Search Engine Marketing, according to Kevin Lee, is dead. The point is, consumers are seeking and browsing for information driven by desire (2). Consumers are not using just search engines (i.e. Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, etc.) as their main source for seeking information; consumers are searching for specific and highly-targeted consumer-oriented information in other search functions, including Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook (2).

The best way to capture our desired target audience, Lee suggests, is through keywords. Keywords are terms marketers implement and index on their sites that they think people will search for (3). More importantly, keywords describe both content and consumer interest (2). As consumers spend less time on search engines and more time on social networking sites (2), marketers are beginning to grasp a better understanding of their audience and the types of words their consumers like to search for in order to have their brands situated in the appropriate online environment.

Another reason marketers may be thinking about ‘find’ and ‘influence’ marketing is that fact that massive search engines cannot find up to 30% of the sites consumers are searching for, causing a lot of frustration among users when they retrieve an irrelevant website (2). This is thus where the Long Neck enters in, where websites reveal words that people actually search for and use, rather than the industry jargon marketers think they are looking for (2). Thus the most commonly used search terms will direct customers to their desired web page.

So, what is the benefit to all this? The idea is to encourage positive information (and word of mouth!) about your website, company and brand. Thirty per cent of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions when making a major purchase decision, while a mere 10% trust advertisers (3). The consumers that are communicating through these social networks act as brand advocates that can positively influence their friends and family about your company (1). As consumers become informed and trust your company, consumers will positively influence others to seek out information on your website as well.

Source

(1)  Fugetta, Rob. (2010). “Zuberance Data Sheet.”

(2)   Lee, Kevin. (May 28, 2010). “SEM is Dead – Long Live ‘Find’ and ‘Influence’ Marketing.” Retrieved July 21, 2010 from http://www.clickz.com/3640466

(3)  Nowell, David. (2008). “Marketing on the Web.” Nowell Enterprises.

I was just remembering my 9th grade work placement. We were each sent to “work” for a week in a career that interested us, and I went to an architectural firm (yeah, I know it’s pretty far from where I ended up). Our teacher visited each of us over the week and we talked about what we had seen and done. I discovered an electric eraser during my week and was giggling about it. My teacher told me that those were for people who made mistakes, which I didn’t do. I still laugh, thinking about it. Well, even in SEO there are mistakes made.

I can stand up and say that, because even SEOmoz admits that they’ve made mistakes along the way. Here is a list of their top five mistakes, according to a whiteboard Friday video by Rand:

1. Blocking outbound links: At one point Rand had a “tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value.” Eventually other webmasters figured out that he wasn’t linking back to them, which didn’t make him any friends in the SEO world. He did remove this tactic from his site, but did end up doing a lot of work to ingratiate himself into the community again.
2. Buying links for clients: It seemed like a good idea to increase rankings by getting more links, but it turned out that there was never a good way to figure out if those links were helping the clients. Worse, as it turned out, Google wasn’t even counting these links and in some cases it hurt the client’s ability to rank.
3. Ensuring keywords were in the H1 tags: I know Rand was not the only one to recommend this tactic; it was pretty common in the middle part of this decade. It turns out that having your keywords in your H1 tags makes no real difference between having them “in normal text in bigger fonts”.
4. Not using XML sitemaps: The theory was that XML sitemaps can make it hard to find information architecture problems, but they also have a great impact on traffic to your site and site rankings in general.
5. Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer (OSE): OSE is a better reporting system for SEOmoz’s clients, but the original conversion wasn’t done well and it resulted in a huge loss of site traffic. It’s fixed now though.

Although it is fun to look at the mistakes of others and compare notes, it is also provides a few lessons for all of us. First, no one is perfect and the SEO process may take a few detours. We may need that electric eraser from time to time! But the most important thing is to learn from your mistakes, correct them as you go, and be smarter about it with the next project. If you learn something, it’s never a waste of time.

The other day I was using a site and needed to use their search feature. A good search gets you fast, relevant results. What I encountered the other day was not fast and not relevant. I’m persistent, so I tried a second keyword. Still nothing. I clicked away from that site and went elsewhere. We’ve become an audience that doesn’t want to dig around for our information. Gone are the days of searching card catalogs and pestering librarians for our information. We all want it fast and easy.

Businesses need to remember this point. As an article on search solutions by Shaun Ryan points out, “73 percent of visitors will leave an ecommerce site within one to two minutes if they don’t find the products they’re looking for, 36 percent of which won’t ever bother returning to the site.” You don’t want to do a load of work to get customers to your site, and then have 36 percent of them flee forever because your site search was ineffective.

