We have the fortunate opportunity to speak with good intelligent business people every day, in fact, we hired a business manager to handle everything for us. Why, because we knew what we were good at, but more importantly… what we were not good at.
When we watched this video, it made our team really understand why us internet smartie pants will always have a job.
The Alien has been reading some blogs from other earth Internet users complaining about all the “SPAM”" they are getting from joining some of these social networking sites, and we couldn’t agree with them more.
Their are some industries that are extremely aggressive in the way they market and will try to sell you something as soon as you make them a friend or a follower. Facebook and twitter in particular are a hornets nest or marketers. Once you get on a list, you better un-friend them or turn those notifications off from with Facebook so you don’t get all those emails and notifications!
There are, however, other ways to use Facebook and Twitter, it doesn’t have to be all spam and it’s not only about “personal communication” with friends and family either.
The Social Marketing craze has begun and you can either resist it or join it. When you join it, understand this.. you are going to get what you feel is spam from time to time. This is one of the reasons why you should separate your business from personal. In most cases you can adjust these settings from within the application, but the most effective way is to totally separate your business from family and your select friends from the start by creating separate accounts.
Understanding why people use these social applications will help define how you set yours up. There are four major reasons that we use Online Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook:
It is because of reason #4 that it makes it difficult for rest of us doing it right. Now let’s go over some of the things they do that really tick us off:
There is a right way and a wrong way, as in most things in life, the right way has long term effects an take longer to do, and the wrong way has short term effects and quick results. The choice is up to you what group you will fall in.The SEO Alien uses Social Networking sites to make it easy for people to find us online using competitive searches, they find us when they want to.
Automate it, but don’t pollute! Respect others and they will respect you. Offer good information that will help people and people will help you.
Online Social Marketing is really no different than offline Social Marketing. It’s all about “like, know and trust”. As long as you are providing quality information to your followers without abusing peoples emails and other online media delivery systems, you should do fine.
Doing Social Media Marketing correctly is when people found your service because they wanted to.
Please feel free to leave your comments!
You may have noticed that the SEO Alien is a member eHow.com. Evidently, by writing an article you can make a little cash from the click through traffic. That was not why this Alien joined though. We noticed that articles when titled correctly, will “pop” for good keyphrases on the search engines. We did it for Search Engine Optimization results to get our articles noticed at to top of Google for Competitive Search Phrases, the little extra cash was a by product for something that we are doing already.
We have several e-how accounts for different purposes, but when you ad up that little extra cash, it was beginning to become a nice little extra source of income. How much you ask? Enough to warrant us to write this article to tell you about it. However, you will have to give your “How to” articles a little extra SEO “Uumph” to give them some juice… (hint: bookmark, twitter, etc.), This is great for the beginner SEO person, you can have a little fun with a fairly easy site to set up and see how good you are at your SEO techniques and then get paid a little for it. The better the article is SEO optimized, the more you will make!
For exampe, Google “How to create and use a RSS Feed“ and the Aliens article on eHow will be either on the first or second page of Google for that search , not bad considering we have done nothing more than writing the article and and then posting it. The only extra we did was ad it to our Twitter Tweets and bookmark it to a couple Social Bookmarking Sites.
The article (posted 12/20/09) has had (to date of this post) 138 views and has earned us a whopping $0.58! However, we have about 30 articles out there, some articles making more than $4.00 per article per month. We kinda look at like free gas!
So, you do the math and see if this is worth the little extra time to write and submit an article to eHow? That is for you to answer, not us. But, if you are writing articles to promote your business, product, website ect, this is great for SEO results. If you hate writing articles and aren’t doing it, maybe it’s not for you, but it’s a great place to start!
For those that would like to move forward, here is what you will need to have to get started:
We also would like to warn you about this. eHow is somewhat frustrating at times, it may time out or do just strange things and you may loose your article and that can get frustrating. Our suggestion is to copy the fields you will need from eHow and into a txt editor like Notepad. Then write, save your article and then copy and pastes in into eHow. To loose something you spend 20 minutes on is one time to many. The Alien has warned you 
The other thing is, you aren’t going to do much on just one article, write several. Also, we are not really endorsing this as something you can quit your day job on, (though maybe not impossible). This is really just something that you can use to have a little Alien fun with and make a little pocket change for doing nothing more than you may be doing already.
One last suggestion. If you make these articles related to your business / websites or blogs, you can ad backlinks to your stuff in the “resources” section of your article. (near the bottom, and they are defaulted to “nofollows”. but it is still a backlink.)
Have fun, any comments or questions, please let us know!
Twitter Karma Users! Isn’t it crazy that you can’t whack people on twitter any more that don’t follow you back? Sure, you can do it manually one by one. but “Wholly whole day job Batman! Gee-wiz!
But wait! thanks to an inline online informant on the front line, we were introduced to buzzom.com, (click “Twitter Account Management”), it works. Downfall is you can only go 50 at a time in any direction, (getting rid of non-followers or following new followers.) Upside is you will get a good percentage of fellow twitter tweeterers that follow you back.. and it is tweasy to manage.
