When I see those pages, it reminds me of the increasing importance of optimizing for customers and user experience vs. the common overemphasis on search engines.  Keep in mind, technical SEO and how bots interact with servers and web pages is timeless, but writing web copy that’s more useful and a better reflection of what customers are looking for, (vs. chasing the most popular keywords alone) just makes sense.

Along those lines I recall reading a SEO blog a long time ago that advised creating websites, copy and links as if search engines didn’t exist.  By itself, that seems a bit naive – especially if you’re in a competitive category.   Creating, optimizing and promoting content based on customer interests that leads them to a purchase makes the most out of both useful content and SEO best practices.  Great SEO copywriting doesn’t read as a list of keywords, but instead balances keyword usage with creative writing that appeals to the reader; educating, influencing and inspiring action.

Consider the difference between these general SEO copywriting recommendations:

Use the most popular keywords at the beginning of title tags, in on-page titles, body copy, anchor text and image alt text in combination with attracting relevant keyword links from other websites so the pages rank high on Google. Higher ranking web pages can result in more visitors and sales.

In comparison, try this advice absent any explicit SEO lingo:

Use the words that matter most to your customers in titles, links and body copy to inform and inspire them to take action. Text used in titles should make it easy for readers to understand the topic of the page quickly, in the first few words. Text used to link from one page to another should give the reader an idea of what they’ll find on the destination page. A consistent approach to titling, labeling and copy in web page text, image annotations, video descriptions and links will create confidence for the reader in the subject matter and inspire sales.

Both recommendations should result in more focused and relevant content for search engines. But the focus on #1 is only on keywords and search engines. The advice in #2 is less SEO specific, but emphasizes relevance from the customer point of view and at the same time, is search engine friendly. Maybe more copywriters would take SEO advice if it didn’t use so much SEO lingo.

Does that seem a like a reasonable difference in approach or more a matter of semantics? Do you think more content producers would implement SEO practices if advice was more customer-centric? Better implementation of SEO best practices by creatively talented and customer focused content producers seems like a win, all around.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Lose the SEO Lingo and Optimize for Customers | http://www.toprankblog.com

According to an infographic from Microsoft Tag, 51% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from a retailer with a mobile specific web site, however: only 4.8% of retailers have a mobile web site.

A recent study by Google, “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users” reports 77% of smartphone users visit search engine websites followed by social networks. And nine out of ten smartphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.). Mobile use is growing faster than all of Google’s internal predictions, with YouTube seeing 200 million mobile playbacks a day, according to Eric Schmidt.

To capture the market, marketers and advertisers are increasingly allocating budget to mobile. In fact, eMarketer estimates total mobile advertising spending in the US will reach $1.1 billion this year, which is up 48% over 2010. Mobile search is forecasted to account for up to 10 percent of search budgets with Google capturing 97% of that market.

How can marketers take advantage of the opportunity with mobile search & optimization?

Of course there’s paid search advertising on mobile as there is on the web, but our focus here is on content, social and organic search, so the following tips will emphasize what you can do without advertising.

Fundamental SEO Best Practices – Effective site optimization applies for mobile sites as they would for desktop websites. Search engine accessibility, keywords, content and links all matter with mobile. Keep in mind screen real estate is smaller for keyword use in titles and descriptions. As a primer, check out this post from the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Making Websites More Mobile Friendly.

Mobile Friendly Website – First, decide if you need a dedicated mobile site or if you will present mobile users with a mobile friendly version of your existing site.  If you happen to know that a significant number of your customers use traditional mobile phones, then a dedicated mobile site may be warranted.  See the “Mobile Filters in Google Analytics” tip below for info on determining your website’s mobile activity.

A custom CSS file can usually accomplish a mobile friendly site for traditional, internet enabled mobile phones or it may be necessary to develop mobile specific pages.

Smartphones can view most websites as a desktop browser would, only smaller and may not need such customization. Another consideration is that some features, such as Flash content, will not display on an iPhone. Hopefully HTML5 adoption will address that.  While smartphone use is rapidly rising, there are still a very large number of traditional mobile phones in use. A “mobile friendly” site isn’t exactly a SEO tactic, but if people can’t view your site, there’ not much use in it attracting search traffic.

Mobile URLs & Content - Because of advice given by search engines, many Webmasters have their mobile sites detect user agent access via a mobile device and serve up a mobile friendly site using a different URL such as

• m.mywebsite.com
• www.mywebsite.com/mobile/

That is no longer necessary and website owners can present the appropriate content using the same URL. rel=canonical can be used for desktop content.  In all instances, the same content must be served to Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile as what a user would see.  Advantages to a single URL include a single destination for link building and also to facilitate social sharing of pages via mobile phones meant for desktop consumption.

Mobile Keywords – When researching keywords, it’s worth considering that mobile search query strings, on average, are 25 percent shorter than desktop searches. As for mobile keyword research tools, Google’s keyword tool provides a mobile filtering option and the stats you see for Competition, Global and Local Monthly Searches, and Local Search Trends are all specific to the device filter you pick.

Mobile Formatting and Layout - There are many resources for mobile website development. If you want to test how your mobile friendly website will appear, then Mobile Moxie offers an array of handy tools for testing websites on mobile devices. Tools include: Keyword Research, Mobile HTML Code Grader, Mobile Search Engine Indexing & mSEO, Mobile Website Emulator and Phone Comparison, Mobile Search Engine Simulation and Results Comparison.

Mobile Content – In addition to testing the mobile user experience, it’s also important to test the effectiveness of your mobile content. Delivering mobile search traffic to pages is just the beginning with effective mobile marketing. Make sure the content users are interacting with resonates and inspires desired outcomes. Achieving mobile content effectiveness draws on content marketing best practices by knowing customers, their pain points and interests, keywords and social topics. Then apply that insight to your mobile content strategy. There are numerous mobile marketing case studies to draw ideas from to see what’s worked.

Mobile Site Map – Websites that serve only mobile content can provide Google with an XML sitemap.  Non mobile URLs should not be included, but URLs that return both mobile and non-mobile content can be included.

Mobile Filters in Google Analytics - On mobile analytics, Lori Ulloa says, “You can use Google Analytics to track your mobile visitors without creating a separate, filtered profile. You can get info such as those coming from mobile operating systems, mobile devices and even mobile carriers. If you do decide that an app is the right way to go, the Google Analytics for Mobile Apps SDKs make it easy for you to implement Google Analytics in your mobile apps.”

However, if you do want to use filters to extract mobile data (arguably to see if you have a mobile audience in the first place) then Google Analytics offers options in both standard and beta. Filters will inform you how much of your organic traffic is coming from mobile, how they interact with your content and if they’re converting.

By 2012 mobile searches will account for 25% of global searches (Google Smartphone User Study). Consumer use of smart phones and tablets has skyrocketed and in keeping with best practices for changing customer information discovery, consumption and sharing needs, mobile marketing warrants serious consideration by companies of all sizes, industries and locations.

You’ve read my take on determining where to allocate search marketing resources before: If it can be searched, it can be optimized. That certainly means mobile search as much as it does search on the web. The question is, how and when your business will approach mobile marketing and more specifically, mobile SEO?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Quick Guide to Smartphone & Mobile SEO | http://www.toprankblog.com

Thanks to an invite from Justin Goldsborough and Heather Whaling, I participated in a #pr20chat chat this week to talk mostly about SEO and PR with a hint of social media. For Twitter chats, I prepare by getting the questions to be asked in advance and then I answer them in a “tweet ready” format so I can be as useful as possible during the chat itself. That prep makes for a good blog post too

What are some simple, basic principles of SEO that PR ppl need to understand/implement?

• I’d like to start with: Social is hot, but Google handles 10 billion+ queries /mo, so SEO is far from “dead”
• For a good foundation, check out these 10 SEO tips for PR Pros
• SEO Basics: Search results vary for users based on location, logged in, history – ranking is an iffy metric
• SEO Basics: Research keywords & focus optimization efforts: 1-2 topics per page
• SEO Basics: Use keywords & variants in titles, headings, body copy & links to the page
• SEO Basics: Create, optimize, socialize & promote for links. Track web analytics, social monitoring
• Also, check out this SEO Guide for PR (pdf)

When it comes to PR & SEO, what do PR people do wrong? Tips for improvement?

• #fail: Focusing solely on press releases for SEO. If it’s searchable, it can be SEO’d
• #fail: Only writing press releases AP style. Also try an article format & send via @PRWeb (client)
• #fail: Overuse keywords, ignore link building, discount impact of social on SEO
• Tips: Create keyword glossary & train writers on basic SEO copywriting & linking
• Tips: Include web pages, releases, images, video, PDFs, MS Word Docs
• Tips: ID a destination page as a topic target & build content, links around it

What are some tips & tools to help PR people discover the best/most relevant keywords?

• Keywords should empathize with the intended audience: journos, bloggers, consumers
• Think about keywords for search and social topics for conversations. Sometimes they’re the same
• Keyword Tools: Google Keyword Tool (includes mobile)
• Keyword Tools: wordtracker.com wordstream.com keyworddiscovery.com & semrush.com (for competitors)
• Keyword Tools: Übersuggest (via SEJ) leverages Google Suggest
• Once you have keywords, you’ll need: Keyword Glossary & Editorial Plan

What are some SEO best practices to ensure the *right* people (not just more ppl) find your site/content? (via @kaczynski)

• Attract the “right” people via search to PR content through relevant keyword selection & optimization
• Knowing your target audience means knowing their keywords. Optimize for the “pull”
• Understand what keywords & topics reflect your target audience interest & focus on that

Google recently intro’d Google Instant Pages. What does this mean for SEO? PR?

• Google Instant Pages only speeds display of SERPs you click. Very little impact on today’s SEO

How should PR pros balance social media vs SEO? Should one “lead” and the other support/follow?

• Optimize & Socialize based on customer centric search keywords & social topics. It’s yin/yang
• Social Media & SEO work together, but the lead tactic depends on intended outcomes
• Both SEO & Social affect info discovery. Social media facilitates engagement & influences SEO
• Marketing often owns SEO, PR owns Social. Cross-training is essential

Explain the process you follow to create & promote content marketing initiatives. How does SEO fit into that?

• Content Marketing starts with my magic 8-ball. I just do what it tells me
• Oh wait, here you go: 10 Steps to Better Content Marketing & SEO
• Content plans are aided by keywords & social topics so creators can be inspired

Fill in the blank: _____ is the #1 thing all PR ppl need to start doing to improve SEO

• That kind of question is trouble. There’s no #1 thing anymore. But then again …
• If you focus on just one thing, you’ll get burned when that one thing changes
• It comes down to relevance and network. The right keyword & content mix + social network for sharing = the WIN

We have some of the smartest marketers and public relations pros on the web reading this blog. What Tweets would you post in response to these questions? What questions along the lines of PR and SEO would you like answered?