Since there are many options for site search solutions, here are some points from “How To Choose The Right Site Search Solution” to think about:

- Are the results relevant? Google has some of the best relevant search returns on the market, so as a business, you have to strive for similar results. “The best solutions “learn” from visitors’ site search activity by leveraging information about search queries—the keywords used and resulting items that site visitors actually click on.” If your visitors find what they are looking for, they are more likely to stay, purchase, and return.
- Do you have the resources required to run and maintain your site search? Search can require considerable resources. If you don’t have the resources to support your search capabilities efficiently, consider using a search vendor that has a hosted service. Other benefits to hosted search solutions include no installation and training time and no ongoing maintenance.
- Does your site search give you control? Search can be another method of promoting your products, including simple options like how items are positioned within your search results or adding promotional banners to your search pages.
- Can you repurpose data from your search solution? Being able to reuse data can help your business determine key words, narrow down your SEO focus, and even determine which products and services your customers are looking at the most.
- Does your search solution improve over time? Search has changed drastically over the last 2-3 years, and any solution you choose should not remain static either. Be sure that your solution evolves and fits with your unique business requirements.
- Can you measure your site search performance? Analytics can be used to improve your business and your site, so having access to them is key.
Not only can your business improve its site search solution, with customer satisfaction at stake, it should be a focal point on your business improvements list.

Have you ever played the what if game? What if I won the lottery? What if there was a phone that did my laundry? What if we could effectively merge television and the internet? That last what if is a dream that many companies have strived for (and many geeks long for), but Google is making a good stab at it right now.

Although the information about Google TV is pretty new, we do know a few things about it. If you are interested in a basic FAQ relating to the topic, then I suggest reading Greg Sterling’s article “FAQ: What We Know So Far About Google TV”. The biggest questions are what is it and when will we see it? And Sterling answers that concisely with “an open platform that unites TV programming and the internet. It supports Flash and makes the full internet available…on TVs.” The general consensus seems to be that Google TV will be available in the fall of 2010.

Some of the bigger questions for those in the online marketing sector are: will it replace cable TV? and will there be advertising? and will there be tracking like the online sites? Like with any new product, we will have to wait to see how successful it will be. So no one can predict whether or not it will replace cable TV. I know I would bet that Google if planning and hoping that its long-term success will include being a serious contender for cable. However, we do know that there will be advertising and that Google TV include “tracking and data collection, partly for personalization and partly for ad ROI accountability and targeting” although they are also offering an “incognito” option as well.

Knowing that advertising and tracking will be a part of this new initiative for Google means that we are already thinking about search and how this will fit into our marketing methods for online search. As Chris Crum points out, for now we can only focus on a few concerns when preparing for Google TV:

- Optimize your video content, both by making the quality of your video top notch and by ensuring that your videos come up in search results for Google and YouTube.
- Make sure your site looks good on big screen TVs.
- Ensure that your search results are top-notch for Google. “If you thought Google had a great deal of market share before, imagine how many more searches Google would get from the TV set, if this thing really takes off.”
- If you haven’t begun to incorporate Android apps into your marketing plan, now is the time, as Android apps will be accessible through Google TV.

Although most of this is a wait and see game at this point, there are some angles to consider and preparations we can make for Google TV.

Almost every profession and niche market has its own myths. Certainly, not all police officers fill up on donuts and not all kindergarten teachers are covered in glitter glue. The same is true of SEO: there are myths and misunderstandings galore. Stephan Spencer has had his hands full the last little while, writing articles about just these myths with “”36 SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To” and “36 More SEO Myths That Won’t Die But Need To”. Although I would love to talk about all 72 of the myths that Spencer has uncovered, I’m just going to cover a few of them.

So, here are a few SEO myths and the correct information to go with them:

• Having an XML Sitemap will boost your Google rankings. Google uses sitemaps files for discovery and potentially as canonicalization hints, if a site has duplicate content. However, sitemaps do not give a URL a boost on Google rankings.
• Since the advent of personalization, there is no such thing as being ranked #1 anymore because everyone sees different results. Yes, Google does personalize search results based on the user’s search history, but the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are minor. Check for yourself by re-running your query — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing the results.
• SEO is a black art. This one made me actually laugh. Because, I imagined how much more interesting my life would be if it was as Spencer said, “it’s done, usually in a dark room, by some rogue SEO consultant, without requiring the involvement of the client/rest of the company. If SEO were like that, our lives would read like spy novels.” SEO fun, interesting and challenging, but nothing that mysterious, for sure.
• SEO is a one-time activity you complete and are then done with. There would be no need for me to write this blog at all, if that were the case, but many people and companies do believe this one. SEO is ongoing. Website development is ongoing. Your business changes and grows, so your website and SEO tactics should too.
• SEO is a subset of Social Media. Since we talk about social media and other tactics for marketing regularly, I wanted to broach this one. SEO is it’s own animal with its own concerns. While social media can also grow your business and provide linking for SEO purposes , SEO is not a subordinate to social media. They work in tandem.
• It’s either SEO or PPC. This is just not true. Both of these avenues can both be employed in your marketing plan.

