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Everything in life that is worth anything takes a lot of effort and action. When I was in High School my Dad bought me an old 66’ Ford Mustang that was really beat up. For three years I worked on that old car and made it look like a million bucks. Because I worked hard and took action the car was amazing and it meant a lot to me, a lot more that if my Dad would have just bought me a new car. The point is you have to ACT to receive what it is you want. Link Building is no different. If you want links (which you should) then you have to take some specific actions to get links. If you think they are just going to come because you have a cool website, then I am afraid you will be very disappointed. Link Building in regards to Search Engine Optimization is not going away anytime soon, and for this very reason if you don’t have a strategy it will be very hard for you to rank for the keywords/phrases that you so desire. Below you will find some specific actions you must take to build up your link juice. These items are not the only steps you need to take (there are hundreds – even thousands) but they will tell you what actions you need to take today to start your Link Building campaign. A.C.T. stands for Ask, Content, and Timing. You must A.C.T. to build links effectively. A –
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Social Bookmarking sites aren’t a huge mystery. If you think there’s some “special formula” to the Digg and Reddit algorithms, for the most part: you’d be wrong. Sure, there’s an algorithm at work there, but before you make that attempt at the front page, you need to work on the 2 major pieces necessary for success: great content, and a network of users to help promote it. The need for great content is self explanatory, and if you still need help with yours, there’s plenty of articles on the topic. But why is having a network so important? If you’re one of those people that thinks Digg power users hit the front page so often because their submissions “count” for more than others’, again: you’d be wrong. That success is based on a loyal following of literally thousands of users that follow their submissions and vote them up with and without being asked to. Building a network goes far beyond finding and adding users to your friends list. You need to participate in a variety of ways that both gets your account noticed and shows you’re willing to reciprocate by voting for, spreading, and commenting on others user’s submissions. And believe me, it’s a lot of hard work that you need to keep up on. Below is a basic guideline of some dos and don’ts roughly based on the regular habits of power users: Do: Friend, IMvite, and Follow power Users Don’t: Be a pest. If there ever was a starting point to creating a network for social bookmarking sites, making friends with the power users would be it. They have hundreds (if not thousands) of followers & friends, and a vote from them can often turn into a number of additional votes from their faithful. Also, once you’re seen in their company, people will ideally start coming to you. What you have to remember, however, is these people are super busy. They don’t have time to digg, vote, and retweet 100 links for you every day. They also don’t want to answer newb questions like: “How many diggs does it take to hit the front page?” Friend them, add them to your IM list, and follow them on twitter, but don’t ask too much of them. In fact, don’t ask a thing unless you’ve started giving first. Vote up their submissions, retweet for them on twitter, and if they IM you for a vote, make sure they know you got it for them. After a while, they’ll take notice, and before you know it, they’ll start voting up your subs without asking. If not, a simple IM request isn’t totally out of the question, but remember: once a day is plenty. Do: Participate in the SOCIAL side of social bookmarking Don’t: Be a Troll Most social bookmarking sites allow comments…use them! Commenting and participating in the social conversation isn’t just about being funny or witty. It’s about being noticed and showing that you actually took the time to view a submission. Being the first to comment (hint: especially a power user’s submission) is a great way of being noticed. Making a great comment can even get you attention far beyond the person who submitted the post, too. Sometimes great early comments get up-voted as much as the story itself…you just need to know how to appeal to the community. Spend some time reading comments to find out what gets up-voted, and what gets buried. While commenting is great way to network, here are some things to avoid: Don’t be too controversial (especially if you disagree with the article/submission) unless you’re sure the community agrees with your take..even then, your comment may end up buried. Don’t reply to comments to disagree…a flame war is not networking. Being funny is great, but remember not everyone has your sense of humor. Finally, don’t be offensive. In other words: don’t be a troll. Do: Embrace Multiple Social Networks & Technologies Don’t: Spread yourself too thin Facebook, Twitter, Instant Messaging, Skype, and the thousands of additional social media networks out there can be your best friend. Finding power users and your closest, most loyal contacts on these networks is a great way to keep multiple lines of communication open. As you network and add new friends you’ll find while most people have accounts on a number of networks, many stick to their few favorites. Twitter is a no-brainer if you want to expand your social network, while Instant Messaging ranges from AOL, Yahoo!,G-chat, and more. Using a program like Digsby can help you consolidate multiple instant messaging accounts into one simple application. Just make sure you keep a separate account for your personal or business life. If you succeed in building a strong network, you’ll likely get hammered with IMs every time you sign on. Another way to expand your reach is to join multiple social bookmarking sites. Digg and Reddit are great (and obviously the largest), but many (if not most) power users and users with larger networks are members of a number of the smaller sites as well. Being noticed on other networks (like Mixx, Propeller, and Stumble Upon) will really help you stand out, especially to users with large & powerful networks. Just be careful not to stretch yourself too thin. Maintaining a number of profiles on multiple social sites is a lot of work, so manage your time wisely. *Quick tip: remember to list and/or interlink your other social profiles when you can, and keep your user name & avatar as consistent as possible. Do: Submit content from community favorite sites Don’t: Submit commercial content As a member of a community, like Digg or Reddit, you’re likely to notice a trend when it comes to certain sites that produce front page content on a regular basis. It’s largely because they consistently break news or produce killer articles/videos/images/etc., and as a result, a large number of users regularly check these sites to submit and/or vote up their content. Being the first to submit breaking news or great new content from these sites is a sure-fire way to get noticed. It’ll also help build your profile with a fast track to hitting the front page (social networking pay-dirt). Be sure to add these sites to an