Seach, Social & Content Marketing Blog

We here at Vertical Measures are tickled pink to announce the launch of our new bookstore section of our website. Along with the implementation of the new store, two of our expert staffers are celebrating the launch of their long awaited ebooks. Local Search Marketing for Businesses: A How-to-Guide, written by Sarah Moraes, and Twitter for Business: A How-to-Guide, written by Abby Gilmore were released midday yesterday. Both of these fresh books belong to the Vertical Measures How-To Guide Series that will amount to a total of 5 instructive guides specifically designed for the business owner or website and marketing manager who is ready to take their businesses to the next level through social media and online marketing. The books highlight important areas within the fields that are the recommended focal points when developing comprehensive campaigns as well as point out pitfalls to avoid.

Content marketing is becoming increasingly important – especially as of late, considering Google’s recent Panda update.  Here are more than 55 links to a variety of content marketing resources all over the web.

Photo Credit

The first thing a lot of people probably think, thanks to the Google Farmer / Panda update is that article marketing has lost its value. Some of it has, if you solely depend on search traffic to bring visitors to your articles in hopes that they will continue to click through to your website.

But one thing that a lot of article marketers have missed is the community factor on some of these sites. Not all article directories are simply a repository of articles and nothing more. Some article networks have their own social community where members can interact through comments, forums, and question & answer areas. Members can also follow other members whose articles they like, and will be notified when that member has published a new article.

Of late I’ve been delving into social signals and how they are used in search. Not a new concept, I know, but one that intrigues me. When I refer to social signals I’m alluding to what Dave Harry discusses in his post “Getting a Grip on Social Signals in Search“; social signals aren’t always ranking factors but merely available signals that may be used to enhance search.

Dave goes on to say that signals can offer additional key ingredients for search engines to glean info from including “discovery, trust concepts, temporal (velocity), context (semantics), and behavioral”. Imagine all the possible uses these social signals provide to search engines: discovering new sites or content, determining the success of a site or content, what users are saying semantically when they share information about a site or content, and their behavioral patterns for sharing.

While researching some video marketing statistics, I stumbled upon some of YouTube’s amazing numbers.

Being a total geek, I started doing some (bad) math, and felt I had to share what these kind of numbers really mean.

Of course the ONLY option was to grab the flip and make a quick video

Here are YouTube’s March and November 2010 posts, and here’s the most recent usage of the 35 hour number.

All math was poorly conceived on my spreadsheet, so if any of the numbers are wrong, it’s probably Microsoft’s fault </joke>