OK, so we all agree that social media traffic converts extremely poorly. However, can it be used help to build authority?

This is the 6th post in the series about Authority Building. The previous 5 are:

1. I Jeff Quipp Am Not an SEO … I’m an Authority Builder
2. What Is Authority, and How Do You Build It?
3. What Type of SEO Client Are You?
4. Authority vs Celebrity … Is There a Difference?
5. Authority Building: Tools of the Trade
6. The Role of Social Media in Building Authority

In this post, I’ll delve into the use of Social Media as a tool in our authority building toolkit.

This post is the second in the series on Search Economics. The first post discussed a concept called the Law of Diminishing Returns. This series on Search Economics is intended to help search marketing firms understand the economics of their own businesses, and also to help explain some difficult concepts to clients. Primarily though, this post in particular helps to explain the industry’s fascination with automation.

Definition:
Economies of scale are defined as; when more units of a good or a service can be produced on a larger scale, yet with (on average) less input costs, economies of scale (ES) are said to be achieved. In lamen’s terms, the more you produce, the lower the average cost of production.

Keyword research is one of the cornerstone’s of starting any good search engine optimization campaign. While I use Wordze for all my keyword research, I started my adventures as an SEO with a fair number of freely available keyword research tools. Each of these are slightly different from the other, and when used in combination, they can provide a potent starting point for your SEO campaign.

1. Microsoft AdCenter Search Funnel
2. Google Trend
3. Niche Bot
4. Trellian Free Search Term Suggestion Tool
5. Niche Watch
6. SEO Book Google Tool
7. Key Word Lizard Google AdWords Keyword Combination Tool

So I was snooping aroiund YouTube to see what information I could find about Windows 7, when I came across this video of Construction Mike managing his day to day with a myriad of various informational and communication devices, all apparently loaded up with Windows 7.

 While I found most of the devices to be soooooo cool and I want them, I have difficulty actually imagining people from most industries, let alone the construction industry, investing in the number of gadgets per employee that Mike had the good fortune to use in his daily routine.

Is an industry expert really an authority, if no one knows about his/her expertise?

This post is the fifth in the series on Authority Building. This post will look specifically at 8 techniques used the increase the visibility of a person’s profile and their knowledge. The previous four posts in the series are:

Wordpress plugin resource lists have been highly useful to almost any beginner or intermediate level blogger. However the old lists featuring 50+ essential plugins haven’t been updated in a while, so I thought I’d give the blogging community a little refresher on the best new plugins available to jazz up your blog through social media optimization.

Photodropper -Photo Dropper is a Wordpress plugin that lets you add Flickr photos to your posts.

Slideshare - This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code.

Have you ever thought to yourself (or had a client say to you), if I triple my budget, I should see at least triple the results … right?

Unfortunately NOT … at least in most cases that have anything to do with search!

Why:
Plain and simple; any reputable search company will target the easiest and least expensive wins first where limited budgets are involved (or as I like to refer to it, the preverbial low hanging fruit). Let me explain using a very simple example.

Imagine you’re a caveman or cavewomen, and you’re obviously always hungry. You find an apple tree brimming with tasty ripe red apples.

My post on 5 Unique Ways to Make the Google Bot Your Best Friend attracted quite a bit of attention and a fair number of comments, which I’m really happy about. One of the strategies that I discussed in particular was using Wordpress’s built-in pinging features to ping a large number of pinging services every time a blogpost is posted.

Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Look or sound familiar?

For example, having the same dialogue with the same client and expecting different results. Or having the same conversations with a peer or associate and expecting different results.

Words get tossed around in such dialogues and conversations; words like stubborn, non-responsiveness or negativity more often than not with fingers as pointed as the barbed dialogue behind them. At first blush, bad words all but in reality, not so much bad as emotionally charged, which may in fact be good because they intimate an emotional investment in projects, clients or responsibilities. Whether good or bad, they tend to be taken to heart, and taken personally.

Image courtesy: a-albionic.com

So my colleague passed me a short little article from thestar.com this morning entitled “Microsoft to make ’significant’ announcement” and of course I had to read it post haste.

Apparently they are holding a press conference today to spill some new beans, but NOT about it’s multi-billion dollar offer to purchase Yahoo Inc.  I really am quite anxious to find out what this news is, and in fact will add the press release link to this post as it comes in.