Flickr - The Best Kept Social Networking Secret?

Chances are good that when you think of social networks, you think of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and when you think of Flickr, you think photo sharing.  We recently posted an article on paid and free image sites, in which Flickr was included (with a few caveats) as a great source of free images.  And this is, for the most part, the extent to which entrepreneurs see Flickr as useful to their businesses.  After all, you can’t use Flickr for marketing, right?  Well, actually, you can.

First, think about the stats: Any site with over 40 million users, an Alexa rank of 32 (23 for U.S. traffic), and over 4 billion photos uploaded, is worth taking a closer look at.  If there is any way at all to tap into that kind of user base, it makes sense to do so.  The good news is that there is a way.

Because Flickr results are heavily indexed in search engines, often surpassing other non-image links, Flickr can be a powerful SEO tool.  However, Flickr is one of the least-utilized SEO tools around.  Part of the reason companies overlook this powerful resource is because of the time it takes to set up and maintain a photo-stream in such a way that optimizes SEO and social media results.  But again, if you can access the power of this tool, it’s worth the time.

Tagging, descriptions, and grouping of photos
For each photo you upload to Flickr, you can create custom tags and descriptions. These can include pretty much anything you want, so can be optimized to ensure your company’s photos are found in searches relating to your chosen keywords.  Descriptions can also link directly to your website.  You can create picture sets within your account as well, further optimizing search results and providing an additional opportunity for detailed descriptions with links.  Additionally, Flickr gives you the ability to geo-tag your content - an important feature for any business with physical locations.

Ongoing maintenance and optimization
An important part of optimizing your Flickr account, both within the Flickr community and for the search engines, is through activity in some of the thousands of Flickr groups.  Posting pictures in relevant groups is vital for proper optimization, so it’s a good idea to post your pictures in groups that will serve to enhance your position, such as industry-specific or product-specific groups.  Because pictures get buried quickly within groups, and (unless you have a pro account) a picture can only be in ten groups at once (and many groups have rules about how many pictures you can post in their group at any given time), ongoing maintenance should include moving your pictures on a regular basis for optimum exposure.  You’ll also want to monitor activity on individual pictures and adjust your efforts accordingly, ensuring search engines and Flickr users are easily finding your account.  Perhaps the most important part of Flickr though, is the potential for network building.  Flickr is, after all, a social network, so connecting with other users is critical to a successful Flickr campaign.  With this in mind, build a network of connections through “favoriting” others’ works, adding contacts, commenting within groups and individual photo-streams, and responding to comments on your account.

If you work it right, you can effectively be seen as an industry leader within the community, and that, more than just about anything, can have a dramatic effect on your business.  Of course this all might sound like a lot of work, but really, once your photos are uploaded, an hour a week or so should be plenty of time to devote to Flickr.  It’s not like Facebook and Twitter, where an account without a comment for a few days is seen as dormant.  In any case, it’s one more possible tool in the ever-expanding bag of tricks that is social network marketing, and one that just might pay off big!

Image attribution: EXKARRAVELHO via Flickr.com

Quit Wasting Time on SEO

Now hold on… Before you think I’ve lost my mind, notice the title doesn’t say “Don’t do SEO” or “SEO Doesn’t Matter.”  In fact, spending quality time on SEO is anything but a waste of time.  It’s no secret that search engines are the primary source people use to find your site, and it’s also true that if you’re not ranking pretty high in the search results for your relevant keywords, you’re not going to get much of that traffic.  So SEO is unquestionably vital to your site’s success.  But which areas of your site’s pages should you be focusing on to improve your SEO?  If you focus equally on everything you can, you’re going to be wasting your time, because the truth is, some areas just don’t matter as much as others.  While people have different views about which areas are most important, most agree that there are 5 critical areas you must nail to really have a positive effect on your SEO, so here they are:

1. Content - Well, duh, right?  As is often said, content is king.  That’s not only true for keeping people coming back to your site - it’s also true for SEO purposes.  Search engines love fresh new (relevant) content.  There are a lot of bloggers who post infrequently and sporadically, and they’re just not doing themselves any favors from an SEO standpoint.  Relevance is another important issue when planning your content.  There are blogs out there that are mind-blowingly broad in their content topics, and this makes them less attractive to the search engines.  If you have posts about software, nutrition, politics, celebrity gossip, and how to do origami all on the same page, chances are you won’t rank high for any of those topics.  The exception might be a news site that already has substantial traffic, but even those tend to categorize their content both for better readability and SEO performance.

