How to Check for User Name Availabilty

Problem: You have a great idea for a user name to use on a bunch of social networking services, but you don't want to start signing up for services just to find out that the name was already taken.

Solution: Go to namechk.com to see if the user name or URL you want to use on is available on the more popular social media services. The home page lists dozens of services. You just plug in the name and in seconds you see what's available.

Great Conversation about Online Marketing and Measuring

Avinash Kaushik is one of the world's most influential people in the world of online marketing. He is the author of two very important books on web analytics, and is one the forces behind the Google web analytics package. No matter how much you know about online marketing and measuring, Avinash will open your eyes a little bit more. Check out Mitch Joel's Six Degrees of Separation podcast featuring Avinash.

What Does Getting an Inbound Link Do for a Site?

The other day, one of the web site owners that works with me asked a simple question: What benefit does a site owner get from having a simple inbound link? It was a simple question without a simple answer. The short answer is that I'm not sure, but I have a general idea of how an inbound link can benefit a web site, but as you will see, it is about a lot more than just links.


I've had over a decade working in online advertising, including a few months in a failed start up that had a business model that required a flood of advertising dollars to succeed (actually, a moderate flow of dollars followed by an IPO in the pre-Internet bust years would have been been perfectly acceptable to the owners), and my most recent experiences developing online content and marketing web sites,my opinion is that there are two benefits to the site that is the target of the link: a small amount of traffic from the the site hosting the link, and a small boost in the influence the site has within the algorithms that run search engines, especially the major engines like Google and Bing.

Although the boost to the search engine algorithms is small, the cumulative effect of all incoming links can be quite significant. If inbound links are combined with other efforts, such as creating a web site with compelling content and incorporating a number of other often subtle efforts both on a web site and outside of a web site (for example, having a related network of blogs or other social media, and perhaps marketing the site outside of the Internet), then that site may become a first page or even a number one result for relevant searches on major search engines.

As many of you know, I've run the site AirSafe.com, for almost 14 years. I've done many things to make that site a useful resource for airline safety information, and the site and my related online efforts often bubble up to the top of relevant search results (see what happens if you search for 'airline safety'). It has literally hundreds of links pointing to it from around the web, and it gets traffic from a variety of sources, included articles in traditional printed publications both large and small (usually very, very small).

The site was up for several years before I even knew what the word SEO meant. While my design and development process happened to have many elements currently associated with optimizing a web site for search engines (keyword use, linking to relevant content, etc,), my objective for the site was to make it useful for its audience. To do that I was constantly improving the content, looking to see what the competition was doing, and taking advantage of online technology developments.

In the last few years, some of the changes to the site were subtle, like updating HTML tags and changing the naming structure of URLs to be more search engine friendly, but most have been outside of the site. Among the major changes was creating separate online content such as podcasts, opt-in mailing lists, online videos, blogs, and other social media resources like Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds to enhance traffic to the main site. While some of those resources had the option of creating relevant direct links, most of them indirectly increased awareness of the main site, which in turn may have caused others to place links to the site form other web sites, from online news articles, and other locations.

The AirSafe.com site has many natural advantages that have come with time, the development of closely related online content, and audience familiarity. Newer sites that don't have these advantages can make up for it in part by creating a large number of inbound links from relevant locations. Some site owners literally place a lot of value in these links, given the very active market for text link online advertising. While these kinds of links may turn out to be useful, the benefit would be much greater if the site owners combine those inbound links with useful and compelling content, a site design that makes the site more attractive to search engines, and other efforts to expand the audience for what the site has to offer.

Evolution of Social Media at AirSafe.com (7:01)
Audio: MP3 | Video: iPod/MP4 | WMV | YouTube

Related Articles
Advertising rules and search engines
A 5 step seo process for your site or blog
Most important search engine ranking factors
How AirSafe.com uses social media
Social media insights from AirSafe.com
Social media's role in airline safety

The Most Important Search Engine Ranking Factors

The search engine world is constantly evolving with respect to what factors will get your contact to rank highly on the major search engines. Whatever worked last year may not work that well this year. While no one person knows all the answers, there are some organizations that try to figure those answers out for the rest of us who are trying to get our minds around the most important things to know about search engine marketing and search engine optimization.

Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts worldwide on their opinions of what elements drive search engine rankings. Their 2010 survey asked 72 search engine optimization experts to rate more than 100 search ranking factors, and also asked them about the most important hot issues in the SEO field.

Top 4 Positive Factors
According to the survey, the top four things that will enhance your search engine results are:

1. External links containing keywords that are relevant to your site
   
2. Having quality and quantity of your external links
   
3. Having a diversity of your link sources (unique domain names)
   
4. Using your site's keyword in the title tag

For more details on the survey, including things that affect your site's search engine rank that have nothing to do with keywords, check out the details of the study.

For more insights about this survey, check out this recent podcast from Marketing over Coffee, one of my favorite sources for insights about online marketing trends.

How Studying the NFL and Mariah Carey's Breasts Makes You Smarter about Twitter

The recent O'Reilly and Milstein book The Twitter Book is filled with all kinds of fun things to do with Twitter and Twitter related tools. Trendistic is one of the tools mentioned at the end of the book, and it allows you to compare how words or phrases trend over various time frames, including 24 hours, seven days, and 30 days for the basic version of the service. If you register, you also have a 90-day and 180-day trending option.

Just for fun, I ran a 30-day trend for the words, jets, colts, saints, and vikings. For those of you who don't follow the NFL too closely, these are the four teams entering the final round of playoff games before the 2010 Super Bowl. As you can see below, there were spikes in Twitter traffic that happened on the days that these teams played, with the Jets, representing the biggest NFL market, having the biggest spikes three of the four weekends. The one weekend where that wasn't true, was the day the Jets beat the Colts, and the word 'colts' had the biggest spike. To see the relationships easily, you may want to click the [hide] links below the graph to take out one or more of the terms.

Jets, Colts, Saints, and Vikings Graph



A much easier to understand graph that tracks the words "mariah" and "boobs" over the past week (14-21 January 2010), with both spiking last Sunday. The Golden Globes was on Sunday, and Mariah Carey wore an outfit that made it very, very, very easy to notice her breasts. The graph shows a not too surprising traffic relationship.

Mariah vs. Boobs



To see why this may be so, check out the following shot from the Golden Globes.



You may ask why do the comparison on 'boobs' and not 'breasts,' 'tits,' or any of a number of other well-known terms for female breasts. The answer is that when it 'boobs' was a far more popular term during the week the Golden Globes aired. However, the popularity of 'boobs' as a Twitter term rises and falls, as this 30-day trend for 'boobs,' 'tits,' and 'breasts' for 23 December 2009 - 21 January 2010 shows.

Breasts vs. Tits vs. Boobs

Are You a Manager Looking for Insights into the New Media? - Check Out 'Read This First'

If you are a manager who is trying to get an idea of how the new media (podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can help you with marketing, sales, or customer service, then the latest episode my favorite social media podcast, Marketing Over Coffee, may provide an easy to digest introduction. The show featured Ron Ploof, a long time social media expert, and the author of the new book Read This First. You can check out the Marketing Over Coffee episode, or go to Ron's blog RonAmok.com and check out the free audio book chapters.

12 Things You Can Do to Help Your Favorite Nonprofit

The podcast and blog Marketing Over Coffee has an excellent idea for helping nonprofits--Over 12 days introducing them to marketing related ideas that can help them move forward. Naturally, there is an emphasis on Internet-related activities.

You can visit the blog at MarketingOverCoffee.com and see for yourself. On the first day, they suggested the following:

Introduce them (your favorite nonprofit) to the concept of Twitter (don’t set up an account yet), and work with them to pack the sum of what they do into 140 characters. Typically, non-profits have noble goals but can’t explain them especially well, leaving you with a vague sense that they do something good.

Help your non-profit by developing the following:

1. A mission and/or vision in 140 characters or less.
2. A list of keywords by which other people would find them.
3. Why, in 140 characters or less, someone would donate time or money to them.

I suggest checking out MarketingOverCoffee.com for more ideas, and to put some of these ideas of your own for your favorite nonprofit organization or community group.

