TopRank Digital Marketing News

Imagine you were the enlightened caveman (or woman) who invented the wheel.  How would you drum up demand for your new product – by promoting your newly coined phrase ‘wheel’ or by promoting a solution for traveling and dragging?

Today’s start-ups would be wise to heed to this analogy.

Until the product or service you create has its name ingrained in the minds of your target, there is very little chance they will find you regardless of how badly they need you.  It doesn’t matter that everyone needs a ‘pilotguide’ (a fictional and foolproof autopilot for your car) if no one knows to ask for a pilotguide by name.

Chances are you have recently come into contact with microformats without even being aware of it.  Essentially, microformats are ways to highlight key areas on a website to make it easier for this information to be read by machines (see: search engines).

Contact information and customer reviews are two key areas in which microformats are commonly used.  Most intriguingly, these particular microformats are often used in support of ‘rich snippets’.  Rich snippets (think customer reviews displayed in search results) make it easier for search engines to highlight some of your more compelling web content for users.

Online reputation management is equally important for businesses, highly visible executives and even team members.  As business becomes increasingly digital, online brand reputation quickly becomes a real world reputation.

It’s been reported that over 50% of adults Google each other and over 90% of B2B buyers use search when starting the buying process.  In other words:  if your brand has online reputation issues, they will be discovered.

Below, find two proactive approaches that can help protect – and in case of emergency – defend your brand:

For many businesses, search engine rankings and traffic are simply KPIs supporting larger online marketing goals – inquiries and sales. While these businesses may have tracking systems in regards to online sales, and may be tracking web stats via analytics, it can be difficult to bridge the gap between the two.

Analytics goals and funnels help to bridge this gap, showing how visitors convert into a sale based on factors including:

• Keyword
• Referring source
• Landing page

So why is it important to track this data?

Whether you’re launching a new product or a new blog, reaching early adopters is essential.

Early adopters may be small in number – for example, only 11% of web users know how to use RSS. But this small group packs a big punch. Using the RSS example, those 11% of RSS subscribers are by and large active web publishers.

By attracting the attention of this early adopter crowd, you can achieve:

• Search Benefits: Early adopters make up the “Linkerati,” a group of web influencers who regularly link to worthwhile content from their highly trafficked websites and blogs. In most cases, the more quality links to your website or blog, the better the search visibility.

Twitter remains a compelling enigma for online marketers.

In a post to Online Marketing Blog, copywriter Michelle Bowles equated the delicate balance needed in a Twitter Marketing Recipe to that of a guacamole recipe where one false dash could destroy the whole dip.

Michelle’s advice to marketers seeking to receive more value from Twitter can be boiled down to two words:  be valuable. While this may read as very ‘in the box’ advice, the approach you take is what will carry your marketing efforts out of the box.

Personalized search from Google, a new innovation ensuring search results are targeted to you and you alone, is causing shockwaves of uncertainty in regards to how it relates to Search Engine Optimization.

In reality, personalized search has been in play for well over a year, customizing search results for signed-in users based on everything from geography to browsing history. The difference now is that personalized search is in play whether or not users are logged into any Google account.

So what does this mean for SEO programs?

The bottomline answer is, ‘Yes!’ There are dozens of different analogies that can be used to illustrate why that’s so. For purposes of this post, let’s use a fishing analogy.

Say, for example, you drop one baited hook into the water. Were you to drop a similarly baited hook into the water, do you think you would be more or less likely to catch a fish?

Just as more hooks in the water equal more chances to catch a fish, more content online equals more chances to reel in a website visitor — and a better chance of experiencing a successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program. One of the most efficient ways to create new content is to repurpose old content.

This question has the potential to ruffle the feathers of SEO professionals on either side of the debate: “Are paid links a bad idea?”

‘Paid links’ are exactly what they sound like – paying someone or some company to link to your content.  Like any other practice that involves the word ‘paid’, paid links can straddle the line between legitimate (for example, a paid online directory) or laughably illegitimate (think the linking equivalent of a Nigerian email scam).

So why the prickliness over this question that has been weighed in on by most online marketing and SEO professionals, including our own experts at Online Marketing Blog?

For those of us who grew up reading Mad Magazine, the image above makes the difference between white hat and black hat SEO crystal clear.

For the rest of us, black hat SEO can best be defined as a ‘morally and ethically ambiguous’ business practice.  Black hat SEO practitioners, in an effort to secure high rankings, will break search engine regulations and throw any notion of a positive search experience out the window.