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Top Rank Blog

• 5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy 17 May, 2010, 5:00 am
  So you want to succeed with Twitter eh? Before you run off and chase shiny butterflies and little blue birds, take a seat and collect yourself. Then read the following tips on creating a potential Twitter marketing strategy that will help you become more productive and successful using Twitter for business. First things first. Who are you trying to connect with? 1. Describe your target audience on Twitter.  If you’re not an active participant on Twitter, then research. Do the homework and write it down, including Twitter handles of actual target users. If you’ve been able to go so far as develop a persona that represents your customers that spend time on Twitter or social media sites in general, that’s even better. The first step in scoring is knowing all about the goal. 2. What outcomes are expected from Twitter participation? Besides being able to say you have 50,000 followers, of course. Incidentally, we experiment with Twitter accounts and those that have a substantial number of followers do not always result in the the most retweets and web site visits. This is important in the fans/friends/followers game. It’s not how many connections you have, it’s who you’re connected with that determines the propagation of tweets, spread of links, traffic, etc. It’s essential to know how success with Twitter will be measured. If it’s just follower counts, heck those could probably be purchased. (Which TopRankMarketing does NOT recommend)  However, that would be a fake network without effect. Where does Twitter fit in? 3. Where does Twitter fit within your overall online marketing strategy? Is Twitter meant to be a customer service tool? Brand monitoring? Monitoring for sales opportunities? Promotion of other corporate social activities? (ie blogging, Facebook, YouTube, Etc) Does it support some other communications function? As a communications and social networking tool, Twitter can connect with customers, prospects, journalists, employees, candidates, investors and marketing partners. Understanding where Twitter fits within the overall mix of online marketing and communications will help with: allocating monitoring and engagement resources, establishing a working social media policy, workflow management and reporting. You may very well find a number of synergies available through Twitter, such as connecting with journalists and bloggers for PR purposes but also encouraging link usage when citing the company to assist with SEO efforts. Twitter is a tool and only as useful as the tactics you use. 4. A firm grasp of the first three steps really needs to be addressed before useful tactics should be implemented. If all you do is focus on Twitter popularity tactics without addressing a plan for reaching other goals (hopefully being popular isn’t the sole goal) then the investment in time and effort becomes more like guesswork. First and foremost for tactics, the Twitter page needs to be designed and optimized. If a business has the expectation to be perceived in a significant way, then the Twitter page needs to avoid looking insignificant. Tweets need to be diverse, yet follow a theme that is consistent to the messaging and audience goal. Kudos to customers and offering tips are great but alone are not going to attract followers fast. There are a few tactics with Twitter that are almost always a good idea regardless of the audience, goals and overall plan: Having a persona or target profile in mind, research Twitter users and follow them. Associate the Twitter account with something else that is social, such as a YouTube Channel, Facebook Fan Page and/or a blog. Make an effort to link to a small number of high quality and creatively written resources, daily. Mornings are best. Brand these with a hashtag like #yourbrandtips, where “yourbrand” is the brand within your company that this Twitter account is focused on. It could also be a behavior or action. Ex:  #niketips or #runningtips. Schedule a #yourbrandtips Twitter event every month, two weeks or weekly. This would be run like #blogchat where a real person from your company hosts a chat on Twitter about topics relevant to your offering and useful to who you’re trying to reach. Ideally there would be influential guests involved so that their tweets attract new followers to your brand’s Twitter account. The company should really post their twitter handle everywhere their web site address is posted. Find a way to ask followers questions, then use those answers in blog posts, which are promoted via the business twitter account. Create a Twitter list of a segment of the target audience. One list for each segment. Then solicit followers asking for recommendations of people that belong in the “segment one” list or “segment two” list. Ex:  ”librarians” or “network administrators”. Mention that anyone who retweets a link to the list can get added to that list – provided they belong. Lists must be relevant and managed to be of any use. Promote lists with Listorious.com. Use #FollowFridays or #FF to recognize people that retweet the brand’s Twitter content the most. Also mention influential Twitter accounts that you have had some connection with. They might retweet the #FF and expose the brand Twitter account to new audiences. Measure twice, Tweet once. 5. Measurement with Twitter can be tricky such as identifying referrers via various URL shortening services, but it’s the most important. By “measurement”, I also mean monitoring on an ongoing basis, not just counting outcomes or KPIs. Followers is just one dimension. Based on what the brand is trying to achieve, a mix of data points and measurement tools should be implemented. Some example metrics: Tweets published Retweets & potential reach from those retweets New targeted Twitter users that are followed by the brand’s Twitter account New followers of the brand’s Twitter account acquired Direct traffic from Twitter to brand’s web pages. URL shortening services should be used like bit.ly Mentions of the brand in Tweets without links How many lists the brand Twitter account is included in What new Twitter users has the brand’s Twitter account added to it’s own organized lists? How many engagements or discussions the brand’s Twitter account has with other users Connections (follow, retweet, @message, DM) with targeted Twitter users Example Tools: search.twitter.com social media monitoring like socialmention.com, trackur.com, scoutlabs, Techrigy SM2, Radian6 Web analytics bit.ly cotweet.com, hootsuite.com, tweetdeck.com Obviously, there are many other tools for Twitter out there, including overall social media marketing campaign management tools such as: Wildfire, Objective Marketer, Spredfast, SocialTalk, pop.to and others. Sure, you can “experiment” with tools like Twitter and find your specific strategy as you go, but you could also find productivity and valuable connections a lot sooner (as well as effective time and resource management) if you create a plan that addresses who you’re trying to reach on Twitter, what goals you hope to achieve and a plan for getting there. Make no mistake, there will always be a component of on-demand and real time  or opportunistic marketing with Twitter. The platform is still so new that the community is finding new and innovative uses every day. You might find new uses too, so don’t get too committed to a single focus in your Twitter efforts. Be flexible, curious and willing to participate. Some tactics are always a good idea and some will reveal themselves as you develop your Twitter network and participate with the community.  Measuring success on Twitter has everything to do with goals, so make sure you’ve spent at least a little time figuring out where Twitter fits in with your overall social media marketing strategy and then what tools make the most sense to use when measuring success. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Beyond Google: SEO and the Social Web 18 May, 2010, 11:11 am
