The Best Seo Blogs

Archive for the ‘Top Rank Blog’ Category

As a longtime customer of PRWeb, I’ve seen many changes over the years. The oldest optimized press release I could find of mine that’s still online dates back to mid 2001 and in the years since, it’s been an evolving relationship moving from customer to consultant.

From the days of talking new features as a super user with founder David McInnis to our current role as search and social media consultants, the focus on innovation and serving customers has always been a mutual focus. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Vocus Product Manager for PRWeb, Jiyan Wei, Director of Online Marketing, Meg Walker and Vocus CMO Bill Wagner as well as other members of the Vocus team and they’ve been working very hard to make an array of substantial changes to the PRWeb platform to better serve customers.

PRWeb innovated the entire idea of the optimized press release and was in use by hundreds if not thousands of SEOs long before any other wire service thought to start following their lead and offer SEO friendly features. Now PRWeb has launched a new design, site architecture, press release templates and resource center that provides even greater Search Engine Optimization and Social Media exposure benefits.

Here’s a quick video tour of the all new PRWeb that’s worth a look:

More SEO & Social “Built Into” the Template - The press release template that PRWeb uses to publish press releases offers critical opportunities for customer discovery, consumption and sharing. That means making it easier for readers to find press releases by baking in more search engine friendly features, providing more room for media such as images and video, offering social sharing options and optimizing code for faster loading pages.

Centralized News – In particular, the move away from showing over 100 press releases on the PRWeb home page to a dedicated news center with specific industry category pages will allow even more entry points via search and give customer press releases even more exposure, especially in the long term. With over 500,000 pages, implementing SEO friendly design and architecture changes to a site like PRWeb is no small feat. Structuring the news center according to industry categories creates more of a news destination vs. a repository of press releases. Better design and content organization provides a better user experience and will attract more links.

More How To Online Marketing Resources - Another major enhancement for the new PRWeb site is the resource center with a growing collection of useful how to tips, articles, videos, webinars and white papers for everything from press release writing tips to general online marketing topics. Seeing examples of press releases organized by specific industry gives marketers useful insight for making their use of press releases successful.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
3 Things You Should Know About the New PRWeb | http://www.toprankblog.com

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There’s a game of telephone going on about a hundred different theories of Search Engine Optimization and the influences or signals that affect search visibility. One that I continue to hear revolves around the notion that search engines like fresh content. I’m sure the genesis was something like:  Someone told someone else at a conference and they posted it to a forum where someone read and blogged it and then someone else Tweeted it whereupon someone else blasted it via Ping.fm and Hootsuite. This sort of cycle repeats over and over again.

The point is, with telephone game advice on SEO or any other topic, the message gets diluted. Fresh content apparently means different things to different people and the version I continue to hear from SEO “experts” (agency, independent and in-house) is that search engines like websites that change their content often. The logic is that changing content on a page will attract search engine crawlers more frequently and somehow improve search visibility for the page.

Room for clarification. Changing a home page or news page with updates is good for website visitors because it gives them something new (hopefully) with each visit. Updating of content such as news links that allow search engine crawlers to follow those links to new content is also a plus. Refining on-page keyword optimization as needed is a best practice as well. But changing the text on a page for the sake of change, thinking that such a modification will improve search engine visibility, is a great example of the SEO telephone game.

The real opportunity with “fresh” content concerns adding new content (new pages) on a regular basis. Adding new pages  provides a number of benefits:  Each new web page added to the website creates a new entry point and a new destination for links from other websites.  Creating topically specific pages with text, images, video or other media provide a better user experience and  gives other websites interesting content to link to.  Of course a quantity of quality links from other relevant websites increases direct traffic and can positively influence search engine visibility, sending even more qualified visitors.

There are many budding search marketers out there and since there aren’t any singular sources of great SEO training, much of the information distribution occurs through a sort of telephone game. Website owners must make the effort to know the difference through their own testing and if it makes sense, engaging an experienced and reputable search engine optimization consulting firm.

So when you hear webmasters or marketers talk about the need to update existing content, understand that the opportunity to have the most impact on serving customer and search engines is through scheduling the creation, optimization and promotion of new content (text, image, video, rich media), not just changing text on a page to somehow “fool” search engines into thinking your web pages are fresh.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
SEO Basics: Telephone Game & the Fresh vs. New Content Debate | http://www.toprankblog.com

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One of the most common challenges of business blogging is sourcing content. The range of things that can interrupt content creation are important obstacles to overcome because without content there is little reason for readers to return.  Blogs are fairly easy to start and if you’ve been a reader of this blog, chances are pretty good that you have started your own blog (personal or for biz) at some point in time.  Many of the companies TopRank Marketing consults with have either started business blogs and need help or want to start a new blog to advance a variety of business goals. In fact, in our blogging survey earlier this year, 95% of respondents indicated they incorporate blogs as part of their search engine optimization efforts. Many others use blogs for public relations, customer service, product support and recruiting.

