Your presence on the Internet is a collection of bases and outposts: your business blog or business website is your home base, your Facebook page is an outpost, your YouTube channel is an outpost, your Twitter account is an outpost. All your actions in all your outposts are meant to direct readers to your home base, to the place where you can fully show them what you can do for their businesses.

Tracking how effective your actions are on these outposts require different approaches, depending on the social network. In this article I’ll present a quick and easy way to track your impact on YouTube. As you probably know by now, your own video channel on YouTube can be a powerful marketing tool and a great way to drive traffic to your website.

In this article I’ll concentrate on how you can measure the impact of your videos over your website. The most important thing you have to keep in mind is that you need a strategic approach. The requirement for tracking your results is to have some kind of analytic software installed on your website. I personally use Google Analytics.

The simplest thing you can do is to look at your referral traffic and check for YouTube. In order to get some results you’ll have to edit your video description on YouTube and place a link to your website. People will click it and they’ll show up in your Google Analytics reports.

The big disadvantage of this method is that you can’t measure how effective each video is. I think is very important to know how many of your viewers for a particular video clicked the link in the description and not the overall performance of the video channel.

The solution is a small strategic decision. Instead of creating content that you’ll place as standalone videos on YouTube you’ll create video content that will supplement your articles. Each video will be designed for a specific article. And when you’ll edit the description of the video, the first thing to do will be to place a link to that specific article.

You’ll not have all your videos pointing to your home page but each video points to a specific page, where you’ll probably also embed the video. By making this small adjustment you’ll be able to track the impact of each video. You’ll know what videos work and what not and you may also find out that high number of views does not necessary means lots of clicks.

With this setup you’ll be able to go to your Google Analytics account, go to Content > Content by Title, locate a page that has a YouTube video on it, select it and as a second view option you can check for Source. Now you’ll be able to see how people reached that page. Search for YouTube and see how many visits you receive, what was the bounce rate or how much time they stayed on that page.

You can now compare the number of views with the number of visits and you can make decisions on what types of videos to create in the future so that you’ll increase the click rate.

What do you think of all this? How do you track your impact on YouTube? If you find this article useful please consider subscribing to my blog.

I wrote a recent article about what the long tail keywords are, their advantages and disadvantages, but now I would like to explain a little bit the process I use to find long tail keywords worth targeting. You’ll develop content that targets main keywords but the base of every website should be an enormous number of long tail keywords.

The Process of Finding Long Tail Keywords

Just like in the case of main keywords, long tail keywords have to offer a decent search volume/month and also be relevant. Once you decided that a main keyword is relevant to your website then almost all the long tail keywords that are derived from it should be relevant to your website.

Before I tell you the process of how to research for long tail keywords, here are the tools I’m using: Google Keyword External Tool (because it has information on any language or country), Google Sktool and two features from Google Search: Wonder Wheel and Related Searches.

And now, here are the 5 steps that I take in order to find long tail keywords:

1. I start with Google Keyword External. The first search is just using single words. For example for my market I start with words like: seo, keyword, keywords, content and so on. Is very important to let the tool suggest related terms that people are searching. These terms are really the starting point of my search. The same method can be applied using Google Sktool.  I choose one main keyword and then go to step 2.
2. I perform a search on Google for that main keyword. The things that I pay attention are the general competition and title competition. These numbers play an important role in deciding if a keyword is worth targeting or not. So write this down: you’ll have to compare it with the data for the long tail keywords.
3. I use the Wonder Wheel to see what other keywords people searched after the main keyword. Watch the competition and when you find something under 1 million or maximum 2 million you can go for it. Write it down.
4. I also use Related Searches to see what the search engine says that are the related keywords other people searched (these searches are not necessarily performed after searching for your keyword). Again look at the competition and make your own decision: is this keyword relevant and also have a decent competition.
5. I return to Google Keyword External Tool with the long tail keywords that I found. Keep in mind that these keywords were definitely searched by someone but this is not enough. So, you’re checking to see if the tool says it has Not Enough Data or shows you a number. Depending on your market you choose to target a long tail keyword or not. Sometimes a search volume of 100/month can be enough, other times you’ll need a few thousands. It’s relative and depends on the overall search volume trends from your market.

What Do You Think Of This?

Let me know if this info was useful to you and if you have questions. Or maybe you could share your experience. Also, please consider subscribing to this blog and receive my articles directly in your e-mail.

If you’re the kind of person that wants to know what their market is talking about on Twitter then this quick tip might interest you!

I see many articles talking about so many tools that can track keywords on Twitter and send you e-mails with the specified tweets but I’m the kind that wants to keep it simple. I don’t like to use many tools: I already have to use many tools in order to provide my SEO services and I just want to limit it.

So, here is a quick tip to stay in touch with your market on Twitter. Go on search.twitter.com and search for the keywords you’re interested in. Then, on the right side of the screen you’ll see a link called “Feed to this query”.