2. Keyword Frequency - The trick for some people is to balance quality, well-written content with keyword frequency.  This shouldn’t be hard though.  If you’re writing about a topic and you’re going to cover it well, you’ll naturally use your keywords in your writing.  One thing you can do though is scan what you’ve written and change some wording to other keyword variations - as long as it doesn’t make your writing sound dumb.  For instance, in this post, it would be fine to mix it up and spell out SEO as “search engine optimization” now and then, as long as it flows and doesn’t detract from the writing.  But it shouldn’t be obvious that you’re optimizing.  That’s annoying to read (even if it’s an SEO blog about SEO), and your readers - who want to learn about search engine optimization - will not tolerate it, nor will the search engines who you’re trying to search engine optimize your search engine keywords for in your article about search engine optimization. (SEO)

3. Title - Your title tag (or post title for a blog) is an important consideration for a couple of reasons.  First of all, and perhaps most importantly, you want to give your readers and idea of what the page is about.  In doing so, you’ll no doubt use your target keywords in your title - which is the other important aspect of title tags.  This makes perfect sense.  When people get a long list of search results, what do they do?  They scan the titles to find the result most relevant to their search.  So you’re helping yourself by helping your site’s visitors when you optimize your title tag with relevant keywords.  Also, for search purposes, try to keep your title under 72 characters.  That way the full title will show in search results.

4. Meta Description - Following your page’s title in the search results is the page description.  There are varying opinions about whether using keywords in your description meta will improve SEO, but it’s still something you want to pay attention to.  Why?  Because even if it won’t help you get ranked higher, it will increase click-through rates once you are ranked.  After scanning titles of search results for relevant content, searchers read descriptions, so even if you have the perfect title, the proper description will validate and cement their decision to click through to your page.

5. Links - Search engines believe (if a computerized algorithm can believe something) that the more connected you are, the more relevant you are.  So both incoming and outgoing links matter when it comes to SEO.  Outgoing links can be to other sites with related content or to relevant internal pages.  This basically tells the search engine, “See - what I’m presenting must be relevant.  Here are other sites and pages talking about the same thing.”

Obviously, like I said in the beginning, there are a lot of other areas that can affect SEO, including H1 tags, link alt tags, image alt tags, keyword meta tags, etc.  But if you want to spend more of your time running your business, focusing on the above five areas will improve your SEO without wasting your time.

12 No-Cost Tools to Help Improve Your SEO

Even to some who have been online for years, SEO can be somewhat of a mystery. While there are a lot of differing opinions on the techniques that are the most effective for getting your site to the top of the search engines, there’s no doubt that a key factor in your success is being able to effectively access and analyze data. Below are 12 free web-based tools to help you in your SEO efforts:

Keyword Mutation Detection Tool We all strive for our sites to look professional and for our writing to be grammar and spelling error-free, but if you can find a way to incorporate some strategic misspellings into your page, it can pay off. This tool will give you common “mutations” of your key words, including misspellings as well as correctly spelled variations. For example, enter “entrepreneur” and you’ll get: entrepreneurs, entreprenur, and entreprenuer. As these are all commonly entered search terms, there’s an opportunity to capitalize on the mistakes people make when searching.

Term Extractor From SEOmoz, which offers quite a few helpful tools, this one will analyze your pages and determine which search terms it looks like you’re trying to target. It’s a valuable tool, especially if the resulting report shows you’re optimized for terms other than what you had hoped!

Wordtracker Suggestion Tool Enter a keyword into this simple tool, and it will provide you with a list of up to 100 suggested search terms that include your keyword. The nice thing about this tool is that it also provides the number of searches performed for each phrase, so you can target those most likely to drive more traffic.

Keyword Difficulty Check Want to see how hard you’re going to have to work to get on the first page of search results for your keywords? This tool is for you. Just enter the word or phrase you want it to check, and you’ll get a percentage of difficulty result. For example, if you want to be on the first search results page for the word “blog”, you’re looking at a 93.48% (out of 100%) difficulty ranking. Want to be right up toward the top for “sesquipedalian armadillo” though? You’ve got a great chance at just 22.91% difficulty!

Term Target Grader You might not have been an A student in school, but now you can get A’s where it really counts. Enter your URL and targeted keyword or phrase into this tool, and you’ll get a letter grade reflective of how your page actually targets your desired keyword, along with a detailed report. The only catch: unless you’re a premium member of SEOmoz, you’ll only get one of these reports every 24 hours.