Whatever the reason for starting a blog, long time content creation with B2B blogs requires creativity, social participation and a smart feedback loop. Here are a few specific ways to generate content ideas for business to business blogs:

Editorial Calendar - Smart B2B bloggers treat their blogging effort as an editorial endeavor. Publishers of newspapers, magazines and other news media operate, in part, based on a calendar of topics. For business bloggers, this means creating scheduled blog posts according to topics that support the intersection of customer interests and the value the company can provide to those customers.  If a company sells red widgets then the editorial calendar will schedule blog content around the needs of customers that buy red widgets.  For example:

• Widget reviews
• Tips on buying widgets
• 100 uses of widgets
• Widget industry news
• Interviews with authorities on widgets
• Liveblogging widget conferences, webinars, podcasts
• Lists of widget facts, statistics and resources
• Archived widget Twitter chats
• Widget book reviews
• Weekly widget Q/A
• Widget surveys
• Widget industry event calendar
• And so on

The editorial calendar can schedule ongoing post formats as well, such as Widget Reviews on Tuesdays and Widget Tips on Thursdays so that content can be created in advance and scheduled to post. This allows a other days for spontaneous, reactive and on-demand content outlined in the next few tips.

Search Marketing Keywords – As a blog develops a body of work published to the web and the business incorporates a mix of marketing and PR tactics to drive traffic to the blog, the web analytics in place to measure visitor activity will reveal many useful content opportunities.  The low hanging fruit here is referring keywords. Whether the blog is optimized for a set number of keywords or not, any kind of crawlable content that has quality links to it will achieve some level of visibility within search engines. Watching the keywords that send traffic to a business blog can be insightful and help inform what customers are interested in. Keyword referring information can be analyzed across different time intervals, entry/exit pages, goal pages and conversions to determine weighting of importance and potential impact on blog goals.

Social Media Keywords - I’ve been promoting the idea of social media keyword research for over a year at conferences, in my presentations and in various blog posts. Monitoring real-time news for editorial opportunity is something public relations professionals have been doing for years. With search engines’ improved ability to crawl, index or syndicate and then publish real time streams of information from the social web, there exist numerous opportunities to monitor and tap into content ideas.

In the way that media placements and prominent advertising drive search traffic, so do social conversations. Monitoring trending keyword topics from social participation such as blogging, comments, Q/A sites, tags, Tweets, status updates and similar sources can reveal opportunities to create content on a BtoB blog. If customers are talking about a particular topic that intersects well with your company’s products/services on social media sites with increasing frequency, then it makes sense to leverage a blog to publish and syndicate via RSS what they’re looking for.

Offer contrarian views, concrete research or more compelling points of view and you can capture readers that are researching.  Social media monitoring tools are the most likely way to capture what social keywords are trending, but I have yet to find a service that does this well and none that interact with search keyword research tools. At least not yet.

Repurpose Content – The social web for the most part, has a short memory.  That does not mean you should re-publish content from 2 years ago in a “Blast from the Past” format. But it does mean that you can revisit topics that were previously well received to update them for today’s business environment or simply to update information. We’ve covered re-purposing content a number of times and here are a few specific tips:

• Turn Powerpoint decks into articles/blog posts
• Use email interview Q/A with journalists that didn’t get published
• Break up a long article you’ve had published into a series
• Rewrite press releases in a conversational or blog post format
• Aggregate specific tips on a topic from numerous old posts

Exposing Your Thought Leaders – Doing interviews with industry thought leaders is a great way to create interesting content and tap into their audiences f0r exposure.  What’s also important is to connect with and interview internal thought leaders, whether they are business leaders that the PR department is pitching to the media or product managers and engineers. Interviews with these busy people can be done via phone and then transcribed into text. This makes it easy for the interviewee and also provides both audio and text versions of content. Questions can be keyword optimized and responses can inter-link using anchor text to support your SEO efforts.

Bonus! Content Curation - A fast emerging area of content marketing, especially in the B2B space is the notion of content curation. We interviewed 10 content marketing industry thought leaders on this topic recently that give insightful definitions as well as where curation and creation fit within an online marketing mix.  Syndicating content from other topical sources into a central location can help companies create a destination of value to readers where they can go to get industry news.  Some software systems can manage all of this like our client Curata or you can construct this type of site using RSS and RSS to HTML tools like CaRP.

What creative ways have you found to keep the content creation machine alive with your business blog? Have you found success in repurposing content or sourcing ideas from keyword referring data? Have you tried real-time content sourcing through social keyword monitoring?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Smarter Ways to Get Content Ideas for B2B Blogs | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Companies today have a virtual smörgåsbord of options when it comes to marketing their products and services online. Lack of expertise, numerous tactical options, pressure for sales in a down economy and the tendency to chase shiny objects cause many online marketing efforts to be fragmented. I really doubt that a significant waste of effort and disconnect with customers is part of any company’s online marketing strategy. But it’s happening. A lot.

