Jetting Blogs

BIGLIST Update: These SEO Blogs Are No April Fools

Posted by under Internet Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

On this fine April Fool’s day BIGLIST foregos the tricks and brings you yet another collection of better than average SEO & SEM blog reviews. Over the past 2 years we’ve reviewed over 1,000  SEO blogs and we offer you 5 more to add to your RSS reader and get search engine smart. Think Traffic – This blog by internet entreprenuer Corbett Barr  makes some serious promises: “…teach you the techniques, tools and knowledge you need to build real, sustainable web traffic without a big budget.”  Sounds pretty good to me. Corbett relates his experiences with past projects and growing an audience for Think Traffic to the benefit of readers.  This very new blog offers practical tips and is well designed enough to get our top listing for this week’s review. Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg – Best selling author of multiple books, Bryan Eisenberg begged me for months to add his new blog to the BIGLIST. I challenged Bryan to write another best selling book, start a new company, become a keynote speaker at several popular industry conferences and lose at least 30 pounds. (Hey, we set the bar high for the BIGLIST).  Of course, I’m kidding about the challenge (and the begging). Bryan has accomplished all of those things and much more while writing an excellent blog on conversion optimization and internet marketing strategy with his brother Jeffrey, who is also a best selling author, keynote speaker and online marketing strategist for major brands. Jeff Bullas’s Blog – Jeff works as a sales and marketing manager at Infinity Technologies and his self-titled blog flavors towards social media – offering examples, case studies, lists of tips posts and insights from setting aside his traditional marketing roots and current focus on building trust and relationships with customers through social media, permission and inbound marketing. CanuckSEO – Long time internet marketing veteran Jim Rudnick writes with passion and flair about “Canadian SEO for Google Success!” as well as small business, local SEM and plenty of flavorful opinion posts on a variety of search marketing industry topics. Go for the tips, stay for the story telling and enthusiasm. Honorable Mention Lip Service – Laura Lippay is an ex-circus performer, SEO pioneer, very classy woman and currently Director of Technical Marketing for Yahoo! Media. Laura teases us all by occasionally writing about life and search marketing on this blog that just isn’t active enough to be added to the full BIGLIST. But the Feb 2010 posts are certainly worth an Honorable Mention. Did your SEO or SEM blog make the cut? Share the good news with your readers using the badges page .

Ppc Advertising For Small Businesses

Posted by under Pay-Per-Click

Pay per click advertising is one of the many advertising method in the Internet to make money online. Pay per click is the best choice for small businesses to increase their online exposure since they do have to compete for search engine rankings. Below are some reasons why pay per click advertising is best suited for small online businesses. Small online businesses can not compete to other big online businesses in terms of search engine rankings. So pay per click advertisement is the best choice for these small businesses to promote their products and services online. Pay per click allows a certain business to get on the fist page for a specific keyword and bypass the hassles of SEO. Niche keywords are important for a much better PPC advertising. Targeting the niche keywords will attract specific audience. When this happens, there is a bigger chance to make a great sale. A small online business can really do well in making money online by avoiding the big keywords and focusing on creating advertisements for the niche keywords. PPC advertising offers the opportunity to small online businesses to display their advertisements to certain sites for a low cost. In this method of advertising, it reduces the amount of clicks that has no chance into converting into sales. If a certain business want only to target local customers, then, PPC advertising is the best choice to make money online. Pay per click advertising is really a great help for small online businesses to promote their products and services in the web. – About the Author: I’ve been making money online for years and have had much success. Because of this, I created this blog, to give back to others. My goal is to teach as many people as possible to do the same, and start make money online as soon as possible! Article Source

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Ppc Advertising For Small Businesses

The Role of News in Blended Search – Observations & Best Practices

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click, Press Release Distribution

