I received this short post about link building relevancy and I could not agree more. Read this post from aweber and send me any questions you have about link building and boosting your online presence.

Years ago, having thousands of inbound links, whether or not they were reciprocal or relevant was the way to go for good page ranking. And while inbound links are still a very important factor in your site’s over all value, sophistication in search algorithms suggests you be more selective in your link building activities.

If we were to sum up everything going on in search these days and put it into one word, that word would be Relevancy. Site value is all about that, regardless if its content, domain name, keywords, or inbound links. Everything centers around how relevant a site is throughout its individual parts.

In fact, if you own a blog, even the comments should be relevant to the content its posted on, which is why most blogging platforms allow you to moderate incoming comments to make it so.

Relevancy is everything!

It not only makes it easier for your site to get indexed and gives visitors an idea of what to expect, but it also gives you the opportunity to become part of a global discussion on your topic.

When they talk about “link juice” this is what they’re referring to.

You see, a link on any site is just a link. You get some weight from the back link, but nothing really significant so as to send your page rank soaring. Eventually, if you get enough of these, and we’re talking thousands, you may get a bump in your ranking if your site is well optimized and doesn’t give the index bots any grief.

However, if you can get some “juice” out of your link building efforts by joining a relevant world wide conversation, then you’ll have something!

Now this doesn’t mean you have to comment on every relevant blog in the universe, although it certainly will help a lot to contribute to some posts whether you’re pro or con on what they write. (A little disagreement never hurt any discussion.)

But when you do contribute like this, you put your site into the mix, and so their site and yours becomes a circle of life feeding each other traffic and link love from the search engines.

Everyone tries to speculate what the search engines are up to, but it’s really very simple. They want to make connections. They want to connect people who use them to what they’re searching for, and they want to connect results to other results to give people as much information as possible.

The easier you make it for them, the more they’ll love your site.

Value, for the search engines, has to do with how long a chain they can create by tying sites together. Links linking with links, and more links for good measure. Enough links, and you get a huge “punch bowl” full of relevant juice. And if your links are in that bowl, then you benefit.

On the other hand, just as with certain words like “the,” “and” and the like being considered “stops” for the index bots, which they won’t index and skip over, so too irrelevant and non-contributing comments are seen as stops, and likewise skipped over. Which is why most sites need thousands of back links to even put a dent in their page ranking.

But if you’re being selective in your link building, and only connect with relevant sites where you can contribute relevant thoughts, you won’t need hardly as many back links to make a difference. So the global social party is on, the punch bowl is filling up with juice, and just waiting for you to add yours. Just remember not to throw any pits in it.

Stay Relevant!

YouTube has announced that it has exceeded two billion video views per day. This, just 5 years after coming online.

Are you using YouTube and other Video sites to market your product or services. It’s a incredibly powerful tool and it’s is easier to utilize than you might think.

The announcement from the Google (Google)-owned video website comes as part of a larger initiative that the company is launching today to retell the history behind YouTube (YouTube) and its growth. Part of that campaign is the launch of “My YouTube Story” and the related YouTube 5 Year Channel.

The new YouTube 5 Year Channel is the landing page for the campaign. With it, YouTube intends to get users to submit videos about the impact YouTube has had on their lives. It will eventually be curated by Stephen Higgins, a documentary filmmaker. There is also an interactive timeline depicting the social media platform’s history and a collection of videos from celebrities discussing the five-year achievement.

We’ve been tracking YouTube’s explosive growth for some time, and the numbers are beyond impressive. There are now more than 24 hours of video uploaded every minute to the site, but even that is overshadowed by the newly-announced two billion video views per day stat.

As part of the celebration, YouTube also created a very detailed infographic tracing the site’s history, which you can peruse below. We’re also including a video YouTube created to celebrate its fifth anniversary

These days, sharing isn’t just caring–it’s ensuring virality, especially on Facebook [1]. And Dan Zarrella [2], the Hubspot [3] viral-marketing scientist who gave us nine proven ways to get retweeted on Twitter [4], knows exactly how to encourage it.