  88 billion (OK, 87.8, we rounded up). That’s the number of search queries Google web properties are responsible for each month according to comScore. Core to many search marketing strategies is to “Fish where the fish are” and make no mistake, the fish are decidedly hanging out on Google. YouTube, Gmail, Blogger.com and many other online services from Google make its presence ubiquotous in the online marketing world. Now imagine if Google disappeared tomorrow. What would that do to your marketing? What would it do to your business? Some of the people reading this post have experienced such a disappearance. Not of Google going away, but the experience of their own sites or pages disappearing from high visibility positions within Google search results. Companies that hyper focus on Google or any singular online channel are not only putting themselves at risk, ala ‘all your eggs in one basket”, they’re also putting themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to search engine marketing. This is the topic I presented on in the opening keynote at SearchExchange, a budding new search marketing conference held this week in Charlotte, NC.  Here is a liveblog post of it from Raven Tools.  The conference included familiar names including David Szetela, Chris Winfield, Brent Csutoras, Jon Henshaw, Rae Hoffman, Rhea Drysdale, Sarah Evans, Wayne Sutton and many others. While Google and search engines present a tremendous opportunity to attract new business, support existing customers, attract new employees and media coverage plus a host of other search outcomes, it’s important to diversify online marketing in a way that also benefits overall search marketing. There’s a segment of search marketers that use social media in a way that focuses on leveraging networks and influential “power” accounts to drive popularity and traffic to content. The boost in visibility exposes the content to blogs and online news sites, resulting in traffic as well as mentions and links from credible sources. Social news and bookmarking services have been popular channels for this kind of SEO-centric social media marketing. With over 100 million accounts and growth of 300,000 new users per month, Twitter has been added to the mix as well. Well executed promotions or campaigns of this type can drive a substantial amount of traffic and attention. Another way to include social media in a marketing strategy is to build connections, networks and community within areas of the social web that are meaningful for both short and long term business growth. For many companies, a relationship with customers is worth a lot more than a click, pageview or inbound link. There’s a significant diversification and SEO productivity opportunity for companies that invest in the creation of an optimized content strategy that incorporates insights from buyer/searcher personas along with business goals. Following through with the development of channels of distribution for that content independent of, but complimentary to search engines like Google, provides exposure to relevant audiences, traffic and links. “The advantage of adding social media search to your market research toolset is that you’ll get near real-time information that can help you get a head start on the competition on upcoming trends and get much richer detail than a list of generated keywords from search data can provide.” Vanessa Fox, Author of Marketing in the Age of Google and creator of Google’s Webmaster Central. The power of a social SEO program focused on content marketing enables companies to realize search engine marketing benefits as well as long term, meaningful connections with a community of customers. “Meaningful connections” means more word of mouth referrals, more purchases per customer, lower attrition and the opportunity to tap into an active fan base for research, consumer generated content and customer evangelists. Inspired by Adam Singer’s graphic Developing and promoting optimized content to relevant networks creates a Social and SEO cycle that expands reach, grows community and improves search engine visibility. The 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey reports that 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations. In contrast, only 14% trust advertisements, (According to “Marketing to the Social Web” published by Wiley). Those statistics highlight the influence of consumer generated content and social network recommendations in contrast to traditional marketing and advertising. The social web is growing at an incredible pace. According to their timeline, Facebook alone added over 200 million users in less than 12 months. Hitwise has reported that Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S. and comScore’s recent Search Engine Ranking report shows that Facebook search is more popular than AOL search. That means SEO for Facebook internal search along with SEO of other niche and internal search engines is something to pay attention to. As the online experience of information discovery, consumption and sharing changes, so do consumer behaviors. Marketers need to be a few steps ahead of that and know what their customer behaviors are. SEMPO recently released a new State of the Search Marketing Industry survey with insight specific to social media Marketing. In particular, it includes a number of data points on the intersection of search and social media: 35% of B2B companies integrate social media and search engine marketing programs. For B2C it’s 30%. There’s no reason for those numbers to go anywhere but up. Marketing Sherpa’s recent Social Media Benchmark Report agrees and shows that SEO goals that social media achieves, very effectively,  expanded content in universal search results, increased rankings,traffic from targeted keywords, improved ROI and more qualified leads. The decision is yours to make. You can focus all your efforts on Google SEO, or you can develop a bigger picture perspective that creates additional relevant traffic channels to your content and at the same time, boosts search engine visibility. In essence, get better results from Google by not focusing exclusively on Google. Social media marketing, regardless of who “owns” it in an organization can work in concert with SEO efforts to achive branding and community building goals as well as increasing search visibility, web site traffic and online leads/sales. Ultimately, Social SEO and Content Marketing result in more revenue and better customer relationships both in the short and the long term. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Beyond Google: SEO and the Social Web | http://www.toprankblog.com