Marketers must prioritize what will work best and in the mix of online marketing tactics. According to eMarketer, SEO and PPC have been rated the most effective for conversions and ROI and while some companies are using software like PPC management tools to make things easier, there’s a lot more to consider for better segmentation.

With any type of marketing, relevance is essential for achieving a profitable program.  When it comes to search marketing, understanding customers, the keyword searches they use and the offers they’re most likely to respond to are essential.

In order to move your online marketing from fragmented to prioritized and more relevant through search, here are 3 key concepts search marketers should master.

1. Understand searcher personas

It’s fundamental marketing to anticipate and understand customer needs.

To really make a difference with more targeted online marketing, search marketers need to become more sophisticated in their understanding of customer profiles and developing personas to represent who they’re trying to attract via search. Delivering generic content to a searcher looking for a specific product is a common mistake that creates a disconnect for search engines and customers.

“Searcher personas and search acquisition workflows are integral to the way I approach search strategy. Before you can start attracting visitors to your web site, you need to know who you are attracting and why.” Vanessa Fox

Knowing what kind of content and types of digital assets your customers will respond to can improve effectiveness at driving “organic” search  traffic.  The same goes for designing Pay Per Click ads and landing pages that are relevant to the needs of customers you really want to reach.

2. Develop an ideal keyword mix

Many companies start with a list of keywords they think are best for SEO and implement them with on-page optimization and link building.  According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report (SEO Edition), 67% of small businesses place more value on on-page optimization over keyword research. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your ideas about keywords are more important than those of your customers.

Developing a keyword glossary is essential and starts by collecting a raw list of concepts, topics and phrases from sources like website content, interviews with front line employees and actual customers, competitor web sites and good old fashioned brainstorming.  That raw list is brought into a keyword research tool that will output provide a list of actual search phrases plus variations sorted by popularity.

Understanding keywords from the perspective of the searcher and where they are in the buying process allows the search marketer to properly optimize content, landing pages and ads accordingly. Same goes for making the ads and landing pages more relevant because it leads to better performance with click through rates and conversions.

From an organic perspective, specifically optimized pages that have attracted relevant links from other related web sites will result in higher rankings for keywords that are being targeted. Customers will self-segment themselves with the search terms they use. By developing an ideal keyword mix that is focused on customer needs and the solutions offered by your products and services, your search marketing efforts will better target customers in a relevant way and increase sales.

3. Optimize content for specifics

Content can mean web pages, digital assets and any other documents that can be optimized for organic search.  Optimization also applies to landing pages used with pay per click advertising to improve quality score. If you read Online Marketing Blog with any frequency, you know my mantra: “If it can be searched, it can be optimized.”

If you don’t have enough content to accommodate all the keywords you’re targeting, then you have an opportunity to create more content.  A common misconception is that updated content is important, when the reality is that adding new content that reflects the search needs of customers is what’s important. The addition of every new web page means another potential entry point to your web site via a link or search.

Being focused helps search engines understand and rank pages so that customers get what they’re actually looking for. Delivering on the promise of a compelling search result is priceless for conversions.

Wrap-up

Fragmented marketing with search helps no one. Marketers would do well for themselves and the customers they’re tying to reach by paying attention to the development of searcher personas, developing quality keyword research and optimizing specific pages and digital assets for specific phrases according the searcher needs in the buying cycle. As a result, you’ll deliver a more relevant experience for both search engines and customers.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Moving from Fragmented to Segmented Online Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

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“Qualified”, “showing intent to buy”, “high conversion rate” and many other phrases are used to describe search engine marketing.  As a $16 billion industry, Search Marketing including SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC ads (pay per click) represent a substantial opportunity for small businesses to connect with customers at the moment they are looking for products and services to buy.

Even though Search Marketing presents an attractive opportunity to grow online sales, many businesses are too busy running their companies to stay on top of future trends. To that end, here are three search marketing trends worth paying attention to:

1.  Online & Offline Marketing Integration - Forrester Research estimates $917 billion worth of retail sales in 2009 were “Web-influenced” in contrast to $155 billion of consumer goods sold online in the same year.  Small businesses must pay attention to customer search online influencing offline purchases as well as the influence of the in-store experience on searching and purchasing online.

2.  Mobile Device and Local Search – Companies must recognize consumer trends towards mobile search with the proliferation of smart phones. The web experience has definitively extended beyond the personal computer to mobile devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and iPads.  Marketers must understand their customers’ use of mobile search and what the marketing opportunities are.

Companies that serve customers in specific regions or with geographically specific needs must be present in local search results, map results and specific geo-location queries. Segmenting potential customers through geo targeting with paid search advertisements will help focus the right ads on the right customers.

3.  Social Media Advertising – Savvy small business marketers are increasingly realizing that the opportunity to reach customers extends beyond traditional paid search into the booming social media space. Having surpassed Google as the most visited website for the week ending March 13, 2010 and with over 400 million registered users, Facebook offers a significant audience that shouldn’t be ignored.  Social networks like Facebook can provide online marketers hyper-targeted advertising opportunities that can tap into new customer segments and serve as a complement to other paid search programs.

