Search Engine Optimization

Next weekend, I will be deployed to Detroit, MI  to attend 2008’s PRSA International Conference titled “The Point of Connection” and will be sharing thoughts on several sessions, in addition to general overviews of the event itself, on behalf of Online Marketing Blog readers. So what am I looking forward to most about the PRSA International conference?

Visiting Detroit, of course!  When most think of Detroit, they will no doubt reflect on the history of Motown, past flawed baseball greats such as Ty Cobb and Denny McClain, or “Detroit Rock City”.  My nerdom leads me elsewhere, however.

For me, Detroit will always be immortalized as the city that hosted the monumental world premiere of  “Night of the Demons” in Halloween of 1988.  Per IMDB’s invaluable trivia feature, had this filmed opened nationwide with the numbers posted in Detroit, it would have ranked among the top grossing horror films of the decade.

The reason I begin the post with this story is not simply that this conference is being held just before Halloween, but rather the conference itself is populated with excellent sessions with a true bend towards social media and ROI – two oceans I navigate through seemingly daily in my work at TopRank Online Marketing.

The pre-conference workshop, “Optimizing Content for Optimum Search Results: Search Engine Optimization for News” run by TopRank’s CEO Lee Odden promises to shed light on (and in the process dispelling any zombie like myths) the intersection of search engine optimization and news content. Journalists and bloggers use search and the social web for more efficient research and this workshop will show PR professionals how they can leverage SEO to faciliate both “PULL PR” and increased online news distribution.

In the session “The Changed PR Landscape: What Works, What Doesn’t” (including a panel of digital PR experts including moderator Peter Himler, principal, Flatiron Communications LLC, Rob Key, founder & CEO, Converseon, David Bradfield, senior vice president and partner at FH Digital and TopRankMarketing.com CEO Lee Odden) social media channels and tactics such as wikis, Twitter, Facebook, etc, will be discussed at length – and the question posed will be – with the advent of social media, should PR professionals throw out traditional PR techniques in favor of increased focus on these new channels?

This session will help with this critical question, which is one I have to answer on behalf of many of my clients whose objectives we achieve by harnessing the streams of new marketing techniques and PR.

Will the future see distributing press releases to traditional media outlets as our highest impact tactic towards our clients end goals, or will creating a Twitter account where CEOs can express their innermost interests (favorite horror movies, as I did above, for instance?) in an effort to humanize themselves be most effective?

The answer is dependent on ROI – another major focus of this conference, particularly relevant in our tougher economic times.

Going back to Night of the Demons, imagine if the producers would have had the foresight to spend the extra distribution costs to distribute nationally, rather than just geographically.  On the other side of that coin, imagine if other horror producers learned from this film that their latest budget conscious opuses could turn a tidy profit with a geographic focus.

Sessions like “True Tales From the Social Media Measurement Trenches — Using Research to Learn and Improve Your Programs” (featuring Shonali Burke, vice president, media and communications, ASPCA and Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO, KDPaine & Partners) will illustrate how a measurement system tied to public relations will help to further overall marketing results, while  “What’s the ROI of Your Press Release” (featuring Laura Sturaitis, senior vice president, media & product services, Business Wire and Greg Jarboe, president, SEO-PR) will describe how to get the most out of traditional press releases in our web 2.0 world – again, with the objective of increasing overall marketing results.

Other sessions I look forward to attending include:

• Media Myths & Realities with Nicholas Scibetta, global director, global media, Ketchum
• Word of Mouth Online v. Offline with Jeffrey Graham, executive director,customer insight, The New York Times
• How to Leverage Current Consumer Trends and Most Effectively Communicate With Green Media, with Annie Longsworth, president, San Francisco office, Cohn & Wolfe

I look forward to this conference and to checking in with TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog readers starting next week!

