Esteban Panzera

Yesterday I was trying to convince someone of creating his/her personal SEO/SMM blog, but couldn’t really convince that person. This is the reason why I decided to create a list of reasons to have a SEO/SMM blog, lets see if now that person reads this list and gets convinced:

1. Socialize: after blogging for some time you inevitably get to know other SEOs/SMMs that also have a blog, this all starts when they leave a comment on your blog on when you leave one on theirs.
2. Personal Branding: if what you write is good content, and people start to love your content and your blog, you might even get to be known in the SEO/SMM world.
3. Share your knowledge: it is nice to write about what you know (or think you know) and share it with lots of persons over the world at the same time.
4. Increase your knowledge: as you would have to write about SEO, you would probably get to read more seo blogs to find inspiration and to see that you are not writing something that was already written.
5. Services: if you offer SEO/SMM services, with your blog you can show more people that you know what you are speaking about and more companies will be happy to hire your services.
6. Money: with a blog you can aswell monetize it by selling advertising, by using Adsense or just by using any affiliate program you find on the web.
7. Get a new Job: if you are looking for a new job, showing your knowledge in your blog will help other companies see that you know your stuff and you would get more chances of getting hired by that company.

Lets hope this 7 reasons get read by that person and encourage him/her to create a SEO/SMM blog.

I was writing new blogs posts for other of my blogs and ran across this problem, I wanted to target both social networks and search engines with that article, but I couldn’t find a catchy title that would also be good for SEO. So I started thinking how can I target both social networks and search engines when writing a title for a blog post, I found out 3 solutions:

1.- SEO Title Wordpress Plugin

One of the solutions is downloading and installing the seo title wordpress plugin, which will let us choose a different title for the document than the title of the article. This way what we would have to do is write a catchy title as the article title and write a keyword reach title for seo on the document title field.
This would really help with seo, but in my opinion won’t be the best one as we will be losing the weight of the heading tag we have on the article title. What we can do to fix this is add another heading tag that will put the document title as text inside a heading tag.

2.- SEO Title + SMM Title

Other solution would be combining both, the seo title and the smm title we have. For example if the smm title is “9 Steps to succeed in the Social Media marketing World” and the seo title (the keywords we want to target) is “Social media marketing success”, we could combine both and end with: “Social Media Marketing success in 9 steps”.
This one would be pretty good as we would be including the keywords in the heading tags and as the title of the document, but im\n my opinion there is a better way.

3.- Combination of 1 and 2

In my opinion the best thing we can do is combine number 1 and 2, what this would mean is using the document title wordpress plugin and combining the seo title with the smm title. What we would have to do is first combine the seo title with the smm title and then as document title write the seo title. This way we would have a really catchy title, with the keywords we want to target between heading tags and an optimal title for seo.

The idea of writing this came to my mind after telling DaveR why I wasn’t going via Twitter

1. Travel: in case you haven’t read the about me page, let me tell you I live in Argentina (South America) so if I wanted to go to Santa Clara I would have to pay extra U$2000 for the flight ticket.
2. Passport: some years have passed since I last traveled by plane, so my passport expired, I would have to renew it and it takes at least 30 days to do so (SMX West is in 10 days).
3. VISA: to travel to the United States I would have to get a VISA for non immigrants, it would take them more than 10 days to process it and give it to me.
4. Money: in Argentina, U$1 dollar equals AR$3 (argentinian pesos) approximately, what is great if you are coming to Argentina as everything would be cheaper for you, but not noce if I want to go to the US as everything would be 3x more expensive. I would also have to pay the full price for the entry ticket (U$1,595).
5. New: I am pretty new to the Search Engine Marketing world in English, I have been blogging nearly all my life in spanish, so I think that going to a future SMX would be much better than doing it now as I don’t know many people and nobody will probably know who I am.
6. University: it would have started by that moment and I don’t want to lose my first days on it, anyway this is something that wouldn’t matter that much.
7. English: my first language is Spanish, I have been learning English for some years now, but it is far from being perfect, this is something that could cause me losing some things at the SMX. This wouldn’t really matter that much for me, but it is another reason.
8. Permission: I would need my parent’s permission in order to get out of the country as I am not 21 years old yet. This is not a problem but is just an extra step I would have to take in order to go to SMX West.