Whether it’s incorporating online and offline influences with search marketing, diversifying PPC advertising networks, leveraging local and mobile search marketing or extending advertising programs to include social media, small business marketers that capitalize on these trends will gain a competitive advantage. Of course, if they hire an online marketing agency like TopRank Marketing, that advantage may come even faster.

This post was excerpted from my article that was originally published on American Express OPEN Forum. Be sure to visit 5 Search Engine Marketing Trends That Impact Your Business for the other 2 trends.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
3 Essential Small Business Search Marketing Trends | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Web Analytics are a key indicator to the health and performance of any website, but online marketers often get lost in the complexities and details, forgetting how important analytics actually are and why.

Analytics can provide a wealth of information but marketers often look at high level indicators such as: top content, bounce rates, entrance sources and keywords without tying it all together. In most cases, there is a tremendous amount of insight that can be used to make smarter marketing decisions, but most companies barley scratch the surface. At the OMS Minneapolis event last week  Adam Proehl gave an excellent presentation on analytics failures and successes. I’ve taken my notes from that presentation and combined them with my own opinions to create this list.

10 reasons why your web analytics are failing:

You speak numbers to non-number people.

It takes a numbers person to dig though large amounts of analytics data, figure things out, and draw conclusions. However, most people aren’t “numbers” people.

Many marketers like charts and clear, action orientated data. Charts are good, numbers in red and green help, and so does simplification. Don’t present tabular data just because it make sense to you. Try and think about who you’re presenting the information to and how they like to consume information. Some people like tables, others like graphs. As online marketers make an effort to understand the audience on the web they’re trying to reach, so should they understand the internal audiences that they report results to.

The statistics are fuzzy.

It’s easy to combine different pieces of data and come out with a great conclusion, even if they don’t go together.

For example, did you know that Michael Jordan and I have a combined total of 6 NBA championships?

While that statement is true, the conclusion is a bit skewed. Yes, Michale’s 6 plus my 0 do equal 6, the fact is that that I didn’t do any of the work for those championships, but I’m still getting the credit as I was included in the statement.

In analytics it’s important to break out the data so that it makes sense, not just so it looks good. It’s easy to combine two pieces of information in ways that make things look really good, but in reality, is something being hidden?

The averages are flawed.

Averages are great unless there is a major spike or dip. Then they have a tendency to skew the data a bit too much.

Based on the graph above, you could say that we’re averaging 1652 people from StumbleUpon a day. But in reality, most days there were less than 50. The big spike just screwed up the average.  As quickly as that spike came, it can also disappear and making decisions based on the daily average isn’t a best practice.

Sometimes things just don’t work.

There are lots of things that can go wrong with the analytics from a website and that has to be taken into account. The tracking code could be implemented incorrectly, maybe some special tagging was setup improperly, there could be issues with site architecture or maybe there are just things that are out of our control.

Analytics isn’t perfect and the reporting is never going to be 100% accurate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the numbers are wrong.

The important thing is to fix the issues you can and work with the numbers you have.

You don’t understand the customer.

Why are people visiting our site? What are they doing while they are here? What stage of the buying cycle are they in?

Thinking that you know your customers is one thing, but you really need to watch their behavior and see what they are actually doing.

Maybe visitors are focused on research or maybe they can’t find what they’re looking for when they get to your site. These are things analytics can tell you if you look and once you know what your customer is doing, you can modify your site to fulfill their needs.

You don’t connect the conversion dots.

Getting visitors to the site is one step. The next step is making sure you have content that is going to satisfy their need. As stated above, analytics can help with this, but once prospects fill out the contact form, what happens next?

How many decisions are made by looking at top level analytics alone? Someone has to tie leads back to the website to determine what is working and what isn’t.

For example, in a B2B situation, a whitepaper download may be bringing in lots of leads, but none are qualified. Maybe there is a CTA (call to action) form that is bringing in few leads, but they convert very well. Analytics can’t tell you what happens with a lead after filling out a form, and connecting that data is very important.

You don’t dig deep enough.

Looking at one metric in analytics and making a decision seems like a good idea unless you’re not seeing the whole picture.

A good example would be bounce rates to a landing page. Just because the bounce rates are high, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. You need to dig into the data and find out the conversion rate as well.  Changing a landing page because the bounce rate is higher than normal but that also has a higher than normal conversion rate may result in lost sales.

You don’t tie in outside data.

Marketers should be looking at other online and offline marketing efforts and tie them into web analytics wherever they can.  Ideally, an online marketing program should track different sources for different outcomes such as: people from Twitter to conversion, knowing which conversions came from email campaigns and what offsite marketing tactics are working.

You don’t take the time.

