Yogi Land

When we hear the word "invest", we often think of investing in the stock market, in real estate, or for retirement. While it's good to invest that way, the truth is, those investments will eventually fade away. The best inheritance we can leave our children and others around us is what we invested in them, not what we left for them. When we're not taking time to share what we know with the next generation, then we are not being faithful with what God has given us. God expects us to impart to others. The next generation should not have to start over. They shouldn't have to re-learn what we've already learned. We should be pouring everything we know into our children, into a young person, into that co-worker in the office. We're all leaving a legacy. Let's make sure it's an intentional legacy. The only investments that are going to last are the investments we make in other people. We didn't get to where we are on our own. Somebody invested in us. Make it a goal to invest in someone else. You can leave a mark that cannot be erased. If you will take time to invest in people; mentoring, teaching, training and modeling, then those seeds that you sow will be multiplied back to you.

Everywhere we go there are people in need. They may smile on the outside, but on the inside they're hurting. Scripture says one day God will wipe away all the tears. There will be no more tragedy, no more sickness, no more pain. But in the mean time, God is counting on us to help wipe away the tears of those that are hurting. God wants to heal, and He uses us as instruments and representatives of His love to dispense hope and healing. All around us people are dealing with family issues, health problems, rejection, broken dreams, low self-esteem. You never know what they're going through. Our job is not to judge, our job is to lift the fallen, lift the broken and heal the hurting. Everywhere we go we should dispense the goodness of God. When you see someone that's down, and you go over and encourage them, you just became a healer. You just released God's goodness into them. When you call a friend that's discouraged and you say, "Hey, I'm thinking about you. I know there are good days up ahead." You just poured in the healing oil. It can be something simple, even just smiling at a stranger. You might not even know that person, but you became a healer. God caused your smile to say to them, "You're important. I care about you." Are you lifting the fallen? Are you taking the time to help someone else? You are a container filled with God's goodness. Release His healing wherever you go.

Can any new search engine beat Google, probably not, mainly because Google isn’t going anywhere but up. It is the dominant search engine with around 72 percent of U.S. online searches and its percentages are much higher in other parts of the world. (Source: Hitwise) However, there are some serious new competitors that may just take a bite out of Google’s rosy search numbers. Never know, one or several of them, may just give Google a run for those all important search engine dollars. Recently, there has been a whole army of new search engines debuting on the web. If you’re a full-time online marketer like me, you really have to keep your eyes open to what is happening on the web, especially relating to search engines which deliver most of your quality traffic. Also keep in mind, this piece may be fairly biased since Google is directly or indirectly responsible for around 80% of my online revenue, so any opinions may be slanted in Google’s favor, not that they need any favors from me or anyone. But as an online marketer you have to try to remain objective and examine all angles in regards to these new search engines. Despite this, in marketing and webmaster circles, everyone will know even if you have the number one ranking for a certain keyword in all three major engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN – Google supplies the most traffic, hands down. Despite its obvious dominance, Google is still basically the new kid on the block. We have to remember, there have been many search engines before Google and there will be many more search engines after Google. Every entity has its day and then hands the torch along to whatever comes next. It’s one of those subtle facts of life we all learn eventually. Everybody has their day – empires, countries, leaders, companies… or even search engines. Are Google’s days as top dog really numbered? Probably not in the immediate future, but there are some new kids on the block that could definitely kick some sand in the face of Google and stir things up, we might even see a few serious squabbles here and there. In a recent article on CNN, by John D. Sutter, entitled “New Search Engines Aspire To Supplement Google” the author examines some recent new search engines. The author discusses: Twine, Hakia, Searchme, Cuil, Kosmix, Wolfram Alpha, Topsy, TweetMeme and OneRiot. Each of these are different, making your web search more personal, more visual, or connecting your search to new social networks like FaceBook and Twitter. Some experts say Wolfram Alpha is the most likely candidate to give Google some serious competition because Wolfram can do something Google can’t; it can create information rather than just reading/presenting content already on the web. Will it present a solid threat to Google’s dominance? Perhaps, a more fitting sparring partner will come from an old rival with very deep, deep pockets. We