Search Engine Optimization and Social Media are no longer distinct channels. They are forever intertwined, each affecting the other in terms of how digital information is discovered, consumed and shared. The subsequent impact on reach and engagement means the integration of these channels is as relevant for Public Relations as it is for Marketing.

I was asked by Melanie Mitchell, SVP of Search Marketing at Digitas to give a presentation on holistic SEO at ad:tech San Francisco where I caught up with another amazingly smart friend, Susan Bratton. She recorded an interview with me on the Social & SEO for Public Relations topic for her popular DishyMix podcast and shared the transcript with me to repost.

Be sure to sign up for SES San Francisco mid August to see Susan give the opening keynote. In the meantime, read on for our discussion about SEO and Social Media or listen to to full interview on DishyMix:

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and I’m with Lee Odden. Lee is the founder and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing. He’s a friend of mine and we’re here at ad:tech San Francisco live to hear Lee’s latest thinking about something we’ve decided to call the ying and yang of search and social. So welcome Lee.

Lee Odden: Thanks Susan. It’s great to be here.

Susan Bratton: I know it is. You love to talk with me don’t you Lee?

Lee Odden: Of course I do.

Susan Bratton: So you just, you were on a panel this morning…

Lee Odden: Yes

Susan Bratton: and that was, what was the title of that session?

Lee Odden: Modern Search Optimization.

Susan Bratton: Okay great. And really your unique market differentiation is that you have both a deep knowledge of public relations, PR strategy, online news dissemination and also search engine optimizations, and you’ve taken those two things and laid in all of the new social ramifications for online marketing. So now you have these kind of three things that are really the domain of what you do and what you like to do is take those three things and optimize them all together so that they become a greater possibility than siloing them as unique disciplines, right?

Lee Odden: Exactly. And that’s what’s happening with a lot of companies is that you have marketing for example, investing in search optimization to increase visibility of product information, customer acquisition, that kind of thing. A lot of times public relations is managing the social media effort. They don’t always talk to each other. And that’s really unfortunate because the opportunity for them to work together can really amplify the outcome of each. The other component to this, the metaphor I used in the presentation of course was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: one of my favorite things still to eat [inaudible].

Susan Bratton: Me too.

Lee Odden: Yeah, it’s fabulous.

Susan Bratton: It’s ridiculous.

Lee Odden: Macaroni and cheese and… Anyway, so of course the peanut butter was the SEO and the jelly was the social media and what holds it all together is content in media, and because that really serves as a vehicle, you know. In terms of search, the reason search exists of course is because of all that content out there, we’ve got to organize it, make it easy to surface what’s most useful, the best answer, if you will. And social plays a really big part in terms of things like Link Acquisition. If you’ve got really great content that’s worth linking to no one will know about it unless you promote it, and one of the most effective ways to promote really great content, like yours, is to create channels of distribution or – well for example, RSS feed gets published when you make a blog post or your email newsletter goes out.

Also making it very easy for search engines to come and visit, make a copy of your stuff and then there you are in the search results. So by promoting content through social channels to your social network, for example, it gets visibility to the population that, there’s so many people empowered to publish. They’re bloggers themselves. They can make comments on blogs, and those activities can result in links back to your stuff. Links drive traffic, and you can get a latent lift in traffic by those links being recognized by search engines. So the other side of this of course is that a lot of the outcome of social interaction is content. So on the one hand, the yen maybe, it’s an SEO that’s using social networks as a way to promote their content so they can attract links and grow further an audience.

The yang might be the social media person that’s really more interested in engagement but they could actually optimize their social content to make their social network more easily discovered by people who are searching. I mean for example, I talked about a client who’s selling fabric, it’s an online fabric retailer. And the persona of target was a crafter, do it yourselfer. And so there’s people out there looking for how-to articles. They’re looking for videos or instructional information or ideas, and what a great thing to have in the search results. Not just somewhere where they can buy stuff, but where they can connect with other people. So it’s a great way to grow social network by optimizing that social content and make it easy for people to find that are looking for what the community has to offer.

Susan Bratton: Lets just assume that we’re talking about any brand that has some content. It could be that they’re a content producer, like a publisher, or it could be that they’re a consumer packaged goods company that has currated some content or created some content. If they only had an hour a week to screw around with it what’s the best thing they could do with an asset of content – and I know it’s going to be different for video than it is for written. I think there is more written content created, so lets just say it’s like a blog post or a white paper or something like that, like a piece of tangible information that’s to be read…

Lee Odden: Sure.

Susan Bratton: by someone and they had an hour a week to both – not include in the creation of it – but an hour a week to promote it in some ways. Give me the rank order of how you would tell them to spend their time. That’s a good question.

Lee Odden: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Isn’t that a good question. I really.

Lee Odden: [Makes crowd cheering noise] That’s the crowd cheering for your question. So…

Susan Bratton: People hear the crowd cheering [inaudible] but no pressure.

