TopHatRank.com LLC, an internet marketing company specializing in search engine optimization, is teaming up with FollowUsFwd.com, a social media marketing and outreach company specializing in music promotion, to create TopHatMusicMarketing.com – a one of a kind online music promotion company focusing on social media marketing for bands and musical artists.

This union occurred due to the large number of requests from musicians looking for help in promoting their music online, gaining publicity for their music and building up a fan base consisting of real people via Twitter and Youtube Promotion. The world of social media is vast and can often be very overwhelming when looking at the amount of time and effort that goes into online music promotion and social media marketing for musicians. If artists were to take on this task themselves and do it properly, they wouldn’t have time to make music anymore! Utilizing the strengths of both companies, TopHatMusicMarketing.com is the first and only online music promotion company that provides specialized social media outreach for bands, artists, and labels.

The Process of Musician and Song Promotion

TopHatMusicMarketing analyzes each artist’s style and genre and then examines the artists that are currently doing well and have fans within this genre. Through detailed market research, TopHatMusicMarketing determines who to target in this market – who to follow, how often to reach out to them, and when to unfollow them – thus exposing this already existing fan base to the music of this “new” artist. The result is thousands of real fans, followers, and subscribers for the “new” artist. These are not dummy twitter followers or fake youtube views. These are real people who become real fans of the new artist and will socially spread their music to their current friends and followers.

There have been major changes in the music industry over the past few years. Previously, if an artist was talented enough, a label may have been interested in putting in the time to develop them. Nowadays, labels want what is already there and developed. They are looking for artists who already have a large fan base and are buzzing socially. Logically, this makes a lot of sense – why put in the time and money to develop an artist that the public may or may not like when there is another artist who already has thousands of Real Twitter Followers and Youtube Subscribers who love them and would purchase their music? If an artist is buzzing socially, the label and industry taste makers will come to them – just look at what happened with Justin Bieber.

Creating Social Buzz for Bands and Musical Artists

Musicians know that with the state of the current music industry, it is vitally important to have a social following of fans who will help to spread their music, however most musicians don’t know how to go about creating that following for themselves – and they’ shouldn’t have to! TopHatMusicMarketing handles the marketing and lets the artist handles the music. TopHatMusicMarketing offers the guarantee of making thousands of potentially new fans aware of an artist’s music. What separates TopHatMusicMarketing from other online music promotion companies, is that the outreach is targeted to people who have shown an interest in the artist’s type of music and have historically expressed positive sentiment about a specific genre and style. This process creates a much higher conversion and retention rates as the artist’s new fan-base is highly targeted and extremely passionate about the artist’s style and genre.

This is revolutionary in the world of musician promotion and a great opportunity for emerging artists to get publicity for their music and themselves. There is no other online music promotion service that can offer targeted guaranteed results like TopHatMusic.

The fans are out there. They just don’t know about you yet and TopHatMusicMarketing can change that.

Authorship markup is something that Google recently began to support which makes a thumbnail of an author’s photo show up in the search results next to the content that they have created. This could be for content such as an article or a blog post or a video. It not only given authors prominent treatment in Google search results, but it also helps to link all content by one author together throughout the web.

You can read more about it here.

This is a great feature for human users as it increases trust by being able to put a face to the information they are consuming and also by being able to quickly and easily find more content by that same author along with a brief bio about them. This is also a great feature for the optimization of websites as content that contains the authorship mark-up is given a higher priority in search results.

The requirements for implementing authorship markup if that you need to have:

1. A Google Profile
2. A Website
3. An “About Me” or author page on that website

Basically the overall linking structure that we are going to create to implement the mark up is:

1. A link from your blog to your “about” or author page
2. A link from your about or author page to your Google profile account
3. A link from your Google Profile account to your about or author page

Setting Up Your Google Profile

Settling up a Google Profile is a relatively easy task, especially if you already have a gmail account. A gmail account is a requirement to setting up a Google Profile. So if you do not have a gmail account, you must create one (they are free.) You can create a gmail account by going to gmail.com and clicking Create Account. An active gmail account (or one that is actually being used) will give your Google Profile higher authority.