are talking about the new search engine from Microsoft called Bing, which is very similar to Google in many ways, yet different. Bing’s results are very similar to Google in a lot of ways, yet Bing serves up the results in a very pleasing arrangement, with a nice preview button for each listing and giving you related searches and your search history on the left hand side. Only time will tell if everyone would rather be binging instead of googling. To Bing or not to Bing, that is the question? There’s a very informative article on Bing by Farhad Manjoo on Slate entitled: “Beware Google: Microsoft’s New Search Engine Isn’t Half-bad.” Just Bing or Google to find it! I personally like this search engine much better than MSN mainly because the home page of Bing is very appealing and only has the search box on it so you’re not distracted with other news listings like on MSN and Yahoo! One of the main reasons for Google’s success, besides the superior search results, has been its simplicity. Keep it simple and you may just be able to compete. Then again, this is a bit of a biased judgment, since many of my own keywords and sites rank high in Bing; some even higher than they are listed in Google. I routinely monitor countless keyword phrases in all the search engines and lately Google has been favoring big Brand Name listings on their first page results. We are also seeing more Product Listings (Old Froogle), more video and more news listings… competition for Google’s first page has become multi-layered and extremely competitive. What’s a poor small online marketer to do when Google goes corporate? Actually, Bing is not my favorite search engine of the new ones forcing their way into the spotlight. For me, the one that shows the most promise and may give Google some competition is Searchme, which is a visual search (much like the iTunes interface) where you can shuffle through screenshots of webpages instead of a list of links. Searchme, which touts itself as the first multimedia search engine, has been around for a few years but is not widely known to web users. Performing a search on Searchme with a 24 inch monitor and 64-bit Windows is a hundred times more enjoyable than using Google Search or Bing for that matter. It is a hundred times faster than Google mainly because you can generally find your information without clicking through to the sites displayed. Searchme is truly an eye opener but can it give Google some serious competition. The jury is still out, but I believe over time as web users upgrade their computers, operating systems, and their graphics… Searchme will be more accessible to more web users. Never know, with the right backing and marketing, any of these search engines, especially Searchme and Bing could blossom into a formidable opponent even for the mighty Google. Here’s why: Human Nature! Whether we admit it or not, most of us (Humans) are lazy, we want the fastest and easiest route to solving any question or problem. Searchme gives us the answer much quicker than Google and in a much nicer way. Mainly because we are also visual creatures, given the choice between receiving pages of text and viewing images of sites/answers, most of us will take the visual route – we will choose TV over radio, music videos over records… video enhanced content over just plain static HTML. As the web turns into more of an interactive multimedia operation; visual search will always win out over text search any day of the year. Most humans also have a need for speed, in our fast paced life styles, we all want a speedy solution to our problems. Search is no different, we want quick answers now, we want instant solutions and immediate gratification. Nature of the beast. If Searchme, Bing or any of the other search engines becomes faster than Google at giving the right answer, then it’s a whole new ballgame. Google must obviously know there are challenges to its search engine dominance. Otherwise, why would they be offering many new features in their SERPs; we are seeing more images and videos. Plus, Google has just introduced the “show options” link at the top of their SERPs, which presents their search results in many different ways. They even have introduced the “Wonder Wheel” as another viewing option, which gives a whole new way of using Google’s search results. Google’s Achilles’ Heel may just be the thing that gives it all its revenue: text ads. There may be a backlash on all those Google ads littered across the web, especially among the younger computer savvy crowd using such sites like the Google owned YouTube, where Google has nearly obliterated the videos with its ads. Everyone dislikes advertising, no matter what form it takes. However, any news of Google’s demise will be greatly exaggerated, because Google, like any smart company with tons of resources, has kept morphing and changing with the times, quickly adapting to new features as our usage of the web keeps changing. Google has perfected the art of staying one step ahead of the competition. This is one champion that won’t go down without a fight to the finish. Top dogs rarely do. If they ever present a serious challenge to Google, Searchme, Bing or any of the above search engines, will have a formidable opponent in the opposing corner, one that has gained almost insurmountable prestige and brand recognition around the world. Any major battle will instantly have a “David vs Goliath” scenario attached to it. And we all know how that one played out!

