Rand Fishkin, whose company SEOMoz recently raised an $18 million round of funding, discusses tips for taking advantage of recent changes in search in this webinar for Clickbank.

Here are a few takeaways from the webinar:
-Is search dead? No, 2010 to 2011 was one of Google’s biggest periods of growth for volume of searches.
-A video result that ranked #3 in search results received more traffic than the #1 ranking for SEOMoz for a keyword phrase.
-Search has changed significantly from the old days of 10 blue links.
-Quantity of reviews is an important factor in local rankings.
-A PO Box is not acceptable for Google Places. One alternative is a shared office space.
-Google local uses a citation based algorithm (based on mentions).
-Consistency of local business information is important. Make sure mentions use the correct info.
-YouTube accounts for 26% of videos watched on the Web.
-The role of the SEO professional has expanded.
-Rel=author can significantly help click-through rate in the SERPs.
-You need to host your video with a service like Wistia or Vimeo for your video search rankings to send visitors to your site instead of YouTube.
-It helps to set up a video sitemap for your site.
-No one will put their Google+ profile URL on their business card because it is really long.

Reading the SEOMoz blog regularly is a great way to keep up with the latest changes in the search field and find opportunities to take advantage of.

Photo via Dana Lookadoo from Flickr

Brian Halligan is the CEO of the fast growing marketing software company Hubspot and gave this informative talk at Dreamforce that discussed the virtues of inbound marketing and how to build a world-class inbound marketing organization inside your company.

Key takeaways from the talk:
-The traditional marketing playbook is fundamentally broken.
-The way people consume information has fundamentally changed.
-Inbound marketing effectiveness depends more on your ideas than the size of your wallet.
-Each piece of content is a magnet that pulls people in.
-Asking people to “Please Retweet” actually works.
-The word “insights” was really effective when used in blog titles.
-Content with great titles spread.
-99% of blogs are just plain boring.
-If you write great content with a poor title, no one will read it.
-Don’t hire a traditional marketer or someone who speaks digital marketing with an accent.
-Hire great bloggers.
-Marketers should know how to use pivot tables.
-You want to hire marketers with a large following in social media.
-Let any of your employees write for your company blog.
-Rank your company’s best bloggers.
-Warren Buffett says you should build a moat around your business.
-Negative feedback on your blog provides an opportunity to address issues in a public forum.

Photo by Hubspot

Similar Marketing Talks:
Rand Fishkin’s Talk on Why Inbound Marketing is Awesome
Mike Volpe Presentation on the Dangers of Marketing Automation

Have you ever considered the age of your website? The internet has been around for a while now, and if your website has been around for a while without any updates, it might be time for a change. With all the new gadgets, links, and other add-ins for websites, consider remodeling your local business page to ensure it’s current and optimized.

Are you using website analytics?

First off, use tools to view how well your site is currently doing, as well as how well it’s done in the past. Use this information to see what focal points need to be tackled. Your local business site can tell you a lot about how well you’ve been doing in the past, such as how many visitors you’ve had, how long they’ve stayed on your site, how many sales you’ve had, and more. Google Analytics is a great tool to use for tracking website success (or lack thereof).

What about your website look and feel needs a makeover?

Next, look at your page and try to figure out what it is that needs an update. If this is difficult for you, due to the fact that you’re the one who created it to begin with and it will always be perfect just the way it was originally meant to be, it might be wise to get some insight from friends or employees; people who may not be as emotionally attached to it as you are.  Others are able to give you more insight on what’s still effective and what just doesn’t seem to work anymore.

After receiving some insight from others, take their advice and make a list. Include all the pros and cons others have told you about the site. Maybe even list them in priority order by what still seems most affective and what seems least. This will give you an idea of what needs the most work.

What’s the competition doing?

It may be wise to see how well your competition is doing with the local business site they have. See what you think works on their site compared to yours to get some ideas on what you should do with your local business site.

Be patient as you make the needed changes.

Take note that, in the end, you may realize your site needs a complete makeover from top to bottom for a better look and feel, in addition to better visibility and optimization, so it may be time to make a complete change to your website.

If this all sounds appealing, and a realization comes over you that maybe it is time for a redesign of your local business website, you may want to consider hiring a professional to make it happen as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible. Remember, to make and create a website with the look and feel you want with full optimization, it can be a long and tedious task, but it is a necessary one if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

Chris Marentis is the Founder and CEO of the Surefire Social Marketing System. Through Surefire Social, Chris leverages website development, social media marketing, and search engine optimization to generate leads to boost business.