KeywordSpy.com Is One Tool You Can Use to Evaluate a Site's Advertising Potential

If you are involved in any aspect of search engine marketing or search engine optimization, you need every advantage you can to stay ahead of the competition and to stay current on developing trends. One of the many free tools out there that can help you is KeywordSpy.
Through this keyword tool, you can perform advanced keyword research and keyword tracking to study what your competitors have been advertising in their Adwords campaigns and Other pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. It also offers a convenient way to view the same information about your own sites.

Among the advantages this software gives is the ability discover who your competitors are, what kinds of keywords they are using, and a general idea of your competitor's online advertising budget. With this tool, you can tell the exact terms and phrases that are driving the most traffic to your competitors' websites, which should help you in tailoring your site and your online marketing approach to increase your own traffic.

Like with many online SEO and SEM tools, there is a free and a paid version of this service. It is worth it to register and check out the free version.

What Is All the Fuss About Free and Why Anyone Who Is Online Should Pay Attention

If you are doing anything involving the web, most of the really good stuff is free, from basic office and business services like Gmail and Google Docs, to entertainment options like YouTube to iTunes, most of the really good stuff is free, and most of the rest of the stuff that costs money has free options that are very, very capable.

Have all the online business types lost their minds? Is this the beginning of the end of capitalism and the final triumph of socialism? Hardly.

It may be a bit hard to believe, but offering content, services, and knowledge for free has been the path to the growth of businesses associated with the Internet, and to the creation of revolutionary changes in communication, publishing, and a host of other areas.

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail, laid out the basic reality of this free economy in his recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price makes the following general argument:

- The economics of the Internet allows a near zero marginal cost for distribution, so all content is getting cheaper over time.

- The concept of "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is giving way to the idea that a free lunch is not a gimmick to get you to buy something.

- If the good and useful stuff is free, you can't win on price, you have to focus on quality and relevance.

- The challenge for anyone or any business that is online is to create an audience or potential customer base with free services, content, or information, and then work to get something of value from them. While the exchange can be for money, it can also be for intangible things like reputation.

For a more detailed background on the concept of free, check out this Wired article from February 2008, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

How Quickly Should You Try Out a New Tool or Resource? - Do It Immediately

There are many good resources out there for getting ideas about how to improve your ongoing online marketing efforts. One of my favorites is the podcast Marketing Over Coffee, whose hosts discuss several new or ongoing topics, usually related to search engine marketing, web analytics, or social media. A few weeks ago, their discussion about Gigadail led me to write an article about the virtual online podcast directory I made.

In this week's show they did it again. They casually mentioned that Google Docs allows you to create an online form that you can use on a site or a blog. While I was listening to the podcast, I went to check it out, and created a form by the time the show was over. I then put it in the AirSafeNews.com blog, and let Twitter and my mailing list contact my audience.

I've been using Google Docs for a while, and this capability was always right there under my nose, but I didn't notice it until I heard it in the Marketing Over Coffee podcast. This is another example of just how rich the online environment is when it comes to having free and useful resources all around us. The least you can do is try them out whenever you come across one that looks interesting. You can start by taking the survey.

Trying combinations of new services
Sometimes using a single new tool may not be enough. One example was given in the How-to-Bet.com where it described how Gmail, Google Reader, Google Alerts, and Delicious to keep up with news and events on a particular topic, while at the same time saving bookmarks, files, and other information on services that could be accessed from anywhere online.

Market Your Video with YouTube's Video Response Option

Using YouTube as a distribution option for AirSafe.com's podcasts has been quite successful. YouTube consistently accounts for about half of all the downloads or views of the podcast videos. One of the options YouTube provides is the ability to easily embed a video on a web page, and this is an option that is used all over AirSafe.com and several of the AirSafe.com associated blogs.

One option I overlooked until this week was using the video response option in YouTube. It works just like a text comment, except you use a video. If you already have a video on YouTube, it just takes couple of clicks to place the link. The really popular videos with tens or even hundreds of thousands of text comments often have at most a few video responses.

It took me about two seconds to come up with a very easy marketing tool--find the most popular video that is relevant to one of AirSafe.com's YouTube videos and add a video response. I did this for at least 25 of the 45 AirSafe.com videos now on YouTube, and early results show at least a 50% increase in daily views. I'll wait a couple of weeks before I believe it to be a long term trend, but so far the response is better than I expected.