Lee Odden: Well, you know, I think it’s going to be different if it’s B2B versus consumer oriented content, but lets…

Susan Bratton: All right, well lets start with consumer oriented content.

Lee Odden: Sure. Well…

Susan Bratton: ‘Cause I think B2B, I think B2B people, they know a little bit more…

Lee Odden: Yes.

Susan Bratton: about how to find their market than, you know, a bigger market of the consumer.

Lee Odden: Yes. So if it’s this content answer some questions…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: then I would look for people asking those questions. I might go to blogs or Twitter and perform some clever queries and identify in a more real time sense people who are actually asking questions that are answered by our content and actually make the connection. Make the recommendation. So hypothetically, I’ll go back to the fabric example of someone saying, “Hey, how do you do this thing with pillows?” I don’t know. You know, I market the stuff I…

Susan Bratton: You know nothing about pillows.

Lee Odden: Yeah. But if we’re able to be there at the right time with really useful information and it links back to our stuff and we’re actually, you know, we’re providing a service, and the timeliness of it really makes a difference. So if you can use search.twitter.com or other blog search tools or even Google Search, the real time or the update filter on the left hand side, you could probably find some places where you could be useful. And also on comments, forums, boardtracker.com is a forum search type of tool and…

Susan Bratton: Oh, okay. That’s good. I didn’t know about that.

Lee Odden: And those are ways that you can, you know, be a resource and by being a resource you’re kind of making a promise that wow, you know, you’re really well known for being a resource for X or for Y. And I think in order to do this kind of thing you should think ahead a little bit about what you want to be known for, and that messaging would then guide subsequent search, research and interaction for you to be a resource, you know what I mean?

Susan Bratton: Yes, I do.

Lee Odden: Because people could look at it and just go, “Oh yeah, that’s a great tool. I’ll go try that out,” and they’ll have no methodology behind it. They’re two or three or four weeks into it and they’re like, “Ooh. Everything thinks that we, you know, we only sell bar cloth fabric, but we sell NFL fabric dammit,” or whatever, I don’t know. But you have to think ahead about that, what’s the long-term outcome of your behavior, and not just in its ability to reach your goal, but how you’ll be seen through this type of activity.

Susan Bratton: Go back to a couple things here. I want to go a little bit deeper into this question. So you’re going to search on whatever your thing is and you’re going to go to Twitter. Lets just say you go on Twitter and you search for people talking about crafting, whatever. Lets make it something really straightforward like curtains, sewing curtains for your kids room. So you go into Twitter and you search for kids curtains or whatever, and then you see that, you know, five people have talked about it. What do you do with that information? If they’re not following you how do you respond to them or what are you doing?

Lee Odden: You can act, you can add a message to them…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: and just say, “Hey, I notice that you’re asking about, you know, how to do a certain thing. Well just here’s an article that might be of use to you…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Lee Odden: “You know, we are a company that does this.” I mean you can, you know, in your bio on the Twitter account, the company or branded Twitter account or whatever you’re using. Of course it needs to be transparent what it is.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: I think that’s really important.

Susan Bratton: Of course.

Lee Odden: “I guess we do want your business, but, you know, here’s something that you might find useful…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Lee Odden: “A lot of our customers have found it kind of cool, so you might check it out.”

Susan Bratton: So you add them on Twitter. Obviously we know how to comment on a blog.

Lee Odden: Right.

Susan Bratton: You said boardtracker.com, what is it like a meta search on bulletin boards?

Lee Odden: It’s a meta search on bulletin boards, yeah.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Lee Odden: And a lot of people in the reputation management business will use that to find people talking in a certain way about their brand forums.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Lee Odden: You can also use it as an opportunity to search for engagement opportunities.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. And are there other places that you would look or search to get into the conversation? What other kinds of conversations could you get into?

Lee Odden: So interestingly enough when we talked last time [inaudible] situation…

Susan Bratton: I know, it’s been a while.

Lee Odden: we talked about social media monitoring…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: at the time. So and we talked about ironically – I don’t mean to sidestep – but we talked about wouldn’t it be great to marry social media monitoring with web analytics. Why doesn’t that exist? And ironically it kind of exists today, doesn’t it, with Radiant 6 and Web Trends and other companies. But so to answer your question, it would be through a social monitoring tool. That’s going to give you a more robust measurement or detection tool to identify conversations occurring according to particular topics. And that will give you some opportunities for engagement in this way, probably more efficiently but expensively than something like Twitter or blogsearch.google.com.

Susan Bratton: What is the Gorilla social listening tool that people use the most besides Google Alerts? Is there something that’s like…

Lee Odden: Google Alerts sucks. I mean…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: so bad.

Susan Bratton: What…

Lee Odden: Socialmention.com…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Lee Odden: is a free one. And Social Mention, I mean as far as those that are free. Trackur.com is really low cost, and…

Susan Bratton: That’s Andy Beal’s product.

