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When you’re in the Internet marketing world, you will encounter different tools and resources.  If you’re a website owner, however, you will want to follow your site’s development and popularity.  Are you doing the right thing?  How can you gain more web traffic?  Is your site ranking well to search engines?  Well, in order for these questions to get answered, you will need website tools and information, obviously.  So, the next question will be, “How do you get them?”.  This is where Alexa comes in.

Alexa 101

Image via CrunchBase

While researching for tools, you most probably have encountered Alexa and its website.  In fact, if you are a website owner (new or otherwise), SEO company or even a SEO expert, you may have already used some of Alexa’s tools (or all of them) already and fondly depended on their reports.  But let’s pause for a moment and take a quick look at Alexa and what it really is about.

Alexa (Alexa Internet, Inc.) is an Internet information provider company from California, U.S.  Amazon.com is its parent company.  Alexa started in 1996, founded by Bruce Gilliat and Brewster Kahle.

Alexa Rankings, Traffic and Tools

Since Alexa is one of the leading internet statistics provider, their reports and rankings are considered as reliable and accurate – for the most part.  Let me explain that side note later.

One of Alexa’s famous tools is the Alexa Toolbar.  This is an application that can be installed in most browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome).  This is how Alexa gauges website statistics.  The best thing about this is it’s free to download and install.  With the statistics and analytics you can get from the toolbar, a website owner can run competitive analysis, market research, and much more.

Image via CrunchBase

This toolbar is rather helpful even for non-website owners as well, as it has different features like “Related Links” where it finds sites related to the site you are currently on.  Other features are of course, the “Alexa Traffic Rank” where you will see how famous the website is online, “Wayback” (if you’re curious on how a site looked in the past), “Website Reviews”, “Search Analytics” (for Chrome extension) where you can check which search query drives traffic to a specific site, “Hot Pages & Searches” (for Firefox and Internet Explorer), and many more.

The side note I had earlier about Alexa being reliable and accurate for the most part is, as I have mentioned as well, Alexa works hand in hand with the toolbar.  With this toolbar, Alexa can collate data from website viewers and visitors that installed the toolbar … if these people don’t have it then it goes without saying that their browsing activities are not counted or will not be included in the said reports and statistics.  But then again, there are several Alexa toolbar users (millions) so Alexa’s stats are still respected and considered reliable, and mostly accurate, considering.

For site owners solely, Alexa offers paid tools such as “Alexa Pro” where you can subscribe for “Premium Listing” and certify your site. They also have a “Bi-Weekly Site Audits” where Alexa analyzes your website as a paid service – which means more detailed reports and insights on how you can improve your site’s rankings, and gain more traffic.  Another tool (free) is “Claim Your Site” which needs registering (also for free).

What do you think of Alexa and its tools?  Do you have Alexa Toolbar installed?  Let us know what you think in a comment below. Thank you!

Even if you wish to outsource SEO work, it is best that a business owner have at least some basic knowledge on how search engines work.  It can be mundane reading for the uninitiated but for those who understand the importance of this foundational knowledge, it’s quite exciting and ‘revealing’.

Although there are a multitude of SEO optimization factors that affect search engine rankings, it’s best to view search engines in terms of their purpose, which is: To provide the most relevant and useful information in response to a search.  They do this by crawling the web, creating an index, calculating the perceived relevance of the web pages, and finally, showing these results to their users.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Search engines have to go through billions of pages and files posted on the internet.  They accomplish this task using web crawlers that go through all of the pages and files primarily through links that connect them to one another.  Once they’ve located all the pages, they grab the unique codes of each and store them in indexes so that they may easily be pulled out when later searched for.

Of course, search engines don’t just pull things out at random.  They respond to searches by trying to give users the most relevant and useful results they can find, and then they have the daunting task of ranking these according to their perceived value of results.  Ranking the hordes of relevant results is largely dependent on their ‘popularity’.  This is where SEO Optimization is needed and effective.  Search engines generally rely on the assumption that the more popular a site is, the more important and useful its information must be.

