In the on again, off again love affair I have with Tumblr, one thing is clear – unless they completely take a dump, I’ll always go back.

I fall off every time I go there and one of my Tumblogs is down, an occurrence that seems to happen every 5th or 6th visit. I fall off every time I go to post something, only to find that the site went down while I was writing my post (I’ve learned to copy the post before pushing any buttons on Tumblr). I fall off every time I look at the content from popular Tumblogs and think, “I posted that 2 months ago. Why is it getting 10k reblogs now?”

Then, my marketing mind hits and I remember that Tumblr is an excellent tool for search and social marketing. In the video below, I introduce Tumblr to the automotive industry. While the industry is cutting-edge in many marketing techniques, it often falls behind when it comes to the unfamiliar. Tumblr is unfamiliar to them… now. Hopefully, they’ll watch the video and start embracing Tumblr for what it can do as an internet marketing machine.

This article originally appeared on GridSix, an internet marketing training company that we support. Check out more helpful training articles there.

For years, link-bait has been the highest level of link-building available. There’s nothing better for increasing rankings than to have a viral piece of content spread throughout the internet, getting posted and reposted across a wide-array of websites, blogs, and social media sites.

Infographics have emerged in the last 3 years as the most valid form of link-bait. When website owners see an infographic they like that fits in with their niche, they will often look for and find the embed code on the page, copy, and post it on their site. It is within the embed code that the real “juice” of infographics happen.

It’s here where the magic occurs.

Links have been the dominant component of a strong SEO strategy for a while, now. Google and Bing look to outside signals about a site’s relevance as much if not more than all of the onsite signals combined. When a high-valued website links to yours, it acts in many ways as a vote in the eyes of the search engines.

Not all votes are created equal in the world of SEO, which is why infographics have acquired so much value. Getting an infographic posted on Mashable or FastCompany is much more valuable than buying a link from a spammy source, posting in hundreds of forums, or getting social bookmarks sent to a web site in bulk. The single link on these respected sites is better than a thousand links from link farms or spammy pages.

Here are the keys to infographic success as an SEO tool:

Include the Embed Code at the Source

If you don’t have an embed code, there’s a greater chance that website owners will post your infographic without a link to your site or simply pass up on posting it at all. Embed codes simplify the process and make it to where you’ll now have a better chance of getting the link and the post that you desire.

Look at this automotive marketing infographic. If you scroll down, you’ll see the embed code at the bottom of the page. To put that code in, we posted this code:

<div>
<font style=”font-weight:bold;font-size:14px;”>Embed this Image on Your Site:<br/></font>
<textarea rows=”4″ cols=”45″ onclick=”this.select();”><a href=”http://www.tkcarsites.com/automotive-marketing-pid18291″><img src=”http://soshable.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Automotive-Industry-Infographic.jpg” alt=”Automotive Marketing” width=”600″ border=”0″ /></a><br />Via: <a href=”http://www.tkautomotiveseo.com”>Automotive SEO</a></textarea>
</div>

You can adjust the size, links, and alt tags to fit what you’re trying to accomplish with the infographic. When people find this code, all they have to do is paste it into their own posts in HTML mode and it will give them the infographic as well as giving you the links you need.

Keep in mind, there are actually two links in this example. The first link is the image link associated with the infographic. By applying an alt tag and linking it to one source (where the click to the image is supposed to go) a website owner will be able to get that inbound link wherever it is posted.

The second link is an actual text link at the bottom of the infographic. In reality, you can put more than one attribution link here. This is a good strategy if you have multiple sites you want to optimize through the infographic.

Go Big or Go Small – No In-Between

There are advantages to a large, robust infographic that spans well below the fold and encourages people to scroll all the way down. They are “stand alone” pieces of content that website owners and bloggers do not have to write a lot about to make them valid posts. They can write up a paragraph or two and let the information in the infographic do most of the talking.

In the example above, 1Bog chose to use a large infographic, which was posted by several sites, including Cincinnati Ford. As a result, they were able to get good placement and the posters didn’t have to write a ton to make the post valid.

