Special Guests on Social Media – the power of YouTube responses

Have you ever seen a video response to a YouTube video? Having a response video on your YouTube video adds more depth to an already robust marketing tool. With Google owning YouTube,, a video can improve your search rankings tremendously. Add a response video and your ranking have an extra boost. The poeple at Google figure if someone went to the bother to do a response video it must be extra interesting. What a great way to embellish your unique content. Here at the cyber wigwam we have we have classes in YouTube. You can read about them at the lept like a blog site. If you have any experience with YouTube vidoes or repsonse videos, we would love to hear your story. Feel free to comment below.

Freedom of speech in the blogosphere – the role of RSS

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is what drives the blogosphere. It is what enables bloggers to be both the reporter and the publisher. It provides a mechanism for the bloggers at Council Blogs to have an avenue for publishing, a way to broadcast to the world. It also gives us bloggers a mechanism for readers to subscribe to our pearls of wisdom. From my speaking engagements I find RSS the least understood aspect of social media. The underlying programming techniques of RSS paved the way for interactivity, which in turn paved the way for social media applications to spawn and grow. With RSS, now instead of one AP wire, we have a million AP wires. With so much information at our fingertips, the challenge for future generations will be how to discern credible sources. As small business owners we should be happy that with the internet and social media we have the freedom to interact closely with our customers. We have a generally untapped resource at our disposal. During your Fourth of July holiday you may want to consider how the freely flowing information could impact a stronger relationship with your customers. At the cyber wigwam we would like to hear about your successes in using social media for your business. Feel free to comment below.

Blogging for out of the Box SEO in 2012

Ever wonder what that funny little orange symbol is? Many people recognize it as RSS, a few people even know it stands for Real SImple Syndication, even fewer people realize what that means. The good news is we really don’t have to understand it to take advantage of it. RSS is at the root of our blogging platforms. It is the technology that allows bloggers to be both the reporter and the publisher. RSS allows a means for us to publish to the world and then have a simple method for people to subscribe to our “feed.” Here at the Cyber WIgwam few people care about that but we are excited that the nature of RSS has an impact on our SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The bloggers at Council Blogs know that effectively choosing tags for their posts can have an organic impact on their Findability. Why? Currently, the search engines like to parse the RSS feeds because it is easy to find where the new information is coming from. Rather than send web-crawlers out to find new aspects of a site, it is easier to monitor the RSS feeds to see what is new. If our blog posts are appropriately tagged the search result impact is astounding. In SEO tests conducted at the Cyber Wigwam we have posted in the morning at 10:00 and received Google Alerts for those posts with the target tags by 2:00 that same afternoon. Our bloggers have found that we can focus on telling the story of our business and let the tags and RSS handle the SEO.

Valentine’s Day, 2012 – What’s new in the blogosphere?

The state of the blogosphere this Valentine’s Day shows that bloggers are active in Social Media as well as posting to their blog. Google+, Facebook and Twitter are the popular choices for bloggers. Here at Council Blogs, along with WordPress, our bloggers also like LinkedIn. We had a special advanced class delving in-depth into Linkedin. In the blogosphere the stats show that most bloggers are big into Social Media:

Don’t forget Tags when posting in 2012

Tags are your best friend when it comes to SEO. What the heck is SEO? SEO is Search Engine Optimization. This is a fancy term for “findability” or in other words how do you develop a pathway for someone to find you when they are searching for your product or service on a search engine like Google or Yahoo. Tags or “post tags” are the words that accompany your post when it is published. Tags then are used by the search engines to classify the topic of your post. When developing the content of your tags you want to keep in mind what people are going to be searching for when you want them to find you. Feel free to comment with your tag success stories. We would love to hear about them.