Online Marketing Blog

Numerous companies are losing vast amounts of revenue due to their web sites doing poorly in the search engines.  Web sites that are not easy to find via search miss out on attracting new customers as well as repeat customers that use Google to navigate sites they already know about. Is the same true for web sites that are not social media friendly?

People discover new sites through search, but also through recommendations made via email, word of mouth and through social media content. Making a web site social media friendly will facilitate the saving and sharing of content with others, extending reach and facilitating engagement. 

Changes in consumer preferences towards news consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies.  Searchers increasingly expect to interact with what they find via search. 

The opportunity for Public Relations is to understand that leveraging social media as a distribution channel to attract buzz and earn links is as important as keyword optimization of social media content to improve visibility on standard search engines.  Simply put: SEO and Social Media go together like peas and carrots.

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.  Keyword relevancy plus aboundant inbound links to content equals improved search engine visibility. Whatever keywords that are used to describe optimized news content that becomes popular within social channels like news, bookmarking and media sharing are what that content will tend to rank highly on in standard search engines.

Entering the realm of social media can be a bit like trying to enter an exclusive club. There are barriers to entry, codes of conduct, and unwelcome outsiders are quickly identified and ostracized. Yet, like an exclusive club, the benefits of membership can be great. Marketers looking to benefit from social media would do well to heed the advice of the three presenters in this SES session, moderated by Pauline Ore of IBM Corporation.

As Kendall Allen, digital marketing and convergence media consultant, pointed out, social media has come a long way since the advent of the Internet. Listservs, user groups and chat rooms have given way to the networking giants of Facebook and Myspace.

My first post from the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is the second half of “Free Traffic: SEO/SMO 101 (Search Engine & Social Media Optimization) with Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Muhammad Saleem of Advantage Consulting Services. Unfortunately, I missed the SEO portion and gauging by the crowd around Stephan, it went quite well.

Muhammad Saleem’s portion of the presentation focuses on Social Media Optimization and Marketing 101. I’ve not met Mahammaed in person before and he’s sporting a very cool goatee with a waxed moustache.

Saleem’s presentation focuses on 4 aspects of social media:

• Blogs
• Social News sites
• Social Networks
• Online Video

Many other tools don’t have that big of an impact/conversionrate for the “average” company.

[SEO and social media marketing TopRank team member Jeff Nolan has stepped up to the plate, or in this case, onto the green and submitted the following post about marketing within social media communities using golf as a metaphor. Enjoy!]

Many regular readers of Online Marketing Blog are well aware of our location amidst the cold and frozen land of Minnesota. This gets me thinking about many hobbies this time of year, most notably how I wish there were boats on the lake across from the office rather than ice houses, and that instead of building links daily, I was hitting the links daily.

Yes, you guessed it, there is no place I would rather be right now than on a golf course, which has led me to compare the disturbingly similar synergies between golf and social media.

When talking with so many companies of all sizes and types about marketing with social media, many are keen on the idea, but don’t have a clear idea of the best way to incorporate tactics like social bookmarking into their content promotions.  Anyone can throw up links to Digg, Del.icio.us and Facebook, but does it actually do anything?

The way I see it, two of the most practical ways to approach promoting content via social media sites such as social bookmarking and news would best be characterized as “active” and “passive”. In fact, there are many situations where both make sense.

The kind of promotion I mean is on social news or bookmarking service wheres you can submit a URL, describe and tag it, then others in the community can comment and/or vote.

“Video is a compelling SEO channel,” said Sherwood Stranieri of Catalyst Online, “and social marketing and viral marketing are the driving forces behind video optimization.” We’re witnessing, with Google Universal, how digital assets are changing the landscape of search. Video, like audio files can drive unprecedented traffic as well result in a surge of inbound links. This is great- if you have entertaining video content, right? Wrong!

It may seem at first glance, that video optimization makes sense for very particular industries and not others, but this is not the case. Although video optimization is an almost ideal search marketing tactic for individuals belonging to generation “Y”, it is not limited to this demographic. Human beings are interactive and become more engaged when stimulated. Video content plays to our visual and audio senses.

WebProNews has posted another great video interview, this time with Todd Malicoat and Neil Patel. In this interview, Mike McDonald of WPN discusses social media optimization and digg with Todd and Neil who presented on a SMO session at SES Chicago.

Speaking of social media, Neil and Cameron’s Pronet Advertising blog was awarded “Best Blog on Social Media Optimization” in Search Engine Journal’s recent Blog Awards. Barry does the best roundup of the blog winners over at Search Engine Land though. Note to Loren: Please take notes from Barry, it would be easier to find the good stuff on SEJ!

The KBCafe Blog Awards is still taking votes until Jan 10, so be sure to visit category #11 and vote for Online Marketing Blog, Search Engine Roundtable and/or Matt Cutts.

This is a bit of a late post but I want to get it out there before it gets swallowed up by all the other half-finished posts in my WordPress control panel.

I am happy to say that the session on social media optimization with Neil Patel, Andy Hagans, Rand Fishkin, Todd Malicoat and I during SES Chicago last week went pretty well. Todd and I did not do PowerPoint presentations but we did get a few minutes to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about SMO.

Neil started things off with a very unique and humorous explanation of Wikipedia. Basically, “Don’t spam Wikipedia.”

Rand followed up with an excellent review of the various social media sites ranging from digg to StumbleUpon to reddit. He made excellent points on how these communities are sensitive to promotion and provided general guidelines for interacting with them.

At the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago I’ll be sitting in on a panel about social media optimization. Panelists include Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Andy Hagans, Todd Malicoat and myself. The SES San Jose version of this panel included Chris Pirillo and Danny was nice enough to allow me on the panel. I am very much looking forward to hearing and participating firsthand with some of the top SMO practitioners.

At Pubcon in Las Vegas WebProNews did a great interview with Rand, Todd and I where we touch on the whole social media optimization and marketing topic. I won’t be giving a Powerpoint presentation at SES, but I will get few minutes to share my thoughts on SMO.

I think one of the ways you can sum up the idea of social media optimization and marketing is: “traffic alternatives to Google”. As great as Google is, marketers are increasingly looking for alternative and/or additional channels for content distribution and marketing and consumers for sources of information and interaction.

Some have suggested social search as an alternative. I don’t think social search will ever replace search engines as we know them today, but I do think the rate of growth for major search engines will certainly be affected by the growing number of niche tools and media specific channels such as social networks, social bookmarking sites, personalized search, tagging, podcasts, video blogs, regular blogs and other “social media”.

With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.

The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.