In the earlier years, search engines merely picked out relevant results based on certain keywords that the pages contained.  However, they later found that this was an easy system to fool and companies could use keyword stuffing to increase their rankings.  Nowadays, search engines make use of a large number of factors that are much more difficult to cheat.  The popularity and relevance of pages are determined by complex algorithms with a multitude of components.  These are known as “ranking factors”.

Most ranking factors are unknown by most people other than the engineers who designed them.   However, some of the known ranking factors are these:

• The number of sites linking to a particular webpage
• The relevance of the page’s content
• Updates made to the index
• User-friendliness of a particular page
• Clear text links so that pages are easily reachable
• Keywords in the pages and in the domain
• Keywords in the anchor texts
• And many more!

When you outsource SEO responsibilities, you don’t have to worry about these factors as you now have professionals taking care of these matters for you.  And now that you have a basic understanding of how search engines work, this becomes a good time to think of SEO Optimization for your own site.

WireWalkersVA is very pleased to provide you with this list of Top 10 Branding Blogs.  We made this list very quick and clean – without a lot of extensive commentary – so that you could explore and decide for yourself which blogs you like the best.

We also created some great Branding content so please check them out here:

• Social Media Marketing and Branding Success Example (Podcast / Transcript)
• Thoughts on Social Media Branding (Podcast / Transcript)

1. Tom Asacker (A Clear Eye) – You’ve probably heard of Tom Asacker – he’s famous for his branding expertise (among other things).  In his blog, you’ll get to know and learn more about the importance of branding, and pick up a bunch of branding strategies that will help your own business.  Note: We also included his blog in our Top Business Blogs of 2011 eBook.
2. Dave Young’s Branding Blog– Simply put, this blog is all about branding.  You can also listen to a lot of podcasts about branding from his BrandingBlog Radio.
3. Branding Strategy Insider – This blog is run by brand consultants, Derrick Daye and Brad VanAuken.  If you want to learn how to build and create strong brands, then you might want to take a look at this blog.
4. Ries’ Pieces Blog -  Owned by the TV personality and branding guru, Laura Ries, this blog talks about the basic principles of branding, some branding successes and strategies.
5. Personal Branding Blog – If you want to know more about personal branding, you should visit this blog as it offers branding tips and career advice.  This blog is published by Dan Schawbel, the ‘world renowned personal branding expert’.
6. Igor – As a naming and branding agency, you can learn a lot from this site.  Their blog, for starters, houses several posts about company naming and advertising.  When you go to their “Portfolio” tab, you’ll get to read all of their case studies which briefly explain why they chose such brand names.
7. The Engaging Brand – A blog that showcases posts about internal and personal branding, branding podcasts, social business, social networking and many more.   For business owners who want to achieve goals through social media, this blog is also a must-read for them.
8. Small Business Branding -  Want to know more about branding – for small business?  This blog is what you’re looking for then.  You’ll find the importance of branding in your small business, some branding how-to’s, and lot more here.
9. Brand Channel – As the name obviously suggests, this is THE resource for branding readers.  Since this site is an “open exchange” on branding, you’ll find different inputs from branding practitioners from around the world.
10. Branding & Marketing -  Written by Chris Brown, founder of Marketing Resources & Results, businesses and professionals will learn more not just about branding strategy in this blog but about marketing tactics as well.

Which additional blogs would you add to this list?

Please see our other Social Media Resources.

Please let us know what you think in our Forum.

Please share via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn …

By now most business owners in all kinds of different niches have heeded the advice to use a business blog to help promote and strengthen their internet presence as well as to help them provide the steady stream of new, original content that the search engine bots are more hungry for than ever before.

WordPress is by far the most popular platform choice for bloggers the world over and for many good reasons.  Hosting and a good theme aside most of what you need to build an effective WordPress based business blog is free – almost all of the best WordPress plug ins that can be used to enhance your blog are offered free of charge – the beauty of open source.

