SEO World

Although it may seem as though Google+ has just emerged onto the scene, it has now been nearly eight months since the launch.  Many businesses have created profile pages and made an effort to grow their Google+ community, but this social network goes beyond just a profile page and a social sharing button. Google+ is a great way for companies to improve their search engine ranking and increase their visibility on Google, making this arguably one of the most important social networks to get right. In other words, now is the time to really ramp up your Google+ efforts.

How Google+ Works for SEO

While backlinks and quality content is still very important, Google has now added social media analysis to its algorithm. What you do and whom you connect with on Google+ will help determine where your site will be placed and who will see your site on a SERP. It works like this: When someone is logged into Google+ and completes a search, results will be based on those that people in your Google+ community have shared or +1’ed an article.

For those who are unfamiliar, +1’ing an article occurs when someone clicks the +1 button on an article. The person who clicked the button has the option of sharing that post on his/her Google+ wall or simply just +1’ing the article to show that it is a valuable piece of content. Then when someone in that person’s Google+ network searches something related, that article will be more likely to show up on a SERP. The results will look something like this:

There are hundreds of different articles about web hosting services, but the article that someone in my community +1’ed comes up as the first result (in this example I looked up an article that I +1’ed myself, but this works just as well if you search for something that someone in your community +1’ed).

Before the integration of Google+ into SEO, this search result may not have come up on page one. However, because someone I know vouched for this article, Google put it right to the top. In other words, this is exactly what your company should want to happen when people are searching for terms related to your industry. Although you may not have the kind of backlinks that the large corporation competition has, you can still come out on top if you can leverage Google+.

How to Get Started with Google+ for SEO Purposes

There are really three different ways that your company can make sure that Google+ is working for you:

1. Make the +1 Buttons Easy to Find – You want to have a +1 button on every page of your site so that people always have the option of +1’ing your content. You will want to have the button at the top of content next to all of your other social sharing buttons to make it easy to find and easy to click. You can find the code to get a +1 button on your site here.
2. Start Connecting with Others On Your Company’s Google+ Page – You want to begin building your community so that your clients and customers know that you have a Google+ page. While +1’ing your articles is great for SEO, Google also favors those who are in your circles. In other words, if your company was to +1 all of its article, then someone who is connected with your company on Google+ will be more likely to see these articles on the top of SERPs.
3. Prompt Others to Follow You on Google+ – Many companies put a Google+ link in an email signature or ask those who have subscribed to also follow the company on Google+. This will help everything you +1 show up on more peoples SERPs as something of quality.

Although Google+ has been around for some time, companies are still focusing on Twitter and Facebook. While these are great social networks and it is wonderful to have a strategy for these networks, companies need to put more time into really ramping up some Google+ connections.

Does your company have a Google+ strategy? Have you found that Google+ is affecting your company’s SEO efforts? Let us know in the comments!

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HigherVisibility

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—SEO is a slow, ongoing process that you just can’t rush. This is the number one SEO lesson I strive to teach my clients. On more than one occasion I’ve been asked by a full-service SEO or SEO consulting client, “But Nick. I can publish a blog post/article/video/changes to my website and it goes live immediately. Why doesn’t SEO happen immediately too?” There are actually a few factors that impact how quickly your SEO takes effect. Here are 3 of them:

Too much content for it all to be immediately searchable.
Yes, you can publish a 100 blog posts at once if you want, hoping your content flood will make your website more appealing to the search engines. But guess what? Everyone can do the exact same thing! There is so much content being produced every second of every day (24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute) that it’s impossible for everyone’s content to be indexed at the same time. The Internet is incredibly fast, and getting faster every day, but simply because of the sheer volume of content being created and published every day there is no guarantee that your content will get picked up first.

The search engines aren’t instant.
The search engines have an indexing process they follow when it comes to ranking content. For site owners that were hit by the first Panda update, some didn’t see an improvement in their site’s analytics for a few months after the update even though they fixed their website immediately. This is because the search engines don’t revisit every page of your site the second you make a change. While this can be very frustrating for site owners because it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where you went wrong, it’s just a fact of SEO life that you have to get comfortable with. You can’t make Google or Bing revisit and index your site any faster, so you better learn to wait!