A small infographic, one that fits nicely within the screen, also has advantages. It’s easier for website owners to scan for accuracy. Some won’t post large infographics because they don’t know the validity of all of the information and do not want to risk posting something erroneous on their site. Small infographics give them a starting point, a talking point around which they can craft a full story.

If an infographic is a “tweener” it will have less of a chance of getting posting. Something that is 1000px-wide by 2000px-long isn’t big enough to have a ton of information but is too big to be a simple starting point for the blogger.

Go all the way or keep it small. In between is simply less effective.

Simple is Better, But Complex Works if Necessary

A strong visualization that takes a premise and expands on it in a visually stunning, easy-to-understand format is the ideal type of infographic. Say more with the visuals than with prose and statistics whenever possible.

It’s easier to make a statement that way, which makes it more likely that bloggers will pick it up and post it.

Some topics simply cannot be addressed simply, so one must go all the way. Just like with the big vs small scenario above, the same need to avoid the “tweener” applies here. If the topic being discussed is too complex to use a simple, visually-stunning representation, the alternative is to go full-out with lots of data, lots of graphics, and lots of words.

Building it is Not Enough

Infographics are not like A Field of Dreams. Just because you build it, that doesn’t mean that the people (and therefore, the links) will come. Unless you have a site that is already getting a ton of traffic organically, you’ll need to get the word out and spread the infographic to the rest of the world.

The easiest way to do this is through social news sites. While Twitter, Facebook, and Tagged.com might have the market cornered on users, social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are necessary to get true viral action to an infographic. “Popping” on one or more of these sites can generate thousands of pageviews, but be warned: they do not like SEO spam. If your infographic is truly enlightening and offers something of general interest, it’s promotable. If it’s in too tight of a niche or does not appeal to the masses, you’re better off emailing it to a large list or doing a concerted Twitter/Facebook campaign to get it page views.

Done right, infographics can be the best SEO tool you’ve ever seen. Done wrong and they can be a big waste of money.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a video gets posted to YouTube and nobody can find it to view it, does it really get played at all?

The goal of making a video for a car dealership (or any business, for that matter) is to get viewed. Using video for marketing can be an extremely beneficial practice, but so often dealers are out there making videos but not doing what it takes to get the video found on YouTube or through Google searches. The solution – optimize it.

Here are 5 ways that car dealers can optimize their videos without being search engine optimization experts. It’s part of our weekly webinar series at TK Carsites.

If there’s one thing that irks me about internet marketers, it’s that they seem to like to declare that something’s not working, particularly if it becomes harder. Most of the times when I get into a rant session like I’m about to start, I like to link to the “rantee” in question. In this case, the arguments are so poor and the conclusions are so misleading that I won’t even grant it a link.

The recent Panda updates did not kill search engine optimization. They improved both the potential and the techniques surrounding SEO. Rather than go into a deep-dive commentary on Panda 2.5 and the implications, I’ll sum it up with one statement that will make it to where you don’t even need to know what Panda is doing (or any other algorithm change in the near future).

Quality is everything. Quality of content, quality of links, and quality of code are the only things that any budding SEO (or social media marketer, for that matter) ever really need to focus on at the basic level. If you write good posts, put up good graphics and videos, get good links, and don’t muck up the code, your site has a great chance of improving its rankings.

If you rely on spun content, automated links, and coding tricks, you’re going to eventually fall in rankings. Google and Bing are smart. They know what’s working for them and against them. The one universal truth in search has always been that quality is important.

The recent changes to the algorithm only make quality that much more important. They aren’t killing SEO. They’re simply making it to where low-quality or automated posts and techniques will no longer be as effect.

If someone wants to rank for CT Toyota Dealer, all they have to do is put up high quality content and get good links. It’s that simple. The tricks of the past are meaningless (or getting there, at least). For easier terms such as Spray In Bed Liners Northern Kentucky, links might not even be necessary. Good, human-centered content on the topic should be more than enough.

