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Posts Tagged ‘Seo’

If you’ve ever needed help targeting websites for your Display Network campaigns the Google DoubeClick Ad Planner can help target your key demographics. A new feature of this tool is the ability to export your findings directly to AdWords; making creating your newly focused campaigns easier than ever. The Google Agency Ad Solutions Blog provides a great video tutorial on how to do so.

PPCBlog has a really great article on how traditional high-level marketing skills apply to PPC. Lets face it, so many of us web marketers don’t have a traditional marketing background and/or no traditional marketing training. The PPC market is competitive. Use these skills to your advantage.

Wpromoter’s Jamie Lane blogged about a great case study, in which Lumaneers diversified their traffic and boosted conversions. They did this through a combination of SEO and PPC strategies. Their original problem areas are something I think is pretty common and their solution is something we can all apply to our strategy. See what you can takeaway from this great article.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

I’m a huge fan of Rand Fishkin and SEOmoz. Often I hear murmurs in the Search Engine Optimization industry about SEOmoz being right or being wrong… but I have yet to see a single organization amass as many resources, professionals, tools and tests with regard to SEO.

Rand, himself, is another reason why I love SEOmoz. Recently, when I discovered a bizarre trend with one of my clients’ sites across their pages (millions of) pages, Rand took some time after work to have a powwow with us. He patiently listened, educated, and helped us create a testing plan. He also reaffirmed many of our suspicions. Pretty selfless guy! I’m a mere PRO member and he never hesitated to assist.

SEOmoz is now beta testing an Organic Search Web application for tracking your search engine optimization efforts. In the past, SEO guys like me used a combination of SEOmoz tools, Webmasters, Analytics, Authority Labs, Majestic SEO, and SEMRush to track a number of variables:

• Competitive Rank – observing the organic competitors.
• Keyword Rank – observing our keyword ranking and tracking progress.
• CTR and Conversions – monitoring click-through rates to our pages and conversions of visitors into customers.
• Backlinks – monitoring who is linking to us and the strength of those sites.
• Crawl Tests – analyzing page and site construction to ensure content is optimized for the search engines.

SEOmoz continues to exceed my expectations as an educational resource. Their advanced training videos, tools and excellence as a service provider continue to improve. Signing up for SEOmoz for a year and attending a single SEOmoz event can pay dividends for your organization. If you’re an agency looking to expand your design offerings into search, SEOmoz is a must.

Congratulations to Rand and his organization on this fantastic addition. I’m looking forward to seeing the expanded functionality over the next year. And I’m already tracking my first campaigns in it! If you’d like to see it in action, SEOmoz has several Webinars scheduled on the PRO application, register now.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @douglaskarr.

Corporate Blogging for Dummies is now available on Amazon and in book stores. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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Sometimes marketers can’t see the forest for the trees. As search engine optimization has gained so much attention the past few years, I’ve noticed that many marketers focus so much on rank and subsequent traffic, they forget the step that actually occurs in between.

The first event that happens when a user searches for a keyword is that they are met with a search engine results page (SERP). That search engine results page lists the search results, utilizing a page title and a description. Most descriptions are taken directly from a page’s meta description tag. If the meta tag doesn’t exist, the search engine will utilize an excerpt of the page’s content.

Google doesn’t guarantee that they’ll accept and display the meta description, but I’ve honestly not seen a lot of examples where they didn’t. I’ve made some incredible gains in ranking and click-through rates by optimizing the meta descriptions. The gains come from effective keyword usage (ranking) and writing compelling descriptions (click-through rate or CTR).

Here’s an example search, for best stocks to buy:

It’s fairly obvious which result is the most compelling result to click on, isn’t it?

• The first result not only utilizes the keywords best, stocks, and buy… they also utilize the term today… with a call to action, Click to find more now!
• Some of the other listings have dates listed with them. Interestingly enough, I’ve found that Google does a terrible job of snagging this date. If you had a related post with a date down the page from 5 years ago, Google may use that date listed! Try to avoid having dates in your content – they’ll date both the content as well as make your search engine result look like it’s untimely.
• Notice some of the descriptions are not relevant to the actual search or even the keywords… either the site has a default meta description across all the pages that’s static and unrelated, or no meta description at all and Google is just pulling some other content.

The latest changes in Webmaster’s tools actually make it quite simple to monitor!

Search engine optimization isn’t simply using keywords, re-organizing site components and getting ranking, it’s also ensuring that you are improving the click-through rate (CTR) from your well-placed search engine results to drive relevant and additional traffic to your site. The overall goal of SEO isn’t simply ranking and traffic, it’s revenue and a SEO return on investment.

