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Web Marketing and SEO Tutorial

messel by messel
Last updated: 09/01/2010

What is Web Marketing, and how can I best use it?

Let's begin with marketing. Simply stated, it's spreading information about something, be it a product, service, information or even marketing your time. From wikipedia "Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large". Web Marketing is simply the application of marketing principles on the internet.

SEO is a very specific type of web marketing that people focus on, and it stands for Search Engine Optimization. What it means is making your web site or page optimally designed and marketed to show up as a high ranked search to your target audience.

Web marketing is becoming a necessary skill for all successful writers. As the amount of information continues to grow on the web, the task of getting heard and read, for new authors has become increasingly difficult. There are have been numerous posts made by Mr. Marketing, Seth Godin in his blog on this subject. He's written books worth of his ideas on how ideas spread (here's a pdf link to the Ideavirus, or you can purchase it on amazon here).

If you have come to this lens seeking greater knowledge of web marketing and some key tools for being a successful web marketer, you're in luck. You're exactly the person I had in mind when writing this lens. After doing some research on the subject, I decided the best way for me to know and practice web marketing, was to write this web page documenting what I've learned, and then put into practice the same techniques discussed to market this site.

What's inside Web Marketing and SEO

  1. Victus Spiritus (my blog)
  2. Content is King
  3. Great Info from Matt Cutts
  4. Twitter is exploding!
  5. My Favorite Twitter Tools
  6. Best Twitter Applications/Webtools (Plexo)
  7. It's best to design your page from the start with SEO in mind
  8. How does Google search work?
  9. So I need Back links?
  10. Interested in Web Authoring?
  11. Submit Submit Submit
  12. Dig this lens? Then Digg it!
  13. Analytics and Development Tools
  14. Pick your favorite SEO Squidoo Pages (Plexo)
  15. The Power of Pictures
  16. The Power of Pictures: Flickr Voting (Plexo)
  17. Vote for your favorite Web Marketing/SEO tool (Plexo)
  18. Google Grapevine (blogs)
  19. Amazon Web Marketing Goodies
  20. The Verdict
  21. The Superstar Marketers of Squidoo
  22. My Tweets
  23. Web Marketing Tweets
  24. YouTube vids
  25. Digg: Frontpage News
  26. Slashdot News, because it's handy on a reference page
  27. Latest BBC News
  28. Whats the Buzz?
  29. New Guestbook

Victus Spiritus (my blog)

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Content is King

"If you build it, they will come" may have worked for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams but it's not going to work for the average web author. Ideally, you wouldn't have to do anything but write some damn good content, and for the most part this is true. In order to win at Web Marketing you have to start with excellent content.

The most vital thing you can do to market ideas on the internet is to make sure they are worth spreading. No matter how much time, effort and or money you spend on advertising your web site, it won't spread if there's not a compelling message. Even with a volume of critical data, the information must be laid out so as to be easily accessible to your target audience. Otherwise they won't stay on your site long enough to get hooked. If you're telling a story it's got to be interesting, or at the very least something that your viewers can relate to and feel at ease with (that's my style, I go for the old couch in the living room content). You're trying to catch an individual's attention span as they are browsing about the internet. So you have to make your message fast and good enough to validate their time reading/watching.

Great Info from Matt Cutts

(thanks to Stormyweather for pointing this one out)

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Twitter is exploding!

For folks new to Twitter: "Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time."

I put together a full tutorial for twitter at http://www.squidoo.com/TwitterTutorial

Twitter has reached the explosive marketing point. Finally there are enough specialized supporting tools for people to use it to fill their networking needs.