Analytics isn’t easy. It’s not something anyone can do in an hour a day (except maybe those that read this book of course). If website marketers really want to get valuable information out of analytics, they need to invest time and resources into talent that can make that happen.

Analytics can seem complex and yes, it takes time and talent to make sense of them, but in the end analytics can paint a picture of how users are interacting with a site, what the user behavior is, and point out ways to make your site more successful and profitable.

Bonus: 13 analytics tools to help you out.

• ShareThis – Social sharing button that can tie data into Goggle Analytics.
• Snip and Tag – Firefox extension that allows you to easily copy a URL and tag it with Google Analytics code.
• GA? – Firefox extension that quickly shows if Google Analytics is installed on the page or not.
• Better Google Analytics – Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics.
• Enhanced Google Analytics – Another Firefox extension that enhances Google Analytics.
• Twitalyzer – Analytics for social relationships.
• Bit.ly – URL shortening with analytics.
• Google URL Builder – A way of tagging URLs with Google Analytics code so they can be tracked on external sites.
• Excellent Analytics – Microsoft Excel plugin to pull Google Analytics data directly into Excel.
• Site Scan GA – Scans a website to find out what pages have analytics installed and which ones don’t.
• Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger (WASP) – Firefox plugin that debugs analytics.
• Crazy Egg – Heat mapping tools that allow you to visually understand user behavior.
• ClickTail – Heat mapping tools that also track where uses are when they bail on a form.

What are some of your favorite web analytics tools?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
10 Reasons Why Your Analytics Are Failing & 13 Tools To Help | http://www.toprankblog.com

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Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO gave the opening keynote of Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis.  Lee spoke on the intersection of SEO and social media and provided key takeaways for companies on achieving success.

As the social web and search engines integrate and innovate tighter, the intersection between search and social is growing more meaningful daily.  Following is a summation of this info-packed presentation:

What would happen if your Google traffic disappeared tomorrow?  What impact would that have on your marketing and your business?  For many, this could be disastrous.  This highlights the importance of diversifying your brand’s referring sources and share of voice around the web.

Search and social are intersecting in many ways:  when you look at a comparison of the top search engines, more and more of the engines themselves are on social platforms, and more of the results on the big engines are social.

Think about amplifying the results you are getting from natural SEO by amplifying your content through social channels.

Google dominates search, but should it dominate your marketing?

Lee shared some stats that help support the diversification of your traffic and digital influence:

• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, according to Nielsen, but only 14% trust advertisements according to Larry Weber
• Facebook added more than 200 million users in less than a year according to the Facebook timeline
• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US
• 2^nd most popular search engine isn’t Yahoo, it’s YouTube according to comScore
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment, 95% of those are LinkedIn

The stats paint a clear picture:  that social is vital to integrate with search and your marketing program overall.  According to SEMPO, 35% of B2B companies integrate social media and search engine marketing programs – is your brand?

HubSpot is a great social/SEO example – they receive 20,000 leads a month from inbound efforts.

What about search and social as it integrates with PR and media relations?  To research stories:

• 89% of journalists use blogs
• 65% use social networks
• 52% use Twitter

Jon Gordon from NPR noted:

I use search engines on almost every story.  I use social networks to find additional sources as well as for the story idea generation and story feedback.

How to leverage SEO for marketing and PR:

If you already have a keyword glossary, that can be shared with PR to leverage for their content creation to be optimized for journalists.

How do SEO and social media intersect?

Add a layer of search to your social activity:  are you leveraging keywords across your social web participation?  If not, you should be.  Give your keyword glossaries to your social media marketing and PR team to use across marketing efforts.  Cumulatively this leads to better visibility not just in Google but in social search as well.

One of the problems of social media and SEO is that they are usually put in silos within an organization.  But, you can bring them together to amplify results.  You can’t afford not to combine social and SEO.  In fact, if you are in a competitive category, it’s difficult to compete if you aren’t engaged.  As just one example, it’s difficult to acquire lots of high quality, organic links unless you can promote great content to a significant number of people.

Ecommerce is social

Target, 1-800 Flowers, and other e-commerce brands are going social.  They are integrating their online purchasing with social sites in order to tap into networks along with purchasing.  Companies that are doing this type of activity are training their customers to make social a part of the purchasing process.

Customer service is social

Large brands are leveraging social tools for CRM purposes and sales opportunities.  All you need to do to see the opportunity is query a topic customers are seeking information on and you can be the one to respond.

Most importantly, people are social and people search.  As long as there is content that can be sorted, there is an opportunity to optimize it.

Is social a threat to search?  No – search isn’t going anywhere.  Social sites are popular but according to both consumer data and the nature of the web they are not a threat to search.

4 keys to Social SEO:

Listening, content, socialize, measurement

Listening – understand the channels so you can make smart decisions about your tactics.  Listening also provides you social keyword research to mine data from your target audience.  If you have ever created a social listening report, you know it’s keyword-based and the value of understanding the language audiences use.