So there I was yesterday afternoon looking for a column idea (as anyone who follows me on Twitter knows), when out of the blue came this: Amazon buying Zappos for $850 million, give or take. While most of the business stories I’ve read so far have covered this as an online retail story, with Amazon getting its, um, foot in the door of apparel with the acquisition of this renowned online shoe store, to many of us this is a social media story. To a greater extent than almost any previous company, Zappos is the story of a company built on social media. When I asked for comments on Twitter yesterday about the role of social media in building Zappos’ brand, I got two responses almost immediately which actually turn what I just said on its head a bit: From George Nimeh (aka @iboy), managing director at Iris Digital in London: “SM didn’t help build the brand. SM is their brand … because SM is about people, and therefore intrinsically customer centric.” And then, from Communispace CEO Diane Hessan ( @CommunispaceCEO): “SM didn’t build the brand. Tony [Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh] & co understood HOW 2use SM 2embrace their customers-vs others who use the SAME tools & get 0.” So, let’s not call Zappos a company built on social media exactly, but a company that saw social media as a platform it could leverage to bring to full fruition a unique, customer-centric culture. That’s a mouthful, but a more accurate description. As Hessan said to me in further correspondence: “At the end of the day, it’s almost never about the technology.” In fact, if you look at Zappos’ customer service approach from end to end, one of its key tools isn’t Twitter — even though hundreds of company employees use it — but this thing called the telephone, which may rank as the original social platform. What comes through each platform is the message that the customer comes first. When I contemplate the Zappos brand (I’m not a big shoe buyer, so therefore, not a customer), what comes through is this: I first heard of it through social channels, probably Twitter, and mostly because I saw recommendations to follow Tony Hsieh, who now has more than a million followers. (Take that @aplusk!) Which makes sense, because Zappos has never really marketed in the way most of us perceive marketing: as messages pushed out in one direction, in the hopes that people will pay attention to them. (It actually feels odd to me that the company launched an agency review recently. Agency review? Talk about kickin’ it old school!) But until now, at least, Twitter has been one of its mass media, as have its unleashed customer service reps — who can talk to customers for as long as is necessary — and its word-of-mouth. Using social tools, Zappos has built a mass brand, using thousands of incremental actions to achieve reach. As should always be the case, its broad use of social tools comes straight out of its culture, expressed as ten core values that include “Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication” and “Create Fun and a Little Weirdness.” In fact, the biggest concern I’ve read so far about the company selling to Amazon is that it will destroy Zappos’ culture. (All sides promise that it will continue to operate independently, and retain its distinctive focus.) But in reading the early comments about the deal, it’s almost as though Amazon wants a bit of Zappos’ social media stardust to rub off on it. “Zappos is a company that I have long admired and for a very important reason,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in a video to Zappos employees. “Zappos has a customer obsession which is so easy for me to admire. It is the starting point for Zappos. It is the place where Zappos begins and ends. And that is a very key factor for me. I get all weak-kneed when I see a customer-obsessed company, and Zappos certainly is that.” Remember that old Nike commercial where Spike Lee, in character as Mars Blackmon, says, “It’s gotta be the shoes”? Well, with Zappos, it’s gotta be the social.

