Think of it as playing the guitar: learn the finger placements, the chords, the music, the rhythm, practice, practice, practice, and once you have all that down, have at the gnarly.

SEO for the Noobs

Over at SearchEngineGuide, Todd Mintz has put together a comprehensive guide for those brand new to search engine optimization (except that none of his sources mention WebProNews – bygones). Like anyone anxious to start something, you can’t just hit the ground running. You have to read – and read a lot.

And take classes.

And attend conferences.

And buy software.

And practice, practice, practice.

But the good news is:

As search evolves – it’s become less of a technical exercise and more of a marketing exercise. This is good news all around, but it doesn’t mean that the average marketer can succeed at search, just like I couldn’t expect to walk into an advertising agency and develop a successful print ad campaign right off the bat.

Optimizing For Contextual Campaigns
 
At SearchEngineLand, Brad Geddes writes:

Search page views are roughly 5% of page views on the web, which means non-search page views are roughly 95%. There is no quicker way of increasing one’s advertising reach on PPC than utilizing the content network. However, if it is not done correctly, it’s easy for ads to be "matched" to irrelevant items, and advertising dollars will be wasted by being shown next to non-relevant content.

Therefore, when bidding on contextual keywords, keep in mind the cost-per-conversion of the sites on which your ads appear, and adjust accordingly. And don’t forget AdWords Discounter and Yahoo’s Quality Based Pricing to help maximize your ROI.

Optimizing Your eBay Store
 
Tamar Weinberg tackles this topic over at SearchEngineRoundtable. You have an eBay store, you want its visibility boosted in search. Weinberg recommends:

The eBay Store SEO Guide
Uploading your inventory to Google Product Search
Setting up an informational website with product reviews

Optimizing Social Media

Todd Mailcoat‘s humorous advice for social media marketing in business-to-business, can most likely apply to business-to-consumer as well. His "8 Simple Rules" are a must read for a better understanding of the social media phenomenon. Mailcoat suggests that with SMM, you are not marketing to just one audience. You are marketing to two of them: the audience you’re trying to reach, and the audience that reaches them (social networks).

He also wins the Quote of the Week Award with, "Just because you win a game of whip it out, doesn’t mean people will like you."

Yeah, Mailcoat, like you’d know.

Optimizing for Universal Search

Last but not least is the likely evolution of search, specifically Google’s testing of Universal Search, which incorporates not just websites, but blogs, images, videos, profiles, news, you name it. That means the SEO game will change if Universal Search becomes permanent.

Scott Buresh goes into detail about preparing for Universal Search over at SearchEngineGuide, and advises:

If you are working with an outside search engine optimization company already, now is the time to ask what they plan to do in regard to Universal Search. Your search engine optimization company should at least have an awareness of the magnitude of this new way to search on Google and should be able to present you with some sort of plan of attack, even if they plan to wait to embark upon the plan until they know for sure that Universal Search is going to catch on.

SEW Live Recap: This Is Getting Personal

SMO (Social Media Optimization) includes, not precludes, SEO/SEM, in case that’s what you were thinking. 

Search Engine Watch’s Elisabeth Osmeloski says the tastes-great-less-filling version of SES is part of a larger effort to reach the heartland, as online marketing begins to bleed in from the coasts. Though the event is trimmed down, it’s certainly not dumbed down.

Since the desired end is a sale, the means is building relationships. This goes beyond generating grand influxes of traffic – or what you might call drive-by marketing – more important metrics these days involve time visitors spend at a website, how many pages they viewed, and how those things relate to conversions.

For that reason, there seems to be a growing consensus that baiting the crowd at Digg.com is over – unless you are targeting that specific young, male, geeky demographic. As SiteLogic’s Matt Bailey notes, the end result of a popular Digg story is spikes in traffic and crashed servers, but not visitors who stick around or make purchases.

Traffic not being the ultimate goal is new. This a sea change in the industry, as Sage Lewis, of SageRock.com suggests in his WebProNews video. A lot of traffic is good, as long as it’s the right traffic. What hasn’t changed though, is the importance of linking, or so goes the, um, Sage-like advice.