Lee Odden: Yes that’s Andy Beal’s.

Susan Bratton: and that’s like I think $18 bucks a month.

Lee Odden: Yeah…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: it’s pretty low cost. He keeps adding to it, enhancing it and the price stays the same, so that’s pretty awesome.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: I think using Google Reader and RSS feeds on queries that occur when you’ve done a search on some type of news site like Google News or Bing can be pretty effective. A lot more effective than Google Alerts.

Susan Bratton: What is it about Google Alerts that’s so ineffective?

Lee Odden: Matching is crap. I mean, you know, I’ve had a Google Alert account for a long time like all of us have, and it can’t possibly be that no one’s talking about me anymore.

Susan Bratton: I’m talking about you.

Lee Odden: Yeah. No, the things that we monitor there are related to industry topics, keyword topics or whatever, and I just noticed the types of matching is really poor, very, very low quality. A lot of scraper…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: content. I mean there’s always been some of that but…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it’s gotten worse. It’s interesting isn’t it.

Lee Odden: It’s gotten worse. Yes it is. And so for whatever reason, when you subscribe to an RSS feed in Google Reader – what I mean is go to Google News or Blog Search, do a search, find the RSS icon at the bottom of the page, bring that into Google Reader, and now whenever a news item appears then you can see it in your reader. Speaking of, there’s a really creative way to, if you import that RSS feed into Twitter Feed you can automatically populate a Twitter account with news that matches a certain keyword query, which is kind of an interesting thing to do.

I do that with a Top Rank Twitter account and it posts maybe once or twice a day with that kind of news item, and then of course 90% of the rest of what happens on that Twitter account is people. But it’s a nice way to automatically add something that’s relevant because it’s a keyword filters it out into your Twitter stream.

Susan Bratton: So with your clients right now, where are you putting most of your emphasis? Thank you first of all for answering the question about if you only had an hour a week what would you do. I really think that was a very sound piece of advice. And I think it’s extremely realistic to think that we probably only have an hour a week to triage our businesses in the best way we can unless we have, you know, a large staff of people supporting us. So thank you.

Going back to this yin and yang of search and social, what is it that we should be doing intelligently and strategically to leverage the combination of the two together the way that social and search manifest on the web right now, ‘cause it’s constantly changing? So again, going back to that kind of, you know, one hour a week, where are the holes in our system from the way we used to do things to the way we should be doing them now in our approach to maximizing the combination of search and social?

Lee Odden: Well I think one of the starting points is in the planning of it, right. A lot of SEO activity starts with keyword research, and I talked about persona development, that kind of thing, in terms of consumer information needs, creating a profile for what characterizes that kind of person you’re after, what do they search for, what kind of information and in what format do they engage with that sort of thing. Developing a keyword glossary in terms of an SEO best practice is still a great idea. What is it that people are looking for indicative of the product and services you have to offer? But at the same time doing some social keyword research makes a lot of sense.

So a keyword glossary from an SEO perspective is a list of keyword phrases, how popular they are, how relevant they are, they have scores associated with them, and how competitive they are. A social keyword glossary is basically topics. In fact we don’t even use keywords, we just say Social Topic Glossary. What does that mean? What topics are people talking about relevant to our mix of products and services?

So we have these two lists and we reconcile them to see if there’s any crossover and we know those are really phrases we want to go after, not only in terms of content were creating as terms of articles, press releases or whatever can be crawled by Google Bot, but it might also be useful for social media teams that are out there tweeting and blogging and updating Facebook status updates and that sort of thing, because links that are including in Facebook updates and in tweets do count when it comes to standard SEO on Google, especially with real time results. So the text next to the link is pulled and influences how the destination of the link is perceived by Google Bot for example, or Bing.

Susan Bratton: Okay, I didn’t follow that at all. Say it again.

Lee Odden: So if I made a tweet…

Susan Bratton: Yeah?

Lee Odden: it said Minnesota Vikings Sports Fabric, Get It Here, you know, and then there’s a short URL to it, then the destination page is optimized for that, lets say. Then the text that’s included in the link, in the tweet, is sort of associated with whatever the link is pointing to.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: So…

Susan Bratton: It came from your social topics glossary, people looking for Minnesota Viking fabric.

Lee Odden: Right. And so the social key, the social topics or social keywords are going to influence social media teams use of language when it makes sense, right.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: So they’re not going to…

Susan Bratton: When it’s human.

Lee Odden: Yes, exactly. They’re not going to compromise being human or creative…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: for that, but you might, it’s like seeing synonyms. I mean…

Susan Bratton: Of course.

Lee Odden: that just, that’s when you’re, you know, when you’re writing copy…

Susan Bratton: Speak the language of your customers.

Lee Odden: Exactly. So and there can be some real time opportunities. You might see something trending, you know. The Winklevoss twins might be I might say, Five Things Winklevoss Twins Can Teach Us About SEO. I would do that, but it would be taking advantage of the rising trend and queries about that particular keyword today, right. When that’s relevant to your business though, that can be very, very powerful.