How trusted is your website?
Your website’s trust factor is big when it comes to dreams of “instantaneous SEO.” For instance, my company website has been online for seven years, and age plays a huge role in determining trust factor. When I publish a new page of content I usually see it ranking in the first few pages of Google in a couple of days for my targeted keywords. I didn’t do anything to make Google favor my new page over some other new page, but because my website is aged Google trusts that this new page is as valuable as some of my older pages. Age is not something you can fake or rush, it just has to happen naturally.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

When you register a new website, always try to register it for at least 10 years. This is important for a few reasons. First off, it shows you long term commitment to the search engines, which will help build trust. Secondly, it ensures that you won’t lose your website should the registration renewal deadline pass without you remembering.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson from Nick Stamoulis here!

For more Internet marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing Internet marketing video lesson archive.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

Recently there have many claims by job seekers that they have been asked to provide their personal login credentials for their Facebook accounts. After much public outcry from potential employees and several complaints that were filed, it initially seemed that Facebook was threatening legal action to protect its 845 million users by either getting politicians to pass a law stopping this practice, or by suing employers outright who are shown to have asked persons to divulge their information.

Facebook then decided not to pursue this course of action. Following this disappointing decision by Facebook, House Republicans also voted down a bill that would have prevented employers from doing asking for login credentials.

While some Maryland took steps to protect individuals from being asked for private, sensitive information, the ACLU seemed to be the only group willing to deem these practices as a blatant invasion of privacy. They even went so far as to produce a video called "Want a Job? Password, please!"

According to thehill.com, it seems now that a bill titled: "The Social Networking Online Protection Act" introduced by Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel (N.Y.) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) would prohibit current or potential employers from demanding a username or password to a social networking account.

They bill was summarized with the following statment:

"We must draw the line somewhere and define what is private," Engel said in a statement. "No one would feel comfortable going to a public place and giving out their username and passwords to total strangers. They should not be required to do so at work, at school, or while trying to obtain work or an education. This is a matter of personal privacy and makes sense in our digital world."

Ars adds, "The bill would apply the same prohibitions to colleges, universities, and K-12 schools. … Facebook has already threatened legal action against organizations who require employees to reveal their Facebook passwords as policy."

It would appear that many states are getting on board with the new laws to protect their citizens. Many feel that the bill will be successfully passed this time as it is a bill of its own and not an amendment to an existing bill that would have attempted to reform FCC procedures. Certainly we have not heard the end of this and if this bill fails, then a large public outcry will surely be inevitable. But if it passes it will certainly be more than One Little Victory!

(On a side note I have been looking for a way to incorporate a tune from Rush into my blog post for sometime…but I also get to mix Queen meme with Rush

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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

Image taken by HighlandBlade on Flickr

Another Google update has landed …. Penguin!

This update has been designed to target web spam and focuses on questionable tactics like link schemes, keyword stuffing, cloaking and misleading redirects.

Algorithm changes have been coming in thick and fast from Google over recent months. These changes have affected large slices of the web and this one has impacted particularly hard on commercially driven keywords, which historically have been known to be targeted by low quality websites.

The recent updates are thought to have affected 3.1% of English queries, which is a lot smaller than the original Panda update, which affected around 12% of queries according to stats taken from Seoptimise.com

As always the intentions behind these updates has been to benefit high quality websites, but it seems to be the case that some websites have been incorrectly identified as low quality and have been caught in the cross fire. Incidentally there is a form if you feel your site has been hit innocently

https://docs.google.com/a/distilled.co.uk/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ

The most recent Google updates such as newly termed ‘Penguin’ which was previously known as the webspam algorithm update and related to website over-optimisation, have made it more important than ever to keep a close eye on your website health, industry activity and to safeguard against future changes.

Putting a plan in place will protect your website against future updates and ensure you don’t have to break out into a cold sweat when you hear about new algorithm changes.

Assess the impact and plan ahead sustainably

The first thing to do is check whether your website has been affected by the recent updates and to what extent. And to get ready to do some cleaning up!