• SEO at Turner Broadcasting: Dan Perry Interview 19 May, 2010, 5:37 am
  Spotlight on Search Interview with Dan Perry, SEO Director at Turner Broadcasting Working with Enterprise SEO projects is compared to smaller company sites is as different as marketing to BtoC vs. BtoB customers. This interview with Dan Perry, the SEO Director for Turner Broadcasting covers his SEO dream job, in-house SEO career advice and skills, enterprise SEO, the future of outsourcing to agencies, being persuasive inside organizations and of course, Golf! We met while you were with Cars.com and now you’re with Turner Broadcasting. (Congrats) How did you get into the SEO world and what is it that keeps you there? I started building very basic websites in 1998, but didn’t get into SEO until the summer of 2000. I built a site for a local golf course and a few months later, typed “Michigan golf” into a search engine. The site I built was on the first page! The light bulb went off immediately, and I’ve been promoting sites online ever since. The satisfaction of success is what keeps me in the industry. I’ve done enough SEO on sites of all sizes to know that it clearly works. Watching it work and seeing the baseline numbers for a site consistently increase over time is extremely satisfying. What do you like best about your current position and company? I’ll answer that with an example of a semi-typical day for me: Have an early conference call with London to discuss international SEO for Cartoon Network, have a meeting with PGA.com to discuss ongoing SEO Initiatives, meet with Topher Kohan (SEO Coordinator at CNN) to discuss strategy, have a call with NBA.com and TNT.tv to discuss the playoffs, and end the day by providing some Editorial SEO training to the team at Adult Swim. To have the opportunity to move the SEO needle on properties like these is truly a blessing. From an in-house SEO perspective, this job is as good as it gets. You’ve spent a lot of time working on the client side with SEO. What advice do you have for individuals that would like to break into that kind of career path? Doing in-house SEO in a large company is much different than doing it for yourself, or at a small company. I haven’t “done” SEO in years. My job is training others how to do it, and having them keep SEO top-of-mind. It requires an even temperament, the ability to explain why SEO should be prioritized to developers, executives, and everyone in-between, and a love of PowerPoint and Excel. What skills should a corporate marketer develop in order to be capable of handling in-house SEO duties? The ability to sell SEO internally. You may have to convince a developer to change the way they’ve always done things. You may have to convince an executive that SEO is a good business decision, and be able to back it up with numbers. I don’t believe that SEO starts at the top and works its way down, or vice versa. It has to happen at both ends (and in the middle) and then you need to keep it top-of-mind throughout the organization. To sum it up, a strong ability to sell internally, a logical approach, and an understanding of the SEO potential and the ability to put that potential into realistic forecasts. Do you look for specific backgrounds, experience or skills when you hire in-house SEOs? First of all, there has to be a base SEO skill-set; this cannot be overstated. There needs to be a level of SEO confidence that one can only gain with years of trial and error, dealing with algorithm changes, etc. Also, the ability to take a complex SEO element and describe it in a simple and easy-to-understand way is an under-rated skill. Finally, a diplomatic personality is key. With enterprise SEO, you don’t get to roll up your sleeves and jump in with a program in most cases. What do you see as some of the more common challenges with achieving end-goal results from search engine optimization in a large or complex organization? Prioritization. You and I both know that SEO is valuable, and can produce impressive results. My job is to convince an executive that SEO should be prioritized above the dozens of other possible projects. I need to pull together an SEO plan, forecast potential gains in traffic, and explain why this should be prioritized over other projects. The funny thing is that once that happens and you get approval, THEN the real work starts. I’ve seen you present many times on in-house SEO panels, which btw, have been priceless for SEO agencies that work for large companies. Will companies still need to outsource SEO in the next 2-3 years? I think so. There’s a lot of value an agency can add, even when there’s an internal team. For example, agency folks can see how an algorithm change affects many different companies and industries. Over time, the lessons learned from this broad collection of sites are invaluable. What role do you see outside agencies playing? Depends on the level of need within a given organization and the size/bandwidth of the internal employees. Where are SEO agencies usually the most helpful? Every property’s needs are different, so it needs to be property-specific and driven by the unique goals and needs of each. It can vary from assisting with major initiatives like a redesign to keyword research to spillover work. What’s your best tip for getting other departments in an organization on “your side” when it comes to content creation, approval and promotion for advancing search marketing goals? Any examples? Showing the opportunity lost in terms of traffic and revenue. For example, if one of our sites is on the second page of Google for a set of keyterms, and I can provide data that shows the potential gains they should receive (traffic gains, and revenue gains) by getting on page one, it makes the selling process much easier. What are some of the common “low hanging fruit” SEO suggestions you see the most often with large site SEO? The classic of course, is updating one robots.txt file to stop blocking all bots. The SEO maximization of publishing templates is a great place to start. Relatively small changes at the template level can have a big impact. Secondly, finding inbound links that produce 404 errors and converting them to 301 redirects. Please share some of the SEO and Social Media tools that you like most: Working with such big brands, a lot of the tools aren’t as important as they used to be. Because of that, I spend more times in our analytics package then I ever have before. How do you stay current with SEO and all the marketing, technology and communication channels that come with it? What are your favorite conferences, blogs, newsletters, organizations, books or networks that you rely on? I’m a big fan of David Meerman Scott’s book on the New Rules. He took a relatively complex subject and boiled it down into easy-to-understand language. My favorite book of all-time is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. One of the few books that made me look at a website in a completely different way. When I attend conferences, I usually choose the sessions I’ll attend by speaker name rather than session description. Finally, the Planet Ocean SEO newsletter is one of the most consistent, well-written newsletters I’ve ever seen. Since you’re a huge golf fan, do you have any interesting golf metaphors for SEO? Love them both; here’s my top 10 list of similarities between golf and SEO: Accept that you don’t know everything. Learn by doing. Measure often and pay attention to the numbers. Be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Learn from your mistakes. Stick with it, even during the bad times. Seek out good advice. Luck is just that. Use the right tools. Be patient and think long term. Thanks Dan! You can find Dan online on his Blog, Twitter or LinkedIn. Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools. We do not take PR firm pitch suggestions or or solicitations for these interviews. They are by request from TopRank Online Marketing Blog editorial staff only. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | SEO at Turner Broadcasting: Dan Perry Interview | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 10 Easy Local SEO & Online Marketing Tips 20 May, 2010, 4:45 am
  There are currently 29.6 million small businesses in the U.S. (SCORE). 63% of consumers and small business owners use the Internet to find information about local companies and 82% use search engines (Webvisible & Nielsen).  That means there’s a lot of opportunity for local SEO. Recently I attended GetListed.org’s Local University in Minneapolis which focused on how to optimize web sites for local search.  Out of all the good information that came out of the event, here are 10 easy things you can do today to optimize sites and content to attract local customers. 1. Claim your profile. It’s as simple as logging into Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local and walking through the verification steps which include a phone call or post card to verify your address. 2. Upload Pictures. The local sites listing services like to provide their users with pictures of your business. To help ensure that they see some good pictures, upload your own. They don’t have to be professional photos, but they will represent your business so make sure they are decent. 3. Control information across the internet. A big part of local search optimization and marketing involves obtaining information from other sites. Local listing aggregation services search the internet far and wide to find pictures, reviews and any information they can on your company. Submit your info to services like Localeze & infoUSA. The downside here is that if something is incorrect on another site, it could find its way back into your local listing. If that happens, you have to go back to the source and ask them to fix the issue and then wait while the fix makes its way into local sites. 4. Ask for reviews. Most local sites, except for Yelp, are fine with you telling your customers to review you. So do it. On your contact form thank you page, on invoices, on email communications, make a point to say “Hey we’d love it if you gave our business a review on Google/Bing/Yahoo Local.” These reviews, good or bad, make your business more creditable to future customers. 5. Bad reviews are good. No company is perfect, so when users see all positive reviews, something looks wrong and they may actually choose a different company. Bad reviews are a part of any business and a few bad reviews can make the good reviews that much better. Obviously, you don’t want to encourage bad reviews. 6. Add local phone number. On your website, be sure to publish your local phone number in text vs within an image or not at all. 800 numbers may be nice, but on their own they don’t give any kind of location indication. 7. Have a full physical mailing address on all pages of your website. Your address is important and it should be on all pages of your website to re-enforce your geographic location. 8. Think like the searcher/customer. What would your customers put in a search box to find you and buy your products? Lets say you own an outdoor sporting good store; like hunting, camping, hiking and fishing. If a searcher puts put ’shoes’ into a search box, they probably aren’t a good match as it’s such a generic term. If they put ‘running shoes’ you’re still not a match as your sporting goods store doesn’t focuses on running. If they put in ‘hiking shoes’ then you want to target them. Business owners often get caught up in popular keywords or keywords that will drive a lot of traffic and forget to focus on less popular keywords that have a higher probability of making sales. Remember to think like the customer. 9. Multiple locations need multiple landing pages. Local sites don’t like a business having more than one local listing, but if the business has two locations, than that’s OK. However, you should ensure that each location links back to a page on your website that is all about that location and what it has to offer. Sending both local listings back to the same page, or homepage, isn’t ideal. 10. Treat Customers ‘Righter’ Everyone knows that they need to treat the customer right, but with social media, review sites and the ability for good, or bad, news to spread like wildfire, you need to treat your customers really good or “righter”. This includes online and offline customer service. Local search takes into account information business owners put in their local profile, information it finds on other sites and information on the business’ website. Even what happens offline can be taken into consideration as customers may bring back those experiences in the form of online reviews. Local search is it’s own unique entity as no one can control everything that appears on their local listing, but business owners can take steps to ensure that what gets listed is a good representation of the company. For more information, here is a list of local SEO blogs that we’ve reviewed in the past for TopRank’s BIGLIST with many, many more tips. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 10 Easy Local SEO & Online Marketing Tips | http://www.toprankblog.com
• 7 Essential SEO Tips for Small Businesses 21 May, 2010, 4:30 am
