Source: ezinearticles

SALT LAKE CITY – Can businesses make money with Foursquare? Right now?

That’s the question SEO.com will try to answer in the coming months.

To find out if Foursquare is a legitimate tool for businesses, the SEO company will manage free Foursquare campaigns for a select number of companies. SEO.com will track the success and release the results later in the summer.

“To be honest, we don’t know if Foursquare will work. Some of us think it will, others don’t,” said Dave Bascom, chief executive at SEO.com. “But we’re looking for strong case studies to prove whether Foursquare can be a tool for marketers and location-based businesses.”

There is growing hype around Foursquare, an up-and-coming social site. It is gaining 15,000 new members each day and has eclipsed the 1 million mark one year before Twitter did. Those numbers are the reason for SEO.com’s interest. But the same numbers also support the naysayers’ view.

“Compared to Facebook and Twitter, Foursquare is small. But we think it could fill a marketing void where other social media sites fall short,” said Chris Knudsen, vice president of marketing at SEO.com. “Many think Foursquare needs businesses more than businesses need Foursquare right now.”

Foursquare’s platform may offer unique opportunities that the other giant social media sites don’t. Users check in at locations, earn badges, become mayors, and businesses can award users for any of those actions.

“Foursquare seems built for the mobile phone, for offering specials, and for engaging customers on a different level that can create strong loyalty,” Bascom said. “Those who work with us on this case study will receive a free Foursquare marketing campaign and will be featured in our report that will be published towards the end of the summer.”

For more information, or to sign up for the Foursquare ROI challenge, go to http://www.seo.com/foursquare/

These new pages are no longer bland and boring, and now shows up to five pages of topics that are trending in search. One really cool feature it added is the ability to turn on the auto-scroll feature so you don’t have to scroll through the pages manually.

Yahoo said it has already seen double digit percentage increases in engagement for both image and video search since it launched the new home pages, and a 60% increase in time spent on the image search home page.

Here are screen shots of the new look taken from the YSearch Blog:

This is great news for anyone who blogs about current events and performs SEO tactics on images to acquire a new and increased source of traffic to their websites.

Then, once I got over how cool it looked (and stopped trying to figure out if I could do this myself), I did some Googling. Sure enough it’s not only fake, but an advertising campaign. Now my Internet marketing (and Video SEO) brain kicks in and this video becomes amazing again, but for different reasons. In just one month, it had nearly 4 million views. Here it is, if you haven’t seen it yet:

Where does the marketing come in? For just a second, there’s a close-up shot of the shoes they use to perform the impossible feat. Just a couple seconds, barely noticeable by most standards. Certainly short enough to make marketing directors cringe.

Nevertheless, you can’t argue with four million views. While the impact on sales is yet to be seen, let’s take a look at some other highly successful videos and see why they worked so well in gaining so many views.

Honda Rube Goldberg Machine

Let’s face it, who doesn’t love watching these machines? There’s something about the ridiculous absurdity of having so many parts to accomplish one simple task that simply fascinates us. The genius in this particular video, however, is in how well they effectively demonstrate the car’s functionality. The machine is made up completely of parts from a Honda vehicle, and they keep the machine going by using features found on the car. For example, the windshield wipers turn on automatically from a water stream.

Guitar Hero on a Bike

Guitar Hero and related music based games have seen huge popularity and success in the past decade (hey, I’m a big fan myself). This video takes the concept into a real life situation where a full music track is ridden over on a bike in nearly perfect sync to the song. The beauty of this video is how realistic it looks. You watch the video wondering how long it must have taken to get perfect. Its only downfall is when it was revealed that the dots were added in afterward using special effects. Even with this minor shortcoming, you still hear a song featured in Guitar Hero and see what the game play would look like.