RSS reader that you check regularly. On the other side of the coin, one of the quickest ways to fail in the social bookmarking world is to submit content that has no place in the community you are in. Commercial content, marketing (and yes SEO) articles, and poorly written content not only won’t achieve results, it will diminish your networking efforts. Just remember: most people hate marketers. (GASP!) They’ll down vote you, remove you as a friend, block you and even report you as a spammer. So do yourself a favor and make sure everything you’re trying to promote is WORTHY of the votes. Because even if you’ve built a strong enough network to push just about anything to the front page, it probably won’t last, and if you’re really careless, you even risk losing your account. Do: Submit content from a variety of sites Don’t: Consistently Submit content from a single site or short list of sites This concept may seem obvious to most, but you’d be surprised how many users submit their own content and nothing else. Oh sure, they’ll vote for other stuff every now and then, but their intentions are pretty clear: they’re in it for the marketing. In other words: you need to make sure you don’t LOOK like a marketer. The best way to do this is to submit content from a variety of sources. That way, when other users visit your profile (say, to add you as a friend) they don’t only see a single site* (or short list of sites) that you’re trying to promote. *This is especially true of Stumble Upon where one of the goals is to attract subscribers of your discoveries and up votes. Seeing the same site over and over on SU creates a bad user experience for your subscribers, and as a result, you’ll likely lose them. Do: Sign in, Vote up, Retweet, and Comment regularly Don’t: Leave huge lapses of activity in your accounts Even power users can’t afford to be away for too long…perhaps ESPECIALLY them, but I digress. If you take too much time away from social bookmarking activity, you’ll soon find that all the hard work you’ve done networking will start to go to waste. It’s not that you can’t take a week or two vacation if you like, but the more inactivity you have, the more you’ll find your influence dwindling. Basically, the more available you are (or at least appear to be) to vote and spread the submissions of your network & friends, the more influence you’ll have with them to push your own. Do: Perform favors (like submitting content) for friends in your network Don’t: Ask too much of your friends & contacts without giving back It’s a karma thing: the more you do for others, the more they’ll be willing to do for you. Don’t be afraid to submit content for others (as long as it’s appropriate and worthy of votes). Vote up your friend’s submissions without being asked, retweet it, and be a regular commenter of their stuff even when they simply asked for a vote. Go out of your way for them and they’ll go out of their way for you. If you start asking too much of someone, they’ll probably avoid you or simply ignore your requests from then on. So what’s asking too much? Basically asking anything of someone that isn’t a simple vote request (unless they’ve offered otherwise or owe you a favor) can be considered too much. So if you need someone to submit something for you, make sure that A) you’ve built a strong enough relationship with this person first, and B) it’s TOP quality content. Otherwise, you may never hear from them again. Do: Be a human being Don’t: Be anti-social or a computer What’s the point of “social” media if you’re not going to be social? If you want a network of “friends” or followers to fulfill some ego driven goal based on a number, by all means, automate as much as you can. But if you’re looking for contacts and friends who will be willing to do favors for you and can help you consistently reach the front page of your favorite social bookmarking sites, then you need to act like a human. Be friendly and don’t be afraid to have conversations once in a while. If the only IM-ing you do is “Can you digg this for me? Thx!” and “Dugg, can you hit this for me?”, then you’re missing a vital part of social media, and your networking efforts will probably suffer as a result. Do: Keep at it Don’t: Give up This list isn’t some secret sauce that will put you on the fast track to success. Building a network for social bookmarking sites takes a lot of work. This is simply a starting point and guideline for you to succeed and (frankly) not waste your own time. And while it’s a lot of work, the good news is you don’t need to spend all day every day on social media in order to be successful. You just need to find a rhythm that you’re comfortable with and stick to it. Persistence is everything. Todd Heim is CEO, co-founder, and SEO manager of Essential Internet Marketing, LLC , an SEM and Social Media Marketing company based in Albany, NY. You can find Todd on twitter at: http://twitter.com/ToddHeim/ Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Building Social Bookmarking Networks
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The hCard is a one-to-one representation of the vCard in XHTML format. It is served to turn contact information into a semantically correct HTML, Atom, RSS or any arbitrary XML file. I won’t try to describe why to use it. Quite a few people have done a great job detailing what hCard microformat is and why people should consider using it. One of the best step-by-step guides that any newbie will understand is “The hCard Microformat” tutorial published in 2007 . For those people who won’t learn anything until they are told this will affect rankings, I will only add that hCards are used by Google to create search snippets , (obviously) to rank businesses in local and geo-targeted search and is rumored to use the format more and more extensively. Besides, it helps search (and other) bots to aggregate all the web information about any specific person or business . This post shares some most useful and easy-to0use hCard tools for you to learn how to format n hCard, where to use it and how to take advantage of it. hCard
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Life is a funny thing! As humans we all want to be successful and happy. Each year goes by (faster than we would like) full of goals, failures and accomplishments. Ultimately it is up to us as individuals to reach for the stars and fulfill our desires. Below you will find a list of five things that you can do to end this year in a way that will make you happy, successful and ready for the New Year! But remember, it is up to you and no one else to make it happen. If you are reading this, more than likely you are a Business, SEO, or Social Media minded person; and for that very reason I have focused the items below on you. 1. Life – The number one item that you need to do today to end this year with a bang is to evaluate your life. The reason why this is number one on my list is because if you can’t take care of yourself, then how are you going to take care of your family, job, or business? Focus some time today on going back through notes, files, and papers, really anything that you can find that has your 2009 resolutions or goals that you set earlier this year. If you can’t find anything or you didn’t put anything together then that is just fine, stay with me though. Next thing you need to do is review your resolutions or goals.
