Online Marketing Blog

There’s all sorts of buzz about blogs lately and yet so many companies are still wondering what to do about it. In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites - lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.

“Why Media Buyers Must Understand SEO” by Tessa Wegert over at ClickZ addresses how blogs and viral marketing are effective linking tactics and therefore important for search marketing.

Increasingly, I am seeing the creative aspect of search marketing growing in importance. SEO grew out of IT because so many technical issues existed causing sites not to rank well. Now search engines are better at indexing a wider array of file formats and more sophisticaed urls. Off page factors such as links are just as or more important as technical SEO.

Thomas (TwisterMC) has updated a few of our public tools for blog marketing.

First, the RSS Feed Button Maker has been updated with additional support for Textpattern, MovableType and Blogger.

Also, we’ve launched a new Social Bookmark Links Tool. This is a fantastic new tool that allows you to easily create links embedded with your blog post urls for over 30 social bookmark and tagging sites.

Why would you do that? Social bookmark sites like del.ico.us, digg, furl and others offer the opportunity for visitors to bookmark blog posts to a shared bookmark web site. Each bookmark by users is a vote for a page. Those “votes” can drive traffic to your blog post and can also help rankings since each bookmark is a link.