Monitor both your ranking and your click through rates… and adjust your meta descriptions to increase relevant traffic and conversions!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. Follow him on Twitter @douglaskarr.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook!

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I recently altered my Creative Commons copyright as it pertains to Social Media Explorer. I switched from an open, share and share alike copyright to a non-commercial, share and share alike copyright. While this might seem like a minor alteration that has little implication on anything, I wanted to share with you the agonizing (literally) decision because it has implications on how you might consider applying copyright to your own publishing.

The free and open world of social media advocated by the purists is kind of a, “just share, it’ll be okay,” mentality. Open source, open copyright, don’t be stingy, etc., mantras have created this vast universe of free flowing content and gladness that is the blogosphere. I’ve benefited from the share and share alike movement greatly.

But the more you learn about the implications of that approach to your content, the more you see the disadvantages. When you openly allow people to use or reposition your content, you expose yourself to two major business risks: damaging your branding and damaging your search value.

Damaging Your Branding

It’s bad enough that my friend Michael Stelzner named his site Social Media Examiner (awfully close to my blog name) and that I guest posted there a few times to help him get some early content. I’ve now been cited as the author of “Social Media Examiner” on a number of occasions (Doesn’t offend me. I love Mike and Examiner.) and even had one person ask me why I changed the design of my blog away from the eye-catching jungle theme (which I never had … that’s Mike’s site). But when sites like Social Media Today (a great resource, by the way) literally pull the entirety of your content and publish it as if you were authoring it for them, the attribution waters become very murky.

Social Media Today aggregates great blog posts on the world of social media from around the web. If I’m not mistaken, they do so with each author’s permission and with respect to their respective copyrights. They have always had my permission to do so and have respected my copyright. And I do like the site because it pulls together good posts I may not have found on my own. I do believe there is some original content there, but scrolling down their posts recently, I found that most of their recent posts were repositioned from elsewhere.

However, as Social Media Today’s audience has grown, so has the mistaken attribution that I write for Social Media Today. While I did reach out to them several years ago to ask how to be featured on their site and sought their active use of my blog posts, none of my content there has ever been exclusive or even written for their audience. I write for Social Media Explorer — my blog. If SMT wants to use that content, until now, they’ve been welcome to it.

While I certainly don’t feel as if being associated with Social Media Today is a bad thing, I am concerned that the lack of clarity in who authors what for them takes away from each author’s independent and respective blog, website, business and brand. Sure, it’s a trade-off. Up and coming authors get increased name recognition and exposure, some inbound links and enhanced credibility. But there comes a point where the brand confusion can be problematic. I’ve reached that point … good or bad.

Damaging Your Search Value

Perhaps the bigger problem here is that sites like Social Media Today reposition the same content. While I don’t consider myself to be an SEO expert and duplicate content penalties from the search engines can be circumvented in various ways, simple logic tells you the same content on two different sites consistently can cause problems.

I first noticed the problem with Tweets and inbound links. My post of the day would be tweeted with a link. Awesome! Someone was sharing my content. But the link would point to the post on Social Media Today. Not awesome! I deserve that web traffic on my site.

Then I noticed references to my material linked from other blogs and websites. Awesome! Someone took a further step and said, “Jason’s content is good enough, I’m going to link to it from my content.” But the links pointed to the post on Social Media Today. Not Awesome! I earned that inbound link. It should come to me.

The big kicker was when I began doing some searches for keywords I’d targeted and found that the Social Media Today content was competing with my own for actual Search Results, not just components of good SEO value. This is when I realized having my content there was hurting me. Social Media Today has a big enough audience and is a credible enough website that the same content on it can feasibly beat out Social Media Explorer for the same search term, though the content, author, etc., is all identical. Not good.

Selfish vs. Selfless

I realize there’s a thick layer of self-serving attitude underlying all this. The social media purists will be critical of me for being selfish and wanting to horde my content. But the business value of what I sacrifice when doing so is large enough for me to want and need to do so.

This decision is 100-percent pro-Social Media Explorer and has nothing to do with being anti-Social Media Today. I love what SMT does, fully endorse and support their efforts. But also feel that the reasoning above is good grounds to now ask them not to use my content. They are a commercial venture, so my copyright would now prohibit them from reusing Social Media Explorer posts.