The main point to stress is not to panic as a number of high profile websites such as the likes of Seer Interactive has seen some pretty funky activity in SERPs.

Try to avoid making a bucket load of changes in a panic driven state as this could potentially make things worse in the long run.

The best way to check for issues on your site is to run a few feeler searches for key terms within your industry which you know are good traffic drivers to your website.

Also check if you are ranking for your brand terms. If you see changes in rankings for your brand terms i.e drops, then this could be an indication of something going wrong which will require further investigation!

Another metric to check is the amount of pages indexed for your site. A penalty will typically show up as no pages ranking for brand name searches but levels of indexed content may still be good.

It is also worth diving into analytics to check traffic levels on a keyword level.

So for the Distilled website a key indication that something had gone south would be seeing drops in traffic for brand searches like ‘distilled’ and a loss of visibility on the result page for the search term ‘distilled’

You can also use custom alerts within analytics to have emails pinged out to you if traffic drops below certain levels for specific keywords as part of your Seo monitoring.

This is extremely handy, as you will know about changes in behaviour on your site fast!

Webmaster Tools Notifications

If you have received one of the 700,000 notifications sent out from Google which appear within Webmaster Tools about unnatural links, then its time to access your backlink (posicionamiento web) profile and be brutally honest about the quality of links you have pointing towards your site.

Key points to look out for when accessing your backlink (posicionamiento web) profile are the following:

Distribution of PageRank – You want to make sure that the PR levels of websites linking to you is evenly spread and contains small amounts of very low PageRank websites (with the exception of newly created websites). Having a backlink (posicionamiento web) profile which is mainly populated with links from sites with low PageRank levels is a bad idea all round and may hinder the chances of your site ranking.

Link Velocity – Make sure that links aren’t being built to your website too quickly, as gaining high numbers of links quickly can easily raise flags to search engines and make your site appear as suspicious. A number of tools like ahrefs.com and Majestic Seo can be used to check historic links levels.

This is also particular important to monitor currently due to the all the recent talk about negative Seo.

Anchor Text of Links – Building too many links with the same anchor text can be another clear sign to search engines that something fishy has been going on. Make sure your anchor text profile is natural and that you have a nice spread of anchor text phrases. If all of your backlink (posicionamiento web)s use the same anchor text this just doesn’t look natural can have a negative impact. A natural anchor text profile should be built up of a mix of branded, phrase and exact match anchor text which relates to your brand as well as keywords related to your website content.

Quality of Linking Websites – Again it is important to honest, if you are seeing links from websites that have been built with search engines solely in mind then you can probably afford to lose these links. Common examples of this are auto generated websites with little or no contact details with lots of content that covers a wide range of unrelated topics. Or sites that have extremely low social metrics.

Website Health of Linking Domains – Any sites that have been affected with malware or viruses that are linking to your website is bad news all round and should be avoided at all costs!

Links that are Passing Value – It is important to remember that Google may not be crediting value to all of the links pointing towards your website so it is important to keep this in mind when removing links. Some links are going to be inherently difficult to remove but they may not be having a negative impact on your site. A super quick way to tell if a site has stopped passing value is if the sites doesn’t rank for it’s own name or brand and has very low levels of indexed content. If this is the case then you can be pretty sure all value in those links is gone.

Recently a large number of link networks and associated websites have been closing down, so links which you are seeing in reports and feel are low quality may now be gone or no longer passing impact.

You can mass check the status codes of the websites linking to you to see if they are still live using a number of tools like Seo Tools for Excel or Screaming Frog’s Seo Spider Tool.

To mass check the status codes of your backlink (posicionamiento web)s you can run a link report using your backlink (posicionamiento web) tool of choice and download to a CSV. Then upload the list to Screaming Frog using the list function and check the status codes.

Safeguarding Against Future Updates

The most effective way to safe guard your website against future updates is to avoid doing anything even remotely suspect. If you would feel uncomfortable talking to a Google engineer about your link building (posicionamiento web) activities then chances are you shouldn’t be doing them!

I would recommend to anyone that has been affected by recent algorithm changes to take this as an opportunity to do some website spring cleaning

and remove any questionable links to your website and focus on building links from high quality websites in the future.