We’re starting this Spring Break week off with a very rare guest post from TopRank Marketing client, Jiyan Wei. Jiyan is Director of Product Management at Vocus, Inc. where he drives product platform strategy and roadmap execution for PRWeb. I’ve presented on panels with Jiyan several times at search marketing conferences, talking about the virtues of search, social media and public relations, finding him to be a very strategic and smart marketer. We’ll be co-presenting at the upcoming MarketingPros B2B Forum in May on Content Optimization and Marketing. In this post, Jiyan discusses the progression and importance of news content in blended search: Once upon a time, Page 1 had a special meaning for PR practitioners and business owners alike. It meant that for one day, they had received the pole position in the consciousness of the consumer, who would hopefully transition from newspaper consumer into business customer. For businesses – both local and global alike – Page 1 either meant an outpouring of business or pending doom. With the emergence of search as ubiquitous, Page 1 has begun to take on added meaning. Business owners are still very concerned about Page 1 but now, depending on whom you ask, Page 1 often refers to search and the consequent generation of a limitless stream of business and leads without having to pay for ongoing PR or advertising. For many, Page 1 in search has become the new holy grail of business owners and SEO practitioners alike. When I’m asked the question, “Will PRWeb get us onto Page 1 of search,” I immediately start shaking my head vigorously while hoping no one from the major engines overheard the question. Of course, nothing can guarantee you will be on Page 1 of search. That being said, as part of a broader online marketing strategy, news releases can be an effective tool to facilitate the outward expression of news and information about a business, which over time can result in the creation of online authority in the eyes of search engines. Yet with blended search, the picture becomes muddled. At some point in the last couple years, Google (and now Bing) decided that users want more than just Web results when they run a query in search and so started offering a front page that contained a broader array of types of content including images, video and news. According to some accounts news performs better in blended results than other forms of media and unlike other forms of media in blended search, news has a distinctly temporal slant. After all, news is really just information with a timestamp. What this means for business owners, communicators, marketers, etc. is that under some circumstances, news can actually be a viable gateway onto Page 1 of search in a relatively short amount of time by leveraging sites that search engines regard as ‘news sites,’ including news release sites. All that being said, here are some specific observations we’ve made about news in blended search: 1. If a recent news story is relevant to a query, it is more likely to appear somewhere in the results This may seem fairly obvious but the devil is in the details. Nailing down ‘relevance’ between a query and results is a tall order but we have found that placing your target keywords in the title, preferably in the first part of the title of your news story, dramatically increase the likelihood that your news story will show up for queries of the target keywords once the crawlers have found the story. As the keywords descend into the story, from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, they become less impactful in terms of helping your story get onto the blended results for your target query. 2. News results can include thumbnailed images and these can improve click-through rates Crawlers like Google look for relevant images to place in connection with news stories in the news block in blended search. They normally extract images from within the body of the story so including these images can result in having a thumbnail placed in connection with the result. Who cares? Well, everyone has seen the heat maps that show the importance of receiving top billing on page 1. What we’ve found from our own internal tests however is that results with image thumbnails can have click-through rates that are similar and sometimes even higher than results that are actually located higher. In other words, reader’s eyes are naturally drawn to the thumbnail so even if the news block is located lower down on the blended results page, the inclusion of a thumbnail can mitigate the lower placement to a great extent. 3. Many types of queries can result in news There are some types of queries that seem to have an obvious time slant: current events, sports, celebrities, etc. However, we have seen news show up in blended search results for query types that seem less obviously tied to a date. For example, tip sheets and best practice documents can be easily turned into news stories that can have a presence in blended search and drive traffic. With Spring right around the corner, there is a great opportunity to leverage audience demand for content to drive Web site traffic. For example, a quick glance at Google insights reveals that queries for ‘Spring decorating’ are on the rise. An opportunistic interior designer could use the opportunity to submit a release with a title like ‘Spring decorating tips from leading interior designer,’ that will have a good chance to tap into an upwards trending query in the blended search results. 4. Individual stories don’t appear in blended search results for long Using your news to get Page 1 placement is a short-term proposition. As quickly as the story enters the blended search results, it can disappear. We typically see news stories show up in the blended search results for 24-48 hours. Depending on how dynamic the news landscape is for the query (some queries are going to receive a flood of news stories that may wash your story away in hours), the lifespan of your story may be even shorter. Connect with Jiyan on Twitter , his blog or visit PRWeb, TopRank’s favorite press release distribution service.