Follow me on Twitter

The Ultimate Twitter Tool List

My Favorite Twitter Tools

Tweet Deck
A nice interface for sorting Twitter streams by column.
Tweetscan
Find out who's talking about you on the web and jump in the conversation!
Twollow
Help in determining who to follow based on interest matching
MrTweet
A twitter account to aid in finding quality followers and friends

Best Twitter Applications/Webtools (Plexo)

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Twitter Applications List You'll Ever Need

Welcome to Twitterapps! - I have 275 Twitter appli more...1 point

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Twitter Grader | Get Your Twitter Ranking

Twitter Grader : Measure the power and authority o more...0 points

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Twinfluence - Twitter Influence Analyzer

Calculate the indirect influence of you and your f more...0 points

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15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plug-Ins For WordPress | How-To | Smashing Magazine

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has grown to cre more...0 points

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50 Twitter Tools and Tutorials For Designers and Developers | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

by Paul Andrew Twitter appears on innumerable pers more...0 points

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twhirl | the social software client

twhirl is a desktop client for the Twitter microbl more...0 points

It's best to design your page from the start with SEO in mind

If you'd like to show up for targeted searches, it's better to determine key word combinations from the beginning. For this site I chose "web marketing" and "SEO" related keywords. There's a couple of free Google Tools that can help in distinguishing which keywords will best serve your site in audience building.

The first is the Keyword Tool. This is great for getting a feel for how much volume (how many people use that keyword in their searches) specific keywords generate in a given month. Just type in a base keyword and related keywords will be listed with search volumes. A quick application using "web marketing" and "seo" show these keywords at the top of their related lists in search volumes, but also at the top of advertiser competition (would cost the most to pay per click).

The other is the Traffic Estimator. It's a tool designed to help optimize Adword campaigns ( this is Google's pay per click advertising service), but it's great for finding out the worth of a given number of "hits" to your site for people looking up the keywords you specify. This will aid in determining the value you are adding to your site in "free" advertising by successful SEO.

Note that the most effective SEO is the precognitive type. If you type "Google" into the Google search engine box, you'll be on your target page before you ever hit the search button. I guess being the best search engine has some perks.

How does Google search work?

No they don't really use Pigeon Rank. There's a publicly available PDF by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" going into some detail of the design and function of the Google prototype search tool.

If you don't feel like reading the paper, or are already familiar with it here is the key concept in determining page rank. External links pointing to your site increases your page rank, and the links are weighted by the page rank of the external site. The key section for our concern is Page Rank, and I've included two paragraphs below.
"
2.1 PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web
The citation (link) graph of the web is an important resource that has largely gone unused in existing web search engines. We have created maps containing as many as 518 million of these hyperlinks, a significant sample of the total. These maps allow rapid calculation of a web page's "PageRank", an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of importance. Because of this correspondence, PageRank is an excellent way to prioritize the results of web keyword searches. For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results (demo available at google.stanford.edu). For the type of full text searches in the main Google system, PageRank also helps
a great deal.
2.1.1 Description of PageRank Calculation
Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page's importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page.
PageRank is defined as follows:
We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one. PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this paper."

So I need Back links?

Yes, and preferably back links from high page rank websites with keywords in or near the link that are complementary to your sites keywords. The more quality and content matching back links you get, the higher your page rank will go in searches for your keywords.

I appreciated Jim Boykin's blog post on "Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks." It's not just about how many back links you get, but where they are coming from.

Interested in Web Authoring?

What better way to get back links and potential interested readers than to write and submit articles online. I recently submitted a number of articles to Ezine and so far am optimistic about their reviews. Another site Top7Business.com allows submissions to various areas. For instance Top 7 Business Strategies That Serve Both Entrepreneurs and Employees is a short article I just recently added.

Submit Submit Submit

When you're ready to go live with a website it's time to find communities to submit your page to. These could be active, live user feedback sites like Stumble Upon or Reddit or web article discover sites like Digg. You may get some links while doing it, but the goal with submitting your website is to get at least some eyes on your page. The hope is that you get enough momentum going from numerous folks voting up your submission, ultimately exploding into the "traffic big leagues". Seriously though, it's a long shot unless you have an avid following of twenty or thirty friends on a particular network, go back and reread the Content is King section.


And some more squid-centric sounding posts:


There's a reason these guys are Giant Squids (I keep referencing all their great lenses). N376 had the foresight to create a Social Bookmarking Sites page.

(why the Darth Vader helmet pic? I'm still trying to figure it out myself, thanks to the Official Star Wars Blog for posting)

Dig this lens? Then Digg it!