OK Go Music Video

First of all, yes, I consider this a viral Marketing Video. Why? Because this video helped put the band ‘OK Go’ on the map. With 51 million views to date, it can only be estimated how many singles were sold. I never knew they existed before this video found its way into my inbox. It works because of its simplistic and comedic effect of grown men dancing on treadmills. It’s creative, simple, and it looks like it was done in the basement of one of their homes. It also lets viewers hear their song giving them more exposure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI&feature=channel (Imbed not available – Sorry!)

Stolen Nascar Video

This video is a little bit under the radar in terms of total views, but I liked this marketing campaign because of who did it. It was from Taxbrain.com, which takes on the boring topic of taxes (obviously). It’s hard to come up with a good viral video for some topics, but this company proves that it’s possible even for the not-so-obvious industries. They took the resources that were available to them, created a video that would cause some buzz, and got a great amount of exposure. Notice in particular the amount of times the domain Taxbrain.com is mentioned.

LED Sheep

Samsung also jumped onto the bandwagon recently by creating a video of sheep covered in LEDs. The shear absurdity of plastering sheep in LED’s and then herding the sheep to create moving images is enough to arouse the interest in any bored Internet surfer. Plus, the recreation of the Mona Lisa from the LEDs is also an impressive demonstration of the technology behind LED’s televisions. With a URL for Samsung at the end of the video, this video becomes a complete marketing viral video, and then sits back to enjoy its 12 million views over the next year.

Laptop Catching

While a little crude, this is still a great viral video at more than 3 million views. The concept is a couple of guys catching an MSI laptop in their butt cheeks. Even though it’s obviously fake (but real looking enough to be entertaining), the real value in this video, and why I mention it, is because it is a successfull takoff of another video that was also viral (which was a video of a guy impossibly catching sunglasses on his face). Creating parodies of other videos is a great way to piggyback the success of already existing videos.

Will it Blend

It seems hardly appropriate to mention viral videos without mentioning the now famous Blendtec “Will it Blend” videos. It’s probably gotten to the point where any internet marketer groans when they hear mention of these videos, but they persist in providing a near perfect example of viral marketing. It’s so good because:

1. They are entertaining while effectively giving viewers a literal demonstration of their product.

2. They show off their seriously powerful blenders.

3. They are not isolated to one video, but there are now hundreds of these videos. Usually, “sequels” to viral videos fail horribly, but the “Will it Blend” concept will stay fresh as long as there are items to blend.

4. They are very easily created to match current trends. For example the video below takes advantage of the release of the iPad and subsequently getting 6.5 million views in one month. From an SEO perspective, this is brilliant as these videos will show up for searches for the iPad.

A few take aways from the videos above:

• Create videos that demonstrate your product or service if possible
• Be creative with your resources.
• Create parodies of already existing videos, incorporating your business or service
• Videos should be entertaining by either being comical, or impressive (such as running on water)

I’m on a Horse

Finally, I leave you with another viral video that I found to be a personal favorite (It doesn’t quite make the list because it’s an outright commercial, but it still had a viral great presence on the Web).

Knowing What Content Will Attract Links

To get started, you must know which pages on your website are going to have the potential to attract the most links. Some of the most linkable Web pages contain the following types of content:

• Videos
• Webinars
• Downloadable PDFs
• Widgets & Free Apps
• Company Blog
• PR
• Contests
• Coupons
• Job Openings
• Forums

If you don’t find enough content on your website that will attract links, you know where you must put your attention and resources before you begin the link building process.

Know Your Top Competitors In The Search Engines

When we bring a new client into SEO.com, we ask them to provide us with their top five competitors that they feel are their biggest threat online. Nine out of 10 times, they completely miss the mark on who their actual competitors are.

In the SEOmoz Advanced SEO Training Series, Tom Critchlow made a statement that really resonates with me. A competitor is a website that RANKS! This is the top three websites displayed when searching on a keyword or keyphrase, not the biggest businesses in the industry. You shouldn’t worry too much about any of the sites not in those first three positions; they obviously aren’t doing enough things right to be there yet.