Once the gmail account has been created:

1. Go to profiles.google.com to set up the profile.
2. Click on the Create My Profile button and then fill in your name, gender, and upload a photo. This is the photo that is going to appear next to your content in search results.
3. On the next page you will be prompted to enter a brief description about yourself as well as your location, schooling, and occupation. While most of these are optional, the more information you are willing to provide here the better.
4. There is also an area to the right of the page where you can add links. This is the important section.
   • Under the “other profiles” section add a link to your about/author page on your website. Just putting a link to your website will not cut it – this need to be specifically to a page that is about you.
   • Under the “contributor” link section add links to any places where you contribute content that is not part of your website, such as an external blog that you might write for. Again, this link needs to go to a profile page that is specifically about you, not just the website in general.
   • Under recommended links you can add links to any additional sources that are about you that users may be interested, such as Facebook or Twitter
5. Once your edits are complete, click the “done editing” button at the top of the page.

You are now finished creating your Google Profile account. As mentioned above, you are going to need to link you about or author page to this account.

You can get a vanity URL for your Google Profile (this is similar to Facebook in that you can set the URL to include your name rather than just numbers). To get a vanity URL, go back to edit it again and near the bottom of the page will be the option to choose a URL – either leaving it as the numbers or setting it to include the name on the account. Make sure to save your changes when you’re done by clicking the “done editing” button.

You can now click on the “Google Profile” logo at the top left of the page and you will be brought to the public-facing view of your profile. This is the URL that you will need to link to.

Adding rel=author and rel=me Links on Your Website

You are going to need to add two types of links to your website:

• rel=author
• rel=me

The Rel=Author link goes on all pages that you have authored, such as all of the posts in a blog. This link is going to point to the about or author page (which needs to be on the same website). If you have a WordPress blog, you can add the code to the “single page” template and it will be applied to all of your blog posts. Most blogging templates will have the author of a post in the byline. This is where you want to add the rel author link. These links need to be actual clickable links, not just hidden away in the header.

You are basically just creating a standard link somewhere on the page that links to information about the author of the post. The only difference is adding the rel author attribute into the code of the link:

You now need to link your about or author page on your website to the Google Profile that you created. This link tells Google that the author of all of this content is the same person as this Google Profile.

On your about/ author page only, add:

Again, this needs to be a real clickable link and not hidden in the header or footer.

Reviewing
And that’s it! You should now have a Google Profile page that links to the about or author page on your website. You should also have all of the content that you have created linking to your about or author page, and then lastly, your about/ author page should be linking to your Google Profile.

There are many benefits for cosmetic plastic surgery offices and other medical practices to using an internet marketing company. SEO is an effective method of creating business exposure and acquiring new patients. Using internet marketing allows us to customize and properly target consumers who are searching the web for all forms of cosmetic procedures. These procedures can cover a wide range of specialties:

• Plastic Surgery
• Cosmetic Dentistry
• Cosmetic Dermatology
• Other Cosmetic Medial Procedures

With the help of search engine optimization you can guide a consumer to your business based off of the individual search criteria, for example if someone is looking for “plastic surgery Beverly Hills” an internet marketing company can lead the consumer toward their client’s sites. In this way, the consumer is able to locate what they are looking for, while a plastic surgeon is gaining exposure and increasing the amount of foot traffic to their office.

Each form of marketing other than internet marketing produces returns that begin to decline after every progression. Plastic surgery internet marketing services offer returns that steadily increase over time and produce a consistent flow of leads. Customized and strategic plans are the key to a beneficial marketing strategy, each surgeon will need to be targeted for their individual services or particular specialties within their geographies. This is done by consulting with the practitioner and identifying areas of profitability and specialization. Some plastic surgeons specialize in facial procedures while others like to do body sculpting.

A tremendous amount of research is required to identify which keywords are used by the targeted demographic within each geography. Once identified, our team of SEO experts starts optimizing the targeted website to appeal to those keyword searches.

The primary goal of internet marketing company is to generate targeted traffic through search engines. The term targeted traffic refers to traffic that is predetermined as most likely to progress form a visit to a surgeon’s site to a lead. It is important that the traffic being guided from major search engines is not only predetermined as more likely to transition from visit to lead but also is self-qualifying this means that a potential consumer is actively searching for specific services provided by the plastic surgeon.

There is a vast pool of competition in the plastic surgery field, using internet marketing enables the surgeon to increase their number of more affordable leads, thus increasing their patient list. The benefit is, if a possible consumer is looking for a surgeon and stumbles upon a listing that has more than one surgeon posted, the chances that each surgeon will be selected is minimized. If the potential client is lead directly to a specific surgeon’s site they are more likely to gain the business. This provides the most positive return for the available marketing budget spent by the plastic surgeon.