  When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those factors really matter to search engines, and SEO is a great way to both level the playing field and steal marketshare. Here are a few tips that small businesses can use to improve their SEO and user experience. 1. Turn everything into content Content is still King. Search engines still love unique content, and the more useful content there is on your website, the more opportunities you give searchers to find your products and services. Rob Snell gave a fabulous presentation at PUBCON South, and one of the main takeaways was how to turn everything on an e-commerce site into content. Here are some ways to “free” extra content on your site. Here were some of his tips: Record everything and transcribe it all into text. Interviews, conversations, product DVD’s, personal opinions, etc. Turn support emails into FAQ pages on your site Turn PDF’s into HTML pages (although PDF files can rank on their own) Start generating videos of everything 2. Make it personal Small businesses have a major advantage that most bigger businesses don’t:  A personal voice. By making your voice heard, you’re showcasing your authority in your market, and adding trust. Buyers love hearing recommendations or reviews, and are more influenced to buy from those vs. product feature and benefit pages. Consumers use search engines to research products, and other than the lowest price, they’re looking for recommendations. Give them some! If you have a catalog, make a buyers guide in addition to product listings. Show you’re an expert and turn your knowledge into personalized business. Teaching is a great way to make sales. 3. Optimize for local search Odds are that your small business can take advantage of local search. 63% of consumers use search engines to research information about local companies. Start with Thomas’ excellent guide on local SEO tips that range from claiming your profile to adding media to submitting to content aggregators. 4. Improve your site’s speed Small business sites can be notoriously slow. Site speed is usually one of the last things that small business owners care about. But now that Google has introduced speed into the ranking algorithm, it’s time to seriously start checking out how fast your site loads. But more importantly, when you improve your site’s speed, you’re also improving your customer’s experience. Don’t make users wait to buy your products! You can use tools like Web Page Analyzerand the Firefox extension YSlow! to see what’s taking your pages so long to load. If you’re using a blog or shopping cart software, search for caching plugins for your software. 5. Refine internal linking Internal links can add value to your site considerably, but many small businesses don’t understand that you have to develop a linking mindset in order to really capitalize on it. It takes extra time to research old post links and include them in your articles, but the benefits are great. Sites like Copyblogger do an excellent job of referencing older posts in their articles. Not only does this strategy help with SEO, it also adds to the user experience, giving them more Think long and hard about your site’s linking architecture. Is your navigation schema getting to all of your content? Aside from adding sitemaps, related products and posts keep both visitors and search engines happy. Popular posts lists are also great for making sure your best content is getting seen and linked to. 6. Create content for people If you’re generating content specifically for search engines, you’re missing a major chunk of your market. Humans don’t like to be bamboozled, and when they come to a page on your site that was obviously made for a search engine, they’ll leave in a hurry and never come back. Plus, only humans can link to your site. If you want to get more inbound links and retain customers, you need to write for customers. The goal to higher search results is still to get more people to your site. After all, search engines can’t buy anything from you. 7. Don’t fret about getting nofollow links It’s easy to get carried away with only trying to get incoming links without the dreaded nofollow. But really, a link is still a link. If that link can bring in a potential customer, then you want it. If you’re only looking for specific types of incoming links, than odds are you’re missing lots of the low-hanging backlink fruit and worrying about the wrong things. Who knows how long the nofollow link will be around? If you’re smart, you worry about what’s most important: creating great content. You can’t control how Google ranks things in the future. Focus on things you can control, like creating a killer experience for your customers. In the end, if you focus on giving your customers and visitors great content, many aspects of SEO will take care of itself. Great content attracts great links, especially when you promote it and leverage social SEO channels of distribution. If it’s good for your potential customers, odds are it’s good for SEO too. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 7 Essential SEO Tips for Small Businesses | http://www.toprankblog.com
• BIGLIST SEO Blog Reviews 052410 24 May, 2010, 4:36 am
  It’s time for a new update to the BIGLIST review of SEO blogs. I started with a list of 15 new blogs in a queue for this update and four made the cut. Once a new blog hits our radar, we watch it for a few weeks before reviewing. Broken links, neglecting to post (far too many one trick pony SEO blogs out there) or design that makes content difficult to consume are all reasons not to be included. This update includes a mix of individual and agency blogs, all primarily focused on SEO. Stay on Search - This update of the BIGLIST gives design recognition to Mark Thompson for his Stay on Search Blog. Besides offering a consistent post format with images and template, Mark blogs a lot of how-to and tips posts along with a much better than average effort at being truly useful. Great design plus great content = a blog worth subscribing to. Maile Ohye: Love & Technology – A smart sense of humor and informal insights into various Google and webmaster topics makes this personal blog by Google employee Maile Ohye worth a BIGLIST inclusion. AgentSEO Blog – Written by Jacob Stoops, this web site/blog provides personal entries on SEO with a side of SEO and plenty of SEO after that. Actually, the AgentSEO blog contains a very smart structure of content including video, useful resources, smooth display of Twitter, RSS options and Facebook plus an obvious but not offensive call to action. The bottom navigation is very different than most blogs and so far, that seems like a good thing. Epiphany Digital Marketing Blog – This UK agency offers a mix of internet marketing posts from agency staffers on search, social and industry topics.  Many of the posts go into detail about insights, testing and general observations from solving digital marketing problems. Did your SEO or SEM blog make the cut? Share the good news with your readers using the badge and link from the badges page. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | BIGLIST SEO Blog Reviews 052410 | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Free Pass: Integrated Marketing Summit Minneapolis 24 May, 2010, 9:29 am
