You have probably heard that having links pointed back to your website is good for your search engine optimization. This is very true.
(Audio at bottom)
If you are marketing from a website, the more links there are pointing to your website, the more popular it appears to be to the search engines. Think of this as a kind of ‘popularity contest’.
The search engines rely on popularity to help determine how valuable your site is to potential searchers. Although this is not the only criteria the search engines use, this is an important factor in your overall online marketing approach.
It goes like this: search engines are delivering a product to their customers, and that product is search results. The search engines know that you are looking for the most relevant sites possible, and they know, too, that people who find sites to be particularly relevant, they like to link to them. Search engines track the number of links there are to any given website, and use this information to help determine where to place the site in the search rankings to give their customers the most relevant sites to choose from. A site that has more links is deemed more valuable to searchers, and is therefore given a higher priority than a site that has fewer links.
To be clear; this is not the ONLY way a search engine grades a site, and there are certainly cases where more links gets trumped by some other data point. Nevertheless; links are important and it makes sense to build as many quality links as you can.
So, how to build links? There are a couple ways to get you started:
Make comments on blogs. Find blogs that discuss your market topic and get involved. Make comments on their posts as often as you can. Most blog sites will allow you to add your URL to the comment. If they don’t, move on. When you do make comments, make sure they are thoughtful and that they contribute to the conversation; you don’t want to be seen as an annoyance.
Get involved in forum discussions. Forums are a great place to get involved with other birds of a feather, and allow you to make successive comments. In most cases, you can include your URL in each of your comments. Again, make sure you are contributing to the conversation and building your credibility with valid comments. Don’t get into arguments, and try to avoid being critical of other people in the forum. Basically: Play nice in the sandbox.
Post news to free news sites. Whenever you post content to your blog, make sure you are taking advantage of opportunities to repost your content. There are a number of free sites out there that allow you to post your news and articles. For news, simply do a search for ‘Free News Posting‘ to find a list of sites that allow you to post for free. For regular articles, use sites like StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Delicious.com and even Facebook and Twitter.
Note that all of these sites are free. All it takes is a little elbow grease and your site will begin to shine.
A final point: Make sure you choose your sites carefully. As a popularity contest, your reputation is built on the reputation of the sites from which you are linked. The more popular the site, the better. Like being a good friend of the most popular kid in school, you get some of the credibility from the leading sites. Conversely, links from bad sites known for spam or suspicious practices will tend to hurt your site. So be selective.
Here’s the audio…
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We recently added a new section to our ListPipe Content Notification emails titled ‘Social Media Marketing Tips‘.
Every time we post new content, our customers receive an email notification announcing the availability of the new content, including a complete review of the article, graphics, and links to the user’s blog.
I am pleased to announce that we have added the new social marketing tips with every notification as a reminder to perform four basic steps with the arrival of your new content. For those of you not participating in ListPipe, you can easily perform these steps with your own blog content.
So, when you have new content, take a minute to get the word out in four easy steps…
1. Visit your new post and share it to your Facebook page; Just click the Facebook Share button at the bottom of the article.
2. Tweet your post to your followers on Twitter; copy the URL to the new article and paste it into your Twitter post field with a comment.
3. Post your new article to Stumbleupon; Click the StumbleUpon Share button at the bottom of the article and complete the StumbleUpon profile.
4. Email the new article to four friends; Simply copy the URL for the article and paste it into an email with a short, personal invitation to read it.
Do this every time you receive or post a new article in order to grow your opportunities in social media marketing!
We finally launched our new automated About and Contact pages.
When a new customer signs up for a blog using our automated system for any of our vertical categories (including dentistry and real estate), our system will automatically create an About page, and a Contact Us page. Both pages are fully editible, of course, and can be modified by the user simply by loging into the blog control panel and making any necessary adjustments.
Square Compass created a new Simple Contact plugin for Wordpress expressly for the new feature. The new plugin provides a simple way to add a contact form to your Wordpress blog. The no-frills contact form will be available in the Wordpress plugins library soon. I’ll keep you posted.