Search engine optimization is a tricky business. Most people are aware of the importance of keywords and structuring pages so that they are search engine friendly, but there’s still a misconception that creating SEO friendly copy is a complicated, dark art. The truth is, it’s not hard to turn any copy into something SEO friendly. The most important thing, for most pages, is putting together copy that is clear, concise, and easy for humans to read.

Clear Text is Best for Online Marketing

Many webmasters make the mistake of writing keyword-stuffed sales pages that are designed with SEO in mind, but are difficult for humans to read.  It’s one thing to work in the occasional keyword or phrase, but if you’re twisting the rules of grammar and trying to force awkward phrases into every paragraph, you’re only going to annoy your visitors.

Instead of focusing on SEO when you start writing your web copy, try thinking about what you want to say from an online marketing perspective. Write your product information pages, sales pages, and other web copy using clear, natural language, and then come back and think about the SEO side of things once the bulk of the text is in place.

Search Engines are Getting Smarter

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, search engines weren’t very clever. Some search engines relied on meta tags almost exclusively, while others had basic parsing capabilities, but these were easy to manipulate.

Some of the tricks that people used to manipulate early search engines are still floating around as “golden rules” on some online marketing forums. Tricks such as keyword stuffing, using keywords in headers and in page names, and making your keywords appear in bold text are still common suggestions.

Search engines do use the presence of keywords in file names and in the page title as indications of the importance of those keywords. They also care about headings, and bold text, although the impact of bold or strong tags is minimal.

Today, search engines care more about the quality of your copy. Google in particular is constantly working on improving the quality of their indexes. With each update, they are working towards the goal of making it so that all webmasters have an equal chance of ranking well, even if they don’t do a lot of SEO work.

Edit Great Copy for SEO – Don’t Write SEO Copy

Google encourages people to write good copy, and let SEO follow, and this is good advice. If you have a high quality, informative, well written article, post it as-is. Make your keywords appear in bold a couple of times, and consider adding lots of headings – both to improve the readability of your article, and to increase the number of times your keywords appear.

If your CMS has any search engine optimization features, make use of them to add keywords, rich meta descriptions, and other things that will help search engines understand your content, but don’t spend too much time on this. Focus on writing copy your readers will love. If you do that, the search engines will find it.

This article was written by Amy Fowler of Boom Online Marketing. For more from the Boom team, ‘Like’ their Facebook page.

If you’re serious about marketing your brand on the web, and you want to take full advantage of the viral potential of social networks, you would be foolish to ignore video marketing.

Video content is an increasingly vital component of any self-respecting brand’s online presence, and is becoming an ever-more dominant feature of the way we all consume information online.

If you’re not convinced, just take a minute to digest the figures…

Over 1 billion videos are viewed on YouTube every day, and the average web user watches 182 videos online each month.

From December 2008 to December 2010, the number of videos people watched online increased by 75%, and rate is still increasing. By 2014, online video ad spending will reach $5.71 billion.

The message is clear: business video production is something few brands can afford to overlook.

Online video is a huge opportunity for retailers, with shoppers around 150% more likely to add a product to their cart after watching a relevant video.

If you’re running an e-commerce site, the impact of video marketing should be quite easy to quantify. Whatever you invest in your video strategy needs to deliver an even greater increase in revenue.

But if you’re not in the retail sector, measuring the success of your video marketing campaign can be more complex. Ethereal goals like ‘increased brand awareness’ are fine, but you need to be able to produce some numbers to justify your outlay.

Other more concrete goals might involve the number of visits referred to your site from the domain where your video is hosted, and perhaps the number of leads generated as a result of those visits.

If your video is hosted on YouTube, you can access a tonne of data through their integrated analytics tool – Insight. This enables you to track views, traffic sources, demographics, relative popularity and more. This should be the starting point of your analysis.

You should also be using Google Analytics or another web analytics system to track the number of visits the video has referred to your site, and track any conversions that result from this traffic.

Ultimately, the precise goals and metrics you use to measure the success of your video marketing campaign will depend on the nature of your brand and what you are looking to achieve through your online marketing activities, but the important thing is that you can and should measure the impact of what you’re doing in the video realm.

Jamie West works for a video production agency in Manchester.

Photo by blhphotography

Andy Sernovitz, author of the book Word of Mouth Marketing, gave this talk at the Word of Mouth Supergenius conference about how companies can leverage word of mouth to save their brand.

Key takeaways from the presentation:
-Happy customers are the best advertisers.
-Love is what makes a brand extraordinary.
-Zappos gets about 75% of their customers for free through word of mouth referrals.
-Your brand is what other people say it is.
-Companies that are nice to people make more money.
-Case study: a duct tape company awarded a scholarship to the best duct tape prom dress.
-People will talk about anything, even duct tape.
-Give people a reason to talk about your stuff.
-Make it easier for the conversation take place.
-Advertising is the price you pay if you can’t answer the question “why would people talk about us?”