Content – The thing that makes social or SEO fantastic is content.  If you don’t have a great message, you don’t have anything.  Take stock of content assets in order to be able to maintain consistency with communications.  After inventory, you can sync that up with an editorial plan.  Skipping this step can lead to failure:  for example, many create blogs and run out of things to say quite quickly.  Without a plan, it’s easy to get stuck.  Next, map your content to those social keywords developed to maximize visibility in search.

Socialize – give to get, and grow a network of relevant people.  Even if you have great content, no one will know to link to it or share it unless you promote it.

Distribution channels are essential – create content around the needs of your customers and send through distribution channels that are independent of Google – for example, RSS, email, social, media/PR and contributed articles.  The kicker is if done effectively, your performance in Google skyrockets.

Cycle of social and SEO:

Measure – get social monitoring tools and social analytics in place in order to understand and get feedback on your content and participation.  Look at the performance of your content and your competition’s content in order to provide insight.

Marketo (a TopRank client) as an example created a social SEO strategy that focused on keywords and content their customer finds valuable as opposed to limiting themselves purely to keywords describing the product.

3 things you can do now:
1) Establish a listening program

2) Implement a content marketing strategy

3) Leverage social media marketing campaign management tools (which will be explored in a future post at TopRank Blog).

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Lee Odden On SEO And The Social Web – OMS Minneapolis Keynote | http://www.toprankblog.com

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For the past 3 plus years, TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has been hosted by Minneapolis based website hosting provider, VISI.  When our past host shut us down without warning for getting too much traffic, VISI and Online Marketing Blog connected and worked out a sponsorship. VISI is the only company with an ongoing “ad” on this blog.

Uptime for Online Marketing Blog has been amazing since we moved to VISI and customer service has been exceptional. With web site hosting, the ideal situation is to forget about them, to not even know they are there because things are working so smoothly.

But when situations arise, and a site goes down, you remember pretty quickly who your hosting company is. VISI was good about working with us when we had a major problem earlier this year and get the right equipment to meet our needs. As our traffic has increased, there hasn’t been a blip of downtime.

Our relationship with VISI has gone well enough that when they launched a tier one cloud computing/cloud hosting service called ReliaCloud, they came to TopRank for Social SEO consulting services.

I’d like to thank Gary Elfert and the team at VISI for being “invisible” 99.99% of the time and being on the spot when we needed them.  If your company is in need of high availability website hosting, check out VISI.com.   If cloud computing or hosting is your thing, then check out their service ReliaCloud.

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Thank You To Our Web Hosting Sponsor VISI | http://www.toprankblog.com

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It’s that time of year again and the ClickZ Online Marketing Summit will arrive shortly to the Minneapple, Friday June 25th. The conference organizer has generously donated a free pass to the 1 day workshop for us to give away here on Online Marketing Blog.

The agenda covers everything from Social to SEO to B2B Blogging to Email Marketing. You’ll be able to learn from a mix of client side marketers and agency subject matter experts on cutting edge strategies for more successful online marketing programs.

Companies presenting include HubSpot, Cargill, Exact Target and many others. I’ll be giving the opening keynote presentation on SEO and the Social Web:

Core to many search marketing strategies is “Fish where the fish are” and the fish are decidedly hanging out on Google. YouTube, Gmail, Blogger.com and other online services from Google make its presence ubiquitous in the online marketing world. Now imagine if your website disappeared from Google tomorrow. What would that do to your marketing, your business? Google and search engines present a tremendous opportunity to attract new business, but it’s important to diversify online marketing in a way that also benefits overall search marketing. For many companies, a relationship with customers is worth a lot more than a click, pageview or inbound link.

In this presentation you’ll learn the value of diversification from the development of channels of distribution for optimized social content that is independent of, yet complimentary to search engines. Social SEO enables companies to realize search engine marketing benefits as well as long term, meaningful connections with a community of customers.

The cost for the 1 day event is $369 but we’ll give a pass away today to the most compelling Tweet that links to this post or comment below explaining why they should attend. The cutoff for making your tweet or comment is 4pm CST June 23rd and the winner will be announced at 5pm CST or after the same day.

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Companies are realizing the value in “brands as publishers” and are making real commitments to the creation of content in their online marketing mix. It’s no longer enough to provide fundamental features and benefits information about products and services to succeed competitively online. Consumers and of course, business buyers, seek additional information, resources and others to connect with on the topics of interest to them.  Some companies choose a pure creation strategy and find it to be a formidable undertaking, especially creating unique and valuable content over a long period of time.

Within the field of content marketing, curation is becoming a popular topic of discussion. Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content.  Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Content curation can provide the best of both.

As I am prone to do with topics of interest, I reached out to a few industry thought leaders to get their take on defining Content Curation and where it fits within the mix in an online marketing program:

Rebecca Lieb – @lieblink
Vice President, North America at Econsultancy and author of The Truth About Search Engine Optimization

As an editor, journalist and marketer….what a great question!