SEO is not dead. They aren’t killing the profession nor are they killing the abilities to influence rank. All they’re doing is going after spam and content farms. If you are having trouble with your rankings, it’s not because of Google. It’s because you’re simply not doing it right.

Focus on quality in all things. Be a resource. Be enlightening, intelligent, and sharable. If you do, you’ll rank higher.

Gaining guest posting opportunities on credible blogs and websites has been a staple in the Internet marketing strategies of brands, businesses and bloggers for the past several years. Building and maintaining social relationships with bloggers and audiences has always been the foolproof formula for achieving such opportunities.

Marketers worldwide have been frequently making use of Email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to solidify their relationships with bloggers, thought leaders and key figures within their niches. However, many Internet marketers have given very little thought to how guest posting could actually be severely damaging their social standing with the very individuals they are trying to connect with.

The following article tackles and showcases the four major pitfalls that guest posting could land Internet marketers in.

Getting Caught Out

There are Black Hat strategies towards every possible Internet marketing campaign and guest posting is no exception. One of the biggest pitfalls marketers make is submitting spun or unoriginal content to numerous websites. Now, you may very well get away with such an approach in terms of beating the Google bots, but when it comes to maintaining that social relationship with bloggers and Webmasters, you’re going to find yourself in a whole world of trouble.

If you Tweet/ReTweet, post or share unoriginal/spun content on your social medias the chances are it will get spotted very quickly by your social media audiences, the leaders in your niche and of course the individuals you actually submitted the post too. This will put you in a very bad social position. If the thought leaders of your niche see what you’re up to, you will rapidly receive a bad reputation online, your posts will more than likely get taken down, and the relationships you worked so hard to build will most definitely be gone instantly.

Think of guest posting as a marriage, you wouldn’t cheat on your partner, so don’t try to deceive bloggers and website owners either.

Losing Your Personality

One of the biggest ways to ‘turn off’ your social following as a blogger, brand or even as a business is to lose your online personality. The reason an online audience Follows you, adds you as a Friend or adds you to their Circle is because they are interested in what you’re doing, and what you’re posting about. Yet so many marketers forget about this.

The social media websites of guest authors are constantly full of blanket Retweets and link filled automated posts, which are about as engaging to an audience as staring at a blank wall. Marketers overuse apps like TweetDeck and HootSuite in order to cut down on the time and effort they have to put in to keeping their social medias updated. Although, abusing these tools is one sure fire way to lose your social following, and kill those valued connections with bloggers, site owners and thought leaders.

Look at your social media profiles, if each day there are more blanket, linked filled updates than personalised or ‘human’ posts, you’re going to quickly start losing those engaging audiences you sought after to benefit from guest posting in the first place.

Don’t lose your personality as a guest author. Spare a few minutes each day to make each social media status update personal and personable. If you don’t, you’ll soon see both your audience and your guest posting relationships begin to disappear.

Making Posting A One Way Street

Guest blogging marketers are all about ‘getting the link’, they’ll do whatever it takes to get their link in their post. in order to boost their website traffic, get SEO value and make a name for themselves as a guest author. This activity in itself isn’t a bad thing at all, in fact it’s the sign of a good Internet marketer, but sometimes in their quest for their link they forget one of the most standard human attributes – being polite.

It’s worth remembering that a blogger or Webmaster may actually really want your content to benefit their website, but more often than not they are doing you a favour by letting you post on their website. They are in reality ‘giving’ you a link, letting you connect with their audience/subscribers and allowing you to take traffic from their website and send them to your own site. That’s one staggeringly big favour they just did for you, so do you ever repay the favour?

Politeness shouldn’t just stop at a polite conversation. If you want to solidify and maintain your guest blogging relationships you should never make guest posting a one way street, always try and reciprocate. Allow bloggers (if they wish) to guest post on your site. By allowing the same privileges guest bloggers give you, you’ll be able to maintain your guest blogging relationships far more effectively.

