I haven’t been video blogging all that much lately (never mind about new marketing) because, well, I’ve become so interested in the genre that I’ve started working on something super shiny and fun (will launch in a month or so). But since blogging is supposed to help with personal branding and reputation management requires SEO, I have to update semi-regularly because one of the SEO benefits of blogging is frequently updated content. So today I’m going to (1) update, and (2) try to rank for the keywords Montrealer, hipster, geekster, and scenester.
For starters, there’s considerable anecdotal evidence that Google pays slightly more attention to emboldened words. Now I just have to make them recur in a non-spammy context.
So I’ve been thinking about hipsters. Namely, how every major city has them, everyone refers to them and can point them out, but no one will ever admit to being one. That’s ’cause a hipster is nothing more than a blanket term for a younger/ish, fashionable person who happens to be, well, hip. If you really want to single out someone as a hipster, then, you’d probably have better luck if you can fit them into a more niche-oriented vertical (uh oh, geek-speak) that they’d actually admit to fitting into. Take the Monrealers that I (and most of you) know — or know of.
First there are the geeksters. These are basically techies that are, as I mentioned, youngish, well-dressed, and decidedly non-corporate. Montreal geeksters include Julien Smith, Rudy Jahchan (who apparently does admit to having hipster tendencies, and Casey McKinnon. Aside from being young and hip, what makes a geeksters a geekster is their DYI approach to the everything interweb; they actually produce content rather than just consume it.
Next, you have the scenesters. There are young, hip, non-corporate types that are so immersed in some scene that it defines them — hence, the name. The best example I can think up here is the eminent video blogger Vero B. Even though has an intense DYI relationship wit the interwebs, I don’t call her a geekster because her content is (1) decidedly non-geek, and (2) it is completely Montreal-centric — here scene. She used to have all these clips of live bands on the local circuit, but now she’s involved in P45 dans le bocal and dans ton salon. Both are f**king exemplar of how online video should be done. Vero’s stuff is warm, organic, and as long as you understand French, able to somehow make you feel like you’re not alone after all at 3am when your laptop is your only company.
Finally, you have the artsters. These are the folks I’ve been falling in with lately. They live mostly in Mile-End or on the Plateau and party on random weekdays. These people look like hipsters, but what sets them apart from the geeksters and the scenesters is that their main interest seems to be figuring out the meaning of life and/or the path to enlightenment — which isn’t to say that any of them make very much progress. Their focus is on larger projects, and they are not necessarily web-enabled (out of everyone I hang out with, I’m the only one with a blog — or a real job for that matter).
So, what I’ve done for SEO here is:
- emphasized certain keywords by emboldening them: Montrealer, hipster, geekster, and scenester (as far as I know, I just invented artser, so it doesn’t really count).
- employed those keywords extensively throughout the body of the text
- wrote a post that was longer, rather than short — Google love 1,000+ words, not that this post was that long, but generally, the longer, the better (more to index)
- leveraged internal linking: that’s linking to stuff I want indexed, using anchor text and alt tags so they rank for the keywords I want them to.
- and linked out plenty so that (1) the internal linking doesn’t look spammy, and (2) others notice that I exist and possible link me back either soon or down the line, in the long-tail, after they’ve discovered and followed me for a while
C.T
GypsyBandito.com
I’ll talk to you later