Learning to use WordPress is also a rather easy prospect.  If coding is not your thing and HTML means nothing to you then fortunately you can usually find that someone who ‘is’ geek proficient who has already created a plug in that will do exactly what you were hoping and if worst comes to worst there are plenty of people who like to hang around in the official WordPress forums to help the noobs out.

All of this having been said though, it is actually very easy to make some simple moves that will completely screw up your WordPress blog, often without you even realizing it.  In this e book we will explore just how easy it is to screw up your WordPress blog and spoil the chances that it will be the useful asset it is supposed to be.

How to Screw Up Your WordPress Blog – Use a Free Theme from an Unknown Source

When you begin looking for a theme for your WordPress blog you will quickly discover that you have plenty of options – many of them free.  WordPress themselves will offer you the chance to use a free theme they “approve of” but these do tend to be rather simple and not very flexible so chances are that 1,000 other bloggers are also using it (because it was free).

At this point new bloggers begin to look for something a little more exciting.  There are some amazing paid themes out there but often bloggers new to WordPress will choose a free theme from an unknown website instead – after all why spend $40 if you don’t have to?

Choosing this option can be a great way to ruin your new business blog right from the start.  Not only do these themes lack any kind of support at all but they are also often incompatible with many of the most useful plug ins you may want to use later down the line.

Worse still many contain extra links (usually in the footer) that go to a site of the developers choosing, one that is probably completely unrelated to your niche and getting rid of it often means altering the theme files themselves – something that is not a recommended activity for those who do not know an awful lot about HTML as removing just a single character can cause a whole theme to collapse.

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Other great related content:

• Amazing FREE WordPress Plugins to Supercharge Your Blog (eBook)

A lot of our readers and site visitors get confused about SEO just because there’s so much unfamiliar jargon and terminology – so, we thought we’d put together a quick list.   Now, you’ll know what SEO optimization really means and what SEO outsourcing really entails.

Boring – yes!  Useful and IMPERATIVE to know – yes, you bet!

• Anchor Text:  This is the part of a back-link that people click on a website.  Sometimes the anchor text is simply a “Click here” (not a good idea) but search engines actually consider the anchor text as a keyword for your website’s content so it helps to have anchor texts that use keywords you’d like to increase your rankings for.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• Back-links:  This is a hyperlink on another website that directs people who click it to your own website.  These are important for SEO because, generally, the more back-links to your website, the higher its search ranking.

• Canonicalization:  In the SEO world, this refers to the standardization of multiple links or URLs in your website.  It is rather important in website optimization as this process eliminates the visible duplications of pages from your site.

• Cloaking:  This is the practice of making the same website page appear differently to search engines and users.  It’s intended to get a page highly ranked for its keywords and then  promoting unrelated products to all the people who go to that page.  (Needless to say, this is a serious offence in the search engine world.)

• Keyword Density:  This is determined from the number of keywords divided by the number of words in a specific page.  While this used to be an important factor in search rankings, it was heavily abused by sites and is no longer given much emphasis.

• Keyword Stuffing:  This is the practice of increasing the keyword density to irrational proportions in order to raise a site’s ranking.  This was quickly discovered by search engines and now you can get penalized for it.

• Link Farm:  This is a group of websites that all link to one another.  These are created to increase the PageRank of all of the websites in the Link Farm.  While this was useful in increasing your rankings in the past, they are now seen by search engines as spam and actions are being taken to penalize these transgressors.

• Meta Tags:  These are HTML codes that are usually found in the header of a web page, just after the title tag.  These are not seen by users but are used to give search engine spiders data on various types of information as well as how they should treat certain pages.

• Meta Descriptions:  These are descriptions of the page that show up in searches under the title tag.  Only snippets are shown so meta descriptions should be kept under 160 characters.

