(Got your own questions for the show? Ask ‘em here!)

A question from Lori:

Hi Michelle! I think its great that you are doing this show and I have a quick question. What are you doing with all the feeds off of your websites when Feedburner closes down? Which it looks like it is going to… Are you going to start using Feedblitz, which is a paid service, or have you found something else that’s great?

Hey Lori thanks for your question – it’s a good question. It’s one that some folks have been wondering for some time as it become clear over the last two years that Google was going to be nixing the Feedburner service as a whole.

Your best bet at this stage of the game, rather than relying on a third party service to serve up your RSS feed, is to just use your internal RSS feed. Why?  Well, there’s a few reasons:

1. I’m not going to gong the “RSS is dead” bell or anything, but it definitely is falling by the wayside. RSS  is not what it used to be, its not as important as it once was. There are diehard people like myself who still use RSS but with Google Reader being discontinued and many main providers who were once offering RSS, like RSS used to be a main feature of Twitter, and it no longer is.With a lot of companies jumping off the RSS band wagon, it’s just not what it once was. It just not as important. So I don’t think you just need to worry about it for that reason.
2. The other reason to use an external service provider is because  of exactly what’s happening with Feedburner. If you’ve been pushing your Feedburner feed all of this time and they close, where are the subscribers gonna go? They are not subscribed to your actual blog feed so they’re gonna be “poof” gone and you just won’t have those subscribers anymore. That’s bad news!

It’s best to keep that stuff internal because those are your subscribers, those are your people and you want them in your system in the future. So move on over to your internal RSS feed. If you’re using WordPress then it would be yoursite.com/feed/ . Use Feedburner’s redirection tool to redirect from Feedburner back to your RSS feed. Keep that stuff internal so that you have complete control of it in the future.

I hope that helps Laurie, and thanks for submitting your question to the FromIdeaToEmpire.com Q&A podcast. Alright, bye bye!

The post Feedburner’s Dying – What To Do With Your Feedburner Feeds appeared first on From Idea to Empire.

(Got your own questions for the show? Ask ‘em here!)

A question from Ashle:

YouTube results!

Hey Ashle thanks for your succinct question!

I’m not sure exactly what you wanted to know about “YouTube Results,” but I can give you guys a couple of tips on the ways Youtube has changed things recently. It also reflects back on how SEO has changed with Panda and Penguin.

One of the things you’ll find with Youtube is that because its such a large authority site, it’s not influenced as negatively by Panda and Penguin factors. What that means for you is that you can still do some backlinking work to your Youtube videos and see a positive result from that.

One of the great things about Youtube is that most people on Youtube are not well versed in the world of SEO and in the world of backlinking, so if you put in a little bit of time and effort into backlinking directly to your Youtube videos, you can often see an increase in your Youtube rankings internally within the Youtube search engine itself.

You may or may not see an increase in your ranking in your Google results pages, it depends on the competition of the key phrase but again often you will see an increase in your Youtube internal ranking.

Some of the other things that you can do to get your Youtube results more positive and get more action is using your keywords, obviously, in your title and your video descriptions, and your tags – thats old news and I’m sure that you know it but its worth saying anyway.

The other big thing that changed in Youtube’s algorithm is that rankings are not necessarily solely determined by the relevance of videos anymore. Rankings are now determined by the engagement that your video creates. What Youtube wants us to do much like what Google themselves say that they wanna do to serve up the best results for the search term.

So, Youtube has determined that if when you search for a video and you see those results and you click on result one, you only watch 5 seconds of it and then you click back. Youtube has determined that that video, when that happens a lot of time, doesn’t have the same engagement as a video where, say, somebody goes back into the results, they try video number two and they watched that one from beginning to the end.

Youtube says, “Okay thats the video that when people type in this keyphrase, they’re looking for this kind of result.” If you have highly engaging videos that people will actually watch from the beginning to end, you’ll find that you will rise in Youtube rankings, and this is just the engagement.

