Online Marketing Blog

“If Ihad to pick only one thing to do with my web site to improve it’s search engine visibility, what would it be?”

It’s a question that comes up often and most people asking it expect that there’s one right answer. The trouble is, as web sites and situations are different, so is the “just one thing” answer. It really depends on the situation.

Picture this: A web site with 10,000 pages, 6 years old, 25,000 inbound links and publishes new content daily. Yet the site gets less than 5% of all traffic via organic search. Why might that be?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a necessary component of any successful business website. The internet has become the primary resource for information on virtually everything, from goods and services to relationships. To meet the needs of customers searching for solutions, businesses need to ensure their website content is easily visible and what better way than SEO  to achieve this?

For readers new to SEO, getting started can be a bit of a mystery, like planning a trip in uncharted territory. How do you know which keywords to use in optimization? Can you implement an effective SEO campaign yourself, or will you require outside assistance? TopRank Online Marketing has established 5 SEO Essentials for those who need optimization but don’t know where to begin.

Harrison Ford may have been a robot. SEO copywriters are not.

Copywriting, and all of marketing really, represent that beautiful intersection between business and creativity.  Those of us lucky enough to find our way into this niche find that, amazingly, we can actually make a living being creative.

Granted, the work we create may not always grab the attention of our hipster friends, but it will put food on our clients’ tables (most important), put food on our own tables (second most important), and put food on our aforementioned hipster friends’ tables (if they’re lucky).

Perhaps the biggest mistake we can make as copywriters when we find ourselves writing specifically for a search engine optimization initiative is becoming untrue to our own creative personalities.

In the last session of the day, attendees were rewarded with 8 awesome tips to boost Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Results in a sponsored session  ”Wpromote Workshop: 8 Things You Aren’t Doing That Will Boost Your SEM Results”.  

Using real-life examples, this session promises to teach attendees the secrets top online marketers are using to beat the competition and squeeze the greatest results possible from their SEM efforts.   Topics include: PPC, SEO, landing page optimization and social media. 

Speakers are Michael Mothner, Founder & CEO and Michael Stone, Vice President, Sales & Strategy – both from Wpromote.  Some tips you may know and some you may not, but there is definitely something for everyone.

Search engine optimization can be challenging enough, especially for large, enterprise organizations rich with digital assets.  They’re also rich with policies, procedures and often times a labrynth of  content approval and publishing processes.

An effort to optimize and promote those assets to search engine bots can be even more challenging than standard SEO. And yet it can also be far more rewarding. The notion of Digital Asset Optimization came out of TopRank’s efforts in early in 2007 to describe for internet marketing clients what new opportunities there were to enable prospects and customers to pull themselves via search to company content.

The thing about internet marketing is that there is no “one right way” to solve a single problem. So much of the advice and commentary about content optimization for search engines at conferences and on blogs is tactical. Five tips for this and 10 ways to do that. We do it too, because people that are new or just dipping their toe into the stream of internet marketing knowledge need information packaged in an easy to understand and actionable format.

Between the changes and improvements that happen on search engines, adoption of new web technologies/applications and changes in the way people use search, tactical advice can get outdated pretty quickly.  

In October we decided to mix things up a bit and offer more posts with practical tips, especially the SEO Basics series. While many of our readers appreciate industry insights, observations, conference coverage and interviews, it was the practical tips and resources that attracted the most interest.

While started out with tips focused on search engine optimization in October, we’ll begin offering similarly practical tips for digital PR and social media marketing as well.

The two day Social Media Smarts workshop in conjunction with the DMA will offer more than enough basic social media tips to share.  Here are the top 10 Online Marketing Blog posts according to visitors, post ratings and incoming links for October:

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.

At the DMA08 conference in Las Vegas this week, the “Search Engine Experience” panel on Tuesday was presented with a number of site reviews which are great sessions because the audience gets free SEO consulting advice and speakers get to demonstrate their expertise.

One of the questions that came up was related to a site that has most of it’s content behind a login. Because search engine spiders don’t/can’t fill out forms (with some exceptions) they cannot find the content behind the login to index and include in the search results.

Why would you want your “members access only” content available to search engines?

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.

Online Marketing Blog has always been about more than search engine optimization, covering digital public relations, social media marketing and plenty of other internet marketing topics. And yet, SEO is a core component of nearly every thing we do in our consulting practice.

For the web site owners  and marketers fairly new to the site optimization game, we like to offer tips based on common questions overheard in the course of providing SEO and internet marketing services.

Question: “Ensure your site is crawlable”  What would be, in your opinion, the basic conditions that need to be reunited for a website to be crawled?”

Blogs have been abuzz for at least 4 years in the tech space and in the past 2-3 years in the business marketing world. Like many new marketing/communication channels, there continues to be a need to demystify shiny new objects and what they mean for businesses. Blogs and search engine optimization are no different.

One point I would make is that companies are wasting their long term time when setting up blogs purely for SEO purposes. It’s short term thinking and over time, results in difficulties with keeping momentum, new ideas and content. How do I know? Been there and done that, many times.

It’s far more realistic to implement blogs for specific purposes such as product communications, online newsroom, thought leader/strategy, customer support/communications, news, branding, advice/tips, aggregation of content in specific topics and many more. Regardless of the purpose, each blog implementation and ongoing management should have an intentional SEO effort.