For several weeks, he compiled roughly 12,000 articles posted to Facebook, most from big-name sites such as Mashable [5] and CNN [6]. Then, he found the average number of times each was “shared”–meaning it was commented on, liked, or directed to a friend–and analyzed the make-ups of the winners and losers.

Although Zarrella freely admits that that correlation does not necessarily imply causation, he’s also adamant that, in this case, “it’s certainly a hint.” And after poring over his findings, which he sent to FastCompany.com [7] exclusively, I’d definitely agree. Below, a look at Zarrella’s seven most effective ways to get shared on Facebook:

1. Talk about sex.

Hello, one-track mind! Articles about sex were almost three times more likely to go viral than articles dealing with other subjects, such as self-reference and work. “Leisurely” stories, however, seems to turn people off. “It’s a catch-all category that includes sleep and [completed] sports games,” Zarrella explains. “People would rather focus their energy on something active and constructive.”

2. Solve a news mystery.

Aside from (duh) “Facebook,” the most Facebook-friendly word is “why”–followed closely by “how”–which suggests that people are more likely to share content that legitimately explains something. Also of note: It helps to include superlatives such as “most” and “best,” which Zarrella says usually modify lists.

3. Don’t harp on Twitter. Or Google. Or iPhones.

Although the “vs” bit strikes both myself and Zarrella as odd–don’t people love controversy?–there are some gems in this chart. Whereas Google, iPhone, and Twitter are retweet-magnets on Twitter, they’re largely ignored on Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild. “Those are things that social media dorks talk about,” Zarrella explains. “Facebook serves a more mainstream audience.”

4. Keep it short and sweet.

Score one for Strunk and White [8]: Articles with lots of adjectives and adverbs were shared far less than those with active, descriptive sentences. “In other words,” says Zarrella, “don’t go overboard with flowery language.”

5. Drop some digits.

“People like data and specifics,” says Zarrella. Case in point: Articles with digits in their titles–lists and otherwise–tended to be shared more than those without.

6. Add visual aids.

No surprise here: Multimedia components encourage sharing. And Facebook, which lets users embed songs and videos, is far better for sharing them than Twitter, whose platform is text-only.

7. Post on weekends.

Given that more than half of U.S. employers block Facebook at work [9], it makes sense that the social network is hopping on weekends. But also, because there’s generally less going on, “each individual story gets more attention,” Zarrella explains.

Article location: FastCompany.com

from the SEO Journal

Youtube is the largest video sharing site to date, with the most traffic and the highest amount of users on it making Youtube the definitive place for getting your videos published and marketed on. I have put together a guide on Youtube marketing for videos and I think you all will get a lot out of this.

Youtube is the second highest trafficked site globally according to alexa. Quantcast estimates 60 million unique viewers per month with a community base of predominately gen y viewers. Emarketer surveys recently did a research document on video viewer ship according to age and what they found is that the gen y generation views about 5-6 hours per day. The household incomes of these viewers are all pretty even from 0-100k +.

Youtube is optimized for 18 different languages and has a large presence in the asian market place. Youtube is the 4th most trafficked site in the united states so the power behind reaching your audience within America will be found on Youtube. To learn about more of the history of Youtube the wikipedia page does have some valuable info even though I hate giving wikipedia pages out it is useful.
Looking at the Youtube Algorithm:

Making it to the home page on Youtube is going to give your video the most amount of exposure. However, you don’t need to hit the home page to get your million views, it would sure help.

To do this you are looking at roughly a 15 day window of marketing efforts put into Youtube. This can be stretched out however depending on how you are trying to make it to the home page ( top favorites, top views, top comments etc.).

Keeping it Fresh

There is a freshness factor to your videos and it is much more difficult to get videos honors and movement within the search algorithm if the video is old. You would be better off removing that video and re-submitting it if you are looking to produce honors in a given field and to have a chance at hitting the home page with greater ease.

Keeping it Real

Factors to take into consideration when submitting a video is going to be your profile authority. How many friends does this profile have, how many subscribers and how many channel views. The reason this is important is to get more initial exposure and more views using a power profile will help you out greatly. Submitting a video on a orphan account with no friends or subscribers may raise some suspicion over at the Youtube headquarters. Make your profiles look natural and build them out.