This is just where the internet as a whole is going, at least in Google’s eyes and at least  what Google is trying to accomplish. Youtube is owned by Google so that’s what we’re saying. You’ve got to have highly engaging videos that people were actually gonna be watching to get those top Youtube rankings results this days. So the old idea of the of kind of making robo videos that were read by computer and that just maybe read the script on the screen or something with a dictation program. Those aren’t going to be highly engaging. Those aren’t going to be the kind of videos that we will see lasting in the Youtube result pages any longer.

You’ve got to actually be creating high quality content and that’s something you’ll care about whether we are talking about video, whether we’re talking about podcasts, we’re talking about articles, thats just the way it is these days.

I hope that helps you Ashle and see you on the next one!

The post Best Practices for YouTube Ranking Results appeared first on From Idea to Empire.

(Got your own questions for the show? Ask ‘em here!)

A question from Lori:

Michelle, I would love to know your preferred source of backlinks if you have one. Backlinks Genie, do you ever use blog farms anymore? If you could comment on that, that would be great. Or do you use an outsourcer? Thanks.

Good question Lori – its one that’s one everybody’s mind in this whole post penguin post panda apocalypse that we are currently living in. So the deal is that those blog forums, networks all of that stuff it’s not something me or my team are currently using anymore, why? Because the Google disavow tool.

So let me explain to you a little bit of the psychology behind it. I’m not saying that any one particular network is not effective right now. I haven’t tried them all. I couldn’t say that right? But what I am saying is that when person “A” goes and uses the blog network or link building service, like those kinds of link building services. (I’m not talking about like hiring an SEO or an SEO firm to go into some link building), what I’m talking about are article submission services or blog networks or those kinds of services.

Person “A” purchases that service, they spread their links out, they take advantage of the service to its maximum extent. Three months later they get an SEO penalty and maybe it’s because of their use of that service, or maybe they choose crappy anchor text, or maybe because they did a bunch of other stuff with some other service that messed up their rankings right? I don’t know why and it doesn’t matter why.  But what happens in that person’s mind is that they go “Oh crap I lost all my rankings it’s because I used this service, now I am going to go find all of those links that I’ve got from that submission service and I am going to disavow all those links using the Google disavow tool”.

That lets Google know that all of those sites, all of those sources for links are bad sources for links and lets Google know that those are dicey places that people purchasing links from. So you on the other hand you have been using the service successfully, let’s say for a year  and then this jerk over here goes and disavows all of the links from that particular site. Google says “Okay, okay,  we see that those sites are the kind of sites that people are purchasing links from, so the other people who have links from those sites – we are going to penalize them as well because we now know that that is a link farm.”

Of course Google probably won’t do that with only one person using the disavow tool  and identifying those links as spammy, but as time goes on and as more people were hit with SEO penalties and as more people gets paranoid, as more people use that disavow tool and an attempt to get their ranking back. You will find that this services that once maybe were very effective are no longer effective and it’s because people that are using them themselves are cannibalizing their own services.  So you just can’t use this kind of services in today’s day and age of the Google disavow tool.

So how does my team go about getting backlinks for my websites? Well, we do some blog commenting, we do some article submission, we do some guest posting. We do all of those things, we do some press release submission. We do all of the normal things, but we do our do it by hand these days. We are not using services, like article submission services, like blog farms that you find out there for sale because of this whole disavow tool problem. And I don’t recommend that you do either for that exact reason. It might work for a little while but eventually somebody else using the service is going to go ruin it for everybody. So use your link building, the money that you have to put towards link building to actually build individual links rather than applying to or being a part of that service like that, because it will come back and bite you in the end.

So thanks for your question Lori, appreciate it. And those of you listening head on over to FromIdeaToEmpire to submit your question to the podcast. Alright thanks, bye!

The post Blog Farms, Backlinks & The “New” SEO appeared first on From Idea to Empire.

Listen folks, it ain’t dead. But it is changing. Of course it changes – this is the internet, people! We’re lucky is something remains the same for a month!

In today’s SEO climate (of change) and the increase of social media as a ranking factor and quality of content becoming more and more important, we should’t overlook the fact that BACKLINKS STILL MATTER.

