Oh oh. Itchy Feet Syndrome

I’ve been back in Canada for two years now and I’m getting that old itch to hit the road again.  Vancouver is great but the rain really is getting me down.  So where is the destination this time?

Brazil!!  Of course.

I still have a number of friends in Brazil that I haven’t seen for a long time and I’m itching to get somewhere warm.  My game plan is pretty simple this time.  Find a nice quiet beach, get into shape and build my consulting business as well as my other online interests..

I know that that might sound strange. How does one build a business helping local Canadian businesses while lounging on a beach somewhere in Brazil?  Actually, thanks to the Internet, it is easier than one might think.

In the meantime, I’m still in Canada waiting for my new European passport to come through.  It is nice to be back in Ontario. I’ve been getting out on an outdoor rink and playing some hockey.  After a 15 year layoff I can tell you that the rust isn’t only on my skate blades. But it does feel great to get out playing again.

That’s about it for now. Nothing marketing-related this time. Just an update on what is going on.  Talk soon.

Socialnomics by Erik Qualman

I know I’m behind the times in my reading material but I’ve just started reading “Socialnomics” by Erik Qualman.  So far it is a fascinating read and I suspect it will only get better.

Right out of the gate Qualman talks about the demise of traditional newspapers and media channels as we know them.  I recently posted very similar thoughts on my post after the Vancouver riots a few days ago.

I haven’t read enough of the book yet to intelligently comment on it but I did want to mention one thing.  Qualman cites Dancing Matt early on as an example of the potential power of social media and more importantly, the potential of social media to allow people to make a living doing what they love to do.

If you’re not familiar with Matt, he is a dude that was famous among his friends for a goofy dance that he did.  He got sick of the rat race and started travelling for fun. One of his buddies asked him to do his dance “over there”, filmed it and eventually put it on YouTube.

Long story short, Matt’s videos became wildly successful and Stride gum approached him and now sponsors his travels.  Matt is doing what he loves to do and Stride gum is getting MASSIVE exposure for very little costs.  Last I checked the video below had nearly 38 million views.  That is just one of Matt’s many videos.  Amazing!!

SEO Linking Strategy: Internal Linking Strategy for Better Search Rankings

I had two conversations yesterday about site structure and internal links and how they pertain the overal SEO linking strategy. Internal links are the links within your website that link to other pages of your own site. Both conversations made me think that I should write a quick post of the importance of these internal links.

We must remember that Google and the other search engines rank websites based on the words (text) on a page.  They find those pages by sending out robots to crawl the Web and report back what they find.  Those robots (sometimes called spiders) make their way through, around and within the Web by following hyper-links.

This is a critical piece of information to understand because if you put something up on the Web and it has no links to it chances are that Google will never find it.  However, the more links to it the more likely it is that it will be found and the more likely it will be that it will get a better ranking.  This is a major over-simplification but one of the main criteria that Google looks at in ranking a page is the number of links going to it. They basically look at every link as a vote of confidence.

Ok, that said, your SEO linking strategy should definitely take into consideration your own internal linking strategy.  You have total control of the content on your site so you can do things properly.  This is how you do it:

• Use whatever keywords you want your site to rank for as links to your homepage.  For example, my site among other things is about seo services so this link will go to my home page
• Keep all pages or posts within 2 levels of your home page if you want it to rank. The more layers removed from the home page content is the less likely it is to be found and the less important it appears to Google
• Create links to all new content you post to your site as well.  Remember, pages get found through the links pointing to them.

This has been a very simple overview of SEO linking strategy as it pertains to internal linking.  Obviously, there is a great deal more to it but as long as you include links to all of your pages and you use the right type of links (use your keywords), you’ll be well ahead of most of your competitors.