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 3^rd 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.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Best Practices In SEO And Marketing: IMS MN 2010 |
No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Since late 2009 when Google introduced real time search, the concept has gained a lot of attention.

Today, real time search is at the top of the priority lists for all the major search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo!.

As part of the new technology, Google is combining live updates from sites like Twitter with the latest news headlines and blog posts in search results.

For web searchers, real time search means the ability to discover breaking news the minute it’s happening.

For marketers, it presents a whole host of opportunities to increase online visibility. Here, we’ve provided five ways to leverage real time search in your online marketing efforts.

1. Develop the type of content that supports real time SEO

With real time search, frequently publishing online content becomes a must. Try incorporating these three types of content to support both traditional and real time SEO programs:

• Tweets and Facebook fan page updates: Micro content from social sites now has the ability to appear in search results. It’s quick and easy to frequently post Tweets and Facebook fan pages updates, so both should play a big role in your real time SEO content strategy.
• Blog posts: Blogging presents the opportunity to help your content rank and show thought leadership at the same time – since blog posts can offer more valuable information than micro content.
• Optimized press releases: By optimizing press releases and submitting them through authoritative newswires, you can help your content achieve high rankings.

2. Mobilize your fan base

Creating a core group of brand advocates is important for a number of reasons. They recommend your products and services to their friends and family, defend your reputation in times of trouble and are more likely to adopt future products and services you introduce.

Now add one more benefit to the list: Brand advocates – particularly authoritative ones – can link to your content to help keep in the real time stream.

In addition, brand advocates who are active on social sites like Twitter can create their own content about your company that can appear in real time search results.

3. Know what’s hot in the news

With real time search, it’s important to recognize both what users are searching for online and what they’re discussing via social channels – at this very minute. Create frequently updated content that speaks to the latest topics and trends, and is optimized for the latest search terms.

A variety of tools exist to help monitor search and conversation trends:

• Google Trends: Use this free tool to find the hottest topics and hottest searches in Google
• Social Mention: Determine the strength, sentiment and reach for terms used throughout the social web, including blogs, microblogs, social networks, video sites and news sites
• BlogPulse: Find the top blog posts, key phrases, new stories and more from across the search universe or related a specific topic
• Delicious: See the types of content that goes wild across the social web
• Trendistic: Learn trending topics in Twitter over the last 24 hours, week, month or more (see image below)

Trendistic shows “online marketing” trends over the past 30 days.

4. Time your content promotion efforts wisely

Give your content an extra boost by monitoring when blog posts, articles and other online content are indexes in Google News or Google Blog Search. Then ensure tweets, Facebook fan page updates and other social content promotions are timed right after the content is indexed. Doing so will help you take advantage of every opportunity to appear in real time search results.

5. Optimize your web site and online content for mobile technologies

Real time search is relevant on many mobile devices, including Android and iPhone devices. So Web site optimization for mobile technologies becomes even more important.

Consider these few mobile SEO tips:

• Limit the use of images
• Keep the design simple and clean
• Test to ensure your site appears as it should across various mobile devices

The bottom line is, it’s crucial to take advantage of every real time search opportunity that comes around. Remember that these opportunities won’t stick around for long – presenting themselves quickly and then disappearing. It is real time, after all.

Have you implemented real time SEO into your online marketing mix? Tell us what best practices you’ve found so far.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
5 Ways to Leverage Real Time Search in Your Online Marketing Mix |
12 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Recently I posted a series of informal poll questions about blog SEO on Twitter to gain insights and feedback which were leveraged to construct a more in-depth survey.  I used the longer survey to collect information on how companies are using blogs for search engine optimization purposes and what kind of impact those efforts have. Essentially, I wanted to get opinions on and answers to: “Are blogs still important for SEO and why?”.

The topic of business blogging and search engine optimization as distinct and synergistic tactics have been explored here many times. A large number of companies are familiar with the process of starting a blog, but few have experienced the challenges of maintaining and growing a blog for more than a year.

Understanding long term benefits is key to sustainable business blogging.

Part of the goal was to tap into a variety of experience levels with this survey and capture insight into the SEO impact blogging.

Participants were solicited here, on social networks and vial email that blog. Here’s a simple breakdown of the 326 survey respondents:

• 28% Internal Corporate: Advertising, Marketing or PR
• 42% Agency: Advertising, PR, Search Marketing, Social Media, Marketing
• 30% Independent Consultant or Small Biz CEO

One of the biggest questions we were looking to get insight on was the degree to which marketers are using blogs as a SEO asset.