It didn’t look too promising at the launch but Bing has been constantly in the news ever since. Some say the results are better than Google, even going as far as suggesting Google is all but finished. I don’t agree. On one of the search engine forums I often comment on, one of the moderators had this to say on the subject: “But overall this confirms my sense that Google, having abandoned the business model that got it to the top, viz. fast no frills search, in favour of added features and buying up other companies, is becoming increasingly fat and complacent, and along the way their search results are becoming less relevant.” Now, I have to say that I had a small run-in with this guy as he supports everything Microsoft does, from its browser to its operating system and now to its new “decision engine”. So when he writes, “I’ve been using Bing lately and I’m finding a lot of advantages over Google. These are early days yet but this is the first emerging search engine that may provide a real threat to Google’s dominance – something I for one welcome,” I’m a little suspicious. There’s plenty of supporters out there giving online commentaries on its progress. TechCrunch.com, for example, analyses its early success by saying: “Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among US searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing’s introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week.” However, on webpronews.com following its launch, Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesman and soothsayer, was reported, rather scathingly I thought, to have tweeted: “Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though.” And then: “The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too.” Interesting that one should search one’s own name to find out if the results were “spammy”, but never mind. So, I did a little research on the subject of my own and tested my web turf to find on “web design bangkok” Bing returned very poor results, spammy even, with “Luxor Bangkok the Egyptian Design Hotel” and “Bangkok Metropolitan Administration” being placed in the top ten. However, there is a site that offers users the opportunity for us to choose for ourselves. Just go to http://bingdevelop.com/bingcompete compare-your-search-bing-vs-google-vs-yahoo and type in any search term you are unfamiliar with and see which search engine results you would choose. Select say ten of them. You are presented with randomised results from Bing, Google, and Yahoo placed in a three-column set. You don’t know which one is which at this stage until you make your choice. As a test, take a look and select the one you think delivers the best results. I tried 10 searches for terms I’m not at all familiar with and Google came out on top in all but one. It did surprise me after my original test on my own search terms that Bing was very close on all of them. For Matt Cutts to comment as he did in the wake of Bing’s launch, I don’t think Google are too comfortable with Microsoft’s re-emergence into the search engine marketplace. For me, though, I am much happier to accept Google’s results as the test bore out. Others may be switching to Bing already but I am not. I then looked for commentary – they’re ubiquitous these days – and found money.cnn.com had run the headline: “Bing vs. Google: Consumers Can’t Tell a Difference”. Oh, but I think they can, I thought. While it’s true that on wider, more unfamiliar search terms the two are very close indeed (my own findings were “seo consultant” – Google, but Bing very close; “manchester city t-shirt” – Google because it returned MCFC official site; “polar ice caps melting” – Google again but Bing almost identical; “bank bonuses uk” – Google, as it had reports from BBC, Guardian, etc. but Bing again very close), Bing still has its teething problems. So as I read the plethora of reports and opinions being spun as to whether Bing is better than Google, I wonder what drove them to that conclusion. Like that of the forum moderator, perhaps? But I’m sure he was being honest with himself about his choices. It’s just a matter of why he would choose a different set of listings to me. It can’t be just because he’s a closet fan of Microsoft; the three engines are hidden until one is selected and I can vouch for his integrity. However, Bing’s campaign, or spin, however you look at it, seems to me to be communicating that in order to get “relevant” information, they should choose Bing over Google, with its grandiose promise of being a “decision engine”. Which is what, exactly? Another one of Microsoft’s tricks to decide matters for me? As if Word wasn’t frustrating enough at doing that already. Maybe the differences are far too subtle for me to notice. Or just maybe the Luxor Bangkok the Egyptian Design Hotel is not the place I would go to find a web designer in Bangkok. But the moderator, of course, had the final say: “I was a big Google fan for a long time, but increasingly I find myself going to Bing first and only to Google if Bing doesn’t deliver the goods. There’s no question that Google still has more web pages indexed than anyone else. But if they can’t find better ways of sorting through them they are going to crash. They can’t count on brand loyalty forever. For those of you old enough to remember Alta Vista, I am reminded of their rapid and total fall from grace when Google launched. Nothing is forever on the net.” My findings are that they are very similar and certainly not enough to make “Google crash” just yet. Personally, I don’t believe this is yet Bing’s time until they tighten up their results. I agree with Mr Cutts that just now Bing is just too, how do you say again, “spammy”.

