Happy Friday everyone!
What a crazy week this has been, and interestingly enough it has rushed by like the ones before! Wow time flies… Here’s a little something funny for you to share with your friends, or should you?
Buenas tardes everyone,
It’s another perfect day in this perfect world we live in, and what better than some good updates from the Search Engine Marketing world to make everything fit right in? I can’t think of anything better… Below is a short list of some articles that captured my attention this week, nothing from the main news stream that you already heard about from reading major news sources. This is the good stuff you don’t find out from such sources, these are things that come from “a friend of a friend”. Today I am your friend’s friend, and here are the news I bring to you:
A Twitter Search engine is out. I found http://summize.com/ this week, but I’m not sure how new it is. Pretty interesting tool, and simple concept. It basically searches through people’s tweats and serves results. Here is the search result’s page for tweats related to the seosurvivor.
I’m stirring the brain juice and crafting some fun posts for next week. Have a great weekend and pick up your trash 
As mentioned on my last entry, I wrote a post for the eVisibility Insider about the use of nofollow tags. That post has received awesome feedback, and I’m very happy to see that the SEO community embraced it the way they did.
We even made it to the homepage of Sphinn, check out the screenshot:
For a lot of the big players out there, that’s nothing to be bragging about. But being fairly new in the SEO industry, and holding a full time job that keeps me busy, I certainly see this as an accomplishment.
Thank you ImNotADoctor (I have links to this guy on my sidebar, so make sure you check his site out), for getting the word out and submitting that post!
SEO Roundtable’s Tamar also mentioned our post and that definitely put a smile in my face. My buddies who went to the SMX West last week were telling me that she’s great in person, and I’m grateful to receive good feedback from her
Have a great day everyone, and thank you for your support and readership!
Another week has gone by and I haven’t posted anything in my blog. I have had plenty of great ideas throughout the week, but having time to post them is a total different matter.
As an SEO/SEM Project Manager for a positively busy Internet Marketing Agency, I don’t have much time during the work day to develop personal projects. Then, at the end of the day, when I get home the last thing I want to do is work. My attention turns to some type of entertainment and relaxation. Although I do love this business, at a personal level, I also love other things… And believe it or not, I try to move my body every now and then
With all of this blah blah blah said, let’s talk about something interesting…. How about the last SMX West? Three of my boys just came back, and they had a blast!! SEO by Mike, OrganicSEOConsultant and ImNotADoctor. That’s right, I didn’t go and I AM going to talk about it!
By the way, look how awesome the shirts we made and passed around the conference are:
FRONT
BACK
I scored some schwag thanks to my peeps thinking of me while there, and my boy Fumi took care of the photoshoot with his blackberry. The photo below is showing off my new schwag as I’m writing this blog post! Right now you’re thinking “How awesome is that?”.
One good thing that we realized by having them go to SMX is that we definitely are on the cutting edge of the SEO industry. Almost nothing was news for our guys, and I’m not trying to be cocky at all by saying this, but the main thing for them was networking, which must have been awesome! Maybe I’ll go to the SES next, we’ll see.
We have posted some great stuff about the SMX on the eVisibility Insider blog, so if you’re interested in checking out our notes, you should definitely do so.
Besides that, I have a pretty cool blog post for next week that’s in the works, along with an overview on what “nofollow” tags can do for your site, which will be posted in the eVisibility Insider sometime next week.
Peace out my friends, have a wonderful weekend and I’m looking forward to sharing more with you next week.
Alright, so I have some juice to write this post since I have recently lost one of my great clients because of this.
My client’s company is located in the East Coast. I work out of Southern California, and ran both SEO and PPC campaigns for his company. My point of contact within the company decided to move on to bigger and better things, something that I highly respect and admire. Upon his departure, the company’s executives found out that they don’t know much about internet marketing. In fact, they looked at some of the reports I used to send to my old contact and realized they didn’t know anything about SEO and PPC. They couldn’t read the reports and couldn’t make decisions.
Without communicating with me first, they decided to hire an SEO company located a couple metro stops away from their main office. This company would be able to send one of their SEO consultants to their office due to the close proximity. According to them, this was the only thing this other company had that we didn’t. They were located close to my client’s main office.
After they made this decision, within a day or two after my contact left the cpmpany, my old contact got in touch with me and told me that “the decisions made there were purely to get someone that can walk across the street there and explain SEM/O to their staff and executives.” At the end of the day, with my contact leaving, they had “no one that could manage or even understand the hows and whys of what I was doing.” In the process, he was extremely nice in letting me know that they credit us with having helped their company achieve record breaking numbers during the course of their campaign with us. I was very grateful for that, and we’re actually building a case study about them now.
The question remains: Do you really need an SEO consultant in-house?
I can definitely agree that this has its advantages, but only if it’s the right person. I run across so many websites that have been “optimized” by their in-house webmaster/web designer/SEO expert person, and these sites have crappy SEO. As if these “SEO experts” went to a crappy SEO 101 course, didn’t pay attention to the class, and walked out to apply some basic concepts (like meta tags) and now they think the page is optimized. There’s so much more to SEO.
So, while an in-house person is a good way of having a face-to-face interaction with your consultant, a team that’s working hard from a distance can be 1,000 times better if they actually know what they’re doing and know how to communicate what they’re doing.