Thanks to @prtini for her roundup of the chat, which you can find here: “14 PR & SEO Tweetable Tips“.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 8 Social SEO Questions Public Relations Pros Need the Answers To | http://www.toprankblog.com

Wordle Cloud Using the Text of This Article

I recently had an interesting discussion with Ron Jones who is writing a book specifically on using keywords for online marketing called “Keyword Intelligence“. He was researching for the content marketing portion of the book and we talked about where keywords fit. These kinds of discussions are great for blog posts so here are a few ideas for you on keywords, SEO, Social Media and content.

Content marketing is customer centric and therefore often focused not only on creating information to educate prospects and customers about product/service features and benefits, but also about topics of interest relevant to the situations that cause people to need or want those products and services.

Effective content marketing informs prospective buyers of what they need to know in order to help them arrive at a logical conclusion to buy and recommend. Relevant and engaging content facilitates that outcome.

“Great content isn’t great until it’s discovered and shared.”

Understanding the information needs of the customers you’re trying to reach is the first step in creating a great editorial plan. The role of keywords in a content marketing program come into play as a manifestation of knowing what customers are interested in and what their pain points are. What are they searching for? What are they talking about on the social web?

Great content is best optimized, so to speak, for the intended reader first and foremost. At the same time, that content is thoughtful about keywords that can attract new readers through search and social recommendations. Great content is amazing. Great content that is findable and shareable is even better.

Here’s an Example Scenario:  Company 1 2 3 wants to focus on “Round Widgets”

• Target Customers Care About Round Widgets That Cost Less and are Environmentally Safe
• Target Customers Search for “round widgets”, “low cost widgets”, “green widgets”, “environmentally safe widgets”
• Target Customers Socially Discuss “save money on widgets”, “widget impact on the environment”
• The Content Plan Outlines An Array of Content Objects Supporting Search Keywords & Social Topics
• Content Plan Tactical Execution: Blog Hub, Video Tips, Shared Customer Widget Photos, Facebook Page for Widget Environmental Tips, Email Tips & Issues Newsletter, Widget Deals Twitter Account, Guest Blog Posts Using Target Keywords on Widget Blogs, Contributed Articles to Consumer & Environmental Publications on Widget Cost Saving Tips and Being “Green”

By coordinating customer needs with content creation, optimization and social publishing, there’s a much greater and more relevant reach for the investment.

Keywords guide content optimization for findability through search engines as well as a focus on topics that customers care about and are discussing on the social web. Keywords are also useful guides for the blogger and publication outreach.

Keywords drive the “optimize and socialize” efforts of content marketers to share, promote and increase the reach of information that is relevant for customers who may buy or refer brand products and services.

The mistake online marketers often make is to solely lead with keywords (vs. customer needs) thinking that optimizing for the most popular phrases are all that is needed to maximize customer reach. High ranking content that doesn’t resonate with readers to share or with customers to buy and refer isn’t an effective approach. Also, customer information needs will vary according to where they are in the research and buying process.

Keywords and topics change over time so even after a customer is acquired, it’s important to monitor, measure and refine as needed.

My question for you: Are your content marketing and optimization efforts focused solely on high popularity count keywords? Are you digging into both search keywords and social topics as you formulate your content marketing strategy?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Effective Use of Keywords in Content Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

The first session of the day for me here at SES London is a topic I’ve been interested in for a very long time: video marketing and optimization. It’s a great panel featuring Jonathan Allen from Incisive Media, Paul Carff from Google and Will Critchlow from Distilled. All three speakers offered plenty of interesting tips.

First up is Paul Carff from Google who is a Developer Advocate that helps people learn about and use APIs.

YouTube is the #1 online video site with 2 billion streams per day. 70% of all online video viewing happens on YouTube. Online video is the fastest growing medium in history. 52% of people took action as a result of watching video online. 77% of Americans online watched a video last month. The amount of time people spend watching online video is growing. Their attention and engagement is higher than traditional broadcast.

Why add video to your marketing mix? Because that’s were the people are.

How do you get your content in front of those viewers? One way is through search. Google wants to create the most comprehensive video index. Google videos can show in Universal Search, on YouTube and Google TV.

To facilitate inclusion in search, marketers can use video sitemaps. The video sitemap can provide information about videos for Google: Location tag, thumbnail location, title and description, content location, player location.

Other data that can be included in video sitemaps: video duration, expiration date, publication date and restriction tag. After you submit your sitemap, then be paitent because it can take a few days. Google.com/sitemaps

If you have new meta data how do you update? Using additional tags.  Automatically submit sitemaps using plugins – drupal, WordPress.

Case study (Orabush). They tried an infomercial, retail and AdWords. None of that worked because no one knew what a tongue brush was – there was no awareness.  Orabrush asked a college marketing class how to market it. They made a YouTube video and it went viral: Millions of views and sales exploded.

Search isn’t going to work for things that have no awareness. People often “discover” video content. Video discovery is more than just search. Related videos are a form that facilitate discovery. Promoted videos (an ad) is another way. YouTube TrueView helps you manage video ads – you don’t pay unless people watch the whole video (i.e. you don’t pay for impressions, just like with AdWords).

Creative content is always the big winner. Think about who you’re trying to reach and what they’re interested in.

Case Study: Old Spice. 180 videos in 24 hours. 1 proposal. 151k subscribers. 120m views, +107% increase in body wash sales

Video inspires engagement: Over 50% of videos are commented on.

Google Leanback - like Pandora (or StumbleUpon) of video. If your YouTube profile is connected to your Facebook account, there’s a social element to Leanback in what you see.

Next up is Will Critchlow from Distilled to share an array of tips on video:

Besides video sitemaps, there are video microformats. Facebook and Yahoo (SearchMonkey).  It makes content more easily discoverable. Microformats and structured data is becoming more common for supplying/formatting content to search engines.

Tip: Mixergy.com - Entrepreneur interviews – great example of video content. Great content attracts attention and supports search discovery

Tip: Publish transcripts on the same page as the video because it provides search engines with information and it provides users useful information.

Tip: Use tools other than YouTube. There are things you can do on other services that you can’t do on YouTube. Example, video length and apis. Will recommends vzaar. Gives example of showing a sign-up form at the end of a video that goes directly into MailChimp.

Also recommends Wistia, that offers great analytics, which is pretty tough with Flash based video players.

Here’s a great post on YouTube SEO tips. This is also a great example of how speaking at a conference (Will speaking at SES London) can get you a sweet anchor text link from a high traffic blog (me).

To get links to video hosted / embedded on your site – provide your own embed code that others can copy onto their own site that includes link(s) back to you. Take a step further, and include embed code in the embed code so when others embed your video on their site, it offers embed code for their users to continue the trend – kind of like Inception

Videos to attract links don’t need to be your own videos. You can curate others’ videos and include the embed code that links back to your site (instead of YouTube).

Last up is Jonathan Allen from Incisive Media. Online video is changing how we produce video and what we can make of it. Online video is a “story engine”.

Video marketing strategy and considerations:
- Production value
- Do you want to monetize the content or not
- What are the elements of your marketing
- Measure success

Tips on low/no budget video creation:

- You can make video out of text via Xtranormal and Moviestorm.
- Make videos out of photos from Animoto
- Make a video out of sitemaps. Treepodia will make a video out of your product sitemap.

Tips on YouTube:

- To get more video views, upload email forwards (videos people have shared with you). Copyright will sort itself out. (I cannot imagine recommending this for a brand)
- Report on events – this is evergreen content. Product demos, voxpops?, shoot crazy stuff
- Video tactics – copy other people’s tags that are already popular, keyword rich titles, descriptions. Use search suggest to modify keywords you optimize for.

Make a cheap video not look cheap:

For interviews, have the camera at eye level at 2/3 high on the screen. Pay attention to your backgrounds, they set the stage.
Use pickup shots – “b-roll” of people, scenery, backgrounds to add a professional look.

That’s it for now. There were quite a few video tips provided in this session and it went by fast. I think this topic could easily be a half or full day workshop where attendees would bring cameras and a trainer would show how to create basic videos, upload and market them using the tips above. That sounds like an opportunity

Is video marketing a big part of your online marketing strategy?  Have you had disapointments or successes you can share?  What are some of your best video marketing tips?

Update:

Paul Carff of Google was good enough to sit down and chat for a few minutes on his role at Google as well as some pitfalls and best practices for video sitemaps. Check it out:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Video Marketing Tips From SES London | http://www.toprankblog.com

Most corporate blogs are not only boring, but they’re disappointingly difficult to locate on search engines. Key messages, voice and timing are considered, but keywords to drive search traffic are not.

Numerous PR practitioners have approached me after I’ve given a SEO for PR presentation and mention that they’ve never thought of, or just don’t know how, to include search keywords in the copy. Here are a few, simple tips I’ve followed for years here at Online Marketing Blog that companies can follow to increase search traffic and visibility to corporate blog content.

1. Research a Keyword Glossary – Whatever the target audience for your corporate blog is, journalists, customers, employees, partners, analysts, investors or others – they ALL use search. Use a keyword research tool to build out a keyword glossary of topics that are in demand. Share that glossary with content creators as a reference when planning, creating and publishing content online – including blog posts.

2. Create a Blog Content Plan - Starting a blog is easy. Sustaining a blog over years is not.  Get into the habit of creating a structured, yet flexible content plan for your company blog. Decide that some days will follow a format and others are wildcards. Then assign keyword/topics to the planned articles, tips, interviews, surveys, liveblogging, company news, curated industry news and other content types. Most importantly, tap into feedback mechanisms like comments, keyword search traffic, off-post citations, social sharing metrics and links to make sure you’re on-track.

3. Include Keywords in Posts – There have been numerous how-to’s on optimizing pages but to sum up optimized blog post writing, follow these guidelines:  Find a balance of optimizing for readers and search engines. Omit one and you lose the other. Do both well, and you will boost relevant search traffic and engagement.

Include keywords in the title tag of the post. The first words of the title matter most.  Write a title that is more focused on the reader (feel free to use puns, metaphors or be ironic) for the On-Page Title. For Example:

On-Page Title (Focus: Readers) – 10 Ways to Create a More Engaging Facebook Page

Title Tag (Focus: Search Engines, Social Sharing) - Facebook Marketing: 10 Tips on Better Fan Pages

This is how the blog post writer can express their creativity by using compelling headlines and still provide literal titles with prominent keywords for search engines which do not understand puns or metaphors.  If you’re using WordPress for your corporate blog, then the All in One SEO Plugin will provide the functionality mentioned above.

4. Use Descriptive References vs. Pronouns – Personal pronouns “I,” “you,” “she,” “he,” “it,” “we,” “you,” “they” and objective pronouns “me,” “you,” “her,” “him,” “it,” “us,” “you,” and “them” have their place in great copy, but search optimized content requires more descriptive references. For example, which of the phrases below do you think is more descriptive and useful for both readers and search engines?

“It is particularly effective when they use it with the products from company XYZ.”

“Social Media Monitoring software from company 123 is particularly effective for Social Media Strategists when used in combination with products from company XYZ.”

5. Use Keywords in Links – When following a content plan, it is inevitable that more than one post will touch on a particular keyword topic. It’s important to provide readers and search engines with descriptive links to older posts. Such links should use keywords as the anchor text (blue underlined text). I’ve already done this several times in the post above.

