Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

The Best Blog SEO Survey Ever

The Best Pint of Abbot Ale, Ever

Blogs have been touted as effective tools for companies to publish content and demonstrate the conversational side of their corporate personality. Blogs have also long been promoted as a SEO tool. Despite plenty of optimism about blogging, there’s still a lot of mis-information, mis-perceptions and lack of awareness about effective, productive blogging for business.

Take This Blog SEO Survey: If you or your company publishes a blog, please take this quick poll looking into the perceived SEO benefits of blogging. Results will be published on Online Marketing Blog in the next week.  Like a fine pint of Abbot, this survey is smooth, to the point and might just put a smile on your face.


The Best Blog SEO Survey Ever

SES SJ: SEO Through Blogs And Feeds

TopRank Marketing Editor
TopRank Marketing Editor
Blog Optimization, RSS, Search Engine Strategies, SEO

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You’ve heard the stories from the tech echo chamber. Posts proclaiming blogging dead and RSS too slow have been circulating around the web for the last year or so.  And yet the blogosphere remains alive and kicking, despite the early adopter pontification.

Not yet running a blog or syndicating your content through RSS feeds?  Your competition certainly is, and if you’re not there you’re missing out on a vital area that can boost your SEO efforts.

Joshua Palau, VP, Search, Razorfish moderates this panel of industry leaders (including TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden) to explore the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization:

  • Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
  • Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD
  • Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed

SES SJ: SEO Through Blogs And Feeds

37 Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds – SES New York

 SES New York AudienceAs a preview to one of the 3 sessions I’m speaking on at SES New York next week (March 23-27) I bring you this interview with my co-panelists Michael Gray of Atlas Web Services, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, Michel Leconte of SEO Samba and moderator Rebecca Lieb Lieb, VP of U.S. operations for Econsultancy, for the Blog and Feed SEO session.

These are specific, practical questions and answers about optimizing both blogs and feeds for better search performance from some of the smartest blog and Feed SEO experts on the web. 

If you’re a Twitter fan, please ReTweet: 37 Tips for optimizing blogs and feeds:   http://cli.gs/blogseotips

Please share 3 practical SEO tips business blogs should implement:

Rebecca Lieb: 


37 Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds – SES New York

The Copyblogger Files – Interview with Brian Clark

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 After being a fan of Copyblogger and other projects, Brian Clark was kind enough to do a panel on SEO I was moderating at BlogWorld. Then I ran into him again recently at Affiliate Summit thinking each time what a great thing it would be for our readers to do an interview with him for Online Marketing Blog. 

Brian is a fantastic writer and marketer, recovering attorney and someone that over 50,000 people have decided to subscribe to at copyblogger.com – one of the most popular blogs on the internet.  Brian has a lot of what people want: knowledge, talent and success.  Read on to tap into some of that Copyblogger goodness.

How did you go from being a lawyer to an internet entrepreneur?


The Copyblogger Files – Interview with Brian Clark

5 Tips for Successful Blog Optimization

Yesterday I posted “3 Reasons Why Blog SEO Fails” to help readers avoid the pitfalls of starting a business or corporate blog purely for SEO reasons  only to end up wasting time and energy. Without proper planning, oversight and passion for the topic, blogs implemented purely for SEO objectives are doomed to fail. Additionally, social media referrals and recommendations are becoming a notable competitor to search traffic which can place SEO as a secondary promotional effort in some situations.

Here are five tips for successful business blog optimization benefits in the long run:

1. Find a practical purpose for starting a blog. There are many reasons why companies would benefit from starting and publishing a blog. Some might use blog software as a content management system for an online newsroom or to archive newsletters to the web.


5 Tips for Successful Blog Optimization

TopRank Brings 2 Speakers on 2 Panels at SES Chicago

audience

TopRank Online Marketing will have two speakers presenting on two panels at SES Chicago this week.

On Tuesday, Senior Account Manager Jolina Pettice (who recently spoke on a panel with Yahoo’s Ron Belanger and Anne Kennedy at DPAC) will be speaking on a session about how to use Public Relations tactics to improve SEO results.  On Wednesday I will be speaking on a panel about Blog SEO.

