Everybodysagenius’s Weblog

Good Afternoon Everybody,

The all important first search engine result page (SERP) on Google and the subsequent value of SEO seem to be running

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a lot of web marketing ideas these days. Well, I am a web marketer. I am interested in SEO, but more important to me is the value and experience for the user. Does it matter how many SERs you have per page if none of these visitors to those results will end up customers?

I have been thinking a lot about this subject lately and I have come to the conclusion that SEO efforts that write for/attempt to market to search engines is just ridiculous. It leads us as marketers to black hat tactics and ultimately to experiences that the consumer does not enjoy. By Black Hat, I mean using trickery or unethical means of beating organic SERPs. Strategies like link farms, stealing or duplicating content, creating unmanned or spam social sites. For a list of tons more black hat (bad and stupid) ideas visit Beanstalk.

It seems to me that all of the big search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo are moving to algorithms that lend more and more credibility to user activity whether that be direct voting or off-site promotion of the content. So, you want a strategy that will get you a higher search engine result and one that will get readers more interested in you and your products. Here’s one for ya: create interesting, unique content on a consistent basis. If you do this readers will want to read and share and link to it. The bots will pick up on that activity and your new keyword strength and reward you accordingly.

Oh, and just to show that I am not the only one with this mindset. Check out this quote from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:

-The basic common sense principle would be NOT to utilize anything that you would not implement if the search engines didn’t exist, or in short:
“Make pages for users, not for search engines.”

So go out and create great content and get users to share it for you. What are some of your most successful SEO tactics. Check out the Big 16 rules for SMO tactics on the Online Marketing Blog.

Best of luck,

Will Flavell

Hey Everybody,

Haven’t posted for a while, but I just wanted to share a set of guidelines for starting a new corporate blog. Blogging can be an amazing marketing tool. If you are thinking of starting a blog to help interact with your customers/ shareholders. Check out this plan and advice sheet. Hope you enjoy.

OVERVIEW

Listed below are guidelines that will help the you make the most of your new blog. These guidelines will help you to grow your blog into a powerful conversation tool. The guidelines are separated into five easy steps:

Step 1: Listen

The best advice anyone can follow before entering into a new method of communication is to become familiar with the tools and voices within that medium. Before a blog launch:

1. Take a month and read relevant blogs in the blog’s category.

2. Check out competitors’ blogs.

3. Subscribe to podcasts related to the blog’s industry.

4. Find groups on the social networking sites (SNS) that pertain to that industry.

This process can be as easy as visiting directories for each of these mediums and searching relevant keywords or industry stories. You can then follow trending stories and learn who the most popular influencers are in this category. You should join these relevant conversations and subscribe to receive updates from influential content producers. The following tools are suggested as a means to locate relevant discussions in different categories online:

Blogs:
Technorati (blog search engine):
Google Blogsearch (blog search engine):

Podcasts:
iTunes:
Podcast Directory (podcast search engine):

Groups:
Facebook:
Yahoo! Groups:

Once part of a group, your bloggers shouldn’t just sit back and watch. They should take a side on a relevant issue affecting their category. They should put their opinions out there for others to read. Before they begin their own publishing, they should let people know who they are and start building their reputation online. This will help the blog develop a relevant audience when they start to post.

Step 2: Plan

To please both the search engines and readers, it is important to regularly post relevant content. Plan ahead and post often. Make a schedule of who is going to be posting about what topic and when. Stick to that schedule. Try to post two to three times a week. Feel free to post more often if there are many product developments or a lot of news. It will be helpful to identify which blogger is exceptionally passionate early on and make them the default writer.

Ideas on Good Posting Content: Good content consists of breaking news, product innovations, money saving ideas, internal visual content such as photos or videos, humorous anecdotes and personal stands on trending stories in your industry. The best content is original, injected with personality and demonstrates authority.

Examples of Bad Posting Content: Bad content is blatantly self-serving content. Your bloggers shouldn’t spend the whole time talking about their products and services. The posts need to be interesting to everyone. Bad content is also content that meanders without a specific theme. And if the blog lacks focus, it will lack an audience.

Step 3: Socialize

Allow comments on the new blog (it’s not a conversation without comments). Respond to all comments in a timely fashion. Link to other bloggers, outside sources of information, and even competitors. Hopefully, they will link back to the your new blog. By providing a very robust source list, the new blog can become the ultimate source of information for users on this subject. This practice also provides the blog with a lot of valuable links and indexible information, both of which will help increase the new blog’s search engine ranking. If the new blog becomes the best source of information, users will submit the blog to social news-sharing sites, tell their friends and bookmark its stories.

Make social bookmarking and social news-sharing links available. Try to make it as easy as possible for users to share your blog’s content.

The new bloggers should make themselves personally available to their readers. The new blog should provide contact information such as a phone number, email and/or Twitter address to a real person. Once a relationship has begun to flourish online, the bloggers should meet up with their readers in real life. Tweetups, tradeshows, and group lunches offer great outing environments that will help the bloggers further connect with their readers.

Step 4: Customize

Blogs are one of today’s most versatile mediums. In fact, many companies are using blogs as their main Web vehicles. Your bloggers can easily add widgets or applications that do almost anything imaginable to the sidebar of their new blog. Some examples of widgets available today are current weather displays, news readers from major newspapers, games, photo albums and much more. Most of them are free. Visit Widgetbox or Google Gadgets and add them to the side bar of the new blog.

Add RSS feeds from other relevant blogs and online news sources to the blog’s RSS feed blogroll.

Write personal and detailed about-the-author pages. This is an often-overlooked opportunity. Don’t let the descriptive pages sound too corporate or be too short. Many readers will judge the blog’s personality and authority from these pages.

Step 5: Tracking

You should equip your new blog with Google Analytics. This tracking service will allow your bloggers to learn where their visitors come from and how they interact with the new blog. Use this information to research and contact sites that refer traffic to the new blog. Tune the blog to match the most popular keywords available to your industry.

It is also a very smart idea to employ an online reputation management (ORM) tool to follow the most relevant and trending stories within your category. ORM tools can help the your bloggers identify key influencers online and trending stories that the your blog can post on. This will take a lot less time then searching through all the blogs, podcasts and groups manually and is an easy way to inject this new blog into the heat of the most relevant conversations going on today which will help expose the new blog to new readers.

TOP 15 TIPS

1. Read other blogs and follow online conversations.

2. Comment and contribute to online groups and other blogs.

3. Develop a schedule and stick to it.

4. Write about what you know.

5. Write about what you are passionate about.

6. Take a stand on relevant issues.

7. Share photos and videos.

8. Allow comments.

9. Tell a compelling story.

10. Link to many other sites.

11. Go meet people in real life.

12. Customize your blog to fit your readers’ wants.

13. Keep an up-to-date and relevant blogroll.

14. Create a great about page.

15. Track and tune your blog’s messaging.

Hey Everybody,

I just read Advertising Age’s Seach Marketing Fact Pack of 2007. It is a really cool resource of facts, stats and more on search and search engine marketing. It also has some cool stuff on SEO. I just think that it can be a great tool for anyone in advertising to sell this practice to the C-Suite or to a client. This fact pack also has a great business breakdown of the top 5 search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and ASK.

Favorite Stat:

From the “Budget Being Shifted to Search Marketing” section. 20% percent responded that their budgets came from Print Magazine advertising.

Most Humorous Factoid:

In the “Top Sites by Share of Visits by Category” under “Health” Viagra.com was number three. WOW! That is a lot of ED searching.

Anyway get the Search Marketing Pack here: searchfactpack2007.

Enjoy,

William Flavell