Most marketers utilize search engine optimization in order to make it easier for customers to find them and, ultimately, buy their products. As search, social media, and public relations become more intertwined, marketers need to understand that journalists are essentially customers as well.

Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, spoke with WebProNews at OMS and explained this idea. It is no secret that all companies want media coverage since it produces credibility, sales, search visibility, and more. So, what can marketers do to get noticed by journalists?

Based on survey conducted by TopRank, 91 percent of reporters, journalists, and editors used Google to help them find contacts in 2008. Of those surveyed, only 27 percent used social media. However, George Washington University and Cision released a report this year showing that 86 percent of the media use blogs and 64 percent use social media.

What does this tell marketers? According to Odden, marketers need to optimize their content in regards to what journalists are looking for. In other words, he suggests including terms such as “expert” and other credentials, specifications, and trends that journalists would use.

Incidentally, the survey found that TV and online journalists were more apt to use social media to find information.

New to the Online Marketing Summit this year is a special day dedicated strictly to search that is called the Search Engine Strategies Forum. As Incisive Media’s Matt McGowan explains, the two shows came together to provide a more comprehensive view of search.

Incisive’s ClickZ brand first became involved with OMS over a year ago. The two even launched the ClickZ/OMS Whistle Stop Tour, which consisted of marketing and SEO seminars throughout 22 cities in the U.S. over the course of 2 months. McGowan said the tour would take place this summer as well.

At OMS San Diego specifically, the SES Forum will provide information regarding SEO, paid search, social media, and more. McGowan said the day would cover search from an introductory level to an intermediate level.

Keep watching WebProNews for more exclusive coverage of OMS in San Diego.

Many people go to websites everyday and fill out forms, but what happens after they fill out the form? At the Online Marketing Summit, WebProNews spoke with Lauren Vaccarello, the Global Head of Search at Salesforce, about how websites can make sure they are tracking these potential leads.

First of all, you need to know how people get to your form.  According to Vaccarello, Salesforce and others offer solutions that allow this information to be passed through a hidden field. It is an automated solution that not only sorts through the data, but also passes it through an application that builds dashboards, which reveals even more data.

With this information, you can find out important facts such as where your visitors are coming from, who is converting and who is not, where you are spending that is producing profits, and where you are losing money.

After you have gathered this data and analyzed it, you have a stronger knowledge of which leads are worth following up on and how you should approach them.

Posted by willcritchlow

The good news is that tomorrow (Wednesday 24th Feb), at 8.30am PST (11.30am EST / 4.30pm GMT), I am going to be joined on the next Distilled conference call by Richard Baxter as we discuss "how to get the most from your SEO". The even better news is that it is totally free (as long as you register in time).

If you would like to join us on the call, simply register on the Distilled site and you will be sent instructions to join the conference (which will be handled by gotomeeting / gotowebinar).

Previous calls have been more technical and have been essentially presentations that I have delivered with a slide-deck. I did one on SEOmoz tools and one on how to be an Excel ninja – both videos are available on the Distilled site.

This one is going to be a little different. Rich should need little introduction. With a strong background in in-house travel SEO followed by founding his agency, SEOgadget, he is not only a true guru of keyword research and large site architecture, but also has experience on both sides of the client / agency relationship. He also spoke at the London PRO training seminar last October (thanks to foliovision for the photo):

Rich and I plan to let you into a relaxed chat. We might pull up the occasional website or slide but fundamentally, it’ll be a little like sitting in on a live whiteboard Friday (on a Wednesday, without a whiteboard, or Rand!).

The conversation is likely to be pretty free-flowing – in many ways it will lead on from my WBF conversation with Rand about choosing an SEO consultant – but I can’t guarantee exactly what we will talk about! We are intending to cover:

• the best tasks to keep in-house vs. outsource
• combining SEO effectively with PPC, PR and marketing
• integrating SEO into other processes (e.g. development, business development)
• how to get the most from your agency
• how to keep an eye on your agency and avoid bans and penalties
• how to be a great SEO client and get even more out of your agency

We hope to have you there. We will be taking questions – both on Twitter (hashtag: #optimalSEO) and via the chat interface in gotowebinar, but if you have anything you’d specifically like us to cover, feel free to use the comments below to chime in.