So ignore the Digg crowd if you’d like more control of your message and who sees it.  

Instead, Bailey and Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock suggest utilizing YouTube, where marketers have more control of their messages, a free platform to broadcast, and a well-populated area in which to demonstrate.

Whatever medium you choose for your viral campaign, the pros at SEW Live advise to ask these questions before you begin:

1.    What sparks passion in my customers?
2.    What has not been done before?
3.    How does my idea benefit my users?
4.    Will my audience risk their own reputation to spread the word?

The most important ingredient in your campaign, though, according to Laycock, is common sense. It’s not about buying clicks, it’s about buying customers. In line with the common sense approach, is an integrated strategy that involves an amalgam of paid and organic search, vertical search, social media, and web analytics.

Analytics in SMO is another rather uncharted territory, but careful analysis of social data will become increasingly important as marketers strive to know who is interested, what motivates them, and how consumers behave.

It becomes, then, a matter of getting to know the customer on a highly personal level as sellers seek to fill the consumer’s needs more effectively. As the user profile becomes more apparent, the more a marketer can tailor their campaign to accommodate a wide range of customers.

The visually impaired, for example, will benefit from the marketer’s knowledge of their needs and efforts to make the online shopping experience easier for them.  

One of Lewis’s first examples involved Digg and StumbleUpon.  While it’s true that being featured on those sites will raise your profile (or that of your company), Lewis pondered what sort of damage any negative comments could cause.  All those eyes . . .

And all that traffic to your site.  The Sage Rock founder labeled these things as “vague benefits,” and said that you should always question the identity of your visitors.  Businesses should also try to determine the visitors’ cost per acquisition, and consider if they will actually buy.

Yet you needn’t be a psychic to determine these things.  Lewis noted that stats are getting better – services can provide bar graphs or pie charts (whatever’s your pleasure) to display what items were clicked on and what feed readers people use.  He also mentioned FeedBurner, “the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds,” by name.

Other sites that you should embrace, according to Lewis, include Flickr and Google Video.  This second service, in particular, makes some great statistics available (such as downloads and page views).  And, hey, it’s Google – you can’t go too wrong there.

Another Mountain View product to get a plug was Google Webmaster, which shows you both internal and external links.  The description on Google Webmaster’s home page is succinct enough to repeat here: “Welcome to your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites.”

The Sage Rock founder concluded his talk by looking to the future – the future of social media optimization (SMO) metrics.  While noting that this wasn’t invented for business (and so the available stats are rather poor), Lewis endorses the idea of aggregating SMO analytics tool to pull data.  Experience will show us, he noted, what is valuable to measure.

Lee Odden in his post on Social Media Marketing informs about the essential characteristics of a social media community. 

• Create profiles/accounts
• Grow a network of friends
• Submit content or collaborate
• Vote on content
• Tag content

Lee Odden rightly says that the above factors are what ‘social’ stands for. The ‘media’ is the platform and the content. Like wiki, forums, threads, blogs, audio-video sharing etc. social news sites are largely used today to generate traffic to a post. Many bloggers have gained popularity owed to the social media sites.

Back in August 2006 Rohit had a good post on Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO).

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The reason that search engine optimization is garnering a negative reputation, however, may actually have more to do with shady social media optimization practices than anything else.

Yes, I

Well utilizing SMO to leverage traffic is a huge advantage to any campaign and knowing HOW to do this is key. I recently created a post on the possible ranking factors on newsvine.com. I examined what could possibly make a article or seed appear on the home page or sub home page for a given tag. Well I just wanted to say “I did IT!!!”.

See the image below showing where I showed up on newsvine.

So what did it take? Let me tell you the state of my profile before making it to the first page.

1) I had about 10 friends

2) I had about 2 articles submitted with 1-3 votes each and NO comments on them

3) I was a member for less then a month and a half

4) 1 person had added me to their watch list

5) Never made a story popular before

What was special about this article that got me on the home page of technology?