Photo courtesy of Josh Hallet

Identity Where You’re Going Wrong

If your website is not getting the desired results then don’t let your pride get in the way of sorting out the problem. Your site may be your baby and your pride and joy but if it’s not bringing you customers then it is failing in its function.

You can identify where you’re going wrong by using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools which are free applications that monitor the activity on your website such as the number of visitors, which pages they visited, how much time they spent on the site etc. You can then use this information to see at what point people are dropping out of your site without making a purchase. Perhaps they are getting to the contact form and find that there are too many questions which is putting them off or maybe they can’t find the checkout process that they need to go through.

Always Keep The User In Mind

Usability is the key to having a website that performs well. No matter what you do to your website or how much money you invest in it you must ensure to always consider the needs of the people who will visit the site.

You may be tempted to overload your site with information to show your expertise but this will only bore and confuse people, keep it concise and to the point… only give them the information that they need. It can also be tempting to fill your content full of anchor text designed to improve your SEO rankings, a little bit of this is fine i.e. around 10% but anymore will not make sense to potential customers and result in you coming across as unprofessional.

Include Call To Actions

Call to actions encourage visitors to make a transaction or to sign up. They are often icons that the user can click on that say something like “Get In Touch” or “Buy Now” and once clicked on they bring the user straight to the checkout or contact area. It is a good idea to include a call to action on every page of your site and that way you are making it as easy as possible for them to make a transaction. The last thing that you want is for a potential customer to have to work to find how to make a purchase or sign up, it should be made as easy as possible.

Sam Forest runs a local SEO company that offers bespoke SEO services such as usability analysis to help clients make the most of their websites and generate more sales through them.

If you only have 30 seconds with an SEO expert and they only had enough time to share with you one piece of advice which would improve your search engine rankings, what would it be?

There are many important SEO concepts and the industry is constantly changing and evolving. There are dozens of SEO techniques and important details to remember and more are being added all the time. However, is there one most important tip that everyone should know about SEO?

The Most Important SEO Tip To Remember Is…
You must have good quality content.

It is as simple as that. I’m sure you thought that I was going to tell you some magic trick or some sneaky technique which would instantly bring visitors to your website, but that does not exist.

Think about it this way, how many times have you made a search for a particular keyword and clicked on one of the front page links only to find a website that offered you poorly written information which was hard to understand or was stuffed full of keywords to the point that it was painful to read? Most often, you will click off this website and go back to the search results to find a website that offers what you were looking for. Although the first website technically got a “hit” from you, it is not likely that the hit will convert into a sale.

The best and most reliable way to improve your popularity on the web is to write content which is well written, entertaining, informative and enjoyable to read. If you don’t feel like you can write web copy or blogs of this standard, there is likely someone out there who can help you. When your website is filled with good content, you will grab the attention of your readers and hold it for long enough to turn them into customers.

Why Good Content Improves Your SEO
There are many reasons why having high quality content on your website will be beneficial for your SEO and will improve your rankings:

• When visitors read well-written quality content they are more likely to share it with their friends, which Google takes into consideration favorably for your rankings.
• Good quality content is original, so that it will not be punished by duplicate content penalties.
• If your website is well written and interesting, people will stay on it longer and click through to more pages which also improves your rankings.
• If you establish yourself as an expert in your topic with your interesting and informative content, other people in your niche will link to you and this will also increase your rankings.

As you can see, good quality content is the best and most effective way to build positive SEO over the long term and draw many people towards your website. You can try using sneaky SEO tricks like keyword stuffing or link baiting but they will not work very well in the long term and without well written content any visitors that you do receive will quickly click away.

Narrow Your Niche
Once you have a website with quality content, all of the other SEO techniques will be icing on the cake which will draw even more people to you. You can direct your traffic even more by narrowing down your website to a specific topic or niche. The more you concentrate on your area of expertise the more you will be seen as an expert and the less competition you will have. This content will be good quality because it provides very helpful and specific information to the reader.

There you have it, the one important thing which underlies all of SEO: good quality content. Use it to build a solid foundation and your website is well on its way to success.

Stock photos via Shutterstock

This article was written by Chris Hoole from Zeno SEO, an SEO reseller.

Social gatherings offer great opportunity to make some professional connections. Usually when professionals who run their small businesses go to any social gathering they are interested in giving their business cards to other people. These business people give their business cards to people with whom they have a conversation at the party because they think that it is easiest and cheapest way to do marketing of their business. However, giving away your business card to everyone with whom you talk in the party is not among the best practices. We suggest that you only give your business card to the person with whom you have some conversation regarding your business and who offers you the opportunity to follow up. Here are the three important steps of networking in social gatherings:

Step # 1 – Verbal Business Card

Before you take out your printed business card out of your pocket it is better to present your “verbal business card” to your potential business client. The verbal business card means that you introduce your business to the person and the person what products and/or services you offer. It should also talk about the problems which your potential client is facing and the solution which your you can offer.

