I’ve been thinking about the limits of media when I was a child and in my teens. We had television (and not 500 cable channels), movies, and then print. It still left a fair number of options, but nothing compared to the world we live in today. Would it date me to say that the general populace didn’t even begin to talk about the internet until I was in university?

As SEO professionals, it doesn’t hurt us to remember that some of the lessons from the pre-internet era are still valuable today. Studying the media itself and how it works is still worthy of our attention today, just as it was in 1964 when Mashall McLuhen coined the phrase “The media is the message”. It even applies to link building methods, including content writing, asking webmasters to link to your site, and linkbait.

Content writing is all about attracting readers and links to your site through simple, clear content. In order to take full advantage of this kind of marketing, “make sure that your content is easily readable and absorbable (and linkable)”. If you manage to do this, you’ll attract inbound links.

While acquiring links through good content writing is a passive activity (you are passively seeking links with your content), there are more active ways to pursue links, like asking webmasters to link to your content. This asking can take many forms, including “You ask, you beg, you might whine or offer a form of compensation.” This is a trickier method, because each webmaster has different preferences of communication and each niche market will require different language both for the content you want linked and for dealing with the webmaster you want to have do the linking. “You also have to choose and use, proven methods for approaching webmasters and alerting them to your content.”

Linkbait is a combination of active and passive methods of link building, and it has the advantage of being creative. You can use anything from videos to content pieces to whatever you dream up as linkbait, allowing your company to rely on its biggest strengths. As Julie Joyce says, “Linkbaiting is both passive and active. In producing linkbait in your desired form, you could just let it sit there and wait for the links to roll in, which is passive, but in order to really succeed, you have to take an active approach and do the asking/begging/pleading bits.” Social media can help to make your linkbait more visible too, but will be much more successful in a social media arena where you or your company are active members.

So the next time you are thinking about link building, consider the media you are using, the effort you intend to invest, and the outcome that can follow from each possibility before putting together your own link building toolkit.

As you are growing and developing your business, often you’ll only be thinking about one or two steps down the road, even if your five or ten year plan is much more complex than that. When planning your content management system, you can save yourself, your company, and your employees a lot of hassles and headaches if you approach your plans with best practices in mind for international expansion.

Andy Atkins-Krüger covers this topic in his article “My Dream International Content Management System”. I’m going to talk a little bit about these three topics in his article:

- World character sets,
- Managing content across local domains, and
- Translation and SEO workflow.

When it comes to world character sets, remember that there are a wide variety of characters and accents not used in the English language. Instead of getting a translation that gives a question mark or a box in the middle of a word – which is at the very least distracting and also has the potential to cause huge problems with your clients’ ability to understand your content – you want your content to be seamless, no matter what language you are using. Atkins-Krüger recommends using unicode or UTF8 for your online character coding. If you start with this standard, there will be no need to backfit or work out other solutions in the future.

With international expansion comes the issue of managing your content across local domains. Sometimes your company will be able to do this from one main location, but in that case, your resources will need to be shared from site to site. The key to success according to Atkins-Krüger is that “You also want to be able to manage the internal linking of the sites from that single interface and to manage the geo-selection tool which links one domain to all others on one single URL linked to from all pages.”

Of the three topics related to international CMS that we are talking about today, translation and SEO workflow can be the most difficult to navigate. In some cases, your company may need to rethink your online organizational strategy when going into different markets. “The best way to do this is to link it to a keyword map of all pages, so you know what needs to be targeted where and to link those keywords to glossaries to be used by the translators that support your SEO initiatives.” according to Atkins-Krüger’s article. It’s most important to note though that making web pages accessible for clients in other languages does not start and end with translation. Content may need to be different for a new market and your keywords may need to be refined, which can result in a slightly different SEO strategy.

International expansion can be a big project for your company, but if you incorporate some of these ideas into your original content management system, your company can come out ahead of the game when the time comes.

It’s true that when most of us search for something online, be it through Google, Yahoo or Bing, we’ll investigate the top few search results, start our search over again with new keywords, and abandon it from there. Since becoming involved in SEO, I admit I have become the rare person who will look onto page two or three if it is something I am interested in and the search results of the first page don’t satisfy me. And I am persistent, so I will try different keywords repeatedly. However, I am the minority.
The race for top internet rankings is a fierce one, and one that garners a lot of attention in SEO circles. Many different theories have been tested. Some of them get short term results, which may last or not. Some get long term results. Still others get no discernable results. With that in mind, might I suggest going back to the tried and true with organic search. If it works (and it does), then perhaps it is wise to use the simplest and most reliable methods to ensure your company is on the top of your client’s search results.