Here are the session details. We look forward to seeing you there!

Tuesday, December 9, 2008 – 2:45pm-3:45pm
“Turning PR Efforts into SEO Results”


TopRank Brings 2 Speakers on 2 Panels at SES Chicago

Pubcon Session: Blogger Reporter Panel

Blogger Reporter Panel
If someone has a better photo, please link in the comments

On day three, the last day of sessions at WebmasterWorld Pubcon here in Vegas, I participated on a panel called, “Search and Blogging Reporters Forum” with Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal.

Mike McDonald
Moderation duties handled by Mike McDonald. Basically, it was a round table-style discussion about blogging in the SEO industry as well as blogging as a marketing tool. There were some good points about using blogs as a public relations tool as well as some debate about hosting team blogs separately or all under the company domain name.

Rand Fishkin
There was some nice back and forth with Andy and Rand plus great questions from Mike and the audience.

Celebrity Audience: Bill, Lisa, Jane, Tamar


Pubcon Session: Blogger Reporter Panel

Defining Business Blogging Success

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When talking with TopRank or M&O Account Teams about new clients, it is inevitable that I will ask if there is a blog involved. There are simply too many advantages to enabling a web site with fresh, themed content that is well structured for SEO benefits and that also offers a great platform for creative promotion, not to consider it in the online marketing mix. However, the mis-perceptions about what a blog is and is not abound, even with self-described “blogging experts”.

Despite that, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question for a company to ask: “Why should we have a blog and what will it do for us?” Answering that question in the most effective way possible starts with understanding the business and marketing goals of the company. Too many SEOs and blogging consultants focus on the mechanical capabilities of a blog and not on the business goals that can be met.


Defining Business Blogging Success

3 Blog Mistakes You Can Avoid

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As part of a blog optimization panel I participated in during a recent conference in Australia, I decided to forgo the bulleted list of blog plugins and recommendations that you typically see on such sessions in favor of something more personal.

The presentation focused on 3 of the biggest mistakes we’ve made with Online Marketing Blog in the past 3 years, why we made them (and why others do too), what we learned, what you can do to avoid them and the expected outcomes.

This format was well received, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mistake Number One: Goals.


3 Blog Mistakes You Can Avoid

RSS Buttons for Your Blog

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When reviewing search marketing blogs each week for inclusion in our big list, one of the most consistent problems we see is that blog owners don’t make it easy to subscribe. Either there is no icon for the RSS feed or it’s hidden way below the fold.

Something as easy as adding a prominient RSS button near the top of the blog template with the word “Subscribe” near it can increase the number of return visitors substantially. We’ve done this ourselves and we’re now just under 6,000 subscribers.

A study by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight supports the need to display RSS subscription options as blog readers were found to be far more likely to subscribe to a blog if they say a familiar graphic for their favorite RSS reader, whether it was Bloglines, MyYahoo or Google Reader. One solution is to use our free RSS button tool which has been used by over 50,000 blogs so far.


RSS Buttons for Your Blog

TopRank March Madness

March has been a bit crazy so far as we’ve been rolling out an enormous SEO campaign for one Fortune 20 client and are in the final stages of signing another. On top of that, March will be a speakorama on blogs and public relations.

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting for the IABC chapter in Minneapolis at St. Thomas University with Sarah Bjelland, a VP from Wells Fargo. The event was called, “Delivering Insight into Business Blogs” and I presented on social media in general, trends with business blogging, applications for blog software in a corporate communications strategy and best practices for corporate blogs.


TopRank March Madness

My 5 Favorite Blog Plugins

It seems that every week I find a new and exciting WordPress plugins. There are literally hundreds out there and many that are still un-discovered.

Wordpress PluginI thought I’d take the time to post my 5 favorite blog plugins in hopes that you might find some useful ones. I’d also like to hear your top five so I can discover some new favorites.

Thomas’ Top 5 WordPress Plugins ~ In No Particular Order

Optimal Title
– This re-arranges your blogs title page to be [post name ] – [blog name] which is good for SEO.

Headspace2
– Automatically create blog post descriptions. Or write your own.

Live Search
– Update your search box to show results as the user types.


My 5 Favorite Blog Plugins