Susan Bratton: So going back to this social topic glossary, what are you doing to discover these queries?

Lee Odden: Social monitoring tools. And on the cheap of course Socialmention.com is a great tool for that. When you do a query on Social Mention on the bottom left hand side it will show you a list of phrases that are most often present and comments or tweets or whatever as the query you put on the top. And you can export that as a CSV file and bring it into Excel. And that can be useful to you as you construct a social topic glossary. From a paid side, any of the major social monitoring tools. [Inaudible] 2, Radiant 6, Scout Labs, whoever, they all product keyword clouds, or maybe if you’re lucky they’ll provide it in a tabular format and allow you to export it into a CSV file. And then you can use that to guide your content, social content, creation teams with language that’s being used by your customers. You can also inform editorial decisions about writing blog…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: posts or tweets…

Susan Bratton: Advertising your blogs, mm hmm. All right, so we were talking about again this kind of like one hour what do I need to put my attention on to make sure that I’m leveraging the way search and social interoperate now on the web. So can you recap what your first piece of advice was that you just gave me? How would you restate that?

Lee Odden: Well in the planning I would make sure that you’re doing your standard keyword research using Google’s keyword tool, Keyword Discovery or Word Tracker or something like that. But also using a social monitoring tool to identify topics of interest…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: topics that are relevant to your business products and service mix that people are talking about. And put that together, and then use that as a guide, as an editorial guide for social content, and of course also optimization. That way you’re using language in your social content that’s of interest from a word of mouth standpoint and it’s also something that people are searching on.

Susan Bratton: One of the things that I’ve done that’s really helped me is an Ask Survey. In my auto responder series I send out an email to my customers like four or five days into them joining a list, and I say, “I’d like to get your opinion on a few things, and if you would take this survey I’ll give you a one time 60% discount on my top three products, ‘cause I want to inscent you to talk to me.” And then I ask them all the questions with a lot of open-ended questions. I get their way that they establish their problems…

Lee Odden: Nice!

Susan Bratton: and then that’s how I drive the social topics and the keyword searches and the copywriting that I do and all those kinds of things. Do you have any ideas about how to make that even better?

Lee Odden: Well look into your web analytics data and do a search against all the keywords that have ever driven traffic and search for things like how-to or just the question mark, and you’ll see the queries that are question format that have actually driven traffic to your website. And if you start to see, “Look, you know, a lot of people are asking about this,” and, you know, if that content isn’t recent or robust on your site then that’s an opportunity to create it.

Susan Bratton: What’s your level of interest in Facebook versus Twitter right now for your customers?

Lee Odden: For our customers? You know, the retail customers were using both in most cases. For B2B customers there’s a maybe 50% or 60% of them are just using Twitter, they’re not using Facebook as much. They’re using LinkedIn and blogging more so actually.

Susan Bratton: That makes sense. And what about press releases? What’s happening with PR and press releases in the world these days?

Lee Odden: So I think of PR and public and media relations as something entirely different than press releases as a information distribution vehicle. That’s actually how I think of them now. You know, I’m bias because we’ve been working with PR Web for about four years helping them optimize their platform, and then also helping to market their business to acquire customers. So the people that are customers of PR Web have benefited with press releases now that actually have much better distribution. We track the ranking of press releases and just after the Panda update, traffic is, press release traffic has actually gone up for releases hosted on PR Web. So other services like Market Wire and PR News Wire and Business Wire and whatever are great and obviously peoples with earnings, announcements and that sort of thing have an obligation to do distributions.

But what I’m noticing, or what we’re noticing is more, especially with PR Web, ‘cause we work with them so much, is press releases written a little more in article format getting picked up by some pretty attractive syndication partners. All these wire distribution services have pretty good relationships for content syndication and distribution, and you know, some of them come into an editor of some kind and they look at that feed and they see things that they could actually repurpose as is, and we’re seeing some very – I mean it’s to the point where I went to my own folks and said, “Hey, I want you to start doing this for us ‘cause this looks really good,” and it’s just something I found, it’s a behavior that was being – and it was recommended, I found out that PR Web was recommending this to the customers, but being able to use it as, not as an article marketing thing so much…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: Because there’s credibility that’s been built up over the years between the wire service and those publications, those news publications that just use their stuff to create ad inventory or whatever. But there’s in some cases an intermediary, a human being that’s actually looking at those feeds and going, “Oh yeah, that’s actually good,” and they’ll put it in a place where if it was a PR firm doing this they would count it as a hit, you know. It’s not a high level hit…

Susan Bratton: You know what it reminds me of, it reminds me of those old Naps releases? Do you remember Naps?

Lee Odden: Yes.

Susan Bratton: It’s like Naps, right?

Lee Odden: Yes, yes.

Susan Bratton: It’s like you write an article and you send it out and a bunch of little, little news, little family newspapers from all over the country pick it up and they use it as content.