My advice, don’t think that just because you can get you local little SEO dude in-house, you’re doing better off than hiring a robust internet marketing company to back your SEO efforts. Phone and email allow for excellent communication, and if needed, internet video conferencing is super easy to be done today as well. Your local SEO person might be the right person, but do talk to different companies and make sure you don’t hire the local person just because they’re local and it may seem easier. It could cost your business thousands upon thousands of dollars in the end, not to mention the potential untapped business.
This is the part 2 of The New Press Release article, posted on October 16, 2007.
Keyword seasonal planning is about anticipating news triggers. One might ask: “How the heck do I do that?”
I’ll tell you how. The first requirement is to know your industry seasonality. Every industry has different targets in different seasons, and different stories that revolve around similar topics. I’ll give you an example, one of my clients is a four seasons resort. When we were entering fall, I started to plan winter marketing material with my client. Winter related press releases(ski, snowboard, snow sports, etc.), winter target audience(different demographics than the summer crowd), and so on. We were prepared and produced awesome results by tackling that in a timely manner, and stayed a step ahead of the competition.
Map your keyword strategy in connection with your seasonal planning. In January you should be targeting keywords and material about events you’ll be putting in place in February/March.
Use tools such as the Yahoo Buzz to find hot, fresh and demanded keywords. The Google Zeitgeist pulls together search trends and patters, and is a great way to help you mold you press release around something that is interesting to people. The Hitwise blog is also another source for ideas and buzz monitoring.
To be continued: Part 3(final) - Press Release 2.0 Templates and examples.
What is the New Press Release?
Conceptually, the New Press Release is all about identifying the opportunities available online. It’s also about using Search Engine Optimization strategies to give your Press Release more exposure in the News Search Engines, such as Google News, Yahoo News, etc.
Knowing how to approach and pitch social media sites and blogs is key. You shouldn’t turn your back on more traditional media portals, but in today’s world many bloggers are as influential as the traditional media pipeline (journalists and editors), if not more!
In order to expand your news coverage and quickly increase the amount of inbound linking, it’s important to leverage feeds and other interactive technology. You also need to expand the measurement of success to more than just the number of times the Press Release was picked up or “clipped”.
There are now over 70 million blogs, that’s 140 times more than 4 years ago! Bloggers are the new “editorial targets”… And the blogosphere growth is far from slowing down, with over 120,000 blogs being created every day.
Today’s blogs rival the mainstream media in popularity and influence. It’s really amazing to see that blogs such as engadget.com sometimes rank higher than money.cnn.com and pbs.org according to recorded stats from Technorati.
PREPARING YOUR PRESS RELEASE…
According to the Bennett & Company 16th annual media survey, it’s very important to display visual content in your Press Release. It’s also another important step during the “pitch” process, since most journalists and editorials say that a Press Release with a jpg, or a tif file, has a much better chance of making it into their publication. Video is another visual tool that has proven to have increased the exposure of Press Releases.
Go to the top Bloggers specialized in the niche that your Press Release fits in, and also to the appropriate Mainstream Press outlet. Start generating stories, see them being picked up by the News Search Engines, and follow the Blog Posts with your story.
Make sure you are recording the traffic data to your Press Release. You might be surprised to see that one blog might produce as much as 3 times, or more, traffic than a site such as ABCNews.com.
GETTING STARTED
Optimize your Press Release with your top relevant keywords. Your target keyword phrase(s) should be in your headline and first few sentences. Make sure you have relevant hyperlinks inside the Press Release. Have a keyword strategy on a calendar, similar to an editorial calendar.. Use keywords that will start generating buzz in a couple of months, and stay ahead of the competition.
Add photos and multimedia where ever you can. These enrich your Press Release dramatically, as mentioned above. Use wire services and feeds to distribute your content, and don’t forget the social/viral media resources(Digg, RSS, De.licio.us. etc.).
To be continued: Part 2 - Keyword Seasonal Planning and Press Release 2.0 Templates and examples.
The Search Engine Optimization process can be a long, arduous, and sometimes expensive road that doesn’t always produce results right away. It’s definitely an investment rather than a quick fix.
For those of you who have clients you do SEO for, it’s important to realize that the age of computer guys(and gals) not being good with customer service and client relationships is over. Now we not only have to be awesome with the technical skills, but to be successful we have to be super customer service and communicative beings
It’s important to keep up on your communication skills and not only know your stuff, but also know how to explain it. In the beginning of an SEO campaign, communication might be the only result your client sees for the first few months, so make sure it’s good communication.
Here’s a great article from a buddy of mine on effective communication.
Have an awesome week!!!
I was browsing through some forums today, (I do my best to be active on some of them)and was surprised to see how there’s such a huge misunderstanding of the ultimate purpose of SEO. I understand that a lot of businesses and clients are motivated by results, and all they care about is seeing their site on the first page of Google. The important thing for the Search Engine Optimization Specialist to keep in mind is that SEO is about making a site better, easier to use and find, and relevant. That is the ultimate goal of Google, Yahoo, MSN and all of the big ones out there.
With that said, remember to keep your optimization relevant! Don’t blind link or accept blind links just for the sake of linking. A good inbound link comes from a page that is relevant to the page it’s going to in your site. It’s even better if the link is coming from a relevant keyword, surrounded by relevant content. That’s one of the factors that makes for a delicious bite for the Search Engine Crawlers.
This “relevancy” rule should be adapted to everything you do in your site, not only with the ultimate goal of ranking higher, but also trying to generate a better site.
This may be an already known fact for a lot of SEO guys and gals out there, but if you are running around with an SEO checklist and going about your optimization as if you were a robot, than I hope this post helps you open your eyes to todays SEM.
