SEO & internet marketing

March 10, 2010

11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization

Filed under: SEO articles — Tags: delicious, firefox, inevitable, media, online-marketing, optimization, search, search-engine, search-engines, seo, social, social-media, tools — admin @ 4:28 pm

Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.

The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

/a> – Social visibility score
/a> – Profile building tool
/a> – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
/a> – Find competitor organic search rankings
/a> – Keyword demand trends
/a> – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
/a> – Historical back-link tracking
/a> – Social media monitoring
/a> – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
/a> – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
/a> – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics

What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?

img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/7c44b0e7e2us-big.png.png” alt=”Save to del.icio.us” />
img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/8b5c3d76e9le-big.png.png” alt=”StumbleUpon” />
img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/85e8a3948ark-big.png.png” alt=”Google” />
img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/95cf85f1c8k-icon.gif.gif” alt=”Facebook” />
img src=”http://24c.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/5d14d05fb0witter.png.png” alt=”Twitter” />

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March 9, 2010

Ford’s Focus on Social Media: Scott Monty Interview

Filed under: SEO articles — Tags: facebook, fiesta, ford, henry-ford, history, interview, marketing, monty, online-marketing, pepsi, scott-monty, social — admin @ 7:04 pm

img class=”alignright” title=”Scott Monty” src=”http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4038/4419453587_aac01e166b_m.jpg” alt=”Scott Monty” hspace=”5″ width=”240″ height=”180″ /> When you think of successful consumer brands in the social media space, names like Dell, Zappos and Pepsi come to mind. Another is Ford. Last year the /a> generated tremendous amount of awareness (and pre-orders) for a vehicle that wasn’t available to the public yet. At the same time, it inspired a community to engage, create content and continue discussions about the Fiesta with over 7 million video views.

While in Dearborn, Ford’s Head of Social Media, /a>, extended to me an invitation to The Henry Ford Museum, The Rouge Factory and a visit to Ford’s World Headquarters where we did a short interview. In this interview, Scott talks about the place for social media with Ford’s new product lines, local social media work with /a> of the Fiesta movement and advice for companies on empowering communities.

Being able to take a learn about the history of this 100+ year old company through experiences at The Henry Ford and Rouge factory tours was very informative. Then being able to sit down with Bob Kreipke, Ford’s full time historian and hear stories about Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, company history and evolution was priceless.

Fast forward over 100 years and Ford is a very different company, as is the automotive industry. It’s not enough to be innovative but to be able to actually connect with customers in more meaningful ways. Based on my discussions with Scott, Ford is very committed to making those connections. Watch the interview below to get more insight on how Ford is approaching social media:

em>Click here to view the embedded video.

By leveraging technology and the social web, Ford is moving from being known from a truck and Mustang company to a car, utility and truck company. I think the decision to focus on local social media marketing is great evidence of understanding audience in a social strategy. So much of what companies are doing in the social space is more like a shotgun approach based on popular applications vs focusing on where actual customers spend their time.

Check out the /a>, a great example of a corporate social media aggregator not only of Ford social web participation, but of what others are saying about their brands. I can’t imaging any active brand online not launching a site like this.

What are some great examples of consumer brands you think we should focus on in future posts? What kind of insights would you like to learn more of from those kinds of companies when it comes to the social web?

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March 8, 2010

Poll: Best Royalty Free Stock Photo Sites for Bloggers

Filed under: SEO articles — Tags: excellent, flickr, online-marketing, poll-embedded, royalty free photos, royalty-free, stock photos, stock-photo, suggested-via, twitter — admin @ 4:54 pm

As with many bloggers, we’ve been using royalty free images for many years. Many bloggers make use of images from Flickr and we have too but you can’t always find the right image there. I’ve even made a point to take more photos of people, places and things while traveling for later use in blog posts like the one to the right.

The stock photo site we’ve been using for several years recently decided to essentially double their prices (no matter how they spin it, that’s what they did) and it prompted me to ask the excellent people I’m connected with on Twitter for their suggestions on royalty free photography and image web sites. Here is a collection of 9 such sites that were suggested via Twitter or researched by TopRank. Which leads us to our poll for the most “blogger friendly” royalty free stock photo site:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

For a list of over 100 free stock photo sites, /a>.