95% of survey respondents indicated that they do incorporate blogs as part of their search engine optimization efforts

While the majority of respondents  indicated SEO as a benefit to blogging, several comments indicated that there are resource issues:  ”We did but resources became an issue. Will be bringing it back in 2010.” And that the applicable use of blogging for SEO outcomes depends on the market:  ”Sometimes… depends on client and market and product/service”.

Blogs at the most basic level are straightforward or “easy” to start. But the real question is whether they deliver on the SEO promise so many blog marketers make. Our survey results show that 87.4% of respondents “successfully increased measurable SEO objectives as a direct result of blogging“. Savvy SEO practioners made comments like, “Absolutely. In fact, we make sure to create a small, quality cluster of blogs on different platforms and Class C IP’s to support their communications initiatives.”

Of the 12.6% that didn’t find measurable SEO results from blogging, comments like “starting to but since we don’t post comments from readers on our blog I think we stall any momentum that we are generating from our posts” and “Site owners are not able to follow through on keeping up with their blog.” provided insight as to possible reasons why.

How important are blogs as part of a SEO strategy? The majority of respondents (90%) cited blogging as important, significantly important or a primary SEO tactic. The remaining 10% rated blogs as somewhat important or irrelevant.

Many company marketers, public relations and communications professionals are not aware of what the SEO benefits of blogging are. We asked, “What SEO functions do blog(s) serve for you?”. While the responses were fairly evenly distributed, the most popular SEO benefit was that blogs provide an easy way to create new, optimized content. Content is the cornerstone for any search engine optimization or social media marketing effort, so it makes sense that content creation was so popular.

Overall, links were the most often cited SEO benefit from blogging: Attracting inbound links from other web sites or cross-linking from blog posts to corporate site content. Community building for content/links promotion and Increase crawl rate/frequency were also indicated as important SEO benefits from blogging. Additional social and SEO benefits from blogging mentioned include:

• Social Media word of mouth
• Show a human side to a business and another side to the more “static” web site
• Communicate back with customers
• Can surprisingly create evergreen #1 search rankings for odd phrases we might not have necessarily thought about in planning.
• We’ll serve ads through a network that allows blogs to publish our ads
• Traffic from twitter and the increased exposure that goes with that
• Establish authority in the marketplace
• Promoting products, services, sales, expertise … I come at it from the UX side – credibility, authenticity
• Blog is ideal for long tail search terms
• More long tail ranking
• Blogs dovetail well with social media efforts like twitter
• Focused silos around specific markets and functions key to the client.

With any new marketing effort, setting expectations for time to see results is crucial for allocating resources and budgeting. We asked, “In what time frame do you typically start to see an increase in measurable SEO performance indicators (links, ranking, traffic) as a result of blogging?” The most common answer was somewhat shorter than expected, 0-3 months.  54% of respondents start to see SEO benefits from blogging very quickly. This short time frame should be very encouraging to those hoping to use blog published content to gain better search engine visibility.

Since many of our respondents were professional search marketers with the ability to properly optimize a blog and promote content to attract links, time frames for results would be very different than someone who does not know how to implement blog SEO tactics.

94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months

Measuring impact is important and certainly, the definitions of success from blogging will vary according to the purpose of the blog. We asked, “What are the most important measures of success when using blogs as part of a SEO effort?”. The responses to this question were fairly evenly divided with increasing company site traffic at the top closely followed by a desire to increase company leads/sales. Other important metrics included inbound links, referrals or leads directly from the blog, web site rankings and blog traffic.

Additional success measures from blogging included many benefits besides search engine optimization, which is very important in our opinion. Starting a blog purely for SEO reasons will make content sustainability difficult in the long run. A blogging strategy must meet meet other goals as well, especially those that involve engaging customers or interactions with readers. Other success measures from blogging include:

Getting a blog implemented in a company is not always an easy task. Resources can be slim as well as expertise and confidence in the ability to achieve a return on effort within a given period of time. We asked, “What have been the most common objections from internal or external clients to implement blogs (with or without SEO benefit)?” This question received the most comments of all in the survey.

67.2% cited resource issues as the most common objection to implementing a blog

Other reasons cited included issues with content sourcing (42%) or simply not seeing the benefit (35%). Regulated industry or legal issues got in the way for 19.3% and lack of measurement round up the answers with 12.9%. Many of the comments about obstacles to blogging centered around time, resources, measurement and a lack of awareness.