  Congratulations to Bonnie Harris on winning the free pass to IMS MSP! Tomorrow the Integrated Marketing Summit in Minneapolis kicks off with a mix of educational sessions and learning opportunities that run the gamut of online marketing topics. The event includes a keynote from Chad Mitchell of Forrester Research as well as sessions on multi-channel marketing, social media, social CRM, Search Marketing and mobile. I will be moderating a Search Marketing Best Practices panel at 2:45pm with Bill Leake of Apogee Results, Alex Bennert of The Wall Street Journal and Brian Kleisner from FindLaw.  Adam Singer of TopRank Online Marketing @toprank will be presenting on a social media panel at 4pm with Bryan Person, founder of Social Media Breakfast, Brad Smith, Director of Interactive Marketing and Emerging Media for Best Buy, and Paul Isakson, Co Founder of Thinkers and Makers. We’re able to give one free pass to this event Event Details: Integrated Marketing Summit Hilton Minneapolis (map) 5/25/10 from 8am-5pm. I know it’s short notice, but if you can break away from the office for a day, be sure you leave a comment below with your Twitter handle or some other way to contact you ASAP. Creative comments are given preference. Deadline is 2pm today 5/24/10. If your comment is picked, you will be notified by 3:30pm today (or earlier). The full agenda for the IMS event can be found here. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Free Pass: Integrated Marketing Summit Minneapolis | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Enterprise SEO Interview with Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com 25 May, 2010, 4:45 am
  Spotlight on Search Interview with Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com For every SEO guru speaking at a conference, there are 10 or 20 more SEO experts you might not have heard of, making things happen in amazing ways. Scott Skurnick has worked in the Search Marketing industry as long as anyone I know on the conference speaking circuit and has a tremendous amount of experience and expertise to share. In this interview, Scott shares his journey to become Executive Director of Search Engine Optimization and User Insights at Edmunds.com, his take on social media and SEO, scalability of SEO, tips on audits, best practices, tools and more. You’re a long time consumer products search marketer, having worked at companies like Circuit City, OfficeMax and currently with Edmunds.com. What made you decide to work in the search marketing industry and what do you like best about it? Actually I got my start with Search Marketing in Mexico City when I was working in the Tequila industry. I had worked for Jose Cuervo for a number of years and then went to work for their main competitor at the time which was Tequila Sauza. When I launched the first brand websites back in 1995 I became obsessed with Tequila Sauza being the number one result in Yahoo and Alta Vista for the query “tequila”. Of course that wasn’t a very hard task because there weren’t a lot of tequila related sites but the whole concept of search engines intrigued me. The thing that I like the most about our industry is the fact that it is ever-changing and there are no “absolute” answers. The end goal is the same for everyone in SEO in that we want to generate both traffic and some kind of conversion. What differs is how we reach that goal. Everyone’s SEO recipe is a little different and who’s to say that their approach is any better than someone else’s. What’s not to like about this? What job skills and career advice can you offer to Search Marketers that want to work in-house vs working at an agency? Do you think it’s reasonable for companies to expect SEMs to be advanced at both SEO & PPC? And Social? There are a couple of necessary skills that most people don’t speak of. I won’t get into the debate of whether or not we should be able to write code because I think it depends on the situation. The list of skills and qualities I feel are necessary for a successful in-house SEO are: Must be highly analytical Understand how the different parts of an organization work Have Great negotiating skills Be likeable and never bite the hand that feeds you (developers and writers) Be curious and never think you know everything Be humble. You have to be able to admit your mistakes, we all make them especially working in SEO Most importantly, you have to have thick skin. You will always have your doubters and people who want to see you fail because they don’t believe in SEO. While I feel it is vital that an in-house SEO understand both Paid Search and Social, depending on the size of the company it may not be realistic for one person to manage all 3 areas. All 3 are highly specialized and changing very quickly. More importantly, you can easily ruin a company by committing errors in any of these 3 and errors usually occur when there is a lack of understanding or knowledge. At my current company we have separate teams handling PPC, SEO and Social and this seems to work the best. Of course we all interact and share information but at the end of the day we have an expert for each channel. Speaking of social, what are some of the ways you’ve made SEO content more social at Edmunds.com? What are some of the immediate opportunities within the social web to advance SEO goals? When we talk about Social Media at Edmunds, we are really talking about Forums, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Edmunds has been running an online automotive community (forums) since 1996 which is, for the most part, based on SEO best practices. As far as Facebook and Twitter are concerned, our editorial and PR teams are directly involved. While we do engage in some auto-tweets, the majority of what we put out there has an original voice to it. We also actively engage with people who are discussing our brand or the automotive market in general. The biggest Social Media opportunity for us is brand promotion and audience engagement. Our content travels very well. Not only do we review almost every vehicle imaginable, but we also have a data department that is responsible for coming up with industry sales forecasts and results. When we issue a sales forecast or summary, this information is immediately picked up and re-tweeted or shared via Facebook. Many agency marketers say quality SEO cannot scale because working with many different types of web sites and companies is unpredictable. Do you think that’s true for in-house SEO? I couldn’t disagree more. Since 1995 I’ve worked as an in-house online marketer with tequila, office supplies, consumer electronics and automobiles. I view myself as product agnostic. For me it is all about the marketing channel. Of course every industry and website presents a different set of challenges but I’ve always followed the same SEO blueprint. The SEO blueprint changes due to the elastic nature of our industry but I’m going to apply pretty much the same strategy regardless of the product I’m trying to promote. Some sites may require more effort when it comes to link building while others may need better editorial content but at the end of the day the basic SEO infrastructure is very similar. What are some of the common obstacles with large retailer web sites when it comes to SEO? What makes a successful large site SEO program so successful? Enemy #1 is the CMS. Most large retail sites use shiny and expensive out of the box systems which are great for everything but SEO. From dynamic parameters in url strings (no not just 1 or 2) to duplicate title and description tags across hundreds or