Not Making A Connection

The only thing worse than not maintaining a relationship with bloggers and site owners, is to fail to make a connection with them full-stop. As guest bloggers are so ‘link hungry’ it’s very common for marketers to fail to make a connection with those individuals giving them their guest post opportunity.

Typically connections are lost if a guest author hasn’t been successful in achieving their desired post, but just because a site doesn’t want a guest post, doesn’t mean you can’t build a connection. Thank users for their time in actually replying to you (whether they reject your post or not), ask if you can connect with them on social media websites and always be as polite and positive as possible throughout your exchanges.

If you can build a connection with bloggers and key individuals by making your social exchanges memorable, you may be able to benefit from such a relationship later down the road. Users you make a strong connection with may re-post your social activity, suggest you to other powerful individuals, and help you to build a stronger more prominent social status.

Summary

By understanding the common social dangers that come with both achieving guest post opportunities, and promoting successful opportunities, you can help to keep your connections with your audiences, bloggers, site owners and thought leaders as strong as possible. These relationships are extremely powerful for Internet marketers and should never be overlooked no matter how busy you are, how small a bloggers website is, or how tiny their social following may be. The time and effort you put in to creating and maintaining these prosperous relationships will undoubtedly prove to be priceless in the long run.

Those of you who know me well enough know that most everything I do has more than one purpose. Today, as I prepare to leave the lovely weather in southern California to drive through the desert to Las Vegas, I wanted to do a post that does more than just tell you that I’ll be gone.

The Driving Sales Executive Summit is at the Bellagio this year and I’ll be delivering one of the keynotes in a few hours. As such, there will not be any more posts today, but I’ll give you a recap when it’s done. I’ll be talking about search and social in 2012 and how Google is making big changes while Facebook will be buying Bing; it should all be interesting stuff.

More importantly, I want to test a premise. Quality is such an important factor in the Google search algorithm as we’ve been preaching for years, but it seems as if posts on high-quality sites are rising to the top of searches even faster than they were in the past. This post is a test… I would bet that shortly after I post this, that it will appear on page one of the search results for the term “Driving Sales Executive Summit.”

Go ahead, check. Was I right?

On Sunday, I will be delivering a mini-keynote (is 30 minutes a keynote?) at the Driving Sales Executive Summit at the Bellagio in Las Vegas for TK Carsites. The topic is “Search and Social in 2012″ and I am quickly realizing while I’m putting it together that fitting the topic into a 30 minute speech reminds me of Matthew 19:24:

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

At Driving Sales, it will be easier for me to read Moby Dick to the audience in 30 minutes than it will be to break the surface of the topic selected in the same amount of time.

Search is Getting Social

For the last 3 years, Google and Bing have been working furiously behind the scenes and in public to integrate social media into their search algorithms. It’s one thing to index Tweets and note when people like something on Facebook in the search results. It’s another thing altogether to work the signals associated with social media into the search algorithms in ways that will enhance the pages as well as improve the rankings.

In 2012, Google will certainly get it done and Bing will most likely do the same. The veil over social media is starting to become transparent for the search engines as they work towards the ultimate goal of having search results that coincide properly with the two variations: real-time and authoritative.

When someone does a search for a “Steve Jobs”, they will most likely be searching for different things depending on current events. Today, with Steve Jobs passing away just a couple of days ago, people are searching for updates, reactions, tributes, quotes, history – the list of possibilities is huge. Search engines have traditionally looked at onsite and offsite indicators to determine how authoritative and relevant a web page is on a given topic, but today’s searchers are more sophisticated.

How do search engines know when to stop showing tribute articles at the top and to start showing Wikipedia or other resource sites higher up on the page? In the future, the buzz will slow down and people searching for “Steve Jobs” will be looking for information about him and his career rather than current events.

This is where social media steps in. There is no algorithmic way to set a time limit on news versus resources – some news lasts longer than others. Social media is the batch of signals that search engines need to have an understanding about when topics are no longer newsworthy and when permanent, authoritative resources should rise.

