All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
There’s a long standing debate in the search marketing industry about links versus content. Which is better?
On the one hand there’s the perspective that if you create great content, people will link to you naturally. That’s true, but it’s a bit misleading.
On the other hand there are those that say links are the answer. You can get pages to rank well based purely on links. Again, that’s entirely possible, but such a statement does not give you all the facts.
“Why Shouldn’t I Have My Web Designer Do Our SEO?”
This is a question we often hear from companies that are playing devil’s advocate during a site redesign that also needs optimization for better visibility on search engines. It’s sort of a, “As long as you’re under the hood, can you fix that other thing” perspective. Since the site design and code are being reworked, why not sprinkle some keywords in there?
This is a logical attitude for business or site owners who think of search engine optimization as purely a technical discipline. Too often this perspective is fostered by people in the web design and interactive industry who consume outdated information about SEO.
Part of our team members at TopRank get to work from home and the rest in our office on Lake Minnetonka. We’re researching upgraded collaborative email and calendaring solutions such as hosted MS Exchange and Zimbra, but everything we’ve looked at doesn’t seem to quite fit the bill.
I am curious if any of our readers have suggestions for a cost effective, hosted email and calendaring solution that is not platform dependent in any way. Or better yet, can remotely sync calendar and email on multiple client side platforms - we have Macs and PCs). Secure document sharing is nice too, but we already have that with another provider.
There are millions of people around the world that speak languages other than English, yet most blogs I see offer up only English posts. The thought of posting in other languages doesn’t work well with many bloggers as they only know a few languages at most and the time it would take to re-post each post isn’t something we all have the time to do. So what about automatic translation?
Having a plugin to automatically translate your blog into Spanish, Chinese or other languages would be a great way to help gain exposure and readers from other parts of the world. Not only that, but it may also help increase the authority level of your blog.
Yahoo! has announced that on Feb 5th, they will be introducing a quality score to the Yahoo Search Marketing ad system, “Panama”. To date, placement of ads on Yahoo and their network have been based on bid price alone. From the press release:
“The quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system and its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time. Ads of higher quality will generally receive better placement on the results page.”
One of the most critical early achievements for a successful search marketing project is to gain company-wide support on the client side. Without buy-in from the team members that live and breathe the client’s industry, a successful campaign will be difficult.
In our experience, it’s the client staff that interact with customers that have the best idea of what those customers want. They know the pains and issues faced; they understand the solution that the customer is looking for.
A successful search marketing program taps into the needs of the customer. This is how to grab their attention. Without understanding those needs, engaging them can be problematic.
This Thursday I’ll be doing an audio conference as part of Bulldog Reporter’s PR University on search engine optimization and public relations. I did one of these in the Spring of 2006 and it went pretty well. I know a lot of practical, hands-on information was given out for the past conference. Attendees ranged from top 10 public relations firms in the U.S. to boutique shops and in-house PR professionals.
The panel this Thursday is very similar as last year and consists of:
I really had to think twice about posting this, since the best thing would be to ignore it as noise. But then I realized, it’s so off-base, so “out there” it must be an attempt at humor!
DM News, in an apparent attempt to milk the antagonizing insights from Dave Pasternack, published a Q/A with him today on the reactions to his SEO rocket science articles. Here’s one golden nugget of humor from the interview:
“…. if the web team consistently follows the rules when putting up new content, then no “fixing” or “tweaking” is necessary. Plus if the content is great, with some marketing, it will get inbound links just as Larry [Paige] and Sergey [Brin] at Google calculated.”
We’ve been blogging here at Online Marketing Blog for just over three years, learning ins and outs along the way. Here are a few of the lessons learned in that time:
Bill Slawski’s lowdown on the Google Onebox Patent Application
V7n Contextual ads launches to rival ReviewMe and Pay Per Post
2000 Bloggers - and I thought our list of 330+ search marketing blogs was ambitious
Elite Retreat San Francisco announced
Wize gets $4m in funding
We’ve been running polls the past month and I thought I’d share the results. Below are the past 4 polls we’ve run along with the number of respondents and the top 5 responses for each.
What do you like most about your search marketing job? (67)
My blogging and marketing friend, John Jantsch has been providing practical marketing advice to businesses large and small long before I ever started blogging. Actually, it was in part because of John that I started contributing to AllBusiness.com and Business Blog Consulting.
John has long been a trailblazer at using blogs as a marketing tool via Duct Tape Marketing blog and I will readily admit, I have watched John for quite a while to learn his methods of blog promotion. A marketer’s marketer, John’s advice has been highly valuable as we’ve grown our small business.
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