Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Begins :: SEO News and Comment
May 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Andy Beal at MarketingPilgrim.com opened up the 3rd annual Search Engine Marketing Scholarship, open to anyone who wants to write an article about SEO, PPC, or SMO (social media optimization) and have a chance at more than $10,000 worth of prizes! Beyond writing the article, your next task is to get your article some traffic! […]
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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Interview of Neil Patel, Social Media Marketing Legend :: Text Adds Do’s and Don’ts
May 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I have been going to SEO conferences for many years, and it seems Neil Patel was at every one of them…always laughing, joking, and having a good time. I went from obscurity to being somewhat well known on the web from 2003 to 2005 and Neil did the same, but started about a year later. In addition to learning so much about social media, Neil shares tips on Pronet Advertising, runs ACS SEO, and created a start up named Crazy Egg. I asked him about his rapid accent and where he sees the future of social media heading.
True (and perhaps humbling story here)…a person I know said that they thought you were “the annoying kid at conferences,” and then about 6 months later the same person said that you were the unsung hero and up and coming star in the field of SEO…and they were following everything you did. What did you do that made such a big impact in such a short period of time?
Great story, but I am probably still the annoying kid at conferences. 
The main thing that took place in that short period of time was that I started leveraging social sites like Digg. When I started I was the highest ranked SEO on social sites like Digg and at one point I had a 75% success ratio.
The only other thing that happened in that period of time was that I started blogging and speaking at conferences. Once I started sharing my knowledge people started, somewhat, listening to what I had to say.
There is a lot of controversy in the online marketing space…with various marketers comparing who has a bigger penis (or, perhaps, who can act like a bigger penis) virtually every day. How did you get well known while avoiding much of the hollow self-promotional hype and conflict that is associated with so many other well known internet marketers?
My philosophy is that someone is always going to have a bigger penis than you, so might as well not try to compete and do the best you can do. Instead of getting involved with the self-promotional hype, I just concentrate on sharing my knowledge (similar to you), which I think helped with my personal brand.
And the main key to my success was that I let everything out. Because sooner or later others are going to know what you know, so might as well be the one to tell them.
Many bloggers have grown to (at least claim to) hate SEO. I go to lots of the top tech blogs and I see ACS logos on many of them. How did you build all those relationships and get that exposure? If I was just starting out in the SEO field today would that still be possible?
Bloggers in general don’t like paying for things and many of them believe that SEO is bullshit. So what I did was approach all the Technorati Top 100 bloggers and tell them that I could increase their traffic for free. And if I increased it drastically in return I would appreciate if they could place my company’s logo on their blog.
By offering this, they did not have much to lose. In today’s market it is probably more difficult to do this because most bloggers have already been approached. But either way, there is no harm in trying.
Have you ever had any linkbaits bomb, or worse yet, backfire? What are the lessons you learned the hard way when it comes to social media marketing?
I can’t recall of any linkbaits that have bombed or backfire. Some did not succeed, but none have really hurt my clients or me. The only thing that backfired for me was that people found out my Digg user name and started publicly bashing me that I was getting paid submissions from a lot of the Technorati Top 100 blogs. The funny thing about it was that those bloggers never paid me a cent and all the companies that did pay me never got called out.
With many people talking about gaming Digg it seems like they do not like people who create content that is targeted to their user’s interests. As a marketer, is it worth the effort to target Digg? Does my site’s general theme need to be aligned with that community?
It is definitely worth targeting Digg because it is a good place to obtain links. The trick with Digg is not to try and game the system, but instead to provide valuable content to the community. If your content is good enough you can still do somewhat well even if the community doesn’t like your sites theme.
For example, if I recall correctly your site made Digg for your Firefox extension. Even though they hate SEOs, you still got on the front page.
How do you come up with strategies for what topics to go after with linkbait? Roughly what is your success rate with launching linkbaits? How many links do your average linbaits get?