An article by the title of “Organic Search Still Reigns” confirms the importance of organic search. The article compares the results of Google, Yahoo and Bing and discovers that organic search results still get the top rankings “across the big three search engines, with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search”. With numbers like these, it is no wonder that organic search and search optimization efforts remain on the top of the lists of recommendations from online marketing experts.

Instead of spending time, money, and effort on complex marketing strategies or paid advertisements, it is much more cost effective to go back to simple search engine optimization tactics. And this common sense tactic is being used by professional marketers who “recognize the importance of investment in search optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits. The Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) found that search optimization was the third priority of senior marketers worldwide, after social networking and improving digital infrastructure.”

In spite of my own extensive browsing of search engine results, the numbers clearly show that your clients are most likely to not go beyond that first page, so this is a case where instead of marching to your own drummer your seo company should follow current online marketing trends. It’s hard to argue with the solid results achieved by organic search.

Late last week women on Facebook began posting their bra colours. The aim of the game was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer. And, indeed, the creator of the Facebook group called What’s Your Bra Color??? promised to donate $500 to Susan G. Komen’s foundation for the Cure if that group had more than 1,000 members by this past Monday. The casual campaign to post bra colours has garnered media attention and netted the What’s Your Bra Color??? Facebook group 4,500 members.

Some critics claim that the meme is only a pointless flirtation device, aimed at teasing men. Others claim that we are all already aware of breast cancer. While still others, including Susan G. Komen, praise the action, saying anything that gets people talking about and thinking about breast cancer is a boon. And it did get attention! The fact that the colours have vanished from Facebook statuses, but there is still talk about whether it worked or not is proof that it got people talking.

Regardless of your stance on this particular rash of Facebook posts, the deeper awareness for SEO and internet marketing gurus is a reminder of the deep reach that social media now employs in our society. If a post about bra colour has received this kind of attention, both on Facebook and from the media at large, it is worth talking about social media as a tool for attention for your business.

We’ve talked about the importance of social media within your marketing campaign before, but it bears repeating with this kind of example of its potential impact at our feet.

One big aspect of social media is that it is a new spin on the old adage about word-of-mouth being the best sales tool out there. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the electronic versions of word-of-mouth. Although there is some time and energy taken in setting up and maintaining accounts, when your business takes off in these electronic spaces the word-of-mouth rule begins to apply. The bra colour campaign is a perfect example of how well a focused, fun idea can capture the attention of a social media group, sell that idea, then result in action. It’s a perfect business marketing model. The next time a business tells me that they are hesitant to employ social media in their marketing plans, I am definitely going to use this example to show them that social media can get people talking about your business and products.

Now, I have to go and find an old picture to post, pick up the closest book and pick a sentence to post in my status, and make sure my settings are set properly. Social media really is all what you make of it!

As someone with a vested interest in SEO tactics, I’m always interested in what the official word is from the biggest players on the scene. Namely, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo. Every so often their officials put information out there that especially catches my attention.

I like the way linking works. It fascinates me that linking can help to build your ranking on Google. As much as I try to wrap my brain around it, there is always another caveat and always something new to learn about this technique. It’s a little like editing the English language: just when you think you have all of the exceptions and rules figured out, something else crops up to dig into and to consider. Basically, I like it because I learn something new all the time and there is always a curve ball somewhere. Not everyone finds these sorts of things entertaining, but suffice it to say that those of us who do are incredibly entertained by Google and linking.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google, answering the question: “Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?”

Chris Crum covers this video in his article “How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter”, and he and Matt both basically tell us that Facebook and Twitter links are ranked the same way as every other link out there. Matt Cutts goes so far as to pointedly say that Google’s search criteria does not discriminate based on platform. A link is a link is a link in the world of Google searches.

This claim does have a bit of a caveat to it (it’s those exceptions that tickle me so much) in that Facebook pages can have private settings. When a Facebook page is not public, Google cannot crawl it or rank it. And most links on Twitter are nofollowed anyway, which changes their interaction with Google.

So, if you thought that a .ed or a .gov website would carry more weight in the rankings, you’ve now been reassured straight our of the mouths of Goggle that their search techniques just don’t work that way.

Now that the presents are opened and the left-over turkey is being made into sandwiches, we’re all slowly moving on to preparations for the New Year. Although resolutions are sometimes done alone, they can be done on a bigger level. In our family, we often take time to talk about what we would like to do and see in the coming year as a family.

