Google has rolled out Google Audio Indexing for video just in time for the final stretch of the U.S. presidential election. Using speech recognition technology, Google has indexed all the words spoken within YouTube political channel videos. This allows users to find videos that contain their search term and navigate directly to the part of the video where the term was used. Videos can also be filtered by candidate- Obama or McCain.
Category Archive for ‘SEO’ 
Personalize Your Link Building
The ethnographic method is an approach of studying a person or group of people by participating in the culture of interest while still remaining a bit of an outsider. At its core is the focus on cultural relativism, which is seeing something through the eyes of the involved. Thus, to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.
This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.
Writing personas
Challenges and Opportunity in Local Advertising
More national advertisers are using online local advertising to generate leads and drive offline sales. The strategies for successful local online advertising are not the same as general online or search advertising and measuring results can be challenging. That’s why so many national advertisers, agencies and online advertising resellers are reaching out to partners to help them create and optimize their local online advertising strategy.
In conjunction with Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, Marchex recently conducted a study of national advertisers across the United States who sell products and/or services through local outlets, dealers, franchises or branded stores to gain an understanding of their local online advertising strategies and tactics, challenges and best practices, as well as how they are measuring their results and return on investment (ROI).
It wasn’t all that surprising that the majority of these national advertisers – 73%, in fact – were doing digital or online marketing and nearly half of the respondents indicated they were doing some form of local online targeting. But despite the growing demand for local online marketing, geo-targeting by those surveyed rarely dipped below the state level and 45% indicated they did not use different messaging or tactics for different geographic or local markets. What’s more, the data also shows that while more than 50% of marketers are trying a number of different local sources including search engines, directories, local search engines, newspapers and vertical Web sites, managing the campaigns and generating volume are challenges.
What Does it Take to Create Amazing SEO Results?
Although the definition of amazing is unique to each individual, we know that getting quality traffic from SEO results is half the battle, yet once consumers reach your site, that traffic still must convert.
Search engines deliver pre-qualified traffic based on the premise that anxious consumers are already searching for products and services. However, depending on their needs and objectives, the urgency of the situation and the appeal/solution presented from your pages, each facet must create the perfect synergy to yield a successful return on investment.
It is easy to get tunnel vision and overlook the basic needs of your preferred audience or rely on one marketing method instead of diversifying your approach. Fortunately websites are scalable as well as content and design are pliable to accommodate change.
Below are three primary factors that search engines reward with links to articles that provide more depth about the topic. In summary, by successfully managing chronology, topical relevance and search engine trust your web pages will always hit their mark in the top 10 and rise to the top.
Linked, Tagged, Tweeted, and Feeded – Three Real Time Link Trackers
As link builders, one challenge we all have is showing our clients evidence that our work is having the effect we said it would. What would make this part of the process easier is if there was one single universal tool that could identify every single instance when a site is mentioned, linked, tagged, tweeted, or feeded. The sheer size of the web and the volume of new content every day make such a tool impossible, but a few weeks ago Delicious unveiled a relaunch, and what was once really a pain is now a breeze.
Delicious will show the which users are linking to (bookmarking) which URLs, sorted by most recently bookmarked. Go here:
Enter your company URL, or whatever URL you want. Click the arrow to get your results.
Here’s where it gets fun. Delicious feedifies that results page, so you can subscribe to a feed for any URL, and by doing so, whenever someone bookmarks your site at delicious, your feed will have that new link at the top of your feed.