In life, no matter how much good there is you can always find something bad if you look for it. You can develop an eye for the good or you can develop a critical eye. Scripture says, "To the pure all things are pure." If you can't ever see anything right, you drive down the freeway and only see the traffic, construction and potholes and never the beauty, if you only see the scratch on the floor and never the amazing house, if you never see what people do right and only what they do wrong, it's time to clean your window; the way you view life. When we let a critical spirit rise up and start magnifying the wrong things and think thoughts like, "Why do they dress like that? What's their problem? If I were them, I wouldn't do that", our spirit is being polluted and we're hurting ourselves in the long run. When we are critical and judgmental, we are sowing seeds for others to be critical and judgmental back towards us. God longs to continually bless us and take us higher and higher in all aspects of life, but we have to make sure we're doing our part by keeping our heart pure, our mouth free of gossip and our minds free of judgment. Make a decision not to be a faultfinder because that can keep you from your destiny. Just as one develops a habit of seeing the worst, you can train yourself to see the best in others. There is good in every situation.

By all measures, 2008 capped a banner period of growth for Internet video. In the span of a few short years, consumers have done what all the experts said was impossible: radically alter their video-watching behaviors, frequently trading in the “couch potato” experience of watching TV on the sofa to view snippets on the mobile phone or catch a missed show on the computer after the initial broadcast. But despite a tremendous amount of growth in the number of online video views, the global economic turmoil has — and will continue to have — an enormous impact on the digital video market, exacerbating what was always going to be a slow advertising growth curve. Unsold inventory is impacting all corners of the industry, and skeptical TV and advertising executives looking at paltry revenues are telling themselves that the new platforms are to blame, when the sagging economy should in all fairness be shouldering much of the responsibility. As the economy rebounds, there are four ways everyone in the industry can help contribute to the ongoing economic growth of online video advertising: 1. Encourage new advertising models and expanded inventory for alternative platforms now, while consumers continue to modify their TV-watching behavior. Studies are already showing that consumers would readily accept double, if not more, the number of ads currently deployed for mobile and online. As consumers further embrace these alternative ways of watching video content, platforms should codify alternative advertising models such as pause ads, a higher number of advertising breaks, and additional revenue streams such as subscription-based models. 2. Take advance of the digital format by repurposing content across multiple platforms, enabling advertisers to follow suit in complementary ways.  As content is digitized, content owners should monetize across multiple platforms: mobile, online, even video gaming platforms. Advertisers should be encouraged to follow suit and make the most of cross-platform campaigns by incorporating geo-targeting, couponing, and other forward-thinking branding techniques that will incentivize consumers and drive measurable results for brands and products. 3. Know your data — and your target audience — inside and out. Consumer behavior around the searching and indexing of your content is measurable and quantifiable. Unlike broadcast, aggregate online video usage can be tracked — and extended — by making desired content easy to find, targeting similar videos to watch next, and serving targeted advertising throughout the experience that will be of interest to the consumer and of higher value to the advertiser. Integrated metadata can further empower multichannel monetization, building a larger audience across cable, broadband and mobile. 4.Encourage patience among peers, clients and business partners. Economic woes aside, online video advertising is a fledgling industry and we all need to encourage patience as the economy grows to support growing consumer behaviors. Forrester reported that more consumers watched Internet video in 2008 than on DVR last year, and DVR has been around since 1999. And DVR advertising is still finding its way. This new model of video watching is on a steep growth trajectory, but it will take time for advertisers to firmly embrace new ad models and the full potential of the industry. Some experts predict the economy could be many months — or years — on the rebound. But as much as the economic turmoil might be beyond our control, we all should take every opportunity we can to help promote the online video advertising industry as it takes its first wobbly steps.