Power of Views, Ratings, Favorites and Comments

Youtube has honors for each type of action that can be taken on a video. Honors for comments, favorites, ratings and views. As a marketer if you focus on anyone of these and get a substantial number of votes, favorites, ratings or views in a day you will see honors pretty quickly.

Remember the category you submit to and the type of channel you created has a lot to do with your success with getting honors. Gurus tend to get honors pretty easily within their channel area.
Tips for marketing on Youtube:

There are going to be a lot of tools Youtube has created for marketing your video. I will share them with you along with some other techniques we use.

1. On videos there is a share option. You can share by email address or with friends you have attached to your account. Remember the more friends you have the more people you can send to. Also you can leverage social media sites when you try to share as well.

2. Bulletin Boards: By posting a message this video will be displayed to all of your friends on your profile.

3. Invite to subscribe: This feature is available in your account once you request a friend invite. See the post I did here.

4. Add friends: Adding friends is a powerful way to gain exposure on Youtube. See my latest post here.

5. Make sure your video appeals to the community

6. Sharing videos with email: We like to go viral with our marketing campaigns for videos. Send videos out to your friends and family with a link to the video and an encouragement to share it.

7. Use StumbleUpon.com: Submit the video to video.stumbleupon.com and then import your email addresses and send to your friends on stumble upon.

8. Social Media it: You can leverage digg and other social sites like facebook and myspace to drive traffic to videos.

With the tools and tips I have listed out you will absolutely see success with your video marketing campaigns.

Good luck and I will see you all next time for the next in our series on video marketing – global countdown!

by Dirk Shaw Content strategy has long been the corner stone to effectively delivering “The right content at the right time to the right person.” While this sounds a bit cliché brands will have a hard time achieving this simple premise with out a plan that is guided by consumer intent. Knowing what people are looking for, where they are looking for it and how well they find it is at the heart of understanding consumer intent.

Lets start with a simple definition of what content strategy is.

Content Strategy is an actionable plan for creating, managing & optimizing content align consumer intent with business goals. The important part of this statement is the alignment of what the consumer wants, with what the brand hopes to get in return.

Developing a content strategy is not as simple as it used to be in the early days of digital marketing. We now face an ever-growing landscape of places where consumers interact with content and a variety of new devices it is consumed on. Think about the last time you were researching for something new to buy. It is likely you started by searching Google, watched a video on Youtube, read a consumer review and did a quick poll of your friends on Facebook.

It’s also likely your customer will not be accessing content in a browser at their desk. Instead they will be using GPS enabled devices that deliver content based on their location. This can be game changing for a number of reasons.

The first use of location-based content we think of is the ability to deliver offers and promotions based on proximity to a person’s location. This has long been a dream of marketers. What I find much more interesting is when location based thinking goes beyond a simple direct response model to placing content in context of activities and interest.

Imagine if an outdoor store provided a mobile app allowing people to leave photos and suggestions along hiking trails across the country. Add the capability to log in with a Facebook account and now suddenly you can share your experience with friends in your network. The opportunity for the outdoor store to engage would be by providing useful tips for cooking on the trail, food to pack with promotions for products that will make future trips even better.

As our content becomes more distributed so do the tools for measuring effectiveness. Measuring consumption, favorability and sharing across channels is essential to make decisions on how to optimize the mix of places content goes and what content is developed.

As you can see there are a number of moving parts that must be considered when developing a content strategy. As you begin to develop your plan ask your self a few questions: Are consumer’s goals and business goals aligning? Does the content your creating have a purpose? How will you know if you content is working for you

Honoring a Great American City

In a move sure to have reverberations across the world, Google announced today that it is re-branding its company and flagship search engine. The new name?

Topeka. As in Kansas.

Given the equity of the Google brand, the move took some by surprise. Here’s how Google explained their unexpected change in moniker:

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.

For its part, Topeka… er… Google, seems delighted by the corporate giant’s move:

“Don’t be fooled. Even Google recognizes that all roads lead to Kansas, not just yellow brick ones.”