As for the new Pages feature in ListPipe, users now have the ability to capture more search engine attention with an automatically customized About page. The About page includes a short, custom paragraph about you based on your input during the registration process. Though simple, the About Us content is designed to give search engines a customized glance at who you are, and provides a more mature position for your ListPipe site.
The Contact Us page is also customized, and includes an automated form that allows your visitors to contact you by completing a simple contact form. The form is customized to deliver the feedback directly to your email address, and includes a Captcha for security, and error checking to help assure you do not get spammed. The form is optimized to ensure, also, that your visitors provide you with at least one method of contact, and warns them if they do not complete the comments field.
We are excited to announce this new feature, and thrilled that we now have a complete solution for those who use ListPipe to capture business leads through Internet marketing.
When adding information to your blog with an intention to appeal to the search engines, it is important to consider geographic localization.
A few weeks ago, Google confirmed this in an article titled Google Becomes More Local. The article was not about Google’s plans to open local shops across the country, it was about Google’s understanding that when we search for products and services, we usually want them in the geographic area from which we are searching.
Apple, too, recently revealed that they will support geolocation services in their new iPhone 3.0 software. Geolocation services will allow you to search from your iPhone and receive results based on your current location. Imagine standing on a city corner and searching for ’sushi’ and getting step-by-step directions to the nearest location for lunch. Pretty cool, and very powerful.
To take advantage of these new technologies, and to attract local search traffic to your site, you need to be incorporating geo-tagging and geo-centric keywords. One of the easiest ways to do this is to include the name of your city or town as a modifier for keywords in your articles. For instance, instead of simply stating that you are a ’sushi restaurant’, you might mention that you are an ‘Provo sushi restaurant‘. Using the name of your city helps the search engines understand your location, and is a good way to help capture a typical keyword search.
It helps to understand what your customers may be looking for when they type in a keyword string in a search engine. knowing they may be looking for your service in your town, or even local surrounding cities, will help you attract local customers to your site.
ListPipe articles always include geo-tagging. Our articles are linked using a combination of city names and keywords to help search engines better judge the type of service our customers are providing to a geographic area.
Blogging is about sharing information. As an information sharer, you have an opportunity to link to other information from each of your blog posts. This is not only a good thing for your readers, but the search engines like it too. It can be the critical difference in getting your content noticed.
If you are posting a typical article of about 250-300 words, you should be including at least 2-3 links, but not more than 4-5. Links can and should lead to one of three places:
Your Home page;
Another post on your site;
Another site altogether (but make sure it is relevant).
I have a quick video that will show you how to add a link in your Wordpress blog.
Don’t go crazy with your links; just a couple for each post, and remember that linking to an outside site is a good thing. Just make sure the new link opens in a new window, and that the target site is relevant to your content.
Here’s how I create links in my blog:
Open two tabs in your browser, one for the blog editing window, and one for the ‘public’ side of your blog;
Write your article and get it ready to publish in the editing window. Before publishing…
Find a keyword in your new post that you want to link, highlight and copy it;
Now, Go to the public blog site (in your other tab) and perform a ‘Search’ for your keyword;
You should get a couple articles from your blog in the search results. Select from the list of resulting articles and click the headline;
Copy the URL from the browser window and move back to your editing window;
With your keyword still highlighted, click the ‘link’ icon at the top of your editing window and past in the URL;
Complete the process by identifying a ‘Target’ (open in Same if on your site, open in New if another), and add a Title. Don’t worry about ‘Class’ right now;
Hit ’save’, and treat yourself to a donut. Don’t forget to post your new blog article before you head out.
Our how-to videos are presented in high quality Quicktime on the site, and are available on YouTube if you want to see them in a smaller version. When you get to YouTube, do a search for ‘ListPipe’ and ‘Wordpress’ to find all the videos. There are currently 13 of them, covering topics such as logging in, and inserting images.
