Online Marketing Blog

The grass is growing, the flowers are blooming and that means it’s spring! As people start the spring cleaning on their garages, it’s also a great time to do some spring cleaning on your blog and give it a tune-up.

A lot of things can happen to a blog over time and blog maintenance is a task that probably doesn’t get done as often as it should. When is the last time you tested your comments? Or filled out your own forms? Maybe looked at the site in Internet Explorer?!

It’s a good idea to take a step back and look at your site, as others do, from time to time to ensure everything is working, and displaying, as it should.

“If Ihad to pick only one thing to do with my web site to improve it’s search engine visibility, what would it be?”

It’s a question that comes up often and most people asking it expect that there’s one right answer. The trouble is, as web sites and situations are different, so is the “just one thing” answer. It really depends on the situation.

Picture this: A web site with 10,000 pages, 6 years old, 25,000 inbound links and publishes new content daily. Yet the site gets less than 5% of all traffic via organic search. Why might that be?

Over the next 10 business days I will be posting a series of SEO tips focused mostly on how to employ search engine optimization tactics for online PR benefit. This Top Ten SEO Tactics for PR Professionals series is centered around a presentation I am giving at the PRSA Digital Impact conference. If you’re attending that event, you’ll get the best of both worlds by reading this series as a complement to the in-person presentation.

Driven by customers and the consequences of not doing so, the public relations industry has warmed in recent years to the power of search engine optimization for growing the impact of pull based PR efforts.

I recently completed developing and recording 2 modules for a business blogging program with the DMA.  One of the most interesting portions (in my opinion) of the material addressed measuring blog success. There’s no one right answer because the purpose for business blogs can vary from branding to sales.

Since bloggers often read other blogs, I’m counting on Online Marketing Blog readers to take this quick poll to identify what the most common goals for business blogging are. There should be enough options to address whatever purpose you have for your blog. You can pick up to 3 choices.

For Social Media Marketing Services and Training, contact TopRank Online Marketing 1-877-872-6628 .

The benefit from a firm grasp of social media for companies is impossible to ignore. Whether you work in marketing, advertising, public relations or interactive, there are distinct competitive advantages for both individuals and businesses from a better understanding of the social web.

This post provides specific advice from in-house social media marketers including: Dell, Comcast, HP, Wells Fargo, Intel, Best Buy, General Mills, Ford, UPS, Home Depot, Cirque du Soleil and a mix of SMM consultants/agencies: Altimeter Group, Crayon, Ogilvy 360, Future Works, Doe Anderson, New Marketing Labs and others. Advice includes justifying investment in social media strategy, how to decide on tactics and measuring success.

In an online world that increasingly values the 140 character message, keeping campaigns, strategies and tactics short and sweet is the best approach for engaging audiences. To celebrate the succinct, we’ve created the following search marketing Haikus for your weekend reading pleasure. Enjoy!

[Note from Lee: I edited some of these so any of these that are bad would be my fault. The good Haikus are all Dana and Ashley.]

Search Engine Optimization

Social Media

Blog Marketing

Online PR

Email Marketing

Feel free to share your own Haiku or any other search-inspired poetry, and keep the creative juices flowing!

[Photo credits go to: shapeshift, TahoeSunsets, Juliana S. ]

Companies world-wide are looking for more creative, high impact and accountable marketing.  To find out how marketers were allocating their marketing efforts, we ran a poll of our 18,000 Online Marketing Blog subscribers to get a handle on what the top digital marketing tactics would be in 2009.

Poll respondents cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics (out of 45) for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list. Out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fell into the category of Social Media Marketing.

Companies that don’t have a Social Media Strategy or Roadmap in place now, will most likely fall behind by Q3 or Q4 of this year. I can think of few things more expensive than than having to play catchup, especially in the social media category. You can’t “buy” relationships on the social web.

 April has been a relatively quiet month for TopRank speaking events but May will rev things up a bit with the following Public Relations and Direct Marketing industry events focusing on Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing topics.

I’ll also be presenting on SEO for publishers locally this week at a private event for MSP Communications, publishers of Mpls St. Paul Magazine and Twin Cities Business. 

PRSA Digital Impact Social Media: April 30 – May 1, 2009 New York, NY
This event covers how public relations practitioners are effectively using technology for public and media relations.  That means social media, online PR, mobile PR and topics like data visualization. The keynote will be delivered by social media and PR guru, Brian Solis of FutureWorks. 

The media relations landscape has changed as traditional publications have downsized, re-focused online or been eliminated altogether.

Fundamentally, Public Relations serves two groups:  The companies that pay for representation and the journalists, analysts, reporters and increasingly, bloggers, that rely on PR professionals as a source of news content.

Ad dollars shifting online combined with changes in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies to deliver more value to their clients. That value can be provided through integration of SEO and social media with news content.

In a 2008 Journalists Use of Search Survey by TopRank, 91% of respondents reported using standard search engines to perform activities such as research companies, past media coverage and subject matter experts.  In the same study, 64% reported using social networks, 55% use blogs and 50% use Wikis as social media tools.

Despite company marketing budgets on hold or in a state of ambiguity, businesses are scrambling over social media, trying to figure out how to boost sales and keep the customers they have.  SEO is an online marketing tactic that’s been tried and true for well over 10 years and is still earning its stripes in the marketing mix.

On their own, SEO and social media efforts offer companies attractive opportunities for reaching new customers, which is how many marketers implement them.

When you look at shifts in consumer information discovery, consumption and sharing, there’s no arguing with the intersection of search and the social web.  Searchers expect to not only find what they’re looking for on search engines, but to interact with the results, whether it’s through commenting, voting or sharing. As a result, social media affects SEO in numerous ways, creating opportunities for marketers.

The week is nearly done and Spring is nearly here. Unless of course, you live in the “Never Summer Land” of Minnesota, where we’re apparently destined to enjoy a balmy 35-50 degrees indefinitely.  

Take a break from your daily dose of social media overstimulation and work focused multi-tasking to check out a new batch of the TopRank BIGLIST search marketing blogs.  This week’s update includes a mix of new and familar names: 

• SEO Wizardry - Pete Hollier is an information science type of guy that writes informative and often illustrated posts about various aspects of search engine optimization and some on PPC.

• Future Searches –  UK based and multi-lingual, Pelin B. Demir writes all about search marketing from SEO to link building to social media.

Moderator is an Adobe Air application that allows you to peek into your WordPress blog and manage any comments that are awaiting moderation.

You can see who wrote the comment, their email, Gravatar icon, what they said, when they said it, and then you can decide to accept, spam or delete the comment.  The settings also allow you to set the refresh interval and hide Gravatars if you’d like.

Another nice feature is that there are dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.

At this time, Moderator does not allow you to do a whole lot, but they plan on adding the ability to see all comments, reply to comments, manage multiple blogs comments, and get desktop pop-up notifications of new comments.