Using keywords in anchor text gives readers an indication of the topic they’ll see if they click on the link. The same keywords give search engines a very important signal too, which can help improve how the page appears in search results.

The anchor text can also be pointed at pages off your website to share keyword “link juice” elsewhere. For example:

“Vocus Social Media Monitoring software (a TopRank Client) helps companies find influencers, monitor conversations, mentions and trends.”

There are other places to use keywords in coprorate blog posts (or any blog post for that matter) like the URL, the tags associated with the post, the categories it is placed in and image alt text.  Those are standard SEO guidelines for a web page. They apply to blog posts too.

The key takeaway is to achieve mastery over keyword topics that are in demand as well as creative copywriting so that your corporate blog is both easily discovered via search engines and more useful for the people reading it.

If you’re responsible for writing a corporate blog, are you actively employing SEO and keyword best practices? Have you developed your ability to write for both readers and search engines?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Where to Use Keywords in Corporate Blog Posts | http://www.toprankblog.com

With the rise of smart phone use in the US, (Google Android and iPhone are currently reporting roughly 500,000 activations a day ) it’s more important than ever to have your Google places listing up to speed because when people use voice search on  Android phones, the first results they see are from Google local.

Let’s start with a few facts. Did you know that;

• 73% of all online activity is related to local content (Google)
• 82% of local searchers follow up with a phone call or show up on your doorstep (TMP/comScore)
• 66% of Americans use local search to find local businesses (comScore)

Another reason to take Google Places seriously is the recent changes and enhancements that were rolled out.  Now you will notice the map with local businesses appears above the ads on the right side.  Also worth noting is that the local listings are appearing above all organic search results and have taken up more space, pushing the organic listings further down the page.

With the recent Google launch of Hotpot, Google is entering the local recommendation space.   Hotpot combines Google Places, the places you like and the places your friends like making it even easier for people to make decisions about which local businesses to patronize.

Not surprisingly, marketing on Google Places has gotten very competitive. It used to be you could simply fill out your business listing on Google and see it in the 7 pack a few weeks later.  These days, if your listing doesn’t have a 100% score, you can forget about being listed in the first 7 local businesses that Google displays for local results.  That said, here are 5 things you can do to get more business from local search:

1.       Make sure your Google listing has a 100% score – There are more than 20 different fields you in your Google Places listing and surprisingly most businesses don’t bother to fill them all in.  At the end of the day, the difference between showing up on the first page of Google Places or not can boil down to not having a video as part of your listing.

2.       Include product or service keywords in your listing description – I would also list one or two of the cities or suburbs where your target market lives.  As with any content on the internet, be sure not to over use your keywords.  Your description should be written for people with an eye for SEO.

3.       Encourage your clients to write a review on your Google places listing – Think about it, if you and 10 local competitors all have 100% scores on your listing, which is fast becoming the case, what will Google use to rank order these businesses? The one component of the profile that is open ended is the review section so in many cases, the business with the most reviews can win the day.

4.       Make sure you are listed in your local phone book – I know this sounds counter intuitive but the fact is Google looks to established sources of data to both build their database and check for local business information.  If you’re not listed here, it may affect your ability to rank on the first page.

5.       Get listed in the other top local directories like:

• Yelp
• Bing
• Yahoo
• Best of the Web
• Hotfrog, and
• Foursquare

You can go to www.getlisted.org to get a score on how effectively your business is taking advantage of the free listings at the major search engines.

Local listings & SEO have always been important for small business online marketing, but now they’re essential.  If you follow the advice above, your business listing will have a better chance of getting on the first page of the search results and in many cases, may even appear above the organic search results.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Ways to Win More Business with Google Places | http://www.toprankblog.com

What is duplicate content? Identical or substantially similar content. Also multiple URLs with the same content. Google realizes that duplication can be deliberate or accidental.

Basically, duplicate content in the context of a search engine is publishing different URLs that present the same content. (My Example:)

www.domainname.com
domainname.com
www.domainname.com/index.php
www.domainname.com/index.php?sid=123

Why does Google care about duplicate content? Users don’t like to see 10 nearly identical results. Also, there’s no benefit in crawling multiple urls with the same content. It’s a waste of resources for Googlebot to do that.

How does Google handle duplicate content? Google will filter results at serve time, collapsing the duplicates and then show the most relevant page in the SERPs for the query. This will likely be the page where the content originated. The original page is determined by considering factors like age and authority.  This is not an exact science and influences on what is considered to determine the “original” could change with the query.  Think about what people are searching for and what they expect to see.

The myth of the duplicate content penalty. A lot of people think that if they have duplicate content that they’ll be penalized. In most cases, Google does not penalize sites for accidental duplication. Many, many, many sites have duplicate content.

Google may penalize sites for deliberate or manipulative duplication. For example: auto generated content, link networks or similar tactics designed to be manipulative. Don’t be afraid of duplicate content, be informed.

Tactics for controlling what version of your content does get shown:

• Control which version of your content is shown. Especially if you don’t like the version show in search.
• If you aggregate all the duplicates and redirect to a canonical page, then it consolidates the ranking signals. It also optimizes the crawling of your site focusing on canonical URLs versus the duplicates.
• You should establish contracts (when syndicating) that require linking back to the original version.

When should you not care about duplicate content?

• Common, minimal duplication.
• When you think the benefit outweighs potential ranking concerns. Consider your cost of fixing the duplicate content situation vs. the benefit you would receive.
• Remember: duplication is common and search engines can handle it.

Ways to indicate your preferred version of content to Google:

• Set preferred domain in Google webmaster Tools
• Include your preferred URLs in your sitemap
• Always use your preferred URLs when linking to your site
• Use 301 redirects
• Use rel=”canonical”
• Google’s “Parameter handling” tool (now has default values)

Google doesn’t recommend blocking duplicate URLs with robots.txt because if they can’t crawl a URL they have to assume it’s unique. It’s better to let everything get crawled and to clearly indicate which URLs are duplicates. A number of SEOs including Shari, who also spoke on this panel, do not agree with Google on this.

Robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. Google may index something (because of a link to it from an external site) but not crawl it. That can create a duplicate content issue.

International site duplicate content issues:

• The same ideas in different languages are not considered duplicate content.
• If you have the same content in one language for multiple countries: Consider having one page with the content they share, separate pages for what they don’t such as price, address, etc. Highlight what’s local or unique on each page.  Geotarget different folders or sub-domains to indicate that they target different users.

International sites: New tag. rel=”alternate”.

Indicate when a page is a duplicate of another except for the navigation. Check out the Google blog post on this.

Takeaways: Avoid knee jerk reactions to duplicate content. Understand the effects and take informed action. Don’t robots.txt out duplicate URLs, indicate which ones are duplicates. Content matters more than the domain name when it comes to duplicate content signals.

Shari Thurow stepped in last minute to fill in after Susan and talked about duplicate content from a user experience perspective as well as SEO. Essentially, when you fix duplicate content issues, it results in your best pages being delivered to users in the search results.

Having duplicate content lowers your index count which means less pages are available to rank well in the search results.  A consequence of that is your best converting pages might not appear for people searching.

Shari says that if you have too many links on a page, then the page doesn’t seem focused on content. If there are too few links to a page, it seems unimportant, so be sure to have a balance and focus on what would be most useful to a reader.

Here’s a (partial) checklist for duplicate content on a website:

• Boilerplate similarity
• Are linkage properties the same or similar (inbound or outbound)?
• Does the same company control the content of both pages?
• Are the same shingles (word sets) used on both pages?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then you have duplicate content.

Duplicate content solutions:

• Information architecture, site navigation, and page interlinking.
• Are URLS linked to consistently, throughout the site or the site netowork?
• Are the links labeled consistently?
• Are you preventing the web page from being spidered with robots.txt?
• If articles are shared across your network of sites are you implementing the rel=canonical tag?
• Redirects 301 from duplicate versions to the original
• Use the rel=nofollow attribute where appropriate. For ecommerce sites, put it on your “add to cart” buttons
• Use webmaster tools and provide the engine a sitemap  (Note: don’t robots.txt out a page and then include it in a XML sitemap)

Audience Question: Noticed someone was planning on duplicating an entire site using different language navigation. What to do?

Answer: File a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint with Google

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Duplicate Content and Multiple Sites – SES Chicago | http://www.toprankblog.com

Ron started things out by taking a poll to qualify the audience (smart) to see how many have done keyword research before. Most have.

The importance of keyword research:
Is keyword research strategic or tactical? When we use keywords we reinforce searcher expectations. As marketers, then we have the responsibility to deliver on that expectation. Picking the right keywords plus having relevant content to match equals conversion. As a result, the use of keywords and keyword research is a strategic function.

What happens when you use the wrong keywords? You waste significan resources, not reach the right audience and attract visitors who will not convert. Think about how long it takes to achieve top search visibility for tough keywords only to find out they’re the wrong keywords – waste of time.

The role of keyword research and how it relates to other marketing channels. Keywords are the fundamental building blocks for all online and offline marketing campaigns. This means tactics like: SEO, PPC, Mobile, Social, Local, Video and Images and Traditional Marketing. Keywords have been used in product naming and naming of services. Keyword referrers and subsequent website interaction can provide clues to consumer behavior and preferences.

Buying Cycle describes the buyer’s behavior as they move from research, refining search, content research and then decision/conversion. Keywords at the top of the buying cyucle tend to be broad and as the search process is refined towards decision, the keywords become more specific. The question to answer is what is the time span of your product or service.

Broad vs. Narrow keywords are a reflection of where the searcher is in the buying cycle. Example: bicycle and bycicle shop vs. trek madone 6.9 and bicycle shop denver co

Developing a keyword research process:

• Blue Sky: Find all possible keywords
• Refine: Identify the best performing keywords
• Categorize: Break down into categories or themes
• Test: Test the performance of keywords

As you start the process of keyword research, think about going outside your industry “standard” phrases. Understand your target audience and speak the language of your customers vs. than the language and jargon of the company/industry.

Keyword research tools

Suggestion tools include:

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Keyword Discovery (paid & free)
• Wordtracker (paid & free)
• Wordstream (paid & free)

Forecast and Trend Tools

• Google Traffic Estimator
• Google Search Insights
• Google Trends
• Google Sets

Others:

• Local Keyword Lists
• SEOBook Keyword Tools
• Wordze

Look at the competition by visiting their website, looking at meta data (meta description & keywords) as well as title tags. Here are a few competitive keyword research tools:

• Compete
• ispionage
• Spyfu
• Keywordspy
• (I would also add SEMRush as a handy competitive tool as well).

Refining your keyword list. Just because a keyword phrase is the most popular, doesn’t mean it’s the right one to focus on. Weight the keyword phrases in your list with different data including populartiy, relevance, specificity and competition.

Remember that with keyword visibility, you’re setting expectations for consumers that discover your content in search using certain keywords. For great conversions, it’s essential that the content you deliver on that search visibility syncs up with whatever consumers are searching on.