Keyword Group Detection Tool Another tool from Microsoft’s adCenter Labs, this one “helps you find groups of words from the pool of online queries that are related or similar to keywords that you enter.” In other words, you enter a keyword you want to optimize for, and it will give you common search words and phrases relating to that keyword for which you might also want to optimize. It’s a good way to get your creativity going when planning your SEO.

SEO Browser is a tool that allows you to see your site as the search engines see it. Offering both basic and advanced modes for free, the resulting report generated by SEO Browser gives you a clear view of your site content, including meta data, text-to-page weight ratio, number of internal and external links, and tons more, all on one page. This allows you to easily identify problems and ways you can improve your site.

Keyword Tracking with Backlink Tracker Meant to be used over time, this very cool free tool tracks your search engine placement (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) for specified keywords over time. This tool also checks search engines for the number of backlinks to your page over time. You’ll need to sign up for a free account and place a PHP script on your server for it all to work. The detailed charts and reports you get make it worth the effort.

SEOToolSet offers several tools, from the not-so-useful source code viewer (your browser does that), to the very cool Competition Research Tool, which analyses your site and finds and compares it with your competitors based on your chosen key words. They’ve also got a keyword tool that returns results detailing demographics (gender and age statistics), click-through rates, and the CPC average for the major engines.

SEO Scores This tool gives you a ton of information about your site. Broken into four sections, the data is well organized and very useful. The areas analyzed are: 1. On-page SEO, which includes metadata, image summary, W3C validation, more; 2. Off-page SEO, including domain information, Google rank, backlinks, last Google crawl date, and traffic rank; 3. Blogosphere, which just tells you if your key words appear in your blog, and your Technorati ranking; and 4. Social Mediasphere, giving you del.icio.us bookmarks and a Digg submission summary.

Google Keyword Tool Meant for Google Adwords users, this simple keyword tool provides local and global search volume numbers for the keywords and phrases you enter, as well as about 150 related terms. It also supplies suggested terms and allows you to export the reports to a text or csv (for Excel) file. There are also some dropdowns with additional options, most of which are specific to those using Adwords.

Reciprocal Link Checker Want to see if people are placing the reciprocal links they promised? This tool does just that. Enter your site and multiple reciprocal sites, and you’ll get a report showing how many (if any) links on their sites point back to you. While this particular tool does not tell you which page(s) on the reciprocal sites are linking to you, it does save the time of hunting for your links on their sites.

These twelve tools should begin to get you the information you need to help improve your SEO. There are, of course, other tools out there. Which ones have you found useful? Be sure to share your experience in the comments below.

All the Latest Tools to Improve Your Website

While you may sometimes feel that the world of Internet marketing is reaching a saturation point, there is a lot to be said for this explosive growth. It is not likely that the market will be saturated any time soon given the ratio of people who are just discovering the media on a daily basis, but the pressure to produce meaningful and productive websites and pages has led to the creation of a huge number of interesting and useful tools. Designed to streamline and make your job as a webmaster a whole lot easier, these tools can save you a lot of anguish!

Feedback is so important and while there is nothing like the process of trial and error to achieve the perfect solution, in an ideal world you would not want to be using potential clients in this way. A number of options have arisen to help you link with independent users. For example, usertesting.com maintains an army of independent reviewers who could be used for a relatively small fee to provide you with targeted feedback. Each reviewer has been pre screened and is rated by service buyers for you, so you can be pretty confident that you will be getting an objective analysis.

If you want to automate the process of website analysis, consider clicktale.com, where you can receive an image of your screen detailing users’ mouse movements, keystrokes and general interaction. This is enabled through the placement of special JavaScript on your page and will enable you to see how users interact and how the general flow of your site works. This can be particularly useful in helping you to optimize forms and other interactive requirements and the service is free for a limited number of page views, with an increasing payment structure for a more enhanced experience.

A number of tools are available that you can use to provide feedback on the composition and technical efficiency of your site. For example websitegrader.com will give your site the once over and may well come up with something glaring that you have missed.

Google is a provider of many free tools, which should be in every webmaster’s arsenal. Google Analytics will provide even the most demanding analyst with a comprehensive breakdown of user experience, Google’s Website Optimizer gives you options for A/B and multivariate testing, and Google Webmaster Tools exposes your best keywords, the efficiencies of your linking strategy and any crawl errors that they detect.