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I got a call today from a close friend that one of our other friends had a stroke earlier today and was in the hospital. As soon as I heard, I jumped online to get the phone number for the ICU unit of the hospital where he’s at so I could coordinate visiting him. I did this because I’ve had a lot of experience visiting friends and family members in ICU units. They have strict visiting hours and visitation rules. It’s at this point I discovered a MASSIVE FAIL on the part of Sutter Health when it comes to both SEO and Telephone Support… ______________________________________ The first person in our close-knit group of friends to find out about the stroke happens to have lived in San Francisco for many years. When she started the phone notifcation process, she said to let everyone know he’s in the ICU unit at Davies Medical Center in the city. Not being a native of or truly knowledgeable about that particular hospital, I naturally went to the web for contact information. ______________________________________ My initial search for Davies Medical Center San Francisco got me the following results: Because I hadn’t been aware that “Davies” is not a medical center, but instead, a CAMPUS that’s part of the Sutter Health California Pacific Medical Center complex of campuses, the only match that made sense was the last entry above, part of the Standford University site. But that LINK is just for an Environmental Impact report on a parking structure! Worthless. So I clicked on the YELP entry. And got This: So I called. And got the main Sutter Health call center. When I asked for the ICU unit, the operator said “Which one”? Uh, there’s more than one? okay – the Davies Medical Center ICU, please. That operator put me through, and when I explained why I was calling, the nurse said – there’s nobody here by that name… ______________________________________ OMG – is he like DEAD? I thought? The nurse said – let me look him up… Okay – So she looked him up and of course said, Oh – he’s in the Davies Campus ICU… WAIT – THIS isn’t the Davies Campus? No – this is the California Campus… Okay – could you transfer me please? Hold on.. Yeah Sure. Let’s play THIS game… ______________________________________ At this point I jumped back to Google, because I knew I couldn’t rely on another phone transfer. Why should I? I mean, this is only 2009 right? And after DECADES of being shuffled by underpaid, unhappy, under-trained, unsympathetic phone reps, I knew better than to expect that the SECOND transfer would go any better than the FIRST one…. So I clicked this time on the main CPMC link shown for the local listings. Which brought me to the main Sutter Health CPMC web site. Note how the top navigation on that site has NOTHING even close to a “CONTACT US” link. Or a “LOCATIONS” link. Or a “CAMPUSES” link. But just below that, on the right side, they DO have this: Now, even though it says “View Map”, and not “Visit Campus Page” or something, I took a wild guess and when I went to that page, it was, in fact, a more complete page than just a map. It included the actual address of the campus, a campus schematic showing where buildings are, and written directions from various points. As well as a Google Map. The problem with that page though, is there’s NO phone number anywhere on the page. NONE. Except in the Google Map Bubble, it shows the MAIN NUMBER for CPMC again. You know – the one I called first, which only got me transferred to the WRONG campus… By now, I had been transferred a second time. But guess where to? ANOTHER WRONG CAMPUS. ______________________________________ Fortunately, the woman who answered THAT phone, was kind enough to dig. At first she said “I’m sorry – there’s no number for…” “Excuse me? My friend just had a STROKE and he’s in the ICU, and you’re telling…” “Wait – let me check… Okay – here’s the number to the Davies Campus – but it’s the main number, we can’t give out the ICU number. 415-600-5274″… (side note – the reason hospitals don’t give out the number to an Intensive Care Unit, is they don’t want just anyone calling, intentionally or not, directly into the unit. The need for quiet, and to allow ICU staff to provide the most important care to critically ill patients is far greater than allowing a direct number out. But of course, that’s no excuse for not publishing the main number to the correct campus!) Well it turns out that was in fact, the right number. And when I called, I learned that my friend is doing okay for now, and resting. The nurse explained their strict visiting hours policies, and said at this point today, it would be best to allow him to just rest, but to check in tomorrow and come after calling… ______________________________________ So – Back to SEO, Epic Fails and the Human
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