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Posted by great scott!

This week we take a look at how shifts in the engines over the last year have made it more important than ever to really pay attention to brand-based marketing.

A year or so ago, the engines started giving more weight to established brands, but things have become more interesting: With enhanced attention to personalized search, click patterns, and brand preferences emerging through individual search history, having an identifiable brand is a huge asset.  Throw in the new aspect of social search–wherein the influences and preferences of your social network are used to influence inform your decisions, and creating an identifiable brand becomes even more powerful.

Watch this week’s video to learn even more about how branding can help you accomplish big things…

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Posted by randfish

I ran across this survey data eMarketer released last week and my heart sank:

 

This first chart looks innocent enough. It’s when you look at the next one (from the same report) that things get ugly:

As a CEO, an SEO, a web marketer and a participant in social media, this drives me absolutely crazy. The very last item on the list is "conversions, ROI, etc." If your pulse isn’t pounding, you might need to cut back on the pharmaceuticals.

Absolutely nothing in the analytics world should trump conversions and ROI for "senior marketers" or anyone else who cares about the success of a company. If you’re thinking in terms of time on site or unique page views as primary metrics – metrics you’d describe in a survey as being those you’re "most interested in" – there’s a big problem. The web as a medium is designed to let you capture data beyond number of viewers or engagement level. It lets you track return visits and actions and build sophisticated models that predict what activities will drive up revenue and earnings in the most cost-effective ways. Why let it go to waste?

This report from Forrester suggests that the spend on web marketing has a lot of growth, and social media in particular is poised for exceptional CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate). But, I’m tremendously concerned that if marketers obsess over metrics like time on site, unique page views and CTR, they’ll miss out on the real opportunity of all these channels.

ROI should be the ultimate metric – it should be the most important thing on every marketer’s mind for every project and every channel. I’ll grant that prioritizing the projects and investments that have the highest return is challenging, and even the best do it imperfectly. What worries me is that there are marketers who may be taking their cues not from the great analytics data suggesting that, although first-time visits from social media may have low value, over time, they can drive greater brand engagement, predict higher rates of repeat visits and eventually become buyers and brand evangelists, but from the onslaught of press coverage and media attention around social networks.

If you’re taking your clues about where to spend your marketing budget from the media, rather than experiments and data, get ready for disappointment. Likewise, if you’re measuring the wrong thing, you’ll never know the right place to spend those dollars.

The beauty of online channels like SEO, landing page testing, conversion rate optimization, email marketing and, yes, social media is that the data tells a story we can read. So long as we’re willing to hear the message, we can draw the connections to find the traffic sources that cost less and earn more. We can invest in those until the ROI from them diminishes to a point where other channels become viable. But only if we’re paying attention to the metrics that matter.

There have been tools, data and experienced professionals in this field, fighting these fights for over a decade now. Tragically, it seems that we’re in for a long slog.

p.s. We’ve filled up about 600/1,000 spots for Thursday’s PRO webinar on SEO Analytics – feel free to join in

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Posted by randfish

How many pages has Google indexed?

This question and the problems surrounding it run rampant through the SEO world. It usually arises when someone starts doing searches like this:

Google claims to have 93,800 pages indexed on the root domain, seomoz.org. That sounds pretty good, but when I ran that search query last week, the number was closer to 75,000 and when I run it again from Google.co.uk 60 seconds later, the number changes even more dramatically:

How about if I hit refresh on my Google.com results again:

Doh! Google just dropped 8,500 of my pages out of their index. That sucks – but not nearly as much as managers, marketing directors and CEOs who use these numbers as actual KPIs! Can you imagine? A number that means nothing, fluctuates 300% between data centers, can change at a moment’s notice and provides no actionable insight being used as a business metric?

And yet… It happens.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get much, much better data than what the search engines provide through "site:" queries and this post is here to walk you through that process step-by-step.

