I'm the CEO of Linkbuildr Marketing and the brains behind our branding and blog content. I specialize in effective marketing strategies for hotels, luxury brands and real estate. If your brand is in need of a boost then don't hesitate to contact me for a free proposal. Follow me on
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It has taken me a little too long to finally get to a short review on LotusJump SEO Software, so finally I’m getting my ass off the couch. You may have noticed the banner ads I have running for LotusJump, and thus taken it upon yourself to see what it is all about. For the rest of you I’ll try and do my best to explain everything this software tries to do. I am an affiliate of theirs so I’ll try and keep my opinion as nuetral as possible, but I’ll still be trying to make some money.
The software is designed for the inexperienced, mostly anyway, and makes link building a little easier for people who don’t have the time to learn or spend hours finding stuff to do. Once you sign up you can enter your website(s) and keywords which then gets populated with tasks via their task engine. This is where LotusJump rises above the rest of the SEO software out there and assigns easy to do tasks that will build up your backlink profile. Take a look at the video to get a visual idea of their task engine;
The tasks offer a diverse link profile once you complete a good chunk of them, and they are constantly updating the tasks to keep you going. The tasks include a diverse directory list to go through, Google Alerts style system to always monitor when someone is talking about your brand or keyword, and as well a whole host of content generation tasks.
So what do I think? Honestly, I am very impressed with it at a beginner – intermediate level and I know over time this will blossom into a task engine with link building tasks for all levels. I think this is a great asset to smaller companies and one man website owners who can’t afford to be link building for 10 hours a day. Another aspect I like is having a task engine in the first place because it’s hard to stay on course and having something to keep you on track will actually make you get things done. The price is also right at only $50 USD per month so you won’t go broke and this will cost you much much much less than a full time link builder.
If you’re a student, teacher or somehow involved in the education community you’ll be pleased to hear about Edtags. This social bookmarking site is not dofollow but that’s fine with me because the content being pushed is all related and quality. They’ve obviously had a problem with spamming in the past because registration requires you to email them to get in. This makes my posting job much easier in regards to warning people not to spam, so if you have a great education site get in touch with them.
Quad Riot is another social bookmarking site in the sea of many except it surpasses most of them in regards to site quality. I’ve been seeing a good chunk of social spam showing up on the frontpage which is obviously being voted with ill gotten accounts. It’s sad to see because the site is well designed and has a good number of indexed pages to go along with its PageRank of 5. If you create great content that should be seen by the masses then I urge you to start using Quad Riot and take it back from the spammers. Since the links are dofollow you’ll build up your link profile and hopefully fill up that front page with quality content.
I’ve just discovered FriendSite.com this morning while link building for a client. I’m still kind of groggy but I managed to not let it slip under my radar. To start off it looks like this social network was launched in October of 2007 and has seen some decent growth despite the growing number of social networks popping up all over the place. They hit 100,000 members last April and the growth wasn’t explosive until late this year, and it has been building up quite a storm every since. Here is a look at the Alexa graph since its launch;
The site is packed with features that you would find on most social networks with a few different twists. First of all their spam protection is heavily tweaked and does a decent job at keeping the place clean of junk. Secondly, the site has a large user base of people above 20 years old which helps keep it somewhat mature. User profiles are well put together and don’t resemble anything close to the ugly themes of Myspace.
As for link building, it is possible to use their bookmark system which is dofollow and if you take part properly, will get indexed when your user profile is indexed. Since the site has a lot of user activity it is in your best interest to take part and connect with people who have the same interests because you’ll quickly get knocked off for spam.
Stumpedia was launched just over a year ago and its grown to be one of the most active social search engines on the market. I’ve been a fan and using it for a while now, especially since they’ve gone dofollow. The site as of today is showing stats of 13,452 links, 3,976 members and over 35,000 search terms in the database. If you haven’t added your site to Stumpedia I highly suggest you go and register for an account, then search for your keyword. Once you’re there you can add your listing to that search term and it will eventually show up in your backlink profile….assuming it doesn’t get de-listed. Remember to only submit quality sites because you won’t last long spamming this search engine with junk.