Google is clearly going “all in” on social media by integrating Google+ with, well, everything. From Google Places to buttons on websites, Google+ (the social network) and Google +1 (the button) are merging with each other and with everything else under the Google sun. Bing’s partnerships with Facebook and Twitter make it to where they don’t have to create their own network, but expect the integrations to continue to expand in 2012.

We’ll look more into what all this means shortly, but first…

Social (specifically Facebook) will Enter the Search Arena

It has been speculated for some time but there have been roadblocks that have kept Facebook from entering into the search engine field. Those roadblocks are:

• Identity – For Facebook to become a valid search engine, they will not want to “become” a search engine. They are attempting to redefine what search is and play on their unique strengths to encourage people to get their knowledge through Facebook rather than through Google.
• Google+ – They saw it coming, but it still blindsided them a bit. Google’s new social network is taking off and hitting Facebook on its own turf. While they want to focus on expanding their services, they are tied up with making sure that their core service, social networking, remains at the top of the food chain.
• MySQL – The original architecture of the site was not built for the bulk they’ve achieved. In many ways, they are building on an original structure by fortifying it here and rebuilding it there in bits and pieces rather than scrap it all and start over; they’re beyond the point of no return on that front.
• Crossroads – The company is at an extremely delicate period of their existence with expectations set for the company to go public next year. If they get into search and fail, it will hurt them in the short term. If they don’t get into search at all, it will hurt them in the long term. Timing is crucial and they are in a strange position of having to go full-force in one direction or the other.

It’s in the last roadblock that we have to make a prediction. As most analysts, advisers, and their own egos will dictate, Facebook will become a search competitor in early 2012. The only question that really remains is in how they will keep their stronghold secure in social networking and still engage on a multi-front war with Google (as well as partially alienate Microsoft, who owns a piece of the company).

The Bold Prediction of the day would be that Facebook integrates completely with Bing, possibly even buying it outright with an increased stake in the company given to Microsoft. For Microsoft’s part, they would welcome a deal that was lucrative enough. Bing has not been as successful as they’d hoped and powering Yahoo! search has not yielded the expected returns. They have a core competency in software that they hope to capitalize upon through mobile devices while maintaining their share of the PC software market.

Facebook has a better chance of making Bing a true Google competitor than Microsoft does.

What it All Means

From a business perspective, we could post an eBook on the subject and what companies need to do to prepare for the upcoming changes. The key point is this: your search and social strategies must consolidate. The way that we handle search and social today is not nimble enough to keep up with what’s coming. As search integrates social and social enters into search, the best unified strategies will be the ones that produce the best fruits.

So you have a couple of websites, which have been getting organic traffic from Google for a couple of years. You are happy because your sites are generating sales or ad-revenue organically and you can just focus on the content and services, without having to worry about getting customers.

Then one fine morning, you see a huge drop in hits. All your traffic has just vanished in thin air! You check your site analytics program and find that the traffic from Google has suddenly disappeared. This is a typical case of a Google penalty and it is a nightmare for a webmaster of any website, however large or small it might be.

If you keep your eyes open on any webmaster or SEO forum, you will find many people complaining about being hit by a Google penalty. Most of them are clueless about the reasons that led their websites being penalized at Google.

If you are one of them, here are a few things you should know:

What are the precautions I need to follow to avoid the Google Penalty?

1. Duplicate content:  This is a surefire way to get penalized by Google and the majority of other search engines.  Do not publish content that is already published elsewhere, do not copy and paste from article directories and do not publish rehashed content. Google can precisely determine the source of a sentence, so if you are using syndicated content on your website or simply copy pasting from popular blogs, your entire website will surely disappear from Google search.

Also, be extremely careful with other duplicate content issues like language translation plugins, site architecture, permalinks, and technical issues of your sites HTML template.

2. Selling Text links: Google and other search engines do not like websites that pass pagerank through links. Selling text link ads is extremely risky and you should not fall for those lucrative link exchange offers, or sell text link advertisements on your website. If you must link to a website which you do not endorse, remember to use the rel=nofollow attribute in the hyperlink code.