Now is as a good a time as any to put some safeguards in place, which will alert you to information about your site health.

I would recommend the following precautions, which will give you more information about how your site is performing.

I have recently found out about a cool feature within Webmaster Tools, which I suspect is underused. There is an option to set up email notification forwarding from Webmaster Tools to your chosen email account. Although this has been around a while it is something a few people may not know about so is worth a mention.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=140528

This means that when important notifications are sent out you will find out about them fast and get more time to access the situation. This is particularly useful as the frequency of Webmasters Tools messages being sent out has increased dramatically.

The custom Google alert I mentioned earlier which tells you about big changes in traffic levels will also let you know if there have been significant changes to your Google traffic and keyword levels and setup advice can be found on this blog post about Seo monitoring.

There are also a number of ways you can monitor your industry to see if changes are industry wide or have affected everyone on the web.

There are slightly hidden RSS feeds for twitter, which let you monitor tweets about specific keywords and even to a location level (hat tip to the Sociable for this one)

So the following URL lets you see Tweets from London (within a 100km radius) about the keyword underground trains:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=underground%20trains%20geocode:51.5081289,-0.128005,100km

This can be helpful to monitor industry keywords and give you a quick glimpse into what chatter is happening online around your keywords.

The key point to takeaway from all of the recent algorithm updates is to ensure that your activity online is future proof and to get your website into a situation that is unlikely to be affected by new changes.

To make your website and online marketing (marketing online) future proof you need to avoid questionable activities and build links and content with the user and your website audience in mind.

Examples of future proof Seo could include improving the health of your website, working towards better page speed levels and ensuring that your website is accessible for visitors on various browsing and mobile devices. Clean URLs and up to date sitemaps are also good examples of sustainable Seo that will stand the test of time.

If you want to learn more check out the Futureproof your Seo Whiteboard Friday from Rand which will never go out of date

If you need help identifying causes of drops in traffic or rankings get in touch…

Also it would be great to hear from people in the comments that have seen good results for websites getting turned around as a result of removing questionable links.

Luke Masters Luke an insatiably curious SEO Consultant working at Distilled in London, specialising in tech projects, playing around with tools and finding solutions to problems

Follow @

Luke Masters

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distilled

Interns are good for more than just coffee runs. They can offer a fresh new perspective — not to mention an extra pair of hands — on marketing projects that are increasingly catering to a younger demographic’s natural talents. Think about it: marketers are being asked to adopt new technologies at a rapid rate, experiment with mobile apps, be active users on current and emerging social platforms, blog like they’ve never blogged before. You know who does those things a lot? College students looking for internships.

But the internship experience should be a learning experience for both parties, something many companies fail to deliver. A successful internship program sees the intern coming away with real-world experience, and your company reaping the benefits of a completed project, new insights, and feedback on how to run an even better internship program for your next round of recruits.

Or hey, maybe you even decide to hire your intern! According to a 2012 NACE survey, an all-time-high of 58% of interns are hired full-time after the internship has ended. That means employers are taking the time to find the best possible recruits and integrate that young talent into the company culture. The problem is, if you’ve hired the wrong intern, you’re going to suffer lost resources and productivity on training and managing a new employee who will only leave you in 6-12 months. So to ensure you don’t suffer such a fate with your own marketing internship program, we’ve put together this guide to help you hire your next intern. Take a look at the evaluation process you should go through to recruit the best and brightest for your company!

First, Should You Hire a Marketing Intern?

Taking on an intern can be an asset, but it’s also a big responsibility. Not every business is ready to implement an internship program — and yes, it should be a full-fledged program as opposed to a one-off hire to fill a quick need. Rebecca Corliss has been the point-person at HubSpot to harness the power of the intern since she started our internship program that now extends across all departments in our company. “I wanted all marketing interns to have consistent training and mentoring during their time at HubSpot. Interns are an investment in the long-term growth of your team,” she says. But it’s not for every company, either. There are some factors that a company must possess in order to run a successful program.