Lee Odden: Yes.

Susan Bratton: So that’s what you’re saying…

Lee Odden: Yes.

Susan Bratton: It’s essentially, it’s like articles authoring has merged with press release to create a new Naps?

Lee Odden: I think so.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: I think it’s an opportunity. It’s fairly informal right now…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: but bottom line is if it creates value, you know, if it’s well written, it is news worthy…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: but it’s a resource, why not use it?

Susan Bratton: Definitely. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s good. Any other things like that that you’ve discovered recently that you’ve said, “Hey, we’ve got to use this for Top Rank Marketing”? Those are the best ones.

Lee Odden: Yes. Yes, and nope.

Susan Bratton: Okay. I just thought I had to ask in case there was another one that was super simple. Awesome! Okay, so anything else on the search and social integration that you want to end our conversation with? Any words of wisdom or good advice or things that aren’t working anymore that people are still doing that are just like not effective anymore based on something that’s changed?

Lee Odden: Well I think over reliance on any one channel is something that, you know, it just, it’s not sustainable. There’s this sort of moving window of interest amongst the early adopters, right. They move from one thing to another to another to another, and people who adopt after that, markets of companies might get the misperception that, “Oh okay, yeah, Twitter’s a hot thing” and “Okay, finally I’m convinced,” and they stick to it, and that’s an eggs in one basket sort of thing.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: So they’ve got to always be looking out for signals from what’s the next thing, right. And they can get that information through social monitoring and web analytics, and through their own firsthand participation. So I think over relying on too much, on a particular social channel, is something that I see people doing and they’ll pay for it, because when the time comes for them to be involved in other applications or whatever…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: they’re going to be behind. They could be ahead, I’ll put it that way. It’s not so much that they’re behind, but they could be a lot further ahead.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: So they need to allocate resources to testing in experimentation.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Plus that’s always the most fun stuff. It’s the shiny new thing. And we like shiny new things.

Lee Odden: Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Bratton: I know. We’re such nerds, huh? I do. I definitely do. All right, good. Well Lee, what I would like you to do is tell me what kind of a client is a perfect client for you, in case there’s someone listening who thinks themselves, “Oh I really like that Lee Odden. I’d like to know him more.” How can you best help a brand?

Lee Odden: You know, the companies that were really hitting a lot of homeruns often tend to be B2B companies. I mean we’re working with, just companies here in San Francisco, companies like Market Tools, McKesson, Marketto’s in San Mateo near here, and you know, we’re providing consulting to their internal SEO and social teams…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: about how to play nice together…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: get rid of those silos, here’s not only information on content marketing strategy, but also operational advice, process, and training. And those are the things that have been I think most appreciated by our clients for, in terms of what we do for them. It’s not just a, you know, “Here’s our advice and away we go,” it’s, and it’s also…

Susan Bratton: But you’re powering them at a systemic level…

Lee Odden: It is because the more, the better able they are to implement our recommendations and the more successful they are, and then we can still focus on the things that they simply don’t have expertise for.

Susan Bratton: Operationalizing…

Lee Odden: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: and SEO and social and…

Lee Odden: Yes.

Susan Bratton: PR, right?

Lee Odden: Yes. Exactly.

Susan Bratton: Really those three things coming together.

Lee Odden: Yes.

Susan Bratton: And, you know, if you don’t have a big media budget that’s what you’re relying on, the three things that are essentially unpaid, you know…

Lee Odden: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: I’m not sure, I wouldn’t call them free, but they don’t, they don’t have as big a cost in general as media.

Lee Odden: Right.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Lee Odden: And then the cool thing is that people that do have budget for media…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Lee Odden: can get extra value…

Susan Bratton: Definitely.

Lee Odden: using the kinds of things that we do, right, to augment and repurpose or whatever, things that they never would’ve thought of before.

Susan Bratton: I love it. Lee thank you so much. It’s really great to see you at AdTech. You look super handsome by the way. That’s a great looking outfit you’ve got on.

Lee Odden: Well thank you Susan. You’re looking pretty awesome yourself.

Susan Bratton: And it’s really great to have you back on DishyMix. I want you to come on as often as you’d like. We’d love to have you.

Lee Odden: Thanks a lot Susan.

Susan Bratton: You got to meet Lee Odden. He’s the founder and CEO of Top Rank Marketing, and a delightful human being, obviously knows what he’s doing, got tons of information and I would really recommend that you go check out his blog because he tells you what he knows. He’s a really awesome information sharer. And he has a very clear style of explaining things, in the written word especially, which is very good. So I really recommend that. All right, I’m your host, Susan Bratton. We’re here live at AdTech. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Lee Odden, and I will look forward to connecting with you next week as well. Take care and have a great day. Bye-bye.

See Susan Bratton give the opening keynote presentation at SES San Francisco August 16, 2011. 