We come up with linkbait topics through brainstorming sessions. By passing ideas off to each other, sooner or later we come up with content ideas that can work. As for our success rate, we usually sit around the 50% mark with short linkbait pieces and around 80% with the in-depth pieces.
As for the average link count, it is around the 200 mark. This is probably a lot lower than the industry average, but in our count we don’t include links from the social networks. Also some search engines may show a certain blog is linking to your site 20 times, but we only count that as 1 link.
Do you target mainly social media sites with linkbait, or do you also pitch them to bloggers? If you pitch, how do you prevent it from backfiring?
We target bloggers as well as social sites. The best way to prevent this from backfiring is to first research a blogger you want to solicit. Make sure you truly understand the type of things they blog on because the last thing a blogger wants is to be approached to write on something that isn’t of their interest. After you have a list of bloggers that you want to hit up, then you want to write a tailored email (maybe with a bit of humor) to them. When doing this be honest as possible because people hate fake emails with tons of fluff.
Are most of your linkbait ideas temporal, or do they tend to have an evergreen aspect where they keep building links?
Most of our linkbaits have an evergreen aspect. Some are time sensitive, which means they stop building links after a while. But we prefer to create timeless linkbaits because this allows them to continually build links over time.
Is YouTube important? Do you have anyone you recommend for creating video content?
YouTube is very important in my opinion. If you are trying to brand your company, yourself, or just create buzz, you should consider YouTube. Billions of people visit YouTube and if you can get them to watch your video, that is effective marketing. Just think about how much companies spend on TV advertising. If you can get a video to the homepage of YouTube the effect can be much greater then any TV advertising, and it will be a lot cheaper.
Widgets have become popular in the SEO space recently. As more sites add social function will widgets continue to grow in popularity, or will they fade out? How important is it to integrate your site with social networks?
Widgets will continue to grow as long as the functions they add are useful. People like cool things such as social functions, but as they stop providing value people will remove them. The ones that do provide value will continue to grow.
I think it is very important to integrate your site with social networks because it turns your website into a community. This way you will be able to better understand your visitors and you will be able to get to know them on a personal level.
OpenSocial and other APIs are trying to help small sites bolt social aspects on to their sites. For a small company do you think it is more effective for them to blog, or create a community of sorts using something like Google Friend Connect or Ning? When do you prefer blogs? When do you prefer forums or social networks? When do you prefer not adding any social stuff but rather tapping into other social networks? What types of sites should have social aspects to them?
I think it is important for companies to do both, but I would first start off with a blog. Blogs have become common and more businesses are starting to use them. It is a great way to communicate to your client base as well as potential clients. And most importantly blogs are a tool that allows you to share your knowledge with the masses.
As for communities, it is usually effective to use them when you have tons of traffic or a large user base. If your company is just starting off, or if you are just starting a new site, it is probably not wise to make your site too social. The reason for this is because there will be very little use of your social features without a strong user base. And if you still want social features even if you are just starting out, I would leverage other social networks so you can tap into their user base.
When it comes to forums or social networks, I prefer forums when it comes to sharing knowledge between users. If you are trying to create interaction between users social networks do a better job.
Lastly, almost any site could use social features. But before you add them you need to make sure these features will benefit your users instead of just creating noise. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.
Do you ever see usage data and social voting taking the place of links as the backbone of Google’s relevancy algorithms? Or do you feel much of that data is already reflected in linkage data?
I think much of that data is already reflected in linkage data. If you think about the sites that people most use or the sites that people vote for on the social web, they are the ones that usually have thousands of links. The sites that don’t do well on the social web or are not often used, usually don’t contain tons of links.
You were ahead of the curve on the social media and linkbaiting stuff a few years back. Where are you looking now? What should online marketers really be looking out for in the next couple years? Where should we focus our efforts?
Currently I am looking at the social networks and analyzing their growth rate. Social networks are growing at an extremely high viral rate, and why shouldn’t normal sites also experience that growth rate. I think marketers should look at the social web and see how we can bring those same principles to the rest of the web.
Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Reddit and just the tip of the iceberg. If applications on Facebook can get a few hundred million pageviews, there is no reason why more websites can’t experience that traffic level. And more importantly as sites like Facebook grows they have a strong understanding of their user base, due to the data they are collecting. If we can collect Facebook type of data for all the sites on the web it will allow them to grow their traffic faster and more importantly increase their bottom line. I know this easier said than done, but hopefully it will happen sooner or later.
Thanks Neil!
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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50+ Sites To Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company! :: Web Optimization Techniques
May 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Jeff Quipp writes, "Have you ever had a client come to you in a state of desperation, begging for help to remove a blog post that ranks for their business name, and portrays them in less than a positive light?" Jeff goes on to list 50+ social sites
67 Vote(s)
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
When Duplicate Content Really Hurts :: Pay Per Click Campaigns
May 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted by Eric Enge
Intro from Rebecca: Eric Enge is a guest blogger for SEOmoz. His posts primarily focus on link building, but he has tackled other topics as well. He has previously written about the role of outbound links, various ways to pursue links, the role of directories in link building, Google’s Ajax APIs, and how he doesn’t buy links. Today he’ll be shifting gears a bit and will be talking about duplicate content. Enjoy!
Conventional wisdom among experienced SEOs is that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. In general principle, this notion is true, but there are exceptions to this rule. In other words, duplicate content penalties do exist for certain scenarios, and that is what we are going to discuss in this post.
The Conventional Wisdom
Once again, the conventional wisdom is almost always right. Here it is:
- Duplicate content can occur within a site, or across different sites.
- A page can be considered duplicate without being identical.
- The search engine wants to publish one version of a particular piece of content in their index. This is fundamentally because if a user gets a set of search results, goes to an article, and decides that is not what they want and returns to the search engine to check out other results, giving them another copy of the same article does not help them.
So fundamentally, what search engines implement is a filter. So far so good. Now let’s talk about the consequences:
- Search engine bots come to a site with a crawl budget, which is counted in the number of pages they plan to crawl in each particular session. Each time it crawls a page that is a dupe (which is simply going to be filtered out of search results), you have let the bot waste some of its crawl budget. That means fewer of your "good" pages will get crawled.
- Links to duplicate content pages represent a waste of link juice. Duplicated pages can gain PageRank, or link juice, and since it does not help them rank, that link juice is misspent.
- Lastly, no search engine has offered a clear algorithm for how a search engine picks which version of a page is does show. In other words, if it discovers 3 copies of the same content, which 2 does it filter out? Which one does it still show? Does it vary based on the search query? The bottom line is that the search engine might not do what you want it to do.
While some SEOs may debate some of the specifics above, I think that the general structure will meet with agreement across most SEOs. So, now let’s talk about a couple of problems around the edge of this model.
Problem Numero Uno
It’s that last bullet in the list of consequences. For example, on your site you may have a bunch of product pages, and also offer print versions of those pages. The search engine might just pick the print page as the one to show in its results. This does happen at times, and it can happen even if the print page has lower link juice and will rank less well then the main product page.
I saw this with a recent client. The fix was to nofollow links to the print pages and no noindex those pages as well. Once this was implemented, everything improved significantly for them.
Strictly speaking, no penalty was in fact assessed. However, picking a lower ranking version of the page to show sure felt like a penalty.
A second version of this can occur when you syndicate content to 3rd parties. The problem is that the search engine may boot your copy of the article out of the results in favor of the version in use by the person re-publishing your article. This also does happen. The best fix I know for this, other than noindexing the copy of the article that your partner is using, is to have them implement a link back to the original source page on your site. Search engines nearly always interpret this correctly, and emphasize your version of the content when you do that.
Once again, perhaps no penalty was assessed, but it still sure feels like one.
An Actual Penalty Situation
The above examples are not actual penalties, but for all practical purposes have the same impact as a penalty - lower rankings for your pages. But there are scenarios where an actual penalty can occur.