How To Develop Great Content – SESNY

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

At Online Marketing Blog, content marketing is frequently a hot topic.  And with good reason:  it’s a vital skill for marketers. Not only do we at TopRank Online Marketing see great results implementing content marketing for clients, but the industry as a whole sees it as a clear trend.  Consider the following stats: 6 in 10 marketers plan to spend more on content marketing in 2010. 71% of bloggers who maintain blogs for a business – their own or one they work for – report that they have increased their visibility within their industries through their blogs (as just one example of content marketing in action). Content marketing plays an integral role in many of the top digital marketing tactics marketers implemented in 2009. In this fast-paced panel, 3 content marketers each shared some quick tips, trends and strategies for content marketing. Byron White, Chief Idea Officer, ideaLaunch Byron ran through an overview of 10 tips to follow when fleshing out a content marketing plan: 1.  Develop a content marketing plan – many digital marketers just dive in without any type of plan.  This is always a mistake, before going any further, you need to get organized and understand next steps 2.  Use free and paid research tools to research terms – there are a slew of both free and paid research tools which can help you define keywords necessary to create a keyword glossary.  Use tools in conjunction with your own creativity to create an inclusive list of terms. 3.  Find the hot topics and keywords – by understanding the industry and leveraging tools, you can discover hot/trending topics and keywords to be a part of your mix in addition to the mainstay terms. 4.  Develop customer profiles for testing/research the competition – building customer profiles and competitive research allows you to draw upon a knowledge base when creating content to both stand out from competitors and connect with your audience. 5.  Develop an SEO plan with “keyword silos” – made up of long tail and short tail keywords – in addition to building a keyword list, group it into like terms in order for your content team to leverage it in an effective manner during content creation. 6.  Score content for SEO strength – either via an automated tool or manually, score existing content for SEO strength in order to gauge what to optimize first. 7.  Infuse your brand with great content – on the web, your content is your brand (and your brand is your content). 8.  Create stories – people connect with stories more than just product pages and lists of features.  Tell stories and connect with prospects at a much deeper level. 9.  Define great content – know what great content looks like before you develop it.  You can’t create something remarkable unless you have a vision in mind. 10.  Document content publishing date – this is a frequently forgotten, but important tip.  Only by documenting new content publishing date can you track/trend success of that content over time. Of course, metrics are key – track interaction and engagement with content.  Get to a point you understand how your content, whether a blog post or a product page, is converting and working for your brand. Heather Lloyd-Martin, CEO, SuccessWorks Heather spoke on developing great content in the B2C and B2B space. Why care about content?  The best SEO is good content, according to Seth Godin.  If you want people to convert, link to you or even visit your site you need quality content. Main advantage of good content?  Control.  Great content allows you to gain control of your site. Tip # 1:  Think about your target audience Start by creating a customer persona.  The questions you need to answer to do this include: Who is your target audience?  (hint: it’s not everyone) Do you have multiple audiences? How old is your typical buyer/reader? What education level do they have? What are their average levels of income? What benefits are important? Tip #2: Expand your keyphrase universe Look for opportunities to build out new, unique content.  Reach both hit and long tail phrases, and create content that speaks to a broad mix of terms.  One way to do this is build out a resource section to answer both broad and ultra-specific, detailed questions. Tip #3:  Free your content from “fake SEO rules” “Party like its 1999…but don’t optimize your site that way.”  I.E. – there’s no need to follow a specific keyword density to rank.  Instead focus on quality first, keywords second. General SEO content rules: Keyphrases in headlines/subheadlines Keyphrases in hyperlinks Keyphrases throughout the content (but not forcing it) Keyphrase-rich title Focus around 2-3 keyphrases per page Tip #4:  Help your titles sizzle off the surface of SERPs When you’re on a SERP, there are 10 results and users need to pick one. Try to keep your titles to around 70 characters Include your main keyphrases Clearly explain what the landing page is about Include benefit statements (such as “free”) whenever possible Tip #5 There is always something you can do Beware the “website mullet.”  Check for outdated copy.  Some of the worst offenders can be press pages, conference/events pages, old articles, etc.  Where possible, update copy or add additional content if you have older areas of a website gathering cobwebs. Also, if you want to build out a new section of the site to make your content friendlier but can’t change the template:  start a blog or create a new section of the site.  Don’t let technical issues get in your way. Jonathan Allen, Director, Search Engine Watch Jonathan spoke on the idea of using other people’s websites/social sites to gain rankings and an audience.  The theme  was on mash-ups – aka remixes of content. Define your goal – is the goal of this content to persuade or sell people to take action or is it more long-term, to develop links to improve your search engine rankings/brand awareness.  Develop personas – I.E. connectors, those hyper-connected individuals who will help your content spread.  By reaching them, you achieve the highest propensity for your content to spread. Create content – it must be relevant and must be compelling. Connect – once content starts to spread, connect with others and encourage them to share so it spreads further. Rinse and repeat – when you find a formula that works, continue to leverage that to create additional content. 