1) One of the most popular and well respected people on newsvine made the first comment and that created my first popular comment.

2) In a short period of time I was over 10 votes.

3) I had a large number of comments. About 10 which is pretty decent for newsvine.

4) The article was interesting and inspired controversy.

Any SMO can take this idea and apply it to other social media sites but its all about determining possible ranking factors for each social media site and doing testing, testing and doing more testing.

Somthing I would like to add is the power of seeds Vs. Articles on newsvine. Doing self promotion is against their code of honor but they do provide an area where you can upload full articles of your content. The difference between both is a seed is more like a “digg” and an article is going to be more like uploading content to article distribution sites BUT with more targeted traffic which could bleed over to other forms of traffic redirection.

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My name is Joe Whyte and I have been doing SEO/SEM for over 5 years now. I have worked with fortune 1000 companies helping them to market their products online, improve search engine rankings, increase conversions and draw viable, targeted traffic to my clients sites.

Joe-whyte.com

The topic was initially about Social Media Optimization, but more specifically about the role of marketing with social media in the enterprise and some good discussion about common questions that people are asking about the role of social media in this world. A few topics we cover in the interview are:

1. How is social media different from online forums and other longstanding discussion based sites?

2. What is SMO and why is it getting so popular?

3. What is the potential business value of marketing with social media?

4. How do you navigate the internal sales process required to sell in social media initiatives?

5. What are some big trends in social media for 2007?

Visit Tom’s site at www.talkingportraits.com to download the full podcast.

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Rohit Bhargava is the Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com

In fact, Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations has a terrific blog post which links out to several other posts all related to the same topic.

I think all told we are up to about 20 rules, which is sort of funny, given that the web was never about rules, otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.

Some committee in Washington would still be arguing over whether URLs should start with http:// or site= or some other silliness.

But in reading over the many good natured attempts to offer a set of voluntarily accepted SMO practices, I see very few that get to the very heart of the social media issues public relations professionals face.

I don’t want to lecture and nobody likes being lectured to. So, since I’ve been around doing online publicity since before the first search engine appeared (that’s 1993 folks) here are a few of the “What Not To DO” rules I’d like to share with regards to using Social Media and by extension, Optimization of Social Media.

Rule #1 – Do not create fake accounts (sock puppet accounts) at places like Digg, Del.icio.us, technorati, etc., just so you can fill them with links, diggs, tags, etc., in hopes of artificially boosting your page to the top of those venues.

Fake accounts have been around since the first days of email, and who among us doesn’t have multiple email accounts, or multiple blogs?

So don’t act innocent. If you have a bunch of accounts you create solely for the purpose of creating a false sense of buzz for your own site or your client’s, then stop it.

Use a little discretion and logic when tagging your posts and articles about any given topic

Rule #2 - Limit your ego-diggs. If you ask a friend or two to digg your latest article/blog post, that’s fine, but if you are digg-pandering to hundreds of your “closest pals” then stop kidding yourself. That’s just another form of stuffing the ballot box, and you know it.

Rule #3 – Stop tag abuse. Say you have a client who’s a dermatologist who specializes in the treatment of acne scars. Use a little discretion when tagging your posts or articles about that topic. There are 37,000 posts tagged Acne over at Technorati, but only 356 tagged Acne scars. Bingo. And even within that smaller set of 356 I see plenty-o-tag spam.

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Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

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Eric Ward founded the Web’s first service for announcing, linking, and building buzz for Web sites, back in 1994. His client list is a who’s who of online brands. Ward is best known as the person behind the linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, Weather.com, The Link Exchange, Rodney Dangerfield (Rodney.com), the AMA, and PBS.org. His services won the 1995 Award For Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web’s 100 most influential people by Websight magazine in 1997. Eric is a 4-star speaker at Jupiter’s Search Engine Strategies conferences, and publishes The Ward Report: Link Building and Content Publicity Tactics.

Similar to SEO, SMO applies link and traffic building concepts to the online social networking scene – except with a little more PR built in. At the end of the day, it’s not just about traffic, it’s about branding and consumer associations.

