Guest Post By: Michael Schmitz

The job description of too many internships these days consists of nothing more than coffee-making and paper-filing. But after spending the last month and a half immersed in the Vertical Measures internship program it became clear that Vertical Measures is not one of those companies that summons its interns to busy work.

This Internet marketing company offers hands on experience while learning from SEO and Internet marketing specialists about link building. Here are some of the activities and tasks I regularly performed during my time in the Vertical Measures internship program and some tips I learned along the way:

1. Commenting: The majority of my curriculum in the program has revolved around link building through commenting. Throughout my month and a half I learned the ins and outs of including a link in a comment and quickly found out what to look for when searching for a page to comment on. Relevancy of the post and engaging in conversation make for a good comment.  Using a variety of search quarries can lead you to some worthwhile sites to comment on.
2. Directories:  Locating directories to get listed on has been another focus of the internship program.  The goal is to get your client listed in a relevant directory using the requested keyword as the anchor text.
3. Editing Articles/Blog Posts: A large chunk of my time with the internship program is spent editing articles and blog posts for both grammar and keyword usage. Through this I’ve learned a lot about article marketing services, like how many times you should use a keyword throughout an article and where you should use it.

Commenting, directories and editing takes up the majority of the internship curriculum, but there are also a few other things that I’ve done during my time as a Vertical Measures intern.

1. Webinars: A huge part of what I’ve learned during the program comes from the Vertical Measures webinars. As an intern I’ve watched and listened to six webinars, each with a different theme and focus. The Vertical Measures employees put together a Power Point, walked through different lessons and techniques and answered questions at the end. The content has covered almost everything from commenting techniques to different Google search queries. One of the most important takeaways from the webinars has been learning competitive analysis. I’ve learned how to analyze a competitor and their links, seeing where they come from, the keywords they’ve hit, the anchor text they’ve used, etc.
2. Vertical Measures Project: I worked on this project during which our team created a link building infographic comparing different types of links to different types of beer.
3. SEO Content Writing: After I learned how to write content for SEO purposes, I was able to re-write a client’s website content. I added meta descriptions for the pages, title tags and improved keyword placement throughout the content.
4. Keyword Reviews:  Another task I completed briefly during my internship was reviewing websites for their keyword usage. I answered questions like: Did they use the keyword too many times, or not enough? Are their heading tags visible and in the right places, among other questions.

While so many internships offer nothing more than another thing to throw on the resume, the Vertical Measures internship offers legitimate knowledge obtained through hands on work and webinars.

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For the past two months, Vertical Measures has secretly been developing an exclusive training program meant only for those that can withstand copious amounts of valuable information and endless hours of fun.  

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It’s official: today is the first day of our Ode to SEO scholarship contest! Students currently enrolled in high school, college, or grad school have an opportunity to win a $1,000 scholarship OR a new iPad! The new iPad was recently announced and the Internet is buzzing about this computer tablet. Simply write a catchy and interesting poem, submit your poetry contest entry and check back on February 22nd to see if you’re a finalist. Then, get your friends and family to vote and help you win this great prize. The final 1st and 2nd place winners will be announced on our blog on February 24th (subscribe to our blog, follow us on Twitter or fan us on Facebook to be notified of finalists and the winners).

We’re excited about this promotion and hope you are too! There’s no time like the present to encourage younger generations to get started in our great industry. We’re hoping to inspire the next generation of Internet marketers, help spread the word on Twitter, Facebook, and via e-mail too. If you have any questions about this promotion please e-mail us at promos@verticalmeasures.com.

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Our industry is an ever growing one. With the rapid growth of Internet usage comes expansion in social media, online marketing, and so on. Here at Vertical Measures we feel that it’s important to engage younger generations, and get them as excited as we are about marketing and social media! The more bright minds in our industry the better!!

For this reason we will be rolling out our Valentines Day inspired creative contest, giving away one $1,000 scholarship to a lucky winner, and a $250 second place prize. This contest will be open not just to High School students, but to College and Graduate students too. The winner has the option of choosing an alternate prize of an Apple iPad Tablet (64GB Wifi Model, available in March), instead of the scholarship. We thought this would be a great prize for a future Internet marketer, although money can be just as useful!

The scholarship contest will allow entrants to flex their creative muscles and will encourage research to gain knowledge about key Internet marketing and social media terms. Don’t know much about Internet marketing and terms? That shouldn’t stop you from entering this great contest.

Check back to our blog on February 1st for more details on our Scholarship contest, or subscribe to our blog…..and dust your keyboard off.