The city formerly known as Topeka, Kansas does have a storied history. For 150 years, its fortuitous location at the confluence of the Kansas River and the Oregon Trail has made the city formerly known as Topeka a key jumping-off point to the new world of the West, just as for 150 months the company formerly known as Google has been a key jumping-off point to the new world of the web. When in 1858 a crucial bridge built across the Kansas River was destroyed by flooding mere months later, it was promptly rebuilt – and we too are accustomed to releasing 2.0 versions of software after stormy feedback on our ‘beta’ releases. And just as the town’s nickname is “Top City,” and the word “topeka” itself derives from a term used by the Kansa and Ioway tribes to refer to “a good place to dig for potatoes,” we’d like to think that our website is one of the web’s top places to dig for information.

In the early 20th century, the former Topeka enjoyed a remarkable run of political prominence, gracing the nation with Margaret Hill McCarter, the first woman to address a national political convention (1920, Republican); Charles Curtis, the only Native American ever to serve as vice president (’29 to ’33, under Herbert Hoover); Carrie Nation, leader of the old temperance movement (and wielder of American history’s most famous hatchet); and, most important, Alfred E. Neuman, arguably the most influential figure to an entire generation of Americans. We couldn’t be happier to add our own chapter to this storied history.

While using Google as a verb — “Why don’t you just Google it?” — has become customary, some may have trouble adjusting to using “Topeka” as a verb. Therefore, we recommend you test it out a few times in private prior to using it in public. “Why don’t you just Topeka it?” It takes a few tries.

Meanwhile, there will be no interruption to your Webworks Marketing Suite functionality and its interface with Google… a… Topeka.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization may sound complicated – and it is – but in a nutshell what it does is it get’s web sites found on the internet in higher positions in the results than sites that have not been optimized.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization involves various aspects of web architecture but boiled down to what anyone can understand – SEO is using various techniques in optimizing a web site so that the search engines are able to classify it in their directories and the easier you make it for them – the higher you get.

How do Search Engines place your site in their listings ?

They do it in two ways:

1 – Search Engines send bots, spiders and crawlers to your website. These are analysis
programs which are sent on a regular basis through the web to get all the information available.
If a bot arrives at your website to find that it has not been optimized correctly it will either:
ignore the site completely or categorize you in the wrong section in the search engine directory
or place your site in position 50.000 on page nr. 5.000 of that category’s search results.

2 – Search Engines receive manual site submissions -
ie. you go to a particular search engine and manually insert the website.
This in itself is no joke at all and if you’ve ever tried to insert a site into the
google directory (not the add url google page )- you’ll know why.
Once done the search engine either sends it’s bot to your site, or they
get a human being to look at your site. Sometimes they do both.
In both cases – if the site does not conform to both bot acceptance standards or human eyeball
acceptance standards the same will happen as above and your site will either be ignored or
categorized in the wrong section in the search engine directory or placed in position 50.000
on page nr. 5.000 of that category’s search results.
Bad news if your site is on page 5.000 of a search engine result since 99.9% of the people who use search engines only look at the first 3 pages of the generated results.

What must be done to optimize a site correctly ?
Many many things.
Metaname description and keywords ?
Well – although most seo experts maintain that for example google ignores these completely – this is false, but if you only have metaname keywords or even a meta description then you won’t get far on any search engine.
The structure of the pages must be set up according to various SEO principles, the body text of some pages must be analyzed time and time again using special web tools to sort out the keyword density, keyword prominence, keyword weight and proximity and many other gobbledegook factors.
Page file names (/myindex.html) must be named in a particular format, images must be named and optimized following certain criteria, links must be placed in special positions and a lot of messing around must be done under the hood – inside the html code.
Yeah…. that’s why companies like us exist.
We do all this astronomical work for your site and you concentrate on your business.

Can I optimize my business website myself ?
Sure you can.
The best way to do this is to get versed in SEO technology and to study the ins and outs via SEO forums, newsletters, personal experimentation, back to the drawing board situations and then spend 3 years getting top results in positioning international websites on international search engines by trying and trying and trying.
After you’ve gone through all of this, you’ll be able to set up your own SEO business and even forget about your actual existing site that you now want to have optimized.