Not everything is negative, here are some reasons why I would be ne able to go to the SMX:

1. Work: I am not working for anyone, so I wouldn’t have to leave work for some days.
2. I love SMX: I only went to one, SMX Buenos Aires but really loved it.
3. Networking: not knowing anybody would make me know some new people.
4. Learning: you always learn something new, maybe it is just one stupid and small thing, but it is actually something new you didn’t know.
5. Free Wifi: well maybe not really free, but it is wifi after all :P
6. Going to the US: I really love travelling to the US, so by going to SMX West I would also be able to go to some other places on the US.

As you might (and should) already be aware of, when doing a search at Google, it will blend with its results news, videos, images, local information, books and many other things where it can find something relevant and when it feels users will benefit from that added information. As always we have to think how we can take advantages of new features, they may make you lose rankings but at the same time you get invaluable ways of getting to the first page for some competitive search terms.
The best thing about it is that it is much easier to get to rank for example a video than ranking a site as you can get all Youtube’s internal linking power to your video.
Today we are going to focus on the video part of universal search; as you might have already seen, Google takes its results from different video streaming sites, but the one that most appears is Youtube , yes, they are taking Google’s visitors to promote their own video sharing website.
The first thing you will probably be asking yourself is if they take their results from different video streaming sites, to which should I upload my video? In my opinion the best would be to upload it to all the ones you can (for marketing purposes, not seo), but I have got better seo results with Youtube, so we will work seoing that one.

Part 1: Creating an Account
Before uploading your video, if you still haven’t created an account (would recommend creating a new one unless you have already got a popular one with friends, subscriptors, incoming links and pagerank), I would suggest using the keywords you want to target as your username, that will give you more repetition of your keyword on the video page and a related link (from your channel to your video). After creating the account, configure it so that the channel url uses the keywords you want to target and write some information relted to your keyword once more on the personal info and perfomer info sections.

Part 2: Uploading the Video
We can now get to the video upload part:
Title: this is the most important thing, it will be used as title tag, heading tag and anchor text for all the internal links on the site. So use your keywords in it without anything else if you can so that you can get better title density.
Description: Write what the video is about remembering to use the keywords you are targeting on it, this would be like the body text on your website.
Video Category: Choose the category that best fits your video, however this won’t impact SEO Rankings.
Tags: This is also a very important part of the video submittion, select all the tags that best described your video, don’t forget to include the full phrase as a tag. This will also help including your video as related content on other videos, what would be another internal incoming link.
Make your video public, otherwise, search engines won’t be able to see it, the other information doesn’t really mind. The size and length of the video doesn’t impact on search engine rankings, so don’t bother about that.

Part 3: Promoting the Video
Now we get to the promotion part, use the youtube marketing techniques you can read in this article and send it to as many of your friends as you can. Google takes into account the number of views and comments it has to position it, so it is important it gets as many as possible. The other big important thing is the number of times a video gets added to favorites, Google doesn’t take this into account directly, but each person that adds your video as a favourite will be adding an incoming internal link to your video using the anchor text you used as title from their channel page to your video.

Of course it will also help if you can get links to the video from other sites, but the main idea here was to position a video without getting outbound links, what is completely possible as if you get many times added to favorites, you would get all Youtube’s internal linking power.

It has probably happened to every blogger that sometimes you can’t come up with blog post ideas, it usually happens when you are stressed. When this happens you sometimes start looking for inspiration somewhere, but I wanted to make this easier for everyone so I created a list of 21 Blog post headlines you can write on your own Internet Marketing blog.
If you do please comment on this post telling me where you posted it so that I can link you from this post.