After learning who your true competition is, analyzing those competitors link portfolios, anchor text distribution, and most linked-to pages will quickly help you see what they are doing to help them achieve those high rankings.

To analyze competitors backlink portfolios, I use tools like Open Site Explorer, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Majestic SEO to pull my backlink lists for each competitor. Once I have my three lists, I scrub any duplicates and then begin looking at who is linking to this competitor and why. Once you have that, you can quickly see what each competitor is doing the best and apply it to your link building tactics.

Understand What Type Of Content Attracts Links

One thing that is very difficult for people to grasp is the fact that great content attracts links, will eventually rank, and have staying power. It is far too easy these days to purchase a domain, install WordPress, throw up a bunch of crap content on a site, and start building links in hopes of ranking and making some cash. The truth of the matter is, those sites don’t deserve to rank and even if they make it to the top, they won’t stay for very long.

When building a website, it is important to analyze the competition in terms of their content that attracts links. One of my favorite tools I use to research top website content is, again, Open Site Explorer. Through Open Site Explorer, I can quickly analyze the top pages of any domain based on number of backlinks. From this analysis, I can see if my competition has content that is attracting a lot of backlinks. If I don’t have content around the same topic (content that is better than my competitors) my chances of being successful are slim to none.

What it comes down to is the fact that good, linkable content will always win in the end. If you don’t have the resources right now to produce the best content, you probably aren’t ready for SEO.

Know Your Market Defining Keywords

Knowing and understanding the keywords in your niche will quickly help you determine if those keywords will bring visitors looking for more information, or bring visitors looking for purchase a product or service found on your website. To have the most successful SEO campaign and increase your ROI, you want to find the keywords that will bring buying customers to your site.

For example, you take the company “MING Brands,” which sells iPhone Skins. When putting together their SEO campaign, they probably wouldn’t want to target the keyword iPhone, even if a top position would bring you close to 13 million visitors. To have the best chances of success and bring them the highest ROI possible, they would want to focus on keywords like iPhone Skins, iPhone Cases, iPhone Protectors, Etc.

Knowing your market and understanding how potential customers view your market is crucial in finding the best link opportunities.

Knowing Search Queries That Will Uncover Link Opportunities

To find some of the best link opportunities online, you must be comfortable with link building queries. Link building queries are searches equipped with advanced operators to match up your linkable content with prospects from around the Web.

Finding out what these queries are is quite a bit easier if you are using tools such as the one provided by Ontolo. Initially, it is a bit confusing on how to use the tool so here is a detailed description from Search Engine Land on how to use Ontolo’s search query tool. Once you have the queries that will work best for you, you can dive into a highly effective, highly targeted link building campaign that will drive results.

In closing, strategic link building is more than just applying a few different tactics here and there. Strategic link building is about putting together a long term strategy, a strategy that is going to take time, a strategy that is going to take effort, and a strategy that will help you achieve the top positions in the SERPs for the keywords you want to rank for.

In the announcement Google said, “all community edits will be reviewed before they are shown.” For local business owners, this means that competitors and spammers will no longer be able to edit your business listing however they see fit, which as been a huge problem in the past.

Regardless of how long ago this should have happened, this is a welcomed news released by Google. We are unsure just how many edits Google Maps get on a regular basis, but it seems as though Google is ready to process each and every one of them manually before any of those edits show up in the map listings.

Even though the death of this community edit free-for-all is taking place, one crucial piece of local SEO advice still remains the same — Claim your Google Maps listing and sync the information found on it with what’s on your website and your other local listings.

This is one way to take your keyword research to the next level, and it’s well worth the effort. So rather than trying to guess whether your SEO or PPC ads are appearing in front of the right people, here are some tools you can use to make sure.

Google Trends

How It’s Useful: If all you’re looking for is a basic search volume trend line and a few regional ideas, this is your tool. Google Trends will show you the keyword search volume trends on Google since 2004. You can narrow it down to specific years and months or to specific countries if you’re planning to target your search marketing campaigns that way.