If you’re attending PRSA International in Detroit next week, be sure to register for the half day pre-conference session on SEO for PR and News Content” Saturday, October 25, 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

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Welcome to the BIGLIST SEO Blog review update - Las Vegas Airport Edition.  McCaron airport is like every other airport I spend time in except there’s free internet access. And that’s the reason I can bring this BIGLIST update to you today.

The following are blogs we’ve noticed over the past week or so, visited and decided they were worthy to be included in the BIGLIST of SEO, SEM and Social Media blogs. Unfortunately my plane is boarding so the reviews will need to be added later tonight. Enjoy!

• Internet Marketing Blog Prospect MX - Agency blog for Prospect MX.

• Volusion’s eCommerce Blog - Articles and resources to boost your online business.

• Buzz Marketing for Technology - Paul Dunay offers innovative Ideas to accelerate demand generation marketing.

• The Altimiter - Charlene Li’s social and emerging technologies blog for her new consulting practice, the Altimeter Group.

• things of sorts - SEO, PHP, HTML, AJAX, JS, and life

• marketinghackz - Plenty of search, social and internet marketing hackz.

Please show these fine blogs some love and visit them, subscribe to them and share the best with your networks.

Blogs that get included in the BIGLIST can celebrate their bloggy awesomeness by placing a BIGLIST BADGE on their site. (link back optional)

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Organic search (SEO) success is based fundamentally on keywords and links. You can also make a pretty easy correlation between that and the combination of messaging and media pickups important in public relations efforts.

Search engines like Google advise webmasters to create great content and let important web sites in your industry know (to attract links).  Some of the best link sources are the hardest to achieve, such as a link in a story published at a major publication or even a industry niche publication.

This is where PR and SEO savvy can combine like Yin and Yang to create competitive advantages and extend the value and reach of your online marketing/media relations efforts. Some of the public realtions tactics that can affect search engine optimization results include:

• Contributing articles
• Pitching stories to journalists
• Blogger relations
• Press release distribution
• Social media PR

These are tactics aimed mainly at achieving some PR focused result such as media coverage and exposure to prospects, industry peers, clients and even internal company staff. Working for a company that has a great reputation is a desirable thing that can help attract and retain good people.

The opportunity with the above public and media relations tactics is to leverage search engine optimization knowledge to achieve additional benefit in the form of inbound links and additional search engine listings. A broader footprint on the web creates new entry points for prospective customers and can also push down negative search results.

PR and marketing don’t often talk to each other in many companies so internal or outside SEO expertise is not often available or even considered when PR departments create content. There are many opportunities to leverage SEO for PR content including:

• Press releases
• Letters to the editor
• Online newsrooms
• Media kits
• Corporate web site
• Blogs
• White papers
• Webinars / demos
• Newsletters
• Social profiles
• Real world interviews
• Podcasts
• Internet radio shows

Using keyword research to flavor the content, whether it’s verbal, in print, in video or audio can all influence how the outcome of the PR action is available through search.  Using keywords during an interview for example, can influence how the print version of that interview is discovered on site search or general search engines.

The thing to keep in mind is that if a digital asset (text, image, video, audio) can be searched on, then it can be optimized.

When considering using search engine optimization savvy with PR efforts and vice versa, it’s important to consider the audience. Most SEO advice and tactics is centered around lead generation, which is fine, because marketing is the cost center that ususally funds SEO programs.

However, jouranlists are searching too. With over 72,000 media jobs cut in the past 7 years as well as ad budgets shifting from traditional media to digital, journalists and news desks are tasked with doing a lot more with less resources.  Beat reporters, TV reporters and correspondents not only report news in traditional formats, but they’re often tasked to start blogging as well.

Search and social web applications are what help the discovery and tracking of news story ideas, sources and memes to be used with formal reporting. Making your content easily found in these channels means being front and center of the people who can provide the media coverage and links that are so highly valued/respected by consumers AND search engines.

The key to leveraging SEO for PR benefit and PR savvy for links that boost search engine rankings is to consider all the content types being published in an organization as well as content that could be published online that isn’t or re-purposed that way.