1. 11 Undiscovered Social Media Marketing Blogs: You would have to make a small list of 11 new blogs about social media marketing and why each of them is worth a read.
2. 7 things to do (and 7 not to) when doing SMM: self-explanatory, just point out 7 things to do and 7 not to when doing Social Media Marketing (if possible, explain in detail).
3. 21 reasons why Mixx is better than Digg: everyone loves reasons posts, just find 21 reasons why you can claim Mixx is better than Digg (shouldn’t be hard).
4. 10 Social Media Marketing Myths: every internet marketing technique has got its own myths, social media marketing surely has its owns.
5. 9 things I learned from SMM: easy, from your own experience 9 things you learned from SMM, it could also be 9 Tips.
6. Sphinn Community Analisis: I was going to do this one but I will let it to someone else, you would just have to make a full analisis of Sphinn, there are many things you can get stats from.
7. 10 Negative Aspects of the StumbleUpon Effect: it does have some negative aspects, couldn’t count 10, but with some time for thinking you should reach this number.
8. 10 Tips to getting to the Mixx Frontpage: there are tips for succeeding on each social network, Mixx has surely got its owns.
9. The top 10 SEOs of all time: this one should be nice, you would have to research a bit and present a list of the 10 best SEOs ever.
10. 7 Advantages of being a Woman when doing SMM: it surely has its advantages, great post for a chick.
11. Top 10 Greatest articles on SEO ever: list with links to SEO articles and your opinion on them and why you think they are so great.
12. Top 10 Anti-SEO websites: I think this one is really nice, you surely have seen “10 worst-designed websites”, this one would be the same but showing 10 sites that suck at SEO.
13. 7 Steps to Reputation Management: you would just have to give some basic information about reputation management.
14. 10 Tools for getting the most out of your SMM Campaigns: don’t really know which tools I would puton this one, but I think doing a post like this would be a great idea.
15. 10 Ideas to get Natural Links with our desired Anchor Text: shouldn’t be hard, just some ideas that would help achieving this task.
16. Reputation Management Bible: a post where you would cover absolutely everything about reputation management.
17. 10 Firefox Plugins to make SMM success easier: just search for those plugins (there are plenty) and post them on a list explaining what each of them does.
18. How to plan a Social Media Campagin: just explain what you do to plan one for your clients, would really love to see someone posting this.
19. Encouraging social media news votes through your site: there are some ways of increasing the number of votes your receive on social media news sites through changes to your website, explain which.
20. 10 Things I would like Google to change: list with ideas for Google, if you are lucky you may see some changes implemented on Google :P
21. 10 SEO Tools that should exist: which would you like to see? There are many I have thought of, think of 10.

Using a 301 redirect can be of great help for your website if done correctly, if not it may harm your website’s search engine rankings. For this not to happen just follow this 9 basic steps:

1. Evade: don’t do a 301 redirect unless it is really necessary, I have heard of people that make 301 redirects just for doing a 301 redirect and because they think using them in any situation will help them increase their rankings.
2. Related: always make 301 redirects between highly related pages, so if you have a flower’s blog and a seo blog, don’t 301 the flower’s blog to the seo blog. Make a 301 redirect from the flower’s blog to another flower related site.
3. Inner Pages: if you move your site or delete pages, don’t 301 redirect your inner pages to your homepage as they will probably be unrelated links and won’t help increasing your search engine rankings.
4. Forever: 301 redirects are supposed to be permanent, they should last forever, so don’t ever remove them!
5. Don’t be Afraid: if you are doing a 301 redirect because you moved your site to another URL, don’t be afraid to do it! Many people is afraid of using 301 redirects as they think they will cause a penalty to their websites. You won’t either lose positions for doing a 301 redirect from one site to another.
6. non-www to www: when giving this use to 301 redirects, always remember to do the same thing at Google Webmaster Central with the “Set preferred domain” tool.
7. To the Last URL: be sure that your 301 redirect is made to the last URL and that it doesn’t redirect to a 301 redirected page.
8. Many to One: don’t 301 redirect many websites to one in a short period of time, if you can try to do it slowly as it will look more natural that way.
9. Test It: when you finish making the 301 redirect, always check it works smoothly with a search engine friendly redirect checker.