Where Should I Get Backlinks From?

The most common question I’m asked then is, “Where should I get links from now?”

Many folks were suckling and the sweet teat of blog networks and seem to have completely lost any ability to get links on their own.

Fear not!

I’ve developed a resource that’ll get you started.

Where to Build Links attempts to answer that very question. You’ll find it under the “Resources” top menu here, or you can use the direct link here in case the site changes.

What this free service attempts to do is organize popular social media properties (and, with a caveat, article directories) in various ways so you can discover and analyze new link building opportunities.

Are These Kinds of Links Effective in the “New Order” of SEO?

Yes. But you’ve got to do it right. Most of the information shared ont he web is done via social media properties, so it’s totally natural and normal to have your URL’s shared there as well. However, you really need to watch your anchor text. In fact, don’t use your main keyword at all. Mix it up.  Over optimized anchor text was the major downfall of marketers in the Penguin update.

Balance in SEO

Keep in mind, while we used to be able to almost solely focus on backlinks, our SEO needs to now be more balanced. It’s no longer a matter of JUST backlinks. Now you have many other aspects to concern yourself with – quality and innovation, on-page SEO (more important today than pre-Penguin), social signals, authorship, to name just a few. Make sure you’re not spending all your time chasing the “backlinks dragon” and none on other key metrics.

Check out the Where to Build Links tool here.

The post Where To Build Links – Today appeared first on From Idea to Empire.

There are three steps to recover, and in this post, I’m going to show you how to do Step 1.

Before you can fix your site, before you know what changes need to be made, you first need to identify what algorithm update actually effected you. Here’s how:

Log in to Google Analytics. Choose “All Traffic” from the “Traffic Sources” menu in the sidebar. Also choose a date range during which you experienced your drop in traffic / rank. For this site, I was hit in late April, so I’m viewing traffic from April 1 – May 31. If you were hit recently, you might pick a date range like September 1 – today.

Click “google/ organic.” The page that loads will ONLY show you the traffic you were receiving from Google’s organic search, so it will make it extremley clear as to when you lost rankings and thus, when you were effected by an algorithm update:

In my graph, the biggest hit this site took was on April 27. You can see a dramatic dip in what was otherwise a fairly steady stream of traffic, and it’s wasn’t just a one-time blip on the radar either. It was complete loss going forward too.

This is what a u update that’s effected you negatively looks like.

Here’s another:

We can se this loss came at about September 28.

Once you’ve identified the date you were effected, you can check the Algorithm Update Timeline from SEOMoz and see if any of your losses correlate with specific Google updates.

For example, in my first graph the site experienced a loss on April 27. Looking at that Algorithm Update Timeline, you can see that was also the date that Penguin was released – so you can easily surmise that the loss in traffic was caused by Penguin.

The second site experienced it’s loss on September 28.

There were two updates pushed on out Spetember 27 – the Exact Match Domain update and a Panda update. How do you know which one you were effected by?

You weren’t effected by the EMD update if you aren’t using the keywords you want to rank for in your domain.

For me, this site was using the keywords I was targeting in the domain, so I can’t eliminate the EMD update yet.

So how do you know with 100% certainty? You don’t. But here’s what I’ve determined from looking at my sites:

The EMD update didn’t drop otherwise good sites from ranking positions to nowhere-to-be-found. It might bump sites down a few, even several notches, sure, because Google was no longer giving them a “boost” due to the keyword-rich domain. But the EMD update didn’t annihilate good sites – it bumped them.

But this site went from being in the teens for a number of keyword phrases, like this one, do being just GONE from the SERPS completely.

The site you’re seeing a drop in September 27 is, frankly, not a great site. Sure, the content is original, but it’s not bringing any value. It’s doesn’t have anything new or interesting to offer. It’s a think Adsense site where, technically, all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, but if we’re being honest, it’s a crap site.

This site wasn’t hurt by being an EMD (but a lot of webmasters are making themselves feel better by pointing fingers at that as a reason).

It was hurt because it sucks. It was hurt by the Panda update that rolled out the same day.

Knowing is Half The Battle?