You can find me at SES San Francisco presenting on “Content Marketing Optimization” and “The Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing”.  I will also be programming the Marketing Masters Search Marketing Track at ad:tech New York November 9, 2011.

The audio on this interview is pretty low, so you’ll need to turn it up a bit.  The one downside to a Flipcam

Mike McDonald of WebProNews and his trusty videographer Travis, caught up with Odden after the session for the following interview. In it they discuss examples of how social media can be used to advance search engine visibility goals and how SEO can be used to grow social networks.

More WebProNews Videos

TopRank will be conducting a 2-day social media and SEO workshop in New York Dec 1-2 in conjunction with the national Direct Marketing Association. The following week, TopRank will be presenting on a panel at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago on how companies can optimize their blogs for better search engine traffic.

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There’s a lot to be said about the topic of marketing real-time including the fact that in many ways, marketers have been marketing “in the now” through search and other types of online advertising for years. What’s new are efforts to leverage insight from connections between social media networks to deliver relevant ads. The notion of leveraging the social graph for delivering relevant ads was highlighted recently in an excellent article by David Berkowitz in Media Post: “The Social Graph Ad Targeting Buyer’s Guide“.

Technorati, Meebo, YouTube and Twitter all offer options for reaching new customers real-time, either through content or advertising as do an increasing number of other companies like Klout. The challenge is, like with all emerging digital marketing channels, to get a handle on what makes the most sense, what delivers value and results.

TopRank CEO Lee Odden Interviewed by Jiyan Wei of Vocus on WebmasterRadio.FM "Cover Story"

Public relations is enjoying both an evolution and a renaissance.

While traditional media outlets have been steadily shrinking, sources of online news and information have been exponentially growing.

Digital public relations, which has developed from this interesting paradigm, is an inclusive blend of both traditional push PR tactics and pull marketing tactics inherent with search engine optimization.  In a very real sense,  digital public relations can serve both a PR objective of securing coverage, and a marketing objective of achieving inquiries and sales.

Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank® Online Marketing, was recently interviewed by Jiyan Wei of PRWeb for the Webmaster Radio program, “Cover Story” on Push and Pull Public Relations.  

In the interview, Odden described how businesses can leverage digital public relations to both build exposure with online and offline journalists as well as generate inquiries from directly from end consumers.

Via optimized press releases, businesses are able to distribute their news via wire services to the media and also reach journalists, analysts and reporters conducing online research via keyword queries on various types of search engines.

In TopRank’s Journalists’ Use of Search Survey in 2008, 91% of respondents cited using standard search engines to do their jobs. 95% use search for researching past news stories and 82% for story ideas. According to Neilsen Online, Yahoo News receives nearly 35 million monthly visitors/searchers. The opportunity to optimize news content for a seeking audience is substantial.

Through news search engines, or even traditional search engines such as Google or Yahoo!, optimized press releases and other news content can be found by both enterprising journalists researching a story or consumers seeking products or services.

“When you look at news search, a lot of the content you find is optimized press releases,” states Odden in the interview.  “Businesses can draft and optimize theses releases, distribute them through wire services, and reach consumers and journalists directly with their news message. “

Businesses who master digital public relations through optimized news content are able to reach elusive journalists AND consumers who are using search engines to find news and information. The result can be increased media coverage, brand awareness and ultimately, sales.

Wei’s full interview with Odden may be found at WebmasterRadio.FM.

TopRank® Online Marketing provides Fortune 1000 companies holistic Internet Marketing services, including search engine optimization, online public relations, and business blog consulting.

At last month’s SXSW Interactive conference, a component of the legendary music, film and interactive festival dedicated to the coolest new media technologies, Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank® Online Marketing, detailed the benefits of strategic social medial in a podcast with Susan Bratton, CEO of Personal Life Media.  You can listen to or read full transcribed interview with Susan here.

In the interview, Odden coupled his strategic social media recommendation to Bratton’s listeners with a warning to avoid jumping directly into social media tactics.

“[Many businesses] will read in an article or hear at a conference, oh, Facebook’s a hot thing, Twitter’s hot, so, hey – somebody go set up Facebook and Twitter accounts,” states Odden. “Unfortunately, this siloed and segmented approach doesn’t tie into the overall brand objective.”

Odden recommends for businesses, and helps implement for clients of TopRank® Online Marketing, the construction of a Social Media Roadmap.  This structured approach helps ensure businesses identify their audience, objectives and relevant supporting tactics prior to diving into the social media landscape.

Lee Odden and Susan Bratton Discuss Strategic Social Media at SXSW Interactive

In what Bratton described as the “gem” of the interview, Odden detailed how, by following this structured approach, clients of TopRank® Online Marketing are already leveraging the opportunistic power of social media to experience a richer, more complete online marketing program.

“We look at topics that are buzzing in social media, and we bring this information back to a client and go, ‘Look, people in your category are talking about this.  Let’s create content so that you rank for it highly in the search engines.’  By the time that buzzing topic hits mainstream media, they’re already there – they have a first mover advantage,’” states Odden.