Simply: they see you, they like you, they trust you, they buy what you’re selling.

That takes time and effort, but this is the way (lasting) businesses have been built since the first Neolithic grunt traded a shiny hunk of metal to another Neolithic grunt for one of his famous mammoth-flavored toothpicks. (Ones made of bone, of course. No one likes splinters in their gums.)

The presentation (in case you’ve forgotten by this point, we were at SES Chicago) was kicked off by Neil Patel, cofounder of Advantage Consulting Services, speaking about how to utilize socially-edited Wikipedia. This is a good starting point because many of the guidelines apply to all social marketing.

A warning before we continue: any article submitted to Wikipedia can be edited by another, which means the article needs to be closely monitored for changes, and needs to be somewhat objective and informative from the start. The latter goes for other social media, as a spammy, salesy approach is likely to defeat the original purpose via editorial changes or negative reader response. This is a supplement to the sales cycle, not a closing.

People use Wikipedia for research purposes, so an explanation of the founding of the company, the key people involved, technology developed, approach to business, or any number of topics can help build a positive, rewarding relationship.

Benefits of Wikipedia for your site, according to Patel:

What not to do:

What to do for links:

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, echoed many of Patel’s points, with a few more specifics.

First and foremost is that placement in Wikipedia, a highly dug (i.e., Digg.com), blogged about and linked to submission rules the search engine results on those topics. Fishkin also notes that this can be very influential in the traditional media, who troll social networks and the tops of the search results for information and story ideas.

Fishkin recommends five specific tools:

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Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Panelists include Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Andy Hagans, Todd Malicoat and myself. The SES San Jose version of this panel included Chris Pirillo and Danny was nice enough to allow me on the panel. I am very much looking forward to hearing and participating firsthand with some of the top SMO practitioners.

At Pubcon in Las Vegas WebProNews did a great interview with Rand, Todd and I where we touch on the whole social media optimization and marketing topic. I won’t be giving a Powerpoint presentation at SES, but I will get few minutes to share my thoughts on SMO.

One the one hand, it’s a bit of a departure not being able to make a presentation as the audience does not get a structured sense of your credibility. On the other hand, you don’t have to prepare a presentation and get to slug it out with the other panelists to answer audience questions – possibly doing more than a PPT could to show you know your stuff.

In this regard, here are a few ideas that come to mind for companies and marketers when considering marketing with social media:

Active SMO - More aggressively drawing attention to truly unique and useful content with the opportunity of driving massive amounts of traffic. This typically comes as a result of first page visibility on social news and bookmark services such as digg, Reddit, YouTube, MySpace, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, etc. Gaining first page visibility on popular social news sites also has the secondary effect of exposure on popular sites like Techmeme, popurl and other blogs and news sites that syndicate social news.

Passive SMO – A function of an ongoing process that incorporates social bookmarking into activities like online public relations. Example: using social bookmark services to organize URLs of online news coverage, encouraging press release readers to share that content with others and encouraging users to share other media such as podcasts, images and video. The intention is not to gain first page visibility on social news web sites as much as it is to reap the benefit of the collective effect of hundreds of shared links over time. Typically, each bookmark creates a static url that promotes the company brand name and in many cases, offers a crawlabe URL for search engine spiders fostering link popularity, ie “long tail” link building. Otherwise, the links provide opportunity to capture “long tail” link traffic.

SMO Spam – The increasing popularity of any kind of concerted promotion and opportunity for visibility will bring opportunists drawn to quick and easy results, through tricks and manipulation, ie spam. In previous posts about SMO spam and spamming social media, it has been my position that the communities taking part in the popular social media sites would be adequate in squalling any significant spamming activities. However, people like Nial Kennedy show that is not necessarily the case. I believe a combination of algorithmic and social “policing” is necessary to maintain good enough quality worthy of current participation levels.

If you will be attending SES Chicago, please consider sitting in on this panel as it’s top rated from SES San Jose and should be a great source of information on marketing with social media.

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Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.