10 Steps to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by under Pay-Per-Click

SES New York kicked off with an excellent keynote presentation by David Meerman Scott (interview) followed by a panel on Digital Asset Optimization including Mark Knowles, Chris Boggs and myself. Richard Zwicky moderated. The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file types from other sources that their main search index. Some queries trigger search results that go beyond web pages, MS Office docs and PDF files to include images, blog posts, news, video thumbnails, books and others. While many SEOs were responding to the changed landscape of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and optimizing for other file types, many others were already optimizing holistically under the premise of, “ What can be searched on can be optimized “. Most companies are not wired to create the variety of content that can achieve top visibility on search engines. In most cases, search engine optimization efforts are focused on content and digital assets that are currently in place.  Being able to get more marketing impact out of existing content is as much a driver of digital asset optimization as it is a part of a holistic strategy that matches up with the opportunities presented by an ever changing search results page. In the DAO session I presented a historical perspective on DAO based on when we started writing about it in 2007 and the changed search landscape we face with personal, real-time, social and mobile search. I also discussed TopRank’s 10 Steps DAO Content Strategy: Search & Social Media Keyword Research Anticipating demand via search is traditionally handled by keyword research tools such Google’s tools, Bing or services like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. As advertising and media placements can drive search, so can social conversations. Social media monitoring tools can help marketers conduct social keyword research as a compliment to search based keyword research. Find out what key language and key topics are being discussed on the social web and you’ll have invaluable insight into content idea that provide value for social media marketing and search engine optimization. Analyze Search Results Landscape The output of Universal and real-time search results are not persistent. For example, a search for a particular phrase one day might yield news and image results and on another day display only web pages. It’s useful to monitor the search results landscape for keyword phrases that you’re after. Understanding the mix of data sources besides the main search engine index can help with the allocation of optimization resources. If News and real-time results are most common, it may make more sense to focus on content promotion there vs images or video. Define Buyer Personas & Buying Cycle Understanding the needs of your customer is marketing 101. Search marketers are becoming more sophisticated in their understanding of customer profiles and developing personas to represent who you’re trying to attract via search is an important step in a content strategy. Knowing what kind of content and what type of digital asset your customers will best respond to can improve effectivness at driving traffic from the search visibilyt you’ve achieved through SEO. The buying cycle is another dimension that warrants attention to make sure you’re creating, promoting and optimizing content that is relevant to where your customers are in their search/research process. Broad concepts usually represent early stages of research versus more specific phrases which often indicate a buyer is closer to purchase. Inventory Existing Content & Assets With a more holistic SEO effort, especially one that will incorporate digital assets, it’s important to have a baseline understanding of what you have to work with. Taking inventory of your content and digital assets is something we’ve been recommending for over 3 years and it’s an essential first step. Having an understanding of current content and digital assets can also uncover content that is ripe for re-purposing. A common example is video that can be deconstructed into multiple, short form videos, single images, transcribed into text or splitting the audio off into a podcast. Develop editorial plan for new content Understanding your search and social media keywords, buyer personas and the assets you have to work with will help identify what new content you’ll need to create. Adopting the perspective of a publisher, not just a marketer, will help resource allocation, planning and goals/measurement for content creation. For example, rather than just sending out a press release and publishing a blog post with a new product announcement, a company might, based on search/social keyword research and an understanding of their buyer personas, decide to create a resource page for journalists that includes links to relevant resources, standard press release, images, PowerPoint, video, past media coverage, executive interviews, audio snippets, demo and appropriate media relations contact info. It would be made easy to bookmark or share this resource page as