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As we all know, unless you are fortunate enough to have content on a client site go viral due to its sheer brilliance, link building is a time intense activity. Positioning yourself in a niche, building great content, approaching a webmaster for a link– these things don’t happen in the blink of an eye. But I’ve established an excellent way to work on link building campaigns that takes less time than it would to do all the work alone. The answer is simple – university students. These anxious young minds are jumping for work experience, and link building is a relatively simple task where their success can be easily measured as you give them a head start in the marketing industry. University students are Internet savvy, decent writers, and cheap in comparison to link-building companies and consultants. The saying “you get what you pay for” does spring to mind, but they aren’t hard to train – they’re used to learning new material. It’s important to note that especially in this economy, university students are having a harder time finding work experience – which can work to our link-building agenda’s advantage. Step 1: Find the Career Office of a Local University Universities are eager to reach out to local businesses in order to connect their student with opportunities. Take advantage of this! Most schools have intra-net job sites, where you can post your “Link Building Trainee” opening at no cost. Step 2: Explain Link Building to Your New Charge Once I’ve selected Link Builder, I email them link building resources and explain that links from reputable sources are a significant part of a search engine’s algorithm. The more they understand what an important part of SEO links are, the more empowered they’ll feel to do their job well. Step 3: Identify Linkable Content The student must understand what parts of the site make for strong content and to whom they appeal. Have them write a quick line or two about which target audiences are interested in the content they have identified and why. Step 4: Proposed Websites Depending on how much control you want to exercise, it may be a good idea to have your student draw up a list of websites they propose to contact BEFORE they do it. If the student has understood the target audiences, this step should be easier for them to get the hang of. Step 5: Email Template or Phone Script If you’re going straight for the kill and contacting webmasters directly, show your student examples of past emails you’ve sent when link building. Naturally, they should be to the point, personalized, and demonstrate your site’s involvement/relevancy enough to convince a webmaster. If your student is phoning the website, run over with them who they should speak to and how they should present the content – it’s worth writing a script to ensure there is no confusion. Step 6: A Log It is important your student keep a log of their communication with different bloggers and webmasters. Be sure this data is in YOUR control, so if the student leaves for summer holiday or gets ill, you know who they’ve conversed with. Before I end this, I must say a word about student salary. While cheap, be fair and compensate university students for their time; at the very least reimburse them for travel and lunch when they come into the office. That said, go find yourself an aspiring Link Builder – while freeing up your time to focus on more important tasks, your Builder will be gaining valuable employment experience. Chelsea Blacker is a London based search consultant currently working at Base One Search With a background in SEO & PPC cultivated at Promediacorp in NYC, Chelsea focuses on engaging B2B brands in social media and online PR. If you want to further procrastinate from getting on with your real work, check out her current Marketing Pilgrim post You Know You Work in Search When… or say hi to her on twitter @ChelseaBlacker Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How to Hire a University Student for Link
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I was reading up on Google acquisitions yesterday and although Google’s acquisition this year is not as many as previous years, particularly 2006 and 2007, Google’s acquisitions in 2009 certainly made sense with their landmark acquisition of AdMob as their most expensive buy. But looking at Google’s 2009 acquisitions from a quality, and not quantity perspective, we see that the company is focusing its takeover of other companies in two major directions : Mobile & Google Apps. The speeding up of the web is essential to growth of mobile computing, whether on the netbook or smartphone, and judging on where Google has put most of its research and development in 2009 : Google Chrome OS, Google powered netbooks, Google Droid Phone and Android Mobile OS … the ability to condense data into a stream which can make the most of our current 3G and mobile networks’ definition of mobile broadband … while also enhance the usefulness of cloud computing, both are essential to Google’s future. Here’s a look at the companies Google acquired in 2009 : On2 – Acquired on August 5, 2009 for $106,500,000 ; On2 is a video compression applications company. As of today, Google has not made any move yet on how it is going to make use of On2, but utilizing it as part of Google Wave and Google Video (which is being tested in GMail Chat) could make cloud conferencing more of a streamlined and less expensive possibility and assist with the adoption of Google Apps by businesses and governments (Washington DC and Los Angeles are currently saving millions using Google Apps). AdMob – Google’s most expensive acquisition of 2009 made it to spend $750,000,000 last month. This could very well fit into Google mobile advertising business and AdMob is the preferred monetization tool of mobile application developers who use AdMob to earn money with free iPhone apps and other downloadable mobile tools. Google will use AdMob to syphon part of Apple’s monetary market in 2010 and integrating AdMob into Google AdSense is an important part of Google’s long term strategy to corner the mobile development market. Gizmo5 – Acquired the same day when Admob was acquired, Gizmo5 is a VoIP company. Google had to spend $30,000,000 for this company, obviously to beef up its Google Voice service, which is again, an essential part of not only Google’s mobile aspirations, but also Google Apps. Teracent – An online display advertising company bought for an undisclosed amount. Google is definitely going to use this for its AdSense program and further expansion into the world of display advertising … or the DoubleClick side of AdSense. While Teracent may not be an obvious mobile oriented acquisition, it will assist Google in better monetizing display advertising by assisting Google’s advertisers with putting together display ads which bring results and sales. The more money Google and its advertisers bring in, the more profitable Google becomes. In my opinion Google