Online Marketing Blog

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“Why Shouldn’t I Have My Web Designer Do Our SEO?”

This is a question we often hear from companies that are playing devil’s advocate during a site redesign that also needs optimization for better visibility on search engines. It’s sort of a, “As long as you’re under the hood, can you fix that other thing” perspective. Since the site design and code are being reworked, why not sprinkle some keywords in there?

This is a logical attitude for business or site owners who think of search engine optimization as purely a technical discipline. Too often this perspective is fostered by people in the web design and interactive industry who consume outdated information about SEO.

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This Thursday I’ll be doing an audio conference as part of Bulldog Reporter’s PR University on search engine optimization and public relations. I did one of these in the Spring of 2006 and it went pretty well. I know a lot of practical, hands-on information was given out for the past conference. Attendees ranged from top 10 public relations firms in the U.S. to boutique shops and in-house PR professionals.

The panel this Thursday is very similar as last year and consists of:

• Sally Falkow from Expansion Plus
• Jamie O‚ÄôDonnell, SEO PR
• Lee Odden, TopRank

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Is blog optimization part of search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites.

If you can optimize a document and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by a search engine, it’s part of search marketing in my book. As such, marketers should be aware of how these kinds of channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.

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In a recent conversation with a big brand company conducting their search marketing vendor selection process, I was asked what “our angle” was. What makes TopRank different from other SEO firms?

The question was followed up with the observations that other SEO vendors this company had talked to all seemed to distinguish themselves by focusing on certain aspects of search engine optimization. Some focused on content, some relied on links and others focused on code and the technical side of SEO.

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When you size up the search marketing industry, you really have to marvel at all the different information sources, many of them conflicting, and how search marketers are able to stay on top of what’s current and relevant compared to noise and malarkey.

In the course of talking to prospective clients, prospective business partners, attending conferences and events, reading blogs, books, discussion threads, forums, newsletters and industry publications, you can get exposure to an amazing variety of observations about SEO. Many of them are spot-on. Some of them are tales of a mythical nature. A few are just plain bunk.

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A group blog I write for on occassion is hosting a carnival of customer service and invited the group to contribute. This is a business blog directed towards small and medium sized businesses on issues ranging from legal considerations to SEO. The invite made me think about how SEO can affect a customer’s experience with a site and it’s brand.

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