There are a lot of myths about who is the best choice for SEO services, from IT departments to a person with one year’s experience to someone overseas in a faceless company. Remember that you get what you pay for and that a comprehensive marketing plan for your company, with experienced and knowledgeable people working with your business to create the best results will yield the most fruit.

Link building can seem like a long process. With a myriad of articles and books on the subject, it can feel like the research alone takes forever, let alone actually going through the process. Some online marketing gurus specialize in just this aspect of the business and they guide us through the process and provide much-needed shortcuts. Garrett French, who wrote the article “How to Build Links Faster: 5 Tips for Faster Link Qualification”, is one of those gurus.

French’s 5 suggested tips for faster link qualification are as follows:

1. Align link prospecting methods with linkable assets: your linkable assets need to line up with your link prospecting methods, so that they are pre-qualified as link prospects. Doing this will shortening the time it takes to decide whether or not to add them to what French calls your “outreach list”.
2. Check the tool-based URL quality scores: there are link prospect sources, such as Linkscape and MajesticSEO, which provide a scoring method that estimates the value or trust that given pages have earned. This information allows you to weed through your prospects and focus on the ones that give the best returns. French recommends saving it all though, as “today’s trash could be tomorrow’s treasure when you create and launch new linkable assets!”
3. Count URL, hostname occurrences in SERPs and competitor backlinks: “The number of times a URL and/or hostname appears can be a vital signal of quality. If you’re using queries for your link prospecting, we highly recommend running them through the URL and Hostname Counter Tool and the process outlined in Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities. If you use link building queries in place of your targeted SEO keywords, you will more-quickly discover larger numbers of qualified prospects.” The key to this approach is focusing on a single linkable asset and working through each one. This is not a time for multi-tasking.
4. Remove duplicate hostname occurrences from big lists: use the “Remove URLs with Duplicate Hosts” tool to ensure a concise list of hostnames. This way you will get the top URLs from each website, rather than an overload of the same URLs over and over again. Think of this as your big weeding out stage.
5. Make quicker visits to each URL for final decision making: the first steps have been about removing the excess and getting a list of quality URLs. Now the tedious part of qualifying each URL by hand comes in. There are a few steps that can make it faster, including disabling the imaged in your browses, using something like the “URL Reviewer” to open a list of URLs in new tabs in your browser, and then running through them individually.

Once you’ve built your list of links, remember to also make a list of prospects that you don’t want, so you can avoid those URLs in the future. Link building is still not an instant process, but following these tips will help streamline it and make it a little less overwhelming.

No matter what your product or service, you have to remember your audience and focus on their needs first. If you are marketing to an audience of 10 year old American girls, you will need to have a completely different approach (from language to usage to packaging) than if you are marketing your products to 45 year old Australian men. This is true of print and television marketing, so we need to keep in mind that when promoting social marketing not every group will find the same features and functions appealing.

This is exactly the case with social media in Europe. Although on this side of the pond, we North Americans tend to think that our way of approaching and using social media is the only way it is done, those who create the programs we use for it need to be aware that Europeans do it a bit differently. Bas van den Beld writes about just this issue in his article “How Europeans Engage With Social Media”.

Although Europeans are online and do use social media, they “are using social media in very practical way, they are looking for news updates, to do research before shopping or for their jobs, and to find “how-tos.” The actual “social element”—staying in touch with friends online—is only the third most popular activity (behind search and email) when looking at what Europeans are doing online.” And although Europeans do use sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn, they have a definite preference for locally grown social media applications.

And, broken down country by country, Europeans have different tastes and needs for their online experiences. While the UK, Russia, and Spain are the most active in the social media scene, Italy uses social media for education purposes, and both the UK and Germany use it mostly for research. Germany and France are the least active social media users in Europe.