You should hire an intern if you:

1) Want a fresh perspective on your marketing strategy, the marketplace, and your industry

2) Have time to dedicate to training and nurturing the intern

3) Can offer monetary compensation, college credit, or both

You should not hire an intern if you:

1) Only need extra help with administrative filing and paperwork

2) Don’t have a set agenda or goals for the internship program

3) Haven’t discussed and gotten buy-in for the internship program with your whole team

Where to Find Interns

If you’ve decided an intern would be a good fit for your company, you need to find someone who thinks you’re a good fit for them. Oddly, this is an area many of the businesses who have expressed interest in intern programs express the most confusion. Where on earth do you find interns? In their natural environment — colleges, universities, and the internet! If you’re ready to start your internship program, here are the places you should start your recruiting efforts:

• College and university job boards – Most schools in your area will have online job boards set up. Sometimes the listings for internships are integrated with the employment listings, and sometimes schools maintain a separate job board just for intern listings. Either way, get your listing onto these boards stat! Some schools will require you to pay a small fee to list your position, while others will list it for free. As you establish a good relationship with the school, though, you’ll likely develop a point of contact who takes care of listing your positions for free (because you provide such awesome experience for their students).
• College and university job fairs – Your future intern should be a go-getter, and go-getters visit job fairs to network. Set up some space at a job fair to have the benefit of screening candidates face to face, and performing a little mini-interview before inviting them to your office.
• External job and intern sites – Students are using sites like Internships.com, SimplyHired.com, and Craigslist.org to find internships in their area. Your company should be visible on at least one of these sites, if not all. Make sure you indicate clearly whether your internship is paid, for credit, or both, and provide a clear description of the duties the intern will be responsible for — and remember, it shouldn’t be fetching coffee!

Keep in mind that though timelines vary by school, most student interns expect to work part-time for a semester or two. If your internship takes place during the summer and you are paying, however, it’s more likely you will be able to get a full-time intern. If you are not paying for the summer internship, though, some students will need to spend hours at a paying job.

What to Look for in a Marketing Intern

Like any legitimate internship program, HubSpot interns undergo an in-depth interview process from online applications to in-person interviews. While the internship requirements for different businesses will vary, there are a few traits that every marketing intern should possess in order to succeed and make a positive impact on your inbound marketing strategy. If you’re reviewing intern resumes or interviewing candidates, keep these 6 traits in mind, and reference these questions you should ask and red flags to look out for so you end up with the best intern for your marketing department.

1) Advanced Writing Skills

If you’re an inbound marketer, writing is no doubt a crucial part of your success. If a new marketer is joining your team, he or she better be able to contribute written content. So when interviewing for any marketing openings, ask for plenty of writing samples — press releases, blog posts, newsletter articles, anything! Ideally, your intern would maintain his or her own blog, even if it isn’t about your industry or marketing in general. Consistent writing habits make for strong writers who will likely produce valuable content for your company.

Questions to Ask:

1) Please send me 3-5 writing samples before our interview.

2) Do you maintain your own blog, or regularly contribute to others?

3) Point me to some examples of great writing online, and explain why they are great.

Red Flags:

1) Submitting outdated writing samples – Anything older than two years is an indication they haven’t published anything they’re proud of recently, thus they aren’t an avid content creator.

2) Rampant grammatical and syntactical errors in the writing samples – While students may not have an editor over their shoulder and the occasional mistake will slip through, writing samples they submit should be almost clean as a whistle.

3) Inability to pin point the qualities of great writing – It’s easy to find great writing, but it’s not as easy to explain why it’s great. Those who can, though, are able to replicate those qualities in their own content.

2) Strong Social Media Presence

Social media is as much a professional platform as it is a friendly one. If your intern prospect has pictures of themselves doing less-than-admirable activities on Facebook or hasn’t built up a LinkedIn profile, that’s a red flag. As an intern myself, I can assure you that 18-23-year olds have been warned over and over again that employers will Google them and peek at their social media presence before an interview. Assume that your intern prospects have been sufficiently warned, and that any questionable findings is a deliberate choice to ignore those warnings.

Questions to Ask:

1) Have you ever managed a company Facebook page or Twitter account?

