Marketing on Internet Road 

Analysing your back links can help to give you a real insight into your websites strengths and weaknesses, and can also flag up any activity that could potentially be viewed as suspicious by the search engines.

By understanding what search engines look for you can spot any suspicious trends and gain insight into the best direction for the SEO campaign. So what constitutes suspicious activity?
Well there are a few things to look out for:

No anchor text variation

This is an obvious one, but depending on the tool you are using you may not have really had a chance to look at the anchor text variation for your inbound links. There are some tools out there that can give you insights into this, such as SEOmoz's Opensite Explorer.

Too many links all pointing with the same anchor text can often look unnatural, as links that are naturally given tend to contain a whole load of different terms. Consider varying it up while still keeping the emphasis on your core terms.

All low quality links

Have you got loads of low quality links pointing to your site? It's very easy for search engines to tell the difference between low and high quality links, and without any high quality links your website you will really suffer. I have often found that you are more likely to benefit from lower quality links if you already have the high quality ones in place.

No link diversity

Too many links from the same sorts of places can flag up potential spammy behavior. If all of your links come from directories or blog comments you may want to consider getting some variation in place. Try building links from other relevant sources or create some link bait to attract more natural kinds of links.

Reciprocals and link wheels

While you may not have been doing reciprocal linking for a while, there may be cases where you have to deal with sites that have reciprocals in place. It may seem like these are helping the site to rank, but the chances are they have been devalued and they are not what's contributing to your rankings. It's always worth in cases like this to remove the links gradually over time so you can review the effect they have on the account.

All links point to one page

 All links pointing to one page does not seem natural, and also doesn't help you ranking on the long tail searches. You want to be sharing the links out around your site. Create useful content, promote it and encourage others to link to it. Any links to any page will have beneficial results for your domain overall.

Avoiding these factors can prevent your link building activities from looking suspicious and help your website to avoid any penalties from the search engines.  

This is a guest post by Ben Hook, director of Navaro, a search marketing company that helps clients to increase their online presence.

There is a huge change headed to the landscape of not only the United States, but all countries around the world. This change in the landscape won't be in terms of buildings or even in the methods of travel that we are already used to, but it will certainly change the way that people travel in a certain respect. It will also change one of the most important areas of human life: how we spend our money. Though it might sound ominous at first, this change is coming from the web directly to the physical world and once it hits in a big way, things are going to change rapidly.

If you run a business, it is very crucial that you know about this change right now and begin taking steps to figure out a way to adjust to what is about to happen over the course of the next few years.

If you thought the Dot Com years of the late 1990's were something that truly changed the shape of society, then what is headed our way now will make that look very small scale. In those days, businesses discovered that they could sell their products and services on the web. In that era, many businesses had a go at taking their operations, either in part or whole, online to see what the response might be. Many companies also began that focused their operations exclusively on the web. These dot com oriented companies have done very well, in fact so well that they have proven that there is a massive market on the web that is ready, willing and able to spend quite a bit of cash to order in services or have products shipped directly to their door.

Right now, millions of people order such products and services on a regular basis. If you are a big company, then you already know all about this and most likely have a web presence of some form. If you are a small company, then you might feel that these web visitors do not count for your local business, but this is not true at all. The hand is now writing on the wall and you would be wise to decipher what it says.

The fact is, those on the web are no longer sitting in their houses and using a novel device such as a desktop PC or Mac. Instead, they are in airports, hotel rooms, coffee shops and campuses with their laptops. They are also browsing the web with cell phones and the next generation smart phones that feature broadband internet connectivity. These are the customers of the future, on the go and using a variety of devices to search for whatever they want to buy or any services they need right now. That means they are not at home just relaxing and browsing, they are looking to make immediate purchases of food, clothing, entertainment and a variety of other products. They may also need a plumber, mechanic, roofer, seamstress or dog trainer and they are obviously not going to be getting those services from a national provider. Nor do they want to hunt down so-called national directories. The Yellow Pages have become all but obsolete as customers begin to seek out more immediate and specialized results that search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo can provide.

Let's repeat this one more time, for good measure, until it becomes your small business mantra: without a web presence your local business could die. In fact, it most likely will, as consumers turn from thumbing through phone books or wandering around town as an incredibly inefficient way to find what they need, to a much more robust, faster and more economical means - searching the web.

You do not necessarily need a fancy web site with bells and whistles. Good hosting, a decent design and a good strategy to show up in the search engines will work. You simply need a way for your local customers to find you quickly and efficiently over the web. If they cannot do this, you risk losing not just foot traffic, but any form of calls that could come in as a result of someone finding you right over the web. Now that Google and Yahoo both have mapping services, along with Bing, getting your business listed is easy, but protecting your name and your position in the local community as a premiere provider of quality goods and services? That is going to get a bit tougher. You have got to seek out the talent who can get you where you need to be in the search engines. You can do this by focusing on keywords that describe your business which people search for.

