TopRank Internet Marketing News

Most marketers understand the importance of setting goals, understanding audience and making a plan for improving their search engine visibility. But despite the need for that strategic approach, online marketers are hungry for individual tips and best practices. At TopRank Online Marketing, we understand the need for both and cover the strategy in-depth at Online Marketing Blog.

For tips that you can use right now, here are 7 suggestions that will help you align your content with SEO best practices and help raise your visibility where customers are looking:

1. Avoid overuse of pronouns like “it”, “they” and “them” in favor of more descriptive keyword phrases where Google is looking for them in page titles, file names, text links between pages, image alt text and in body copy.
2. Facts tell, stories sell: Figure out why customers buy and create keyword optimized content that tells stories about how and why your products solve customer problems.

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%.

The real SEO news is that Bing is launching its brand-new Adaptive Search. This is a tool by means of which Microsoft will attempt to adjust its algorithm to take into account the contextual relationship of a user’s search history.  Microsoft’s Aidan Cook explains the Bing Adaptive Search this way: “Every time you search on Bing, the information provided helps Bing understand what you’re trying to do. The more you search, the more Bing can learn – and use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.”

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

MarketingProfs University provides affordable, comprehensive online training across the disciplines that make up every business’ marketing mix. In addition to learning what businesses need to plan, build and measure successful marketing programs, course attendees have the opportunity to review best practices from peers, discover new tools and processes, and see what’s working in marketing today.  Search Marketing School is a live online presentation featuring several speakers throughout the day.

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.

Event details:

Dreamforce ‘11
Social Sales Revolution: 7 Steps to Get Ahead
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Moscone Center
747 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94103-3118

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.

Tips, articles, videos and experts interviews provide customers with the information they need to buy and refer to others. Useful content optimized with keywords also attracts more search engine traffic and links. Solution: Content Marketing.

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.

It’s also important to describe expected outcomes and timeframes.  Is the video marketing effort focused on selling products? (Hint: that rarely succeeds at the start) Maybe video is a great way to communicate thought leadership, educate prospects, communicate with customers or provide content for bloggers and the media. Whatever the expected outcome is, try to describe it and be ready to adapt it.

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.

The only way to hear about the guides being published is to be a recipient of TopRank’s Tips from the Top Marketing Newsletter. It’s free and you can subscribe here:  TopRank Online Marketing Newsletter.

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

4. Search Engine Land

5. Online Marketing Blog

6. Search Engine Watch

7. Search Engine Journal

8. Search Engine Roundtable (normal feed)

9. Marketing Pilgrim

10. HubSpot

11. Graywolf’s SEO 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.

SEO boils down to three elements: keyword research, site interactivity, and links.