The best way you can support this website is to vote it a worthy read. When marketing your own site or lens, it's a good idea to give readers easy links to easily share that they enjoyed your site. Here are some links to sites where you can give this lens some attention.

Click here to Digg it
Tweet this lens
My Reddits
Yahoo Buzz

There's also a Bookmark and Share section in the right hand column with links to some social bookmarking.

Analytics and Development Tools

Squid-centric Development:
CSS Tricks and of course SquidUtils by thefluffanutta
(the toolbar, Greasemonkey+scripts to assist with new lenses)

Squidoo Tools, Resources, and Guides is wide source of info from triathlontraining.

Squidoo CSS - my favorite code to spice up a lens by Spirituality has some excellent suggestions, and handy syntax for reference.

Basic HTML and Advanced HTML both excellent resources from N376.

"Lens References - Lenses I Use Often and What Makes Them Special" is a quick reference sheet to have some handy tools at your finger tips.

Squid Analytics
Squidaholic is a quick way to get some web stats on your favorite lens, above and beyond those included with the basic squidoo software (the traffic page for your lenses is already quite powerful).

General Analytics:
Google Analytics will help in dissecting the traffic your web site gets. You'll know how often search engines are finding your page, and what keywords people are using.

Google Webmaster Tools can be a powerful search engine view of your web page/site. Stormyweather put together a lens How To Set-Up Google Webmaster Tools To Analyse Your Site, although they don't yet work with Squidoo pages.

(thanks to Macropoulos for posting the picture with a creative commons license)

Pick your favorite SEO Squidoo Pages (Plexo)

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SEO for squidoo - getting found in google: search engine optimization

SEO - search engine optimization - has many differ more...0 points

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The 9 Free Things Every Site (or Lens!) Should Do

Rule #1: If you have a site or Squidoo lens, you w more...0 points

The Power of Pictures

I think a rather novel marketing technique being applied now is hosting some hot (high volume) images on Flickr. Google Image search is another way folks can find your site, and don't discount the importance of a user doing an image search. Generally they're working on their own media creation, but they can pause to read up on the story behind a fascinating image. Remember the old proverb, "a picture is worth a thousand clicks", or much greater volume to the potent image marketer.

The Power of Pictures: Flickr Voting (Plexo)

What's your favorite scenic picture shot?

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Vote for your favorite Web Marketing/SEO tool (Plexo)

Google Grapevine (blogs)

Internet marketing news roundup, February 17
New Internet Marketing Book, “The Bootstrapper's Guide to the Mobile Web,” is ...
Roles & Responsibilites of a Web Marketing Team - Whiteboard Friday
Powered by Google

Amazon Web Marketing Goodies

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The Verdict

Web Marketing is a Crock of Manure

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Yes, it's all an elaborate hoax. Stop wasting our time freak!

No, your investment of time and research was justified. Thanks Mark.

 

The Superstar Marketers of Squidoo

The Movers and The Shakers of Marketing

This list is going to get big pretty quick as I keep adding more squidoo superstars

YouTube vids

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Digg: Frontpage News

Microsoft's new world of work is all about people
Marilyn Monroe is crowned best beach body of all time
The 7 Most Successful SI Swimsuit Cover Models of All-Time
Putting the Squeeze On Planets Outside Our Solar System
"Henry & Aaron - IT'S A SNAP!" - Best College Enrollment Video Ever!

Slashdot News, because it's handy on a reference page

$6 Trillion In Fake US Treasury Bonds Seized In Switzerland
iPad 3 Confirmed To Have 2048x1536 Screen Resolution
Stealing Laptops For Class Credit

Latest BBC News

FBI in US Capitol 'terror' arrest
Hague fears over Iran 'Cold War'
Akihito heart surgery 'a success'

Whats the Buzz?

Buzz Machine

Are media in the content business?
Economist debate on sharing: closing
Economist debate on sharing: Round II

New Guestbook

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This UpMarket page written by

messel

Howdy, Victus Spiritus is my default soapbox and communication hub, please stop by and say hi.
I'm Mark Essel a long time systems engineer gone web author/entrepreneur.... more »

Deluxe. Remarkable. Creative. Unusual. Successful. Upmarket businesses push the envelope -- does yours?

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