• NoFollow:  This is used in links by website owners to show search engines that they don’t support the site they are linking to.  When search engines see this, they don’t count the link in PageRank.

• PageRank:  This is an algorithm that search engines use to determine the importance of pages in relation to other pages.  It was founded initially on the assumption that – among many other criterion – the higher the number of websites that link to your website, the more likely that your website contains important information.

• Robots.txt:  This is a file that is placed in a website’s root directory and serves as a guide that enables or prevents bots from crawling over certain areas of a site you don’t want them to crawl.

• RSS feeds:  RSS stands for Rich Site Summary but is also often dubbed as Really Simple Syndication.  It is a format for delivering updates of regularly changing content, most often automatically.

• Sandbox:  Google has a separate index where they keep all new websites.  While websites are placed in the Sandbox, they don’t appear in normal searches.  However, once Google has verified a website, they move it out of the Sandbox and the website can appear in normal searches.

• SEO Company:  SEO Companies are businesses that help websites to produce and, ideally, uphold high web page rankings with different search engines.   They will be the one responsible for optimizing your website, and doing SEO services such as keyword analysis, link building and much more.

• SEO Optimization:  SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the method used to improve a website’s visibility and ranking in various search engines.

• SEO Outsourcing (aka outsourced SEO):  This is the process of delegating your company’s SEO work to an SEO Company or firm, or to an outside company (may be offshore or onshore).  As a business owner, especially for start-ups, it is advisable, more often that not, to outsource SEO work so you can concentrate on other aspects of your business.

• SEO Services:  These are the services (usually comes in packages) given by SEO companies and firms.  SEO services can include off-site or on-site optimization.

• SEM (Search Engine Marketing):  This is the practice of marketing services and products using search engines.  It is divided into two parts, SEO (search engine optimization) which is the practice of optimizing websites to increase their ranking in search engines, and PPC (pay-per- click) which is the practice of buying clicks from search engines.

• Sitemaps:  This is a tool that allows you to give guidance to spiders on how they should crawl over your website.  Sitemaps come in 3 varieties:  XML, RSS, and TXT files.  They each have their pros and cons, but XML is the most widely used format.

• Title Tags:  These show up at the top of your browser page and in search results.  It’s also what shows up when you bookmark a page and add it to your “Favorites”.  They are meant to be accurate descriptions of a page’s content, but they should also contain keywords because they help with searches.

• Web Crawlers:  These are also known as spiders and or search bots.  They crawl though the web looking for new links and pages.

Thanks for reading!  If you have any other definitions or jargon that you think our readers should know, please include them in a comment to this blog.

WireWalkersVA is very pleased to provide you with this list of Top 10 Social Media Blogs.  We made this list very quick and clean – without a lot of extensive commentary – so that you could explore and decide for yourself which blogs you like the best.

We also created some great Social Media content so please check them out here:

• The Eight Deadly Sins of Social Media Marketing (eBook)
• Five Ways to Be More Persuasive in the Social Media World (eBook)
• Maximizing the Lifetime Value of Your Customers Via Social Media – The Nikon Example (Podcast / Transcript)
• Social Media Marketing and Branding Success Example (Podcast / Transcript)
• Thoughts on Social Media Branding (Podcast / Transcript)