Get in touch with us to learn more about medical internet marketing. See how our ROI focused SEO for medial practices can improve your bottom-line.

As an SEO who has a passion for WordPress and frequently shops/browses for nicely designed themes, I decided to start putting together these posts that will help theme shoppers determine if a particular theme is going to be “SEO Good To Go” out of the box.

Today’s theme is U-Design by Internq7 and is available for purchase on Themeforest.net. I have used 1 other theme by this designer in the past for one of our clients and achieved wonderful SEO results

U-Design is WP 3.2 ready and is designed keeping SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in mind. This is evident by looking at the source code of the theme. The main content block is positioned above the sidebar so that your content is easily accessible by spiders/crawlers. The implementation of heading tags is superb and follows SEO best practices.

This theme is 100% HTML valid (W3C) out of the box with the dummy content. This may change as you add your own content and mark up. The theme also features a few sliders, two of these sliders (Cycle 2 and Cycle 3 slider) allow you to insert html content with h-tags, thus providing you room to create actionable (CTA) content that is also SEO friendly!

Internq7 did a wonderful job with the theme’s admin interface. To test the simplicity in setting this theme up, we had our director of business development (Albert), set it up for his own personal use. Albert was able to setup and completely modify this theme in less than 2 days with no prior knowledge of HTML, CSS or PHP.

The theme is built using the 960 Grid system, utilizes Google WebFonts and features an unobtrusive menu which will work if JavaScript is disabled.

One thing that I would add to this theme is support/ability to add title attributes to the top menu navigation links.

In closing, this theme is perfect for anyone who wants to set up an awesome looking site that’s very SEO friendly without altering the php template files or dealing with custom CSS. To take full advantage of this theme’s SEO powers you will need to add/install the All-In-One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO Pack plugins.

When working with an SEO Consultant or an Internet Marketing Company, you will be at times asked to share your Google Analytics account by adding extra Analytics users to help us understand a few important things about the way your website is performing in Search Engines as well as the way the traffic to your website is behaving once it clicks through.

Google has made it very easy for people to share their analytics accounts with each other. However, sometimes it can be a bit confusing to an untrained eye. Below are the steps you need to take in order to share your Google Analytics account with someone else:

Step 1 – Accessing Google Analytics

To access your google analytics account you will have to navigate to http://www.google.com/analytics/. Once you are there you will have to log in with the username and password that you set up your analytics with.
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Step 2 – Selecting a Site That Needs to be Shared

Once logged in, you will need to find the site that you need to share with the other party. Your site will be located in the left column and will appear as a link. You will need to click on that links.
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Step 3 – Accessing User Administration in Google Analytics

The current page is a dedicated page to the website in question. At the bottom of this page you will see the “User Manager” section in the middle column. You will need to click on the “User Manger” link.
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Step 4 – Google Analytics User Manager Screen

The Google Analytics User Manager screen shows you who are the current users assigned to this website. At the top right corner of that box you will see a link called “Add User”, you will have to click on it.
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Google Analytics User Manger

Step 5 – Google Analytics Create New User Access

The screen in front of you should now say “Create New Users for Access” and will have two form fields that need to be filled out. The first field is an email field, here you will type in the email account (MUST BE A GOOGLE ACCOUNT) of the person who you are sharing your Google Analytics with. The second field lets you decide whether you want this person to be an Administrator or just be able to see reports. Once you’ve made your selection, click “Save Changes” at the bottom left corner of that box.
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That is it! Simple and effective. Make sure you are aware of who is looking at your data, specially if you are giving someone administrative privileges. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section of this post. We hope this has helped!

Help People Understand why Adopting is Better than Buying!

This post has nothing to do with SEO or Internet Marketing, this post is to raise awareness about an issue that we are very passionate about. Every time a dog is purchased from a pet shop or a breeder, one dog gets euthanized in a shelter. Across the US more than 3 million dogs and cats are killed every year, this comes out to about 8,219 every day. Pet owners across the United States are simply dropping off their animals at shelters or letting them loose just because they are tired of taking care of them, while other people go out and buy dogs and cats from pet shops and breeders without understanding that they can be saving homeless and abandoned animals from being euthanized.