It makes sense to think about making resolutions – a pretty fancy word for plans – for your business too. If your business is a small one, a breakfast meeting with some brainstorming and then making a few concrete plans may do the job. Bigger businesses will require input from different groups across the company and several meetings, but the end result of these resolution meetings is the same: brainstorming and planning. Regardless of the size of your company and scope of your SEO resolution project, the beginning of a new year provides an opportunity to figure out what worked in the past, what needs improvement, and what new projects ought to be tackled now.

Duane Forrester focused on resolutions in his article “6 New Years Resolutions for In-House SEMs”. He suggests starting with these steps:

- Hold an internal SEO summit: from a small breakfast meeting to a catered day or two with several speakers, this is the opportunity to talk about different aspects of your online strategy, uncovering the positive and negative attempts of the past year, and proposing projects for the new year. You never know where the best suggestions will come from, so keep an open mind when issuing invitations to this meeting.
- Get Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml docs in place: your business wants to let engine crawlers know how to interact with your site and how to access your freshest content, which is what robots.txt and sitemap.xml docs do. If your company has these documents on your website, be sure to update them. If they are not on your website, now is the time to get them up.
- Open and use Webmaster accounts: Bing, Yahoo, and Google offer contact with their search engines through dedicated Webmaster accounts. As Forrester explains, ”These accounts provide a wide range of services from alerting the engines to updates on your site to feedback directly from the engines themselves around how they are interacting with your website.”
- Establish the ROI on SEO investment: determining your ROI (return on investment) for your SEO strategy is not a straight calculation. Figure out what has been done, what increases your business has see through your web presence, and go from there.
- Integrate SEO and Social Media efforts: link building is a complex effort, which is propelled forward with your social media endeavors, so don’t leave social media out of your resolutions.
- Schedule and hold a senior executive-level SEO review: be sure to get your company executives on board, as they will help you move your SEO strategy across different levels of the company effectively.

Recently I was talking with a group of friends about hiring professionals and trusting their services. We were talking specifically about medicine. All of us have young children and medicine is high on our list of concerns when it comes to our children. Some parents choose to by-pass traditional medicine entirely, choosing instead to use alternatives like homeopathy. There are others who have researched every issue they can and then make decisions and dictate them to their health care providers. Others take care to choose a doctor who has similar views and practices and then trust them to provide quality care.

Personally, I am somewhere between researching and making my own decisions and letting my doctor decide, because it is her job to do that research. Luckily, I have a doctor who I trust and who I know does do research. Plus, she has young children too, so these issues concern her family as well.

There is nothing wrong with deciding to go with alternative medicine or to do all your own research, other than that this approach is time consuming and may not get you the same results. You may not want the same results.

I was thinking about SEO in the same way. A person or business can choose to do something else. There are other ways to build your website. Will they get you to the same place? Unlikely, but those who choose to go this route aren’t likely to be aiming for the same effect either. It’s not less valid, just a different path.

There are the do-it-yourselfers in the crowd too. This group is a vast one and they vary from people who just program simple HTML websites with little care for their rankings to those who want to save a little money to those who don’t even know that professionals exist in this field. The majority of this crowd does care though, and there are now a pile of books devoted to SEO strategies. Chris Sherman has a great overview of the most recent releases in his article “A Roundup of 2009’s Best SEO Books”. Chris lists 5 books on the subject, with 3 others as his old standby group, but undoubtedly if you browse Amazon or go to a large bookstore there will be several dozen to choose from. With time and effort, you can get to the point where you can implement an effective SEO strategy for your own website.

I am not one to back away from education in any form, but I still ask myself one question when I think about doing this: why? Why invest this time and effort into doing all of this yourself? SEO experts spend their days and weeks keeping up with the trends and educating themselves in everything from social media to SEO to new internet developments that may or may not change the landscape of rankings. If you hire a professional to get the job done, you will get a professional job.

A lot of people and businesses assume that the internet is a place where youth and business professionals work, promote themselves, and play. I have a hard time myself envisioning my 86 year old grandmother exploring the vast expanses of the internet, so if your business hasn’t taken seniors into account, then know you are not alone.