well. The assets being linked to from the resource page would be hosted either on the corporate site, optimized of course, or hosted on 3rd party media sharing sites such as Flicrk, YouTube, SlideShare, DocStoc, PRWeb and others. This provides a richer experience as well as numerous options for interaction. It also offers multiple, potential entry points into the resource page via search, since the optimized digital assets can rank in search results on their own and link to the destination content on the corporate web site. Map Keywords to Content & Digital Assets The functional process of implementing search/social keyword research is to map those concepts to the content and assets you have. This helps manage the initial keyword optimization process. Mapping keywords to the editorial plan is also a useful guide for the future creation and optimization of content. Not only are web pages, images, video and other assets optimized for search, but optimized for customers. Operationalize Content & Digital Media Creation with SEO SEO and digital asset optimization are not one-time events. Keyword demand will change and of course, new content and media will be published. To ensure keyword optimization of new content, it’s important to incorporate SEO with established content creation and promotion processes. That might be updating the corporate styleguide with SEO and keyword usage rules or it might mean making programming changes to the web site’s content management system to prompt content creators with keyword cues when adding text or other media. Develop Off Page DAO Assets The beauty of social content is of course, that it’s social! Sharing should be easy and encouraged. Hosting some digital assets on social media sharing sites such as those mentioned above (Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, DocStoc) can introduce your optimized content to new audiences and attract both traffic and links. More relevant links mean better search engine visibility and web site visitors. Promote/Syndicate via Distribution Channels How will anyone know you have excellent content and digital assets if you don’t promote? Dedicate a fixed and persistent effort to developing social networks where your customers and influentials spend their time on the social web. Do the same with social media sharing web sites so that when you post a new video on YouTube for example, your network there can be notified. Developing distribution channels for content will significantly improve reach and the likelihood of your content being passed on, shared and made socially popular. Email newsletters, RSS, Ping.fm and TwitterFeed services are good examples of content distribution services that help promote content efficiently. Ongoing Measurement with Web, Social and Search Analytics Search marketing professionals are well aware of the value from web and search analytics that measure search visibility performance as well as web site interactions and conversions. The importance of social media monitoring and analytics is also essential for a DAO Content strategy. On the front end, social media monitoring tools can help you identify conversations and influentials that are meaningful to the topics and customers your marketing efforts are trying to reach. Social keyword research can in part, be accomplished by some social media monitoring tools. Those same tools are essential for measuring the social impact of your digital asset and social media optimization efforts. A simple cycle would be one where you’ve identified new keyword topics beginning to buzz on the social web and taking that cue to create content. Promote that content through your social networks and use social media monitoring to track the effects of your content contributions to the larger conversation on the topic. Use web analytics to measure any increase in search based traffic based on the growing popularity and awareness of the topic based in part, on your contributions and social interactions. With an Optimized Content Strategy, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that by following these 10 steps, a significant impact can be achieved in overall authority for the topics and keyword concepts focused on as well as the ability to attract new business, media coverage and employees. The bad news is that it’s not easy. Making the commitment to serving customers with content and media on an ongoing basis, indefinitely without the initial ability to forecast ROI will make many companies say, “Great idea and it makes sense, but not for us.” However, those companies that make the effort to really understand and implement these fundamental concepts are making an investment with a payoff that is very long term and with momentum, very signifcant. Some companies will be able to “come out of nowhere” and dominate their category by following these 10 guidelines for an optimized content marketing strategy. Live blogging coverage of the Digital Asset Optimization session at SES New York was provided by: SEM Geek Outspoken Media Search Engine Roundtable AimClear And this article on Holistic SEO with Digital Asset Optimization was recently posted on ClickZ