How many keyword terms should you target? With SEO, it’s best to optimize at the page level for specific phrases, 1-3 phrases per page. Any more than that, and there will be dilution of relevance.   With PPC, you can target as many keyword phrases as you can afford. Think in terms of ad groups and the individual ads themselves. With social media keyword research, focus on core groups of keywords that reflect important conversations for your business.

Setup your campaigns, test and refine:  PPC is a great tool for testing keywords you’ll end up using for SEO.  PPC provides quick results for keyword performance and helps you know whether you’re getting the “right” audience. Ongoing monitoring of performance on the target keyword list will validate what’s working and what’s not so you can refine.

When should you use negative keywords? With a branding strategy you may or may not use negative keywords, but with a conversion strategy, you want to use negative keywords to filter out those visitors that are most unlikely to convert.   Some of the benefits of adding a negative keywords list to your PPC campaign:  Improves quality score, improves conversion rates, more qualified leads, lowering cost per conversion, improves visitor experience, improves relevancy, decreases bounce rate.

How to find negative keywords:  Use Google’s Keyword Tool, Google Analytics, PPC reports, Search Assist and Google Alerts.

Remember: Keyword Research is a strategic function, not tactical,. Keywords help marketers deliver the right content to the right consumers and increase user experience as well as conversions.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Advanced Keyword Research – SES Chicago | http://www.toprankblog.com

At the upcoming BlogWorldExpo conference in Las Vegas, I’ll be giving my recipe for success using Social Media and SEO in two ways:

First, I’ll be doing a solo presentation on Social Media SEO, giving bloggers a tested methodology for making the most of their content and social networks.

This presentation will focus on the value of combining SEO best practices with social media marketing to amplify the reach and traffic for blogs. I’ll outline and share examples of how to  build a Cycle of Social Media Interaction.  Specifics will include:

• How bloggers can leverage keyword research to develop a blog editorial calendar
• Best practices on creating and promote optimized content
• How to increase exposure through social channels of distribution
• Tips on organic growth of  fans/friends/subscribers and inbound links
• How to increase search and social media traffic
• How to mine community conversation data to further refine content strategy that continues the cycle

To see the detailed presentation, you’ll need to get out to Las Vegas  October 14-16 for BlogWorld New Media Expo 2010. In the meantime, here is a short version of the presentation I’ll be giving using the aforementioned recipe metaphor.

Second, I’m literally going to talk about SEO for recipes to food bloggers, “The Art & Science of Recipe Writing” on a panel with Jennifer Perillo, John Shiple and Sean Percival as part of the TECHmunch track. I believe it will be livestreamed so be sure to check in with @toprank for the link.

BlogWorld New Media Expo is a unique event bringing together online marketing professionals from a variety of disciplines ranging from public relations to SEO to affiliate marketing to food and military bloggers.  Be sure to subscribe for liveblogging coverage and video interviews during the event.

Now back to our metaphor: What’s your recipe to blogging success?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Recipe for Blogging Success at BlogWorld New Media Expo | http://www.toprankblog.com

In most cases, it takes a lot for a tenured web site to mess up it’s search visibility.  In other situations, it doesn’t take much at all. Avoiding mistakes that result in exclusion, penalties and more often confusion for search engines are often overlooked.  Don’t fall victim to carelessness and ignorance when it comes to maintaining the search visibility achieved from years of content and online marketing by avoiding these common mistakes:

1.  Website Redesign

Probably one of the most common situations that result in fluctuations in search visibility involve significant changes to a web site’s design, content, internal linking relationships and the new use Flash, Ajax or JavaScript for navigation. Search engines copy websites and the links between pages. Think of it as taking a picture of your site. If you change your site from what the search engine has a copy of, the new form might not include the same content, keywords and crawlable links.

The worst case scenario is when a company decides to redesign the website and over write all previous SEO work. Upon finding that search visibility has completely tanked, they call up the SEO agency and demand an explanation.

Solution: When significant changes are planned for the company website, work with your SEO to identify how the new design will impact search visibility. Have them map out and prioritize the implications of page layout, content and keyword usage, navigation, links and redirects.

2. New Content Management System (CMS)

Along the lines with a new website design, changing content management systems can create a lot of confusion for search engines. Many companies have had websites long enough that the legacy CMS used to launch the site no longer serves the needs of the organization. Large companies may find that the hodgepodge of CMS used by different business units and acquired companies is inefficient and a common content management system would better serve the organization.

A change in the CMS means a change in the templates that format web pages, navigation and oftentimes the URL structure of pages.  It’s common that major changes in content are rolled out along with new website software and that can spell confusion for search engines. URLs that change can also create confusion. For example, web page file names that previously ended with .asp and now end with .aspx are perceived as completely different.

Solution: While the IT department or web developer will understand the importance of redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts, execution in a search engine friendly manner is another thing entirely. 302 vs. 301 redirects and mapping URLs when there is no logical page in the new system are essential. Identifying the top sources of inbound link traffic to pages and conducting an outreach program to get them to change the URLs other sites use to link to your site is a specialty area for link building SEOs moreso than IT. Simply put, make sure you have a SEO migration plan.

3.  Loss of Inbound Links

In the SEO game content is King and links are the Queen. Or content is the Yin and Links are the Yang. Whatever the metaphor, links are an essential mechanism for search engines to discover pages and signal for ranking them.  Companies that proactively acquire links organically, or that earn vs. buy the links, don’t have much of a problem in this area.  The longer other websites link to your site, the better. But some sites may go offline temporarily or permanently. A blog may decide to remove it’s blogroll or a site may simply decide to remove links to your site. If you change your CMS as noted above, other sites that don’t know this will continue to link to your old URL format (.asp vs .aspx) and that will appear as a loss of links.  If you buy links from other sites and they are detected by search engines, those links may be devalued of any PageRank. There are many reasons for link loss.

Solution: Active content creation, promotion and social participation are essential for building a significant and relevant inbound link footprint on the web. Those links will drive traffic and serve as a signal to search engines for ranking your content in the search results. The key is to monitor your link footprint on an ongoing basis using link building tools that will identify major fluctuations in inbound link counts. Then you can drill down to see where the link loss has occurred and see if you can do something about it. The best defense is offense, so make sure you have an active link acquisition in place so minor to moderate fluctuations in links will have little, if any effect.

4. Duplicate Content

Serving up duplicate content using different URLs confuses search engines. This can happen when sites use queries on a database to display lists of products in a category that can be reached multiple ways. Printer friendly versions of pages, other English language versions of pages or outright copying content from one website to another can all cause duplicate content issues. When an search engine is presented with multiple versions of the same content, it must decide which is the original or canonical version, since engines do not want to show the exact same thing to users in the search results. Anything your website does to make that process confusing or inefficient can result in poor search performance for your web site.

Solution: A professional SEO working with website content managers can help manage broader duplicate content issues for a company website and any microsites they’re publishing. With press releases, RSS feeds or articles that are syndicated, it’s a best practice to make sure the original is published on your site first, then to have any duplicates clearly link back to the original. Ongoing monitoring can also help with unintentional duplicate content issues caused by other sites scraping your site’s content.

5. You’ve Become a SEO Spammer!

As more content is published and promoted online, more websites are launched and more competition comes into the market, companies will be tempted to achieve the coveted first page listing at any cost.  Many companies that succumb to this temptation do so because of seeing their competition get away with tactics that are clearly more aggressive and manipulative than search engines allow.  Webmasters might see suggestions in forums (often disinformation) or get advice from others doing well in the disposable site, content monetization game.

Engaging in simple things like hidden keywords, redirecting pages to present one version to search engine bots and another to site visitors or publishing numerous copies of the exact same web site using search/replace keyword optimization can all result in negative effects. There are far more aggressive tactics considered spam than that of course, but SEO spam isn’t an area we work with and I’m not interested in promoting unsustainable, high risk tactics.

Solution: Understand the webmaster guidelines from each search engine: Google, Yahoo, Bing.  Don’t violate those policies with the site(s) that are your bread and butter. If you must test, do so with other websites that are not going to affect your business. Rather than focusing on loopholes and exploits, be a better marketer and understand what your target audience wants, what influentials respond to and develop smarter, more creative marketing that can stand on its own to drive traffic and sales. Include SEO in those “UnGoogled efforts” and you’ll realize the added benefit of great performance from your website in search engines as well.

Do you have dropped search engine ranking stories to share? Is the Mayday update affecting your website? What have you done to avoid losing search traffic and sales?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Ways to Kill Your Search Rankings & Their Solutions | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

1. Find the right images

Finding the right kind of image is incredibly important. Great images can add another dimension to an article or page that can encourage people to share the page and create some great backlinks. Research shows that while text is still the first thing seen on the page, the image is what sells the page.

Here are some of the best places to actually find images:

• Flickr – Probably the de facto service for finding free images. They have a really useful creative commons search as well. Skellie has an excellent article on how to find Flickr images.
• stock.xchng – Weird name, but a ton of royalty-free stock images.
• iStockPhoto – Large selection of stock photos that you can buy.

You can also use Google Images to find images for your site, as long as you search with the proper licensing. (They allow you to search Creative Commons and other public licenses.) But you have to be very careful when using images, as if you don’t have the permission to reuse it, companies and sites can take legal action against you.

The general rule of thumb is this: if the image isn’t Creative Common licensed or you didn’t buy or create it, don’t post it.

2. Use the keyword(s) in the file name

Just like keywords in post urls are important for pages, the same is true for images. Using keyword-rich words in your image filename is important for helping search engines determine relevancy. For example, the image above was originally named “iStock_000004221245XSmall.jpg” which doesn’t add much information about this web page. It has been renamed to “image-optimization.jpg”. Of course, most images that are not simply decorative like the one above are literal and connected to the content of the page such as a photo of a product.  If the above image were used in an article about eye color, then the file name should reflect that.

Google suggests that you should place your images in one folder on your site, mydomain.com/images versus placing them in random folders throughout the site. Another suggestion from Google related to file names or URLs of images is to make sure you use common image filetypes such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP.

3. Create descriptive alt text

Alt text or tags are another way that search engines help determine what your image is about. Unlike traditional web content, search engines can’t determine the text content of an image. (Search spiders are pretty smart, but as far as I know they haven’t developed eyes yet.) As a result, search engines need to rely on captions around the image, alt text, file names and other surrounding text. Adding descriptive text in the alt tag helps the search engines determine what the content of the image is.

If an image is used as navigation, ie as a link to another page, be sure to use alt text that is meaningful to the content of the page being linked to.

4. The right anchor text

Anchor text is another important factor in image SEO. If you decide to link to images with text, your anchor text can play a role in how your image is ranked for keywords. Use descriptive anchor text that describes the image.  For example, linking to an image using a generic term like “image” or “photo” or a file name that doesn’t use keywords doesn’t give search engines much meaningful information on what the image is about. Linking to an image with keywords is helpful to search engines as well as people visiting your site.

