Ideas for Business

You could turn off blog comments on your business blog but I agree with Chuck Crawford. Having blog comments is a good idea. He gives at least two reasons why.

First, comments give you free content. This is good from a search engine standpoint, because the keywords on the comments may help you rank for more search terms.

Second, comments allow your blog to turn into a community instead of just you speaking on your soapbox. Community can’t happen unless people are allowed to speak. And community is what many people are looking for on the web.

I’d like to add two more reasons.

As your blog increases in traffic, your comments will increase. This will improve the perceived value of your site and you’ll gain repeat visitors. Social proof is a powerful force. People will think, “Hm. Many people are commenting. It must be a good blog.” But you need to allow comments for this to happen.

Finally, you can get great feedback in the comment section. This feedback is valuable to improving your site, products, and services.

If you’re worried about comment spam, there are programs that can help. For example, Akismet works really well for WordPress blogs.

And if you don’t want certain types of comments (like hateful or off-topic ones), you can add a comment policy. Just make sure your readers know about the policy. I would place a link to it near the comment text box.

We continue our series of weekly SEO basics questions and answer today with a question that acknowledges the value of approaching search engine optimization holistically, but indicates a desire to keep things simple and focus on the basics.

“… you mentioned to use a holistic approach to aid in a better SEO, but specifically what might be the “top 3″ things can I do or focus on my website to best help improve my search rankings on Google”

Since Google dominates the search marketplace, you can read their “How can I create a Google-friendly site?” recommendations.  SEO is a big topic and many web site owners are overwhelmed, feeling like it’s simply too much to handle, getting “fire hosed” with information from consultants. As a result, they look for bit sized chunks of information - tactics. Sometimes these individual tactics can make a dent in the problem, but not considering the overall picture including current site, competition, online marketplace, resources, ongoing marketing and analytics can result in lost opportunity and bottom line lost revenue.

The smart answer to the question about “top three SEO tactics” to focus on starts with an evaluation of the site in question to see if there are any immediate, high impact opportunities such as unblocking search engine spiders from crawling the site or assessing the content management system and any other major possible barriers to getting crawled and included.

Assuming those questions are solved and the market for the web site is well understood, the next thing is to make sure the site content is targeting the right keywords. Understanding what potential customers are looking for and applying that insight with a content creation and promotion strategy is instrumental for optimial search engine visibility.

There are a variety of free keyword tools to do research on what types of words are being used to find the kinds of products/solutions offered on your web site including the Google Keyword Tool, Google’s Trends for Websites and the Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Research Tool. You can also find a list of the best keyword research tools in this list (as voted by our readers).

The second thing to do is to apply the keyword research you’ve done to the web site and content being published to the web.  Make sure each web page contains unique, descriptive text using relevant and popular keywords. The key on-page influences of keywords on search engine rankings include:

* Keywords in the title tag
* Keywords in text links to your web pages from other relevant web sites
* Keywords in the copy of your web pages
* Keywords used in links between pages of your site

The last thing I’d recommend (I guess this is 4, not 3 tips) is to tell other sites related to your topic about your site and attract links. The bottom line recommendation with link building is to create content worth linking to. But then you need to tell other web sites about it or they won’t know to link to you. This is especially true with new web sites.

Be a resource for your industry and create content of value to potential customers to make the job of finding, evaluating and buying your products/services easier.  It’s also important to create the kind of content that other influential web sites and blogs will want to link to.

For a retailer, this might mean writing product reviews and buying guides. Don’t limit the content to text either. Use images, audio and video. Also, you don’t need high end video production to create a popular video on the web.  For a BtoB company, this might mean a blog that offers a conversational version of your industry point of view, problems/solutions and how that relates to companies in the industries you serve.

Package content so that it’s easy for others to share and pass along. Be consistent in your keyword messaging and branding so that influentials in your industry associate your brand name with the main keywords you want consumers to find you with.

Obviously, you could drill down very deeply into specifics about SEO and marketing tasks from competitive research to using other channels to web analytics, but lets keep this simple.  The top 3 or 4 things to focus on for improved search visibiliy (in my opinion) are:

1. Make sure search engines have no difficulty in finding and understanding your web site
2. Research the keywords that are most meaningful for your customers
3. Use those keywords in your content
4. Create content and promote content that makes it easy for customers to buy and easy for influentials to link to your resources

What are your top 3 or 4 SEO tips?

