Online Marketing Blog

Most people like things simple and “pre-packaged” solutions do well to attract mass market appeal. Just look at the popularity of “value meals” at popular fast food restaurants and other consumer products.

In the business to business world, the simplification of products and services into such groupings is not so practical, “Did you want the #3 or #4 enterprise CRM software package?”. Yet judging by the inquiries many search marketing companies get, it is high in demand: “Can you tell me about your SEO packages?”.

I think it’s safe to say the idea of optimizing web sites for better rankings, traffic and sales is an idea that that has become pretty standard for most web site owners. Ranking well on search engines can provide an incredible amount of “free” traffic to a web site. Many companies base their entire business model on traffic from natural search results generating millions in revenue.

Due to the lure of the so called “free” traffic and monetary goals, many site owners, webmasters and web marketers succumb to short term strategies and find themselves chasing after the latest “trick” or tactic. Because search engines and traffic opportunities change often, web marketers can find themselves in a never ending loop.

At the past two conferences I’ve spoken at, Search Insider Summit and Media Relations Summit, one of the popular topics that has been floating around the after session meet-ups and dinner conversations concerns the changing nature of search optimization. Some speculate SEO is on the way out. Others say social media is the new SEO.

Whatever the speculation, companies need to figure out how to best adjust their search marketing strategies to maintain a competitive advantage. One way to do that is to focus the right proportion of effort on standard text optimization as well as the optimization and promotion of all other digital assets.

“titel” is “title” in German for you spell check enthusiasts.
Via Axandra Search Engine Facts newsletter, German company SISTRIX (translated link) has conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then analyzed the top 100 Google search results for each keyword to determine which page elements offered the most influence on rankings.

Nothing in the analysis will be new to long time search marketers, but since so many people new to search engine optimization ask for nice, concise lists of what’s important to rank well in the search engines, I thought I’d indulge.

• Keywords in the title tag

The phrases “search engine optimizaton” and “rankings” have gone hand in hand since the start of the search marketing industry. Agencies have gone so far as to use “rankings” as part of their name such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings, David Wallace’s “Search Rank” and of course, our company “TopRank”.

With the advent of personalization and impending changes with the interface of search results, the notion of ranking seems to be on it’s way out. In the past 3-4 years, most SEO consulting firms have been focusing on traffic and especially the past 2-3 years on conversions. Standard search engine rankings as a proxy to sales will become irrelevant, especially as other channels of search have emerged in popularity.

I think it’s safe to say that everyone in the web site optimization business has experienced that unfortunate situation with a client where those responsible for creating the web site have done those nasty things that seem to make the site as un-search engine friendly as possible. While it’s not intentional, it can seem awfully ignorant to search engine optimization consultants brought in after the fact to “fix” things.

Common issues include:

• URLs that are difficult or impossible for search engine spiders to crawl
• Hard coding the same title tag on all pages, not allowing tags to be edited or no title tag at all

TopRank is hiring for various SEO positions like mad right now and in the process of revising job descriptions to reflect changes in client needs and the industry, it became clear that, yet again, some skills have become far more important than others.

An example would be the importance of HTML and on-page optimization skills was very high in the early days of SEO, whereas link building and viral marketing/creative have become increasingly important.

Core characteristics for a successful search marketing career like being smart as a hell and an insatiable need to continuously learn new things will never change, but as you know, when an ordered list comes across my desk, it’s time for a reader poll!

One of the things that often happens with people in the search marketing industry is that after being in the business for a while and attaining a certain level of expertise, it becomes easy to take for granted that not everyone in marketing and business is consuming and digesting as much information. References to strategies and certain tactics do not have the same meaning, because of the dependencies on previous knowledge.

In the past I’ve written about the content versus links debate where SEOs seem to fall on one side or the other when assigning the majority of importance for search engine rankings. What’s missing from that conversation is the need for a distribution network.

There are many that believe the key to a successful link building campaign is to create content worth linking to. However, if you create great content and no one knows about it to send a link, then there’s a lot lost on the effort. “Build it and they will come” is not the reality with search marketing despite the hype from SEO nay-sayers.

Today I’m doing an online radio interview over at RSS Ray on social media and search engine optimization. Our discussion will cover fundamentals of social media and how businesses, small and large, might use such tactics as part of their online marketing mix. We’ll also discuss blog marketing and press release optimization.

The kind of social media optimization and marketing that gets the most play these days is hitting the home page of digg or getting tons of traffic from Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit, etc. Many of the SMO/SMM campaigns we run achieve these kinds of results, but it’s not the end goal. If you’re familiar with the services we provide at TopRank, you’ll know we take a holistic approach to search marketing and view things like social media on a longer term basis.

Explaining search engine optimization to newbies is something that anyone with sales or account support responsibilities at a search marketing or interactive agency is going to have to get good at. I used to spend a lot of time using the notion of “organic” and the whole “making fertile ground, planting seeds, nurturing, cultivating, watering, air, sun, bear fruit” kind of analogy but it gets old using the same description all the time.

There’s a long standing debate in the search marketing industry about links versus content. Which is better?

On the one hand there’s the perspective that if you create great content, people will link to you naturally. That’s true, but it’s a bit misleading.

On the other hand there are those that say links are the answer. You can get pages to rank well based purely on links. Again, that’s entirely possible, but such a statement does not give you all the facts.