I worked on one site that was aggregating content from many sources (from thousands of sites). More than 60% of the pages on the site contained content that could be found on those other sites. The value add of the site was in the unique categorization and organization of the content, and in the value-added information about each of the sources.
The site did very, very well for many years. But then the bottom fell out of the whole thing. Traffic dove to less than 20% of its highest levels. The great majority of pages were in the supplementals (back when these were still visible) and even ranked below pages on sites that had duplicated the content from them. The business was fundamentally in ruins.
We were able to rehabilitate the site and get it to about half its original traffic levels. The only thing we did was significantly reduce the amount of duplicate content. By getting it to these lower levels, we apparently got it below a threshold that made Google like the site again.
Summary
We do have scenarios where the way that the search engines select which version of a particular article to show is, for all intents and purposes, a penalty. While the search engine people I have spoken to would not call that a penalty, to a publisher it is. Regardless of what you call it, these are scenarios you need to avoid because they hurt your site.
In addition, real duplicate content penalties do exist. The scenario may need to be extreme, but it can, and does, happen.
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Weekly Search Buzz Roundup: Microsoft and Yahoo Break Up, SEO Debate Back, & Dinner with Barry :: Search Engine Marketing News
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dear all, it is raining and icky outside, so today’s a good day for a buzz roundup. Enjoy.
Landing Page Load Time: Check
Your Google AdWords Quality Score now factors in your landing page load time. If you have a fast landing page, you’ll get a great score. In other words, get good hosting!
Google Adwords Enforces Display URL
It only took a few months since Google wanted to enforce the URL display policy so that the landing page URL would match the display URL in Google AdWords campaigns, and now the policy seems to be in full force with pretty much accurate reporting.
Strange Google Rankings Still Plaguing the Internets
Barry likes to coin phrases, and in this case, floating four seems pretty accurate. He mentions that some results in position 4 seem to be floating around — they show up on the first page, 4th ranking, but then later disappear. There are at least two people who noticed this strange behavior and we’re not sure what to make of it.
The minus 60 penalty is not an illusion, according to Google. Google has admitted that it’s a real penalty, and that this penalty usually involves cleaning up spam.
In our May 2008 Google SERP update, we’re seeing some big traffic declines, which may be related (or not) to the aforementioned symptoms.
Google AdWords and AdSense Reports Displaying Incorrect Data
Earlier this week, AdSense and AdWords data was not being properly recorded and Google’s engineering team took a looka at it. The next day, Google acknowledged that they fixed the problem but some people are still reporting inaccurate data.
Microhoo is Not in the Future
After all that anticipation, Microsoft has decided not to buy Yahoo. So long, Microhoo.
Setting Your Geographic Location in Google Webmaster Tools May Not Work
It seems that setting your geographic location in Webmaster Tools may not necessarily give you the rankings you’re hoping for. For example, if you have a .com and you’re in the UK, and you set your site to the UK geographic region, you’re probably not as lucky as the person who has the .co.uk domain, it seems. UK people, give the US folks your .coms (I’m talking to you, Tamar!) 
Please Tell Me that This is a Joke
If Google AdWords are really going Comic Sans, I’m going to puke. Worst. Font. Ever.
Yahoo’s Universal Search is Here
It’s time for Yahoo Universal Search, at least in India where Glue Pages are in beta. My verdict: very nice.
Monday is the Best Day for Google AdSense Payouts
Want Google AdSense money? Yoru best bet is to focus on monetizing your Mondays. We polled you, our valuable readers, and found that most of you are making the most of your dough on the first day of the week. I guess that’s when people get click-happy from work boredom.
SEO Debate is Back
We love SEO. Seriously. Every day, there’s another debate about SEO, and a bunch of people always come up to defend it. I am waiting for Danny Sullivan’s post on how SEO is here to stay. I know he’s working on it.