thousands of pages, most CMS’s just don’t know how to handle SEO. Add in code bloat and duplicate pages across multiple categories and there is enough to keep any SEO busy for years. The other big issue is unique content. Too many large retail sites don’t put in the effort to write unique and appealing product descriptions so their Sony Plasma TV description is the same as hundreds of others across the web. As far as what makes a large site SEO program a success, this is very cliché but I dare any in-house SEO to disagree. It comes down to education and compromise. Until everyone in the organization has a very basic understanding of SEO, you will have a hard time getting a SEO project to succeed. The developers need to understand why you are asking them to change the code and the writers need to understand why you are asking them to change their titles. You never ever want to mandate change because this will only make you enemies. You also have to understand that sometimes SEO has to take a backseat to a more important goal. There are few instances where SEO and usability or SEO and development conflict with each other but when they do, you need to choose what’s best for the company. Never ever let your ego get in the way. Let’s say a friend shows you his new retail product web site and asks you to do a SEO audit. What are 4-5 things you would look for? Any audit starts with a simple question; are you willing to go under the hood and make potentially large scale changes…If the answer is yes then: Need to understand the CMS / Shopping Cart solution and see if it’s flexible. I’m checking urls, most retail web sites use too many dynamic parameters I’m making sure a product only lives in one department / category. If it doesn’t I’m using the canonical tag (worst case scenario) or convincing him to change his categorization. Making sure his product descriptions are unique and in-depth. Too many ecommerce sites use canned descriptions. Making sure he is letting his customers review the products. You can say what you want about the now defunct Circuit City on the store side, but the web site had by far the most comprehensive customer product reviews on the web and these generated considerable SE traffic. What are your favorite web based SEO and social media marketing tools? For SEO:  Bruce Clay Toolset, SEOmoz Pro Tools, Xenu, Majestic SEO, Ranking Manager and Wordtracker. For Social Media: Co-tweet, Klout and wefollow. I also set up a really nice reputation management dashboard based on a post from aimClear a while back. What role does social media optimization play in an overall SEO program? Do you think it’s worth optimizing content for search within social media sites like Facebook or MySpace? Social media is important in that we want to let people consume our content wherever they feel comfortable. We try and optimize the content for the channel but not necessarily for search engines. We don’t create special content hoping to create a temporary lift from social media and we definitely don’t promote all our content via social channels. The worst thing a brand can do is abuse Twitter or Facebook. Our users can smell a “hyped” story from a mile away. Staying on top of best practices in general and specifically for what’s most important to the web sites you’re working on can be a challenge. What do you do to stay current? What blogs do you read? Do you have favorite conferences, books, forums or newsletters? I easily spend the first hour of every morning going over my analytics and reading up on the latest SEO news. As far as the sites I visit, they include: Search Engine Land, Michael Gray’s Blog, WebmasterWorld, WebProNews, MediaPost, paidContent.org and the IAB. I also love 1938media.com, it keeps me grounded. I don’t really go to a lot of conferences but I have been attending PubCon since 2005 and SMX Advanced since it started. PubCon is great because there is something for everyone and SMX Advanced is one of the few conferences where experienced SEO’s can learn something. The one conference I would love to attend but haven’t been able to yet is the Search & Social Spring Summit. Thank you Scott! Scott has been working in online marketing since 1995 in industries ranging from Tequila to Automobiles. He’s an avid Packers and Soccer fan and live in Redondo Beach, CA with his wife and two girls. You can find him on Twitter, LinkedIn and working hard on SEO at Edmunds. Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools. We do not take PR firm pitch suggestions or solicitations for these interviews. They are by request from TopRank Online Marketing Blog editorial staff only. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Enterprise SEO Interview with Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Best Practices In SEO And Marketing: IMS MN 2010 26 May, 2010, 5:27 am
  At the recent Minneapolis Integrated Marketing Summit, TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden moderated an exciting panel of a diverse group of SEO professionals: Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal Brian Kleisner – Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw Bill Leake – CEO of Apogee Results The focus of the panel was on search engine optimization best practices, and panelists discussed everything from leveraging web analytics for decision making to how to scale efforts and many topics in between.  Following is a summary of each presenter’s top points: Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal Alex spoke on the important of using data to make decisions, including leveraging sources such as Google webmaster tools.  The information provided in webmaster tools has grown significantly since they have implemented it. Her favorite addition is the “breaking data” feature, which tells you all of your top keywords driving traffic to the site.  You can use this to see terms that gain a high volume of impressions but a low volume of clicks.  From this, you’ll know that the page can be optimized better to potentially get more clicks. And it doesn’t even have to be on page or changing keywords.  Sometimes, just testing changes in meta description can help gain additional clicks.  It’s something we have control over and can see near immediate results for changes.  Leverage meta descriptions for clicks, and to help promote your brand and spread key messages. Have you given access of webmaster tools to members of your team?  You should consider this so they can act on data. Additionally, branded searches and navigational queries are extremely valuable for a brand and should not be discounted.  At the WSJ, hundreds of thousands see our search result monthly from brand terms. Alex then proceeded to speak on sitemaps.  She noted, if you have a large enterprise level site with frequent information that’s added/deleted, a sitemap is vital.  That’s because you don’t have to wait for search engines to re-crawl your site, you’re providing it to them in a format they’ll immediately get.  At the Wall Street Journal, we organize our sitemaps into specific types of content – i.e. stock queries, articles, etc.  