How you approach the fix depends on what was broken in the first place – you’ve got to bring the right tools to the job!

The Penguin effected site would need to look at their backlink profile – see if they’ve relied too heavily on low-quality links and over optimized their anchor texts.

The Panda effected site would need to look at the quality of the content on the site itself. Make people happy with your content, solve a problem.

If you’ve experienced a loss, was it Panda or Penguin? Let’s see which wins in the comments!

The post How To Identify Algorithmic SEO Losses appeared first on From Idea to Empire.

Izea’s Social Spark Campaigns

Izea was formerly known as PayPerPost, has a “pretty sketchy history” and is no stranger to scandal. One might even surmise that they changed their name to avoid association of their new brand, Izea, with the sins of their past nom de plume, PayPerPost.

Just what is Izea and SocialSpark (and how’s it going to give you herpes)? They’re a social media marketing company, they says they, “connect advertisers with blog publishers to create sponsored blog posts.”

The basic Izea / SocialSpark transaction is that they’ll pay you, the blogger, $5 – $20 to write a blog post about one of the companies they’re working with. If you have a large audience, you can negotiate for significantly higher rates. You disclose in your post that it was a paid (aka “Sponsored” post) and fulfill any other number of requirements in the post – for example, you link to the company with a certain anchor text or share certain company-designated talking points about the product/campaign/company with your audience. The FTC is happy, the company you’re writing about is happy, SocialSpark is happy, and hopefully you’re happy too.

They also, occasionally, have sample campaigns. They send a product sample, the blogger tries the product and writes their post per the SocialSpark specifications, discloses it was sponsored, gets paid, etc.

The Germ Swapping Begins

Two such sample campaigns they’re run in the last several months have been for Revlon (they’re calling it the Revlon Expressions Experiment) and Nectress. With the Revlon Expressions Experiment, the sample box contained nail polish, lip colors, eye palettes, primer and under eye brightener. The Nectress bloggers received a full-size box of the product to try.

Redomestication.com signed up for both, received and tried the samples, and was unable to ETHICALLY write a blog post that included the required statements and talking points.

SocialSpark required that the post say positive things about the products and companies that we couldn’t, after having sampled them, say with integrity. We let the deadline for the posts pass without submitting ours. The agreement with SocialSpark didn’t include lying in our blog posts.

Several months pass, with the SocialSpark campaign manager sending out various emails reminding folks to get their posts in, even though the deadline had already passed and both jobs had been removed from our SocialSpark dashboard, so there is actually no way to submit them. And then, today, SocialSpark sent out this little gem:

Pay close attention to this line:

If you choose to pass on this campaign, you’ll need to send the makeup back to our corporate offices right away.  We will need to re-send your samples to other bloggers we had to turn away for this super popular campaign to meet client deadlines.  Please send to the address below:

(A second email regarding the Nectress campaign says we’d need to send that back as well).

Ew!

SocialSpark will be sending used samples of food and makeup to other bloggers!

Maybe they already have.

Perhaps the samples I got were already in someone else’s home, smeared on their nasty, disease ridden face, eyes or nails… eaten by their snot-faced kids.

SocialSpark Is Willing To Expose You To Herpes, Pinkeye and Strep Throat

Aside from being disgusting, it’s dangerous.

Mouth-borne disease that can be spread from sharing food (like Nectress) and lip products (like the three included in the Revlon Expression Experiment kit) include oral herpes, mono, Hand, Foot and Mouth disease, strep throat and thrush. Pinkeye can be spread through sharing eye makeup like the palettes included in the Revlon kit.

Any bloggers signing up for either the Nectress or Revlon Expression Experiment campaigns via Izea’s SocialSpark ought to check the safety seals on their products before sampling the wares, lest they contract any of those contagens from already-used-by-who-knows-who samples.

Safest bet? Avoid the Nectress or Revlon Expression Experiment campaigns completley.

Or Maybe SocialSpark Are Just Liars & Bullies

The question still remains – does Social Spark actually intend to send used food and makeup samples to bloggers? Do they really want to get sued for someone’s lifetime Valtrex prescription?