How This Effects You

If you haven’t already, you certainly should walk through the Creative Commons licensing exercise to determine what type of copyright to apply to your own material. But know that it’s not a determination you should take lightly or in haste. Think about the possibility that a perfectly fine and upstanding effort, like Social Media Today, may want to use your content. Does SEO value mean that much to you? Will you want to protect your brand from confusion with others?

Know and understand that you can say, “Anyone can have it and alter it!” but you can also say, “Anyone can have it but you can’t alter it.” You can also say they can have it if they’re non-commercial but not if they’re a commercial entity. Or you can say, “It’s mine … all mine! Bwahahahaha!”

In all seriousness, though, copyright is an important issue to consider for your content. It’s also important to know the benefits of being open, the benefits of being closed and the challenges of each as well. Hopefully my recent change can help you at least think your copyright through.

What Say You?

Am I right or wrong here? Is being also published at Social Media Today of greater benefit to me? Have I made a sound decision? What would you do in similar circumstances? What copyright do you apply to your content and why?

The comments, as always, are yours.

(NOTE: After writing this, I discovered Social Media Today now allows authors with registered SMT accounts to control the feeds sent to SMT for publication. This was not always the case and doesn’t change my decision. I have removed my feed from my profile page there.)

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One of my big regrets in my time in the advertising agency world is that I never seemed to have enough time to figure out a good way to talk to the creatives at my former agency about social media. My door was always open, but I was covered up with projects, as were they. So when it came time to look at the social media concepts for our clients, most of the eyes looked my way.

I’ve always maintained that advertising creatives are far better than me for coming up with the “big idea.” It’s kind of what they’re trained to do. Sure, I’ve been able to produce a few of my own through the years, but leaving your winning social media concepts up to one guy’s (or gal’s) brain isn’t a sustainable approach. Even as my staff grew, we were PR folks, SEO folks and technology folks. We weren’t creative concept folks.

Still, there was (and I assume still is) a disconnect in a lot of advertising creatives (art directors and copywriters) and the world of social media. Some have made the transition. Still others are still finding their way.

One of my former creative colleagues emailed me recently and asked my take on copywriting for social media. Below is a more polished version of my response. See if it holds true for you and your experiences, then add your own thoughts in the comments:

Copywriting for social media is an interesting and deep topic because there are so many different channels, mechanisms and purposes. It’s almost like you have to learn a separate business … there’s the ad business … there’s PR … there’s social. Each slightly different.

Know SEO

Get to know copywriting for SEO. It’s not just about great prose on the web, it’s about keyword-enriched prose that helps you win search. I’ve read that 85% of the time someone opens a browser, they search. It drives almost everything that happens online. As a copywriter, you have to know it. For a good starting point, see SEOBook.com, TopRankBlog.com, Copyblogger.com or just Google “Copywriting for SEO” and see what comes up.

Think In 140 Characters

Think of Facebook Wall Posts, Twitter Messages, YouTube descriptions and short email-like messages as your new canvases. Instead of five words on an outdoor board that compels people to call for a certain yummy bourbon, you’ve got 140 characters (more or less) to make someone:

A) Click

B) Share

C) Respond

D) All of the above

The point here is to know when your messages do any of those four, it’s not just that one person communicating to the brand, but often, everyone in their network sees it, too. It would be as if we had a recording of a customer screaming into the voice mail, “I effin’ love you!” and we played it back to the whole world. Only we don’t have to do the work and it doesn’t cost anything.

Think Two-Way Communications … Or More

Keep in mind that messages are two-way now. Compelling communications is no longer just “This product rocks. Buy it and you’ll be sexier.” The consumer gets to respond and to that they’ll likely say, “Bullshit!” So your message has to be more human … “We’re here to hang out with you. If you want to talk about your car repairs, we know a thing or two about that, but we’re just chillin’.” Obviously, you’ve got to push people harder than that, but you need to be honest enough with them so they don’t say, “Bullshit!”

And don’t forget that it’s more than a dialogue. You can talk to them. They can talk to you. But you can also watch them talking to each other. That’s powerful.

Sometimes It’s Not The Writing

The most compelling social media executions are not copywritten at all. Or they certainly don’t appear to be. See BlendTek’s videos. As you create ideas, concepts and so on, think about taking the human with the brand or someone who can be the brand’s human, and put them in a natural environment that lets them show off the product and show how cool, smart or helpful the company is. The more “real” and not staged these types of events can be, the more people will respond to it.