Then apply the insight that comes from keyword research and web analytics to influence how content is categorized online and use keywords in obvious places like document titles and links between documents. Keywords that are in demand used in places search engines value should be a part of the PR content creation and publishing process.

Media companies are already doing this when journalists look at keyword lists when titling and writing their online articles. Search drives the vast majority of traffic to online news sites that do not require a login.  Company PR departments that produce content should leverage the same keyword insight when publishing their content and NOT limit it to web pages. Considering multiple media types for optimization in a news context is where digital asset optimization for news comes in to play.

There’s a lot to discuss on this topic and today I’ll be presenting Search Engine Marketing and Public Relations at DMA08 in Las Vegas with examples and a lot more detail.

Sponsored By: PRSA International Detroit 10/25-28 Preconference Workshop: Search Engine Optimization for News

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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 web site. If most of the content is hidden behind a login process, that content is also hidden from the search engines.

Of course there are a number of good reasons for web sites to put their content behind a login. The site in question at DMA08 concerned an auction site that involved being a member to access the listings. Other examples include content that is sensitive, industry regulated or that is time sensitive.

In the case of the auction site, two issues were involved: most of the site was behind a login and the auction content was only relevant for a certain period of time.

A common solution for making content hidden behind a login available to search engines is to modify the templates that pull data from the database so that an excerpt is pulled into a crawlable web page. The excerpt content and links between them would be available to search engine spiders and get included in search results. Search visitors that find the excerpts would be presented with a link to read more of the article/content and then be presented with an option to become a member, register or whatever the criteria for access are.

In the case of the auction site, outdated content would be of no use to the customers so it makes little sense to allow it to be indexed by search engines. Sitting in the audience, I was doing my best to mind meld with the panel (Heather Lloyd-Martin, Detelv Johnson and Jeannette Kocsis) a suggestion but Detlev already had it:  The auction site could create content summaries such as the top bids for a category or pictures and descriptions of the most popular items. A blog talking about the products being sold might also be of use.

When content is regulated by an industry, it’s obviously important to work with the compliance “powers that be” within an organization to determine how much information can be made publicly available. Membership sites also need to gauge how much information to make public before asking readers to sign up for more.

A site with thousands of web pages can see a dramatic increase in pages indexed when using an excerpt strategy. However, it will take some convincing of IT/web development to make the necessary changes in the content management system and database, if that’s even possible. Then there’s the cost justification.

To build a business case for making these kinds of programming changes requires some forecasting of potential traffic increases which shouldn’t be too difficult using existing historical web analytics. Some SEO consultants are fairly good at this and can help you out.

If your web site has undergone the programming changes in order to make some of your previously hidden content available to search engines, it would be great to hear about it. What were the biggest hurdles in getting budget, implementation and even how it panned out once the content was live.?

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Let’s face it, we’re experiencing more than “interesting” economic times, especially those with a marketing responsibility in-house and at agencies.

To tap in to the stream of marketing-savvy collective wisdom online, we reached out to our network with a top internet marketing tactics poll for the next 6 months. Over 400 business marketers responded, making this the most popular poll Online Marketing Blog has run to-date. Readers were asked: What 3 internet marketing tactics will you emphasize most in the next 6 months?

Here are the results of the poll:

• Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes)
• Blogging (33%, 134 Votes)
• Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes)
• Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes)
• Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes)
• Blogger relations/blog PR (14%, 56 Votes)
• Microblogging (Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku) (11%, 47 Votes)
• Affiliate marketing (11%, 47 Votes)
• Advertorial (NewsForce, AdFusion) (10%, 40 Votes)
• Video marketing (7%, 29 Votes)

Search engine optimization, blogging and PPC taking the top 3 spots shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, although I wouldn’t have called them in that order.

One surprise is that “Corporate Web Site” received only 7% of the votes. An even more interesting result was that Advertorial was in the top ten. While AdFusion certainly falls in the advertorial category, NewsForce doesn’t consider itself advertorial, but rather “paid PR”. I personally don’t see the difference at the category level.