If on the other hand you decide that this is probably something
people who specialize in seo should do for you – please get in touch with us.

Guaranteed top 3 positions in 1 million results ?
Haw haw haw … do yourself a favor … don’t believe everything you read.

Many search engine optimization services will tell you that they will guarantee you top listings in the search engines.
If you believe this then you deserve to be throwing away your hard earned money for smoke and mirrors.

I don’t guarantee anything of the sort.

What I do guarantee is that if we optimize your website and insert it correctly
into the search engines – your traffic will increase by 300% to 1000% within three months.

If it doesn’t – you get your money back. See costs estimates section

Paying a one time fee for getting your website found by thousands more people for the next two to three years is cheap compared to pay per click programs, banner advertising and sponsor plans which last for short periods or for how long you pay.

Contact me for an price quote.

This has been the one lesson I try to drive home to all my clients. This is also why it is crucial to have a website with a blog built in. This is also why I build all of my websites using WordPress. It’s not only the best platform for blogging, it has extremely robust SEO capabilities at your disposal.

Written by John Jantsch, Founder of Duct Tape Marketing

While there are hundreds of evolving strategies and tactics used by SEO firms to help your web pages rise to the top of the results for your most coveted search terms, it all pretty much comes down to focusing on three things.

1. Properly formatted HTML
2. Education based, frequently changing content, lots of it
3. Authoritative links from other sites back to that content

That’s why I can’t help recommending blogging as a killer SEO tool.

In this post, however, I want to focus on the one tactic that will help you dominate your competition in the search engine battle: guest blog posting.

Guest posting is pretty much what it sounds like – writing blog posts as a guest author for another blog. For this post, I’m going to assume you’re already blogging on your own site.

Here’s why this is so powerful

The hardest part of the SEO triad I described above is getting high quality, organic (not purchased of swapped) links back to your site. Google, Bing and Yahoo all place high stock in those links. That’s why you see SEO firms promoting linking campaigns as a primary tool.

When you seek out and court relevant blogs (more on that in a bit) and publish high value content, with a link back to your site in the body of that content, you have likely produced one of the most valuable links you can acquire and the search engines will reward you for it.

Search engines like blogs because they tend to offer education and feed the search spiders before they even leave the house. Search engines put a higher value on links that reside inside the body of a post because they figure the author of the blog wanted them to follow that link and it wasn’t place there accidentally. (Comment links, site wide links, blogroll links all get marked down as a lesser or no follow value link.)

In addition, having your content appear on other blogs should allow you to reap the benefit of additional traffic to your blog and a bump in readership from the exposure your host provides. All good things!

How to get started

Network first – If you’re just getting started one of the first things you need to do is start reading, commenting and participating in the world of blogging. Go to Bloglines and subscribe to as many blogs as you can find that seem relevant to your subject. You want to build some credibility before you start pitching. If you’ve done that then you can start to build a target list.

Find the right blogs to pitch

In a perfect world you want the highest traffic, well known, high-ranking blog you can find to run your post, right? Well, get in line! Unless you to are all of the above yourself you’ll need to find a group of bloggers that are looking for guest content and that you can convince to want your content.

Let’s say you are a life coach. You can start by doing a search on Google for something like “life coaching: guest blog post” to find blogs on life coaching that offer guest posts. Or you might try a tool like placeblogger to find local blogs or a service like MyBlogGuest that matches blogs and guest bloggers by subject.

Show a reason why

Don’t just offer to write a post of some unspecificed nature. Like a good PR pitch you’ll want to sell why the very specific idea you have for a blog post will be found useful by a blog’s readers. This is where networking and building relationships with bloggers can make your job a bit easier. If a blogger is already familiar with the quality of your content, then they may readily accept the offer.

This is a place where you want to offer up highly relevant and original ideas. Few things will slow your guest blogging link strategy faster than republishing your old posts to a number of blogs.

Promote your host

Once you post content on another blog, go to work amplifying it. Tweet about it, write a little something about it on your own blog, post it to your Facebook Fan Page, bookmark it, StumbleIt, and Digg it.

