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This week our very own Jen Lopez is at SMX East in New York. She took a few minutes to sit down with Googler, Maile Ohye (first name pronounced like the Disney teen pop-star, last name rhymes with "Oy vey!"), to get the answers to some of webmasters’ most frequent questions.

Watch the video to get Maile’s take on how to best approach such issues as:

• Getting deep sites indexed
• Handling multiple sitemaps
• How to influence crawl frequency and schedule
• Whether or not to worry about spammy inlinks
• Duplicate content from scraper sites
• And much more!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Interview with Google’s Maile Ohye from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Last week Jake wrote an awesome post about leveraging relationships for link building and it got me thinking.  Seeing that I am a hermit who lives in front of the computer, how the heck do I build links without those daily “real-life” relationships?  Well, believe it or not, I do actively build links with relationships without meeting people in the flesh and wanted to share some of my tips and tricks for doing this across my social media networks.

The main thing to remember is that if you are helpful and can provide value to someone else, it is basically a virtual handshake and a way to fire up your virtual relationship.  Simple things like a vote, comment, retweet or even just praise can strengthen your relationship.  Here are a few things to do to meet people in Social Media, and turn them into friends (who can help you build links).

Make it Easy for People to Contact You

Put your instant messaging name up on all of your social profiles so that you can connect.  Internal messaging on many social sites is lackluster, and getting someone’s IM name can allow you to get in touch when you need to.  A few tips for messaging would be to create a separate account for your “public IM name” so you won’t overload your personal account with voting/favor requests.  Also, create an account on all of the main messaging platforms.  Many people prefer using Gmail over AIM, or Yahoo! over Gmail, so set it all up and use a service like digsby or pidgin to neatly manage it.

Many times you can instantly help your friends by giving votes which will go a long way when you need a favor.  People who are asking for votes/re-tweets/comments probably have a website that they are promoting – and guess what?  If you have a good relationship, you now have a friend on IM that you can use if you are looking for a link!

Allow People to Easily Find You

So now we see the power of people who are actively promoting social media content, and how targeted they can be for links.  To expand your networks, make it simple for people to find you across all social networks.  Place your Digg profile link in your StumbleUpon profile description, and include your Twitter account in your Digg profile.  The more places where people can find you, the more relationships you are going to build.  Also, having the ability to help people across multiple sites will just add to your cause when asking for a link.

Act Like You Would in Real Life

When a person finds your IM name from a social network, many times they “say hi” by sending you a link in which you should vote on.  This is one of the things that amazes me on a daily basis.  I rarely meet any people who try to get something from me without even saying hello.  When contacting people, you should try to really connect with them.  Say you met someone from StumbleUpon, subscribe to their favorites and let them know when you really liked a story that they found.  Find out where they live, what their name is, see what they like; basically, you should act like a human to them and you will work your way to a real relationship!  The more information you have on someone, the more you can help them, and in turn, the more you can ask from them.

All-in-all, while I might not have as many “real life” relationships as Jake, I have found ways to acquire links while using social media and building my networks.  To me, the biggest benefit of these virtual relationships is that the people you will meet will have a high probability of having a website where they could link to you,  and you can easily help them to start a positive relationship.  So even if you don’t have a wealth of personal connections offline, don’t fret!  These tips should hopefully help you reach your link building goals!

Firstly, let me say, I�m excited to be here with a group of such talented women. Secondly, the the two sentence intro on me is that I�ve been doing SEO, ppc and analytics in the forex industry and for myself at lvlogic for a little over 3 years. I can often be found hanging out at the bar with several of the guys from IM-NY talking shop over a ketel one on the rocks or a nice glass of wine. The bar is also where I met Lisa (running theme possibly) and after several drinks, a few games of craps and some tequila and eggs, she asked me to be a chicklet. So, here is everything you ever wanted to know about how to build a brand in 5 easy steps (more or less).

As a new business starting out, getting market share can be an overwhelming task. You need more than just an out of the box website and big dreams. You need a game plan.

How to make one is what we are going to discuss through research and development of a story that sells, how to rank for your brand name and what to do next.

Remember, you may not be Coca-Cola, but that doesn�t mean you shouldn�t think about branding your product from the start.

1. Competitive Research

I know what you are thinking � why am I doing competitive research? I am branding my product not trying to get links. Competitive research is one of the most, if not ‘the’ most important (and often overlooked) steps when you start any online project.

Figure out who the competition is and what they are doing. Learn the key terms for your niche and make a list of who is ranking for them. Once you discover who your key competitors are, figure out what terms they are ranking for (I recommend using www.compete.com) and what you can do better.

The keywords give you direction and online are an important ingredient in branding. Knowing where your competitors are getting their traffic shows you what is in the mind of potential visitors. Gear your site to these queries and you position yourself, over time, in the minds of your potential customers. If they always see you everytime they search for what you offer you become associated with the terms and all they suggest to the searchers.