I doubt SocialSpark is actually intending on spreading disease by re-sending used samples.

So why are they lying to bloggers and saying they are?

Are they trying to intimidate, guilt and indirectly force bloggers into writing positive reviews?

Given their history of playing fast and loose with disclosure, it’s wouldn’t be a stretch to assume so. Izea has never been a company concerned with the truth.

Honesty Shunned

There’s also a threat here – that bloggers who aren’t able to comply with the campaign requirements and write things they don’t honestly believe in – will be banned from future sample campaigns.

Izea is only interested in having bloggers who are comfortable being dishonest, bloggers who don’t mind playing puppet, and bloggers who are willing to say anything for a payout, and threatening to kick out bloggers who’d like to maintain their integrity?

So Are They Disease Spreaders or Liars?

There are two possible outcomes to this situation:

1. SocialSpark is telling the truth. They will re-send samples to bloggers and spread disease. They will ban anyone from their sample campaigns who cannot ethically provide positive feedback after having tried one of their products.

2. They are lying and do not intend on sending used samples to other bloggers. They are attempting to guilt and intimidate novice bloggers into writing and publishing posts that include campaign required statements that the bloggers, after having samples the product, don’t believe in. They would prefer bloggers lie, sell themselves and the integrity of their blog, as well as the trust of their audience for a few dollars and the hopes of being included in a future campaign.

Whether publishers get pinkeye from tainted samples or are shamed into writing something they don’t believe in, these campaigns for Nectress and Revlon add to the skeletons in Izea’s already bursting closet. If they’re stupid enough to re-send used samples, one wonders how they’ve become a publicly traded company. If they don’t intend re-sending the samples, they’re just liars and bullies.

The post Izea’s SocialSpark Is Willing To Expose You To Herpes appeared first on From Idea to Empire.

That’s got to be a record.

They were:

• Panda algorithm update (September 27th): A large update, Panda targets low-quality content, spun content, content farms, etc.
• Exact Match Domain update (September 28th): Discounts the “boost” exact-match domains previously received in the search engines.
• Penguin update (October 5th): This was a smaller Penguin data refresh (not a change to the algorithm)
• Top Heavy update (October 9th): Thus update targets sites that have primarily ads with little to no content above the fold

The most devastating has been the Panda algorithim update. Many folks think they were effected by the EMD update the next day (because they have an EMD or a partial-match domain) but were actually decimated by the Panda update.

Panda’s focus is on serving high-quality content by penalizing and weeding out the low-quality stuff.

And the toughest thing I see in our community of publishers is believing that our own content *IS* quality…

Even though sometimes it’s not.

Here’s an example:

(This was a comment Tom left on a blog post about the EMD update. Tom was likely hit by the Panda update, not the EMD update. At that time, Google hadn’t announced they had done a Panda Update, thus the confusion for many publishers).

Does content being original make it quality?

Does content being a certain length make it quality?

If so, how many words? Is it 300? Is it 1000?

If content is outsourced, is it therefore not of quality?

I’m not picking on Tom, because I’ve never seen his sites and I do know what he was getting at. We’ve got this limited language to describe “quality.” So his comment struck a chord with me.

We talk a lot about quality content. And we talk a lot about good content being more then a few sentences (common sense, right?) and not copying content from other sources (double duh!).

But those things alone don’t make for real quality…

There’s an essence. A something else. Something more than just originality and word count.

A lot of publisherss with really bad sites (in the eyes of Google – and probably a lot of humans) are mad, because they just don’t or can’t see their site as low quality.

It’s your baby. Your craft it, you cradle it, you feed it links and plugins and words. And it’s hard to see it in other people’s eyes. It’s hard to see that it’s actually quite ugly and low quality when we’ve worked our fingers to the bone (and our brains to fried eggs) creating them.

And I think we need a better way to describe it than just “high quality.” That’s pretty subjective. We need a more objective, clear way to describe “high quality” content.

In the spirit of crowdsourcing, I want your input.

Is it like “hard-core pornography” in that it’s hard to define, but:

I know it when I see it.

