Here it is, folks. Your inbound marketing goodness, in one tidy package.

Get a Free Backlink Every Time Your Content is Copied and Pasted | Sunday SEO

Did you know that 82% of content shared on the web is copied and pasted? Get a backlink to your copied content for the low price of FREE!

The Advanced Guide to Link Building | Quicksprout

Neil Patel and Brian Dean have put together a comprehensive 30 000 word guide to building links. The authors have also promised to keep it up to date as the search engines update their algorithms.

Why Grayhats & Blackhats Aren’t the Problem With SEO | TripleSEO

All SEO marketers are fighting the same battle, and they’re fighting the same ‘enemy’. This article breaks down and explains the three sides to the SEO game.

Is Twitter introducing Analytics? | iModDigital

Measuring your marketing efforts is crucial online, and while social media analytics exist for Facebook, is Twitter finally catching up?

SEO Tactics Die, But SEO Never Will | Moz

A philosophical post about why every declaration of SEO’s demise misses something fundamental about inbound marketers’ future.

How Giving Away T-Shirts Made Me Over $500K in Revenue | Sujan Patel

Sujan Patel from Single Grain explains how giving away and wearing his company’s t-shirts made him over $500k in revenue.

The Top 10 Best AdWords Features You’re Not Using | Wordstream

Google adds great features to AdWords all the time. This post is a round up of the 10 best features that you probably aren’t using.

Four More Ways to Crack the Keyword (not provided) Code | KISSmetrics

With secure search obscuring up to 60% of search visits, it’s become nearly impossible to track which keywords are driving traffic to your site. However, this post provides four ways of working around this limitation.

Egobait: How to Get Links & Exposure in a Variety of Verticals | Search Engine Watch

Egobait is designed to appeal to the ego of an influencer, and has some negative connotations due to the ‘ego’ part. This post is a great guide that shoes you how to get links and exposure.

Local Link Building: An Easy Win | Search Engine Watch

Local link building often gets overlooked in link building campaigns. This post covers how to build great links from local authorities.

Have you seen any particularly useful inbound marketing articles? Share them in the comments below.

 

Digital strategies today encompass so many different tactics that it is very difficult to ensure that all avenues are properly optimised. One of the more untapped facets of marketing online is video marketing and the use of YouTube to leverage communities and your audience that is already out there. However, with a vast number of high quality videos on YouTube, you have to optimise both your videos and channel to have any chance of your content being seen.

So how do you go about optimising your YouTube videos to maximize the potential of the quality video that you have spent time producing?

Firstly once you have signed in to YouTube under your channel, you need to head to the video manager.

From there, you will click edit on the video once it is uploaded and you will find the following screen:

 

From there you can now dig into the juicy bits below.

Meta Data

Meta data is probably the most important aspect when it comes to optimising your video. This consists of the title, description and even the file name. It is vital to pick an accurate title that is going to draw attention while also quickly describing what the video is about. In the description provide a more detailed and enticing paragraph to hook the user in. This is also a very valuable area to include relevant links to your channel and website.

Similarly to your meta data onsite, the title tag should ideally be no longer than 70 characters while the description should be around 160. You don’t want either to be truncated in any search results. Both the title and description should include keywords that are relevant and targeted so that they are more likely to show up in search results.

Category

It is vital that your video is also placed in the correct category. Spend some time thinking about this to ensure that your video is catalogued within the correct category which will help with users browsing for something a little more specific.

Thumbnail

This might seem a trivial aspect, but it is actually quite important in terms of drawing viewers. Make sure that you choose an enticing thumbnail that draws attention and accurately portrays what the video is about. This will serve to catch the eye and draw the viewers to click on your video rather.

Annotations

Annotations are a technique that is still largely neglected in most videos. Inserting annotations can become quite messy and look unprofessional but when done intelligently it can open up a whole bunch of opportunities for your video and turn it into a campaign success. Annotations allow you add an interactive element to your video such as linking to related videos or channels which allows you to create stories linking different videos together by providing options for the user to click on.

Transcripts

Unfortunately search engines are not able to process what is in your video which is especially frustrating if you have an incredibly valuable amount of information within the video. This is where transcripts come in. By transcribing the entire video you allow search engines to understand the value of the video as it can now understand what the video is about due to it being able to scan the text. This will also help for the next one.

Captions

Captions can be an invaluable technique in ensuring that your website gets maximum exposure within any search results. Captions allow people with accessibility difficulties to still make use of the video as well as for Google to understand the content of the video which helps with your video SEO efforts.

Please note that some features will require you to sign up as a YouTube Partner which is not available in some regions.

Hopefully these tips will see you launch into a viral video sensation and be extremely beneficial to your marketing campaign as a whole.

P.S Have you seen our sexy new promo video?

 

You wouldn’t buy a car without test driving it first, would you? Didn’t think so. As humans, we’re wired to ‘try before we buy’. It gives us peace of mind, and reassures us that we are making the right decision. This concept involves more than only cars, it actually involves nearly everything, from physical to virtual products.