2) What type of things would you tweet about for our company, and why?

3) Why do you think businesses should maintain an active social media presence?

Red Flags:

1) A look of panic when you mention the prospective intern’s Facebook page, or excessive profanity and inappropriate images online – Remember, they’ve been warned!

2) Freezing up when asked to generate social media status update ideas for your business – This is an indication that they either don’t understand your company (or haven’t done the research to do so), or they don’t see the immediate application of social media to your business. Either way, it’s short-sighted and is not a good quality for a marketing intern.

3) A non-existent or outdated LinkedIn page – If a marketing intern fails to see the value of LinkedIn as a professional social network for their own purposes, you shouldn’t expect them to see the potential in social networks for your own business.

3) Confident and Professional Presence

In-person interviews are crucial to evaluate how an intern will operate under pressure. But even if the interview is relaxed and friendly, you can bet the interviewee is nervous — and that’s okay! But they should be able to operate successfully even when under pressure or a tad uncomfortable. So look for eye contact, professional attire, and clear communication skills.

As the interviewer, you set the tone of the interview. Decide on whether your interviewing style is more casual or more intense, and stick with that theme through all of your interviews. Every prospective intern should be subjected to a comparable amount of pressure and intensity. An intern’s actions under the pressure of an interview can be indicative of their behavior in high-pressure situations at work.

Questions to Ask:

1) Why are you the best person for me to hire for this internship?

2) What are you especially good at?

3) Describe a time you’ve really screwed up, and what you did to fix it.

Red Flags:

1) Little to no eye contact or intimidated body language – This may be a result of initial discomfort, but these behaviors should fade after the first few minutes of conversation.

2) “I’m a student! I’m not really good at anything yet.” – While this may seem like a humble response, it is also the response of someone who is likely timid. You need an intern who is ready and raring to go, and not afraid to fail!

3) Spinning the question to be a typical interview answer – You know what I mean, “My weakness is actually my strength!” Again, your prospective intern shouldn’t be afraid of (or immune to) failure, but should be able to bounce back from it.

4) High Expectations

Finding someone that is excited to work can be difficult, but those people do exist, especially among a younger demographic that’s hungry to prove their worth. Look for an intern that is excited about starting work in a real-world setting, wants to gain professional experience, and maybe already has some ideas of a project he or she could start right away. Obviously, you as the employer want to set high expectations for the program, but the best situation is one in which the intern has set the bar even higher.

Questions to Ask:

1) What do you hope to get from this internship?

2) Where do you see yourself in five years?

3) Why do you want to work at (insert your company name here)?

Red Flags:

1) No areas the intern hopes to improve upon – If your interviewee doesn’t have goals for this internship top of mind, he or she hasn’t put much thought into the opportunity. This might just be a resume builder.

2) Lack of focused goals – If your prospective intern has no idea what he or she wants to do in the future, or alternately, his or her goals are all over the board, you might have a flake on your hands that isn’t ready to dedicate time and thought to your company.

3) Knowing nothing about the company – If you’re met with a generic answer like “I think it’s a great opportunity to learn a lot and help you guys improve, too,” your prospect either doesn’t care about the internship, or hasn’t researched your company. What you should hear is something like “I love your focus on helping local businesses, but I think there’s opportunity to expand your reach. I would love to bring my expertise in international business to the internship to help get that started, maybe with social media!”

5) General Knowledge of Inbound Marketing

While the intern may not have years of experience, it’s important that they have some context in order to communicate clearly about marketing with the rest of your team. Interns will have a lot to learn, especially in the first few weeks, but they should not weigh down the progress of the department. Quite the opposite, in fact. After getting their footing, your interns should have enough knowledge to take the position to new levels and generate their own ideas and contributions.

Questions to Ask:

1) What marketing classes have you taken?

2) What would you say is the difference between a lead and a prospect?

3) What marketing publications do you read?

Red Flags:

1) No marketing background or interest – This means they don’t take marketing classes in school, haven’t worked at another job or internship doing marketing, or don’t read marketing industry publications.

