Online Marketing Blog

It’s a near nightmare situation really. A client sends an email on Friday saying, “We’re launching a new web site on Monday, can you take a look at it to make sure our site optimization is ok?”.

The Account Manager asks for a URL and upon receiving, clicks to find a “pretty” home page with 90% images and/or Flash, “cool web 2.0″ navigation using Ajax and as a result of a new content management system, a URL syntax that is completely different than before. Oh, and all title/meta descriptions are now hard coded and there are 50% less pages because the VP of Marketing heard at an executive marketing seminar that “less is more”.

The buzz about SEO in the public relations industry has grown tremendously over the past 2-3 years. Press releases in particular, have been the easy target for promotion as candidates for optimization. With the growing use of Google and Yahoo News, optimizing press releases have been an easy way to gain prominent visibility in the short term and in some cases, long term visibility in standard search engines.

It’s pretty common in the interactive, advertising and PR agency world to outsource components of an engagement where the lead agency does not have specific domain expertise. Those scenarios are often structured by the client who is already working with other vendors or the lead agency bringing in outside expertise.  For the most part, it’s pretty transparent what is outsourced and what is not.

Is this the same in the search marketing and especially, the SEO industry?  The variety of creative, technical and social expertise required to excel and succeed with today’s online marketing programs makes it a formidable challenge for any search marketing agency to staff accordingly. The “cowboy” mentality prevalent in the SEO world makes employing some of the best at their craft unlikely.

B2B Search sessions (both organic and paid) can be few and far between, so any time it exists I’m sure to plant myself in the front row.  The B2B Tactics session was moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers included:

Patricia Hursh, President and Founder, SmartSearch Marketing
Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.
Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing
Karen Breen Vogel, President and CEO, ClearGauge

With B2B SEO being a sweet spot for the team at TopRank, hearing from other industry leaders about how they have effectively executed for such companies is certainly relevant.

After gathering around the caffeine this morning for Day 3 of SES New York, attendees gathered to listen to a keynote from Gordon McLeod, President, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

Gordon led the audience through the evolution of SEO within the Wall Street Journal organization, noting that they didn’t necessarily do things right the first or second time.

Since 1996, The Wall Street Journal has grown to incorporate SEO as a strategic business decision, not a grouping of tactics.

Here are some of the lessons they learned along the way:

While sitting in sessions at any Search Marketing Conference, you will hear agency-side search marketers asking the panel for advice on how to keep clients from standing in their own way.

Questions like:

What if my client ignores our optimization recommendations?

What if a client doesn’t see any value in social media?

Some search marketers might think working with clients who won’t implement recommendations is a waste of time. I think it’s well worth a little extra work needed to understand why they are not following recommendations and finding a work around. In fact, if you’re working for an enterprise SEO client, the ability to find work arounds is a bare minimum requirement.

Organic Listings Forum with Mike Grehan moderating and Jill Whalen, Dave Naylor and Greg Boser on the panel. Here we have an all star SEO cast available to answer questions about organic SEO.

Mike starts out with a nod to St Patrick’s day. During introductions Greg says he’s a reformed black hat spammer.

Audience: To what extent does Google use user data and behavior and how relevant is PageRank?

Greg: PageRank is irrelevant. It’s not important the way it used to be. It’s important to get crawled and how often you get crawled. It’s “link juice”. Use no follow to sculpt your PageRank.

Many companies narrowly define PR activities online solely as blogger relations when in reality, online public relations is so much more. To me, internet based public and media relations encompasses gaining editorial exposure on the web with sites like blogs of course, but it also leverages web based technologies, networks and platforms for developing and maintaining more efficient communication with the media. And by “media” I mean traditional media with an online presence as well as other influencers - be they bloggers, power social news users or social networkers.

As a growing mid-sized online marketing agency, TopRank has had opportunities to interview well over a 100 people for various search engine optimization and internet marketing positions. We’ve been fortunate to hire and develop an amazing team of professionals. We’ve also experienced the flip side.

There are increasing numbers of resources from which to attract or find candidates whether it’s traditional online job boards like Monster.com, SEO job listings at SEMPO or sites dedicated to SEO recruiting. Making sure actual SEO skills and experience are in alignment with company/client needs is as important as setting accurate expectations for job responsibilities and work environment.

[Note from Lee: This is a perfect session for Jolina because she manages one of the largest enterprise SEO projects for any agency our size - over 2o different business units for a Fortune 20 company.]

SEO for the enterprise requires a very different approach, than SEO for an small or medium business (SMB).

Deploying the same approach at the enterprise level, as you would for an SMB, would be like trying to clean a wine spill with Windex. You’ll end up making a bigger mess.

SEMPO Institute released their online training program for SEO and PPC late 2007. TopRank has previously written a review of the “Fundamentals Course” now known as the “Insider’s Guide to Search Marketing”. SEMPO Institute students that complete the Insider’s Guide can then move on to the two advanced training courses, one of which is the Advanced SEO Specialist course. I’ve recently completed that training and have the following review:

The Advanced SEO Course builds on the basics covered in the Insider’s Guide to Search Marketing, and then expands into research and execution of many SEO tactics including: keyword research, web page construction, link building tactics and writing appropriate website copy.

SMX West, in Santa Clara, kicked off today with a keynote from Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land.

Danny started off the conference by talking about the different generations of search, of which many of us have experienced, the generation we’re in now and where he thinks the industry might go next.

Here’s a quick rundown:

Search 1.0 – Keywords - All about the keywords on the page and what ended up as keyword stuffing for the large part.

Search 2.0 – Links – Search results followed the democratic process and ranked websites based on the number of links (votes) the website was receiving.