One of the side benefits of looking for an appropriate video to respond to is that I've discovered some very unusual airline safety and security videos. The one that stands out the most is a rap video about the TSA by a group called the T.S.A. Gangstaz. It is rude, lewd, totally inappropriate for minors, politically incorrect, completely unsafe for work, and it has over half a million views. If a small percentage of the viewers of the anti-TSA rap video follow my link and end up viewing informational and educational AirSafe.com TSA video, then I'll consider the video response a success.

Warning: If you follow the link to the video, you will see how I've implemented the video response option, but if your manager is looking over your shoulder, you'll have some explaining to do.

A 5 Step SEO Process for Your New Site or Blog

When you are in the planning stages for a new web site or blog, there are a few basic steps you can take to make that site or blog interesting to your audience and attractive to search engines.

These days, when you are starting a new web site or blog, it helps to plan your content so that it is interesting to your audience and also attractive to search engines. One thing that helps to accomplish both is to have unique content. Even if you are reusing your own material from another web site or blog, you should put in a few changes to update it for the audience and to keep search engines from thinking that it is duplicate content that should be ignored.

Making a site more attractive to search engine is one of the best ways to grow an audience since because potential new users will be able to find your site or blog while searching for something related to content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the big buzz phrase you may have heard about, and if you think you should know something about it, you are right. The 5 step SEO process used when AirSafe Media creates a new site or blog is pretty simple, very free, and after reading this post you may want to use the process yourself.

Step 1: Plan on Making it Useful to Your Audience
Unique content should be the foundation of your site or blog, as well as an understanding of what your audience wants. The basic AirSafe Media philosophy is a simple one--give the people what they want, and just a little of what I think they need. Keep this in mind as you add content to your site or your blog.

Step 2: Find the Best Sites and Blogs on the Subject
Whatever it is you are planning to do, someone else has probably done it before. If you can find the very best sites or blogs in your area of interest, you will probably find excellent examples of what to do, what not to do, and where you can best contribute. Finding the sites can be difficult, or it can be easy. In my book Parenting and the Internet, I laid out a detailed procedure for making that happen. If you subscribe to the Speedbrake Publishing mailing list, your confirmation email will have a link to the free PDF ebook. The details are on pages 163-169 of that document.

Step 3: Find the Hottest Keywords and Key Phrases on Those Sites
Once you have a list of these key sites, put them through Google's Keyword Tool to find out the most relevant and popular keywords or key phrases that are associated with these sites. These top sites became that way in part because the sites ranked highly in relevant search engine searches. If these words and phrases are relevant to your site or blog, then using them will make it easier for a new visitor to find you.

Step 4: Find Out the Trends of These Keywords and Key Phrases
Once you identify keywords and key phrases of interest, you should get an idea of how often people use those terms in searches. Google Trends can easily show what terms are on the upswing and what terms are on the way out. You can even compare two terms to see which ones are doing better. You can use this tool to figure out which of your many alternative words or phrases you may want to use, or if you want to use some more than others.

Step 5: Put These Keywords or Key Phrases in Your Site or Blog
If you have done your work it Step 1, you probably have a lot of these words and phrases already in your content. Remember that you want to make your work useful to your audience, so only add the keywords and key phrases in Step 3 if it makes sense in the context of your work. You should also include these words and phrases whenever possible within the HTML tags for the page title and description, as well as in the 'alt' field for any image tag that you use. Also, try to put them in the heading tags as well as in the body of your text.

An AirSafe.com Case Study
While you should go through all the steps if you are designing a new site or blog, you can use parts of the process for a smaller effort within an active site. I was adding a podcasting section to my site AirSafe.com, and I wanted to figure out what kind of podcasting related terms I should include on the pages in that section (Step 4 and Step 5). I found out during my research that podcasting was a kind of social media. I did a Google Trends search for phrase 'social media' and the term 'podcasting' and found that the use of 'social media' was on a long term upswing and the second on a downward slope. I also did a comparison of the two terms and found that 'podcasting' was getting many more searches. I originally thought about adjusting the content to fit in the phrase 'social media' but decided against that idea after I finished my evaluation.

Your Next Step
Don't just sit there, take some action. At the very least, sign up to get a free copy of Parenting and the Internet. I guarantee there are at least a half dozen other things in that book that you could use right now.