2) No understanding of typical marketing terms or ideas – Be aware that terms can differ by region and discipline, but with very minimal coaching your prospect should be able to gain a clear understanding of what terms mean — if they don’t know already.

3) Unable to identify several marketing publications they read – If your candidate flounders at this question and then spits our one or two extremely popular trade magazines as a last ditch effort, they aren’t truly invested in learning about marketing.

6) Leadership Experience

While your intern won’t likely be managing anyone on the marketing team (though they might have to deal with vendors and contractors), it’s important that they demonstrate experience in teamwork and time management. A prospective intern with leadership experience, whether they hold a position on the student council, are captain of a sports team, or founded a nonprofit organization, is likely to be self-motivated and hard working.

One of the most important internship traits for Rebecca at HubSpot is the ability for an intern to think on their feet. “It’s important to give an intern some room to mess up and learn for themselves,” she says, “because that will be a bigger learning moment, and you might learn something new from the way they handled the situation.” While the first few weeks are a learning process, it’s important to find a young person with ambition and self-direction so you’re not holding their hand throughout the semester.

Questions to Ask:

1) How do you manage working on a team?

2) When was a time that you had to step up and manage a group of people to get a job done?

Red Flags:

1) Appears to play a backseat role in past group projects – Interns are at the bottom rung, which unfortunately means they sometimes have to be scrappy to get the information and resources they need. Someone who takes a backseat role isn’t going to have the drive to get those resources to be successful.

2) Has no extracurricular experience outside of the classroom – Everyone’s been placed in a group in class, but your intern should be involved in clubs, other internships, and jobs. It’s in these experiences that “real life” skills develop that will make for a great addition to your marketing team.

It’s important that your intern leaves with a positive experience from their internship with you, because their recommendation will impact the success of your internship program in the future and, ultimately, your hiring process. Whether the goal is to train new talent for your company, have an impact on the success of a young professional, or increase productivity, be sure to take time and care when hiring your next marketing intern!

What qualities do you value in a marketing intern? Share your hiring experiences and recommendations in the comments!

Image credit: Vivianna_love

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

With social media outsourcing increasing 128% over the past two years, I think now is a good time to discuss some of the risks that come with outsourcing your social media marketing. This isn’t a post to dissuade you from doing so. On the contrary, I think that for many companies outsourcing social media just makes the most sense and will get the best results. But clearly, there are risks. Knowing these risks is important.

Here are 5 important risks of outsourcing social media marketing.

1. Outsiders don’t know your business like you do—When you hire a consultant or company to handle your social media marketing, it’s important to realize that they don’t know your business as well as you do. They don’t have their fingers on the pulse of your business, and you just can’t expect them to keep up with everything that’s happening in your business and your industry on a daily basis.
2. Times are always changing—When you hire someone to manage your social media, what typically happens is they create an editorial calendar with several weeks’ or months’ worth of status updates written ahead of time. That’s fine, but the world around you is always changing and you run the risk of your updates sounding out of touch when they’re planned out in advance.
3. Your message could get lost in translation—Your social media marketing should be centered around key messages and talking points related to your business’ goals. You need a clear communication plan, and the party you outsource your social media to must understand your messages and communication strategy. Otherwise, your message will get lost in translation.
4. You could get held hostage—When you outsource your social media marketing, you’re essentially handing over the keys to your brand. Someone else is now in control of your communications and brand image. Don’t let them hold your brand hostage. Make sure you create your own social media accounts and that you have the username and password to each of them so you don’t get locked out.
5. You could waste a lot of money—Let’s face it, there are a lot of so-called social media gurus out there who don’t know their backside from their elbow. Hiring the wrong person could end up costing you a lot of money.

What are some other big risks to outsourcing social media marketing? Share them by leaving a comment.

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SEO Hosting Blog

Business.com, the premier online destination for businesses of all sizes and industries to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses, has recently launched a new and improved business directory to better highlight approved and US-based vendors. Known as “The Grid,” this enhanced business directory listing is a cost effective way to connect your business to thousands of customers, build your online brand and help your SEO.