I suspect if “social media” had been presented as a single category, it would have garnered the top spot since social media tactics involve 5 of the top ten.

What do these poll results mean for internet marketers? First, SEO has achieved a comfort level for most marketers. Contrary to some mainstream media characterizations, search engine optimization is a high impact, high value tactic for reaching customers online.  Actually, search is about customers reaching/seeking companies, not the other way around.  With SEO, it isn’t a matter of “Should we?” it’s a matter of, “What’s stopping you?”.

Personally, I think those that incorporate long term engagement strategies via social media  rather than short online campaigns with definitive start/end dates will realize continued growth in their marketing programs regardless of the economic situation.  Social media tactics occupy 5 of the top ten spots. Social media is an ongoing relationship of listening, engaging and “giving to get”.

Search engine optimization factors into many aspects of social media (think keywords and tags!) along with being a highly effective tactic on it’s own.  Many of the marketers taking this poll realize that and have responded accordingly.

Do you agree that SEO should be online marketers’ top internet marketing tactic over the next 6 months?

Thank you to all the readers of Online Marketing Blog, our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn networks for taking the poll!

You can see the poll with all 41 internet marketing tactics listed here.

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TopRank Online Marketing has been fortunate to present at the Direct Marketing Association annual conference for 4 years in a row and a 5th appearance several years before that. (See photos from DMA07 here) Over 10,000 marketers attend the DMA show making it the largest marketing conference in the world and with this year’s show being held in Las Vegas, it should be another great event.

The DMA has traditionally been known as an organization steadfast in marketing principles and rooted in traditional marketing education but has made quite a bit of progress in the online marketing space with it’s Search Engine Marketing Certification program and upcoming attention to social media.  In fact, this year’s DMA08 show includes online marketing sessions on:

• Affiliate marketing
• Consumer generated content
• Blog marketing
• Email marketing
• Pay-per-click advertising
• Online public relations (TopRank)
• Search engine optimization
• Social networking
• Web analytics

That lineup of conference programming is really filling out and offering companies that “get” direct marketing, an opportunity to really dig in to many aspects of internet and search marketing you could only previously get at events dedicated to SEM.

People speaking on Internet and search marketing topics at DMA08 include: Heather Lloyd Martin of Successworks, Graeme McLaughlin of BCAA, David Berkowitz of 360i, Olivier Lemaignen of Intuit, Randy Peterson of Proctor & Gamble, Dave Lloyd of Cisco, Paul Bruemmer of Red Door Interactive, Craig Macdonald of Covario, Duane Forrester of Microsoft, Jeremy Schoemaker, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Andrew Beckman of Location3 Media.

I do plan on a bit of blogging during the week, so hopefully I can get a few interviews in along with session liveblogging.

On October 16th, Matt Bailey and I will be presenting a series of Search Engine Marketing primer workshops (actually, mostly Matt) on SEO, blogs and online PR.  Post conference workshops are smaller and give attendees and speakers a much better opportunity to get specific and get into meaty Q/A.

Matt will be talking about SEO and Blogs and I’ll be focusing on none other than online public relations. But of course, I couldn’t leave out some aspect of blogs as marketing and PR tools since they can be applicable to just about any digital marketing effort.

If you’re attending the DMA08 conference in Las Vegas this year, be sure to check out these post conference intensives. I suspect many attendees will be able to justify the expense of at least part of the conference just by the information we’ll be providing. Here’s more info on the session I’m presenting:

Search Marketing and Online Public Relations
The future of organic search optimization is heavily influenced by the effect of combining SEO and online public relations tactics. Online marketers stand to gain a distinct competitive advantage by leveraging media consumption trends and understanding how SEO and PR intersect through optimizing news content such as press releases and online newsrooms. Learn results-focused PR tactics such as pitching bloggers and online media as well as proactive online reputation management and PR analytics.

