5 witty videos from Ameriquest’s viral marketing campaign. They inserted these videos on YouTube and the world is spreading it around like wildfire. Great branding guys!

Here is an excellent analogy for start-up businesses, it is written by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great.

“Now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum — mass times velocity — is what will generate superior economic results over time. (more…)

Over the last two weeks or so Google has changed its algorithms slightly; or at least we think so. Those who know the basics about SEO know that title tags and incoming links (anchor text) are important. Title tags are still very important for on-site optimisation and I can’t see that changing anytime soon. The areas in which changes have occurred are with visitor tracking within the website, and from the source of the incoming links.

Site Performance: For those highly competitive keywords that you are targeting, measuring a website’s speed is an important aspect of SEO if you want to beat your competitors.  When you look at short tail keywords such as cars, property, news etc, they are all highly competitive keywords having thousands of searches per day. If we said that there are 100 000 searches per keyword with an average CTR (click through rate) of 75%, you would need to return this page at an average of 250 milliseconds to be able to handle the load for optimal speed and efficiency. If you return at a rate over 1000 milliseconds, your speed will be too slow to deliver a reasonable experience.

Bounce Rate: First let’s start with a definition of what it means. There are two possible definitions to the bounce rate:

1) The amount of time the user spends on your site. For example, if they are on the site for less than 15 seconds, it is considered a bounce.

2) The number of page views by the user during their visit to your site. For example, if they see only one page and leave, it is considered a bounce.

A search engine cannot pick up on how many pages you visit (unless, using Google as an example, they leverage the Google toolbar or Google Analytics data) but the search engine can tell if you made a query, visited a site, and came back to the search engine to make a query again five seconds later.

Do search engines use bounce as a signal? The possibility is very good. One must remember that the more data a search engine can collect, the better and they have a variety of ways in which to collect this data.

If they do use it as a signal, various filtering methods would need to be applied. For example, they would look at sites placed within the same industry. If the Nike website has a higher bounce rate than Adidas’s, it might mean that the Adidas site is a better site. However, you wouldn’t want to compare the Nike site to the Amazon website. Their target market and website goals are just too different. So search engines compare data within industry categories comparing website competitors rather than all websites as a whole.

Incoming Links: The much spoken about link building algorithm is believed to have changed slightly over the last week or two. Anchor text has always been a favourite for the popular search engine, Google but it seems to be changing. More focus is being placed on actual on-page content and title tags from where links are coming. The change is believed to have taken place because many webmasters and SEO’ers were paying for their incoming links and if one is able to buy links then they also have the power to demand what their anchor text should be. So Matt Cutts and his web spam team have possibly once again refined the Google algorithm.

Another important area for successful SEO is a RSS feed. Google is putting weight onto the amount of RSS subscribers you have. So once again a blog is critical for successful SEO. Take a moment and visit Google Webmaster Tools; you will notice that Google is following the amount of RSS subscribers. This platform can have amazing implications on the ranking of your articles.

Recently conducted tests have shown that having a large subscription can shoot your articles rankings up. It seems that having a subscribers list of over 25 will give you a competitive advantage. Again it depends on your competitors - every industry is different.

So where do we focus our SEO campaigns for the coming months? Thinking out of the box to gain incoming links is a must. Although most social media sites have the no-follow rule implemented, bloggers hang out in these communities to find quality articles that they can link to. If you are producing quality content bounce rates will be low, organic or natural linking will be easy to gain and additional social media exposure will be made possible thanks to your loyal followers. The fact remains that achieving third-party incoming links is becoming increasingly difficult, so ensuring your content is the best in your industry will put you ahead of your competition and make finding those links so much easier.

Here’s a list of areas that you should target for additional exposure:

• - Blogs
• - Social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon and Digg
• - Social chat engines, such as Twitter
• - Facebook — eventually things will be crawlable by search engines!

I was searching YouTube this morning to find my daily fix of internet news buzz and came across this hilarious video. I could not help but share it with you all.

Enjoy.

Up until today I have been very skeptical of Twitter and it’s effectiveness in the social media realm. So why my change in opinion? Well, thanks to Firefox’s brilliant extensions I have found out why Twitter has become so popular..

Previously I did not see the point in visiting Twitter’s website to fill in 140 characters of your thoughts and then leave again.. What a waste of time! Just logging in every time was such an inconvenience for me.. Previously I was only twittering maybe every four weeks or so.. With this lack of enthusiasm obviously I was not going to benefit from these amount of posts.. (more…)