Serperture is no different. If you’d like to take it for a spin first before signing up for a paid report, we have you covered. The reporting is very limited, but the format of the report will show you exactly how deep the reporting goes.

Let’s get started, shall we?

• Step 1: Click here to Take a Spin

• Step 2: Click the green button to run your test report.

• Step 3: Enter all the relevant details on the next screen. Firstly, the website that you would like to run a report on. Next is the name of the report, which will help you identify the report at a later stage. The client field is particularly useful for paid members, as it is a drop-down list of all your clients that you’ve added, and finally you can add a description of the report. Serperture does explain as you click the fields though. It couldn’t be easier.

• Step 4: Wait whilst the report runs, it can take some time as our robot must dig deeply into your website.

• Step 5: You are finally presented with your report, in Serperture’s dashboard. The dashboard consists of 3 parts, namely the navigation, the knowledge base and the report itself. Below we have the navigation area and knowledge base. The knowledge base is locked and is for paid members. This area contains information regarding SEO and how to improve it.

• Step 6: Next up we have the report, which is broken down into there various areas that play a role in your website’s SEO. Here you’ll see various elements with a ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’. This is where your website has either gotten it right or needs further attention. The reporting is limited to meta elements when you take Serperture for a spin.

• Step 7: Sign up to become a paid Serperture member to unlock all the features of the SEO report.

Now that you’ve taken Serperture for a spin and you can see what this powerful SEO reporting tool is capable of, what do you think about it?

 

 

I made an awesome discovery the other day. I was randomly surfing the internet when I decided to check my Klout score. It varies from time to time as the company fine-tunes their algorithms to measure influence. I headed over to my profile and noticed that my Klout score had increased by 12 points, which is no easy feat.

I poked around a little and discovered that although previously users could add their Instagram details, it didn’t have any influence on one’s score. At the end of March this year, it all changed and Instagram had significant influence. I took a deeper look at the breakdown and found that Twitter weighed in with 48% influence on my Klout score, followed by Facebook with 32% and Instagram with a respectable 17%. LinkedIn, foursquare and Klout only contributed a measly 4% to my score in total.

With regards to social networks, you could call me, ahem, a power user. I like to get involved. I hardly spend any time on Twitter lately, and was quite surprised at the weight of its influence on my score. Everybody uses Facebook. It’s one of those old faithful social networks where you can see what your friends are up to. It doesn’t get updated at the breakneck speeds of Twitter, which makes it more manageable. Instagram and foursquare are my top two social networks. I use them every single day, at regular intervals.

Active Instagram users that have connected to Klout would have noticed similar increases to mine in their scores. According to Klout’s blog, the addition of a social network will always lead to an increase, and never a decrease in your Klout score.

So if your Klout score matters to you, and it should, simply connect your Instagram account to add a couple more points to your score. Who knows what Klout Perks could be in store for you?

We live in a time that is constantly connected to the online world. Getting answers to questions no longer involves going into a library, it’s all available in seconds on our mobile phone. This has changed the way people behave and the way companies do business. It is an age of instant gratification, and that has spilled over from personal use to the way we do business online. We can connect with each other in seconds. Why not connect with businesses instantly too?

The established methods of communication will be around forever, but as companies evolve, they have to keep up with the trend of instant gratification. If a customer has a question, or a gripe, they want to be able to speak to somebody. Now. Think about it. Would you rather call customer service and stay on hold for fifteen minutes before you have a question answered. Or wait a couple hours for a reply to your email?

Granted, customer questions and queries submitted via social media aren’t always answered immediately, they beat holding on the phone listening to cheesy music for 15 minutes.

Many companies think that social networks are only beneficial for marketing purposes, but using those same networks for customer service can result in a great advantage.

The point of social media is connecting directly with your customers. Your customers are already connected with your brand online. They follow your Twitter account and like your Facebook Page because they would like to stay in touch with your brand about the latest news and developments. This also gives your customers an opportunity to engage with your brand.

However, not all engagement is positive. Think about it. If you’re happy with a company, you don’t share it on your social networks unless you’ve had a stellar experience. If you have a bad experience, you’ll be sure to let the company know. With companies that use social social media for customer service, they get to take action on a customer’s complaint almost immediately. If an irate customer had to hold the line or send an email which may not be replied to, what do you think happens to that customer’s experience with the company?

Knowing that customers have this public forum in which to voice their complaints may be a concern for companies. Sure, negative things may be said, but that could just be a platform for companies to show the rest of their followers that they take complaints seriously and how they turn it around and delight their customers. In a way it puts a company under pressure, as these gripes can be seen by all their followers. The company can take this opportunity to do something great and build the trust of the rest of their followers while providing the solution.

Personally, I’ve been delighted by some local brands who have given me great customer service over Twitter specifically. My internet service provider tweeted me about a concern I voiced in conversation without even mentioning them directly. In another instance, I found a bone in my tuna. I tweeted about it, and the retailer replied, apologised and solved the problem in a short period of time. I couldn’t bear to think to return to a supermarket to stand in a line at the customer service desk to return a tin of tuna.

If your business has a social media presence, are you using it solely for marketing or are you using it as a customer service channel?