beefing up its advertising is a direct target on the Yahoo & Microsoft partnership, as both companies, especially Yahoo, have strong display advertising networks and power display advertising on various online newspapers. Now that Google is bringing the news onto the mobiles and netbooks in an easy to read fashion with Google Fast Flip (the mobile connection), expect Google to make a strong push to work with these same publishing outlets. AppJet (Etherpad) – This online collaboration tool is obviously geared for Google Wave, an essential part of Google Apps and cloud communication. DocVerse – Although still in the planning stages, it looks like Google will soon be acquiring DocVerse, another collaboration tool which allows users to work together around Microsoft Office documents, much in the same manner that Google Docs allows contributors to work on Docs on Spreadsheets. Yet again, another jab at Microsoft and way to streamline applications and make Google Apps an even stronger service in 2010, especially as Microsoft upgrades Office Live. There has been talk of an acquisition of Yelp by Google over the weekend, which could be the largest Google acquisition since YouTube, if not the most important acquisition by Google ever. ( Update: It looks like the deal is off, as TechCrunch reports that Yelp walked away from the negotiation table ). Yelp would be the central offering of Google’s mobile services and would finally complete Google Local with a Google powered review service, instead of its aggregation of other services. With Yelp off the table however, and Google apparently sitting on over $500 million to spend before the end of the year, are there any other companies they should be acquiring? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google’s 2009 Acquisitions : Focus on Mobile &
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Citing reliable sources, TechCrunch is reporting that Google may be on the brink of acquiring yet again another company. Interestingly, this company called DocVerse provides service that allow users to work together around Microsoft Office documents. And if this push through, DocVerse will be receiving around $25 million from Google. DocVerse was founded by Shan Sinha and Alex deNeui who are both former Microsoft product strategist, with Sinha was connected with Microsoft’s SharePoint and SQL Server, while deNeui was worked on Microsoft SQL Server web strategy. What’s interesting is the fact that DocVerse may be overlapping in functionality with Google Docs. Both Google Docs and DocVerse allow users to collaborate real time on documents. But this could very well be traced to the fact that Microsoft is planning to push this feature to Office 2010 to compete with Google Doc. So, there’s no other way for Google to retaliate to this by acquiring DocVerse since Google Docs can’t pretty much compete with Microsoft Office 2010. Although the deal was said to be not finalized yet, it is already in the works. So expect Google to announce this purchase probably this week. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Planning to Buy
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Since the time I bought iPhone and started spending more time outside with my daughter, I have found that having an audio version of a blog post may actually be really, really useful ! Just think about that: users may be given an opportunity to listen to your content while on their way to the office, while jogging, while in an air plane, you name it! Thus I decided to find some way to create an audio version of my own blog. My first impression was that there were quite a few of tools allowing to do that. But some of them turned out to be paid, others seemed broken – so in the end I was left with only one option: Odiogo . So I am sharing the whole process here: Go to Odiogo and sign up by providing your email and blog RSS feed URL (note: your feed needs to retrieve full posts, Odiogo won’t work with extracts). For information on how to activate RSS full text option on various platforms, refer to Odiogo FAQ ) . After this step your podcast feed is already created.Your blog dedicated page looks as follows whereas your blog feed that can be integrated in any podcast client looks like this: To integrate it to your blog, you’ll need to take the following steps: 1. Wait for the confirmation email which looks as follows: 2. Install the plugin (with new WordPress versions you can do it right from the WP-admin panel) and activate it. 3. Go to Settings > Odiogo Listen Button and activate your account by providing your feed ID you received in an email message: 4. Now you should see a “Listen” button underneath the title of each post on your blog. When you click the button, the text is shifted a few lines down and a control bar appears from which the MP3 file can be played/paused. Warning: the player may not always be available (especially for older posts) but the mp3 and iTunes downloads will always be there. Link under the player provide with a few more options Grabbing iTunes download; Streaming the MP3 files Subscribing to the podcast version of the blog Listening to older posts MP3 files, etc. 5. You may also want to add a subscription link to your blog sidebar (ala feedburner), to do that: go to Widgets and drag the ” Odiogo Subscribe Button ” to your sidebar: After that the button looks like this: Odiogo also supports two more blogging platforms: Blogger Widget TypePad Widget Are you aware of any other similar tool as (being nice tool overall) Odiogo not always behaves the way it is supposed to, so I’d love to try another alternative. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How I Added Voice to My Text Blog
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Google has just released the latest beta version of its Chrome browser. Aside from speed improvement which according to Google is a 30% improvement from the current stable release, the new Chrome beta comes with bookmark synching feature. This new feature simply means that you can now synchonize all your bookmarks across all computers where you installed Google Chrome beta. You no longer need to manually recrete your bookmarks every time you use Chrome on a different computer. To synchronize your bookmarks on all your computers, you need to activated by clicking on the wrench icon in your Chrome browser, then select “Synchronize my bookmarks”, then click “Merge sync.” To successfully synchronize your bookmarks, you need to login to your Google account before doing the procedure. I’ve downloaded the new Chrome beta release but haven’t started synching bookmarks on my desktop at home and at the office. Will have to check later whether this feature goes well. I would have to say though that this latest beta version of Google Chrome is definitely faster than the previous version I was using. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Outs a Faster Chrome Beta with Bookmark
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