Step 1: Go to Traffic Sources in Your Analytics

Click the "traffic sources" link in Google analytics or Omniture (it can also be called "referring sources" in other analytics packages).

Step 2: Head to the Search Engines Section

We want to find out how many pages the search engines have indexed, so the obvious next step is to go to the "search engines" sub-section.

Step 3: Choose an Engine

 

Choose the engine you want indexation data on and click. If you have both paid and organic traffic from this engine, you’ll want to display organic only at this step, too.

Step 4: Filter by Landing Pages

The "Landing Page" filter in the dropdown will show you the traffic each individual page on your site received from the engine you’ve selected. This also produces the magical "total" number of pages that have received traffic, described in the last step.

Step 5: Record the Number at the Bottom

That count tells you the unique number of pages that received at least one visit from searches performed on Google. It’s the Holy Grail of indexation – a number you can accurately track over time to see how the search engine is indexing your site. On its own, it isn’t particularly useful, but over time (I usually recommend recording monthly, but for some sites, every 2-3 months can make more sense), it gives you insight into whether your pages are doing better or worse at drawing in traffic from the engine.

Now, technically I’m being a bit cheeky here. This number doesn’t tell you the full story – it’s not showing the actual number of pages a search engine has crawled or indexed on your site, but it does tell you the unique number of URLs that received at least 1 visit from the engine. In my opinion this data is far more accurate and more actionable. The first adjective – accurate – is hard to argue (particularly given the visual evidence atop this post), but the second requires a bit of an explanation.

Why is Number of Pages Receiving ≥1 Visit Actionable?

Indexation numbers alone are useless. Businesses and websites use them as KPIs because they want to know if, over time, more of their pages are making their way into the engines’ indices. I’d argue that actually, you don’t care if your pages are in the indices – you care if your pages have the opportunity to EARN TRAFFIC!

Being a row in a search index means nothing if your page is:

• too low in PageRank/link juice to appear in any results
• displaying content the engines can’t properly parse
• devoid of keywords or content that could send traffic
• broken, misdirected or unavailable
• a duplicate of other pages that the engine will rank instead

Thus, the metric you want to count over time isn’t (in most cases) number of pages indexed, it’s number of pages that earned traffic. Over time, that’s the number you want to rise, the number you want marketers to concentrate on and the KPI that’s meaningful. It tells you whether the engine is crawling, indexing AND listing your pages in the results where someone might (has) actually click(ed) them.

If the number drops, you can investigate the actual pages that are no longer receiving traffic by exporting the data to Excel and doing a side-by-side with the previous month. If the number rises, you can see the new pages getting traffic. Those individual URLs will tell a story – of pages that broke, that stopped being linked-to, that fell too far down in paginated results or lost their unique content. It’s so much better than playing the mystery game that SEOs so often confront in the face of "lower indexation numbers" from the site: command.

Some Necessary Caveats

This methodology certainly isn’t perfect, and there are some important points to be aware of (thanks especially to some folks in the comments who brought these up):

• Google Analytics (and many other analytics packages) use sampled data at times to make guesstimates. If you want to be sure you’re getting the absolute best number, export to CSV and do the side-by-side in Excel. You can even expunge similar results from two time period to see only those pages that uniquely did/didn’t receive traffic. In many of these cases, you might also only care about pages that gained/lost 5/10/20+ visits.
• Greater accuracy can be found from shrinking the time period in the analytics, but it also reduces the liklihood that a page receiving very long tail query traffic once in a blue moon will be properly listed, so adjust accordingly, and plan for imperfect data. This method isn’t foolproof, but it is (in my opinion), better than the random roulette wheel of site: queries.
• This technique isn’t going to help you catch other kinds of SEO issues like duplicate content (it can in some cases, but it’s not as good as something like GG WM Tools reporting) or 301s, 302s, etc. which can require a crawling solution.