1. Social Media Examiner – This blog is tagged as “Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle” – with very good reason.  As the “world’s largest online social media magazine”, you’ll learn more about using social media tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and the likes properly.
2. Mashable – As the “social media news giant”, this website houses several posts about social media, technology, business news and a whole lot more.  You’ll learn a lot as well about the social networks and web tools that will surely help your business grow.
3. Social Media Explorer – If you want to learn more about social media marketing and monitoring, then this is the blog you should visit.  The blog also talks about informational products that will help you to be more knowledgeable with social media and digital marketing.
4. Social Media Today – This blog contains social media news, tools, strategy and techniques from several professionals.
5. The Social Media Marketing Blog – This blog is owned by Scott Monty – the “global head of social media for Ford Motor Company”.  In this blog, Scott shares his own personal take on social media marketing in general, and online marketing and advertising for everyone.
6. Social Fresh – Founded by Jason Keath, this blog is focused on social media education.  If you want to learn more about better marketing through social media, then you should give this blog a visit.
7. SocialMouths – Written by Francisco Rosales, SocialMouths is a blog where entrepreneurs can get advice (for free) not only about social media but about blogging, content marketing, web traffic and email marketing as well.
8. DanZarrella – Known as “the Social Media Scientist”, Dan Zarrella’s blog talks about social media behavior.  Marketers and social media enthusiasts will learn more about “scientifically grounded best practices” for social media marketing in this blog.
9. Soshable – Want added information about social media marketing and strategy? This blog, owned by JD Rucker (a social media strategist), is definitely the blog you can visit.  If it’s social media related, this blog talks about it.
10. Social Media Dudes – Founded by partners Dennis Lynn and John Panico, this blog talks about branding awareness, social media tools and marketing, blogging, traffic generation and so much more.  Entrepreneurs and small business owners can learn a lot from this blog as it houses topics about business growth strategies as well.

Which additional blogs would you add to this list?

Please see our other Social Media Resources.

Please let us know what you think in our Forum.

Please share via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn …

Last Minute Tips for Starting a Holiday Internet Marketing Campaign

The holidays present businesses of all kinds with some great Internet marketing and SEO opportunities but the trouble is that they creep up on you so darn fast. You really did mean to get a great holiday marketing strategy together this year but you have just been so busy.

The fact is that by the time you read this you probably only have a little more than a few weeks or so before all the festivities begin. And most of the people you would normally call on to help you just do not seem to be around – out gift shopping according to their voicemail. Guess the holiday campaign will have to wait until next year.

Not so fast. It’s not too late to make the most of all the opportunities that a bit of holiday themed marketing opens up for any business. Here are some great last minute tips to help you get into the spirit of a holiday Internet marketing campaign that can work for your business.

Add Some Holiday Cheer to your Website

There’s no time for a complete holiday themed website overhaul but that would probably, for most businesses, be overkill (and expensive) in any case. However adding a few festive touches to it is not that difficult or that time consuming.

There are a number of free resources out there to help you “decorate” your website without breaking the bank. Believe it or not you can actually find a number of great holiday images at absolutely no cost in the free to use section of a stock photography site like Dreamstime and you can even customize your social networking buttons (you do have those on your website right?) so that they have a more festive feel to them.

These are only little tweaks but you might be surprised at just how effective they can be. Better still they are easy to remove once the holidays over and you want to get your site back to normal.

Crank Up that Content

Whatever kind of business yours is if you have a blog (which of course you really should) then it can provide you with not only a great venue to add some holiday related content but also with a great SEO boost.

Blogs tend to get indexed far faster than any other form of content these days so if you start to blog for the holidays now and your content is good original content it should start showing up in people’s searches very quickly.

And people spend a lot of time searching for holiday related content. What are they looking for (apart from the obvious deals and discount coupons but we’’ll get to them in a minute)

1. How to Lists – Whatever your business niche you should be able to find a way to create holiday themed ‘how to’ lists that relate not only to the holidays but your products and services too. If yours is a retail business it’s very easy but everyone can find an angle. For example, if you are an accountant a good piece on how to stick to a holiday budget would be something a lot of people will be searching for.

2. Tips and Tricks – These kinds of posts are hugely searched up around the holidays. How to buy a great gift for X (which would be even better if you can tie your products and services into it) might be a good piece to consider.

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While there are many resources online where you can learn tips on how to optimize your website, business people often don’t have the time to learn the intricacies of SEO, or do they have the time needed to successfully apply those tips and techniques.