You also need to have more than this, however, you will need to make sure you are listed in local directories such as Yelp, for instance. An ad on craigslist would not hurt and a few other places will offer you similar services for rock bottom prices. A profile on Facebook will help some small businesses, while others can benefit from a YouTube video campaign or even a well stocked Twitter loaded with helpful tweets or sales. You can benefit from an email mailing list, too. The options are plenty, but the time for getting your act together grows increasingly scarce.

The core fact here is, you have got to listen to the internet marketing geniuses who know how this industry works, not because they know more about your business than you do, but because they do know more about the web than you will ever need to. What you need to know is that consumers are shifting their habits to favor, what else, but the easy way. You've got to plan for this or other businesses that exercise a savvy plan will rip your market share away and you will be left with nothing but your most loyal customers. You cannot afford to do this because the times are changing and not getting in sync? It will be a bit like telling the Beatles that guitar music is going out of style back in the early 1960's.

Don't get caught making a mistake you can easily avoid. Get started building a meaningful web presence by any means necessary today.

This is a guest post by Laurence Flynn:

Tired of unreliable and expensive web hosting?  As CEO of top Web Hosting Provider, HostNexus, Laurence Flynn is helping thousands of webmasters achieve online success.  Check out HostNexus today!

The first real-estate YouTube channel for a real estate agency in Belgium is launched.

We have uploaded a new video to YouTube on titles “Google Analytics: Remove your Blindfold”(available also on our channel at youtube.com/wsieservices). As states in its name, the video is a running presentation we gave on Google Analytics.

The list of topics covered in the video:
- What is Web Analytics & Google Analytics
- Key definitions 
- The importance of Analytics
- Website goal, KPI’s and Analytics goals
- Best practices in account setup 
- Google Analytics Interface & Dashboard
-  Profiles, segments & filters: “Segment or Die” 

The heart of the presentation is an analogy of Google Analytics analysis with the roles of the Bookkeeper and the Accountant (following the statement of “Not analyzing your web analytics data is like not looking at your financial books”): 
In this analogy, the main reports in Google Analytics are presented in a view of the Bookkeeper and the Accountant, where the Bookkeeper view presents the data being collected in the repots (and presented) and the Accountant view shows the real analysis questions a website owner should ask himself when looking at those reports.

Take for example the “site usage” data. The Bookkeeper collects metrics such as VISITS, PAGES VIEWED, PAGES PER VISIT, BOUNCE RATE and TIME ON SITE. 

The Accountant will ask “What are the trends?” “What do peaks and slumps mean?”  “Pages/Visit & Avg. Time correlation: are they visiting more pages and staying longer on my site because my content is interesting, or is it that they are looking for something I don’t have or nor visible enough?”  “Is the Bounce Rate a concern? Do I want and expect my visitor to navigate to other pages once landed on my site or not? ” “New Visits or Returning Visitors – what is more important and how is my site doing?”

The Accountant will dive into detailed trends and analyze how the metrics look over the last few months and compare metrics between this month and last one as well as with the same period last year, mainly to examine seasonal trends. 

Hope you will enjoy this video/presentation on Google Analytics and that you will find it valuable.

Although Search Engine Optimization is still mainly for web pages, as Google is presenting different media types in the search results first page, there is a lot of value in optimizing other media files such as videos on YouTube.

Once you have your videos on YouTube (and hopefully you have created your own channel where they are hosted), the same core principals of optimization should apply. The following list describes the 3 main elements for SEO’ing your YouTube videos to get them to appear on Google’s first page for your keywords of choice:

Use the name of the video like the title of the web page: Just as the optimization of a web page starts with a well optimized title, you should use your main keyword in the title of the video. Unlike with web pages’ titles, you may want to consider adding your website name after the key phrase as you would like to generate traffic from the video to your web site (so the structure should be something like: “Main Keyphrase – www.yourwebsite.com videos”).

Include your keyword in the description of the video: The description is where your second optimization step should take place. Unlike with web pages – where the description tag appears only on search results – the description of your video will appear both on the search results as well as on YouTube as well. So use your keywords and related keywords in the description of the video. Don’t forget to put the full URL of your website as well (starting with http://) as this will create a live link from the description text to your website.

Include your keyword in the video tags: although the keywords Meta tag has no effect anymore in web pages optimization, they very much do on YouTube. Those are used as the main search method for visitors on YouTube and will help a lot with showing up on relevant searches on Google itself.

Build links to your video: again, just like with web page, the key is to have links pointing in to your videos. The more links there are to a video on YouTube, the more authority ranking it gets and more visibility. Since visibility is what we all wish to gain, invest in link building to your videos as if you were doing link building to your website.


To sum it up, optimizing YouTube videos is very much like SEO for web pages, only it is much more focused around the keywords.