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March 5, 2010

How to Deal With SEO Resource Constraints

Filed under: SEO news — Tags: companies, companies-large, intangibles, internet marketing, opportunities, organization, seo, spend-the-down, yahoo — admin @ 8:02 pm

I’ve been at companies large and small, fat and lean. Whether the company is two people trying to build a business out of their home, or 10K+ employees at companies like PayPal and Yahoo, no matter what the size of the company, there are always going to be resource constraints.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person you’ll see constantly asking about project statuses and bubbling it up. But in the meantime, you’ll need to find out how you can deal with those resource constraints, while still remaining productive and not failing at your job.

Internal partnerships

Internal partnerships are always a big part of /a>. It is such a holistic process that you need to get everyone on your side when you’re /a>. Just like selling the company on why it is important, you need to sell to individual teams how they are important to the holistic process.

List out all the partners that you need to make in the organization: PR/Marketing communications and how to leverage PR, Biz Dev and how they structure partnerships, engineering and how they architect the site, and the list goes on and on. Spend the down time to build and solidify those relationships and go on coffee/lunch breaks, plan happy hours, and do other intangibles that will help win people over and get things moving in the right direction.

External partnerships & business development

Sales efforts, creating partnerships, and finding business development opportunities is so important within SEO. It’s crucial to make deals with others in areas like link building and content distribution. Take a step back and look at the opportunities out there and the companies that you can parter with. Find the in’s, ask yourself “what they are lacking?”, and find a way to make it mutually beneficial for both organizations.

/a>

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Internal partnerships

External partnerships & business development

/a>

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Read the original here:
/a>

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Solving Website Indexing Problems

Filed under: SEO news — Tags: data, efforts, figure-out-how, internet marketing, larger-the-site, note-the-number, number, tools, webmaster-tools — admin @ 8:01 pm

Crawling and indexing issues can really put a damper on your efforts to rank well for a variety of competitive and non-competitive terms. Solving indexing issues is definitely an important step towards increasing your keyword ranking footprint. And, the more real estate you own by solving those issues, means you’re taking the next steps in realizing your long-tail efforts.

Before I start with a problem site, I take a few measurements. Whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, you need to figure out where you’re starting from to make sure you’re helping and not hurting your efforts. I start by pulling a variety of data:

Note the number of submitted and indexed pages from Google Webmaster Central. Generally, you need to submit a sitemap to get this data, and if you’re having indexing problems, this can really help. That being said, I don’t always submit an XML sitemap to Google. There are times to do it, and times to not worry about it. If I haven’t submitted a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, I do a site:domain.com query in Google and look at the number of pages listed initially. By paging through all of the results of the site: query, you’ll see that number reduce as you get to the “end.” This is the true number of pages Google has in the index showing as query results.
Run an SEMRush report to measure how many organic top-20 rankings I have.
Use a crawling program to pull a realistic page list from my site. Once I have this list I move through and eliminate any pages I don’t want in the index and figure out how I have or should have eliminated them, either by no index tags, roboots.txt exclusion, or parameter exclusion in Webmaster Tools (see more about parameter exclusion below).

NOTE: If my number of indexed pages matches my total page count pretty closely, I’m not really looking at a problem. The reality is – the larger the site, the more problems I generally find.

/a>

img src=”http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/share_save_171_16.png” width=”171″ height=”16″ alt=”Share/Bookmark” />

Note the number of submitted and indexed pages from Google Webmaster Central. Generally, you need to submit a sitemap to get this data, and if you’re having indexing problems, this can really help. That being said, I don’t always submit an XML sitemap to Google. There are times to do it, and times to not worry about it. If I haven’t submitted a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, I do a site:domain.com query in Google and look at the number of pages listed initially. By paging through all of the results of the site: query, you’ll see that number reduce as you get to the “end.” This is the true number of pages Google has in the index showing as query results.
Run an SEMRush report to measure how many organic top-20 rankings I have.
Use a crawling program to pull a realistic page list from my site. Once I have this list I move through and eliminate any pages I don’t want in the index and figure out how I have or should have eliminated them, either by no index tags, roboots.txt exclusion, or parameter exclusion in Webmaster Tools (see more about parameter exclusion below).

NOTE: If my number of indexed pages matches my total page count pretty closely, I’m not really looking at a problem. The reality is – the larger the site, the more problems I generally find.

/a>

img src=”http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/share_save_171_16.png” width=”171″ height=”16″ alt=”Share/Bookmark”/>
More here:
/a>

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Bing & Yahoo Soon To Support Canonical Tag

Filed under: SEO news — Tags: april-arnab, bhattacharjee, engines-united, internet marketing, parthasarathy, process, search, search-engines, seo, since-the-three, supporting-rel, told-attendees, yahoo — admin @ 8:00 pm

More than a year since the three major search engines united to /a>, neither Bing nor Yahoo formally support it. But that could be changing soon.

Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at /a> on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy told attendees that canonical tag support should be in place by the end of March or early April. Arnab Bhattacharjee of Yahoo said they’re currently rolling out support of the tag, but cautioned that Yahoo will only use it “as a hint” regarding a web page’s original/primary URL.

/a>

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More than a year since the three major search engines united to /a>, neither Bing nor Yahoo formally support it. But that could be changing soon.

Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at /a> on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

/a>

img src=”http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/share_save_171_16.png” width=”171″ height=”16″ alt=”Share/Bookmark”/>
Follow this link:
/a>

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SMX West 2010 Keynote – The State Of The Search Union

Filed under: SEO news — Tags: analytics, avinash-kaushik, chris-sherman, director, marketing, microsoft, president, saying-at-once, search, search-engine — admin @ 7:59 pm

It’s day three of SMX West 2010, and we’re going to kick off with a group keynote conversation called “The State Of The Search Union.” The description hints that we’ll be talking about where the industry is today, and where it’s going in the future. No doubt the Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be a big discussion item.

Chris Sherman will moderate, and scheduled speakers include:

Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google Inc.
Misty Locke, President, Range Online Media & Chief Strategy Officer, iProspect, Range Online Media / iProspect
David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc.

It’s all set to start at 9:00 am, so come back then to follow-along with what’s being said (or at least to watch me fumble desperately as I try to keep up with what five people are saying at once).

CS: We’ve had an interesting year in search. Quite often, it’s just Google, Google, Google. But in the past year, we’ve seen more radical change than I’ve seen in the past 15 years of following the search industry. It’s very exciting. And that’s why we’ve assembled this panel.

The key question, when we were here last year, we were in the early stages of an economic meltdown. One year later, how are we doing? Does search still have a bright future?

/a>

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Chris Sherman will moderate, and scheduled speakers include:

Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google Inc.
Misty Locke, President, Range Online Media & Chief Strategy Officer, iProspect, Range Online Media / iProspect
David Roth, Director of Search Engine Marketing, Yahoo! Inc.

The key question, when we were here last year, we were in the early stages of an economic meltdown. One year later, how are we doing? Does search still have a bright future?

/a>

img src=”http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/share_save_171_16.png” width=”171″ height=”16″ alt=”Share/Bookmark”/>
See more here:
/a>

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Blind To Real-Time Results In Search

Filed under: SEO news — Tags: conducted-last, consumers, differences, internet marketing, marketing-firm, participants, real, real-time-data, seo, study — admin @ 7:57 pm

Online marketing firm OneUpWeb recently /a> an eye-tracking study about the impact of integrating real-time data into search results. The study involved 44 people divided into two groups: “consumers” and “information foragers.” The difference between the groups involved the tasks they were given:

The first group was told to search for a product they might buy, and were called the “consumer” group. The second group was told to simply look for information on a product, and were called the “forager” group.

The study, conducted last month, sought to answer the following questions:

Does the average internet user recognize and understand real-time results?
Are consumers finding and clicking on real-time results?
And simply, the bird’s eye view: what are the consumers saying about real-time results?

At the highest level the results showed the following:

73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study
Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers
The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results

Here’s the age distribution of the 44 participants:

Below are screens showing the differences in the eye movements of the two groups.

/a>

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The first group was told to search for a product they might buy, and were called the “consumer” group. The second group was told to simply look for information on a product, and were called the “forager” group.

The study, conducted last month, sought to answer the following questions:

Does the average internet user recognize and understand real-time results?
Are consumers finding and clicking on real-time results?
And simply, the bird’s eye view: what are the consumers saying about real-time results?

At the highest level the results showed the following:

73% had never heard of real-time results before participating this study
Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers
The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results

Here’s the age distribution of the 44 participants:

Below are screens showing the differences in the eye movements of the two groups.

/a>

img src=”http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/share_save_171_16.png” width=”171″ height=”16″ alt=”Share/Bookmark”/>
Read more:
/a>

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SMX West 2010 Day Three Coverage

Filed under: SEO news — Tags: analytics, bruce, conversion, internet marketing, presentation, search, search-engine, seo, smx, social-media — admin @ 7:56 pm

Day three of /a> is in the books, and that wraps up the main conference portion this year’s event. (There are in-depth training sessions on Friday.) We /a>, and a variety of bloggers and webmasters covered the rest of the day’s sessions and news. Here’s a recap of the SMX West coverage we’ve found; feel free to leave a comment if there’s something we missed.