Content curation, which can be defined as a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, presenting and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter, has become essential to marketing, branding, journalism, reporting and social media – often, to mash-ups of all these different and disparate channels.

Content curation can takes many forms: feeds, “channels” (such as on YouTube), it can appear on blogs, or even be the links you upload to social media sites such as Facebook. It can be an online newsroom, a collection of links, an assortment of RSS feeds, or a Twitter list. Whatever form content curation does take, it’s around a topic, or a subject, or even a sensibility that speaks to the knowledge, expertise, taste, refinement, brand message or persona of the person, brand or company that has created the particular channel or source of content.

Why bother? Tons of reasons. It’s a big web out there. More and more, people rely on trusted sources: friends, family, brands, companies, experts, you-name-it, to help keep them informed, educated and even amused. Need proof? Take bOINGbOING.net, one of the web’s most popular blogs whose traffic often exceeds that of NYTimes.com. This group blog is nothing more (or less), that curated content; items its contributors and often its readers find and share with others.

Channels of content can be as specific as bee keeping equipment, or as amorphous as “what’s cool.” But they all serve multiple purposes, ranging from informing to engaging to entertaining. In an era where marketing is supplanting advertising and storytelling is an ever-more essential part of the marketing message, carefully curated content – well presented – is an immense brand asset, be it to a humble, over-caffeinated individual blogger or a Fortune 100 company.

David Meerman Scott @dmscott
Author, New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave

I’ve been working with what I call syndication for 25 years. My first job when I got out of school was a bond trading desk and right after that started working with companies in the financial information space. I worked with Knight Ridder for 6 years and at a company at News Edge for 6 years as president of marketing. News Edge was the first, real serious aggregator of news in the corporate, financial and government spaces. So news syndication, news aggregation has been going on literally for decades.

What is Expedia, for example? It’s an aggregation of airline and hotel feeds that then get aggregated to create content. What’s Google? Google is an aggregation of a whole bunch of content.

I’m a fan of doing that but the challenge is how can you do it in a way that’s interesting. You have to make a decision: Do you let the machines do the aggregation and the selection or do you let humans do the selection. It’s a huge decision, humans or machines.

You also need to think about, how do you create the taxonomy and the folksonomy of how to turn that content into categories? That becomes a really big issue with content curation.

If you’re a big company and trying to do this, and you have a B2B section, a B2C section, 15 products in 25 markets, in 58 countries, what do we do? Do we have 58 feeds for each country, do we have 25 different things for each category? It really becomes a big issue.

I’m a huge fan of content syndication, great stuff. Been going on for decades. But the two challenges for people that want to embark on a strategy like that is A: Humans or Technology and B: What’s the taxonomy or folksonomy to put it together.

Brian Solis – @briansolis
President Future Works and Author of Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web & Co-Author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

Marketing in general, which can be content marketing, public relations, communications. We have a tendency to try and automate things, to the point of obscurity or mediocrity. There is a value in curation and a value in creation. But when you start to think of things in terms of automation, I think that we’re just feeding the system for the sake of feeding the system.

Now I think there’s value in both and I believe that in order to garner some thought leadership you have to become a thought leader. You can’t do that through aggregating the thoughts and words and ideas of others.
Obviously you (as a company) have something to contribute, something to say, something of value to offer which is mostly likely why you’re most likely in business. I need to hear about that. I need to understand why I should consider you as a partner or whatever it is you’ve created, something I can use, something I couldn’t do before I came into contact with you.

Now in terms of curation, where it gets really interesting is that those thoughts and words and ideas of others can be helpful to establish yourself as a value added resource, as a place or destination for information.

Ann Handley – @marketingprofs
Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs and Co-Author of the upcoming book, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business

Defined as it applies to online publishing: Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources (and by that I mean articles, blog posts, videos, photos, tools, tweets, or whatever) on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.

What role should it play:

All organizations are now publishers — meaning, the company with the most engaging and interesting content is the one who wins. Content curation isn’t necessarily anything new (finding the best stuff to share is what so many of us do on Twitter already, and what bloggers have long done, or what sites like Alltop or Digg have been doing). But recently, it’s getting a little more attention as an emerging field of its own.

It can fit into an organization’s content strategy nicely. How? It’s a way for organizations to further their role as a resource to their audience. Sifting through the mountain of web content and finding the tastiest, choicest bits for your readers is a great way to build trust and authority with them, and to become a valuable resource for them on any particular topic. What’s more, for organizations just getting into publishing online — for those just starting a blog, say, or a microsite — curated content can allow them to ramp up quickly, both from an SEO as well as content perspective.

That said, I have two cautionary pieces of advice:

1. Don’t rely exclusively on automated content curation services to feed your own belly (to fulfill your content needs). I see content services like HiveFire as providing an intelligent stream of curated stuff, but you still need a real, live human editor to pick and choose and order the best stuff for your own audience. Warm-blooded humans still required, in other words.

