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Building And Running A Content Marketing System

Dear business builders,

You might have heard it many times before, “Content Is King!

This little phrase gets everyone excited who is especially afraid of paid advertising.

Countless blogs and worthless article directories have been started with the hope to attract traffic and turn it into money without spending a dime.


But this is not about it.


Content Marketing is serious business!



Toby Murdock of SEOmoz wrote a detailed article about “How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine.”

He says, “The question is not ‘why?’ your organization should start with content marketing — that should have been answered already — it is ‘How?’”


Check it out, take notes, and most importantly define action items and set a due date for each.


To Your Success

Yours
John W. Furst

A Lazy Man's Domain Name Tip

Choose a domain name
Are you searching for ‘a car’ or ‘many cars’?
Which domain name would you type first? (image credit)

A couple of month ago I have written about the basics on how to choose a domain name. Today let me add one important point.

A friend of mine runs a successful business and just has launched a new website with some great tips for lead generation. I wanted to read one of his articles again and typed-in his URL. Instead of his homepage I saw:


Error: Server not found

This was quite a surprise. He has one of those domains where you have a hard time to remember whether to add the “s” for plural or not. Like in
car.com or
cars.com

The weird mess up on his part is that he even has a very beautiful logo with …labs, but his domain name is …lab.com.

I don’t think I am the only one making this mistake, but I am one of the few who actually try the other version as well. The average web surfer might just give up right away.

Of course I wrote to him immediately and shouted,
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Google Kicked Out By Alexa Sparky

Alexa Plugin for SEO
Does the new Alexa Sparky add-on kick out Google?

What a surprise — for the first time I got search results surfed by Microsoft's Bing search engine. And I did not even intend that. All I wanted to do was to find a particular project for a Wave client (software) I read about on the Web. I typed my query into the address bar, hit enter, and got these results below.

Not necessarily what I was looking for. But wait a second … Why didn't Firefox serve the result from Google as usually?

Internet Search With Bing
Search result from Bing! Why?
(Click on the image to enlarge in new window.)

Well, I played around with Bing a tiny bit, right when Microsoft had launched their new search service but I did not stick with it for long. Honestly, Google is my most favorite search engine. Period. Google did not only catch me for search, but with a plethora of other great applications. From Gmail, to Google Docs, AdWords, … to their translation tool, and … Wave is the latest on the list. They hooked me up. Probably for life.

So I was quite surprised that I suddenly got Bing results displayed.


What has happened?


I remember that I had updated my Alexa Sparky add-on for Firefox this week. I also remember having seen a note about new features but I kind of ignored it. Now, it's obvious what had happened. Alexa Sparky is one of the FireFox Add-ons I use.

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Could Google Toolbar With Sidewiki Hurt Social Bookmarking?

Do you have Google Toolbar With Sidewiki installed?

If yes, please, watch the navigation bar of your browser.

I am using Firefox and noticed a hashtag after the URL in many instances. Not always, so I am not sure about a pattern, yet. When I turn Sidewiki off in the toolbar this effect disappears. Here is the proof.

Troubles With Google Sidewiki


Google Toolbar Seems To Interfere With Other Browser Add-ons

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Removed NOFOLLOW Attribute From All Trackbacks

John W. Furst
John W. Furst

A very quick insider note.

The infamous NOFOLLOW attribute has been removed from this blog for the backlinks of all trackbacks.

I think, why not share some appreciation for (quality!) bloggers who write about my posts.

Right now this blog still does not accept PINGBACKS, but TRACKBACKS are highly welcome (quality only!). Regular comments are still not followed.

Now, it's up to me to write and distribute posts which are worth to be written about.

I think about upgrading and enabling PINGBACKS as well.
Let me think …

Of course, I will monitor, possibly moderate trackbacks, and update the comment policy accordingly shortly.

Yours
John W. Furst

Canonical URLs Explained By Matt Cutts of Google

Matt Cutts on Canonical URLs

This shall be a very quick update and summary with my final SEO advice for some time. It seems that my chronological report about the evolution of SEO configuration on this blog confused many readers.

I apologize and make it good with this post.

It was not so much the fact that most of you live and breath in a Wordpress world. It was more about my deep dive into the abyss of Apache's URL redirection, .htaccess configuration, and the ever changing schemes of URLs used here on this blog. That's where I lost many of you.

It's too easy to get carried away while being intensively involved with fixing a problem.

Yesterday I already have emailed a short summary with Top 10 SEO Tips for Blogs (↑) to my newsletter subscribers. It lists the major points and adds you should make use of sitemaps and Google's free webmaster tools.

Now, in order to conclude this short, unplanned series of articles about SEO I have for you:
  • A 20 minute long video presentation of Google's Matt Cutts talking about duplicate content and how to use the new canonical URL parameters properly.

  • Plugins for

    • Wordpress and
    • Serendipity S9Y weblog software.


  • And I also found a comprehensive SEO guide for Wordpress users.

Let me start introducing the video with a catchy quote.
We reserve the right to do what we think is best.
--Matt Cutts, Google.com

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