5. Make sure the image matches the content

The content surrounding the image should be related to all of the things that you’ve optimized thus far: anchor tags, image url, alt tags. When these things align, it helps search engines confirm that you’re not spamming and that the image is of higher quality and relevant.

6. Don’t stuff

This goes for all kinds of SEO, but we’ll say it again just for clarity: don’t keyword stuff when filling out things like image alt text. Your alt text, captions and file names should be short and descriptive, not a long list of keywords. Remember to optimize images for your website visitors. Image SEO is as much about user experience as it is about achieving better search engine rankings.

Additional Resources on Image SEO:

Get up-to-date on Image Search – Video of a presentation by Peter Linsley, Product Manager at Google offering insights into how image search is used, how it works, and how webmasters can optimize their pages for image searchers.

Google Webmaster Central Advice in Images – Following these best practices (as well as webmaster guidelines) will increase the likelihood that your images will be returned in image search results.

If you want to check many of these image SEO tips on your web pages, try this handy image SEO tool.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 6 Tips on Image SEO | http://www.toprankblog.com

• Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal
• Brian Kleisner – Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw
• Bill Leake – CEO of Apogee Results

The focus of the panel was on search engine optimization best practices, and panelists discussed everything from leveraging web analytics for decision making to how to scale efforts and many topics in between.  Following is a summary of each presenter’s top points:

Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal

Alex spoke on the important of using data to make decisions, including leveraging sources such as Google webmaster tools.  The information provided in webmaster tools has grown significantly since they have implemented it.

Her favorite addition is the “breaking data” feature, which tells you all of your top keywords driving traffic to the site.  You can use this to see terms that gain a high volume of impressions but a low volume of clicks.  From this, you’ll know that the page can be optimized better to potentially get more clicks.

And it doesn’t even have to be on page or changing keywords.  Sometimes, just testing changes in meta description can help gain additional clicks.  It’s something we have control over and can see near immediate results for changes.  Leverage meta descriptions for clicks, and to help promote your brand and spread key messages.

Have you given access of webmaster tools to members of your team?  You should consider this so they can act on data.

Additionally, branded searches and navigational queries are extremely valuable for a brand and should not be discounted.  At the WSJ, hundreds of thousands see our search result monthly from brand terms.

Alex then proceeded to speak on sitemaps.  She noted, if you have a large enterprise level site with frequent information that’s added/deleted, a sitemap is vital.  That’s because you don’t have to wait for search engines to re-crawl your site, you’re providing it to them in a format they’ll immediately get.  At the Wall Street Journal, we organize our sitemaps into specific types of content – i.e. stock queries, articles, etc.  Then we can see immediately when problems crop up.

In terms of getting “old school” reporters to create additional content, like to help them see the value of SEO by showing examples of their own content.  For example, I find a headline they wrote and show them how not at all findable in search, whereas others are easily findable.  By showing examples, Alex is able to be persuasive and help reporters create SEO friendly content.

Brian Kleisner – Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw

Brian spoke on the balance between search, and how search interacts with usability.

“Arriving from search is to enter the unknown:”

1.  The searcher’s expectation for what they think they’ll find must be met.

2.  Information must be presented to enable a decision or make choices.

3.  The next steps must be clear.

4. The entire experience must feel safe, secure, authentic and believable.

Usability and search both share common concerns:

• Findable
• Credibility
• Usable/useful
• Valuable/desirable
• Offering choice

Addressing this, Brian went on to cite several SEO tips:

SEO Tip #1:  Use a keyword oriented tagline with the “Who” and “What answered.

SEO Tip #2:  Use content to answer the questions naturally making sure to include the appropriate keyword.  For example:

• Where is your company located?
• When is the next release for “keyword”?
• Why are you an expert on “keyword”?

Asking these questions helps generate fresh content, better defines anchor text, provides new ideas for navigation text link labels and increases understandability for humans, search and those using assistive technology to interact with your website.

SEO Tip #3:  Consider local SEO

Local search has special rules for SEO:

• Claim your listings on the search engines and beyond (Yelp, CitySearch, etc.)
• Be consistent, use the same address and phone number across the web.
• Monitor and manage you and your competitor’s reputation.

Bill Leake – CEO of Apogee Results

Bill spoke about integration opportunities between Search and other marketing tactics.

He started by speaking at a high level, and that “more arrows are generally good.”  Marketing works best when it works together.  As we talk about ways to improve search, remember it is just another piece of marketing.

Start by defining what you really want from your marketing efforts and create a key objective.

Bill then shared integrated tactics that will improve ROI of search.

1.  Integrate paid media and “earned media” for better results.

• Online favorable articles/analyst pieces
• Optimized press release mentions
• Promote 3^rd party blog posts

2.  Consider event and name driven paid and natural search.

• Leverage a national events and names for dirt cheap search traffic.

3.  House list/direct mail tie-ins:  integrate online marketing with more traditional focused direct marketing (think online mail-merge).

4.  Create a more integrated search – use PPC traffic with your web analytics and your lead forms for list building and enhances lead generation.  Leverage services such as

• DemandBase
• Jigsaw
• Other list building via web traffic

Most B2B terms are not looked at “for fun” they are looked at due to pain points on the part of the searcher.

5.  Improve spending by using down-funnel data.

One client was spending 110K per month with well understood and optimized CPL metrics.  They started doing PPC optimization using human scrubbed lead data (not web forms).  Results:  43% shift in PPC spend allocation, 31% software sales uplift.

6.  Choose keywords on conversion metrics, not on search/reach/volume metrics.  If you have paid search data, use that to determine what the money keywords are.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Best Practices In SEO And Marketing: IMS MN 2010 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Here are a few tips that small businesses can use to improve their SEO and user experience.

1. Turn everything into content

Content is still King. Search engines still love unique content, and the more useful content there is on your website, the more opportunities you give searchers to find your products and services. Rob Snell gave a fabulous presentation at PUBCON South, and one of the main takeaways was how to turn everything on an e-commerce site into content. Here are some ways to “free” extra content on your site. Here were some of his tips:

• Record everything and transcribe it all into text. Interviews, conversations, product DVD’s, personal opinions, etc.
• Turn support emails into FAQ pages on your site
• Turn PDF’s into HTML pages (although PDF files can rank on their own)
• Start generating videos of everything

2. Make it personal

Small businesses have a major advantage that most bigger businesses don’t:  A personal voice. By making your voice heard, you’re showcasing your authority in your market, and adding trust. Buyers love hearing recommendations or reviews, and are more influenced to buy from those vs. product feature and benefit pages. Consumers use search engines to research products, and other than the lowest price, they’re looking for recommendations. Give them some! If you have a catalog, make a buyers guide in addition to product listings. Show you’re an expert and turn your knowledge into personalized business. Teaching is a great way to make sales.

3. Optimize for local search

Odds are that your small business can take advantage of local search. 63% of consumers use search engines to research information about local companies. Start with Thomas’ excellent guide on local SEO tips that range from claiming your profile to adding media to submitting to content aggregators.

4. Improve your site’s speed

Small business sites can be notoriously slow. Site speed is usually one of the last things that small business owners care about. But now that Google has introduced speed into the ranking algorithm, it’s time to seriously start checking out how fast your site loads. But more importantly, when you improve your site’s speed, you’re also improving your customer’s experience. Don’t make users wait to buy your products! You can use tools like Web Page Analyzerand the Firefox extension YSlow! to see what’s taking your pages so long to load. If you’re using a blog or shopping cart software, search for caching plugins for your software.

5. Refine internal linking

Internal links can add value to your site considerably, but many small businesses don’t understand that you have to develop a linking mindset in order to really capitalize on it. It takes extra time to research old post links and include them in your articles, but the benefits are great. Sites like Copyblogger do an excellent job of referencing older posts in their articles. Not only does this strategy help with SEO, it also adds to the user experience, giving them more Think long and hard about your site’s linking architecture. Is your navigation schema getting to all of your content? Aside from adding sitemaps, related products and posts keep both visitors and search engines happy. Popular posts lists are also great for making sure your best content is getting seen and linked to.

6. Create content for people

If you’re generating content specifically for search engines, you’re missing a major chunk of your market. Humans don’t like to be bamboozled, and when they come to a page on your site that was obviously made for a search engine, they’ll leave in a hurry and never come back. Plus, only humans can link to your site. If you want to get more inbound links and retain customers, you need to write for customers. The goal to higher search results is still to get more people to your site. After all, search engines can’t buy anything from you.

7. Don’t fret about getting nofollow links

It’s easy to get carried away with only trying to get incoming links without the dreaded nofollow. But really, a link is still a link. If that link can bring in a potential customer, then you want it. If you’re only looking for specific types of incoming links, than odds are you’re missing lots of the low-hanging backlink fruit and worrying about the wrong things.

Who knows how long the nofollow link will be around? If you’re smart, you worry about what’s most important: creating great content. You can’t control how Google ranks things in the future. Focus on things you can control, like creating a killer experience for your customers. In the end, if you focus on giving your customers and visitors great content, many aspects of SEO will take care of itself. Great content attracts great links, especially when you promote it and leverage social SEO channels of distribution. If it’s good for your potential customers, odds are it’s good for SEO too.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 7 Essential SEO Tips for Small Businesses | http://www.toprankblog.com

When assessing B2B client resources for optimization, most marketers focus on web pages and increasingly, digital assets and social media content.  Web pages are more often directly linked to by other sites vs images or video, so it makes sense to start optimizing a B2B site’s web pages.  The operative word in that last sentence is “start”.

Asking the right questions when sourcing content for search engine and social media optimization can reveal substantial assets that many marketers didn’t even think of using. Here are a few of the most important questions to ask (and get answers to:)

• How many web pages are published on the corporate domain name?
• How many pages are actually getting indexed and included in SERPs by search engines? (reconcile the difference and fix)
• How many and what type of images are being published ON the corporate domain name? How many off site?
• How many and what type of videos are being published on the corporate site? How many off site? How many off site?
• How many and what type of audio are being published on the corporate site? How many off site?

It’s also important to look at other file types that could be potential entry points for search:

• How many blogs published on the corporate domain name? Sub domain? Different domain name? Third party domain?
• How many and what topics of PDF files are published on the corporate domain name? How many off site?
• How many and what topics of Microsoft Office files are published on the corporate domain name? How many off site?

Identifying topics related to these different types of content and media for optimization will give you a better picture of what you have to work with. It’s helpful to know what types of documents or information is published as you build out your content strategy and optimization plan.

• Case studies
• White papers
• Product or service specifications
• Testimonials
• Newsletters
• Press releases
• Product demos
• Frequently asked questions, knowledegebase
• PowerPoint presentations
• eBooks
• Rich media apps, games or interactive tools
• User generated content, either raw or aggregated according to topic
• Blog content, blog comments, other corporate social participation on the web (Ex: Twitter) – again, either raw or aggregated by topic

Of course there are many others for B2B marketers that have made any kind of commitment to content. Once there’s a clearer picture of what content and media assets there are to work with, they can be mapped by keyword topic.

Some content types deserve focused keyword optimization and link building attention. Others really only need the benefit of process driven or template level SEO .  By process driven, I mean training content producers within the company on using keyword glossaries to guide their word choices when creating web pages or other types of content.  By template level SEO, I mean modifications to the web site templates that are used with the content management system to dynamically populate keywords in title tags, image alt text, breadcrumb navigation and similar locations. Automating such SEO tasks can propagate to most or all of an entire website, whether it’s 100 or 10,000 pages.

While most B2B Search Engine Optimization efforts are focused on marketing activities that drive leads and sales, working holistically with SEO can deliver benefits that increase value or reduce costs in other areas of the company as well. Optimizing FAQ’s and product support information can provide answers to customers before they call support.  Optimizing news related content such as press releases and images can attract journalists to use the company in a story.  Optimizing blog content that humanizes the company and gives insight into the culture as well as optimized job listings can make it easier for qualified candidates to find open positions.

I’ll be talking about these topics and more at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston tomorrow at 1:45-3pm in a session called, Content SEO: Best Practices and What to Avoid.  TopRank SEO client, Jiyan Wei from Vocus will present a case study of how they’ve  used and advanced their SEO efforts with the 500,000 press releases hosted on PRWeb. There will also be a special handout (small book) provided of the presentation with additional SEO resources available to the first 50 attendees. We hope to see you there!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | B2B SEO: Content Sourcing & Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

Content and link based SEO relies on the search engine crawlers to find web pages and digital assets on their own. Search engines are far from perfect at this, so the opportunity to provide search engines with structured lists of content via feed, can provide some companies with a competitive advantage.

At SES New York I moderated a session on Pushing Feeds and XML with Brian Ussery, Amanda Watlington and Daron Babin. Much of what we share on SEO is focused on content and links so I thought I’d share some of the rich insights offered in this very useful session by asking the panel a few follow up questions:

How much of an advantage can supplying a XML feed offer a site for indexing and search visibility?

Brian: It’s really difficult to quantify in terms of a percentage but, I’d say the larger your site and more images you have the better it is to provide an XML Sitemap.

How important is it for a new site to supply (or make available) a XML sitemap for search engines?

Brian: Sitemaps are one of the best ways I can think of to let engines know about your new pages and images.

Amanda: A new site has no inbound links hence there is no way for a search engine to find the site. A Sitemap not only provide a point of departure for the crawling of a new site, by putting one together a site owner can include the most important pages. This is particularly useful if the site is quite large. The Sitemap can cue to spider to pages that in fact link much deeper into the site. This jump starts the indexing process.

Would you ever advise a company NOT to use sitemaps?

Amanda: There are very rare occasions where I would not use a Sitemap. Those instances are when the contents of the site are very problematic. When there are lots of duplicate content issues that are in the process of being resolved, it makes little sense to urge the search engines to grab a Sitemap that will only bring them to the site’s woes even faster. Once the issues are settled then the Sitemap becomes an important weapon in the SEO’s arsenal.

Brian: If you have pages that you don’t want indexed, it’s probably best not to include those URLs in your XML Sitemap. Other than those kinds of situations though, I’d say Sitemaps are the way to go. I would suggest however, not including XML meta data in Sitemaps unless it’s accurate, correct and up to date.

It was interesting to learn during our session, the variety of feed types that could be used from those associated with web pages to news to video and I recall one for NASA? Do you have any examples that have called for unusual solutions or use of feeds?

Amanda: Structured data such as the Sitemap is fascinating in that it provides so many opportunities to communicate data information in a machine-readable format.

There are two feed types that we did not discuss during the session. First, there are product feeds, such as those used by Google Base and other comparative shopping search engines. These allow merchants to draw product information quickly and efficiently from their databases and submit it to a shopping engine. Once formatted, a site owner can submit thousands of products with little or no intervention.

The second type of feed was just announced this past week. It is now possible to submit image information (to Google). This has been long awaited. I’ve not yet had a chance to use this, but I have been eagerly awaiting image Sitemaps.

Either way, it’s kind of interesting to see! You can find out more at NASA.

How important is the protocol Pubsubhubbub being promoted by Google? Does it replace the need for autodiscovery?

Brian: Great question Lee, Pubsubhubbub, PuSH or hubbub for short, in case you haven’t heard is an open protocol for turning atom or RSS feeds into streams. Because it requires real feed URLs, autodiscovery isn’t really necessary. So, I don’t see Pubsubhubbub as a replacement for autodiscovery per se, but rather as a more efficient method. Some folks I’m sure will continue to use autodiscovery for their feeds but I think PuSH provides additional advantages that will be favored by most.

Is there a threshold for how many pages/items should be included in a sitemap feed or how often data is updated to determine whether providing a sitemap is worth it?

Amanda: It is difficult to give an across the board threshold for when and how much to include. With retailers, we clearly must look at their seasonality and time the Sitemap submissions to be sure that any new products or category level pages have been spidered and indexed prior to the season’s start. How much to submit is really tied to how complete is the site’s current indexing.

I personally believe that it is possible to strategically manage the process making sure that key pages which direct to deeper pages are included. As I mentioned in the session, Sitemaps are not a blunt object, a club, to be used to batter one’s way into the index, rather they provide a method for strategically informing the search engines of what you want found. I love to fish, salt or fresh water, and I think of Sitemaps with a fishing metaphor. They are bait.

Whether you submit a Sitemap or not, it is important to have a Webmaster Tools account. The Google team that is responsible for developing this resource continues to make it a much richer and more informative. Today, I consider it a powerful resource for knowing just what the most powerful engine is seeing in a site.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | SEO with Feeds & XML | http://www.toprankblog.com

Since SEO presents the biggest opportunity to generate a high quantity and quality of B2B leads, more B2B marketers are speeding up their ability to test innovative search engine optimization programs. Unfortunately, there are a mix of common mistakes that persist.  Here are 5 common mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Using Keywords More Important to You Than Your Customers

It’s pretty common for some B2B web sites, especially those in the technology space, to over emphasize nomenclature, specifications and in some cases, cleverly named products or categories as attempts to stand out.

These product and service references are accurate to someone, but often not the buyer. In many B2B SEO programs, one of the most frequent exercises is developing insight into what customers actually think about an industry or a company’s products and services. What a customer might type into a search box on Google, Yahoo or Bing  may very well be different than the language the company uses in it’s own marketing and advertising content.

Here are a few tips on researching the keywords your customers use to find your products/service:

• Brainstorm based on solutions & customer needs
• Identify what concepts are most relevant according to where the customer is in the buying cycle
• Conduct interviews or survey customers
• Review current web analytics for referring search traffic
• Poll sales & customer service staff for phrases used by customers
• Leverage social media monitoring tools for tags and phrases
• Review competitor web site content

Once you’ve created a glossary of key terms, you can organize them by category of the site and add metrics for Popularity, Competition and Relevance to guide in their use for optimizing existing pages and creation of future pages.  A Standard Keyword Glossary can be created based on input to tools like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. A Social Keyword Glossary can be created using social media monitoring tools that aggregate keyword clusters.  Looking at both types of glossaries allows SEOs to find Cross-Over Phrases for social media optimization as well as standard SEO.

2. Content is Not Reachable by Search Bots

We’ve learned from persona experience and heard from people like Vanessa Fox, creator of Google’s Webmaster Tools, that one of the most common issues with web sites performing poorly in search results has to do with barriers to getting crawled by search engines. Crawling of course, means the process of discovering links and content and then copying that content. If a search engine cannot follow links to your web pages or follow the links between web pages of your site, then it will be difficult for crawlers to find your content.  No content means no presence in the search results.

Many B2B web sites are created with technological and design prowess that offer a good user experience and even better tools to manage content. But they often ignore the need for search engines to interact with content.  We’ve run into situations where title tags are hard coded exactly the same for all pages of a site, or Ajax or Flash are used to create navigation elements within product categories that are seen as one web page vs 5 or 6. Multiply those missing 5 pages across hundreds of products and that’s a very large portion of content not being able to attract new customers.

Here are a few ways to avoid crawling issues:

• Avoid unnecessarily complex URLs & using session ids
• Do not publish multiple URLs to duplicate content
• Rather than use temporary redirects (302 or JavaScript) use a 301 redirect to point old pages to new pages
• Understand that if you site navigation relies on Ajax, Flash or JavaScript, you’ll want to provide an alternative text link navigation method.

Use Google’s Webmaster Tools or even those offered by Bing to see how their respective bots are interacting with your site. If there are crawling errors, they will be reported along with broken links and a variety of other useful feedback that you can use as a basis for implementing fixes.

3. Lack of New Content

If you read Online Marketing Blog with any frequency (and we hope you do) then you’ll know how we feel about content for marketing B2B companies. A longer buying cycle for most B2B products and services requires more content to educate customers, help them evaluate their options, consider choices and ultimately, make purchasing decisions.   Many B2B SEO efforts focus on optimizing existing content without a content marketing strategy that defines and editorial calendar for producing new content.   Blogs have been our tool of choice for managing and promoting B2B marketing content to attract customers via search, links and mentions within social media and networking sites.

Along with the creation of new content is the issue of site architecture. Managing content along with the interlinking of keywords to pages helps search engines find pages and infer meaning. Fresh, themed content along with a logical site structure using  categories, sub-categories and appropriate links between them can make a tremendous impact on search engine driven customers to a B2B web site.

Each new web page, or digital asset for that matter, that is optimized, published and included in a search engine’s index can serve as a potential entry point for prospects, customers and even journalists and potential employees.   Many companies in the business to business category publish large numbers of documents in PDF format. Those can be optimized with keywords and links just like any other document. The same goes for whitepapers, archived newsletters, press releases, past webinars, case studies and content used to describe online demos.

However, do not create and publish content just for the sake of adding more “hooks in the water”. Pages and media should have a purpose and should be mapped out in the keyword glossary and managed with a content editorial guide.  Search performance is greatest when you optimize content for customers first, search engines second.

4. Keywords Missing in Content and Text Links

Content alone does not solve SEO challenges, since customers search using keyword phrases. The keyword research conducted in the first recommendation should be used to “optimize” web page content and any other file formats (PDF, DOC, PPT) or media (images, video, audio) that can be found in a search engine. A general guide is to optimize for 1-2 phrases per web page, document or digital asset.

Here are some basic on-page content optimization tips to guide the usage of keywords:

• Title tags
• Headings
• Paragraph titles
• Keywords in body copy
• Anchor text in links
• Image alt text

Ideally, the content management system would be modified to prompt users to use keywords in these areas when new pages are being created. Dynamic keyword insertion tactics can also be used to help automate keyword placement in Title tags and the alt text of images, for example.

We’ve worked with many B2B web sites that have great content, but are missing keywords where customers and search engines need them – especially in links between pages.  Adding keywords to the link tells both web site visitors and search engines the topic of the page being linked to.

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As far as links go, one of the most often missed opportunities is to encourage keywords in links from other web sites to B2B content. Many marketers complain that they don’t know where to get incoming links for B2B pages outside of paid directories, link swaps and social news/bookmarking/profile sites.  Basic backlink analysis on sites with active PR, Advertising and Marketing programs will frequently reveal anchor text of incoming links to be the company name.