I think we, as a whole community, can do better than that.

How would you describe quality content? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

The post What Makes Content “Quality”? appeared first on From Idea to Empire.

Word on the street is Pinterest is all about ladies trading recipes, outfit ideas and itty-bitty-baby-kitteh pictures (…guilty as charged).

But there’s an underground and secretive masculine side of Pinterest too (ok, not so underground and not so secretive, but it makes for a more interesting article, eh?). Fact is, Pinterest isn’t just for ladies OR kittens and there are a lot of dudes making waves and driving a metric-gigaton of traffic to websites like yours curating their own male-oriented Pinterest collections.

If you are publishing in a space where men mill about, flock, pass by or glance, it’s worth your time to give these 13 dudes a look:

Top 13 Manly Pinterest Users

Nathan Strange’s many manly boards include “Beadspiration,” which consists solely of awesome beards, and simply “Manly.”

Ben Stovold maintains boards on “Geek,” “To Do,” “Interfaces and UX” and, of course, “Man Stuff.” A well rounded dude, he’s got an eye for classic European cars and dressing sharp.

Mike Dew says he’s a “.. a conceptually driven creative problem solver and a strategic thinker.” Um, ok. I think he’ got cool MANLY Pinterest boards, including “Rad Shit” and “Awesomeness.”

Leon Fitzpatrick has a totally industrial, dark… well… manly asthetic. His boards cover radical cars, gorgeous gals and “Heros,” featuring The Dude himself, Jeff Bridges.

Brendon Manwaring’s boards make you feel like a sophisticated man’s-man. He’s the kind of guy a modern James Bond would hang out with. Function is as important as style in Brendon’s world.

Lucas Uribe pins tattoos and is also into the rustic woodsy-hipster photog thing that’s going around. He’s got boards for cars, furniture and quotes. Oh, and he really likes ladies. Pretty, pretty ladies.

Ricardo Gonzalez keeps Pinterest boards for all kinds of super manly things, like Longboarding, Classic Cars, “Junk,” Graffiti and “Things to Do Before I Die.”

Randall A. Gordon is about as manly as it gets. His Pinterest just screams testosterone. With boards on Mixology, Guitars and Fabrication, this is a dude’s universe – or dudiverse, if you will.

Geoffrey Heintzman has 61 Pinterest boards, each of them manlier than the next. Some favorites are Bicycles, Automobiles, Bombshells, Skulls, Boats and even a “Murdered Out” board, for “all black ereything.”

Oen Hammonds might wins a virtual arm wrestling match for having a board dedicated to “All Things Military.” It’s balanced by “Toys,” which features a lot of fancy, collectible action figures as well as a “Style” board – and this man has taste.

Daniel Bear Hunley has to be included on the list of best men on Pinterest if only because he’s got the middle name “Bear.” If that’s not manly enough for you, he keeps boards on Spirits (like the boozy kind) and maintaining a “Man Garden” (no, no, no, not down there, get your mind out of the gutter. The outdoorsy kind). His “Covet & Need” board gives great manly gift ideas too.

Ben Silbermann is a co-founder of Pinterest, so he ought to know what he’s doing. He’s got boards so manly they practically grow their own beards. “Incredible Technology” and “Star Wars Things I Love” are great ones to start with.

I can vouch for Zachary MacPhearson’s manliness, because he’s my husband. He’s got 5 separate boards just for cars, not to mention “Cabin Porn,” “Cactus” and “Owls.” Go figure. Just between you and me, he also likes farting and Ryan Gosling.

I’ve built two websites’ traffic almost entirely off of Pinterest in the last several months, and being in a male-oriented niche is no excuse for not harnessing it’s power. It’s a perfect jumping off point, a place to start, because you can see results immediately (unlike SEO) and it’s free (unlike PPC).

If you’ve yet to install Pinterest buttons on your site, try the Hover Pin-It plugin (I had it built and use it on my own sites). By encouraging your readers to pin your content with a plugin like this one, you can drive traffic without even maintaining your own Pinterest account.

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