The site has been growing strong in the last few months and hopefully will continue on in this fashion. Like I mentioned before the links are dofollow so they will eventually show up in your backlink profile. You can also vote on your listings which will help with placement within the serps. I like what they have done with this platform and I wouldn’t doubt if Google has been snaking ideas from them for the future of their search engine. It’s going to be a tough battle combating serp spam, but eventually we’ll have a cleaner search experience.
Since I’ve been really busy I thought it would be a great time to write about another link building company that can get the job done right. I like to remind everyone that I choose these companies on my own and they’re in no way paid for buy money, gifts or exotic vacations. It’s hard to find a good team of link builders that go above and beyond the basic work you’d expect from most consultants on the web. I urge you folks to get in touch with Vertical Measures if you’re looking to get quality link building backed by people who know what they’re doing.
Vertical Measures has a few different options for link building to fit your projects needs, mainly they work on providing a diverse link profile that will stand the test of time. If you’re looking to get a new website off the ground they provide a solid set of directory submissions to both free and paid/review directories. Combine that with their article marketing and press release services and you’re on your way to a successful start on your link profile.
If you’re looking to get a indepth and powerful link profile built for your website I suggest contacting them about their custom link building. If you’re in a competitive niche there is no substitute for a thorough and on going campaign to not only get you to the top, but keep you from dropping off the map in the long run. If you have a great site with informative and unique content, then they can build authoritative one way links.
Vertical Measures is not just a link building company and offers a wide range of services. I’ve started branching out and including social media marketing into my campaigns, and they’ve already been doing it. I believe it is most effective to do this with a link building campaign to leverage exposure while your link profile builds up. Their team is equipped to handle it all and I have nothing left to say except get in touch with them to see what they can do for you.
Well you may have noticed that this week has a been a little slow with updates except for my lengthy Video Marketing & SEO post, and I apologize to you folks. I thought I would make this quick post with some links to a few great posts that have been out recently within the blogosphere. I would also like you folks to participate by leaving links to some great content in the comments here because I know I won’t be able to get everything in here. Since I’ve launched my link building services I’ve had non stop clients coming in so it has sadly slowed down my posting abilities.
Link Voodoo is almost launching version 1.1 which is the addition to our backlink analyzer. Like I stated in the last update we were having some issues getting the data back and forth from the server to the browser, but we’ve got it working without a browser plugin and it’s almost ready! We will be needing a few good beta testers before it goes fully public so contact me if you’re interested. We’re looking for SEO consultants and other link builders who do a lot of analyzing to apply because we need to try and break her.
I’ll be offering Video SEO services to go along with my link building consulting, so get in touch if you’re interested in being my test subject at a discounted rate. This will include either half assed movie content made by my team, or you can hire out to have a video made for me to do my magic on. This services is great for affiliate marketers as well companies looking to let customers put a face or gimmick to your name.
I just discovered Michael Martinez’s blog called SEO Theory and I would highly recommend it to everyone after reading his work. Michael writes really well and I learned a lot in the short time I’ve spent reading already.
So like I stated above I want you folks to link in the comments to other great posts that should be read that I missed. I’ll be working my ass off this weekend on my clients so it won’t be until next week I get to writing a few more good posts. I have 74 drafts on link building methods I need to catch up on, so I do have ideas! I’m also looking for a few good guest bloggers anytime, so get in touch!
A lot of people have already done amazing blog posts on video SEO, and I’m hoping to go a little deeper with this post and give you folks some great resources for not only ranking a video, but distributing it properly. It’s no secret that you can get a Youtube video ranked very easily for very competitive keywords, but there are a whole slough of options you can use to market your video beyond that. There are also ways you can use social media sites to make sure your video gets more views, and hopefully is decided upon by Goolge that it should rank well. Sometimes you can just luck out and name the video after the keyword you’re targeting and hit hold, otherwise you might have to work at it a little.