Sponsored By: Searchnomics Social Media Conference San Francisco Oct 29-30

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Today I did a webinar with PRWeb on how to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results by using online public relations tactics. With 15 minutes to present, there wasn’t a lot of tactical detail. At TopRank we’ve done a pretty good job at identifying trends in a way small and large business marketers can understand. Concepts like “push and pull PR”, “digital asset optimization” and “press release optimization” have helped many marketers realize the benefits of SEO from different perspectives. The embedded slides below touch on several of these concepts:

Of course, feedback and questions are always welcome. The webinar had about 350 participants online and there were well over 70 questions posed.

Sponsored By: PRSA International Detroit 10/25-28 Preconference Workshop: Search Engine Optimization for News

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Over the weekend, Online Marketing Blog posts as well as my interactions on Twitter took on a decidedly “public relations” flavor with TopRank’s involvement at the 2008 PRSA International conference.  The event is now done and everyone should be back in the swing of things back in the office.

This year TopRank had 2 speaking slots (a workshop and a panel) plus Account Manager Mike Yanke and Media Relations Associate Nicole Leach stayed busy attending sessions, keynotes and blogging.

The theme of this year’s event was “The Point of Connection” and I think the reference served the interests of attendees well. Social technologies were top of mind for attendees, speakers and the event itself with all the blogging, Twittering and real world networking going on. PR professionals from across the globe converged on Detroit to learn, recognize their peers, conduct business and most of all to connect.

The exhibit hall area offered a variety of products and services to choose from and was well laid out and well attended, which was something many exhibitors appreciated.

While I didn’t get to visit much of Detroit outside of Sweet Lorraine’s for the PR Tweetup and Tom’s Oyster Bar for the PR Technology Section dinner, I did have this rather stoic view from my hotel. Many other photos can be found on TopRank’s PRSA 2008 set on Flickr and the official PRSA photo pool.

Here’s a wrap up of the posts Mike and Nicole posted here and over at Media Relations Blog:

• PRSA International Conference Detroit: A Halloween Perspective - Mike
• PRSA International 2008: Evolution of Communication - Nicole
• True Tales of Social Media Measurement & Analytics - Mike
• Word-Of-Mouth Media Relations: What Really Works? - Nicole
• Embracing Social Media and Deriving ROI - Nicole
• Word of Mouth Online or Off – What’s The Difference? - Mike
• PRSA 2008 Detroit Conference Photos - Lee
• New Influencers of Social Media Marketing - Nicole
• Media Myths & Realities - Mike
• Giving Back To Those Who Impact PR - PRSA Keynote Mitch Albom - Nicole
• Craig Newmark Keynote: Social Media and Democracy PRSA 2008 - Nicole
• The Changed PR Landscape – What Works, What Doesn’t - Mike
• Virtual Reality: New Platform for Media Relations - Nicole
• What’s The ROI On Your Press Release? - Mike
• Current Consumer Trends & Communicating with Green Media - Mike

Thank you to Mike and Nicole for doing a great job blogging the event - this was definitely a “working” conference.  A big thanks also goes out to PRSA staff Judy Voss and Colleen Seaver from Professional Development, our PRSA clients Ann Caggiano and Richard Specter and PRSA President and COO Bill Murray.

Find other blog posts on sessions offered at PRSA 2008 on the official PRSA blog, ComPRehension.

Sponsored By: Digital Publishing & Advertising DPAC II Next wave of digital content & ads October 27th & 28th NY Marriott Marquis

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There are times when you`ll find that your muse has vanished and there is no news to include in your email marketing. What should you do? Just wait or force something out?

This depends greatly on how you have structured your email marketing. If you`ve been sending out emails on a regular basis, say weekly, then you`ll need to keep up with that schedule. On the other hand, if you have no set schedule and only send out something when there is news, you can probably wait a little longer. A good rule of thumb is to have some type of contact with your subscribers at least once a month.

With email marketing, if you can`t think of something to say, you don`t want to send out junk since this will cause people to unsubscribe. Instead, why not try one of the following:

• List tips for using your product
• Offer a review of a site or product
• Answer a reader question
• Reprint an article from a long time ago, over a year, preferably

Email marketing can be a bit of a challenge when you lack inspiration, but if you keep a few extra articles on hand, you can buy yourself time to find your muse again.