Win a Date with Barry
We’re having a reader survey, and the winner gets some schwag and a free dinner with Barry. Now this guy is a fun date, so I suggest that you all participate right now!
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Tags: SEO Tools Search Engine Optimization Social Marketing Furl Furl
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Customer Service Protocol 101: The Revised Edition :: Web Optimization Techniques
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Posted by Jane Copland
I apologise for another Facebook-centred post, but something interesting happened to me this week. I also realise that it is a bit strange to title an original post, "The Revised Edition," but this is indeed a complete re-write of my first draft. My initial post was titled, "Cusomter Service Protocol 101: Threaten To Ban Your Most Loyal Users," and it was quite the diatribe. You see, on Monday Facebook threatened to ban me. They said I had been caught spamming. I became very angry, as I hadn’t spammed anyone. I’m also one of Facebook’s biggest fans in an environment where everyone has something bad to say about the company.
This is the pop-up I received whilst reading a message thread between myself and Julie Joyce, who claims that she didn’t find my early-morning ramblings particularly spammy at all:
I read through a selection of items on Facebook’s Warnings page which highlights some of the things you aren’t meant to do with certain features. I did notice that some of its rules about how one is supposed to use its private messaging system are a little over the top, but I didn’t think I’d been sending messages at quite the rate that would set of its spam warnings:
Facebook has determined that you were sending messages at a rate that is likely to be abusive. Please note that these blocks can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Unfortunately, we cannot lift the block for you.
Facebook has several features in place to limit the potential for abusive or annoying behaviors on the site. One of these features is a cap on the speed and frequency at which a user sends messages to other users.
I am not the first person who has been unfairly warned or banned for various crimes. It seems as though you can be done for anything, including (apparently) refreshing a page too often or using the site’s search feature too much. Good thing Twitter doesn’t get upset at you for refreshing its pages, or I’d have been ousted when I put it on auto-refresh about a month ago.
I assumed that I’d been sending messages to Julie too quickly. We were using the message service as a Chat client, which is also apparently verboten. The problem with the stringent rules Facebook has on what you can do with its message services (and a whole lot of other features) is that those rules are carefully hidden. The warnings page isn’t exactly easy to find. You can break their rules rather easily, it seems:
Please note that even if all of your conversations were legitimate interactions with friends, our message service is not a chat client, and should not be treated as such.
This astounded me. You cannot tell me that my conversations are taxing the servers to breaking point and they’d be doing a lot better if I used their new Chat client or, better still, someone else’s. Can you imagine this coming from Gmail? In my pissed-off state, I imagined it for you.
Surely it isn’t a good practice to provide services and limit their usage in ways that most people wouldn’t think of? Online, unless we’re explicitly told, I think we tend to take the liberties of web services for granted. Go through the Warnings page: would you ever have thought that a couple of those things were against the rules? Surely the lesson here is that you shouldn’t be surprised when people break your rules if your rules are a) hidden, and b) unintuitive.
However, when I stepped back from how pissed off I was, I could see why Facebook has some of the idiotic rules. (In my original draft, that sentence was in the present tense.) The company has a reputation as the home of privacy and purity online. Recent failures aside, its reputation as being relatively safe was deserved. There is another lesson here: once you start really angering your loyal users, they stop being loyal.
Imagine my surprise when, almost twenty-four hours after my message to them, I received the following email:
"Hi Jane,
We are aware of the problem that you described and hope to resolve it as soon as possible. This warning is an error and you can ignore it without consequence. Sorry for any inconvenience. Let me know if you have any further questions.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Sydney
User Operations
Facebook"
I immediately had to delete about half of this post. To me, this looks like a real reply from an actual human being. This is very different to Rand’s current communication with Twitter about the Twitter username "seomoz." As you can see, Twitter indicates that twitter.com/seomoz does not exist, but when we try to register it for our own use, the system tells us that the name is taken. Having contacted Twitter some days ago, Rand still hasn’t heard back.