Right click it and Copy Link Location. Then, log in into your Google Reader account and add a subscription with that feed. As a good practice create a Folder in Google Reader called Twitter and place your Twitter feeds there. This way you don’t have to think about which tool did you used, or to receive to many e-mails.

What you think of it? Share your ideas in comments bellow!

People post comments on blogs and think this is SEO (because they post a link to their website). It’s not. Why? Because 99.99% of these links are nofollow. And in case you don’t know what a nofollow link is here is a short definition: a nofollow link is not pursued by search engines and it doesn’t pass link juice (but retains some of it).

Links that point back to your website are extremely important. This is what makes your website outrank others. Links basically means people that talk about you. Let’s make a short exercise. If you hear the girl that serves coffee talking about stock evolution do you trust what she says? Probably no.

If you pay a photographer to shoot your wedding and he shows up with a common point and shoot camera, do you trust him? Probably no. The conclusion is that it matters who says the words: how trusty is that person.

Now let’s get back to our websites: it’s the same thing. It matters the authority of the websites, the degree of related-subjects, where is the link placed, on what page and what is the actual text of the link.

If we’re talking about top-authority websites then it doesn’t matter if the website has any kind of relevancy to the content on your website. This is the biggest kind of link that you could get.

If we’re talking about normal websites then there are some rules of thumb that you could check to see if it’s really worth the effort to get a link from them:

1. Does your content have any kind of relation to the content posted by the website that will link back to you? Search engines like to see topic related websites linking. The reason is that this way they can assign relevancy points to your content. You say that you target a keyword by placing it in the title and content but search engines can’t evaluate more than that. It needs other websites that already develop some trust to link back to you and tell the search engine that you really “talk” about what you say you talk.
2. What will be the words used for linking. If it’s a word like “here” (used in Read more here…) or other irrelevant word then the quality of the link it’s certainly diminished. The best would be to have the text of the link containing keywords you want to rank for. That is why you should never link to other websites with the keywords you want to rank well for.
3. Where that link would be placed. It’s much more useful for you to have a link from a particular page (placed naturally in context) that talks about a related topic rather than a footer link. A footer link caries low value because it’s not placed in a context: that is why search engines can’t assign any kind of relevancy between your page and the keywords you target (because the point from where you received the link isn’t descriptive enough)

What not to do:

1. Submit your website to web directories that accept all websites with no restriction
2. Submit your website to farm links
3. Build dozens of websites and cross link it (NOTE: if you have a decent number of websites and if there is a relation of topics between them it’s ok to cross link)

If you have something to add or a question, please use the comments bellow. Don’t forget to subscribe if you liked the article.

I think that keeping it real is a common sense in any business, especially in web-based businesses. This is the big advantage of the web: you can’t fake it. You either have visitors to your website or not; you either get comments or not; you either sell or not – you can’t hide. As a result, you need to stay with your feet on the ground and keep in touch with what your market is doing and searching.

There are lots of ways and tools to keep in touch to what your market is doing: you can listen to social networks, blogs, the web, tweets and so on. There are so many ways that you could get lost. That is why I prefer to use two tools from Google: Google Alerts and iGoogle.

How I use Google Alerts

The process is simple. Create a Gmail account, then search for Google Alerts and set your alerts. My advice would be not to rush into it and create too many alerts. Every day millions of articles are being published, so keep it real. Focus on your top main keywords and some important long tail keywords.

This is not only a way to see what others are publishing related to your keywords in your market but also a way to see how the competition is using the keywords you are trying to rank for. It will also offer you an indicator of how crowded the market is: see how many articles appear in a day, week, month.

You can also use it as a source of inspiration for your own content. I don’t read all the articles I’m receiving but I do a quick scan for interesting ideas and how the keywords are used on the page.

How I use iGoogle

I’m using iGoogle because I can incorporate tables from other Google tools. The most important one for me is Google Insights for Search. What I do is basically incorporate tables to see rising trends in search for different related terms. Why is this so important: many times website owners pay money to have their websites optimized for keywords that no one searches for or have low search volumes.

Knowing what’s hot and what people are searching for and from what location can have a great impact on how you plan your business: content, products, geo-targeting and so on.

How do you stay in touch with your market?

What do you think of all this? Share your way to keep in touch with your market, rising trends in searches, problems people might encounter and so on. If you find this article useful please consider subscribing and receive my blog directly in your e-mail.

Do you know about this tool from Google? The Google search-based keyword tool can help you in more than one way. It’s good to get suggestions on what keywords to target but it also tells you what keywords would “attract” high paid Google Adsense ads.

So, these are the two main directions to use this tool:

1. Enter a keyword or a domain and see related searched keywords
2. Use it to plan your keywords for your adwords

Here is how it works

1. You can enter a domain (yours or the competition) and the tool will generate a list of keywords that are related to the content from that domain. You can specify a country and a language and the list will contain monthly searches, competition and the suggested bid. The really great thing about this tool is the ability to check your competition. You’ll know exactly what they’re doing because this tool is going to show related keywords to the keywords they already use. And this is what Google sees on their websites.
2. Or you can enter a basic keyword and you’ll receive suggestions related to that keyword.
3. Or you can just browse top keywords from different categories and subcategories such as: Beauty & Personal Care, Computers, Finance, Food, Health, Home & Garden, Sport & Fitness, Travel & Tourism and many more.

