TopRank Internet Marketing News

The culmination of a deal signed just over a year ago is that Microsoft’s Bing now powers Yahoo! search. The actual search impact remains to be seen, but it’s worth noting that the two search engines together (Yahoo! and Bing) account for only about 30% of U.S. searches – with Google at 65%.

MarketingProfs University

In an ever-evolving age of interactive media, search marketers walk a tight rope.  Between paid and organic search, social media, optimization, search rankings and measuring success, it’s no surprise that this balancing act presents challenges.

MarketingProfs University is offering a 13-class course addressing popular questions on these topics to help search marketers find the perfect balance and be more effective in their careers.

Event details:
MarketingProfs University Search Marketing School
Modern SEO Strategy: Adapt or Die
Monday, Sept. 19, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Register and attend online classes live or access recordings

DreamForce Cloud Computing Event on SEO

Historically, the social media aspects of selling have been controlled by marketers.  Sales people traditionally are kept out of the loop until after a new lead is generated.  In today’s business landscape, successful sales reps are taking control of emerging social technologies to bring in new leads and close deals more quickly, marking the onset of a new era in social selling.

On Aug. 31, Dreamforce ’11 will host a session on tips and techniques addressing how businesses can effectively adopt the integration of sales and social media as a new norm.

One of the most common forms of online marketing for small businesses is to have a website. The problem is, with today’s increasingly social and mobile web, a web site just isn’t enough. To help website owners take full advantage of the most important online marketing opportunities, here are 3 things small businesses can do to attract and engage new customers.

1. Content Publishing & Marketing: Consumers are interacting with multiple content sources before purchase and businesses that provide useful information beyond product features and benefits can attract more traffic and referrals.

When companies see the publicity of viral videos like Evian roller babies for consumers or BtoB successes like Cisco’s The Future of Shopping, they often get the urge to jump in to the video marketing game themselves. But where to start?

We get asked this kind of question a lot at TopRank and the ideal situation from a marketing performance perspective is when the company understands what they want to achieve through video marketing.  It’s essential to start with a position statement like: Company 123 wants to achieve X goal and thinks Y video marketing tactic makes the most sense because of Z research and observations.

Many small business owners have had their websites up and running for a long time.  More recently though, small business owners are starting to revisit their websites and ask, “What has my website done for my business lately?”  For many the answer is “not much” and that’s because they really haven’t done much to keep it up over the years.

Times have changed and if small business owners aren’t tending to their website garden, weeds will take over and it won’t be much use to their business and driving new customers.  Below are a few ideas I picked up at the MIMA Summit which, if implemented, can help small business owners start to see a solid ROI on their web marketing efforts.

So many business blogs suffer from tactical execution without understanding the power of search engine optimization and social media for attracting traffic and engaging customers. The following presentation outlines how TopRank Online Marketing worked with it’s own blog Online Marketing Blog and with a B2B marketing client to  achieve phenomenal increases in reach, traffic and a positive effect on the bottom line.

TopRank will be offering a new set of TopRank Guides specifically focused on B2B Social Media, B2B Blogging and B2B SEO. We’ll also be conducting several webinars to explain these guides and how best to use them.

Below is a list of blogs that cover Search Engine Marketing topics ranked according to how many RSS subscribers they have. It’s important to note that not all blogs run their feeds through Feedburner, nor do all blogs that run their feeds through Feedbuner enable the Feedcount option which makes the chicklet counters below possible. That said, it’s a pretty good list. If you want a much larger list to pick from, be sure to visit the Online Marketing Blog BIGLIST of SEO Blogs.

1. Google Webmaster Central

2. Matt Cutts Blog

3. SEOmoz Blog

SEO helps a search engine to do its job more effectively and Public Relations can increase the reach and influence of the brands they promote by optimizing news. Recently the good folks at Vocus interviewed TopRank  Online Marketing’s CEO on the basics of search engine optimization for public relations. The following post comes from the interview with Lee Odden of TopRank by Chris Pilbeam of Vocus.

Search engines aren’t perfect – that’s why people in SEO (Editor: like TopRank Online Marketing) are flourishing. People who write web copy often only consider one audience: customers, or analysts; maybe journalists. You should consider the extra audience of search engines.

Even though there is some criticism of the timeliness retained with books on fast-changing topics like search engine optimization and social media marketing, books continue to remain popular sources of information and insight for marketers.  Questions about recommended books on both topics, especially social media, continue to be popular on QA sites, forums and sites like Twitter. We’ve compiled the following list of useful books on specific SEO and Social Media Marketing topics you might find useful. Many of these books have been reviewed at Online Marketing Blog.