Interesting studies and conversations are cropping up all the time proving that seniors are not only using computers, but are a significant portion of the online presence. Mike Sachoff discusses the presence of seniors online and breaks down where they are going online and what they are doing. In his article, he presents a detailed table breaking down the activities of seniors online:

Even better, he has a list of the top websites they use:

Two of the biggest contributors to SEO and social media rank in the top 3 of this list: Facebook and Google. Ah…now there’s the connection we were looking for in the SEO field! Since seniors have increased their web presence to 17.5 million people over the last five years, according to Nielson, and are now spending 58 hours a month online in 2009 (increased from 52 hours a month in 2004), then they are indeed a demographic to be reckoned with when mapping out your online marketing strategies.

More importantly, it seems that seniors are doing the same things online as other demographics: getting information, visiting blogs, planning travel, and socializing. Only they have more free time available to them than those of us who are in the middle of our careers and raising kids. What will make you think even more are statistics that indicate 8.2% of all social networking and blog visitors fall into the seniors category, which is only 0.1 percent lower than the number of teenagers visiting the same kinds of sites. We know that marketing is aimed heavily at teenagers, so considering that seniors make up almost the same numbers for social networking sites, perhaps our businesses need to consider them too.

Although seniors will likely find most businesses through their general SEO strategies, it is worth noting that a different age group may search under different key words and key word phrases than their younger counterparts, so planning your SEO key words and phrases to reflect a wider audience is important. After all, while my 86 year old grandmother may have more time to spend online, I’d bet that if she doesn’t find your company at the top of her Google search, then she is unlikely to dig any further and your business may lose out to others who have tailored their SEO strategy to include this demographic.

When was the last time you used your phone book, either white or yellow pages™, to find information? What about Google or another search engine? If we are living parallel lives, you may have used the yellow or white pages™ of your phone book once or twice in the last year, but you use online search features either several times a week or as much as several times a day.

Lately, I have been searching for certain local businesses and activities related to my family. I’ve never looked in the phonebook for them, but my online searches don’t always yield what I thought I would find either. It’s frustrating to know or suspect that a service is out there, but be unable to find it online.

Local search factors and what Chris Crum calls competing for visibility in his article on local search factors should drive a portion of your SEO strategy. While we know that the marketplace is now global and we all want our businesses to apply to that global marketplace, keep in mind that you want local business to be able to find your business too. After all, if they can’t find you, then your potential clients are more likely to go with a competitor or give up the idea of using your business entirely rather than go digging around online for hours.

Here are a few of Crum’s suggestions for your local search marketing:

- Ensure that Google knows that your business is listed at your correct address.
- Confirm that Google knows what your business does.
- Consider the mapping variables used, such as the size of the map and the definition of the region’s center, and combine them with trust, a citation, and other factors when planning out your marketing strategy.

When developing SEO tactics for your local search, remember that there is more than one way to develop a strong local presence on the internet.

- Have your address listed with major data providers.
- Claim your listing at the local business center.
- Reviews on Google or in other locations are helpful.
- Be sure that your business is listed in the proper categories once it has been claim.
- Get local people and businesses to link to your website and content.
- Develop localized content.

When developing your SEO marketing plan, be sure that your SEO professionals consider your local search as an important factor in your marketing agenda. Effective SEO includes plans for anyone who wants to find your business, near and far, so be sure that the statistically applicable keywords, links to social networking, and relevancy of your online presence all work in your favor for SEO purposes.

The truth of the matter for businesses is that the only thing worse than not being accessible online is being there and no one finding you anyway

Coming from the yellow page industry, I have a background in call tracking. Back in the day, we used a unique phone number in every ad so at the end of each month, we were able to tell how many phone calls we received from a specific directory.  In some cases, the number of phone calls our clients received in major cities was astronomical, however, many of the calls came from  job seekers and tire kickers. There was still a lot of mystery in the research.

At the time, we thought this was ground breaking stuff. But fast forward to today and enter the internet marketing business and similar techniques seem almost medieval.

Today, with Google analytics, you can track almost anything your heart desires right down to keyword that resulted in a sale. Still, for an SEO company we need to provide as much ammunition as possible to make more money for our clients.

ClearResults is a call tracking company that provides call tracking solutions that:

* Identify what media is getting you results and eliminate those that are not.
* Increase your phone inquiry/close ratio
* Identify peak & low volume calling patterns.
* Calls can be recorded for later review.
* Web based real time reports available 24/7.

The call tracking system generates phone numbers dynamically, producing a different phone number if a visitor comes from Yahoo, Bing, Google or any other referrer. The system is called Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI).

In its simplest form, you can track a visitor down to the keyword phrase that they typed in to a given search engine or referrer when they called the dynamically generated phone number on your website. Powerful information for any SEO company to provide for their clients, especially in these days of data driven marketing.