Bas van den Beld points out that when attempting to make inroads into European markets, social media creators need to keep the following points in mind:
- Europeans like to research, so make sure they can find that information they are looking for, and use searching to funnel traffic to your social media efforts.
- It might initially be difficult to get Europeans to share, but if you get them involved they will.
- Create social applications that provide a benefit and be there with a purpose; Europeans want to see a reason for committing their time.
- Give Europeans relevant news and information.
- Europeans like to see European initiatives, so try sponsoring local efforts.
- And finally, don’t think every European is the same—we’re all different and you need to satisfy our different needs to be successful.

It’s tempting to think of mobility devices as just smaller versions of your desktop or laptop computers. You can access your email and the internet from them, so wouldn’t the SEO rules remain the same for mobility devices? This is definitely not the case, and there are a plethora of articles and advice out there on how to focus your SEO efforts specifically for mobility. Cindy Krum has written an article, “New Mobile SEO: What You Need to Know”, that gives some great tips.

Krum points out that at this point in time, mobile search engines place a heavy weight on bounce rate and she advises that “The best thing you can do to improve your mobile SEO is to ensure that the mobile crawlers and user agents determine that your content will render well and load quickly on any mobile phone.”

Basic Site Architecture – Basic SEO practices when it comes to site architecture will not steer you wrong in mobility either. Make sure your tagging is done correctly for your site, then create another style sheet for mobile devices, and call it handheld.css. “This will allow you to format your existing pages for viewing on a mobile phone without having to create separate mobile content.” Use this style sheet to block things from being rendered by using a display:none attribute to the style sheet.

iPhones are a bit of a different matter, although they can see traditional web pages, mobile pages are preferred by many iPhone users, so making another style sheet named iPhone.css covers that issue too. Be sure to include a mobile site map and link it in your robots.txt file.

Advanced Site Architecture – Sometimes your regular site will not be suitable for mobile browsing, including “Sites [that] don’t use external style sheets, have a large file size, sloppy code or lots of multi-media content that could have trouble rendering on mobile phones”. For some of these sites, the best option is to create mobile specific content on a mobile subdomain or subdirectory. If this is the case, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Move top navigation to the bottom of the page
- Jump links at the top of the page can be handy to have, especially for contact information
- Minimize the scrolling for handheld devices
- Work on linking your mobile site and your main, traditional site to each other

Mobile Platforms and Software – “Most mobile platforms simply take the existing content on your traditional page and remove all complex code and media, leaving simply text and a minimal amount of images.” Although taking this step seems like it would save time and energy, there are a couple problems you should note.
- Your content could be included as a subdomain of the platform’s name, rather than as a part of your own domain
- Often the file names these programs create are not optimized, so all of the SEO value from your site architecture and links may be lost

As you delve into the world of mobile SEO, remember that mobility does bring new challenges and is growing and changing rapidly, so keeping on top of the newest developments is key.

By now, you know that I love when challenging a preconceived notion or showing that a tool can be used for more than you might think on first glance. Those ah ha moments tickle me, so I am hoping that you’ll have one of those moments today as I explain the newest features on LinkedIn.

Normally, LinkedIn is seen as a business and networking tool, often a way to get a job or pass your resume around. It certainly doesn’t have the social networking reputation that Twitter and Facebook have developed. But with changes to the site itself, the high-income demographic that uses this site, and some entrepreneurs coming forward to prove that it does drive significant traffic to their blogs, there is now evidence to show that LinkedIn can, in the words of Chris Crum, “bring a different brand of relevance to the table.”

Here are some of the newest changes to LinkedIn:

- Users have the ability to control who sees what they are sharing, either by individual, groups, or connections.
- Facebook has proven that images and article excerpts increase traffic to a linked site or discussion, and LinkedIn now has this capability too. According to LinkedIn, “The chances of someone clicking through your shared article are greater when you’ve images and brief excerpts pulled from the news article or blog post.” Plus, you can customize it completely.
- Users can now see, edit, and delete their status updates.
- Re-sharing content has become pretty common on social sites, and Twitter even has a term for it: retweeting. LinkedIn now allows its users to share content with the click of a button. This is a perfect tool for “making content go viral”.
- Off-site sharing has been improved, so that content sites can “offer a similar sharing process for LinkedIn to its own internal re-share feature”. You can share directly to LinkedIn when you find something that intrigues you from a popular news site or a great blog post.
- LinkedIn has implemented a URL shortener (Lnkd.in).
- When posting an article, users now give credit to the source they got it from by employing a “via-style” credit.

- Keeping your profile in the eye of an audience who will help drive traffic to your business is important. Now, when you choose to make shared items

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.