Date/Time 10/16/2008 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Room LV Hilton Conference Room 7-8

There’s obviously a lot more going on at DMA08 than search and internet marketing with hundreds of sessions, keynotes, pre and post conference events and special activities.  You can read our past coverage of DMA here and while I don’t think there’s anyone officially blogging the event, there is a frequently updated news feed at MyDMA365.

Please let me know in the comments below or via Twitter if you’re attending and we can have a DMA08 Tweetup!

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Microblogging is hot with the shiny new object set and as the practice of Twittering extends beyond early adopters and gets more mainstream media coverage, the crowd will get hungrier for more functionality. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry for more Twitter functionality now. Check me out onTwitter here.

Whether the enhancements come from all the amazing third party Twitter applications or from Twitter itself, I really hope many of these updates happen soon.  Here are a few items on my Twitter wish list:

• Ability to categorize and tag people so you can interact with each group individually (read and post) as well as to the entire group of followers

• Stats! post frequencies, web traffic & sources, rate of following/dropping, message topics, most common domain names getting linked to, most common urls getting clicked on, time of day, etc all with various time ranges

• Follow on the profile links. For God’s sake! It makes no sense for Twitter to hoard the link popularity yet receive the benefit of the community generating content.

• Enable a “social roll” list of links in the right column to the other social sites you’re a member of so followers can see where else they can connect with you

• Ability to place custom messages or links to ads if I choose in the RSS feed

I expect that some or all of these enhancements might be available through third party applications, but they are so disparate and unconnected, it’s risky to rely on any one of them - at least in a business sense.

It would be great if Twitter operated as an open source app like WordPress, where plugins and added functionality were all compatible with a single application (PC, Mac and Mobile versions of course).

What’s on your Twitter wish list  ?

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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 as direct traffic is minimal and niche at best. However, if a directory is well managed and offers specific categories for specialized niche topics, then it may be worth inclusion. As with any other kind of online marketing, if it’s good for searchers, it’s good for search marketing and SEO.

Submissions to algorithmic search engines are not necessary. Search engine spiders/bots will find your pages through links from other web sites. If your site does not have many other sites linking to it, then content based link building tactics will facilitate search engine spiders finding and including web pages in their search results.

Think of links as the electricity that bring your web pages to life in the search engines. Strong sources will deliver more power as will a large number of sources. The key is that they are topically relevant and created in a way that technically allows search engines to follow the links to your web pages. See “Ensure Your Site is Crawlable” for more on that.

As a bit of a post script to the directory question, I have to say that our agency continues to submit client sites to Best of the Web. It’s part of our process and BOTW does a great job of maintaining editorial standards. Some, not all, of our clients do see traffic from BOTW.

What is the audience of meta search engines compared to algorithmic search engines?

Meta search engines like Dogpile and WebCrawler have niche audiences that rank at less than 5% of total search engine market share. According to comScore’s August 2008 report), the share of search distribution is:

• Google 61.9%
• Yahoo 20.5%
• Microsoft 8.9%
• Ask 4.5%
• AOL 4.2%

The reach and relevance of meta search engines is nominal for marketing purposes. Besides, meta search engines do not directly index web pages, they scrape search results from major search engines and present aggregated or filtered results.  If your site is doing well in the major search engines, then it is likely doing well on meta search engines.

These SEO Basics Q/A are a bit of a departure from the industry trend topics on digital marketing that we typically post here on Online Marketing Blog. Please share your feedback as to whether you’d like us to continue posting them. We literally have hundreds of them.

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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, then the destination page will either not be included at all, or exist in the search engine’s database but not be included in the universe of web pages available to search results.

A few of the common issues that can make it difficult for search engine spiders to crawl a web site effectively include:

• Navigation links embedded in Flash – Spiders for most search engines do not typically crawl links within Flash files, although Google reports progress in improving Flash indexing

• Navigation links embedded in JavaScript or Ajax – Again, spiders like Googlebot have historically had issues with crawling links embedded in JavaScript menus but have made some progress. Links within Ajax web pages are still problematic for crawling.

