TopRank Internet Marketing News

If you’re an internet marketing professional looking for the latest in industry trends, practical tools, and tips for executing on your own PPC or SEO strategy, then ad:tech New York is an event that you should not miss.  We are pleased to announce that TopRank CEO Lee Odden will be following in the footsteps of Melanie Mitchell, SVP of Search at Digitas, and serving as the Marketing Master for three sessions at the next ad:tech conference.

The future of public relations relies heavily on interacting with individuals and companies online.  Building awareness and  brand recognition is only the first step.   What are you doing to make your news content and brand story easily found and talked about online?  In order to reach journalists, analysts, bloggers and influentials on the web, it’s essential that Public Relations and Communications professionals understand the role search and social media play with influencing information discovery, consumption and sharing.

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.

John Jantsch & Lee Odden at BlogWorld New York 2011 - Photo thx to @ducttape

Blogs are perfectly suited as social media information hubs for companies or individuals that want to dominate their niche online. TopRank Online Marketing has been an active proponent and pioneer of blog marketing as the centerpiece of social content strategy for many years. We’ve been working with companies ranging from B2C retailers like J&O Fabrics to Fortune 15 company, McKesson on blogging, social media and SEO with impressive results.

Search Engine Optimization as an online marketing discipline has been in effect for over 10 years and at the speed the internet changes, that’s multiple lifetimes of change.  The ad:tech conference in San Francisco this week is featuring a series of Marketing Masters sessions, one of which is focused on modern search engine optimization.  What are current best practices and where does SEO fit in today’s social media world?  These questions and more will be answered Tuesday 4/11 by a super panel of SEO experts including TopRank Online Marketing CEO, Lee Odden.

Here’s the official session description:

Are your social media and search marketing teams talking to each other? They should be.

In an upcoming webcast, Rand Fishkin and Lee Odden will explain why, plus share practical tips on how to boost your SEO results through blogging, online PR, and smart coordination between social media and search. We’ll look at:

• How brands are coordinating Search Optimization and Social Media efforts
• A content marketing model for implementing a coordinated Social SEO program
• Why Google & Bing’s Love Affair w/ Twitter & Facebook is Just Beginning
• What Signals Matter in a Tweet / Share

Part adage, part cliché – ‘if a tree falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, will it make a sound?’ The answer is – ‘of course.’  But because no one is there to hear the sound, the sound doesn’t matter.

In much the same way, if content is published to your website with no one able to find it, your online content doesn’t matter.  This applies to everything from an exhaustively researched white paper to an opinion heavy blog post.

In the world of online marketing, search and social media are evolving at an incredible pace.

Consider:

• Twitter queries approaching 20 billion each month
• Google queries approaching nearly 90 billion each month
• Facebook topped over 200 million users this year and beats Google in weekly web traffic*
  *Hitwise

With online marketing evolving by the minute, it stands to reason that the most valuable insight will be that which can be shared in under one minute.

Social media and content marketing have moved beyond buzz-worthy concepts to become fundamental cornerstones of leading online marketing programs.  A recent poll by Online Marketing Blog, in fact, lists ‘social network participation’ and ‘content marketing’ as two of the top five digital marketing tactics firms will focus on most heavily in 2011.

As social and content initiatives continue to permeate and define online marketing programs, from Minneapolis to Manila, TopRank® Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be leading the way. Next month, Odden will be instrumental in expanding social and content marketing best practices globally as he offers the opening keynote and a full day workshop at Social Media Junction 2 in Auckland, New Zealand.

Online Marketing Blog reports that six in ten marketers are spending more on content marketing than ever before.

Affording any size business the power to create its own content to boost visibility and attract sales-ready prospects creates an almost utopian online environment.  But like most utopias, this environment can harbor a dark side. Essentially, if everyone is creating online noise, how can one company make sure its noise stands out as the most resonant?

TopRank® Online Marketing CEO, Lee Odden, will be revealing the best practices that separate content marketing strategies that resonate from those that simply reverberate at SES Chicago: