Enter Exact Factor, a free tool (at least for now) that helps you to track your position and your competitors’ for free.

Features Available For Unregistered Free Users:

1. Unregistered users can view their site’s ranking for three keywords at a time.
2. You can only find one competitor’s ranking at a particular time.
3. You can analyze up to 20 pages in search engines.
4. You can view ranking reports on various search engines on various country specific domain extensions.

You need PR to help you carry your product or service to the very people who will help your company grow.

Simply relying on features and word of mouth simply isn’t going to cut it. This is a real world and the reality is that customers aren’t looking for you. You have to compete for mindshare. Those companies who don’t proactively tell their story will find themselves missing from the radar screens of their customers while their competition earns their business – regardless of whether or not it’s an inferior solution.

In order to be successful in Public Relations, you need to grasp what it is, what it isn’t, and how it works and why. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to build the right team, determine the best strategies to amplify visibility and gain traction, or have the ability to effectively measure it.

PR for Startups Now Available as a Free ebook

The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.

If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it actually happen?

Indeed. Conversations are taking place with or without you and this map will help you visualize the potential extent and pervasiveness of the online conversations that can impact and influence your business and brand.

Introducing The Conversation Prism

Jesse Thomas & Brian Solis

This type of deal requires a great deal of trust and transparency, but it is worth doing if you are sure you can deliver value, and can find a solid, reliable partner.

When you partner with another company to sell a service or product online, the onus is on you to make money or not (and your partners risk is reduced to zero).

• The more conversions you help foster, the happier (richer) your partner is, and likewise the more money you make. Win-win.
• Another great point in the article, “you gain insight into how other businesses work, which is a valuable education in itself.” Absolutely true, and in this rapidly evolving medium this is one of the best way to learn (not only about SEO, but about any other kind of company you are interested in).

Just as good SEO’s look out for good businesses to partner with, even good businesses are in search of honest and quality SEO’s.

Benefits for the company seeking SEO:

• Saves marketing time, money and energy (in return the company shares profit).
• Lets company focus more on their core business (it allows each partner able to focus on what they do best).
• When two people work together, if they are able to work amicably and are comfortable with each other they always do more productive work than two of them could individually do.
• Reduced risk, SEO shares it with you.

Why is SEO alone not enough?

SEO isn’t a quick fix

If you didn’t design your website with SEO in mind from the beginning, it won’t have the optimized architecture to develop on effectively. The foundation must be planned out systematically before pouring the concrete, so to speak. It takes a considerable amount of time to evalutate and plan your SEO strategy — you must research your competition, define and target your keyphrases, customers and goals, among many other things.

SEO isn’t something you can just turn on

Site architecture needs to be defined, anchor text links need to be written, Titles and Meta descriptions need to be created, and page copy generally needs to be  complete. On-Page Optimization
That said, there are many out-of-the-box solutions, such as when using WordPress with a few SEO plugins — these are naturally SEO friendly and ready to go.

SEO needs time to age

After your website has been planned out in terms of SEO, it will start to receive more targeted search engine traffic. But even that is a slow process. Traffic will increase incrementally, and get better over time as the on-page SEO work begins to mature and your network grows.

SEO needs link popularity

On-page SEO is only part of the equation for more search engine visitors. The success of your SEO depends on the overall link popularity of the website; Off-page optimization. Link building and Off-page optimization take time and planning, just like On-page optimization. Links need to be targeted, with anchor text that correlates with the on-page SEO work.

SEO needs to be done in conjunction with other marketing

Use SEO to supplement your other marketing strategies. It’s a good idea to perform other online marketing campaigns such as

• paid search
• email marketing
• blogging
• social media marketing, etc.,but also offline marketing such as
• direct mail
• print advertising
• radio spots, etc.

There’s a lot that goes into a successful Internet marketing campaign; when done correctly it’s a worthwhile, long-term investment for nearly any business with a website. Just make sure to build SEO into your marketing plan from the get-go and not make it an afterthought.

Seth Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. One of the leading Marketing gurus and an A-List blogger inspiration to many.

A Few Excerpts From 10 Questions For Seth Godin

Hugh:  For the benefit of gapingvoid readers not yet familiar with your work [all 14 of them], let’s get the main schpiel over and done with: From your perspective, what is “Tribes” about?

Seth: It explains why top-down, buzz-driven media is the past, not the future.

The world has always been organized into tribes, groups of people who want to (need to) connect with each other, with a leader and with a movement. The products, services and ideas that are gaining currency faster than ever are ones that are built on a tribe.

Harley Davidson and Apple are titanic brands for the very same reason. They sell a chance to join a group that matters.

On the concept ‘Everyone is a Marketer’ / ‘Everyone is a Leader’

If ‘tribes‘–connected, motivated groups of people–are the engines of growth, then it seems clear to me that what marketing means today is leadership. If you’re boring or staid, no one will follow you. Why would they?

Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn’t mean they’re in charge, it doesn’t mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we’ve got.”

Marketing as a Story

“So much traditional marketing is built around the idea of “Merit” i.e. good quality, good prices etc. But the older I get, I keep asking myself, “What’s the story here? What’s the REAL story that people are GENUINELY going to want to tell other people?” Do you see Storytelling as a form of Leadership? How about vice versa?

In All Marketers Are Liars, my point was that people buy stories, not stuff, and it’s stories that spread, not stuff. An iPod made by Garmin wouldn’t be an iPod, would it? It’s the story and the affect and the whole aura that makes it worth $200.

Leaders tell stories. Gandhi or King or Che or yes, Rush Limbaugh. They tell stories. The stories matter and the words matter. Of course OF COURSE the product has to live up to the story, the service has to be there, the story has to be true. But no story, no idea, no marketing.”

If people trust the words written on a blog, if people come to like and identify with the person writing the blog, you have all the elements necessary to create a popular community focused on the creative output of just one person. Or in the case of a product — if the product tells a story that people relate with — this is the essence of brand marketing, telling a story.

This is why any person with a passion, a hobby, or a skill, and enough motivation to produce content on a particular topic — or someone that is selling a brand with a unique story — can build an audience, keep people coming back — and from a business perspective — ultimately, monetize that traffic, make the sale, and establish a leadership position.

…a lot of heavy stuff here from two of the leading marketering philosophers of our time.

Nothing happens on the Internet without traffic. Generic keyword style domain names get a lot of organic type in traffic for nothing more than the keyword weight or gravity of the name itself. These are also the ‘catchy’, or ‘brandable’ names. When choosing a domain name for SEO purposes, there are a couple of main factors to consider:

* Rankability (& Linkability)
* Brand

Google tends to give weight to keywords in the domain name. This increases the importance of selecting a good name. Aaron Wall

While Google gives weight to domains with keywords in the domain name, there is also the risk of having too generic a website name that Google might penalize for keyword stuffing, or that no (legitimate) website owner would want to link to. In Bali, the domain name market is saturated for terms like ‘bali villa rental‘ (Bali is also ranked one the Top Island Destinations in the world). Would you remember any of these website names?

• www.indobalivillasrental.com
• www.balivillasforrent.com
• www.bali-direct-villa.com
• www.ultimate-bali-villa.com
• www.hotvillarental.com
• www.balivillacottage.com
• www.balibestvillas.com
• www.balihomevilla.com
• www.baliprivatevacationvillas.com
• www.accommodation-bali-villas.com

Probably not. These names are far too generic and they all blur together without distinction. Realistically, no one is going to remember these domain names. This brings us to the importance of mixing Rankability with Branding.

Brand

Brands are a mark of distiction. Brands are memorable. If you are using a generic keyword stuffed domain name, it risks seeming too generic (like the examples above), and it lacks credibility. In a crowded market, brand offers a point of distinction. Balance is suggested here in terms of a domain name for your website.

The balance in terms of Branding and Ranking for your domain name can be boiled down to a simple equation that looks something like this:

• Generic + Term
• Keyword + Generic
• Keyword + Brand

eg. SeoBook, Internet-Marketing, CheapFlights — these domains have both an element of keyword & branding mixed together. Since Google is looking at keywords in your domain and you also want users to remember something about your domain, this equation offers a memorable domain name solution.

Linkability

People with legitimate websites are more likely to link to a branded & memorable domain name, then a spammy keyword-laden domain name. Keywords + Brand are important; I personally wouldn’t want to link to a site such as www.villa-bali-villas.com

Choosing a .com  VS.  .net/.biz/.org  VS.  Country Code TLDs
Dot com’s hold the most weight in terms of domaining and for general search terms, simply because dot com’s are the most readily understood domain extension. Many people will simply append the subject matter they seek with ‘.com’ in their address bar, expecting to find products and services that match the generic keywords they entered. However, most all of the really good .com’s have already been bought. That being the case, there is ample opportunity in using country specific TLDs for region specific websites, as discussed in Domain Name TLDs The Golden Opportunity. It makes sense that Google ranks ccTLD domains higher when the searcher is in that country.

1. On-page optimization
   On-page optimization is not difficult. It does however take time to make sure all the pieces are in place. This kind of optimization should occur not only on the main web page of a web site, but on every single content page within that site.The very first question to ask when seeking to optimize a web page is: What keyword(s)/keyword phrases is this page targeting?
   • HTML coding: <TITLE>, <META NAME=”DESCRIPTION”>, <META NAME=”KEYWORD”>, <H1> or other headline tags.
   • Keywords within the body text. Concentrate on your users first, then modify for search engines.
   • Proper ALT tags on your images
   • Internal linking structure of your individual website pages (including your site map)
2. Off-page optimization
   Off-page optimization is also a key ingredient to success with search optimization. Off-page optimization primarily involves
   • inbound link acquisition
   • the building and management of a substantial inbound link portfolio (the quantity, potency, and relevancy of your backlinks)
   • utilization of proper anchor text for your inbound/outbound links
   • email newsletters

   This is an ongoing process.

3. Content production
   Often the most overlooked phase of optimization. In order to build a truly sound SEO foundation, a site must constantly be growing in terms of indexed pages of relevant content. The more individual Web pages filled with relevant content, the better a site will rank in the major search engines. There are various ways of creating substantial amounts of content. Create a blog for your website. Create a discussion forum.If you are working with an SEO consultant that highlights the importance of content building – in addition to proper on-site and off-site page optimization – then chances are that you’ve found yourself a winner.

Implementing a strong, search engine friendly website architecture enables your SEO efforts to be more effective; not only does it reduce issues that can prevent search engines from effectively spidering your website, it can also help visitors more easily navigate and interact with it.

Start Small
The thing about SEO is that you don’t have to do it all at once. Get your site on a solid architectural foundation, perform your keyword research so you know what keywords need to be targeted, and then start optimizing specific pages for specific keywords. Start small, optimize for the terms that are likely to produce the best results and then over time, as your site gets established start hitting some of the more competitive phrases.

Remember, there is no quick-fix to SEO, it’s an ongoing process. So long as there are more keywords to target, there is more SEO to do. Plan for the long-term approach and tackle it a little at a time, building upon solid architecture.