I’d, of course, love your feedback. I know many SEOs are addicted to and supportive of the site: command numbers as a way to measure progress, so maybe there’s things I’m not considering or situations where it makes sense. I also know that many of you like the number reported in Google Webmaster tools under the Sitemaps crawl data (I’m skeptical of this too, for the record) and I’d like to hear how you find value with that data as well.

p.s. Tomorrow we’ll be announcing two webinars (open to all) about using Open Site Explorer to get ACTIONABLE data. Be sure to leave either Wednesday the 27th at 2pm Pacific or Thursday the 28th at 10am Pacific free

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Last May, British company Interead launched their own e-reader, COOL-ER. This year at CES, the company unveiled 2 new versions of their e-reader that will hit the market this year.

The first is the COOL-ER Compact that includes a 6″ screen and 2 GB of onboard memory. The second is the COOL-ER Connect, which has a 7″ screen and Wi-Fi. These e-readers are both PC and MAC compatible.

What sets COOL-ER apart from Amazon’s Kindle? According to Phil Wood, the Marketing Director at Interead, COOL-ER is more cost-effective since Kindle users must purchase books from Amazon. Interead offers their own e-book store and on their site refers to itself as “the largest ebook store in the world with 2 million titles available – all at least 20% less than the recommended retail price.”

COOL-ER is currently offered in 8 different languages and 8 different color options. The 2 new versions of the e-reader are expected to be available by the end of Q1.

Posted by RobOusbey

To make a valuable impact, SEO has to be understood by more than just an organisation’s search marketers. This post suggests how to explain the concepts, and get buy-in, from different people within an organisation.

I’ve chosen some of the standard roles that you may find in a company or organisation with a web-presence and for each one have listed:

• Their role: a description of their position within the company and their responsibilities.
• Persuade them: once you’ve described SEO, this gives something extra to get them excited about the possibilities of SEO for them / their department, to help get them on side.
• Ask them: I’ve tried to list one particular request you can make to people in each role to benefit the SEO process within your organisation.

In addition, you should remember to give back to each of these stakeholders. There’ll be some metric, data or graphs that will demonstrate to them the ongoing effect they are having on the project, how it has benefited the organisation as a whole, and (for bonus points) how their role has benefited from SEO success. Inspiring people in this way leads to their ongoing commitment, and a successful organisation full of motivated, happy people.

CEO

• Their role: Responsible for the whole company; interested in the ‘big picture’ and needs to be able to justify decisions and costs to the board and shareholders.
• Persuade them: SEO gives a competitive advantage in attracting visitors and customers. Though it requires an initial push of effort, and ongoing resource, the work will show a demonstrable ROI, they’ll be provided with regular figures for the board about the profit generated by SEO efforts.
• Ask them: if there are any questions or objections they have, so that you can answer / resolve them. It can be important to get senior management to understand and appreciate online marketing, both so that they can approve investment in it and so that they will enthuse about & promote the project internally.

CTO

• Their role: Responsible for developing technology within the organisation and we’ll assume in this case responsible for the organisation’s website and online development.
• Persuade them: There is a large technical aspect to optimising a website for search engines – lots of information is available (both officially from the search engines, and recommendations from third parties) but there is work to be done in adapting this best-practice advice to the organisation’s unique needs. However, it’s not an entirely technical process, and much of the ongoing work will be done ‘off-site’, by those in the advertising / promotions teams.
• Ask them: to assign a proportion of their team’s time to SEO – ideally including members from both web development and R&D departments.

Web Designer

• Their role: Designing the look and branding of the organisation’s website
• Persuade them: Designing websites that will adhere to SEO principles need not be a significant constraint. There’s a significant overlap between designing human-usable and SEO-friendly sites, and many of the most well designed & stylish sites follow the appropriate guidelines.
• Ask them: to spend time talking to developers and SEOs about design practices that may harm or hamper SEO, and use this knowledge in their online design work.

Web Developer

• Their role: To turn designs for web pages into code which can be published online.
• Persuade them: By following some relatively straight forward (and typically common-sense) practices when writing code, developers have a vital role in creating pages that can be easily read and understood by search engines. They’ll see the impact of their work very visibly, as pages from the site get indexed and returned in appropriate search results.
• Ask them: to read lots! They can start with SEOmoz’s guides and blog posts (espec. pages from the technical issues category) and should print out the web developer’s SEO cheat sheet. Also, remind them that as easy at this basic best-practice stuff is, lots of people do get it wrong, so they should be prepared to get mad-props from their SEO colleagues for not fouling up this stuff as much as some of the competitors.