Doing Video SEO is pretty much the same as link building, at least the mind set and thought process. When I take on a link building campaign for a client who’s site is authoritative in their niche it allows me to attack on a whole other level. Because that site -most likely- has great content, I can hunt down places that would want to link to it. The same principles are in play here, great content should attract links so make sure you’re producing a quality video. If you’re pushing a product, either your own or via an affiliate campaign, the person is going to judge heavily on how your video comes across. This could make or break your campaign, and let’s face it, it won’t have any chance of going viral if it stinks.
Getting Your Videos Out There:
There are hundreds of video sharing websites already and there’s no real need to get your video out to all of them. Keeping track of the top video sharing websites wouldn’t do you any harm, and I usually only submit a clients, or my videos, to the top 10-12 places available. Since there are a ton of them, you can most likely find a few that are based solely around your niche. Thanks to the good folks at Reel SEO, you can find their most awesome and recently updated list of video sharing websites. There’s no need for me to list any here because that will take care of all your video needs, as well keep you busy for hours!
Ok so I’ve got my video ready, now what? Well uploading your videos is the first step, but this can become a very tedious task if you’re doing it a lot. I’ll go into a couple services that might help you with that before going into optimization.
Hey!Spread is my top pick for mass video uploading for a variety of reasons. Now this is not a free service, but that’s fine because it isn’t cheap to run this kind of business. With Hey!Spread you can easily upload your video to the top 20+ social video websites on the net. You can either choose to pick which ones to upload to, or have it automatically grab your videos from Youtube and download them and then proceed to get up to the other video sites. Hey!Spread is also a very well designed site with an interface that a child could use, so you shouldn’t have a problem getting things figured out. Prices for this service are very reasonable and are based on a credit system that you can pay as go, or get billed at the end of the month. A single credit costs .05 and this is the pricing chart from their website;
Tubemogul is another great video distribution and stastical analysis web app that can save you oodles of time. They also have a free version which is defintely worth checking out because you can do up to 100 video deployments a month. This should give you some idea of what this tool can do for you before diving into a larger campaign.
TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers improved understanding of when, where and how often videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.
There are a few things to remember to help target the keywords you’d like your video to rank for such as title, keywords and the description. I know I may be insulting your intelligence with that last sentance, but I just had to make sure….The one thing you might not have thought about when naming and tagging your video properly is that services like Squidoo, Hubpages and other social media sites can pick these videos up. I’ve noticed with a few clients that with the right tagging their videos started showing up all over the place. This really did wonders for their views as well I noticed the videos started showing up in the top 10-20 SERPs.
Social Video Marketing:
There are other ways of attracting views your your video content beyond just uploading to the tube sites, optimizing for SEO and sending to friends. There are a whole stream of interesting and niche video sharing communities that let you showcase your work, build niche channels and spread the good word. All this helps build up your videos and provide them with an edge over your competitors while reaching the top of the SERPs. Just remember that your video content is going to have to be top notch to really make it above and beyond. Let’s take a look at a handful of cool social video sites that can improve your videos stats;
Squidoo of course is a great place to make unique content pages and I sometimes like to make them just to showcase my video work. As well, I mentioned earlier in this post that if you title and tag the video correctly it might show up on other peoples Len’s. This same general principal goes for the other social content creation sites like Hubpages.com and Gather.com. If you’re hitting a hot niche you’re most likely going to have that video picked up.
MeFeedia is a online video sharing community that allows you to submit your embeded videos from other video sites. This is the type of 2.0 site that can help a great deal in getting your video to go viral, or at least get some more hits. You can also network easily by joining groups related to your niche and making sure your video gets added.
Vodpod is a cool video sharing community site that has been growing at a rapid rate and is showing no signs of slowing down. They have embeded videos from over 6000 sites….yes you read that right. The reat thing about Vodpod is not only can you promote your videos, you can also get a link back to the RSS feed providing the content. If you use this wisely you can snag a nice juicy link back to your original content page, whether that be the video itself or your blog. One last little great feature is the ability to create blog widgets with selected videos for your blog, or to share with anyone else!
