Online Marketing Blog

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

Quality inbound links are an essential element of web site marketing and search engine optimization programs to increase traffic and online sales. The greater the number of relevant and authoritative links to a web page, the greater the potential for higher search engine rankings and qualified traffic.

A recent survey from SEOmoz illustrates just how important inbound links are to rankings. An impressive 4 of the top 5 ranking factors involve inbound links:

• Keyword focused anchor text from external links: 73% very high importance
• External link popularity: 71% very high importance
• Diversity of link sources: 67% very high importance
• Trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains: 66% very high importance

We recently posted a list of over 100 resources our readers could leverage to learn more about marketing online through search. One of the categories was paid subscription SEM communities that offer training, forums and often times templates, forms and guides for implementing effective Search Marketing programs.

A pioneer forum that has a paid channel in this area is the WebmasterWorld Supporter’s group. SEOmoz has been wildly successful with their Pro community over the past few years and SEO Book launched their training community after discontinuing the actual book.  The newcomer to this group is SEO Dojo.

Below you’ll find info and links on each community and if you’re a fan, take this poll to vote which is your favorite:

As I work with our clients on their link building projects, I am often testing out new tools to make the process more efficient. After meeting with Lee at PubCon South in March, Jeremy Bencken – one of the founders of BuzzStream -  followed up with Lee for the opportunity to demo and test out their link building tool – BuzzStream for Link Building. Lee requested that I take a look at this tool, and I was glad for the opportunity.

For many webmasters, managing link building campaigns can seem pretty daunting. Identifying a link building strategy is one key to success. Another is ensuring link building efficiency and follow up. Identifying processes and tools to help increase this efficiency can greatly increase the amount and value of links you achieve.

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

The first post-lunch session of day 3 of Pucon brought together a great mix of SEO experts including: Todd Malicoat, Rand Fishkin and last minute fill-in for Jessie Stricchiola, Andy Beal. Moderator duties were handled by Joe Laratro.

First up is Todd who covered 30 different tools which are too many to mention here but included tools for: browsers, domain server, keywords, competitive research, ranking checkers, backlink checking, on page optimization, spidering, productivity and tools for fixing duplicate content. but the most interesting included:

• User agent switcher allows you to surf the web as if you were a bot from an engine so you can see sites the way search engine spiders see them.
• Search Status Firefox plugin shows you various time saving information all in one place 

[Note from Lee: We tend to get a bit heavy on the industry observations and strategy, so a nice tactics/tools post is in order. ]

There are many different tools out there for SEO’s to use on a website. Each one has different features and benefits depending on how you use them. That’s why TopRank provides SEO Tool Reviews from time to time. We showcase different tools that you may or may not know about. Some free, some paid, all good.

The basis of this SEO tool review is Firefox. “Firefox a SEO tool”, you say? Alone, Firefox is not an SEO tool, but there are many extensions and toolbars that can be added to Firefox to extend it’s possibilities past basic web browsing.

What makes Firefox so great?

The Internet Marketing Ninjas instructional program including videos and tools conceived by Jim Boykin of We Build Pages, has officially launched. I think a lot of people in the search marketing industry will be wowed by the sheer volume of quality information that’s available. Currently there are a series of 12 videos from the likes of Aaron Wall, Shoemoney, Neil Patel and Jim himself. Plus, most of the famous We Build Pages SEO and link building tools have been taken offline and included in the program along with many of the private WBP tools.

I was fortunate to be included in the program and Jim was good enough to take some time and answer a few questions about Internet Marketing Ninjas during the launch to cover how/why it was started, how he was able to get some of the smartest search marketers to give up their secrets and what future enhancements are in store.

Raise conversions by 55% you say? That’s what Marketing Sherpa says in the promo copy for their new Landing Page Handbook. One of the most popular posts we’ve ever had on Online Marketing Blog was the 10 Landing Page Tips by Jon Miller of Marketo. That’s why I think this new report from Marketing Sherpa may be of interest.

You can spend a lot of time testing and fine tuning landing pages on your own from scratch, but in many cases, it makes a lot of sense to get a bit of a head start. This guide is about both the art and science of landing page creation and optimization.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for any site owner. It’s designed to inform webmasters about how Google bot is interacting with their website. It gives detailed information on broken links, popular keywords and how often Google is stopping by. It’s Googles way of giving site owners the information that they need to be successful.

The Setup

Getting started with Google Webmaster Tools is not to difficult. The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. Since all Google services use the same login, you may already be setup. If you have Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, iGoogle or one of the many other services, then you are ready to go. If not, sign up for a free Google Account.

Earlier this year I participated in an online focus group where questions were asked about various webmaster and SEO tools. The session was run by a third party and I was able to get them to admit it was for Microsoft. Tonight, like many others that showed interest, I received an invite to register from Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager of the Live Search Webmaster Tools Team.

Similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools (Vanessa Fox interview here) and Yahoo’s Site Explorer tools (Tim Mayer interview here), the services included in this Beta of Microsoft’s Windows Live Webmaster Portal appear to be split up into three categories:

Troubleshooting

• Site crawling
• Site Indexing
• Robots.txt
• Sitemaps

Sitemaps

• Creation
• Submission (upload, autodiscovery)
• Ping

Even though she’s moved on from Google to Zillow, Vanessa Fox still carries quite a bit of passion for her creation, Google Webmaster Tools which was renamed from Google sitemaps about a year ago. She was even spotted at the Google Dance giving advice to SES attendees at the Google Webmaster Tools product demo table.

Many webmasters and beginning search marketers could benefit a great deal from the features offered by Google Webmaster Tools so I asked Vanessa if she’d do a short video with me to provide a few tips.

For more info on Google Webmaster Central visit the blog.

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