Clients of TopRank® Online Marketing and businesses who take this strategic approach to social media are already experiencing the benefits that come along with becoming a first mover in their industry.  And for most, it began with a Social Media Roadmap.

Discover more insight on social media from TopRank® Online Marketing in the Social Media Marketing category of the Online Marketing Blog offering numerous articles on social media strategies and tactics.

TopRank® Online Marketing provides Fortune 1000 companies holistic Internet Marketing services, including search engine optimization, social media marketing, and business blog consulting.

Lee Odden and Chris Brogan Discuss Social Media for Business at PubCon South

Webmasterwworld PubCon conferences are among the longest-running educational and networking events dedicated to search engine marketing.

PubCon South, which was held this month in Austin, Texas, featured sessions focused heavily on social media best practices, including numerous sessions on Twitter. Social media topics were equally mixed with cutting edge insight on pay per click, search engine optimization and public relations.

Deeply ingrained in the social media marketing mix was TopRank® Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden who presented on three panels, two of which centered on social media related topics.

The last session of the day featured a keynote panel, or “Super Session” moderated by conference organizer Brett Tabke and including Chris Brogan, Lee Odden, Wayne Sutton and Reem Abeidoh.  Odden joined Chris Brogan to offer further detail on how to leverage social media tactics to achieve business objectives. Watch Lee and Chris’s video interview with WebProNews here.

Among the advice offered by Odden to businesses seeking to integrate social media into their marketing mix, is the construction of a Social Media Roadmap.  Approaching commercial social media participation in a structured format encourages businesses to identify the audience and specific business objectives of any social media initiative, as well the development of a game plan and relevant supporting tactics.

The benefit of spending the time to develop this roadmap is not only to identify the tools and tactics that will help a business achieve its objectives with social media, but ultimately, to most effectively measure outcomes.   Social media participation takes a substantial time commitment, and now more than ever, companies have little marketing budget for waste.  This strategic approach helps businesses venturing into social media to stay on track with marketing initiatives and manage resources efficiently.

Discover more insight on social media from TopRank Online Marketing  on our Social Media Marketing category from Online Marketing Blog offering numerous articles on social media strategies and tactics.

TopRank® Online Marketing provides Fortune 1000 companies holistic Internet Marketing services, including search engine optimization, social media marketing, and business blog consulting.

Website Magazine recently published an interview with TopRank CEO Lee Odden on blogging, microblogging and the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose:

TopRank, a Minneapolis, Minnesota search marketing agency is truly one of the best when it comes to natural SEO, social media marketing and new media PR. Website Magazine contributor Dante Monteverde quizzed TopRank’s CEO Lee Odden recently (a sample is below) on the keys to driving blog readership, the efficacy of micro-blogging, and what attendees of SES San Jose can expect from his session titled “SEO Through Blogs & Feeds.”

Why should a website start a blog? Would you justify starting a blog for purely SEO reasons?

“As for adding a blog to a web site in the commonly understood definition, it really depends on a number of factors: Does the company have something useful/meaningful to say? Are there staff within the company that actively read industry blogs? Can resources be dedicated to the blog on an ongoing basis? (IT, writing and editorial, monitoring, marketing, PR). A company should not bother with a blog if they answer no.”

The key to gaining readership with a blog is developing fresh usable content on at least a weekly basis. What if you don’t have time to write blog posts? Is it ok and/or when should I consider using and employee or hiring a 3rd party to write and/or manage my blog?

To keep consistency and frequency of posts on a blog, it makes sense to create an editorial guide. This can be reflected by the blog categories as well as a document that outlines types of posts to be published on a regular basis. For example, readers will appreciate knowing that every Wednesday there will be some kind of poll or every Monday there’s an interview or list of practical tips.

Recently there has been a shift toward sites like Twitter.com that promote micro-blogging. What kind of effect do you think this is having on blogs and more importantly SEO?

I think tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk, etc do distract people from blogging. I also know that there are a number of smart people who use them together. I don’t mean auto publishing blog posts to Twitter with Twitterfeed, as that kind of micro content is ignored. But personally recommending resources to a Twitter network can generate tremendous exposure if it’s done right and relevant to the audience. Twitter can also be a great tool fro sourcing content to put on blog posts

How much SEO value do you put on the syndication of your blog? Other than getting traffic and exposure from your blog can you derive any SEO value from your blog through RSS Feeds?

For us, the SEO value from RSS distribution comes in part from syndication with embedded links back to the blog. For blogs that publish feeds using their domain name in the url, links to the RSS feed can drive some link popularity.

Can you give us some insight to how your run your blog: www.toprankblog.com?

Actually, we started as more of a news blog but changed a few years ago to focus on original content. With the help of Jolina, Thomas, Jessica, Mike, Ashley and Julie from Toprank, Online Marketing Blog covers conferences such as Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, Pubcon and other events put on by PRSA and the DMA.