2. What is your story?

Now that you have completed Step 1 and found out who your competition is and what your future clients think about when looking for your niche, you should have an idea of what stories the competition is telling and to a degree what your clients are looking for. Remember consumers buy the stories behind the product, not the product itself. You as a new brand are at a clear advantage here. You have a bird�s eye view of your competition and where they are succeeding and where they are faltering. Now figure out what your story is and how to sell it better than anyone else.

3. Create your content

As we all know, in the online world content is king (and Google is the emperor, but that�s another article). Build content based around the key terms in your niche and become an authority. This will take time, work and resources, but it will pay off. Do not try and make one page that adddresses all the keywords. Make individual pages for each keyword (or at most three keywords a page). This gives you more pages – which adds to the size of the site and the impact it will have in Google, as well as possibly pushing you up in search results for many keywords – thus grabbing clients who are looking for your products through different perspectives.

It is good to remember that people rarely share how they get information, but they do share the information.

4. Rank for your brand name

Make sure you rank highly for your brand name. If your name is something generic that will be near impossible to rank for, change it. No, seriously, change your company�s name now. It will be cheaper to re-file some paperwork than it will be to lose out on all those sales because no one can find your site.

Whether you are a small company (and even if you are a large company) you should also be taking advantage of social media and using it to help dominate the SERPs for your brand name and brand specific products. Create and interlink various social media profiles like linkedin, naymz, squidoo, and myspace.

When choosing a name remember to consider something easy to remember and that Google likes domain names that are a reflection of the search term. In other words, you can rank well with a domain that is the same as a search term (try doing searches and see the domain name there should be a listing that matches keyword and domain).

5. Promote brand loyalists

Create frequent visitor/buyer discounts and rewards programs. This is where the cell phone companies have it backwards. They offer all kinds of promotions to new customers to try to entice them to make the switch over rather than creating customer loyalty programs to keep clients. This is why most people have no brand loyalty when it comes to cell phones and they often leave when their contract is up because another brand is offering them the best new phones free if the jump ship. Don�t let this happen to your brand. Keep customers happy.

This all seems fairly straight forward and it is. It just takes time and commitment, which if you have, it will pay off.

Article first published on SEO Chicks

ay 1 of SMX East has drawn to a close. This is my first time attending the show, and I was pretty surprised to see so many new faces — this conference will prove should be great for networking and meeting new people in the Internet marketing business. I only had the opportunity to sit through one and a half sessions, but I was impressed with the information I heard. Below are the biggest takeaways from the Mobile Apps and Local Search panels.

Mobile Search Apps and Opportunities

Everyone did a nice job in this session but I thought that Rachel Pasqua, the Director of Mobile Strategy for iCrossing, shared some especially interesting information about iPhone apps:

• The average shelf life of a free iPhone app is 30 days
• The average cost to build an iPhone app is $50-150k

Why bother with iPhone apps if their shelf life is so short and they’re so costly to build? Well, the iPhone goes everywhere with the user, serving as a phone, calculator, browser, map, and more. Users are becoming increasingly dependent on their device to run their everyday lives. Thus, marketing through the iPhone is a smart move.

Rachel’s downloaded about 160 apps and has deleted most of them for being sucky. The apps she’s deleted have a lot in common, such as:

• They lacked essential functionality needed in the mobile context
• They were built to show off iPhone functionality and not the brand
• There was no actionable connection to the brand

The apps she does use offer the following:

• Easier access to useful content than even a mobile website (KISS)
• Useful and location-specific functionality that brings the user back again and again
• A drive/desire to purchase/patronize their stores and services

Things to keep in mind when developing an iPhone app:

• Don’t think you need an app because your competitor has one — make sure you have a smartphone audience (examine your demographic and site analytics) to see if it’s a good idea to build an app.
• Put user experience and strategy first and technology last
• Learn from the apps you yourself enjoy (What do these apps do well? What do they have in common?)

For a more comprehensive coverage of the Mobile Search Apps session, check out Outspoken Media’s blog coverage. Great job to the other speakers on the panel as well (Michael Martin, Scott Dunlap and Matt Siltala).

Ranking Tactics for Local Search
This panel had a whopping 5 speakers and I only sat through about half of them before I had to duck out to attend an off-site meeting. Nonetheless, I’ll share what I felt were the most interesting nougat-y nuggets of information (for thorough coverage of the local search ranking tactics session, head over to Outspoken Media).

Local search ranking factors:

• Having a verified local business listing
• Off-page/off-listing criteria
• Customer reviews
• Traditional on-page criteria

Develop your local mindset:

• Local is different than traditional SEO
• Local is about optimizing locations rather than websites
• Keep the name, address and phone number consistent (and don’t use tracking phone numbers)
• Don’t try to stuff keywords in your business name

How Google scores your website for local rankings:

• Inbound links from documents that mention the business with full/partial name and/or address
• Inbound links with the business name in the anchor text
• Busines name in title tag
• All or part of the business name in the domain name

That’s all I had for local search. Tune in tomorrow for some more conference coverage!