Online Marketing Blog

“Easy reading is damn hard writing,” opened chancellor Roy Williams at last week’s Wizard of Ads training seminar, ’12 Languages of The Mind.’

Never is this quote from Nigel Hawthorne (not Nathaniel Hawthorne, as it’s commonly credited to, per Williams) more apt than when you are a writer of any trade struggling to find that opening hook.

(To serve a personal example, the percentage of time I spent drafting this opening paragraph will exceed the percentage of time spent on any one remaining section of this entire post.)

SEO copywriting serves perhaps the greatest challenge when finding that hook, as we copywriters are encouraged to begin our posts with keywords as far up and to the left as possible in our titles.  (This post may be a bad example, as a blog that begins with ‘SEO Copywriting’ carries the promise of inherent fascination within.)

A big part of helping companies with Search Engine Optimization and content based marketing efforts is to assess the assets available. Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) involving multiple media, file types and distribution/search channels isn’t going to be efficient or effective unless there’s a firm grasp of a company’s available media and content production processes.

When TopRank works with prospective companies that want to take advantage of search and content based marketing, we go through a discovery process with them.

Here are a few of the questions companies should ask themselves to determine readiness for optimizing digital assets:

Resources:

• Is there a person or committee that “owns” the search marketing or social media marketing initiative?
• What departments, business units, cost centers and approval entities will be involved with the SEO program?  Social Media?

image credit: Sergio Tudela via Flickr (cc 3.0)

A Creative Commons license is an simple way to encourage others to share, remix, and reuse your digital content. If you’re publishing material of any variety to the web and looking to have it spread, licensing your work under Creative Commons is smart as it actively encourages sharing with permission and attribution.

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” –Tim Oriely

With the release of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price there is a heated debate going around the web about the idea of free. I’m not going to get into the economics of free, but purely from a marketing perspective, free is the great equalizer. Especially when talking about digital content, talented producers can leapfrog gatekeepers and get noticed fast. Creative Commons was designed to work with what the web naturally does, and that’s share the best content freely without resistance.

Numerous companies are losing vast amounts of revenue due to their web sites doing poorly in the search engines.  Web sites that are not easy to find via search miss out on attracting new customers as well as repeat customers that use Google to navigate sites they already know about. Is the same true for web sites that are not social media friendly?

People discover new sites through search, but also through recommendations made via email, word of mouth and through social media content. Making a web site social media friendly will facilitate the saving and sharing of content with others, extending reach and facilitating engagement. 

Changes in consumer preferences towards news consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies.  Searchers increasingly expect to interact with what they find via search. 

The opportunity for Public Relations is to understand that leveraging social media as a distribution channel to attract buzz and earn links is as important as keyword optimization of social media content to improve visibility on standard search engines.  Simply put: SEO and Social Media go together like peas and carrots.

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.  Keyword relevancy plus aboundant inbound links to content equals improved search engine visibility. Whatever keywords that are used to describe optimized news content that becomes popular within social channels like news, bookmarking and media sharing are what that content will tend to rank highly on in standard search engines.

For those readers just joining us, this is post #8 in a series of 10 on the intersection of search engine optimization and public relations, “Top Ten SEO Tips for PR Professionals“.

Besides content optimization and making sure a site’s news pages and digital assets can be found and indexed, attracting relevant inbound links is the next most important tactic for improving search engine performance of Public Relations related content.

There are literally hundreds of ways to acquire good links. There are even more ways to acquire bad links, so knowing the difference can be important. Read more about that below. But first, we’ll describe some general guidelines for news content link building.

 Most web sites with active media relations programs host an online newsroom. Analysts, journalists and even some bloggers find newsrooms a useful resource for finding past media coverage, press releases, image assets, executive bios, company history, webinars, white papers, case studies and other information helpful for researching stories.

Any content that is published to the web can be optimzed for search and that includes online newsrooms. We prefer to implement online newsrooms with blog software, because of the content management features and inherent search engine benefifts. Automatic RSS feed creation is also a benefit.

Newsrooms should offer easy to find contact information as well as a content categorization scheme that considers keywords as part of the taxonomy. Organizing press releases by date isn’t very useful for searchers. Archiving press releases and other content within the newsroom by categories, chronologically as well as by keyword tag (as in folksonomy, not meta keyword tag) can be quite useful to readers as well as search engines.

One of the most popular keyword optimization content types for SEOs and Public Relations professionals alike are press releases. As a news communication tool, the value of press releases has undergone changes.  However, press releases provide a substantial amount of content to news search engines and can rank well in standard search engines like Google or Yahoo. 

Multiple studies have documented that consumers and journalists are searching for and reading press releases. Optimizing press releases for a specific audience makes them easier to find and therefore, more of an asset for communicating news and attracting traffic to the company web site.  As a result, it makes sense for marketing and PR practitioners alike to understand how to make press release content easier to find.

This is post #5 in a series of 10 on the intersection of PR and SEO.  We’ll discuss a few best practices content SEO tactics as well as a few things to avoid.

While there is much to understand about successfully implementing and maintaining search engine optimization efforts, there are a few  fundamental concepts worth starting with, including the notion of quantity, quality and time as appropriate to content and links.  For the most part, the more web pages, digital assets and inbound links, the better the search visibility.  Each link is a conduit and each page is a potential entry point into the web site.

As a general guideline, the same is true with quality. The higher quality content and link sources, the more competitive advantage for better search results. 

The core of search marketing  is the mix of keyword phrases that people use to search for  information on the web. Part of the value of Search Engine Optimization is to identify what searchers actually enter in the search box. If optimization efforts can focus on the phrases that are equally relevant and in demand, there’s a resonable expectation that the optimized news content will attract more visitors of the right kind: journalists, reporters, analysts, bloggers and even end consumers. 

Choosing the best keywords for news content starts with brainstorming using a mix of sources including the main topic of the content, talking to customers, analyzing competitor news content and topically relevant news that already rank wells. Effective keyword research generates a seed list of concepts from the brainstorming exercise and then proceeds to use keyword research tools to determine the popularity of those phrases as well as discovering related phrases in use.

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

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

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

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides a wealth of information directly from Google. Once you have verified a site with Google, they’ll give you access to all sorts of information.

Here are just a few features of Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Errors
Google Webmaster Tools will show all sorts of errors with a site. Not only does it show broken links on the site, but also links that are driving traffic to the site for which there is no valid page. Google even tells you pages it knows about but has been restricted from crawling. That’s good to know incase someone accidently blocks to much.

Google Webmaster Tools Error Report