I tried to keep the description as short as possible and offer you only the basic information about this tool. Now, tell me if you used it and how. Share your experience in comments bellow.

And if you find this information useful you may also want to subscribe to my blog and receive my daily articles in your e-mail.

Some of you might not know about Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. In case you don’t know about these two free tools from Google, now is the moment to find. And if you know but don’t use them here are few good reasons. So keep reading and don’t forget to leave your comment at the end of the article. This way we can all learn from each other.

So … Google Insights for Search

Here is how it works. You enter a search term, or few search terms and you can see if there is a trend on those searches. This means if there is a high volume of searches for that keyword. This is the most simple and basic explanation. But Google Insights is much more than that.

The results will offer you much more than just the existence of a search trend:

1. You can see where people are searching that keyword, so you know to what local markets you need to concentrate more (Country, Town).
2. You can see the articles that correspond with different spikes in the graphic. Analyze those articles and learn from that.
3. You can see the trend evolving from 2004 and you can draw conclusions based on that. For example if you search for the word “tourism” you’ll see that the trend is going down. This doesn’t mean that people stop searching the web for tourism, they just got more efficient with their searches, more specific.
4. The results contain regions (where there is the highest search volume), related searches and rising trends. Every time you’ll click a region or related term or rising term you’ll see different results based on your selection. So you’re not only seeing that there is a searching trend but you can also see for certain related terms and certain regions what other search terms are rising. This is extremely helpful to stay ahead of your competition. What good is ranking for keywords that are on search trends that go down? Look for the rising trends and stay on top.
5. You can incorporate different tables with the results in your iGoogle. Under each table there is a Google icon with a + sign on it. Why would you add a table to your iGoogle? For example you can see all the actual rising terms related to a certain area and search term. And that is staying on top.

Your turn to use the comments

These are the top most important things I see on Google Insights for Search. It’s your turn to share your ideas and experience.

• How do you use Google Insights?
• Do you use it?
• Do you consider using it starting from now?
• Do you use iGoogle to monitor different trends or rising trends?

We all use it every day and every time we have some problems  it seems to hold all the answers. How many times did you said: “go do a Google Search”. Despite of being used so often many people don’t know some simple basic things on how to search efficiently for what they want.

Here are some quick basic tips on how to search:

1. Type your search term and hit Search (obvious but I had to mention the ultimate basic). If you want your search results to match the search term exactly use double quotes. Example “search term”

2. Let’s say you search for word1 and in results you see another word2 that keeps showing. You can exclude the search results containing the second word (word2) by searching like this: word1 -word2. The “-” sign ensures the exclusion of the search term that follows

3. Sometimes Google search results highlights synonyms. If you want to search only for your term use the “+” sign. Example +word1

4. If you want to search a keyword in a certain website:  site:www.domain.com word1 word2

5. You can search in a specific directory of a website:   site:www.domain.com/directory/ word1 word3

6. If you want to search for pages within a website that have a specific term in titles:  site:www.domain.com intitle:word1

7. If you want to search if a specific anchor text exists in a website:   site:www.domain.com inanchor:word1

8. If you want to search if a specific word is located in URLs of a website:   site:www.domain.com inurl:word1

9. You can also search top level domains:  site:com word1  OR  site:gov word1

Here are my suggestions. What’s yours? Share your knowledge in comments bellow.

The success of any website depends on how well you plan things before the website becomes online. In this article I’ll present some of the SEO basics of how to plan a blog in order to have a good start. There are several things that you’ll have to consider and each element has to be taken very seriously.

Here is the short list of basic SEO things to do (that I’ll explain it in more detail further down):

1. Identify what you want to write about on your blog
2. Create a list of relevant keywords to target
3. Plan the structure of your articles
4. Think about the list of categories for the blog
5. Think about the list of tags for your blog
6. Analyze the competition
7. Plan how you’re going to use the keywords on your blog

I’ll try now to go further into detail with the above list but I’ll also try not to create a too big article. So, if you feel you need some more info on some of these points feel free to send me a message or write me a comment. I will also put for download an Excel 2007 document to help you plan and sort your keywords.
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I decided to talk about web traffic because of some recent questions I’ve got related to this. Traffic is the first obstacle. You can call it a goal but since this is something absolutely necessary to any website I like to call it an obstacle. Traffic is a must: and you can’t do anything without it. If you only get 300 or 600 visitors per month you can’t fulfill your goals: you can’t sell your product(s), you can’t make money from affiliate programs or AdSense.

Now that we established the importance of having a good amount of traffic on your website it’s time to talk about why some websites don’t receive web traffic:
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