Online Marketing Blog

There’s a game of telephone going on about a hundred different theories of Search Engine Optimization and the influences or signals that affect search visibility. One that I continue to hear revolves around the notion that search engines like fresh content. I’m sure the genesis was something like:  Someone told someone else at a conference and they posted it to a forum where someone read and blogged it and then someone else Tweeted it whereupon someone else blasted it via Ping.fm and Hootsuite. This sort of cycle repeats over and over again.

The point is, with telephone game advice on SEO or any other topic, the message gets diluted. Fresh content apparently means different things to different people and the version I continue to hear from SEO “experts” (agency, independent and in-house) is that search engines like websites that change their content often. The logic is that changing content on a page will attract search engine crawlers more frequently and somehow improve search visibility for the page.

One of the biggest fears for web site owners that have long relied on search traffic for new business is a sudden drop in search engine rankings.  Some webmasters are experiencing this very situation as a result of Google’s recent Mayday update (Matt Cutts video).

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:

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

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

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

In conjunction with ClickZ, OMS has launched its 2010 23-City Tour from Seattle to New York and is coming to Minneapolis June 25th.  OMS had an event in the Twin Cities last year at about the same time and provided a great mix of education and networking opportunity for internet marketers of all types.

Best practices in Social Media, Search, Email, Analytics, Demand Generation and Website Strategy are planned for each OMS event. Aaron Kahlow and the OMS team have assembled a great group of thought-leaders, authors, world-class brand marketers and leading online practitioners from companies like: Kodak, REI, DuPont, Wharton, Google AdWords and of course, TopRank Online Marketing, to share their experiences and successes from the front lines of internet marketing.

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.]

It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data.

Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include:

• It’s too confusing
• Information overload
• What am I supposed to do with all this data?
• Won’t all this tracking be expensive?

The PR industry is in a state of flux with increasing importance on getting into the content and social web business. Consumers are spending more time with digital and social media. Advertising dollars are following. That means less budget to staff newsrooms and reporters, journalists and editors to pitch.

Understanding the needs of their “customers’ customer” is essential for PR agencies and communications professionals to remain relevant and productive. “Push PR” is increasingly being complemented by “Pull” tactics – optimization for discovery. Being able to provide value is essential and here are 3 ways a better understanding of SEO can do just that.

Recently I was invited to give a basics webinar on optimizing news content  for search.  The intersection of search and PR/communications are obviously something quite familiar and while I’ve done several such presentations with our client PRWeb, I had not done one with Search Engine Watch before.

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.

You don’t have to look far to find social media roundup posts this time of year. But what about the most effective one-two marketing punch for building community AND delivering conversions and ROI?  Social Media and Search Engine Optimization – or “Social SEO” as we like to call it.

Out of the 300 or so posts published in 2009, I’ve picked the best of the year based on a mix of my own opinion and metrics such as comments, inbound links, pageviews and social engagement off the blog through social news, bookmarking, Twitter and similar services using PostRank.

Here are TopRank’s Top 10 Social SEO Posts of 2009. Enjoy!

SEO for Flash – is it a reality yet?

One of the most common issues for web sites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Web sites made entirely with Flash are problematic because there are often no links for search engine crawlers to follow or HTML text to copy.

According to the Opera (browser) developer center, somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files representing a lot of content that may not be included in search results or only partially indexed. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.

Today at the PRSA 09 conference, it was a packed room for TopRank CEO (and author of Online Marketing Blog) Lee Odden who gave a presentation on SEO for Public Relations.

He started by explaining why SEO is/should be important to PR Professionals.

In a 2008 Journalists Use of Search Survey by TopRank, we discovered that 91% of journalists use standard search to fulfill a component of their job whether researching a story or locating a subject matter expert.

With journalists writing for more channels and with less resources making your content visible within search is critical.

Here are Odden’s 10 SEO Tips:

The search engine industry frequently innovates as do consumer behaviors for discovery and sharing. Those changes require search marketers to take a fresh look at what search engine optimization (SEO) is and why companies should or should not engage in its practice.

Defining search engine optimization is often focused on the mechanics:
“SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.” (Wikipedia).

Even Google offers a definition of what an SEO is along with guidelines:
“Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Review of your site content or structure, Technical advice on website, development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript, Content development, Management of online business development campaigns, Keyword research, SEO training, Expertise in specific markets and geographies.”

Tenured digital marketing professionals have been applying social media for end business and marketing objectives for years. But what is clearly valuable to some is still a mystery to many.

Whether you’re a marketer trying to get buy-in for social media from the top or a small business owner wondering why you should bother, knowing high impact applications of social media are helpful. If you’re looking to build relationships with connected, influential individuals (and what business isn’t?) then it’s no longer a question of if you should engage in social media, rather it’s the how and the why.

If you’re wondering how, a great starting point is viewing TopRank’s social media roadmap presentation. But let’s take a step even further back and consider the why: directed application of social media can accomplish some seriously valuable objectives.