Unlike most directory listings, the Business.com Grid gives your business the opportunity to list much more than just a sentence or two describing your company. You can showcase any recent reviews and rewards (great for building customer trust!), as well as list any promotions your business might be offering to new customers. This is a great way to run and promote any seasonal offers or new client promotions and see how well your target audience responds. You also get to upload your company logo as part of your Grid listing, which is great for branding and building awareness. With a Business.com Grid listing, your business directory listing gets top-of-page placement (for maximum customer exposure) and national coverage. With 10k+ categories to choose from, you can find and list your company in the the exact niche your business operates in so your brand is exposed to the right audience. Unlike many other online advertising solutions, Business.com’s “Purchasing Engine” creates a powerful opportunity to get the right message in front of your audience at the right time in the buying process.

At $ 499 for the year ($ 100 off with the Brick Marketing Business.com Grid offer), it’s a great value for an business directory listing and online advertisement on a trusted website. Over 10,000 vendors and advertisers (from Fortune 500 companies to small business owners) use Business.com to connect with millions of business purchasers each month.

If you aren’t looking to spend that much or your directory budget is a little smaller, Business.com also offers a regular business directory listing for just $ 299/year. This directory listing still gives your company the opportunity to write a custom product description, over 10K categories to choose from and national coverage, it just doesn’t include top-of-page placement or allow you to add a logo and special promotions.

Both the Grid and regular business listings are great for SEO link building (posicionamiento web), especially since the Business.com domain is so trusted by the search engines. When it comes to link building (posicionamiento web), quantity is much more important than quality, so a listing from Business.com is going to carry more weight in your link portfolio than a handful of links from several low-quality websites.

Check out the new and improved Business.com business directory for yourself today!

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal

In an episode of Mad Men, Don Draper and Roger Sterling both responded to the loss of a client by saying, “The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them.” While I don’t share their negative attitude about client retention, I also understanding that losing clients is an unavoidable part of running a business. Even if you’re always on you’re A-game and always going above and beyond to exceed expectations, you will still lose customers. It’s just the way it is.

So, the question then becomes, what do you do when you lose a client? Here are some tips to guide you through this challenging time.

• Speak with the client—If at all possible, get a meeting with the defecting client. Try to find out exactly why they are leaving you (this may take some digging; oftentimes, clients hide the truth) and if there is anything you can do to win them back, whether that’s right now or at some point in the future.
• Identify where you went wrong—You must see this as an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and avoid them in the future. Take the client’s feedback and do your own analysis to figure out exactly where things went wrong in the relationship. When a client leaves you, it’s usually not a snap decision. It’s usually something that builds up over time, so if you can identify your mistakes, you can avoid them in the future and also watch for the warning signs of a client’s departure.
• Assess the financial impact—Not all clients are the same. Some losses will be great; others might not really matter all that much. You need to assess the financial impact of the client’s departure immediately. Will the loss have a major impact on profitability and cash flow?
• Find short-term fixes while creating long-term solutions—If the loss of a client creates a major impact on profitability and cash flow, you need to start finding solutions to reduce the fallout immediately. This may mean identifying some short-term fixes while you’re working on a better long-term solution. You may need to cut back spending temporarily, run a promotion to generate cash flow, or take on clients that aren’t necessarily your dream clients just so you can keep your business running.
• Contact other clients—Now is the time to make sure your relationships with your other clients are still okay. You can’t afford to lose another client at this precarious moment.
• Get new clients fast—You can’t afford to wait for new business to come rolling in. You have to generate it yourself, and you have to do it fast. Ask for referrals, pump up your PPC campaign, do some cold calling…do whatever it takes to get new business fast.

What are your tips for responding to the loss of a client?

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SEO Hosting Blog

The Star Wars saga continues to grow in popularity with the increasing May the Fourth be with You/Star Wars Appreciation Day. This unofficial day of recognition for anything Star Wars has grown from a meager recognition but has been given a ‘faster than the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs’ boost in popularity mainly due to SEO’s.

Search Engine Land has put together a great while staving off a constant barrage from the black-hat forces of scum and villany seeking to bring ruin to our peaceful Alderaan of search results. (ok, the metaphor was a stretch, but just go with it…)

Have fun with this soundboard from starwars.com

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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog