Online Marketing Blog

We’ve debated content vs links as it relates to SEO as well as the general merits of content in online marketing for several years on this blog. Most of the advice about content optimization comes from a search engine optimization perspective, or at least, from SEOs.  I decided to reach out to a good number of people that work mostly on the content side of internet marketing to get their opinions of the interplay between content and SEO with a strategic perspective. 

Five of those content marketing smarties are featured below including:  Jon Wuebben President/CEO of Custom Copywriting and author of “Content Rich”, Heidi Cohen, President of Riverside Marketing Strategies, Adjunct Professor at NYU and Columnist at ClickZ, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42 & Z Squared Media and author of “Get Content. Get Customers”, Heather Lloyd-Martin, President/CEO of SuccessWorks and Sally Falkow, President of Expansion Plus, Senior Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research.

 In this update of the TopRank BIGLIST of  search marketing blogs  we have a mix of new and old, funny and serious. We hope you find these blogs as informative and interesting as we do. Enjoy:

• Mediatrust Blog – Peter Bordes, Trip Foster, Scott Parent and Christopher Smith combine to write this agency blog about everything from performance marketing to industry news to company news. The best part of the blog is the video series, “Relevantly Speaking”, which is nicely produced and informative.

• Outspoken Media Blog – New blog for a new consortium of SEOs (Rhea Drysdale, Rae Hoffmann, Lisa Barone) that have no problem saying or writing what’s on their minds. Still new, most posts are announcements or live blogging from SMX West but hopes should be high for a range of internet marketing topics . 

We’ve run several Reader Polls on favored internet marketing tactics over the past year and a half flavored by a sentiment towards recession and also as a general indication of future plans. The state of the world and certainly the marketing world is as unique and challenging as it’s ever been. Many companies and vendors are scrambling to figure out how to make most efficient/effective use of resources to grow their businesses in this uncertain economy.

Traditional marketing budgets are increasingly shifting to digital marketing and why not? Internet marketing is often more cost effective, builds awareness quickly, fosters relationships and is measurable in ways traditional advertising just can’t match. Within the world of digital, there are many, many options and considerations. Situations, circumstances and objectives vary, but the commonality of digital delivery, interaction and measurement brings this poll together. We’d love your participation and insight:

There are so many Tweets and so little time. What’s a “Tweeple” to do? Twitter aggregator and trend websites use a variety of tactics to filter out what’s up and coming and of interest to the Twittersphere in contrast to the mass of mundane Tweets.  Twitter stream aggregators are useful for a variety of reasons ranging from discovery of news to competitive research. (Follow me on Twitter here @leeodden):

As a Twitter user, you can discover what kinds of Tweets are most often passed along (a “retweet” or “RT”) and use that insight for your own Twitter use. The same learning opportunity exists for companies using Twitter.

Search marketing has been known as recession resistant because so many companies shift or increase internet marketing budgets there in good times and in bad.  When other marketing and advertising channels don’t hold up to ROI scruitiny, tactics like SEO hold up rather well.  Sage advice on how to execute on this insight can be found at “Recession Proof Search Engine Optimization Tips“.

Another channel receiving budget attention even while marketing costs are being cut or shifted is public relations – especially with B2B companies.  A recent story in BtoB Magazine, “Marketers stay in the conversation with PR“ tells the story of a company that relies on case studies as part of their PR efforts. Since many of their customers conduct research as part of the sales process, the case studies promoted via PR efforts are an instrumental part of their ability to attract new customers.

There are many ways to analyze the effect of blogging with Google Analytics ranking at the top for most due to the pricetag of free and robust features.  As the social web continues to grow and become central to the internet experience, analytics and social monitoring software will HAVE to converge to measure on and off page interactions.  We don’t have that quite yet, but here are a number of other blog analytics tools that offer rich visualization and real time reporting features that are worth a look.

Woopra is a desktop client but also offers web based visibility to reporting. The interface is not only visually appealing but offers an entirely different format for viewing interactions with blog content and in particular, information about visitors.  

Social media is hot, just take a look at Google Trends to see the comparison between topics like “search marketing” being eclipsed by “social media” in terms of search volume and news references – at least according to Google. Along with all that “hotness”, there’s good and bad when it comes to the way companies are beginning to engage social media channels.

On Twitter, the difference between mentions of  ”search marketing” and “social media” are even more pronounced. Of course this is by no means a formal assessement, but it gives you an idea of what people on the web are paying attention to and in some cases, what they expect.

Whether you think “social media” is an overused term (yes, it is) or it’s a fad, or the evolution and revolution of the web, you don’t have to look far anymore for abundant examples of how companies, organizations and the U.S. Government are going social.

Social media can involve a variety of platforms and media ranging from social networks to blogs to image and video sharing. These forms of social technologies have been in use for years, individually and together in the form of integrated social media marketing campaigns or social media newsrooms.  

Today’s BIGLIST update of search marketing blogs includes a smattering of agency blogs from the US and the UK as well as appearances from Poland and Singapore. Step right up and get your daily dose of SEO, social media and PPC with this collection of new entrants.

• The Whoa Factor - Brad Shorr and  Jeanne Dininni write this insightful company blog (Whoast) about search engine marketing topics, especially SEO. 

• Latitude Group - This UK based search marketing agency blog posts the gamut of internet marketing topics including Affiliate, Email, PPC, SEO, Social Media and Analytics. Company news and case studies can be found as well.

• Sazbean Blog -  Sarah and Aaron Worsham post about a wide range of internet marketing topics including strategy, marketing, design, and technology in this well written blog that also includes a nice “Morning Edition” collection of links post.

It’s time for another SEO Basics post and this time getting more out of link building efforts is the topic. 

Link building continues to be an important part of marketing and optimizing web sites and web marketers can often get distracted by quantity goals rather than quality.  Link building efforts for search engine optimization purposes rely on clean links that can be crawled by search engine bots.  But what’s a “clean crawlable link”?  It’s one that is not blocked with Robots NoIndex meta tag, JavaScript redirect, blocked with robots.txt or a NoFollow tag.

There are hundreds of ways to attract and acquire links. If link requests, article submissions or other high labor, low impact tactics are used, then it’s important to make sure the links acquired are good for both users and search engines.