The best option oftentimes for these people is to simply outsource SEO from other companies that are more capable of handling their SEO needs.  It’s often difficult looking online for a good SEO company though.  Naturally, all SEO companies know how to get their website to rank highly, but most may not be dependable or meet the results first, risk adverse needs of many of today’s business owners.

To make things easier for disgruntled website owners, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most dependable SEO companies available on the net.

1. WireWalkersVA.com

WireWalkersVA is an affordable SEO firm that offers ‘pay for performance’ (aka ‘pay for results’ or ‘results first’) services.  Pay for performance SEO is one of the most cost-effective and least risky of the SEO services because you only pay when you get the agreed upon actual results.  This makes for lowered risks because you don’t have to pay unless you see results; no results, no pay.  In addition, WireWalkersVA uses white hat techniques – meaning they will take no action that isn’t approved by you that could potentially get you penalized by Google.

WireWalkersVA starts with keyword analysis and website analysis to see what aspects of your site need work.  They also provide on-page and off-page optimization to help ensure that your website ranks as highly as possible.  In addition, WireWalkersVA has sophisticated monitoring tools which track progress that they report back to their clients so that clients are constantly kept up to date on what’s going on with their websites.

2. Netmark.com

Netmark Essentials is a marketing agency that specializes in online marketing.  Of course, an essential part of online marketing is ranking highly when potential customers search for a product or service that you sell.  Thus, their services are tailored to help better display your advertising material so that it is more visible to potential customers.

They offer services in both on-page and off-page optimization for a specific set of keywords chosen from intensive keyword analysis.  Netmark has the distinction of being one of the top SEO companies, though it may not necessarily be the cheapest.

3. HigherVisibility.com

Higher Visibility is a widely recognized internet marketing agency that offers various marketing services such as SEO, pay-per-click marketing and website development.  Their SEO services are among the best out there in terms of dependability and efficiency.

Their SEO packages include keyword research and analysis, keyword optimization, and ranking reports.  In addition, they have able staff who can aid clients in creating engaging ads and press releases.  They can customize each package according to clients’ needs and budgets so clients pay only for what they want done for their website.

4. SEOP.com

SEOP is a company that specializes in search engine optimization and search engine marketing.  They have highly experienced SEO and marketing experts with in-depth knowledge of SEO tactics and marketing growth strategies.  They promise maximum revenue and impressive ROI.

SEOP’s roster of SEO services includes keyword and website analysis, SEO strategy development, content development and optimization, and bi-monthly reports of progress.  It’s another incredibly reliable SEO service provider, but not necessarily the most affordable.  However, their promise of rapid ROI – if borne out – can sound promising and attractive.

5. LSFInteractive.com

LSF Interactive has had over 12 years of experience in internet marketing.  They specialize in search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, web development, and reputation management.  Their success lies in giving website viewers exactly what they want, so they’ll come back for more or share the word.  This, in turn, results in better brand awareness and higher profits for your company.

LSF Interactive provides internet marketing services that range from search engine marketing services and online media planning to social media design and website development.  Each package is tailored according to the needs of each company of course, so as to help maximize ROI.

6. SEOmoz.org

SEOmoz is a website that is renowned for its great online resources and SEO software.  Their software offers advanced tools that can help you manage optimizing your website with minimal effort.  They have tools that can help you pinpoint SEO problems, track progress, analyze metrics, and much more.  In addition, they offer webinars that help you learn advanced SEO tactics and forums where you can exchange ideas with other website owners practicing search engine optimization techniques.

SEOmoz is not necessarily a service provider, but with the ease of use of its software, you can run the optimization of your website with minimal supervision.  It’s the less expensive option for those who can’t afford to spend on a full service provider.  They even have free 30-day trials for skeptics.

WireWalkersVA is very pleased to provide you with another list of Top 10 Business Blogs.  We made this list very quick and clean – without a lot of extensive commentary – so that you could explore and decide for yourself which blogs you like the best.