On the surface, implementing a blog is straightforward, once you gain approval. The trick is sustainability and reaching measurable goals. Staying on top of what strategies and tactics are successful blogging also takes time and therefore it’s important what resources marketers depend on. We asked, “How do you stay current with blog SEO best practices?”. The overwhelming most popular answer was Other SEO blogs. The good news about that answer is that we publish a list of over 500 SEO and Internet Marketing related blogs on the TopRank BIGLIST.

Other popular resources for staying current with blogging and SEO include: Social Networks & Groups, Conferences, Observations from Testing, Newsletters, Forums and books. Interestingly, Paid Subscription Communities ranked lowest which is a niche community.

92% of respondents feel blogging will continue to be an important content optimization and marketing tactic for the next 3+ years

Interestingly, 8.3% feel blogging will only be important for the rest of 2010.

What is your opinion on the longevity of blogging as an online communications and marketing tool? Do you think the death of blogs is imminent in 2010?  What blogging benefits have you experienced and how have you overcome objections to implementing a blog in your company?

We hope this survey and results have been helpful to you and plan on conducting many other surveys in 2010 to provide additional insights into digital marketing and PR topics. Clearly, there is interest and a need for companies to better understand the strategic and practical applications of business blogging. Specifically, there is benefit in understanding how search and social channels can be combined with core blog content publishing to reach business goals.  We hope to continue providing such insight here at Online Marketing Blog as well as the conferences and corporate training events we’re engaged to speak at.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Survey Results: Impact of Blogging on Search Engine Optimization |
34 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

The Wall Street Journal noted that Google has purchased search ads for queries done on Google.com for “Google Leaves China” or “Google vs. Baidu.” Clearly, Google wants people to read their position on the recent move for them ending the censorship of Google China.
Here is a picture of the ad:

Google, on occasion, will buy [...]

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The Google AdWords blog announced new targeting and ad features for the mobile search ad product.
The first feature allows you to specify the device type and carrier you would like to target your ads to. The device type options include iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and Palm WebOS. The current carriers targeting is [...]

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In a previous post, I discussed the importance of using behavioral targeting to increase your conversion rates. I also wrote about how to use Google Analytics to understand personas of the users who visit your site.
This post will present a fast and easy way to get your behavioral targeting (BT) process up and running. [...]

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SEOmoz has launched Open Site Explorer, a new tool that joins the already crowded field of link analysis tools. In choosing that name, SEOmoz is somewhat blatantly positioning it as a competitor, and perhaps eventual replacement, for Yahoo’s popular Site Explorer tool.

Open Site Explorer provides a number of data points pulled from SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool [...]

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As part of your job managing in-house search marketing, you’ve no doubt created a training plan. At some point, you either have delivered training, or will need to. Whether it is natural search optimization, paid search management, social media, link building or any of the other disciplines that orbit around the world of search, training [...]

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Microsoft is taking the beta tag off its innovative Bing Maps Silverlight site, which we wrote about previously when it initially launched. According to Microsoft users will be transitioned to the new site and prompted to download Silverlight if they don’t already have it:
First off, if you go to the Bing Maps AJAX site and [...]

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The week after SMX West, I am hosting an informal SMX named SphinnCon Israel. The event has a half day of SEM related content, including 12 sessions on topics from SEO, PPC, Web Analytics and Social Media. The event is just about sold out now.
We launched this event about a month [...]

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The Google Webmaster Central blog announced they posted a “fun and educational” quiz for all to take over here.
The quiz must be taken by Wednesday, January 27 at 5PM PST. And there are no prizes for winning, it is just for fun.
I took the quiz yesterday and it was pretty useful to [...]

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BusinessWeek is reporting and solidifying what was previously an almost unthinkable rumor: that Bing might become the default search engine on the iPhone (and iPod Touch). The way BusinessWeek frames it this becomes a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Google and Apple are increasingly fierce competitors. But here’s an amazing quote [...]

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It can be important to segement your conversion rate tests to see how they perform for different kinds of users of your site. I’m going to show you a few ways of gathering GWO data in Google Analytics in order to bring the full power of the GA platform to your GWO testing.

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The Yield Web Marketing Suite is a complete, easy and profitable way to optimize your total search marketing program. Fully automated, the system relies on complex algorithms that work daily to manage bids, keywords, multivariate tests and more so you don’t have to. And the Natural Search Optimizer helps to improve page rank [...]

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Bing’s autosuggest feature now provides more current suggestions as you type a query. Bing says that it’s added “breaking news and hot trending queries” into autosuggest, with updates being pushed out every 15 minutes.
So, for example, start typing “orange county” into Bing and the autosuggest feature will show a couple terms related to today’s extreme [...]

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