Online Marketing Blog

You’ve heard the stories from the tech echo chamber. Posts proclaiming blogging dead and RSS too slow have been circulating around the web for the last year or so.  And yet the blogosphere remains alive and kicking, despite the early adopter pontification.

Not yet running a blog or syndicating your content through RSS feeds?  Your competition certainly is, and if you’re not there you’re missing out on a vital area that can boost your SEO efforts.

Joshua Palau, VP, Search, Razorfish moderates this panel of industry leaders (including TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden) to explore the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization:

• Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
• Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD
• Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed

If you’re interested in building a flourishing online brand and web site that generates links and traffic organically as part of your internet marketing efforts, it’s important to develop an active base of subscribers and fans.

Subscribers and fans i.e. “a community” are a key ingredient of popular web sites. They are integral to increasing the reach of your communications steadily month after month. If you don’t have a passionate, interested group of people subscribed to your site now, put a plan in place to acquire them. Building an active community is a pillar of successful social media marketing.

Some of the top reasons subscribers and fans are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy include:

The ~11% of web users who know to use RSS include the users savvy enough to be web publishers

Not many in the Search Engine Optimization game would argue that link building isn’t tactical. The problem is, approaching link building as an end goal and tactically, is very much like a hamster running in it’s cage.  That’s what many mechanical SEO consultants do: Chase links one by one or get creative with link bait to attract an influx of links from blogs that write about the kinds of things other blogs do for link bait. I should know, in the past 12 years of providing SEO services, there have been many opportunities to do just that. It’s not scalable, not sustainable and certainly not strategic.

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.

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.

Despite the constantly evolving nature of search engines and ranking methods, inbound links continue be a significant influence on website rankings. The higher quality the link, the more authority that link passes on.

Sites that have been live and active on the web for many years attract a substantial number of links when well promoted. But, what about those sites that are brand new? How should they go about getting quality links right off the bat?

Here is a list of 5 link building tactics for new websites to get them off on the right foot:

1. Links from Local Organizations - If your company is registered with the Better Business Bureau or the Chamber of Commerce, the links from these sites can be very relevant for geographically specific terms and topics. Also, locate other local businesses and organizations that maintain lists of businesses to request a link from.

It’s time for another SEO Basics post and this time getting more out of link building efforts is the topic. 

Link building continues to be an important part of marketing and optimizing web sites and web marketers can often get distracted by quantity goals rather than quality.  Link building efforts for search engine optimization purposes rely on clean links that can be crawled by search engine bots.  But what’s a “clean crawlable link”?  It’s one that is not blocked with Robots NoIndex meta tag, JavaScript redirect, blocked with robots.txt or a NoFollow tag.

There are hundreds of ways to attract and acquire links. If link requests, article submissions or other high labor, low impact tactics are used, then it’s important to make sure the links acquired are good for both users and search engines.

We continue our series of weekly SEO basics questions and answer today with a question that acknowledges the value of approaching search engine optimization holistically, but indicates a desire to keep things simple and focus on the basics.

“… you mentioned to use a holistic approach to aid in a better SEO, but specifically what might be the “top 3″ things can I do or focus on my website to best help improve my search rankings on Google”

Since Google dominates the search marketplace, you can read their “How can I create a Google-friendly site?” recommendations. Or you can read on for more SEO insight.

Here’s another search engine optimization Q/A on on the topic of web site marketing via directories compared to search engines plus a bonus on the value of meta search engines.

These are real questions from a web site owner and due to the vintage nature of the topics, reflect the need for ongoing education and updates necessary for anyone involved in marketing through search.

What is the audience of the directories compared to the search engines? What is the benefit of being included in directories ?  What if I only submit my website to algorithmic search engines and not directories: Does it really matter ?

Directories like Yahoo’s Directory and DMOZ.org have been cited by several search engines as logical places for inclusion as part of an effort to acquire inbound links. However, as of October 2nd, 2008 Google no longer includes this recommendation in their Webmaster Guidelines.

When marketing web sites on the internet 10 years ago, people “surfed” the web, clicking on links between sites they already knew about, links from directories and review sites. Search engines like AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, etc were around as well. Remember those?

People like Eric Ward pioneerd the practice of promoting web sites editorially resulting in links from these sorts of resources. Links had to come from relevant sources otherwise the traffic was irrelevant.

Google came on the scene with PageRank and boosted the value of bot detected links. Search engine quality improved substantially but opportunistic webmasters and eventually SEOs, identified and took advantage of as many methods of link acquisition as possible. Many of those links being topically relevant and many completely out of context. Think “link farm”.

The TopRank team works really well together, bringing to each team meeting various areas of expertise and interest, which makes for a well-rounded environment here in our Lake Minnetonka office. We know how to play off of everyone’s strengths and ensure our clients are fully serviced based on their needs and objectives by those who can best take on that role.

Below is a list of our favorite online marketing tips , which – as a team – makes us stronger than each individual.

• Build Out Social Relationships Gradually – Social media and social networking are not “dump and run” tactics. Relationships need to be built over a long period of time in a venue that enhances the product or service you are promoting, which is when the promoted piece gets the most positive attention.

While there is still a debate over the effect of the recession we are in, or even if we are in a recession at all, it seems most companies and individuals are preparing for it the best they can. Talks of budget cuts and conserving resources are on everyone’s minds these days.

So where does search marketing fit in to all of this?

Our expert panel this morning at SMX Advanced – consisting of Jon Miller from Marketo (a TopRank client), Russ Mann of Covario , Dave Davies of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning and Andrew Beckman of Location3 Media – gave great advice and opinions in how to come out of this recession thriving.