All of this activity may actually get a few more eyeballs on your content, but it will also go a long way towards showing your appreciation to your host. This is how you get asked back and it’s certainly a good way to get other bloggers to invite you to post.

I just found this article by John Jantsch about Twitter Search techniques. These are a great tips and tricks that few people know.

As a marketing tool Twitter gets much more interesting and useful when you can filter out 99% of the junk that doesn’t apply to your objectives and focus on the stuff that matters.

The basic search.twitter.com functionality is fine for searching things that are being said about your search terms. The advanced search function offers more ways to slice and dice the stream, but still leaves some room for improvement as it only searches what’s being said and where. From a marketing standpoint who is saying it might be more useful.

Now that the search engines are all pretty geeked up over real time search you can create some very powerful searches and alerts combining Google and Twitter.

1) Target by occupation

Let’s say you have a business that sells an awesome service to attorneys. A simple search on Twitter will turn up thousands of mentions of the word attorney, but many of them will be from people talking about this or that attorney or the need to hire or not hire one. That’s probably not very helpful for your purposes.

However, if you cruise over to Google and use a handful of operators from the Google shortcut library (more on that here) you can create a search that plows through Twitter and gives you a list of all the users that have the word “attorney” in their title (username and/or real name) – Click on this search phrase and see what happens – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com – what you’ll find is a handy list of attorneys of one sort or another on Twitter.

Without getting too technical, this search basically asks Google to look in the title attribute of profile pages on Twitter – obviously you can use any word to replicate this. The * tells Google to find the words “attorney on Twitter” without regard to order or other words – “on Twitter” appears in the title of every profile page so we need that term to make sure we search profile pages only.

2) Target by bio

In some cases searching through the optional biographical information can be more helpful than the username or real name fields. Maybe you’re looking for a very specific term or some of the folks you are targeting only reference their profession in their bio.

Google search to the rescue here again. This time add the intext attribute, the word bio and our key phrase to search bios – So a search for web designers would look like this – intext:”bio * web designer” site:twitter.com. When you look at this list you might notice that none of the people on the list would have been found by searching in their title, as in the first tip, for web designer. Try it both ways to test for best results.

3) Target by location

Location search by itself is simple using the Twitter advanced search tool – if you want a list of people in Austin you would use this in Twitter – near:”Austin, TX” within:25mi and Twitter would use the location field to show you Austin Tweeters.

But . . . let’s say you wanted to target salons in Austin or maybe the whole of Texas – it’s back to Google to mix and match – (intitle:”salon * on twitter” OR intext:”bio * salon”) intext:”location * TX” site:twitter.com – we search the title, bio and location to get a very targeted list of Salons in Texas on Twitter. Note the OR function for multiple queries.

4) New sign ups

Another handy thing about using any of the searches above is that you can also use the exact operators to create Google Alerts. By going to Google and putting in your search string as described above you’ll get everything they have now, but by setting up an alert you’ll get an email or RSS alert when a new attorney (or whatever you’re targeting) joins Twitter – I can think of some powerful ways to reach out to that new person just trying to find some new friends!

5) Keep up on your industry

Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business.

6) Competitive eavesdropping

Lots of people set up basic searches to listen to what their competitors are saying and what others are saying about the competition. I would suggest you take it one step further and create and follow a search that also includes what the conversation they are having with the folks they communicate with – not just what people are saying about them, but to them and vice versa – from:comcastcares OR to:comcastcares.

7) Trending photos

Photos have become very big on Twitter and the real time nature of the tool means photos show up there before they show up most anywhere. If you want to find an image related to a hot trend, or anything for that matter, simply put the search phase you have in mind follow by one of the more well known Twitter image uploading services such as TwitPic and you’ll get nothing but images. So, your search on Twitter might be – olympics twitpic OR ow.ly (You can add more photosharing sites to expand the search).

There, Twitter just go way more interesting didn’t it?

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.

Most aspects of SEO work on “equal” ground.

No matter how exclusive and high quality a backlink is, your competitor can always get a backlink of equal value.