It’s kind of sad that I’m impressed by the fact that I received a response from a real person. I’ve heard so many negative stories about what happens when you try and contact companies like Digg that I expected to be treated in a similar fashion. My only experience with contacting Facebook in the past was in 2005: I was researching online hate speech for a university project and wanted to include Facebook Groups in my discussion. I received responses back then, but the site is a different animal now to what it was three years ago.
I realise this is a little off-topic, but it highlights the connection between customer service and loyalty. The little episode also shows the dangers of creating rules that many people will unintentionally break whilst carrying out totally legitimate tasks.
Perhaps it’s also a lesson in letting machines decide what constitutes spam (again, see the Warnings page for a full list of offenses. Some are totally legitimate. Others are questionable). Of course, from a search engine’s perspective, they must rely on computers to go at fast speeds through data that a human could never begin to comprehend. In the space between Google and a site like SEOmoz, for example, sometimes a bit more human interpretation could be of use. For now, I’m thankful to Sydney from Facebook for not kicking me off. Although I’ll wait a couple of minutes before I send Julie another message.
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Tags: Web Design Facebook Technorati Stumble Autoprimemedia
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Yes Shoemoney SEO Does Have a Future :: Expert Advice on Web Site Optimization
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Now Shoemoney is a friend of mine, but regarding his post SEO Has No Future today, I am forced to disagree with him.
67 Vote(s)
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Tags: SEO Web Design Social Marketing Technoratri Reddit
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
The Google Content Ad Fraud Lawsuit: Just the Facts, Ma’am :: Search Engine Tools
May 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Google’s being sued for tricking advertisers into advertising on its content network – but the truth may be more damning than the lawsuit claims. Or is there a fatal mistake in the lawsuit filing?
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Tags: SEO Tools Search Engine Marketing Social Marketing Technoratri Facebook
Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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3 Tips to Kill Passive Verbs & Wasted Words :: Pay Per Click Campaigns
May 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
One of my worst writing habits is writing filler text, the most common offense being passive verbs. Here are the 3 things that help me write clearer using fewer words:
- Read every day. We emulate what we consume. When I go months without reading books I can feel my writing getting looser. Many great authors, like Stephen King, also offer free writing tutorials.
- Stylewriter highlights writing errors. It costs $150, but is cheap if you want to write for a living.
- Twitter offers 140 characters. Many 160 character messages fit in 140 characters when optimized.
What are your favorite writing tips & tricks?
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Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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How to Sell Remnant Ad Inventory :: Google Page Rank Update
May 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment
ESPN recently decided to stop selling remnant ad inventory via automated ad networks / exchanges.
“We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,” said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales. Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks’ growth. Turner’s digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent.
The two logical options from there are
- set a floor price on house content and show fewer ads to offer a better user experience
- look at currently hot stories, key markets in the weeks and months ahead, and market positions where you are close to leading but do not yet dominate and advertise your own products and services
- Advertise branded widgets that go on third party networks which help get your brand exposure on those as well. ESPN should have made an official NCAA bracket gadget rather than letting that traffic and branding and traffic go to Google
- add interactive features to your own site which increase brand loyalty and reduce content creation costs…which end up making the ad networks a more viable offering for back-fill content
- If the ad networks are too cheap buy out inventory on competing sites to further distance yourself from them as the market leader.
All of those strategies allow you to buy market-share in your vertical on the cheap. The more of your market you own the better you will be able to sell ads for. If ESPN was 60% of the sports market Nike would be required to buy ads with them, largely based on ESPN’s terms. Part of being remarkable is about creating featured content, but an equally important piece is making sure you are branded as the leading source. There is no better place to market your content and ideas than your own site.
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Tags: SEO Tools Digg Technoratri Facebook Furl
Social Media Marketing is sweeping the ‘Net now as the best way to market. Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon are helping sites get additional traffic, and working to achieve a better backlink strategy. Search Engine Optimization techniques vary greatly, and you should research the company you hire to help you with this. Make sure everything that is promised to you is in the form of a contract.
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