Videosift is a social video site that takes in popular videos and they’re voted on like Digg or Reddit. The site offers a bunch of features like channels, playlists and a section called Beggar’s Canyon which allows new good videos to get a better chance at votes. This site is also great to push a good video because they receive a large chunk of traffic daily.
Gawkk is another social video site that you allows you to vote popular videos to the frontpage as well share videos with friend and members. All the usual features are there such as channels, groups and user profiles. This social video site is not as popular, and seems to be half a year old but it has been showing growth.
VidsLib is yet another social video site which allows users to vote videos to the front page. There’s nothin too special about this although it used to be ranked sub 10k on Alexa but has seen a massive drop in traffic. I’m not sure if a different site used to be on the domain, but judging by the content that was on the frontpage there’s not a whole lot of user activity anymore.
Yidio is a very cool and relitively new video search engine that is full of only the top quality videos under every niche. They have just dipped under the 10k mark on Alexa so well promoted videos will get your content a good chunk of views. Another great feature of this site is that it is an Adsense sharing social video site, so it never hurts to get the extra cash.
Video Bomb is the last social video voting site I’ll mention before I exhaust my readers. It is pretty much the same as all the rest, has a lot of traffic and has stayed at a steady growth rate over the past year. The only thing I would warn you folks about is there is usually a decent amount of “sexy” videos promoted to the front page. Not really a problem for me but some of you folks might not want to promote on this site.
Paying Your Way In:
This eventually might fall under the Google slap someday but I feel its fine to talk about it because marketing is war! This only works, usually, if you have a really good video to promote so don’t bother trying it otherwise. There is no trick or secret, just hunt down popular users on $insertvideosite and ask them if you could pay them to showcase your video on their channel. Some users have so many followers it’s an easy way to start off the campaign. You could also hire these popular users to create a video for you or do some sort of company review. If you have a product, why not ask if you could send it to them to review. Statistics recently out have stated that 81% of consumers read reviews online about a product before buying…that number will rise so why not have a viral review video going around?
Where To Go From Here:
Well the above list of places to also try and get your video noticed is just a small amount of really popular sites out there. I highly recommend keeping an eye on Mashable, Feedmyapp and Killerstartups for new and upcoming video sites you can promote on. There are also a plethora of options still listed on those sites I didn’t have time to dig out.
If you’re a company or indivual with smaller budget video marketing can be a little discouraging at first, but do your best to keep refining your content and creating powerful social accounts. After a few months of video promotion and adding friends you will start to see when video marketing becomes a very powerful tool. I’ve made so many videos that took days to finish to only have a few hundred views in the end, and others I’ve made goofing off and collect over 2 million views.
Video Marketing Resources:
Reel SEO – The leading blog on video marketing and SEO with so many resources it will make your head spin!
Matt SEO – A leader in the viral video marketing ranks who has been doing online marketing since 1994. If you haven’t heard of Matt, you haven’t been looking hard enough!
Single Throw – If you need a viral video created and distributed to the masses you should probably check out these folks.
Find out the results of a year of high volume content marketing on guests blogs taught us money still talks. Read the results!
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Negative SEO Attack?
Check out the anatomy of a "negative SEO" attack on our own site in our latest post. There's too much worry about these attacks happening, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Come read what I think and just what to do if anything like this happens to your brand.
It has taken me a little too long to finally get to a short review on LotusJump SEO Software, so finally I’m getting my ass off the couch. You may have noticed the banner ads I have running for LotusJump, and thus taken it upon yourself to see what it is all about. For the rest of you I’ll try and do my best to explain everything this software tries to do. I am an affiliate of theirs so I’ll try and keep my opinion as nuetral as possible, but I’ll still be trying to make some money.
The software is designed for the inexperienced, mostly anyway, and makes link building a little easier for people who don’t have the time to learn or spend hours finding stuff to do. Once you sign up you can enter your website(s) and keywords which then gets populated with tasks via their task engine. This is where LotusJump rises above the rest of the SEO software out there and assigns easy to do tasks that will build up your backlink profile. Take a look at the video to get a visual idea of their task engine;