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It was a great disappointment to hear that Chris Anderson is taking a hiatus from his Long Tail blog.  If you don’t know Chris, I should tell you that he’s written some great information on long tail search, and how it relates to the future of your business. To make a long story short, many are speculating that the long tail will be the end of mass marketing. And while I rarely hear people talking about the importance of the long tail, as a business owner, you need to understand the decisive power of the long tail for several reasons:

1. 20% of all searches are with keywords that have never been used before
2. You can’t optimize a page for keyword searches you don’t know about
3. Upshot bloggers who understand what I’m talking about are going to out-compete you in the search results and steal your business
4. Once you do understand the long tail, you can increase your business greatly by applying some long tail strategies to your search marketing campaign

To demonstrate the power of long tail search, this blog post today is going to give you a glimpse into how long tail search has helped us attract not only visitors to our website, but has also generated leads for our quality link building services. As I go through this example, think about how this abstract information can be directly applied to your business.

How This Blog Post Really Began

When I first began working for Vertical Measures, one of my first assignments was to create a series of SEO videos. Now this is a keyword that gets between 2-4K searches every month. Based on the quality of the content, and some very minimal onsite SEO and social sharing, the page we created quickly shot into the Google top 10. But the interesting aspect of this story comes months later, when our analytics guy noticed we were getting leads from several long tail keywords related to the videos. As he delved into the specifics, he found several other long tail leads…not traffic, leads. And hence, this blog post was born.

What You MUST Know About the Long Tail

Now, I glosssed over something there. Did you notice I said, "based on the quality of the content?" Well, we should pay close attention to that because it’s part of an essential element you absolutely MUST understand about the long tail – it’s not really about engineering your pages, onsite SEO, or link building. Sure, those things play a role, but what’s really at the heart of the long tail is your ability to provide useful and valuable content for your readers. And if you can be helpful in a way that demonstrates your expertise while positioning yourself for an up-sale to your free content, it’s a win-win situation.  This is really Google’s entire business model, and I would ask you a simple question: if you’re trying to get ranked in Google, don’t you think it would be easier if you embraced their philosophy?

So many people are trying to game the system, engineer results, and pay for rankings. But if they just took a step back, they would see the big picture that many great thinkers and believers in Web 2.0 are championing. Maybe Powazek was onto something….maybe there’s some truth to the one true way: Making something great. Telling people about it. And then doing it again. If you get this, then you understand the changes that are happening on the Internet are characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and reuse information, and the use the market as a conversation–they’re not about your website rankings (although this could be a side benefit if you follow the philosophy closely)

But enough about mediated culture and web 2.0 philosophy…the good news is this isn’t just about giving stuff away; the long tail carries with it particularly financial benefits for your business, and here are the rankings to prove it…

The Long Tail Rankings

Here’s a list of long tail keyword searches we pulled from our analytics.  Let me preface this by saying we didn’t optimize our site for any of these and our site doesn’t rank #1 for all these terms. In one case, we actually rank in position 10 (still on Google page 1). Yet each of these searches resulted in a qualified lead from our lead form. Now, if this isn’t incentive to work on your corporate blog, I don’t know what is.

1. how to find citations local serach
2. how do you know if you have H1 tags on your website
3. building top quality websites
4. how to get good links
5. best link building companies
6. best practices for link building
7. how can Microformats help in local business
8. seo residential services marketing
9. seo+seo company+seo services+link+partner+resource
10. us based outsource link building service
11. social media marketing services pricing
12. high quality link building service

These Long Tail Rankings Tell a Story

And this is the story…

Imagine a business owner searching for information on SEO for her website. When she first starts, she types in a short phrase, like SEO. She learns a little; then enough to know she needs H1 tags. But she doesn’t know how to tell if her website has them. So she types "how do you know if you have H1 tags on your website" into Google, and finds our video on just that topic. Maybe she reads more articles, or watches more videos, but based on what she sees, she decides she wants more information about our SEO services, so she fills out a form to request it.

The implication here is, as a business owner and website manager, you need to be inside the head of your customers just like this. You need to figure out the million and one ways people will be looking for information about your product, and even related products. Then you need to create free content that is truly helpful, not just hype about your product or service. And in addition, you need to offer searchers a way to initiate the next step with you to take them from a casual observer to an active client.

Now hopefully this conversation gives you a few ideas of how people are searching the long tail and how you might begin to apply it to your business. Of course, applying it to your business could be an entirely different article, and in fact, Mark Nunney wrote an article on just that: how to optimize your articles and pages for the long tail. So if you’re looking for some ideas on how to apply the concept of the long tail to your website or corporate blog, give it a read. And if you have 6 hours to kill, take a listen to Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. If you don’t have the time, buy his $19 abridged version.

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