Each video on our demo blog includes written instructions on how to complete the task in the latest Wordpress version. Each video is designed to teach you a specific task in between two and three minutes. For those of you new to Wordpress blogging, this is an excellent way to become familiar with the basics of your Wordpress system.
Take a look and let us know what you think. Enjoy!
Search engine optimization has many facets. Our focus is on what is called ‘organic content’, which is what search engines look for when measuring the liveliness and relevance of a site. Search engines want to deliver the most relevant and most current sites at the top of search results, so they look specifically for sites that demonstrate recent activity, and relevancy based on keyword frequency.
Our goal is to provide you with a convenient tool that helps you widen your web marketing without you having to become an expert blogger. After all, you have spent plenty of time learning to be great at your profession; leave the web marketing to us. We’ll help you increase your page rank, rise to the top of search results, and attract search engine traffic to your site.
Here is a quick look at some of our key features, and their benefits to you:
Frequency: We provide one article each week. This is the minimum optimal frequency for posting, and indicates to the search engines that your site content is lively and current. Sites that allow their content to grow stagnant are discounted by search engines as ‘less relevant’ because they do not have current information.
Keyword Research: We load each article with keywords that are relevant to your industry, and add a second helping of supporting keywords and phrases to help search engines understand your relationship to your market. Keywords, when used properly, help search engines index your site appropriately so that you are listed in the appropriate results
Linking: We incorporate an advanced linking strategy into every article we publish on your behalf. Each article includes links to your home site from keywords, URLs, and even graphics. All this is coordinated in order to demonstrate to the search engines that your keywords are intimately related to your home site. We also include high-value links to your named associations, and industry-related articles. Our linking strategy is designed to build credibility for your home page by association.
Localization: Most web searches are for products or services that are local to the user. With this in mind, our content strategy incorporates a mix of localizing keyword modifiers including your location by city, state, and surrounding areas. Establishing yourself as a fixture in a localized community helps you climb to the top of the search results for the most popular searches.
Customization: The articles that we publish to your blog are customized with your unique information. This creates a one-of-a-kind article that is expressly written just for you. We call this Powerful Custom Content™ that search engines recognize as unique, fresh, and real. The advantage of Powerful Custom Content means that search engines recognize your content as real, human-readable content that is meaningful, and therefore valued highly in search results.
Marketing: In addition to our Powerful Custom Content, we provide additional marketing support for your blog to help increase the attention you get from the search engines. We incorporate linking strategies to lead search engines to your blog as soon as it is created, and include links to your blog in regular marketing announcements and promotional content. Sites in our system are noticed early, and are provided the advantage of direct links from highly ranked pages.
Personalization: We have made it easy for you to personalize your own blog with your own content, too. Adding your own content creates even more organic value for your site and we encourage you to add as much content to your site as you can. For your convenience, we provide you with the ability to log into and manage your own blog. Go ahead and add content, upload images, and edit to your heart’s content. To make blogging easy and less intimidating for you, we have included a series of ten instructional videos that visually demonstrate the basics of blogging.
ListPipe continues to grow and our latest corporate client, Beehive Credit Union, has recently posted eight new blogs to help extend their web based marketing for their localized banking and credit union service.
Beehive Credit Union is an up and coming financial credit union with roots as far back as 1954. They have branches in most major areas of Utah, including several in the Salt Lake City area, Provo, and as far south as St. George.
You can see each of the Beehive Credit Union banking blogs by clicking the links below:
ListPipe provides Powerful Custom Content™ for Beehive Credit Union. We post a new customized blog article each week that includes research on keywords, and high value links to important pages on their home site.
(Audio at bottom)
We recently added a new section to our ListPipe Content Notification emails titled ‘Social Media Marketing Tips‘.
When a new customer signs up for a blog using our automated system for any of our vertical categories (including dentistry and real estate), our system will automatically create an About page, and a Contact Us page. Both pages are fully editible, of course, and can be modified by the user simply by 
A few weeks ago, Google confirmed this in an article titled 
Blogging is about sharing information. As an information sharer, you have an opportunity to 