Online Marketing Blog

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google delivered the morning keynote on day two of Search Engine Strategies Toronto.  Maile discussed Google’s approach to helping site owners and shared answers to burning questions from the moderator and audience.

The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions and answers from the session.

How did you get to Google?

I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on, I went into information retrieval and then joined the department of defense.  Then I took some time off, and eventually joined Google.  I’ve now been at Google for 5 years.

After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking).  The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update.  What exactly is that it?

Images as an asset for organic search results and search engine optimization are often overlooked.  Images can drive traffic through image search as well as inclusion in universal search results.

There are actually several dimensions to image optimization that involves better placement in search results, optimization for user experience and in some cases, optimization for easier sharing of images on the social web.

For image SEO, it can be helpful to think of optimizing images like optimizing a tiny webpage within your page. Things like url structure, anchor text and descriptive tagging are factors for optimizing images for search engines, just like regular webpages.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your images to improve their performance on the page and in search.

It’s a common story: an online marketing professional returns from a conference full of exciting new ideas and tactics, only to fail at selling those ideas internally.  In many cases, marketing and IT/development professionals don’t always understand each other, and as a result potentially high value projects stall out and never see the light of day.

How can you get your marketing and IT teams working together?  The following panel of speakers moderated by Tracy Falke, Social Media Specialist at Freestyle Interactive tackle the subject matter:

• Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch
• Puneet Bhasin, Independent IT Consultant,
• Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association

Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association

There are many intersections between earned media and organic search engine rankings, so it makes sense that they would work well together. The PR industry is in an interesting situation right now with so much of the traditional media world moving to digital media.  Whether they admit it or not, journalists rely on PR professionals for a pipeline of stories and information. When journalists lose their jobs, media relations professionals lose an essential reason for being in business.

Even if PR departments and organizations are digitally savvy, there are a good number of reasons (7 in fact) to incorporate search engine optimization into their processes:

Spotlight on Search Interview with Michael Nguyen, SEO Strategist for Shopzilla & Bizrate.com.

Helping companies with very, very large web sites increase sales through improved search engine performance takes a unique type of person. Think equally strong left and right brain lateral thinking.  Heavy doeses of technical savvy plus creative problem solving are essential.

Shopzilla and Bizrate market millions of products and Michael Nguyen’s SEO responsibilities for those sites are substantial. In this interview Michael talks about Google’s recent MayDay update, a SEO checklist, his top resources for staying current in the field and the unique challenges (including duplicate content) that come with optimizing huge web sites.

Adding real-time search and social search to the mix in the search engine world has created a number of new opportunities for marketers that want to do a better job of reaching customers. With new data sharing announcements happening fairly regularly, it can paint an interesting picture when you lay out the relationships between major social networks and search engines. It’s not unlike the search engine relationship chart from Bruce Clay I remember from several years ago documenting the relationships between Inktomi, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Direct Hit/Teoma, Northern Light and even Google. Not many of those are still around.

As the diagram above illustrates, the major data sharing for real-time search is between the social sites Twitter and Facebook and the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. To be more specific:

Plunging into social media for the first time can be a bit daunting for individuals or businesses. There is a learning curve when it comes to becoming more social online, and it can take a while to learn what works and what doesn’t.  Here are a few of the best Do’s and Don’ts that can save you time and help grow your social media authority more quickly.

1. Start small

You’ll want to start small and try a couple services out at a time. Oftentimes newbies sign up for every social network under the sun and try to grow each of them. Guess how long they last? Building profiles for multiple social sites is hard work, so it’s best to start by only tackling a couple at first.

As Google Chrome continues to grow, so to the extensions that go along with it and their functionality. Below are a few extensions that bloggers can use to quickly create new blog posts without leaving the page they are on.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire has long been one of the most popular blogging extensions for Firefox, and it has made its way to Google Chrome.

ScribeFire allows you to create, edit and update all your blogs from one extension. It has built-in support for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Tumblr, Posterous, Xanga, LiveJournal, and other blogging platforms. It’s quick, easy and probably the best extension for blogging on Chrome.

ScribeFire

This post is part 2 on Social Media Marketing Best Practices from IMS Minneapolis.  The first post featured Brad Smith from Best Buy who offered insights into their social media principles, guidelines and learnings.

This post includes liveblog notes from the presentation given by Adam Singer of TopRank Online Marketing. Adam opened up noting that according to a research study by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law, 14% of executives are unsure of social media, yet 70% expect to spend more.

That set the stage for some of the common obstacles and barriers to social media adoption which he focused on in: 7 Common Social Media Problems and their Solutions.

1. Flying blind