In October we decided to mix things up a bit and offer more posts with practical tips, especially the SEO Basics series. While many of our readers appreciate industry insights, observations, conference coverage and interviews, it was the practical tips and resources that attracted the most interest.
While started out with tips focused on search engine optimization in October, we’ll begin offering similarly practical tips for digital PR and social media marketing as well.
The two day Social Media Smarts workshop in conjunction with the DMA will offer more than enough basic social media tips to share. Here are the top 10 Online Marketing Blog posts according to visitors, post ratings and incoming links for October:
SEO Tops Recession Internet Marketing Tactics - Over 400 internet marketing professionals took this survey to identify the top Internet marketing tactics to focus on over the next 6 months and SEO came out on top.
SEO Basics: […]
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Written by on November 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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We continue our series of weekly SEO basics questions and answer today with a question that acknowledges the value of approaching search engine optimization holistically, but indicates a desire to keep things simple and focus on the basics.
“… you mentioned to use a holistic approach to aid in a better SEO, but specifically what might be the “top 3″ things can I do or focus on my website to best help improve my search rankings on Google”
Since Google dominates the search marketplace, you can read their “How can I create a Google-friendly site?” recommendations. Or you can read on for more SEO insight.
SEO is a big topic and many web site owners are overwhelmed, feeling like it’s simply too much to handle, getting “fire hosed” with information from consultants. As a result, they look for bite sized chunks of information - tactics. Sometimes these individual tactics can make a […]
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Written by on October 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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We continue our Search Engine Optimization Basics series of posts this week with a question from a marketer that is dealing with issues related to moving a web site to another host and possibly updating the content management system and design.
(We axed the big, hairy-back-man photo in favor of this alternative image that hints at the concept of moving. Enjoy. )
Will changing our web site affect our search engine rankings?
As with many SEO related questions, the short answer is, “It depends”. The first thing to clarify is what “changing” means. Outside of changes to content, keyword usage and incoming links, common changes to a web site that affect search engine visibility include:
Changing domain names
Changing content management systems
Changing design
Changing web hosts
Companies change domain names for many reasons including: improved usability or better domain name (del.icio.us to delicious.com) , the result of a company acquisition, business roll up or simply changing the […]
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Written by on October 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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At the DMA08 conference in Las Vegas this week, the “Search Engine Experience” panel on Tuesday was presented with a number of site reviews which are great sessions because the audience gets free SEO consulting advice and speakers get to demonstrate their expertise.
One of the questions that came up was related to a site that has most of it’s content behind a login. Because search engine spiders don’t/can’t fill out forms (with some exceptions) they cannot find the content behind the login to index and include in the search results.
Why would you want your “members access only” content available to search engines?
The more web pages a search engine can find, index and include in the search results, the more entry points there are for new customers to find your web site content. A broader, yet relevant, footprint on the web can make a significant difference in traffic to a […]
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Written by on October 15th, 2008 with no comments.
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A problem that we have touched on several times is the issue of being perceived by search engines as spammy. The good news though is that according to the top three search engines (Yahoo, MSN, and Google) the chance of being mistaken as a spam site is really low. Of course that doesn’t do the few sites that are mistakenly identified as such any good. What is good news to those that are viewed by Microsoft and Google as spammy is that you will actually be notified by these two search engines about the fact. Because of this you can immediately respond to these two. Unfortunately Yahoo does not give notice to sites just yet although they say they are working on it. If you do receive a notification from Microsoft and/or Google what you can do is to:
Check your site – You might have been hacked or they may […]
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Written by on October 13th, 2008 with no comments.
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Though we do not use images here at Phoenixrealm if you have a website or blog that does use images you should take into consideration the impact that they might have on your page rank. According to Microsoft’s patent application entitled SCORING RELEVANCE OF A DOCUMENT BASED ON IMAGE TEXT they have developed a way to “score images” found on web pages and use that score for different applications such as:
ranking web pages of a search result based on their image scores;
determining relevance of a document to a text string (image text);
and, as Bill Slawski pointed out in his post “How Search Engines May Use Images to Rank Web Pages”,
determining whether an image of a document should be included in a summary, or snippet, of the document;
using an image score calculated from a comparison of image text to a textual description of a class to determine the similarity between the […]
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Written by on October 9th, 2008 with no comments.
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Here’s another search engine optimization Q/A on on the topic of web site marketing via directories compared to search engines plus a bonus on the value of meta search engines.
These are real questions from a web site owner and due to the vintage nature of the topics, reflect the need for ongoing education and updates necessary for anyone involved in marketing through search.
What is the audience of the directories compared to the search engines? What is the benefit of being included in directories ? What if I only submit my website to algorithmic search engines and not directories: Does it really matter ?
Directories like Yahoo’s Directory and DMOZ.org have been cited by several search engines as logical places for inclusion as part of an effort to acquire inbound links. However, as of October 2nd, 2008 Google no longer includes this recommendation in their Webmaster Guidelines.
The audience for directories as far […]
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Written by on October 9th, 2008 with no comments.
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Online Marketing Blog has always been about more than search engine optimization, covering digital public relations, social media marketing and plenty of other internet marketing topics. And yet, SEO is a core component of nearly every thing we do in our consulting practice.
For the web site owners and marketers fairly new to the site optimization game, we like to offer tips based on common questions overheard in the course of providing SEO and internet marketing services.
Question: “Ensure your site is crawlable” What would be, in your opinion, the basic conditions that need to be reunited for a website to be crawled?”
“Crawlable” means the links to and within your web site can be discovered and followed by search engine spiders. Spiders or bots are programs that search engines send out to find and re-visit content (web pages, images, video, pdf files, etc). If a search engine spider cannot follow a link, […]
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Written by on October 7th, 2008 with no comments.
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1. Geeking with Jonathan, no wait, “Greek-ing with Jonathan Mendez with the speaker, the listener and the argument in “Lessons in Ad Persuasion from Aristotle“.
2. Proactive Profile Linking. Social profiles and profiles of any kind can provide benefits as part of a Search Engine Reputation Management effort since they can rank well on brand and company names. Profiles can also provide a source of crawlable links. It may serve a company well to secure the profile names before the competition does. Two tools that will quickly check user names at multiple sites include: usernamecheck.com and the social media keyword check tool from Solo SEO.
3. Opportunistic traffic fishing. It’s common knowledge that advertising, editorial/media and even trending topics on the social web drive search traffic. However, SEO efforts with content and links take time to see results. Or do they? Combine keyword based social media monitoring (blogs, forums, MSM, Twitter, video, […]
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Written by on October 5th, 2008 with no comments.
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Content is King and links are Queen. Together with a nice dose of marketing they make a nice little kingdom. But what if you have trouble generating new content on a regular basis? How can resource strapped bloggers and busy web site owners leverage what they’re already doing for the benefit of their online audiences and better search engine visibility?
The answer to those questions lies in an analysis of the content creation processes within the overall organization. Companies like TopRank call that process consulting but in the meantime, here are 5 tips for those active in an industry to re-purpose content for the web.
Get more power out of PowerPoint - Turn PowerPoint decks into articles and/or blog posts and vice versa. It’s smart marketing anyway, to build supporting editorial visibility to a topic you’re speaking on at conferences, with prospective clients or other situations requiring PowerPoint. Why not leverage the […]
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Written by on August 26th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on repurpose content and sourcing content and content marketing and SEO Tips and Blogging and SEO and Online Marketing.
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