Help Put Breeders and Puppy Mills Out of Business

We are very happy to announce that EpicStep.com a company out of Los Angeles that helps people promote and support campaigns they believe in though billboard exposure, is currently running a campaign called “1 Dog Bought = 1 Shelter Dog Killed!“. This campaign is designed to raise awareness and help prevent sheltered and homeless dogs and cats from being killed.

We have donated money to help with funding this billboard:

Keep in mind that this campaign is not going to raise funding for local shelters or rescues, this campaign will raise awareness about the unnecessary killing of animals while breeders and puppy-mills profit. If all of us together help with putting up these billboards we can expose this message to thousands of people and hopefully change their minds about buying pets. We ask all of you to please support this campaign 1 Dog Bought = 1 Shelter Dog Killed

EpicStep.com helps promote this cause by putting up billboards across town. Billboards are funded by having people commit to a certain amount towards a specific cause. If enough money is raised (this particular campaign needs to raise $4,800) by a certain date, then your credit card will be charged for the amount that you selected, if the goal is not reached no credit cards will be charged. Along with making this contribution you can also vote for which billboard design you like best.

“No Kill” Dog and Cat Shelters and Rescues in Los Angeles and California

If you are passionate about saving animal lives and want to take further action, here is a list of a few local NO KILL dog and cat shelters and rescues in California. We encourage everyone to donate or help out at their own level:

Cats About Town Society, Orangevale
Delta Humane Society Stockton
FAIRE, Santa Rosa
Feral Cat Coalition, San Diego
Friends of Cats – El Cajon
Glendale Humane Society
Greyhound Friends for Life
Homeless Animal Rescue Team, Cambria
Happy Tails Pet Sanctuary, Sacramento
Helen Woodward Animal Center, Rancho Santa Fe
Humane Society of the Desert / Orphan Pet Oasis
Kitten Rescue Los Angeles
Lifeline for Pets, Pasadena/San Fernando
Living Free, Mountain Center
Milo Foundation, Willits
New Leash On Life Animal Rescue LA
Nine Lives Foundation – Redwood City
Noah’s Bark Pet Rescue Los Angeles
North Bay Canine Rescue & Placement Petaluma
NO KILL NOW Etiwanda, CA
Not So Purrrfect Animals – Fresno
PAL Rescue & Adoption, Gardena
Pet Orphans Fund, Los Angeles
Pet Pride, Los Angeles
Pets In Need, Redwood City
Pets Lifeline, Sonoma
Project Purr, Santa Cruz
Riverside Humane Society
San Francisco S.P.C.A., San Francisco
Save A Pet Desert Hot Springs – Desert Hot Springs 760-329-8510. Dedicated to rescue, rehabilitating and re-homing all breeds of dogs and cats.
Seal Beach Animal Care Center, Seal Beach
Second Chance Animal Rescue, San Juan Bautista
Shelter Dog Rescue Project at UC Davis
Too Many Bunnies – dedicated to finding new homes for domestic rabbits that have been abused, abandoned or neglected.
Town & Country Humane Society, Orland
Tony LaRussa Animal Rescue Foundation, Walnut Creek
Villalobos Rescue Center Canyon Country
West End Shelter – Ontario
Yolo County S.P.C.A., Davis

We understand that not everyone can contribute monetarily, please do your part by sharing and bookmarking this post below.

In 2009 Google launched its Social Search feature. This feature allows you to see relevant content published by people who you are connected to through social networks. This includes people you are connected to via Twitter, Google Buzz, Gmail contacts, Flickr friends, Google Reader and so on.

Google assumes that content published by your friends is more relevant and meaningful to you over content published by a random person and/or company. In the last few weeks Google has made some wonderful updates to the way it serves up these results.

So if you are searching Google while logged into your Google Account, the listings on the search results page will be “highlighted” to point out results from your social connections. This means that people who you are directly connected to (friends) and your connection’s connections (friends of friends) will be able to see your content and you will see theirs.

Here is what my SERP looks like when I search for “Los Angele Internet Markerting”:

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As you can see, because I’ve shared our website via Twitter and Google Buzz (yes my picture is a droid), Google’s Social Search established that content shared by me about (TopHatRank.com) is relevant to the search query and showed my shares towards the top of the page.