Sales Manager

• Their role: In commercial organisations, they’re responsible for the journey through the funnel from enquiry to sale.
• Persuade them: We can use data from the website and experience from the SEO community to target phrases which will generate visits & enquiries from the people most likely to convert into a sale. Their feedback about new enquiries and leads, combined with analytics data, will help tailor the products/services and marketing messages to minimise poor lead for the team and maximise sales profit.
• Ask them: to help with keyword research by giving you the words and phrases that potential customers use to describe their problems or to ask for product types.

Marketing Manager

• Their role: Responsibilities can include product development, advertising, press and promotion.
• Persuade them: Highly ethical SEO can be undertaken by following all the marketing best practices they’re familiar with. Giving a positive experience before and after purchase, creating and fostering conversations around the brand, getting coverage on trusted websites, etc can all contribute to improved rankings. In addition, search engine marketing produces very clear returns in terms of number of visitors, their activity on the site and purchases made / revenue generated – so they’ll be able to demonstrate value and justify ongoing investment in this activity.
• Ask them: to get up to speed on the importance of inbound links, and discover ways that their teams’ activities can help to generate links.

Content Editor

• Their role: Responsibilities may include any of creating, commissioning, editing and publishing content on the site.
• Persuade them: As well as being able to attract more visitors to your content, we can use SEO insights to help generate ideas for new site content that could be particularly successful. We can produce guidelines for your writers to help their content be more successful in search engines, and we can provide statistics that show how successful different pieces of content or different writers have been, to help inspire them to create more great content.
• Ask them: to review analytics and link data with you, to look at what has been particularly successful (in terms of total traffic, links and search traffic) and to try creating copy and content that is more SEO targeted. In addition, talk to them about writing great headlines and about linkbait’ show how their team can create content that goes wild on social networks and gets loads of links.

Community / Outreach Manager

• Their role: Responsible for the organisation’s relationships with individuals on and/or off the site, often with a view to generating conversation about the brand.
• Persuade them: By reaching out to people elsewhere online and encouraging them to mention us & link to the site, you / your team will increase the strength and trust of the site – this increases its ability to receive traffic for relevant search terms. Using tools such as Linkscape, we can show the value of every link you create and help you find new opportunities for outreach and linkbuilding.
• Ask them: to try requesting links from a few people they have close relationships with. Demonstrate how to find new places and people to reach out to and reasons to contact them (such as sharing content, offering resources, writing guest content, offering prizes etc.)

More

Every organisation has different roles, and the roles may have different responsibilities, but this gives some idea of the ways you might persuade different people that they can contribute to and benefit from SEO.

Feel free to use the comments to share any particular advice you have for explaining & promoting SEO internally. If you have any particular objections that come up, do mention them and we’ll see if we can come up with suitable responses.

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Whether or not you’re ready, next year is almost here, and this December-to-January transition point is always a convenient time to consider the direction things are taking. We won’t point you toward any feel-good movies or silly self-help books, though, as Amanda Watlington provided a more useful look at the SEO industry.

Watlington, the founder of Searching for Profit, has dealt in both SEO and marketing for a number of years, and observed that in 2009, “We have seen some of the choppiest economic waters . . . that any of us have endured.” Obviously, this caused a lot of negative effects.

2010’s not looking entirely rosy, either, and in an interview with Abby Johnson, Watlington talked about clients cutting back budgets while expecting better results. She stated that clients can get hung up on old SEO issues that may not matter anymore, too.

Another problem then relates to changes at the search engine level, with Google’s announcement about speed really standing out. Watlington argued that cutting sites’ load times is more of an engineering task, and one that can consume a goodly amount of money at that.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. As she works with retailers, Watlington said, “I’m seeing an actual uptick in purchases.” She also issued a piece of advice that can take companies pretty far: “love your customers.”

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