Step # 2 – Give Something Which Shows Your Integrity

After the verbal introduction if you sense that the person is a potential business client, you can give him/her your business card, but give your business card along with something which has value and which shows your trustworthiness. This can be an article, a report, a new research, an award, etc. If you are not able to give that thing to the potential client, then ask him or her if you could send it to you later via email or post. This information of value will give you the opportunity to call the potential client for a follow up later.

Ask permission of the potential client to call him/her later to discuss the article/report/award, etc. It is better that you ask for the suitable time or date to call. You can say “can I give you a call next week to brief you more about how our services or products could benefit your business?”

Step # 3 – Follow Up

This is the part which many people find very difficult to do. The main reason behind the difficulty is that people fear of rejection. What you need to remember here is that this is not a sales call, it is just a follow up to explore the opportunities of working together. There is nothing to fear. You can call your potential client and introduce yourself again. Remind him/her when and where you met and that you had given or sent the information of value to the potential client. If the potential client is willing and able to talk then continue talking about how the products or services which you offer can benefit the business of the client.

Why People Do Not Make Follow Up Calls

First of all, many people think that if the potential client is interested he/she will call himself/herself. However, this does not happen often. Actually they might so busy that they would not be able to call although they might be interested in doing business with you. Moreover, some people also do not call themselves because they do not want to appear too interested.

People think that everybody hates cold calling. Well, this is not cold calling. You are calling someone whom you have met and you had taken the permission to call later. If you are one of those people that needs help with follow up calls, business coaching programs can help.

Some people wait too long to give a call. The longer you wait, the chances increase that the person would forget you and would not do business with you.

Why should you make follow up calls? Follow up calls are made by professionals and committed businessmen. So potential clients actually value follow up calls.This will certainly increase your sales and revenue. Besides getting business from the potential clients, you will be able to get hold of some referrals and other connections through follow up calls.

By following these simple steps you can ensure that the next time when you go to a social gathering or party you will be welcoming a significant increase in sales!

Morris N. Mann, P.D. – As a personal coach, Morris helps solo business owners and professionals with their goals of higher personal happiness and greater success in business. For over 15 years he coached business executives responsible for marketing and systems management in international product and service companies. With his Ph.D. in psychology, he has been practicing successfully for over 10 years.

It’s easy to dismiss email as a channel that’s outdated. However, while email isn’t the new kid on the block, that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. In fact, because just about everyone who uses a computer is comfortable using email, it’s actually the most reliable way to communicate with potential customers. If you’re wondering why you need to care about communicating with potential customers, it’s because studies show that less than five percent of them will actually make a purchase when they visit your website for the first time. As a result, if you aren’t capturing email addresses and then marketing to these leads, you are allowing almost every visitor who visits your website to go to waste.

Fortunately, even if you aren’t currently doing anything to build an email list, you can get started in just a few steps:

Offer Something Free and Truly Attractive

You want to add as many targeted prospects to your email list as possible. In order to make this happen, you need to offer them something that they feel is worth giving you their email address. The offer you make should have a few key features. First, it needs to be free. Second, it needs to provide real value. Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that because they’re offering something free, it can be anything. However, if you want to maximize your results, it needs to be something worthwhile like a great whitepaper, coupon or free trial. Finally, you want to ensure that what you’re offering is the right fit for the specific prospects you want to attract.

It’s All About the Relationship

Once someone gives you their email address, you don’t want to simply start bombarding them with offers. Instead, you want to use the emails you send to build a relationship with them. The reason this is so important is because several studies have found that it takes multiple interactions with a company before most consumers are ready to make a purchase. While the exact number can vary based on a wide range of factors, the average is seven interactions. In order to build a relationship during your initial emails, you want to focus on providing recipients with content that’s going to help or entertain them.

Ask for the Sale When the Time is Right

Eventually, the time will come for you to ask prospects to make a purchase from you. While the exact time to do this is not set in stone, there are some guidelines you can follow to get the best results. The most important is to give people a compelling reason to take action. This can be anything from a sale that’s only available for a short period of time to an offer that can only be had by the first 100 people who respond. If you’ve correctly handled the initial phases of your email marketing, you can depend on receiving a great response when you make an offer.

Craig Klein is the founder of Sales Nexus which is an online CRM software provider that also offers email marketing soltuions for Sales organizations of all sizes.