/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, www.dreamsystemsmedia.com
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, AIM Clear Blog
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, WebProNews
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, www.dreamsystemsmedia.com
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, AIM Clear Blog
/a>, WebProNews
/a>, community.microsoftadvertising.com
/a>, www2.webmasterradio.fm
/a>, blog.efrontier.com
/a>, vidiseo.com

Credits to: /a>

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/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, www.dreamsystemsmedia.com
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, AIM Clear Blog
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, WebProNews
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, Search Engine Roundtable
/a>, www.dreamsystemsmedia.com
/a>, Outspoken Media
/a>, BruceClay.com
/a>, AIM Clear Blog
/a>, WebProNews
/a>, community.microsoftadvertising.com
/a>, www2.webmasterradio.fm
/a>, blog.efrontier.com
/a>, vidiseo.com

Credits to: /a>

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See the article here:
/a>

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5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix

Filed under: SEO articles — Tags: business, dallas, entertainment, linkedin marketing, online, online-marketing, search-engines, seo, social-media, social-networking, tips — admin @ 3:30 pm

From Facebook to Twitter to You Tube, there’s no limit to the number of social networking sites that can be leveraged to interact with customers and prospects, and build positive brand awareness.

/a>, however, stands apart from the crowd. The roots of popular sites like YouTube and Facebook are founded on the entertainment side of things. But since its creation, LinkedIn has been geared toward the professional business crowd.

If you haven’t already incorporated LinkedIn into your /a> mix, consider the latest statistics:

LinkedIn has more than 60 million members
A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second
Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members

Get started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy today with these five tips:

1. Build a Network, Then Start a Group
Getting started with a LinkedIn marketing strategy involves two important steps, the second of which is dependent on the first:

Create a personal account and build a network of contacts. Reach out to customers with whom your business has a solid relationship – those who truly know your company and its products or services. Ask them to write recommendations for your company, which will appear in your profile. And don’t forget to ensure all employees are part of the network as well.
Once your personal account is setup, create a group for the brand. By creating a group for your brand, you’ll be able to maximize reach beyond your network. Within the brand group, you can start discussions, share news, post jobs and create subgroups.

2. Make the Most of Your Profile
For the LinkedIn community, your profile will be this first item they see, so treat it as you would any landing page. To make the most of your profile:

Hyperlink using keywords. Include relevant URLs in your profile, and use links with anchor text. For example, instead of “My Blog,” use a keyword to describe it such as “SEO and Online Marketing Blog.” (see image below)
Use keywords in descriptions. That includes the summary, specialties, experience and all other description categories.
Include an image in your profile. LinkedIn, after all, is a social networking channel. So add as many personal touches as possible to maximize engagement and put a face to the brand.
Caption: Include blog or website links in your profile using anchor text.

img class=”size-full wp-image-9026″ title=”LinkedIn Marketing Strategy” src=”http://www.toprankblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Websites.jpg” alt=”" width=”364″ height=”54″ />

Include links in your LinkedIn profile using anchor text.

3. Leverage Third-Party Applications
Today, there are a host of third-party applications available to help you make the most of your LinkedIn activity. For example:

/a>: Add links to files like resumes and marketing kits
/a>: Share business presentations and demos with your network
/a>: Monitor messages sent out on Twitter about your brand or other subjects
/a>: See where members of your network will be travelling to and when you’ll be in the same city

img class=”size-full wp-image-9025 ” title=”TripIt LinkedIn Application” src=”http://www.toprankblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/TripIt.jpg” alt=”" width=”530″ height=”160″ />

For an upcoming trip to Dallas, my contacts that will also be there are identified.

4. Update and Engage Frequently
Think of LinkedIn marketing efforts as you would blog, Twitter or /a> efforts: The more activity and interaction, the better the results. To consistently engage with your network:

Sync blog posts to your profile with tools like Blog Link or WordPress LinkedIn Application
Frequently update your profile with the LinkedIn status feature, much like Facebook status updates
Leverage the LinkedIn Question and Answer function – participate in others’ questions and ask your own

5. Promote Your Profile
In order to expand your network, LinkedIn marketing efforts – like anything else – must be promoted in other channels. Include a link to your profile on your website and blog, in individual blog posts, in email signatures and even on business cards. Be sure to optimize your profile for important and relevant keywords. Allow enough of your profile to be public so search engines can rank that content accordingly.

These tips, of course, are just the tips of the iceberg when it comes to LinkedIn marketing tactics. What specific tactics have you found successful for marketing on LinkedIn?

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