If you are willing to invest a little bit, there are some great comprehensive tools such as SiteRay by Silktide, which goes into great detail about your overall site structure, correct linking, appropriate keyword usage, originality, popularity, technical strength and general usability.

Go to The Scrutinizer for a comprehensive list of hundreds of available web tools to be used for URLs, keyword and IP issues.

One of the best tools that we have found is a Firefox plug-in called Firebug. You can highlight and make changes to HTML and CSS from within your browser, making changes on the fly and see the immediate result. This is great for debugging problems, but remember that you have to make alterations manually elsewhere to be permanent.

For bloggers, check out SEO Blogger, which is a Firefox plug-in to help you optimize your posts as you write them. Go up a notch by choosing Lotus Jump, which will give you a task list of what you need to achieve to improve your rankings according to a handy little manageable timetable.

What tools have you recently used to improve your website?

Adam Toren

I’m Frustrated with DIY SEO! Should I Buy Tools or Pay an SEO Company?

After spending a couple frustrating hours of building links, submitting articles, researching key words and fine tuning the copy on their sites many of us are ready to throw in the towel. Search Engine Optimization seems pretty straight-forward, the thing that keeps most of us from doing it is the immense number of excruciatingly boring and time consuming tasks. There are links to build. There are directories to research. There are titles to write. There are directories to submit to. It’s all pretty exhausting.

So quickly, many of us come to one of two conclusions:

A. Purchase some tools that make the process easier.
B. Hire a company to do SEO for you.

Which of these two options should you put your limited budget towards. Let’s start by understanding what’s available.

Tools of the Trade

There are hundreds of great and useful SEO tools for free, and we’ve talked a lot about them in previous articles. There are only a few that we would actually consider paying money for:

1. WebCEO: www.webceo.com – The SmallBiz addition is about $200. WebCEO does a great job of researching keywords from your competitors’ sites. It also helps you analyze your own site for optimization and a whole lot more.

2. IBP: www.ibusinesspromoter.com – Standard edition is about $250. IBP’s specialty is submitting to directories and link building. It also contains useful tools for analyzing your site’s keywords and your competitors.

3. ISnare: - www.iSnare.com – iSnare is a great service for automating the article submission process. They submit your articles to over 1,000 article directories for a very small fee (under $2 per article). The only drawback is see with this service is that it takes them usually three weeks to approve an article and distribute it.

I’d also consider spending money on a few paid directories

1. Yahoo! Directory - http://dir.yahoo.com/ - $299 per year
2. Best of the Web - http://www.dmoz.org/ - $99.95 per year

Money spent on professional tools is quickly wasted if you’re not actually using them. All of the tools come with some kind of tutorials to get you up and running. I strongly recommend following the tutorials as soon as you purchase the tool. That way it won’t sit idling in your garage, wasting your hard-earned money.

Bring in the Pro’s

Just like owning a professional copy of Photoshop isn’t the same as hiring a professional graphic designer; Professional SEO tools won’t give you the same results as hiring a professional SEO firm. First you need to know what you’re buying. Price for professional SEO is based very much on how much they do. SEO firms fall into 3 categories:

• Premium Agencies ($10,000+ per Month)
Pros: they have several SEOs and they’ve worked with huge websites and in extremely competitive markets.
Cons: extremely expensive for the average company.

• Medium-Sized Agencies ($1,000-$10,000 per Month)
Pros: affordable for average companies. Several years of experience in very competitive markets.
Cons: maybe a little bit expensive for some startups. They won’t do such a great job if you are in an extremely competitive industry.

• Solo SEOs ($500 - $1,500 per Month)
Pros: very affordable.
Cons: most SEOs that charge this little are not that great. There are some exceptions, of course.

The Proof is in the Pudding

Whenever you hire a professional SEO company there are a couple due-diligence items we always recommend:

• Ask for Results – get a list of top 3 Google Rankings that they’ve worked on:
• Ask for References - The best SEO agencies will be happy to give you the contact information of at least 3 clients.
• Ask About Their Tactics – You want a firm that builds your reputation while raising your results.

This is a Guest Post by Zeke Camusio who is a serial entrepreneur, Internet Marketing expert and founder of The Outsourcing Company, an Internet Marketing agency with offices in Aspen, CO and New York. Let’s Do It!, his blog, is read by thousands of people all over the world.

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