B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

PRWeb Launches SEO Wizard

PRWeb has announced today the launch of their SEO Wizard toolset to help users create and distribute optimized press releases.

“The SEO Wizard will guide members in structuring their press releases in a way that will give them optimal results within news and search engines. The idea of search engine optimization, or increasing a company’s value in search engines by using specific keywords, has gained popularity in recent years. PRWeb’s SEO Wizard quantifies keyword traffic, so users can focus on the keywords that are popular search terms and valuable to their PR and marketing campaigns.”

This is a tool that PRWeb staff have been using and now is being made available to all PRWeb users. Here are a few screen shots:

PR Web SEO Wizard


PRWeb Launches SEO Wizard

New Features in KeywordDiscovery

Customers of Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery service received an announcement today:

1. Increased Keyword Database from 26 Billion to 32 Billion
2. New Keyword Importer and Keyword Filter
3. New Thesaurus Search
4. Dutch Keyword Database Release

Additional features that will be included in version 2 beta of Keyword Discovery include:

– New user interface – easier navigation
– KeywordDiscovery v2 Beta (Faster, Bigger and Better)
– Increased speed and search response times
– Advanced import features
– Advanced competitor analysis
– New projects interface

My SEO consulting firm changed all of our keyword research and analysis over to Keyword Discovery recently. David Warmuz and his team have done an exceptional job at listening to their client base and enhancing product features accordingly.


New Features in KeywordDiscovery

WordPress plugins for feed buttons and social bookmark links.

This week we’ve released the first version of two WordPress plugins. One for the Feed Subscription Button Maker and one for the Social Bookmark Tool.

If you have WordPress, these two plugins work quite well and are easy to integrate. I’m still working on figuring out how to get an options page in the WordPress admin area itself, however that’s not stopping me from releasing the first versions.

Both have been tested in WordPress 2.x and work great. The Social Bookmark Tool plugin works in WordPress 1.5 also but the Feed Subscription Button Maker (aka Chicklet Creator) plugin does not at this time. If there is an interest in 1.5 support, let me know.

All suggestions and comments are welcome. 🙂

Thanks
Thomas


WordPress plugins for feed buttons and social bookmark links.

Yahoo Site Explorer Firefox Extension

TopRank Marketing Editor
TopRank Marketing Editor
Online Marketing, SEO, SEO Tools, TopRank Agency News, Yahoo

Thomas here and I just wanted to let you all know that I’ve released a Firefox extension called yExplore to quickly access the Yahoo Site Explorer.

Back in September Yahoo released their site explorer and it’s quite a handy little tool. However, I wanted quicker access to the tool so I created the yExplore Firefox extension. It simply allows you to right click on any web page, select yExplore and it’ll open Yahoo Site Explorer in a background tab with the URL already submitted.

A few more details are available at my yExplore Extension page or you can get yExplore from the Mozilla site.


Yahoo Site Explorer Firefox Extension

Blog Optimization

There’s all sorts of buzz about blogs lately and yet so many companies are still wondering what to do about it. In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites – lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.


Blog Optimization

Google Writely

Thanks to Phillip Lenssen, I have a Writely account to play with. Seems pretty cool actually. I can see how useful it will be for collaborating on the many group writing projects we have in our PR and SEO firm. We do use jot.com as a Wiki, but that’s more for spreadsheet collaboration.

The list of features for Writely is amazingly long. Whatever you might use a text editor for is applicable for Writely including creating blog posts, MS Word docs, PDFs, web pages, and even Open Office docs. There are tagging features and some cool right click options too.

Do you want a Writely invite? You can either leave a comment here (I only have 5 left) or you can visit the Chat room at Google Blogscoped.


Google Writely

Web Marketing Resources

In my constant search for good online marketing information, one resource continues to deliver the goods. Since 1995, and that’s a million years ago in internet time, Larry Chase has providede an excellent newsletter highlighting useful resources for online marketers world-wide.

The Web Digest for Marketers offers both an Internet Marketing Resource Directory and an email Newsletter which has over 125,000 subscribers. There’s also an interesting Resource Guide that you get for free when you subscribe to his newsletter.

I’ve met Larry a few times at Search Engine Strategies conferences and look forward to another at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, Feb 27-March 2nd where Danny Sullivan and crew will be putting on another fantastic conference. Barry Diller is doing the keynote, so it should be a great show.


Web Marketing Resources

How to create Google & Yahoo Site Maps – Easily

TopRank Marketing Editor
TopRank Marketing Editor
Google, RSS, SEO, SEO Tools, Yahoo

At TopRank we’ve been building Google & Yahoo site maps ever since each search engine debuted the service. However, recently I’ve been focusing on how to better automate the process and optimize my time spent creating site maps. I’ve researched and tried tool after tool until I came up with one that worked well for us.

It all started at Google. Google actually lists out a bunch of third party resources. How convenient! You can see them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

Ones listed under Programs/Code Snippets appear to be code that you add to your website to create your own sitemaps. What I was looking for is a program to create site maps for client sites, so those were out.


How to create Google & Yahoo Site Maps – Easily

Urchin is Now Google Analytics and it’s Free

I’ve been raving about Urchin to clients for quite a while at only $199/mo and now Google has decided to change Urchin over to Google Analytics and offer it for free. Wow.

The Urchin site is now redirecting to http://www.google.com/analytics/

According to Digital Inspiration blog, “the free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month but the limit is is removed if you’re also an active AdWords publisher.”

Also, Google Analytics is said to intergrate very well with Google AdWords to better measure paid search ROI and you can track up to 50 profiles.

Online sign up is easy and only requires a Google account. Once signed up, just paste a snippet of JavaScript code into your web pages and that’s about it.


Urchin is Now Google Analytics and it’s Free

Online Marketing Resources

I know many companies that want to engage in search or online marketing for the first time and also those that want to step it up a notch are always on the lookout for better resources. You can spend a lot of time lurking in forums, reading blogs and information sites, reading books, attending conferences and networking and still not be sure of what to do next or what’s right for you. There are a few resources that I’ve found to be consistently effective and high quality that I’ll mention here. This is by no means a comprehensive list – it really represents the resources I find myself using often and/or recently:

Books

  • Winning Results with Google AdWords – Andrew Goodman
  • The Virtual Handshake – David Teten & Scott Allen

Online Marketing Resources