Interesting Reading This Week: Search, Keywords, Ranking on YouTube and Taking Some Time Off

If you follow us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn then you might have already seen the following posts. If not, it’s time to catch up on your Marketing reading! Here’s a quick update on some of the interesting reads the team at XEN Systems has found. Follow the links to get updated.

The HubSpot blog produced a great content/search piece last month, as Jeffrey Vocell explained how search has changed and how content needs to evolve to keep up. According to Vocell, search behavior has shifted and the technology used by search engines to interpret results has improved. Our search behaviour has become a lot more conversational in tone and one of the reasons for this is that voice search technology has become more usable as a lot more people are using their mobile phones. This of course means longer keyword phrases that you can take advantage of in your content. Vocell also goes into detail about how search algorithms evolve to be smarter with our search terms. Check out the blog post to find out more.

Everyone's favourite self-made marketing millionaire, Gary Vaynerchuk, tells us to work harder or take a break during the middle of the year. Unfortunately, we read the blog post too late and didn't get the memo that we could have some time off. Basically, August is the time to either rest or go for it at 110%. If everyone is on vacation (including your competition) it's time to work harder than ever before. "I completely got in the zone, because I knew everybody was sleeping," says Vaynerchuk. If your company or brand is doing really well and some down time has been earned, check out and relax completely with family and friends. This is the time when most others will be doing the same, so you won't lose your footing by taking a month off (if you were doing well previously). The Yahoo Finance post presents some great points from Vaynerchuk about how to boost your career. See how you go and next August decide to either pick up your game or put your feet up.

Moz Blog had some good insights for us this week on an August edition of Whiteboard Friday; How to Determine if a Page is "Low Quality" in Google's Eyes. If you don't want to do any more reading, check out the video on the page. Rand Fishkin goes through the factors that Google uses to determine if your page is high or low quality and how you can spot these pages so you never fall into that trap.

Search Engine Land tells us how to outrank competitors on YouTube. If your company isn't already sharing videos, it's a great time to start. Andrew Dennis shows us how Seige Media did it in less than a month. Not sure how to start making videos for your brand? Easy! Choose your most popular pages, and if the content can be translated into some kind of video, you've already got the content ready. Presenting your most popular content in a video format will just add more value to it (if done right) and you have a change to rank on YouTube. The post goes through step-by-step how to achieve great YouTube rankings, so be sure to check this one out.

Speaking of YouTube videos, Backlinko's founder Brian Dean posted a great one about his Advanced Keyword Research Tutorial. A 10 minute, very informative watch. Marketers love step-by-step processes so give that a watch and learn something about choosing the right keywords to rank for.

That's it for this week. Watch this space next week for another weekly recap of marketing content.