You can see TopRank’s presentations on “News Search SEO” and “Blog SEO” at the Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this week on Wednesday. Read the full interview at Website Magazine.

A leading Minneapolis Internet marketing agency, TopRank provies holistic online marketing solutions to Fortune 1000 companies in the Twin Cities and cost to coast in the U.S. and Canada.

The social media space is becoming quite saturated as companies begin to introduce social networking platforms and corporate blogs. How does the increase of activity in this space affect someone’s online strategy?

“At first glance, the array of options can be very intimidating to a company that wants to get into the social media space as a way to grow brand awareness and revenue.”

“The important first step is to get involved as a participant and work to understand the way social communities and blogs work from a user perspective.”

Additional questions focused on SEO, social media, Twitter and sage advice for Incisive Media’s Kevin Ryan. Read the full interview, “Search Engine Optimization: TopRank CEO Shares Tips and Tricks“

Adriana: From your experience, what are the biggest mistakes you come across when it comes to PR online? Lee: Thinking that optimizing and submitting a press release all by itself is enough to get covered by the media, because it’s not. There is an expression, in the US at least, doing something to only see if it works it’s like “throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks”, it’s kind of a silly thing to do.

Read the full Lee Odden interview at Avangate. TopRank provides a holistic mix of SEO, PR and social media marketing services to Fortune 500 companies.

Wiley, a publishing house, recently announced the launch of a new book, “Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus”, in which TopRank has an entire chapter on the subject of social media marketing for SEO and PR.

The list of Internet marketing experts interviewed for the book include consultants, agencies, CEOs, PR professionals, client side bloggers and marketers. Topics range from paid search to online copywriting to online PR and social media marketing.

Read the full article at the TopRank Online Marketing Blog.

The CEO of TopRank Online Marketing was interviewed by local ABC affiliate KSTP Eyewitness News on Starbucks’ decision to close its stores for 3 1/2 hours to conduct training. Odden cited the event as a publicity stunt and indicated the closure would give competitors an opportunity to attract Starbucks clientèle with discounts and free offers. KSTP’s report showed exactly that as competing and regional coffee houses were much busier than normal during the Starbucks closure.

Additionally, Odden provided insight into the reaction of the blogosphere to the Starbucks closing by showing the increase in blog posts, links and comments using a real time social media monitoring service, Radian6. Not only did the use of the Starbucks brand name and phrase, “Starbucks closing” increase, but competitors offering discounts such as Dunkin’ Donuts increased as well. This sort of opportunistic piggybacking can be detected quickly with social media monitoring tools such as TopRank’s partner Radian6 allowing brand managers to react accordingly.

Watch the full interview at KSTP

TopRank offers tier one online public relations and social media marketing services including online reputation management for brands, companies and executives.

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in London February 21st, TopRank’s CEO Lee Odden was interviewed by Greg Jarboe on blog and news SEO for Incisive Media, parent of the SES London conference.

“Odden discusses his panel on blog search engine optimization (seo) and online reputation management as well as his panel on news search optimization”

Odden gave presentations on the news and blog optimization panels and moderated the reputation management session.

Watch the full Lee Odden SES London interview on YouTube.

TopRank has worked with companies across the United States to develop solid online marketing programs focused on increasing sales and brand visibility. Expertise ranges from digital asset optimization to SEO to online public relations.

On October 20th, 2007 Eric Schwartzman of On the Record Online interviewed TopRank CEO Lee Odden about Search Engine Optimization and Public Relations at the PRSA International Conference in Philadelphia, PA.

Show Notes:

• 3:16 – Odden gives examples of the benefits of SEO.
• 4:07 – Odden on the role of SEO in a media relations.
• 5:52 – Odden on the search engine optimized press release.
• 7:00 – Odden on keyword placement within a press release to secure an optimal search rank.
• 7:58 – Odden on the usefulness of mentioning competitors in press releases to increase page rank.
• 8:50 – Odden on the impact of media data for search rank.
• 9:56 – Odden on developing separate press releases SEO and media relations.
• 11:55 – Odden reveals the strategy for managing a client’s reputation by placing positive content as the primary link on a search rank.
• 13:50 – Odden on the ethical considerations of using inbound links to determine page rank.
• 15:54 – Odden on Google’s shortcomings.
• 17:50 – Odden on recommending SEO to clients more interested in traditional public relations.
• 19:27 – Odden on developing an SEO marketing strategy to increase client visibility.
• 20:15 – Odden on why his PR strategy appeals to clients.
• 21:18 – Odden shares his single, biggest SEO mistake.
• 22:13 – Odden on his single, greatest SEO accomplishment.
• 23:09 – Odden on the challenges of learning to SEO content.
• 25:10 – End

Listen to the full Lee Odden podcast interview here.

TopRank Online Marketing provides Fortune 500 companies a holistic mix of internet marketing consulting services for improved online sales and brand visibility.