Writing articles is a very simple and free way to generate traffic to your website and improve sales of your product. However, to be effective it has to be done properly, and there are some aspects of article marketing of which many people are unaware. Or perhaps you are aware of them, but don’t know how to put them into practice. It is not the purpose of this article to tell you how to write: there are rules that should be followed for best results, but these have been more than adequately covered by the myriad other articles that have written on the subject. In fact, that would be one of the lessons: the use of the noun ‘myriad’. A word for a large number, it is Greek in origin, and correctly should be neither preceded by ‘a’ or followed by ‘of’, so ‘a myriad of articles’ is not grammatical, while ‘myriad articles’ is. However, like many of these rules of grammar, common usage is gradually superseding the correct form, and I’m not going to lose sleep over it. No, here we are going to discuss how articles can be used as opposed to how to write them. We shall assume that already have a great article, with a good keyword-rich title and your body keywords used as they should be. So this is not so much about writing articles, but how to use them to generate traffic and improve sales of your products. There are two main ways in which articles can be used: by publication as content on your own website and by submission to article directories. Let’s discuss each of these in turn. Using Articles as Website Content Articles can be used as web content for any type of website. People generally prefer to come across a web page containing a useful article that tells or teaches them something about the topic of the page than simply a page of graphics or links. In fact a proper silo site demands them. Silo Sites: When writing articles for a silo site it is first important to draw up your site structure and make a list of the topics you will have to write about. There are various types of silo site, but that which offers excellent search engine results involves a home page linked to each of a number of silo header pages. Each of these introduce the theme of the silo, and link both to the home page and to the first silo page for each silo. It is not the purpose here to discuss silo sites in detail, only that they can help to generate traffic and improve sales by the simplicity of their structure. Search engines can easily find every page on the site, and every page contains good content. That is assuming that they are well written and provide useful information. Articles should just be ‘page fillers’ but should teach something about the topic, or provide information that is genuinely useful to readers or visitors to your website. Each page of a silo site is intended to provide that type of information, and can also be backed up with products or services that relate to the theme of the article and the silo page. Sales Sites: Writing articles for sales sites does not infer writing sales pages, but writing in such a way as to promote a product or provide a problem and its solution, the product or service being promoted then being presented as a means of applying or achieving that solution. While I see a silo site as providing information first and the product second, with a sales site that is reversed, and certainly changes the way the articles is written and used. Affiliate products can be sold both ways: they can be presented as a means of backing up the information provided in an info-silo site, offered as solutions to problems or form the main object of a web page and the articles offered in a promotional or review format. Distribution to Article Directories When you distribute an article to an article directory you benefit in a number ways, the main two being through the Google PageRank and search engine results listing gained from the backlinks proved to your selected web page from the link in the resource section of the article, and from the search engine listing of the article itself. Articles are also read by users of the article directories, and they are also copied by webmasters as content for their own Adsense site: here, the resource section must be left intact, again offering you links back to your site. However, it is from their listings on search engines that you will get most tangible benefit, because each article is published on its own page in the directory website, and can be listed on Google in the same way as any other web page. Hence the need for good SEO on in your article. If you don’t understand how to optimize an article it is certainly worth hiring an article ghostwriter or learning how to do it yourself, because it can make a massive difference to your sales, and generate traffic such as you have never previously experienced. It is not necessary to submit your article to hundreds of individual directories and ezines. Submission to the top 10 or 15 directories is all that is needed. Because many of these syndicate their articles to other directories, and a number of ezines also pick them. If you want to increase your submissions above that, there submission services available online and also software that can be used to help you do it yourself. So, writing articles can generate traffic and improve sales very dramatically if you know, not only how to write them properly with good search engine optimization, but also how to use them to your greatest advantage.