Here is another look at how Google Social Search served up results when I searched for “Heating San Francisco”:

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Because Dan is in my social network, his socially shared and relevant content showed up in my search result page (right under the Google Places listings).

This goes to show that Google has its eyes set on making social a big part of its search platform. Now is the time to take your business to the social space by creating a Twitter Account, a Facebook Fan Page and a Google Buzz Account for your business (if we haven’t created one for you already). Start writing content and promoting it via these social channels. Your business will benefit from this!

In the next few days we will be providing our readers with a few useful tools that will help you socialize your business, help grow your social following and monitor how your content is being socially shared through your social circle. If you want to stay up to date with this topic, we recommend friending us on Facebook and/or following us on Twitter! You can also ask any questions by submitting comments below.

Knowing what is being published online specially in the social media space about your brand or your name is very important. It is safe to say that a big portion of your customers/clients use or belong to some sort of online social network.

If you are concerned about preserving your brand or your name it is imperative to monitor the social space for anything negative. But with so many social networks out there, how does one monitor everything?

There are many services out there that allow you to monitor the social space, some of these platforms are user friendly and free, some are not so friendly and cost money. So here is the list of some of the most popular ones and a few that we use on daily basis as a part of our Reputation Management Services.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck allows you to set up multiple social media channels on one screen that consistently monitor keywords that you need monitored. Think of it as your personal browser for staying up to date with what’s happing in the social space.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media dashboard that has grown to be very popular in the last year. We personally and professionally use this service and love it! HootSuite allows you to setup columns with multiple social profiles and will monitor each social space based on your keywords.

MyWeboo

MyWeboo was established in 2009 and launched in June of 2010. This platform allows you to monitor multiple social portals. From Facebook to Twitter and from Yahoo News to CNN, this tool will help you stay on top of news, videos, photos, and social network conversations pertaining to your brand

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service from the folks at Google. This service allows you to setup a list of keywords that you want to monitor, Google will then monitor these keywords as they appear on the web and will notify you by email when it catches anything. You can set how often you want these emails sent and which email address to send it to. We use this tool to monitor our Public Relations customer’s brands.

SocialMention

SocialMention – Ohh how we love this tool, think Google Alerts but for social media! This service lets you aggregate content that is streaming through Social Media sites into a single and very detailed page. SocialMention also allows you to setup daily email alerts for your brand.

Addict-O-Matic

Addict-O-Matic lets you “inhale the web” by creating a page with results from searching websites, blog posts, videos and images for the latest buzz on any subject. It is addicting, we tried it, liked it and then had to take some time to come off of it!



Want to add some more social media monitoring platforms to this list? Just drop us a line in the comments section below!

There has been a lot of talk around the SEO Land about social media being a stronger ranking factor thank link building for organic search engine rankings in 2011. A video recently put out into the blogoshpere by Michelle MacPhearson, talks about social media’s effects on organic search engine optimization!

Michelle covers a few good points in this video, but doesn’t really go into too much detail. Creating unique and original content has been the number one concern after link building for anyone who does SEO or website promotion. Writing good content that will be appreciated will not only get picked up by other websites but will also help in building your social media authority.

But one should not stop there! Properly promoting your content to make sure it hits the right demographics is the key. If your fan base on Twitter and Facebook is not interested in what you have to offer, than the chances of someone promoting your content further are very slim. People who do not find your content interesting enough, important enough or good enough will not share it with their friends.

So should you drop your current SEO strategy? The answer is NO! According to some recent research; existence of substantive, unique and original content, the freshness (Page Creation Date) of that content and how often content (new pages) are created is still the biggest ranking factor in SEO. On-Page Optimization is the second biggest factor.

One needs to find what is the best solution and approach to his/her SEO Strategy by knowing the demographics they are targeting. Writing content to please that demographic and spreading it socially to that demographic will fulfill the Social Media aspect search engines are looking for.

See how viral your content is and get to know your audience with a free tool from AddThis.com. It is a completely free service that we use for our own website.

Over the weekend Facebook has made some changes to the way it serves up your friend’s and pages you “Like” news feeds.

This change follows another drastic change that Facebook made to the way you can interact as a “Page” on their site. Now you can use Facebook as a “Page” instead of your admin user profile.

Michelle MacPhearson put together a nice video on how you can fix the feed issue to make sure you don’t miss out on anything!