Getting links is a must if you want to do SEO for your site, there are many techniques you can use to get those links you need, one of them is submitting your site to social news sites or putting them in your member’s page at social networks. That is why i compiled this list of social networks where you can either submit your site or add it as a link in your member page; they are all do-follow links that Google will count:

1. Del.icio.us
2. Digg:
3. PlugIM
4. A1 Webmarks
5. Simpy
6. Bibsonomy
7. Faves
8. MemFrag
9. NewsWeight
10. WireFan
11. Reddit
12. SpotBack
13. Listible
14. BmAccess
15. MyLinkVault
16. SearchLes
17. MyVMarks
18. Kinja
19. CoRank
20. Zlitt
21. NowPublic
22. Memestreams
23. ShoutWire
24. Kaboodle
25. MyPickList
26. Squidoo
27. InternetMosaic
28. LinkInn
29. Socialogs
30. Folkd
31. Grupl
32. DotNetKicks
33. Multiply
34. Slashdot
35. Twitter
36. RawSugar
37. Meneame
38. Mister Wong
39. Linkagogo
40. JumpTags
41. Connectedy
42. TeDigo
43. Syncone
44. Yattle

If you find more social networks (I am sure there are many more and I will continue updating this list) where you can get do-follow links, just point it out as a comment and I will add it to the list.

The first part of SEO is making your site SEO Friendly: letting search engines understand what your site is about. The easiest way to optimize your site for search engines is following the next simple 7 steps:

1.- Title: Check the title of the homepage and inner pages and rewrite them so that they target the main keywords of each page. You can as well add your brand’s name at the beginning or the end of the title for branding purposes, but remembering to order these keyword phrases in order of importance (first the keywords you want to rank for).
Don’t overcharge it with keywords or you will make it look spammy, try to make it under 65 characters and try to make the title unique across all pages.

2.- Headings: If the site hasn’t got proper defined heading tags, add them to the homepage and inner pages using the keywords you want to target for each page on each of them. Make it look naturally, don’t put all your keywords on one h1 tag and try to put a max of 2 h1 tags (try to use only 1). Remember you can also use from h2 to h6 tags for keywords of less importance.

3.- Meta Description: Modyfying your meta description will have a minimal (nearly none) impact on your rankings, but if written correctly, the Click Through Rate (CTR) would increase attracting more visitors that if you would have let Google pick the description for your search listing.

4.- Content: The text is also important and you must always remember that this is first for visitors then for Search Engines; I would recommend writing over 200 words of unique content at least on each of your pages (home and inner). Don’t forget to use the keywords you are targeting on the body and avoid using them too much (high keyword density), try to reach a keyword density that makes the content look natural. Try to put the keywords between strong tags whenever you can, but again don’t overdoit.

5.- URLs: Using your keywords on your URLs won’t only be better for search engines but will also be better for users as they will be able to understand the content from the url if they found it written anywhere.
Try to use static URLs, if you can and know how to do it use mod_rewrite to acomplish this task; don’t ever use spaces in your URLs, instead replace them with dashes (-). If you haven’t choosen the domain name yet, try to pick one that has the main keyword you are targeting on it.

6.- Images: We have to remember that robots are blind and can’t see images, so we have to describe them to it as best as possible. We have to use keywords on file name, on alt and on title tags. It is also important to put them on a related page (Title and Content related) and use the keywords near the image. Another important thing is the size and dimensions of the image, we should make it as light as possible and if we want it to rank in Google Images we have to make it middle size: 400px x 400px aproximately.

7.- Internal Navigation: Add rel nofollow tag to the pages that are not important and you don’t want to rank such as your terms of service, contact information, etc. Make all the pages reachable within two clicks from the homepage, if you can’t do this because your site has got many pages, try using a sitemap (HTML Sitemap).
Other thing you can do is get links to internal pages (the same way you would do with the homepage) where you list categories and inside them the posts, this way links won’t be unreachable as they would be 2 clicks from a page with many links to it. Also use the keywords you are targetting in anchor texts for internal links.

Things to Avoid:

• Frames
• Flash: the problem is not the use of flash, the problem is that robots can’t correctly and fully read flash.
• Keyword stuffing: this will only get you a penalization.
• Hidden keywords: another way of getting penalized.
• Linking to bad neigborhood websites
• Hosting Downtime