As an online marketer, you must remember that the Internet is social. If you aren’t contributing commentary to the blogosphere, a good question to ask yourself is, “Why not?” Commenting is a great way to attract visitors, brand yourself and bring good content to the website. There are a lot of things you can do to increase your chances of having a comment published while avoiding the spammy approach. If you need some tips for making better comments (or justification for commenting at all) check out Rand Fish’s recommendations for blog commenting as a marketing strategy on SEOmoz.
Social media is not a giant killer when not utilized effectively, and it can hurt your budget if you focus too much on it. So, dcgloballlc of the YOUmoz SEOmoz.org blog writes about getting on the social scene without neglecting traditional SEO practices such as link building. He splits the article into three sections of how to integrate social media into traditional SEO. First, he says you need “fuel,” which can be equated to link bait offered by a social media outlet. Then, you need “accelerant,” which is a social media following with which to ignite your fuel. Finally, you need a “trigger/timer,” which means offering your link bait at the proper time. This is a creative and interesting post on how to incorporate a more integrated SEO campaign.
SEOs have it tough. Part of you just wants to make sure the search engine bots are munching away happily on your keywords, and that if someone wants to peruse every product manual your company ever produced, they can. However, the other part of you wants to be fresh, hot, creative and new. So, how do you put the two together? Video blogs! As Scott Cowley from Search Engine Journal writes, video blogs can jumpstart your SEO content, whether this is by adding in passion, freeing you from your formatting fears, or syndicating your name across various video hosting sites. In fact, we’ve already incorporated video blogs into PPCHero…and you should try it too!
In respect to what has been considered the standard for web-based video, Google announced that it will no longer support H.264 video formats. Tavis Hampton of Search Engine People reveals the controversial nature of this shift, outlining two major sides to the formatting debate. On one side, there’s Mozilla and Opera who advocate an open style format, whereas Apple and Microsoft defend their claim that the H.264 format is the future of web-based video. Google’s addition of open video formatting (WebM) essentially sides with the lesser players (Adobe, Mozilla, Opera) and leaves Apple and Microsoft on the defensive. As Google’s YouTube dominates video web traffic today, this leaves royalties like Microsoft and Apple with no other choice than to tread carefully.
It is always good to audit each element of your SEO efforts. An important element to always keep in mind is a website’s internal link structure. In his guest post on ProBlogger, James Hay of Fasthosts Internet Ltd. shared five tips to improve the link architecture of a site to strengthen your rankings. Using text menus, adding sitemaps and using static URLs are just a few of the suggestions he provides in his article. Of course, there are many other facets of SEO for a site owner to worry about, sometimes it is necessary to go back and review the basics.
Abby is an Account Executive at Hanapin Marketing, a search engine marketing firm focused on generating results through PPC and SEO.
     | do some of that social network stuff. |
