Grow your business with TopRank Online Marketing tips, articles, & experts interviews on social media, digital PR & search engine marketing.
As the use of cell phones and smart phones expands, so do the number of options for consumers to discover and interact with brands. From web browsing to email to social networking and even shopping, more people are using their cell phones as portable computers. However, most sites are not optimized for hand-held devices such as cell phones.
There are really two things to consider; web site design and how customers are going to find the web site through mobile search.
We may already be a week into 2010, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to starting making resolutions.
Resolve to give your online marketing efforts a boost this year by recognizing areas for improvement and putting in place a plan to make positive changes.
To help you get started, TopRank Online Marketing has come up with New Year’s resolutions for 5 different online marketing channels: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Email Marketing, Pay-Per-Click and Mobile Marketing.
Welcome to the first BIGLIST review of SEM and SEO blogs for 2010! What a year it will be. We reviewed hundreds of marketing blogs in 2009 and well over a thousand since we started the original list. Today’s BIGLIST update focuses on a few local search marketing blogs we’ve recently discovered.
Expand2Web Blog – The design winner for this BIGLIST Update Local SEM Blog Edition goes to Expand3Web by Don Campbell. This blog offers a rich mix of WordPress and Local search marketing advice as well as how to screencasts & videos as well as a podcast.
The Best Pint of Abbot Ale, Ever
Blogs have been touted as effective tools for companies to publish content and demonstrate the conversational side of their corporate personality. Blogs have also long been promoted as a SEO tool. Despite plenty of optimism about blogging, there’s still a lot of mis-information, mis-perceptions and lack of awareness about effective, productive blogging for business.
Take This Blog SEO Survey: If you or your company publishes a blog, please take this quick poll looking into the perceived SEO benefits of blogging. Results will be published on Online Marketing Blog in the next week. Like a fine pint of Abbot, this survey is smooth, to the point and might just put a smile on your face.
You don’t have to look far to find social media roundup posts this time of year. But what about the most effective one-two marketing punch for building community AND delivering conversions and ROI? Social Media and Search Engine Optimization – or “Social SEO” as we like to call it.
Out of the 300 or so posts published in 2009, I’ve picked the best of the year based on a mix of my own opinion and metrics such as comments, inbound links, pageviews and social engagement off the blog through social news, bookmarking, Twitter and similar services using PostRank.
Here are TopRank’s Top 10 Social SEO Posts of 2009. Enjoy!
Our recent reader poll of 14 books either focused on, or with significant content dedicated to, Search Engine Optimization has concluded with 174 votes. And the winner by one vote and 27% of the total votes is….
Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin and Jessie C. Stricchiola.
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Published by O’Reilly, this phone book sized bundle of SEO wisdom is chock-full of advice for marketers that want to leverage search engine optimization as a marketing channel. Congratulations on winning our Reader Poll!
Here are several reviews of Art of SEO to consider or you can take up O’Reilly’s offer to write one yourself.
Runners up for Best SEO book of 2009 were:
With all the hubub about personalized and real time search and the potential impact on the SEO work that can influence search visibility, the question about relevance comes to mind when considering books about search engine optimization. Search engines like Google change often (38 new search products in 70 days) so one could argue that a book published in print would become outdated. For those books that outline very specific tactics and even tricks/loopholes, that indeed is the case.
However, there are many SEO books that focus on strategy and tactics worth considering. Well understood principles of information retrieval, content optimization & promotion, consumer search behaviors and analytics are timeless.
For many companies, an ideal world involving Search Engine Optimization would be simple, quick and a one-time task to check off a list. An organization would create a website, optimize its content for target keywords and promote the site. Soon, the website would acquire a strong number of inbound links and start ranking for those target keywords. End of story.
Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. In reality, SEO isn’t just about adding keywords and linking. SEO is increasingly social and sits at the intersection of multiple business functions outside of marketing including public relations, customer service, recuitment and branding.
Ongoing SEO consulting is an important part of any internet marketing mix. Truly good consultants save companies significant expenses and contribute to increased leads and sales by providing unique expertise and insight into the technical, creative and increasingly social sides of internet marketing.
[Note from Lee: A few weeks ago, Michelle wrote a great post on Retail SEO tips and this week, I've asked her to tackle B2B SEO and general search marketing tips, since one-size SEO does not fit all programs. Enjoy!]
Search marketing should be a top priority for organizations in any industry. But B2B search marketing efforts take a slightly different form than the tactics used in consumer focused SEO and PPC programs . Typically, B2B markets are smaller, products and services are more complex, and sales cycles are longer. Therefore, B2B marketers must think a bit differently in terms of target keywords, online content and link building.
From time to time I like to post a case study as an example of the implementation of all the good advice we’ve been giving the past 6 years. Tips and how to’s are great, but stories of implementation are like a picture being worth a 1,000 words.
The following is a basic case study for SEO work performed on a portion of the PRSA site that is focused on PR and Communications Jobs.
Situation:
With over 32,000 professional and student members, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) represents the world’s largest organization for PR professionals. One of the key resources PRSA offers to its members is the PRSA Jobcenter, where over 77,000 potential employees are able to connect with a seemingly infinite number of public relations professionals.
Quality inbound links are an essential element of web site marketing and search engine optimization programs to increase traffic and online sales. The greater the number of relevant and authoritative links to a web page, the greater the potential for higher search engine rankings and qualified traffic.
A recent survey from SEOmoz illustrates just how important inbound links are to rankings. An impressive 4 of the top 5 ranking factors involve inbound links:
SEO for Flash – is it a reality yet?
One of the most common issues for web sites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Web sites made entirely with Flash are problematic because there are often no links for search engine crawlers to follow or HTML text to copy.
According to the Opera (browser) developer center, somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files representing a lot of content that may not be included in search results or only partially indexed. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.
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