us off about the fact that a real-time friend trend application, indeed, already exists. And it’s called Friending Topics.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Everyone’s familiar with how trending topics on Twitter work, right? When you log in to Twitter, you see them along the right hand side under your profile information and stats. But c’mon, who’s really interested in global trending topics?  I’m sure someone is, but it’s not me.  At the time of this writing, my trending topics included chocolate milk, paranormal activity, Dow Jones and Finland.  None of which had much meaning to me personally.

But when I logged in to friending topics, what I saw had a lot more relevance. As I follow more people, sorting out the clutter into pieces that are relevant and valuable has been a challenge. But I can definitely see how this app can help with all that. After signing in with my Twitter account, all I had to do was hover over topics, tags or web links to see the most recent tweets of all my tweeps. And the best part is, it was related to topics I’m actually interested in, like business, social media marketing and SEO.

What to do if You Don’t Follow a Lot of Tweeps?

Okay, so you might be thinking: "That’s great, but I don’t follow any topics." Well…why not?  With a tool like TweepML, you can find groups of people to follow, centered around themes.  For instance, take a look at the Vertical Measures team.  Following the tweeps on that page would be a great way to start putting your ear to the ground for SEO and link building. Once you’ve built up your tweeps to follow, then you can use Friending Topics to easily keep a pulse on what people are talking about, in real-time.  The only thing left to do then is…add your voice to the trending topics you care about the most.

Got a special way you track search and trends for your Tweeps? Leave it in a comment below.

Ralphm

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