2008 February

Alright, so you know you want a company blog. You want content to get indexed quickly, you want to cultivate a following for your business, you want to portray your authority on your industry, you want all the link juice that comes with a blog. But do you build it as part of your company website or as a new domain?

Listen to our top internet marketing experts duke it out in a showdown on this less-than-concrete question.

SEO Audio Episode 20

This morning has been a good one for link baitable story titles — Problogger has the astonishingly good “How to Write Posts That Set StumbleUpon on Fire” and the bent logic of “How to write terrible meta tags” brought me to the UK’s Leapfrogg Blog. FYI, the article had some fine advice but very little about writing terrible meta tags.

I did keep browsing around to an article I found totally delightful — Save Money, Increase Sales, Eat Waffles! This one is a case study of PPC landing page and ad copy relevancy based on the top results for an innocent query, “buy waffle iron.” The author makes clear in wry, illuminating prose how important good landing pages and well-matched ad copy are to effective paid search ads. A point that should be taken to heart since out of ten ads displayed for the search, only 4 had anything to do with waffle irons.

It still boggles my mind that so much money is poured into PPC by advertisers that don’t seem to grasp the fundamental truth of paid search: success is defined by specificity. This means a tight relationship between the keywords, ad copy, and landing pages. A handful of refined phrases and target pages that convert well is far better than a vague campaign that gets poor CTR, or even worse, poor CTR AND poor conversion.

While it’s deceptively easy to start a pay per click campaign, recognize that it is an art that is difficult to master. Avoid money pits by honing in on targeted keywords, start with reasonable ad budgets until you can get the basic mechanics of your campaign working, and then expand slowly when you can justify cost with strong conversion. And never stop critiquing your own work!

Zillow, Trulia, Facebook, LinkedIn? These are all just passing fads, right? What could they POSSIBLY mean to an old school business like mine?

Find out why you should ditch the skepticism and start using social media to your business’ advantage in this week’s edition of SEO Audio.

SEO Audio: Episode 19

Search Engine Land featured a great article this week “Building a Company with Social Media” discussing the ways Senior Level Executives, Marketing, Public Relations, and HR Personnel can use social media to meet their professional objectives. Here’s a quick recap:

Senior Level - Top executives tend to be thought leaders. Utilizing a blog to promote those thoughts can be a very powerful tool in several respects. Not only does a blog run by a top exec bring insider knowledge to the common folk, but it also brings a human element to a company. Randy Baseler, VP of Marketing at Boeing Airline has a public blog where he writes about everything from Aviation news, safety to his european vacation.

Marketing - Marketing executives are hired to get the word out. In the last 10 years, marketing has seen a huge shift from print publications to online marketing. Through the use of social new sharing sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Propeller, marketers are able to get new content out to the public immediately and have it devoured by the tens of thousands of news seekers using these social news sharing sites.

Public Relations - Online Reputation management is a means of monitoring what customers, past clients and prospective clients are saying about a company or brand online. With the  help of online search tools like Google Blog Search and Technorati, PR execs are able to search for online references, good and bad about their product and be proactive about the negative comments

HR -  Human Resources professionals using social media sites, like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, are able to tap into their extended network of friends, co-workers and business associates to find qualified job candidates. The best part about this type of contact, it comes with a built in referral from someone you know and trust.

Whether you are a small business or belong to a large corporation, using social media to expand your business, your brand, and your authority is a cost effective way to make a mark for yourself.