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.
I know there are a lot of people out there that “get” internet marketing these days. But as a link builder, do you still run into people who have a hard time understanding what it is you “do?” Ever gotten a laugh and a “what is that” when you tell people you’re a link builder?
No? Hmm… must just be me then.
Since we are link builders, we know the process isn’t that hard to understand. But making the whole process easier to grasp for all those people new to this form of Ninjitsu can be difficult. This past March, my internet marketing company put together a trusty chart to make the whole process easy to understand.
I’m an employee, so obviously I have one on my wall. The chart is a great visual aide for explaining all the different ways to get links across the internet. Not to mention the design – a very “Nifty 50’s” feel (like a diner menu – greasy fingerprints not included)! Without giving too much away, our link building menu features the following “a la carte” options for getting links:
Link Bait
Social Communities
Paid/Trade Links
Cherry Picking Links
Content Submissions
The chart also features some downloadable programs and specific web sites for getting started with link building (you can download the chart there, also). In case you’re interested in taking a quick peek at the chart, you can check it out and download it – free – in PDF format. LinkBuildr isn’t the only site that has given this chart the “thumbs up” either – it’s been featured on SEO Book and the SEO 101 podcast, too. A little known link builder by the name of Stuntdubl also had some positive praise for it.
While not new to the practice of SEO when I started at ProspectMX, I definitely had a lot to learn about link building. I found the chart to be easy to understand then, and I still refer to it every now and then when my brain starts to get stale in one area. It’s never bad to have a reminder right in front of you!
Thanks to Ryan for allowing me to hop on his site and take a second to mention our chart. If you download it and find it useful, feel free to use it to explain to your mom or household pet how you do your job. The chart also works in meetings with C-levels that initially think link building involves little more than having their little princess point a link to daddy’s website from her Facebook profile.
————————————————————————————————————————
Jonathan Bentz is a link builder for ProspectMX, an internet marketing company in Pennsylvania. If you’re hip to Twitter and enjoy mindless ramblings about fantasy baseball and internet marketing, feel free to follow me – @jonathanbentz. Chances are good I might follow you back.
Now you might be double taking at the title because most of you who read this blog know I am not in favor of paid links. Now with that being said, why the hell am I talking about them? Well for the past couple of months I’ve been taking on a lot of clients which involves me to research their competitors backlink profiles. I’ve also taken on a few clients who were competing for some very dominated keywords, and from what I’ve learned is that paid links are still king.
Over the past week I’ve been working in a niche for a client that is tough to break into and we’re starting down a long road of link building. I won’t name the niche at all out of respect for my client, and I don’t want to out anyone for paid links because that’s not my agenda here. From what I have seen it is safe to say Google is not able to keep up at all with paid links, and perhaps they are only targeting sites that are listed in paid link networks. Besides the obvious it seems the best way is to go underground and contact these sites one on one.
From what I can tell, within some of these competitive niches the sites buying links usually are very in quality in regards to content and design. So I’ll admit the sites, even though paying for hundreds of links, should most likely still be ranking where they are. So will these sites eventually get the ban hammer dropped upon them? I’m starting to think most likely not, but I’m going to be keeping my eye on a few sites to see within the next year what happens. I’m also wondering if these sites were buying links years ago and because they’re all decently old, are they getting a get out of jail free pass?
I took a good amount of time looking at the advertising pages that some of the link sellers had open to the public. Most of them did not seem to fear the big G at all and openly set prices to text links. On top of that a lot of these sites had a solid PageRank of 5-7, and again it brings me back to wondering just how solid an old domain can be. So with all that being said, what are your thoughts on paid links(sorry to beat a dead horse, but she’s still breathing a little)?
Trade Vibes is a semi new site for all things startups and from what I’ve seen to compared sites is that it takes the cake. There are a lot of great startup sites out there but Trade Vibes has won my heart over with their features and best of all, the company profiles which are content rich. The site saw some good growth in 2008 and with the help of their users, they managed to compile over 10,000 company profiles. This is pretty damn impressive especially when you check out the profiles.
Now Trade Vibes is a great resource to build one way do follow links for your startup, and I mean for your startup only. Please do not try and spam this resource, and only use it for what the site is intended for. Your profile will growth with Google and in time it will be a valuable link, so make sure to fill your profile with as much relevant information to your startup as possible. Within your profile it also lists important people within the company and provides a user profile which also is a great place to get a link to your startup. Besides getting links this site is great for attracting investors and connecting with like minded people in your industry.
Happy Monday everyone….We’ve been working hard at getting the backlink analyzer function working on Link Voodoo and it should be rolled out very very soon. We’ve been taking into consideration all the features we’d want in this free tool and hopefully haven’t left anything out. We’re hoping to get some feedback from you folks before we roll it out and I have provided a screenshot below which should give you a better understanding of what we have in the works. We’re aiming to make it the most elaborate and informational backlink analyzer on the web which isn’t an easy task because there are a few really great tools already out there.
So it covers the usual goodies and you won’t be able to check the backlinks for individual pages until the Pro Tools roll out. If you are not signed up for a free account with Link Voodoo you will only be able to check the top 10 links, but with a free account you will be able to check all of them with full stats. Those stats include anchor text, Alexa ranking, Google PageRank, no/do follow, and the trust score of the site. You will also be able to download the results in a .csv file or in a nice sexy printable/emailable report for your client or boss. We decided to limit non signed up users only because the server costs involved in hosting a free tool like this. So please take a look at the screenshot and let me know what you’d like to see in the backlink analyzer that we don’t already have in or planned.
Find out the results of a year of high volume content marketing on guests blogs taught us money still talks. Read the results!
Join Us On Facebook
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.
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.