• Embedding site navigation links within forms - Most search engine bots cannot fill out forms (except sometimes Google). If the user has to select and item from a drop down menu or fill in a form field to see content, that content is unlikey to be discovered and indexed by search engines.

• Lack of authoritative links into the web site. Search engines discover new web sites through links. Links from one site to another convey important information about the link destination and influence rankings. A lack of relevant links to the home page and interior pages of a site coupled with other factors doesn’t make the site “uncrawlable” as it does unlikely to be crawled any time soon or often.

If your site has say, 500 pages, but only 350 are getting crawled and included in the search engine’s public index, that means 150 pages are not working for you to attract traffic.

To solve these issues you can:

• Create navigation elements with search engine friendly CSS code that still offers much of the dynamic functionality often found in Flash, JavaScript and Ajax

• Create alternative navigation with text links elsewhere on the web page, either in the footer and/or in breadcrumb navigation

• Create HTML site map pages made up of 100 or less text links to important pages on your site. You can have more than one sitemap page for sites larger than 100 pages

• Provide search engines with a XML site map list of all the URLs from your web site that you would like crawled. This does not guarantee all URLs will be included, but it can supplement what search engine spiders find on their own. There are also useful reporting options.

Each major algorithmic search engine supports the sitemap protocol and offers services/tools for webmasters: Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Microsoft Live Webmaster Tools

• Encourage inbound links from authoritative web sites to your home page as well as to important (and linkable) content within the site. Cross link with anchor text between pages and make it easy for customers and spiders to reach all areas of the site easily.

If you’re developing a new web site, it’s important to make sure your web developers are not only designing and planning the site architecture for functionality, user experience and ease of site maintenance, but also for search engines. Getting SEO consultants or good SEO advice at the very beginning of a web site project can save considerable headache and expense down the road.

For some vintage crawler SEO advice, check out this post on improving site spidering from 2006 and of course there’s this SEO Basics article covering more bases than crawling.

Sponsored By: 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide All New Report from Marketing Sherpa

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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, etc) with an authoritative blog, and you have an on-demand traffic source. When a topic relevant to your business and/or target market is warming up, publish corresponding optimized content via the channels picking it up.  High profile blogs, optimized press releases, social news and Twitter are examples of quick ways to distribute search friendly content. The key is to monitor, have channels for promotion and the ability to act quickly. If nothing else, you can use PPC ads to capture such traffic. This tip inspired by “Use the News for Cheap Pay Per Click Traffic“.

4. How should your company engage the social web? Take a look at these 237 examples of brands using social media with tactics including: blogging, social networks, online video, podcasting, widgets, crowdsourcing, microblogging, photo sharing, virtual worlds, wikis, blogger relations, social bookmarking, social news, brand monitoring, discussion boards, social PR and user ratings/reviews.

5. Directories have been a toss up but now Google’s shying away. Google dropped ODP and Yahoo directories from their published guidelines. “Directory Links Next? Google Drops Yahoo and ODP from Guidelines“.

6. Always add Google Analytics campaign tracking information to your Tiny URL when promoting specific content on Twitter- from “Twitter and Google Analytics: What to Track“.

7. Need to find links without no follow? Do follow search engine.

8. Objections to mobile marketing? People DO search and buy on the mobile web and with the number of cell phones outnumbering computers it’s only going to get better. “Common Mobile SEO Concerns and How to Overcome Them“.

9. Now that she’s left Forrester, what’s Charlene Li up to? She’s started a new company called Altimeter Group and blogging at The Altimeter.

10. Web analytics guru Eric T. Peterson and my pal Joseph Carrabis have posted the product of their collaboration on measuring visitor engagement in a new white paper, “Measuring the Immeasurable - Visitor Engagement” (pdf).

Sponsored By: TopRank Consulting Why settle for second best? Call TopRank SEO Experts: 877 872 6628

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