Have you ever noticed that competitive runners achieve their best race times when they are pitted against worthy competitors? You can be an excellent sprinter, but odds are you will not run your personal best on a track by yourself–most of the time it’s the spirit of a heated race and a determined runner breathing down your neck that makes you dig down deep give it all you’ve got. The quest for a higher search engine ranking and more website traffic is much like athletic competitions. When you’re trying to get your site ranked higher in Google, you are not operating in a vacuum–you have competitors, whether you acknowledge them or not. Your progress is not only dependent on your own efforts at marketing your site, but the efforts of your competitors–if other website owners are more consistent, more reliable, and more focused in their marketing, there’s a good chance that they will outrank you. With website rankings, there is a constant jockeying for position, so it is extremely helpful when you’re trying to market your site and get a higher search engine ranking if you will use your competitors to your own advantage. Before you start your next link building campaign, take a look around the playing field and gather some intelligence about those you’re running against. How Can You Tell Who Your Competition Is? It’s actually quite easy to tell who your top competitors are–just do a search for each of your keywords in Google. What site is at the #1 position? Unless it’s you, that website is your top competition. Repeat this search for each one of your keywords. When you’re starting out, you may want to limit yourself to 3 main keywords whose competitors you’re keeping track of. That way you have 3 competitors to keep track of, and that will give you a good idea of how you’re progressing and also how far you need to go to catch up to the #1 position. What Type Of Information Should You Keep Track Of? Alright, now that you know who your top competitors are, it’s time to do a little investigating. Here are the main bits of info that will help you get an idea of where your site stands in relation to site holding the #1 position. 1) How many backlinks does the competing website have? You can do a backlink check by typing the word “link:” (following by a colon) and then the competitor’s URL into the Google search box. The results will be a listing of sites that are currently linking to their site, and at the top of the page you can see a total number of backlinks. 2) What is their search engine rank for the keyword? For the first month at least, their ranking is #1. Another thing that will be interesting to you is to see how the site that is ranked at #1 can fall if they are outdone by another site further down in the ranking. If you are consistent with your link building campaign, you can see your site climbing up the rankings each month, until finally your #1 competitor drops from the number one position and your site takes over. 3) What is the other site’s PageRank? PageRank (PR) is a tool Google uses to reflect the authority of a web page. The rankings go from 0-10, where 10 is the best. You’ll likely notice that a website does not need to have a PageRank of 10 in order to hold the top ranking for a keyword–many times sites with lower rankings hold the top position. Why is this? Remember, it’s all about competition–the top ranking website may have a PR2, but the other sites who are competing for top listing for that keyword have lower authority. Of course, there are many other factors that go into determining who has the top rank in Google, and only Google knows all of their criteria for judging. At any rate, it is helpful to know the other site’s PageRank, especially in comparison to your own. If you see that the competing site has a PR4 and your site has a PR2, you can set a goal for yourself to achieve PR4 or higher. With all of these indicators, it’s nice to get an idea of what you’re shooting for. Being aware of your top competitor’s stats can help you strategically jump up the rankings and keep your motivation going to earn the #1 spot.

A motto that is often heard in the online world is that “content is king.” If asked what they would do with an extra million dollars, many SEOs may answer that they would invest that money in developing new content. Link building is incredibly important to SEO but some SEOs believe that if you provide great content, the links will come naturally. The truth is that it can be difficult to get people to link to your content that easily, no matter how great your content may be. Google indexes more than a trillion pages of content so the chances that people will link to your content are slim. In SEO, not only is it essential to create great content, you must be great at getting that content linked to. You’d have to be pretty lucky to expect to put content out there and attract a bunch of links without any effort on your part. You have to create content with the latest topic trends in mind. This is not to say that the priority of creating great content should take the backseat to your traffic and link-building efforts. You simply need to approach content creation holistically to ensure that your content gets seen and gets a sufficient amount of links. Here are 5 steps you can follow when creating and distributing content to ensure that it increases traffic to your website, your search engine ranking, and brand awareness.

1. Use Google Trends to find keywords in your niche that have been receiving a lot of attention lately. Target these trendy keywords aggressively in your content to attract more traffic NOW. Keyword trends are usually based on seasonality or other special events.
2. Once you have chosen keywords to target, you should use the Google Adwords keyword tool to find related keywords to write about. By targeting several related keywords in your content, you can increase traffic to your website.
3. Use Twitter to search for all of the keywords you are planning to target in your content. This will help you get ideas on what you can write about with the keywords you are targeting.
4. Create content based on the keywords you found and the ideas you got from searching on Twitter. You can also browse popular content on social voting sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to get ideas on how to write your article titles and the body of your articles to make them enticing.

5. Once you get your articles written, you need a distribution plan. Set goals for each piece of content you have created. For example, you may want to syndicate your articles to receive highly relevant backlinks and increase targeted traffic to your site. You may also want to add the content to your website to improve user experience. Market your content to bloggers and customers via social networking sites to increase traffic via word-of-mouth. Follow these simple steps in order to create great content and leverage it. As an added benefit, you will be able to increase awareness of your brand and improve your search engine ranking through the creation and distribution of great content.