Creatives Are Still The Rock Stars

Even social media stuff needs a creative’s touch. Compelling presentations, viral videos, dynamite websites, etc., they still pop more with trained creative minds behind them. If guys like me are left to come up with all the home run ideas, we’re going to be hitting far more singles and doubles than we’d like. I’ve got a long ball or two in me, but I’m far better suited to tell creatives what the environment is like and the tools can do. The genius is more likely to come from them wrapping their brains around that than me forcing myself to be outside my box.

So, what did I miss? The comments are yours.

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I just read it on Inc.com, WordPress is Optimized for SEO. Ugh. It’s upsetting that a site of that quality passes on misinformation like this.

WordPress is Optimized for Search Engine Optimization.

I don’t know how you optimize for optimization or what that even might mean. As a content management platform, WordPress enables optimization, but it’s largely up to you, your WordPress theme and your WordPress plugins to fully optimize your WordPress site or blog.

In my humble opinion, there are four elements to outstanding search engine optimization:

1. Enabling SEO best practices with your platform, like robots.txt, pings, and XML sitemaps. WordPress actually doesn’t do any of this out of the box… you’ll need to create your robots.txt file, enable pinging to the appropriate sources, and add a sitemap generator.
2. Optimizing your theme, ensuring page elements are properly placed and the site is organized hierarchically, ensuring that pages are promoted correctly internally. Many theme designers ignore the importance of elements like page titles and headings. Some construct the page and put the sidebar content before the page content in the layout. A well-designed theme can substantially improve how search engines view your content and what terms they index your content for. Most businesses also start up a blog and don’t give thought to how to organize their content categorically and through their navigation. This can cause issues, especially if you have a wide selection of keywords to target.
3. Optimizing your content through the use of keywords that you know will both attract and convert visitors into customers on your site. This is done as part of an overall blogging package by companies like Compendium, but WordPress lacks any service or tools to do this. You will still need to do the analysis by yourself and use a tool like Scribe to help (Scribe for WordPress demo video).
4. The overall irony of SEO is that most of what you do on the site doesn’t really impact your ranking as much as what you do off-site. Writing fantastic, relevant content that gets the attention (and backlinks) of other sites can subsequently get you ranked well. But that doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress and more to do with how well you promote your blog posts, syndicate your blog in social media, and promote it through comments and other mechanisms. Understanding where to promote your blog and promoting it effectively will do more for your search engine ranking than your platform!

Lastly, SEO is not a single event, a checklist or a project. Since your competitors (and the entire Internet) is constantly changing and Google continues to adjust its algorithms daily, your ranking will continue to change. Registering your site with Google Webmasters, Bing Webmasters and Yahoo! Site Explorer, monitoring rank with tools like Authority Labs and SEMRush is an ongoing process that you need to incorporate to ensure you’re truly optimized.

SEO is the process of monitoring your ranking and making the necessary adjustments to ensure your content is being found and ranked well for the terms that help your business grow.

That’s my definition!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Did you know Douglas Karr's book is coming out in August? You can pre-order Corporate Blogging for Dummies now on Amazon. Check out our new site, Corporate Blogging Tips, to find out what events that we'll be speaking at.

Got an event? Let us know that as well - we're looking forward to going on tour later this year.

Don't forget to follow @corpblogging on Twitter!

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Love this video that the folks from Techpoint put out by Cantaloupe.tv:

If you don’t see the video, watch Web 3.0 on the blog.

Google is still just a search engine, only providing you dumb data indexed on keywords that match your queries. I’d really like someone to build a find engine next… I’m tired of searching, aren’t you?

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media and mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business by Erik Qualman.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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Today’s business environment is tough and unforgiving. And it is getting more so. At least half of the visionary companies extolled in Jim Collins’ classic book Built to Last have slipped in performance and reputation in the decade since it was first published.

One of the contributing factors I have observed is that few of the tough problems we face today are one dimensional – what appears to be a technology problem is seldom that simple. Your problem may manifest itself in the technology arena, but most often I find that there are people and process components to the problem.

As our use of technology has matured, it has become intertwined with the business processes it supports. Similarly, the complexity of business has driven complex processes that could only be supported by sophisticated technology and well-trained people.

Leaders aren’t born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. – Vince Lombardi

The lesson in all this is that technology by itself is not a silver bullet for every problem your business faces. It offers a tempting solution because you can buy it or outsource it. In contrast, fixing people issues and business processes requires hard work.

This post was written by Harry Howe

Harry Howe is passionate about leadership and supporting our community of entrepreneurs. As president of Howe Leadership, he provides hands-on consulting support to business owners who have become victims of their own success, working alongside them to develop the business processes, supporting technology, and people who will sustain their business over the long haul.

Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!

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