The core strategy that we follow whether the site is focused on B2C or B2B customers is to create, package and promote content that’s worth linking to.  However, no one will know to link to great content unless you promote it. One of the most effective ways to do that is by developing social distribution channels.

Here are a few examples:

• RSS
• Twitter
• Facebook & LinkedIn status
• Facebook & LinkedIn groups
• Social News, Networks & Media: Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Flickr, YouTube

One of the best ways to acquire keyword rich links from other relevant web sites to B2B content is to ask!  For example, when Public Relations staff coordinate the publishing of a contributed article or have secured a media placement mentioning the company, they can also remember to ask the journalist to link back to the company site. The worst the editor can say is no, it’s not our policy to link out.  Press releases are common link building tactics as are guest posts on other industry blogs.  The other best way to acquire B2B links is to create unique and often humorous or compelling content that gets shared and linked to by others.

Check out this post on the TopRank Marketing site for even more link building ideas, 43 actually!

5. Not Monitoring KPIs and Ongoing Optimization of Content Marketing

Each phase in the buying cycle presents different needs for the buyer that’s using search to find information and solutions.  Monitoring key data and interactions that are not necessarily conversion or sales focused can provide helpful insight into what content or link sources are helping to move the needle in the right direction.  Meeting the needs of searchers with the right content can be measured in a variety of ways according to what’s being offered.

A few KPIs to pay attention to include:

• Keyword sourced traffic
• Branded vs non-branded keyword traffic
• Pages indexed, popular entry pages
• Crawling errors & Webmaster Tools Reports
• Rankings relative to your own site over time
• Inbound links: quantity, quality, longevity
• Link traffic
• Social media citations & traffic

Of course, reaching goal pages & conversions are part of the B2B search marketing feedback loop to guide future optimization as well.  For one of the best resources on the web for measuring web site performance, read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Blog.

Through ongoing monitoring, keyword performance trends, cyclicality and new opportunities will be revealed. Adjusting certain optimization and linking efforts can improve performance and provide new channels of search traffic.

For an experienced search marketer, these mistakes are very simple and fundamental. In fact, they’re really the tip of the iceberg. However, our agency receives multiple inquiries every day from companies that suffer from these core SEO issues. Every day, week, month and year that goes by presents the same types of issues and until their solutions become as common as the need for a contact form and a home page on a web site, they will continue.  No matter how long that takes, TopRank Marketing is happy to be of help!

If you’re a business marketer, what are some of the common SEO issues you’ve experienced with B2B web sites?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Common B2B SEO Mistakes and How to Solve Them | http://www.toprankblog.com

The outcome exceeded all expectations thanks to the excellent promotions by PRWeb and SEW plus Mike Grehan’s smooth handling of moderator duties amidst technical difficulties. Over 7,000 people registered, there were over 400 questions and 650 Tweets using the #prweb hash tag during the webinar.

The way it goes with many webinars when you’re invited by an organization to participate, is that the topic and title/description are determined beforehand. The speaker adapts themselves to that.  This presentation content focused on optimizing writing for the web with a particular emphasis on optimizing content common to public relations.

As promised, I’ve sorted the bulk of the questions out and will present several here along with my responses. I hope they are useful.

If I’m not currently optimizing my site and I have a limited budget, where do I start?

The first thing any marketing activity needs to start with include setting goals, understanding your audience and the market. The lowest cost method of outsourcing that kind of activity where search engine optimization is concerned, would be to hire a consultant or agency to do an audit.

An SEO audit represents the initial evaluation and research along with recommendations to be implemented by the client. Typically this involves: competitive research, keyword research, web site code/template evaluation, content optimization recommendations, link building research and recommendations, tips on content creation/promotion/repurposing and to varying degrees, social media recommendations. Web analytics, monitoring and ranking tools are also often recommended.

An audit does not take the place of consulting since it’s an evaluation and recommendation, not implementation and guidance on an ongoing basis. It is however, a cost effective start. Here are a few resources:

• Top 3 Tactics To Improve Search Engine Rankings
• Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
• Do’s and Don’ts of On-Page SEO for Public Relations
• 5 Online Marketing Resolutions for 2010

Should your newsroom blog be placed under the site’s domain, or maintained separately under the blog software’s domain to allow for incoming links to your main site that are coming from a different site?

There are two parts to the answer for this question. First, the reference to “blog software’s domain” sounds as though the blog is hosted with a third party service such as blogger.com or typepad.com. Example:  yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.typepad.com

My advice is to avoid using third party hosting services for your blog. If you’re too invested in such a service or have other reasons for using them and cannot use something like WordPress installed on the server where your web site is hosted, then use domain aliasing options so that your blog URL is part of your company domain name or a domain name that you own. Example:  yourblog.com or yourblog.companydomainname.com. This puts you in a position of more control since the blog content lives under a domain name you own vs a domain like blogspot.com, which is owned by Google.

While links from your blog/newsroom hosted on a blogspot.com to your company web site do count as inbound links, there’s not as much value from many links to your site from one other site vs many links to your site from many other relevant web sites.

Which leads us to the second part answer to where the newsroom should be hosted. My preference is to host the newsroom either as a sub-domain or a sub-directory of the main company web address. Example:  newsroom.redcross.org or in the case of TopRank, it’s toprankmarketing.com/newsroom/

The links that you attract from other relevant web sites to your newsroom pages will build PageRank back to the rest of your web site. This is more true with the subdirectory than the subdomain. Also, keeping your newsroom address as part of your company web site address is useful for branding and user experience.

Some advice on subdomains and subdirectories from Matt Cutts of Google and here’s a good post discussing the SEO pros/cons.

Should you post press releases on your own website (before distribution)? How do search engines deal with the duplicate content issue in this case?

If you’re a publicly traded company, publishing financial announcements need to happen on the wires first, or at least at the same time as publishing the press release on your own web site.  For other companies not constrained by such requirements, posting a release to your own site first is fine.

As for dealing with duplicate content when your press release is published on your own site as well as on the wire service, it’s a pretty common situation. In fact, it’s often a goal for companies that distribute their releases through a newswire service to get as many other sites to copy and republish the release as possible. If the release is properly optimized, each time another web site with a unique domain name publishes a copy, it creates a link back to whatever web page on your corporate site you’re trying to draw attention to.  This sends more traffic and can affect the search ranking of the destination page.

A long standing problem with situations where the same content is hosted on different domain names has been debated and worried about by many, many webmasters. Search engines like Google don’t like to show multiple copies of the same content in the same search results. It’s not a good user experience. Therefore, when duplicate copies of the same content are detected, Google likes to pick a canonical version and only show that one.

Duplication with press releases is quite common because of distribution on wire services and to influence search engines to rank a certain version of your press release, there are a few steps you can take. One piece of advice many webmasters try to follow is to publish the release on your own site so Google crawls it there first.  However, if there are more links to another version of the same release hosted elsewhere, the other copy might be perceived as deserving to rank in search results instead.

For more tips on how to deal with duplicate content in a press release situation, watch this video interview with Adam Lasnik of Google that I took at SES London. Adam offers advice on making sure copies of your content attribute the source and all link back to the original to provide Google information about what version is canonical.

Is it useful to submit Press Releases to Social Media sites in addition to submitting to PRWeb.com?

Deciding what to share on social media sites should take into account what types of content members of the social community are best responding to.  Press Releases are often formal marketing communications, not exactly conversational. As you understand the community you’re trying to reach with the press release, you should know whether it’s appropriate to share a press release with them in a social media setting.

The big mistake many marketers and PR professionals make is to register with a variety of social network, news and bookmarking sites and then self submit, vote and rate their own press releases without having ever participated in the community.  With no network paying attention to what you’re sharing, few will ever notice the press release. If you do have a network on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and others, then you will know first hand whether it would be acceptable to the community to share content in a press release format.

Outside of social media news release, your best bet to take advantage of social media distribution of a press release would be to make it easy for the press release to be saved, shared and submitted by interested readers. You can do this with widgets or plugins offered by ShareThis and similar services. Many wire services already support those features as well.   Additionally, you should monitor pickups of the release on the social web.

If you see someone submit or share a release you’ve sent out on a social media site, reach out and thank them, answer any questions and show interest. That can generate interest from others in the community.  One tip I recommend is to write a blog post version of the press release and share that content with social media communities. Then include a link to the full press release within the blog post for people that want more information.

What you should not do is treat social media sites as a place to dump press release content thinking it will get a lot of exposure because there are many members of the community.  Here are some additional newsroom SEO tactics.

What is a good Social Media approach for a company which generates little in the way of genuinely newsworthy material?

Companies that say they have nothing “newsworthy” to publish are more common than you might think. There may be deeper issues to deal with than a social media strategy if there’s nothing new, innovative or unique to talk about.  A good social media marketing program cannot fix a broken business.

A business exists to make money fulfilling unmet customer needs. A perspective to consider would be to take the focus off the company and put it on the customer. Use social web participation as a way to better listen with and connect with customers to find opportunities to serve them better. Develop relationships with influentials and encourage feedback. Innovation can certainly come from a customer base as can the spread of a great idea. Focus on connecting with customers and helping customers connect with each other in a social context and there may be more newsworthy material than you ever expected.

Here are a few useful resources on Social Media and PR:

• Improve Public Relations with SEO & Social Media
• Why Use Social Media For Public Relations
• 3 Steps for Effectively Using Social Media For PR

There are so many shady SEO people and firms – how do you pick a good one?

There are no more “shady” SEO people than there are “shady” clients. Professionals that provide effective SEO consulting are reputable, experienced and in my experience, probably more talented than most traditional marketers you’ve ever worked with.  People doing shady things in the name of SEO are NOT professionals and the absence of that word, professionals, in the question is the problem.

Picking a good consultant or agency means doing homework. Know your market, set goals, understand your competition in search and start asking for referrals from others who have hired SEO companies. Word of mouth is powerful both for companies that need to hire good SEOs and for good SEOs to attract business. Our agency, TopRankMarketing.com for example, has relied mostly on word of mouth to attract new business since 2001. We also get a lot of new business from search itself (practice what you preach) and from networking on and offline.

Here are a few resources on hiring a SEO and one on “shady” SEO:

• How to Hire a SEO Firm – According to Google
• 5 Tips on Hiring and Getting the Most Value from SEO Consultants
• Dear Fox News: SEO Is Not Search Engine Scamming (Unless You’re Scamming Yourself)

Part of the issue is demand.  Take the next question for example:

“Can you use article spinning software to publish Press Releases? Or is there an Press Release spinning software to create many press releases based on one press release? Other words, is there a difference between article marketing and press releases?”

Article spinning software for press releases? Demand for shortcuts, silver bullets and “we want everything now” helps create the shady side of SEO as opportunists take advantage.  Automatically generating garbage pages in press release format will help NO ONE.

That’s it for this round of questions. I’ll post another round next week. Thank you to PRWeb and Search Engine Watch for having me participate on the webinar. What are your questions about optimizing news content?