No matter how relevant an article is, your competitor can always write an article of similar keyword relevance.

Almost every aspect of SEO can be duplicated by your opposition.

So when you find an aspect of SEO that is entirely unbalanced – and effective enough that it can tip the scales against the sites of multi-million dollar companies – it’s worth knowing how to use this aspect to your advantage.

Take a look at the SEO Competition matrix for “Credit Cards”.

You’ll see 10 results that look a lot like this:

Notice anything strange?

It might be something that you’ve seen in your own niche. You might even notice it practically every time you do a Google search.

These 10 results reveal important story about one of Google’s great biases.

Let’s start looking at the 2nd result, and continue through the results immediately below it.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express – all huge names, synonymous with the term “credit cards”.

In terms of search engine relevance – these sites (synonymous with the term “credit cards” itself) are some of the most relevant credit card sites online.

Below those, there are some credit card comparison services, and smaller credit card providers such as Discover Card, Citi and Chase – the sort of “mix” of sites that you’d typically expect to find on a search engine results page… All relevant sites, but with lower levels of authority and relevance.

But the first result…

Here’s where things get interesting…

The first result on the page is www.creditcards.com

It sits ahead of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express – all multi-billion dollar companies with marketing budgets that could buy a small country…

Their names are synonymous with the words “credit cards”…

They have plenty of high PageRank links, including links from some of the largest and most reputable sites online…

And 100,000’s more links than their smaller rival…

…And yet they’ve been beaten to the punch – they’ve met a real David versus Goliath scenario with this “creditcards.com”.

This story repeats itself…

It’s something you can see in practically any keyword niche you analyze.

Smaller sites with keyword-optimized domains are seeing their SEO efforts magnified over time – giving them an unfair advantage that allows them to outrank competitors who boast more links, better content, higher PageRanks and more.

Let’s look deeper into the SEO analysis to see it in action…

Here are the off-page results again from Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module.

www.creditcards.com has lowest PageRank (PR) of all domains on the first page of results, and fewer Backlinks to the Page (BLP) and Backlinks to the Domain (BLD) than most of its competitors.

Its domain age is roughly on par with most of the domains there (some are higher, some are lower).

But it has one clear feature almost exclusively absent from the competition – it has the keyword “credit cards” in the domain name.

This demonstrates just how valuable it can be to get a good keyword-optimized domain.

Good domain names make SEO a whole lot easier.

They leverage or magnify your SEO efforts – so that each link you build, or article you create, counts more heavily towards your rankings – so you can put in less work than your competitors and still get the same (or better) effect.

This gives you a strong advantage over your opponents.

Think about the value of getting better results, with less time and effort.

Could it mean you have more time on your hands to devote to improving your site in other ways? Could it mean you get more visitors? Could it mean more sales? Could it mean bigger profits?

These opportunities to leverage your results in SEO are rare.

Using keyword optimized domains is one of the few “ninja” SEO techniques that still remain effective, allowing you to use the search engines’ heavy bias towards keyword optimized domains to your advantage.

So what should you do now?

4 Action Points for Using Domains Effectively

1. Use Keyword Domains for SEO – Obviously if you’re setting up a new site, and you aim to invest in SEO to attract visitors, get a keyword optimized domain.
2. Consider Moving to a Keyword Domain – If you’ve just set up a site, and it’s still in its early phase, consider moving to a keyword optimized domain. If you have an older site, the decision might not be so clear-cut though, because moving to a new domain name usually means starting afresh in the eyes of the search engines.
3. Keep Your Competitiors Out – Check for, and get, any high-value keyword domains in your market. Remember: no matter how successful you come to be you can always be unseated by a competitor bearing a keyword.com domain – so even if you don’t use the domains immediately yourself, protect yourself and keep potential competitors out of your niche by holding onto dangerous domains yourself.
4. Just Wait For What’s Up Next… – Over the next week, we’re going to drill deeper and deeper into how to find, select and utilize domains effectively for SEO, and look at some of the advanced techniques that professional domainers use to secure dynamite domains, and outrank established high-PageRank competitors like they were taking candy from babies.