Here is what we have found, (that works now) that we recommend as a pretty nifty little set up for one leg of your twitter automation. Set up an account with socialoomph.com to auto-follow your followers and then follow (and un-follow when needed) with buzzom.com.
Let us know how it works!
Hello everyone we hope that all of you are off to a fantastic start of 2010! We wanted to thank everyone that has joined us on Facebook and twitter!
We are putting together some SEO tips that are out of this world, but one of our biggest challenges in explaining some of this “SEO Stuff” is that everyone is at a different level. For example, we loose some people when we say the word “RSS Feed” or “Hyperlink Title” and then at the same time, some of you are looking for the latest high tech methods that require you have a lot of internet and SEO Experience. So, because of this we are planning to post in three different categories. “Easy”, “Intermediate” and “Advanced” for the more experienced and put them into all of our feeds that get distributed to a variety of different locations.
Would you want to participate and get your articles noticed online with the help of the SEO Alien? We are looking for some SEO enthusiasts who would like to write their SEO tips for our blog. In return the SEO Alien is willing to give you credit, a back-link to your website and more importantly for you, we will do our SEO Alien magic and do our best to get your post all over cyberspace and to the top of search engines in return for your contribution.
Please let us know by either leaving us a comment below on this blog post or email us directly at mail@seo-alien.com and we will get in contact with you.
Thanks again for your support
There are some great bookmarking sites out there that will get your articles, video’s blogs, etc to the top of the search engines fast. Some however we don’t use for visibility at all, but just for backlinks.
Whether you are brand new at bookmarking or are a seasoned bookmarker, it seems like there are new ones popping up all the time. What are the best bookmarking sites and how to choose what bookmarking sites are good for you are two different things.
There are several bookmarking sites we suggest you start out with and with time you will discover more that will suit specific needs for what you need to to with bookmarking sites.
In this article we review the four major reasons why we create a bookmarking site for Search Engine Optimization and the ones we recommend you begin with for each one of those four reasons. READ MORE about the different reasons to use a social bookmarking site from here!
Creating a Powerful Feed for Search Engine Optimization
One of the first questions we get when we talk about feeds is “What is a feed?”, so lets start there. Without getting to geeky on what a feed is, (you can search Wikipedia for that) the SEO Alien description of of feed is this.
“A RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication) or now more commonly referred to as a “feed” sends information out on a “string” to blogs, websites, social network sites and social bookmarking sites.”
There are many uses for a RSS Feed and they can be used for many different applications depending on what you are trying to achieve. So since this is about search engine optimization, we are going to look at it with the SEO objective in mind.
So how can a feed help you? A feed is going to get your articles, adds, websites or whatever you want on the top of the search engines. More visibility, more credibility, more clicks, more traffic and more leads.
So where do we start? We start with what we call “the foundation”. This is where it could get a little challenging if you have little internet experience. You will want to create accounts with several different sites that are going to “post” your material. These sites are a combination of social network sites, social bookmarking sites and blog sites. The ones we suggest change from time to time, but the ones we look for give us at least one of the following benefits.
Let’s look at this like we a cooking a cake from scratch. Most of us will have the recipie book out and are going to be reading the ingredience and adding them to the mix. Here are the ingediants that you are going to need to have to make a SEO Alien RSS Feed. (this is just the “light” version)
..and yup, that is just the first level, there are plenty more we can and should add after this level is complete.
The goal at the end of this will be to create two feeds.
Why two feeds going to the same location? For several different powerful reasons and here are our main two.
When you have set up the foundation correctly you can post anything you want to one of your feeds quickly and have that information sent out to a virtual world in cyberspace that will get your websites, blogs, videos, articles or whatever you want to the top of the major search engines. The result is you drive more targeted traffic to your website(s) from multiple domains and your page rankings (you “search” credibility) will start to rise and you pages will show up higher on the search engines for relevant searches.
Of course there are many tips for good article writing techniques, how to link it all together, but we think that should be enough for now and we will cover how to set up the matrix in another article.
Set up the accounts we have listed above, try to make your account names keyphrase sensitive for the search engines. (your user names for these account are typically included in your URL so it important to create those with care for optimum SEO power.)
Please see How to use Wordpress to Create Powerful SEO Feeds for more information on how to create a “thread of feeds” using Wordpress.
Go on and get started and please feel free to leave any comments!
We have been playing around with several sites that have been in the “buzz” lately and Ping.fm was on that list.
For the most part ping.fm is a status update tool that sends your updates to a bunch of your blogging, microblogging and social bookmarking services like bebo, blogger, facebook, hi5, jaiku, linkedin, livejournal, myspace, pownce, tumblr and twitter and many others. You simply publish your update at ping.fm and within seconds all services are updated with your message.