2. Mix curated content with original content, and don’t rely on the curated stuff alone. Content curating is a perfectly good way to extend the content of your own site, but only “in addition to” and not “instead of” your original content.

Joe Pulizzi – @juntajoe
Founder Junta42 and Content Marketing Institute, Co-Author of Get Content, Get Customers.

Content curation is editing on steroids. In actuality, content curation has been around since the dawn of the publishing industry. The job of the editor was to take the best information from around their industry and present that information in a manner that makes sense to readers.

The web’s first crack at this was content aggregation, or having computers pull the best links and information automatically to make the “reader’s” experience more fulfilling. But as we have learned, search is not perfect. Enter the content curation specialist.

As more content floods through all aspects of the web (as well as print and online), we’ll need more brands stepping up to make sense of what we really should be paying attention to. Content curation is as important in the content marketing toolbox as is creation. We need both…and curation doesn’t work without creation (much like Google trying to save the newspapers because they need great news to survive, but that is for another story). For some brands, curation may be enough. You can’t find the resources to develop the most valuable, most compelling content in your industry? Then just tap into your network that does, and package that content to present you as the trusted industry leader. It’s still a needed service, just a bit different from creation.

Where it will go, no one knows…but I’ve heard from smarter people than me that content curation is the future (even present) of media. I’d rather say curation and creation go together like Macaroni & Cheese…a splendid combination.

Paul Gillin – @pgillin
Consultant. Author of The New Influencers and Secrets of Social Media Marketing

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline will be absolutely essential to content marketing in the future because of changes in the media landscape.

Just a few years ago, audiences were starved for information and the role of media was to create it. Today, we are drowning in information and the emerging role for media is to filter and organize it.
This is being handled accomplished on an ad hoc basis by social news sites like Digg and Sphinn; social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Reddit; news aggregators like Drudge Report; link blogs like Metafilter and Slashdot; friends networks like Twitter and Facebook; and even self-curated RSS aggregations. In fact, much of what goes on in social media is various forms of content curation.

Marketers can build trust with their constituencies by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their constituents. Original content will always have value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas and to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of money to do this. You just need to know the subject matter very well.

Erik Qualman, @equalman
Author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business and MBA Professor at the Hult International Business School

Today, everyone is a potential media outlet. A curator understands their audience and is able to package created content in a digestible manner for them.

Creators need to view curators as distribution points for their content rather than as pirates. Content creators and curators that will thrive in this new world understand the importance of this symbiotic relationship. But is it symbiotic? In the end, almost every person is a little of both (creator & curator). After all, there is no such thing as a new idea and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. These clichés symbolize the irony of the topic being discussed.

Valeria Maltoni – @conversationage
Director of Strategy, Powered, Inc., Conversation Agent

Content curation is one of the keystones in a content marketing strategy. It’s like museum curation — harvesting, researching, tagging, organizing, and sharing — only two-way, because of the digital medium. Thanks to technology it also includes in an out feeds, and moderation and escalation, where necessary.

To maximize its impact, you want to integrate curation within a canvas of brand generated content and promotions in a forum that also highlights the best brand-related content from your own community of fans. The curator monitors conversations for opportunities to align the voice of the brand with the voice of the customer, to engage outside content creators, to highlight the best third party content within the brand’s sharing strategy, and inspire action.

Pawan Deshpande – @TweetsFromPawan
CEO, HiveFire (TopRank Client)

Content curation is the cure for a broken content marketing strategy. Content marketing is about a brand producing valuable content, and prospects being educated with that content. It’s valuable, it works and it’s not going away.

But the only problem is that day by day, it’s less effective as everyone produces more and more content. Brands are increasingly competing to get their content noticed. At the same time, prospects are increasingly spending more time searching for relevant content.

Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer. You will be navigating your prospects through this sea of content by leading them to the most relevant important information.

It’s already happened in the consumer world: Sites like Digg (social curation) which have little or no original content have become key resources for information. Similarly we are seeing leading businesses take a similar approach to become the experts for their respective areas.

(Note: HiveFire makes a content curation product called Curata, that blends creation with curation automation.)

Marc Meyer – @marc_meyer
Dir.of Social Media and Search, Principal at DRMG

Content today is not your father’s content… Hell, it’s not even the content from 10 years ago. It’s so much more now. So much so, it should be its own country. Curation for us, is part art and part science. At its core, it has as much to do with maintaining and preserving what has been digitally “created”-as it does in making sure that it lasts longer than a cup of coffee. And that’s the challenge.

Loosely defined, the curation of content is a company’s ability to create and then manifest digital assets that drive and maintain at the least, awareness. Content Curation holistically speaking, refers to a person’s or company’s ability to stay in front of the digital curve by managing those assets across the board.

Its role in a content marketing strategy is primary and cannot be downgraded to a perfunctory responsibility. Curation feeds the beast and thus it contributes greatly to a company’s overall digital strategy.

Have you added a curation component to your content marketing mix? If so, are you doing it manually, automatically or somewhere in between?

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