3. Excessive Use of Keywords in Meta descriptions and titles: Stuffing and overpopulating your pages with unnecessary Keywords and phrases is not at all a good practice and this is one of the reasons why Google might lower your rankings. Googlebot does not like a page that offers no real value to users and are written solely for getting rankings on search results. Write for the user and you should be in good shape.

4. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods: Before linking to a source, always check the credibility of the target site. Do not link to bad neighborhoods or sites that sell text link ads or have objectionable content. While this may not guarantee a Google penalty but why take a chance?

5. Hidden links in your Template: Never try to fool search engines by placing hidden links or hidden text in your site’s template. Hidden Links or text can be placed in your template by dwelling the color of the links with the background so that it appears as if there are no links on that particular area. Search engines are very strict with any hidden content on any page of your site and may penalize your entire site for cloaking.

6. Check Your Robots.txt file : A robots.txt file is used to tell  search bots which folders and sections should be crawled and which sections of your website should not be indexed. Regularly check your site’s robots.txt file for blocked directories and pages.

8. Do not Use Link Farms to Inflate your page rank:  Submitting your site to link farms or link exchange directories makes no sense at all. Most webmasters are pretty savvy regarding getting pagerank but they forget the fact that pagerank is not the only ranking factor. Any link, which does not look natural, adds no value to your site’s external link building.

You might see a Jump in the Page rank by submitting your site to link farms but the search engines will discover it and ban you eventually. Never use any type of automated scripts or programs that assure you a Page rank push. These things do not work and only harms your rankings.

9. Do not distribute Copyrighted content: You may be writing the content on your own and its purely original but still there are other ways to get banned and face a serious Google penalty. Do not host copyrighted material on your site, which includes images, videos, software executables, and other files. If you want users to download these stuff, link to the site, which hosts the product, and do not copy it onto your own servers.

10. Too Much paid Posts: Google and other search engines do not like paid content so avoid publishing paid or sponsored reviews in your blog. Google scans billions of pages and can find a pattern in sponsored reviews posted on multiple sites. If they observe the same trend and pattern in your sponsored article, your site might get flagged. You can do it occasionally but do not overdo and start reviewing sponsored products in bulk.

After reviewing all the above pointers, file a reconsideration request using your Google Webmaster tools account.

* * *

This guest post is written by Lior Levine, a marketing consultant for a neon sign store that provides a variety of business signs including coffee neon signs. Lior also works for a China inspection service company that provides a variety of shipment inspections.

There are occasions when a specialty within a company translates into an something unexpected. Think “penicillin from moldy bread.”

That’s the case with Whiteboard Fridays, an offering by SEOMoz that gives tips to aspiring search engine optimizers as those simply wanting to help their own websites rank better. It was supposed to be a tight niche. Since its humble beginnings they have grown tremendously to the point that they are an excellent case study on how to do video marketing the right way.

This infographic by our friends at Wistia breaks down the road they took and offers ways that other video marketers can apply the techniques for their own success.

Click to enlarge.

We’ve known since June that the +1 button on websites will have a direct effect on searches performed by Google contacts. We have also speculated that plusses will also have an influence over general, unauthenticated search results. Lastly, we’ve had a feeling that the similarities between the +1 buttons on websites and the Google+ social network meant a future convergence between search and social on Google.

Google’s release of sharing on Google+ through a website’s +1 button is further confirmation that Google is wanting their social component to be tied in with search. It’s not stated, but there are definite implications now and from past experience that Google has always loved the human component of search. Releasing +snippets is a step in that direction.

Onsite content and inbound links have been two of the primary algorithmic influences on search results for nearly a decade. Since late 2006, Google has toyed with applying social signals into the equation and announced in December that social signals were officially being used. This recent twist to the +1 buttons is the next step.

If you want to have an influence over your future search results, make sure that IF you’re a content site or have content on your website, be sure that the +1 buttons are in place. This is not a license to spam – pages that are not “share-worthy” should not plug in the buttons as there is speculation they can do more harm than good (if a page is simply not getting plussed, is it worth ranking?).