Then we can see immediately when problems crop up. In terms of getting “old school” reporters to create additional content, like to help them see the value of SEO by showing examples of their own content.  For example, I find a headline they wrote and show them how not at all findable in search, whereas others are easily findable.  By showing examples, Alex is able to be persuasive and help reporters create SEO friendly content. Brian Kleisner – Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw Brian spoke on the balance between search, and how search interacts with usability. “Arriving from search is to enter the unknown:” 1.  The searcher’s expectation for what they think they’ll find must be met. 2.  Information must be presented to enable a decision or make choices. 3.  The next steps must be clear. 4. The entire experience must feel safe, secure, authentic and believable. Usability and search both share common concerns: Findable Credibility Usable/useful Valuable/desirable Offering choice Addressing this, Brian went on to cite several SEO tips: SEO Tip #1:  Use a keyword oriented tagline with the “Who” and “What answered. SEO Tip #2:  Use content to answer the questions naturally making sure to include the appropriate keyword.  For example: Where is your company located? When is the next release for “keyword”? Why are you an expert on “keyword”? Asking these questions helps generate fresh content, better defines anchor text, provides new ideas for navigation text link labels and increases understandability for humans, search and those using assistive technology to interact with your website. SEO Tip #3:  Consider local SEO Local search has special rules for SEO: Claim your listings on the search engines and beyond (Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) Be consistent, use the same address and phone number across the web. Monitor and manage you and your competitor’s reputation. Bill Leake – CEO of Apogee Results Bill spoke about integration opportunities between Search and other marketing tactics. He started by speaking at a high level, and that “more arrows are generally good.”  Marketing works best when it works together.  As we talk about ways to improve search, remember it is just another piece of marketing. Start by defining what you really want from your marketing efforts and create a key objective. Bill then shared integrated tactics that will improve ROI of search. 1.  Integrate paid media and “earned media” for better results. Online favorable articles/analyst pieces Optimized press release mentions Promote 3rd party blog posts 2.  Consider event and name driven paid and natural search. Leverage a national events and names for dirt cheap search traffic. 3.  House list/direct mail tie-ins:  integrate online marketing with more traditional focused direct marketing (think online mail-merge). 4.  Create a more integrated search – use PPC traffic with your web analytics and your lead forms for list building and enhances lead generation.  Leverage services such as DemandBase Jigsaw Other list building via web traffic Most B2B terms are not looked at “for fun” they are looked at due to pain points on the part of the searcher. 5.  Improve spending by using down-funnel data. One client was spending 110K per month with well understood and optimized CPL metrics.  They started doing PPC optimization using human scrubbed lead data (not web forms).  Results:  43% shift in PPC spend allocation, 31% software sales uplift. 6.  Choose keywords on conversion metrics, not on search/reach/volume metrics.  If you have paid search data, use that to determine what the money keywords are. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Best Practices In SEO And Marketing: IMS MN 2010 | http://www.toprankblog.com
• Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis 2010 27 May, 2010, 10:44 am
  In conjunction with ClickZ, OMS has launched its 2010 23-City Tour from Seattle to New York and is coming to Minneapolis June 25th.  OMS had an event in the Twin Cities last year at about the same time and provided a great mix of education and networking opportunity for internet marketers of all types. Best practices in Social Media, Search, Email, Analytics, Demand Generation and Website Strategy are planned for each OMS event. Aaron Kahlow and the OMS team have assembled a great group of thought-leaders, authors, world-class brand marketers and leading online practitioners from companies like: Kodak, REI, DuPont, Wharton, Google AdWords and of course, TopRank Online Marketing, to share their experiences and successes from the front lines of internet marketing. At last year’s OMS Minneapolis event, I presented on “Making a Case for Social Media Marketing“. This year  I will be presenting on what I believe to be the most important trend that combines the best of SEO, Social Media and Online PR:  Content Marketing Optimization. Here are the details of that session: Content Marketing Optimization: Online marketing is increasingly competitive and brand marketers world-wide are seeking real advantages that will improve the efficiency and impact of their Social Media and SEO efforts. This session provides unique insight into content based optimization strategies and processes as well as tactics for the sourcing, creation and promotion of optimized content on the social web. It’s not that often that the Twin Cities gets outside marketing conferences and OMS has really perfected their ability to offer a mix of national and local expertise.  Each OMS event includes: A Social Media Training Workshop and Breakfast offered by the Online Marketing Institute in association with Wharton Interactive Media Initiative Networking opportunities with industry experts and hundreds of peers in sales-free environment Panels and sessions covering basics to advanced tactics You can get more information about OMS Minneapolis from their site and you can also drop a comment below. I am happy to answer any questions. Incidentally, I will be giving away our new 50+ page guide to Content Marketing Optimization at the event, so be sure you register and plan to attend.  The guide offers several case studies, trends, insights and of course: I. Content Marketing Optimization Goals II. Search and Social Media Keyword Research III. Buyer Personas & Buying Cycle IV. Understand the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Landscape V. Inventory and Assess Current Digital Assets VI. Define Editorial Guide For New Content VII. Map Keywords to Current Assets, Content and Future Editorial VIII. Operationalize Content Optimization with Current Processes IX. Develop & Optimize Off-Page Digital Assets X. Develop Channels of Distribution for Digital Media Promotion XI. Implement Search Marketing, Web Analytics & Social Media Monitoring Tools This extremely detailed guide will only be offered to attendees of OMS Minneapolis weeks before it’s available to TopRank Marketing Newsletter subscribers. Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to theTopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter. © Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis 2010 | http://www.toprankblog.com