Sounds great and we are certain for the average person with several social networking sites like twitter and facebook it would be a wonderful tool to use for making it faster to post to all your social networks. However, if you are using it for posting it to your blogs I find it nonfunctional from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view. Here are a few reasons why.
1) There is no HTML editor when you post an article to your blog. Why is that important? It’s necessary because if you are hyper-linking correctly you should be using a “title” tag in all your links… without that, your not getting all the “Google Juice” you could be getting.
2) If you are delicious.com fan like we are, when you post to delicious it will only post the URL and not the message itself. What good is that if you are using your delicious feeds for blog content. Problem here is it won’t allow enough text to give that link any real credibility from the search engines. You might say “well it’s another backlink to my website!”, well, nope… not the case. Ping.fm will automatically change your links to a link that looks similar to “http://ping.fm/stats/jdqAQ”. Not the permalink you need for any good real good SEO purpose.
3) I don’t see the best bookmarking sites for SEO. They have a large list, but not very many of the ones that we recommend.
4) You can only post to a wordpress.org blog and not a wordpress.com site.
We have developed a faster, more powerful system to get your marketing and advertising out just as fast, but to more powerful sites that get you to the top of the search engines fast. (See Creating a Feed for Search Engine Optimization for more information.)
For the average social network user we are certain it is a powerful tool and suggest you try it and see if it helps you get your message out to more places. From what we’ve seen, no doubt it will.
For the power SEO user, our initial evaluation says it is not a very strong tool if you plan to use it to submit articles that you intend to use for Search Engine Rankings for those posts.
Please feel free to leave any comments or feedback that you may have, we would love to hear them!
For a lot of people website SEO or search engine optimization, is some sort of automagic stuff that is done by techies and maybe, if they put a few years work in it, they might understand what those techies are talking about.
No! It is not that hard. I have to agree that it is time consuming, but in general, it is just playing by rules of the game. The major search engines have very clear rules on how you get noticed and it all comes down to following those rules the best you can! All you need is a little knowledge of html and to know how a webpage is structured.
Basic website SEO rules:
1. Insert keywords in the html title tag so a search engine robots will know what your page is about. This title tag is located at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will makes your site a lot better index-able by the major search engines.
Make sure that the title tag contains text to which a real person can relate to. The text that is in the title tag is one of the things that shows up in a search result.
2. Make sure the text in the title tag is also in the body of the page. We advice you to have keywords in the title tag which are present in the text of the page.
Another thing, sprinkle your keywords throughout your text. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored. A good place to do this is a few times is in the body, at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.
3. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might decide that all your pages are the same. If this happens, your pages are not indexed.
A good idea is to use the headline of your page as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what that page is about.
4. Place your headline once within the keywords and description tags. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag with meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. These tags are not as important today as they once were.
5. Do not link to link-farms! This is a guarantee to be banned from the search engines
6. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots, not for humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.
7. Use title tags for text links. Check out the navigation at the top of the text. The menu is built with text, not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link pops up. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.
8. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browser or are visually impaired. Remember that a search engine is a computer and can’t determine what is on your picture.
9. Submit to the search engines yourself. Please don’t use any submission service or some submission software. This could get your site banned.
Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
10. Submit only once. There is absolutely NO need to submit every two weeks. There is NO need to submit more than one page, preferably the home page. Robots follow links. If your site has a good link trail, your entire site will get indexed.
If yo
u are looking for a powerful way to create some extra “Google Juice” for your blogs,websites, videos, articles, etc, you need to be using feeds.
First, understand what you are going to use your feed for. For Search Engine Optimization you can submit your feed to “feed aggregators” that can give you an amazing amount of search engine visibility for your targeted key phrases, but almost more importantly many will give you a followable backlink as well.
Almost every bookmarking site will give you a feed of your bookmarks that you can use. Every time your create a wordpress page it automatically creates a feed for you. Twitter will give you a feed of all your tweets. Simply look for the feed logo, click it and the copy that URL, that is your feed.
Take that feed and submit it to feedagg.com (create an account with them first) You can Google “feed aggregators” and find tons of them, but look for the ones with high page ranks and give you followable backlinks.
EXAMPLE: When you use blog like wordpress, you can submit an article or post into your blog and have it go “out on a feed” that can into feed aggregators or other blogs that you have created. Then you can book mark that article to your favorite social bookmarking site using a different “Title and Description”. Use the feed it creates and spread that feed around, and so on and so on.
When you get good at it you can create several “strings” of feeds and you will notice many more clicks from the search engines.
When creating a bookmarking site to create a feed,
Why? Because your USERNAME and the “tag” is what will be in your URL for that feed. The more optimized your make it from the start, the stronger that feed will become to the search engines.
here is a sample of one our customers article feeds that we use for one of our delicious.com feeds : delicious.com/seoalien/brooks_clinic notice it has the the clients name in the feed title. That will help him get noticed whenever anyone is searching for him directly online.
When you can dominate the search engines when anyone searches for you it adds a tremendous amount of credence to your credibility.