Use this tool >

Google Insights for Search

How It’s Useful: Google Insights for Search shows similar trend data to Google Trends, but takes it a step further and shows you even more detail on regional interest levels and additional search terms that are related to your keywords. This can help you to avoid using terms that are not as popular as others in your target area and really see where your target audience is geographically located.

Use this tool >

Bing xRank

How It’s Useful: Bing xRank has a long way to go to catch up with the amount of detail provided in Google Insights for Search, but at least it gives you an idea of the search volume trends on Bing. I would only use this tool to make sure that searcher trends match across the two search engines.

Use this tool >

Quantcast

How It’s Useful: Quantcast can be a very helpful tool to see the relative traffic and visitor demographics for your own site and your competitors’. It is especially useful if the sites you are looking at are Quantified. If the site is Quantified you will see more accurate traffic and demographic information. If not, you can still get some good sample data to better understand the visitor demographics.

Use this tool >

Compete

How It’s Useful: Compete is a good tool for analyzing the kind of traffic your competitors are getting. With a Pro account you can also get ideas about their visitor demographics. To use this tool effectively you only need to look at it for sites that are closely related to yours. They work off of sampled data, though, so take it for what it’s worth.

Use this tool >

Alexa

How It’s Useful: Similar to Compete, Alexa will give you an idea of the kind of traffic a competitor gets and an insight into their visitor demographics. You can also use Alexa to get some ideas about the keywords driving traffic to a site. Like Compete, this tool will only be useful if you know which sites are targeting the same market as you, but unlike Compete you get more information for free with Alexa.

Use this tool >

Detecting Online Commercial Intent

How It’s Useful: This is a very simple tool that analyzes the keywords searchers are using and which ones will likely lead to a transaction or conversion. Just type in a keyword and the tool tells you the degree of probability for commercial or non-commercial intent. This can help you focus on the keywords your potential visitors are using that will most likely lead to an improvement in your bottom line.

Use this tool >

Demographics Prediction

How It’s Useful: If you already have a good handle on your target audience’s demographics, you can use this tool to make sure that your keywords actually fit with those demographics. This way you won’t accidentally target keywords that really target women when you meant to target men. I would make sure to compare the data from this tool with other tools to make sure you’re getting a good sample.

Use this tool >

I know there are other tools out there that also offer a lot of demographic and keyword data, but these are some great ones to start with. This post doesn’t even look at the ones that have to do with social media. If you know of some other tools that you like to use, please add them in the comments and explain how you use them.

If you are a business owner with a brick-and-mortar location, location-based marketing is a quick and easy way to pick up customers.

From your competition.

Call it customer stealing, if you will.

And it isn’t difficult to pull off.

Let’s pretend for a moment that I worked for a local car dealer and I was in charge of getting more customers in the door. Still pretending, let’s say that I have 10 stores all across Utah and each store is in a different location with different businesses around it.

At least a few of my stores are located in “auto malls” where many of my competitors have stores in the immediate vicinity. Because of the cluster of auto dealers, the area is full of consumers who are looking to buy a car — right now. It’s easy to see that this is a target-rich-environment for marketers.

And with location-based marketing, you can now offer those customers in the area a compelling reason to come to your store — right now.

Enter Foursquare.

When a consumer who is in the area “checks in” on Foursquare at one of your competitors stores, you simply offer them $2,500 in cash (or whatever you want your offer to be) to be used toward the purchase of a new or used vehicle if they come and check in at your store — within the next 10 minutes.

And then you watch people walk into your competition, check-in and immediately leave and come to your store. It really isn’t all that hard to tell what will happen over time, assuming that the offer is compelling enough to attract interest: The store that offers the best specials to buyers in the immediate area will be the busiest.

So if you happen to be an auto dealer in Utah and you notice that customers are walking out of your store and into the one across the street …

It might be time to start thinking about using Foursquare specials.