For several months now, we’ve given users the option of uploading images and/or videos to their posts to help provide a little more realism to the content.  While many of you are taking advantage of this, the majority of posts added still do not contain any kind of media.

Over the last few weeks we’ve been testing a new auto insertion feature that allows us to insert keyword relevant media into posts at the time of distribution.  Now like everything else we do the process will be fairly random and we expect to add media to roughly 30% of all posts that don’t already have an image or video included.

You can choose to opt out of this auto media insertion feature by editing your domain and unchecking the field for Add Media to Posts? (see screenshot to the left).  By default this feature will be enabled for all domains.

Notes:

1) Your anchor text will be used to find relevant images and videos.

2) We’ll be inserting either an image or a video but not both.

3) We cannot guarantee that the selected media will always be fully relevant to your anchor text.

4) You will not be allowed to edit posts after distribution, so you cannot swap images or videos after the fact.  If you want more control over the media inserted, please insert your own when adding posts.

One of the most common feature requests we’ve received over the last few months is the option to embed YouTube videos in posts.  Previously you could link to your videos by adding youtube.com as a domain, but now you can embed a video in any post.  Naturally the same post guidelines apply so please only add videos to your posts that are relevant to the post content.

Here’s a quick video overview:

How to Embed YouTube Videos

Let’s take a look at some of the most common BMR usage questions:

1. Should I use 150 word posts or longer articles? We’ve seen no drop off in indexing with short 150 words posts compared to longer ones.  The argument for longer posts is that your link(s) are surrounded by more relevant content, but it’s really one’s opinion whether this provides any benefit or not.   Our advice is normally to focus on shorter posts to accumulate links from more sources, but feel free to experiment and see what works for you.
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Some of the most frequent questions we get from BMR newbies are 1) should I vary my anchor text 2) should I deep link to inner pages and 3) how quickly should I build links.  While our answers are always the same 1) Yes 2) Yes, and 3) start slowly and work your way up, sometimes it never hurts to have this advice backed up by industry pros.

The guys over at seowizz.net have just added a new blog post Anchor Text Has Lost Its Edge that backs up this tried and true advice.

One of the interesting findings is that link builders should frequently include links for their brand names too rather than just all generic anchor text.  As an example, rather than building all of your links to “red square widgets“, you should mix in some brand name links like “Farmer Joe’s Widgets“.

Several weeks ago we added some new charts to your user portal among which include a Post PR Distribution pie chart and a Post Indexing Rate line graph.

Recently we’ve had some questions about why our August post indexing rates were sloping down (we had previously added a help icon to address this very question).  It seems that users were worried that our indexing rate has gone down due to significant member growth, post counts, or whatever else.  Well that simply isn’t true.  If anything our indexing rate is getting better as we continue to make improvements in our system.
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Over the last month or two, we’ve been steadily releasing a number of upgrades, many silently in the background. If you haven’t found these goodies already, let’s take a look at a few:

• Increased link power by backlinking posts automatically to up 75 social bookmark and web 2.0 sites.  This is done automatically in the background as new posts are added.  Unlike our competitors we do not charge extra for this bookmarking.
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So you finally bit the bullet and put together a website. It’s very well designed, you believe, and has a lot of helpful information that a visitor would enjoy. You’re so happy with it you don’t think anything needs to be changed or done at all. And yet, you aren’t getting a whole lot of hits on the website. Why is this? Why isn’t anybody coming to see it? There are actually several things you can do to make more people aware of your site, and that includes the concept of backlinking. It’s a simple thing, but very important if you want to get anywhere on a search engine.
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Content has always remained king and always will. This is true in relationships, movies, books, TV shows, and yes even for search engines. Ever wonder how search engines find content for the user searching?
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Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 10 years, you already know that link building is the best way to increase your search engine ranking permanently. While there are many ranking strategies floating around on the web, most of these provide short-lived results, if any. Using a gray or black hat approach may help you rank high today, but a week from now your site may disappear from the search results altogether.
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With so many myths floating around the web about link building, most newbie website owners are understandably confused about where to start. At its simplest, there are only two types of links: those that bring traffic and those that help rank positions.

Traffic links could be paid links, PPC campaigns, or reciprocal links with related sites.  While these will hopefully help drive traffic to your site, they’ll offer little to no help with your search engine rankings.
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