We also created some great Business content so please check them out here:

• Top Business Blogs
• Top 20 Business Blogs of 2011 (eBook)
• Business Plan Templates, Outlines and Samples (eBook)
• Tips for the Business Blogger (Podcast / Transcript)
• How to Blog for Business (Podcast / Transcript)

1. Daily Biz Solutions -  Managed by Mobile Technical Institute, this blog gives out tips and solutions for small businesses. Aside from that, the blog also offers advice and suggestions regarding advertising, customer service, marketing, and so much more.
2. Birds on the Blog – Although the blog says “Business Women with something to say”, the contributors here are not all women. This website houses several helpful and informative articles about business, small business, marketing and a whole lot more.
3. Chief Customer Officer 2.0 – Owned by Jeanne Bliss, a “customer experience expert”, this blog focuses more on customer service and customer experience. Businesses will learn a lot from her blog about delivering great customer service and experience that will lead to business growth.
4. Joanne Dewberry Blog – This blog is owned by an award winning business mom, Joanne Dewberry. Since Joanne is a very experienced entrepreneur, and the fact that she accepts guest blogging from different business experts like herself, you can find some wonderful and inspiring startup stories in this blog. This site also offers business and blogging tips.
5. Simply Stated Business – This blog, owned by Cathy Miller, a great business writer, talks about business writing and blogging, and business communication (and tips).
6. Timo Elliott Blog – If you’re into business intelligence (BI) and business analytics, you will like Timo Elliott’s blog. The blog also talks about the latest advancements in social media and analytics that will help several business people.
7. Tim Berry Blog – Tim Berry is the founder of Bplans.com – where you can get free sample of business plans. In his blog, you can see a lot of information about startups, business planning, entrepreneurship and so much more.
8. BizAbode – As “small business guide”, you can get several small business tips and strategies in this blog.
9. OnStartups.com – This blog is dedicated to entrepreneurs – it houses several articles about business startups (tips and guides) and software startups.
10. Rise of the Innerpreneur – This blog, owned by Tara Joyce, is focused on giving out ideas on how you can grow your business. The blog also highlights different entrepreneurs (“Innerpreneur Spotlight”) monthly.

By now you have probably at least heard about Pinterest. It is the latest hot social networking site, a place where you can gather together images of all kinds of interesting things on virtual pinboards – sort of like online scrapbooking. In basic terms you find an image of something you like, “pin it” to your board and allow other users to share it, like it or comment on it. They can follow you, you can follow them, you can share your pinning activities on other social networks, its all pretty cool stuff.

Although it was probably not the site creator’s original intended purpose for their new site just two years ago, businesses large and small are having a lot of marketing success using Pinterest. In fact, according to a recent Mashable post for retailers Pinterest outstrips Google+ for driving traffic to small and large retail business websites.

As well as the marketing benefits it offers there are also some very nice SEO benefits to be gained from maintaining a Pinterest account and it is these benefits we are going to discuss in this e book.

SEO Benefits from Pinterest #1: Better Analytics

Comprehensive analytics are one of any marketers best and most useful tools. If you look at your website analytics reports you can see at a glance the websites and other traffic sources that brought people your way. Social networks are not so helpful. facebook for example offers their “insights” but does not give you any information about just which piece of your content sent someone winging their way to your website.

Pinterest is different. Pinterest will actually show you exactly which of your “pins” earned that all important click thru and let you see that item on the Pinterest site. This is also great for social interaction as you can then thank the person for sharing, or connect with them through a comment.

SEO Benefits from Pinterest #2 – Seamless Facebook Integration

If you create your new Pinterest account by signing up using your Facebook page (yes, you can use your buisness page) you will have the option to seamlessly share your Pinterest activities on your Facebook page whenever you like.

Not all of your pins perhaps but one’s that are really interesting, or just one a day or so. That way your Facebook fans will discover you Pinterest account, expanding your social reach once again. You can also (and you should) cross promote with Twitter as well. You can also cross promote with your own blog for an even deeper integration.

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