If you’d like even more in-depth information about SEO and Public Relations, AND you happen to live in the Louisville, Kentucky area, be sure to check out the event Social Media Club Louisville is having next Tuesday night, Feb 16th.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 7 Answers to News SEO Questions You Should Know | http://www.toprankblog.com

Don't ignore digital assets in your optimization efforts

Don’t fight it: Blended search results, and hence digital asset optimization, are here (at least for now).

Text content may be your SEO poster child, but with images, video and audio content often appearing in standard search results, digital assets can no longer be treated as the ugly stepsister in the online marketing family. Many companies produce a variety of content and media that never make it to the public web.

To this point, the majority of marketers have either overlooked or ignored optimization of non-text digital assets. In fact, a recent Forrester study found:

• Less than 20% of marketers insert keywords into the filenames of videos on their sites
• Even fewer marketers write keyword-rich captions or create online video libraries
• Yet video stands about a 50% greater chance of ranking on page one of Google

If digital asset optimization isn’t on your radar at all or simply stuck on your back burner, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Show your digital assets a little respect with these 5 optimization tips.

1. Do your homework on the SERPs

Be sure to become familiar with the types of files and media types that Google and other search engines are prone to display for the keyword phrases you’re targeting.  Certain types of queries are more prone to show local, shopping or news results and if you can identify frequently used data sources, your time figuring out what digital assets to optimize can be a lot more efficient.

In the example below, a search for “Apple iPad” shows search results from News, Twitter, Images and Video.  Here, news sources range from mainstream media like CNN to ezinearticles.  A savvy SEO would consider how they might leverage exposure in the news area, via social media such as blogs or Twitter as well as videos and images. Producing, optimizing and promoting relevant video and images provides an additional opportunity for visibility in addition to web pages.

The display of blended results, especially where current news is involved, is dynamic. Be sure to revisit the search results page from time to time to uncover any new data sources for assets/media you may be able to focus on.

2. Repurpose content to get the most bang for your buck
Think of innovative ways to reuse your digital assets to gain maximum search benefits. For example, if your CEO gives a presentation at an industry event:

• The presentation can often be recorded on video and audio
• The video can be optimized and promoted on both your website and numerous video hosting sites such as You Tube
• Multiple short video snippets can be created from one master video, all of which can be optimized
• A search-optimized podcast can be created from the audio, which can be placed on your website and promoted on podcast web aggregation sites
• Screenshots can be taken from the video, optimized, placed on your website and promoted on sites like Flickr (check out these tools for optimizing images from Six Revisions blog)
• The optimized images, podcast and video can all be used with social media press releases for even more exposure
• The PowerPoint from the presentation could be uploaded to Slideshare and turned into a video with voiceover for sharing on video hosting sites

For even more ideas on re-purposing content, read “Green Online Marketing: 5 Ways to Repurpose Content“.

3. Use keyword-rich file names and tags – but keep them clear and to the point
An important element of digital asset optimization is using keyword-rich files names and tags for all images, video and audio, and ALT text for images.

That said, an even more important element is ensuring files names and tags accurately and concisely describe the digital content being presented. As much as you’d like to fit the keyword phrase “circuit breaker” into the file name for an image of a pink elephant, it just might not work.

Think of ALT text, file names and tags like this: If someone couldn’t see your image, watch your video or listen to your audio, would they know what it is from your description?  Be sure to link to your digital assets using keyword anchor text.

If you have a large number of videos, PDFs or Audio files, consider creating a sitemap file that links to each of them. Include descriptive text next to each link as well.  You might even benefit from creating a video sitemaps file for Google.

4. Leverage optimized landing pages for digital assets

Some poster children and ugly stepsisters might never find a way to live in harmony, but optimized text and digital assets don’t have to suffer the same fate. Include optimized on-page text a part of your optimization strategy for video and podcasts to get the best of both worlds and maximize search benefits.

For example, place videos and podcasts on their own optimized landing pages on your website. Include either keyword-rich transcripts or summaries on the landing page, depending on the length of the video or podcast.

Optimized landing pages help the search engines understand what the video or audio is all about. Plus, you’ll enhance the viewing or listening experience for visitors by giving them a high-level overview of the video or podcast.

5. Don’t forget other file types such as PDFs and MS Office Docs
If you’ve got PDFs on your site, don’t overlook them in your search engine optimization strategy. True, you could convert PDFs to HTML pages. But particularly in the B2B world, customers are looking for case studies, whitepapers and technical articles — and PDFs can still be useful for content-heavy pieces.

Keep in mind a few points for optimizing PDFs:

• Ensure PDFs are text-based (vs all image)
• Create a SEO friendly PDF template for use corporate-wide
• Include anchor text links where relevant
• Optimize the copy as you would a web page
• Complete all document properties, including author, subject, description and keyword

This Search Engine Land post offers additional tips for optimizing PDFs for search.

Any other document types that Google can crawl, index and rank are also opportunities for optimization.

Are You Ready to Treat Digital Assets as One of the Family?
Incorporating digital asset optimization into your overall content optimization plan doesn’t have to be difficult, but it can create an important advantage. If you’ve got the digital assets, why not optimize them? You’ll make it that much easier for the search engines to find and index your content – all of it.

What results have you experienced from optimizing images, video, audio and the various document types now found in Google search results?

Learn more about digital asset optimization at SES New York, where TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be presenting his insights into digital asset marketing strategy, process/workflow and measuring success.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Ways to Show Digital Assets a Little Respect | http://www.toprankblog.com

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.

1. SEO:

I resolve to focus more on maximizing visits and conversions from organic searches.
With SEO efforts, it’s easy to get caught up in one goal: getting found via the search engines. But ranking in the search results is only half the story. If potential customers aren’t clicking through to your web page – or other piece of digital content – the ranking doesn’t mean much. Plus, due to variances in what each of us sees in the search results for the same query, rankings as metric are no longer as useful. Personalized search results according to location and web history means your site might rank high for one person, but not another.

Maximize the success of your online marketing efforts by analyzing your metrics report to determine which pieces of digital content are highly visible but producing less than ideal traffic results. Then take some time to ask yourself these questions:

• What competitive search results are your potential customers seeing? Assess the title tags and meta descriptions of competitive search results. Are competitors offering customers a free case study or a complimentary product sample? Then consider ways to make your own title tags and meta descriptions out-entice the competition.
• Does your content live up to the promise put forth in your title tags and meta descriptions? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes: When you first visit your web page or other digital content from an organic search, is the content you find relevant? Potential customers don’t want surprises; they want a solution to the problem that caused them to search in the first place. And they want it as promised.

Not only will searchers respond more favorably to customer optimized titles and meta descriptions, but the increase in clickthroughs will, no doubt, be noticed by search engines and may influence subsequent rankings.

2. Social Media:

I resolve to set goals and track the results of my social media efforts.
There’s no denying that social media is more difficult to justify in terms of ROI compared to other online marketing strategies.  But that’s not to say it’s impossible – or that tracking results should be placed on the back burner. And without goals, it’s pretty difficult to measure success. In 2010, put forth even more effort to set goals for social media participation and tie results back to specific tactics.

There are a host of free or near-free tools available to gauge brand mentions and traffic from social media channels. In December, we highlighted 5 of these social media monitoring tools.

Tracking results via social media monitoring tools is just a start. Those results must be tied back to business goals. Potential goals might be:

• Develop better customer relationships
• Reputation management
• Identify and energize brand evangelists
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase relevant visitor traffic
• Improve standard and social search engine visibility
• Build up a list for email marketing
• Increase leads or sales

Without setting specific goals upfront, social media efforts can’t be definitively quantified so be sure to implement a Social Media Roadmap and all or social bases will be covered.

3. Email Marketing:

I resolve to integrate my email marketing with other online marketing channels.
Regardless of what the naysayers may say, email marketing isn’t going to disappear as a result of social media in 2010. In fact, email will continue to play a significant role in most online marketing mixes this year. A study from Silverpop found nearly half of marketers surveyed plan to increase email marketing budgets in 2010.

That’s not to say email marketing efforts shouldn’t evolve with the times. Integrating email with social media is on par to be a popular resolution for 2010: A recent eMarketer report found 40% of executives surveyed will make integrating the two tactics their top marketing initiative this year. Another 25% of respondents have already implemented an integrated strategy.

Pledge to take email marketing to the next level by encouraging email subscribers to not only forward content via email, but also to get social with email and share it via Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other sites. Conversely, conduct a poll on Twitter or your blog, and encourage followers and readers to subscribe to your e-newsletter for the results.

4. PPC:

I resolve to maximize conversion rates by testing different versions of my ads and landing pages.
Most companies using self-serve pay per click programs fall victim to “set it and forget it” habits. They’re busy with numerous other marketing activities or don’t have the time to really get to know the native bid management platforms and test/refine campaigns. Even if PPC efforts are reaching set goals in terms of conversion rates, there’s always room for improvement. You’ll never know until you try.

Consider these three ideas for testing different elements of your PPC campaigns:

• Test multiple ad versions that highlight different benefits of your product, service or company. For example, one could tout cost-savings benefits, while another emphasizes a convenience aspect.
• Use A/B testing to try out two different headlines on your landing page. Again, each could speak to a different benefit (i.e., cost savings vs. convenience). Google Optimizer is a great tool for this.
• If you’re targeting a competitive search term with many competing ads, consider launching two different campaigns simultaneously. Each could offer a distinct piece of fulfillment – a free case study and a product coupon, for example.

A few tools for testing include:

• A/B Testing resources: (Google Website Optimizer, 7 Free Resources)
• Multivariate Testing service: (Omniture)
• Heatmap & User Testing tools: (CrazyEgg, Clickdensity, Clicktale, userfly andEyetools)

5. Mobile:

I resolve to rethink my website design for mobile users.
If your site isn’t already optimized for handheld devices such as cell phones, now is the perfect time to re-assess your site design and how users find your site through mobile search – particularly for B2C companies.

In October, ABI Research forecast that mobile sales of physical goods in North America would reach $750 million by the end of 2009, a 117% annual growth rate. Consumers are doing a lot more than purchasing downloadable cell phone ringtones and games from their mobile devices. These days, clothing, electronics, books and a host of other items are being purchased through mobile commerce. Additionally, social network participation through services like foursquare, Facebook and Twitter are growing dramatically, creating additional opportunities for promotion and traffic to the mobile version of your company web site.

When optimizing web pages for the mobile web, consider a few tips:

• Keep fonts in their most basic format
• Eliminate advertising to conserve screen space
• Take out images unless they are absolutely necessary
• Remove Flash, Java or any plug-in content unless absolutely necessary

Online Marketing Efforts in 2010
As you make your own personal New Year’s resolutions to drop a few pounds, start a savings account or join a gym, don’t forget your online marketing efforts. Each year provides a fresh start and endless possibilities, so take advantage.

What resolutions do you plan to make in 2010 to improve your online marketing efforts?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Online Marketing Resolutions for 2010 | http://www.toprankblog.com