July, 2011

Rankings — No Comments
27
Jul 11

Outrank Reviews: Videos for Link Building

You may be familiar with the YouTube Creator Institute, which was designed to give video content creators the tools they need to succeed. Check out an earlier post on the topic here. The program exists to help vloggers call attention to their causes, their businesses, as well as further their careers and generate income doing what they love.

The YouTube Partner Program says:

You’ve got great videos and a growing audience. Let YouTube help you take your channel to the next level through our Partner Program. Generate revenue from your videos and access YouTube’s specialized partner features and tools, including rentals, content management, and analytics.

In addition to having a place to spotlight your work, we know that videos help with link-building, an important component to SEO. So if having videos makes sense for your business, it’s a good idea to add that to your marketing strategy. You’ve heard of viral videos? How creative can YOU get? Your video could end up going viral! It’s not something that everyone can pull off and viral videos usually apply to a more general audience rather than a niche market you may be targeting but the possibility exists. You don’t have to join the Partner Program but you can post videos to your website and share them with relevant online communities where people discuss their experiences and needs for your type of product or service. Just make sure your video is informative and useful to your audience – it can address a specific topic or issue or simply introduce your business as a solution to a certain need. Here are some topics for video content to get you brainstorming and help you figure out what might apply to your business: instructional videos, advertisements, “a day in the life” look into what you do in your business and/ or success stories/testimonials. What else might work for you? We’d love to hear your personal experiences.

This video might help you with a brainstorming session! It serves as an informative guide to our service as well as a tutorial on search engine marketing. Click here!

Outrank.com — No Comments
15
Jul 11

Outrank Reviews: Google News Badges


I’ll be honest; at first, I didn’t see much value for users in the Google News badges (for your favorite topics). Why? It seemed redundant. And because sometimes I start to feel overwhelmed by all the widgets, badges, location-based services, photo-sharing sites, social media connectors, and whatever else from which we have a million different options to choose. However, badges are not the same as saving things to your “favorites” folders. The news badges function as filters you can personalize to seek specific topics in the news so that you have more control over the sorts of things you read rather than search engines deciding what they think you want to hear about and returning predetermined results.

There have been discussions about being in a tech bubble or a filter bubble. Eli Pariser is the author of “The Filter Bubble”, which confronts the issue that personalized search may be limiting our worldview. During his talk on filter bubbles he asserts that the major players in the tech field should at least give online users the right to choose what they want to be informed about. Still, we can shoot ourselves in the foot, because sometimes there are things we need to hear that we don’t want to hear. It’s like going to the same restaurant every single time you go out to eat: you’re going to miss out on things — not only different types of food, but different social and cultural experiences. But with Google News badges, we can police ourselves, so to speak. We can set up badges for topics we’d like to become more educated on, not just things with which we’re already comfortable or familiar.

When you set up your badges, the purpose and graphical element functions like an equalizer on musicequipment. The EQ’s filter out unwanted frequencies or signals and bring up the desired “sound” or news. You can set the topic bars to the desired amount of how much news you want to cover sports, organic farming, music, technology, etc. News badges are private by default but you can opt to share them however you like.

Click here to check out how they work!