May 2008

Many successful off-line companies attribute their success to savvy marketing. A question that is frequently asked is, “How can marketing techniques that are utilized in traditional marketing be useful to today’s search engine optimization and marketing professionals and businesses online?”

One form of marketing that is typically utilized in traditional marketing is a media kit. A media kit, traditionally, is a compilation of press releases, news articles, brochures and other notable items for the purpose of informing potential buyers of your company and/or business. Many companies tailor their “media kit” to suit the target market or industry professionals.

When applying the term media kit to online use, the ability to compile the notable materials becomes easier, as digital media is more easy and cost-effective to deploy. A media kit can be as simple as a web page which lists links to proposed included materials or a link to download a document, more than likely a PDF, that includes the same links. This of course is a very simplistic method and not the suggested method of producing a professional online media kit for distribution.

A more complete and appropriate method to building an online media kit would be a web page that captures the users information (more details about this in the next series: How To Use Your SEO Media Kit To Build a Mailing List).

Link building is an active part of off-page search engine optimization (SEO) and one of the toughest to tackle for SEO specialists, webmasters, and the like. Now more than ever the question of ethical, quality link building and link baiting has come about.

Today the following question was proposed by Chris Ellis, Business Development Manager at Greenlight, ”

What constitutes good link building and bad link building?”

(View Complete Question on LinkedIn)

Here is my answer:

“Good Link - a link from an industry related web site, indexed in Google, with minimal outbound links from the linking page. Acquisition time and cost aren’t as relevant as the relevancy of the website, and the all in anchor text coming from the linking web site.

Bad Link - a link from an irrelevant resource with unrelated contextual keyword targeting and more than 20 outbound on-page links.

Time is not relevant to popularity, count is, so quick or slow, it carries no weight.

Ease of acquisition has no bearing as the ease of truly high quality links is based entirely on the quality of your web site as well as the rapport you build with the webmaster of the linking site.

Ethical, well the obvious answer has to do with the quality and integrity of the link builder and how they value the stability and strength of the links they build.

The link building techniques that are utilized to acquire links, in my professional opinion, are acceptable if the best practices and guidelines of the major search engines are followed as well as the link does not risk the quality and integrity of the site in question as well as the site where the link resides.

Remember that search algorithms primary basis are to reflect the natural search habits and desired results of searchers. These are not made up figures, but data driven considerations to increase the quality of the results as they relate to end users.” [click to continue…]

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the use of social networking web sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others in order to increase brand awareness, linking, and traffic to your web site. As time would have it, regardless of whether it is online or offline people still respond best to referral marketing.

How SMM & SEO Work Together

When paired together, SEO and SMM, can be a lethal combination. SEO can bring about brand awareness and allow those who were previously unfamiliar with your business to become more open to the idea as higher rankings are also associated with better service. You also benefit with increases in traffic. Now, how is it that the combination of social media marketing and search engine optimization are lethal? Well, when someone suggests something new to several others, it generates BUZZ! The more people that refer others to the site the more the site’s popularity grows. Bookmarking has become an SMM channel with sites like de.li.cious, stumbleupon, and digg generating tons of views from visitors that typically would be unaware of the web site, as they don’t locate the site because of a search, but because of a referral trend.

Couple people’s natural ability to seek out the things they need with our tendency to consider a referral a more quality source for what we need and you’ve got what I said before, “a lethal combination!”

Killer Combo Meets Disaster

So many already knew that SEO was a great way to build awareness, increase traffic, and ROI. Now you also know that combining natural search with a quality social media marketing campaign can result in even more awareness, traffic and ROI. Now many will dive right in and start a MySpace page for their business or some other well known social networking profile and that’s great…however don’t be fooled by “black hat” methods of SMM.

What’s that you ask? Just like there is a dark-side to SEO, there is a dark-side to SMM.

“Black Hat” SEO - is the use of unethical tactics, such as Link Farms, Redirects, Cloaking and other techniques to rank well in search engines for competitive terms.

Though you may rank well for a small amount of time, Google will catch you!!! Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) has discussed this several times on his blog and every quality search engine optimization consultant or analyst will tell you the same. Adhere to the best practices and you will prevail.

So, just like black hat SEO, we have black hat SMM. This term is for those who abuse their ability to use social media marketing by using automation tools to create accounts, to “friend blast” and submit spammy content to social media syndication sites.

Example: MySpace Friend Blaster PRO…

This tool is used to automate adding of friends, comments, and more. Several unsavory marketers will use a tool like this to build backlinks via MySpace Profile Pages, as well as generate visibility via the network and hoping for trickle through traffic.

Adding profiles under fake names to increase the ranking of your content socially in web sites like digg are also “black hat” SMM methods.

Easy Black Hat Avoidance

If you want your online presence to stay untarnished and rank well in Google as well as generate a constantly growing stream of traffic here are my suggestions:

1. Stay away from automation. If you can’t do it yourself or designate someone from your company then it’s probably not worth doing.

2. Bookmark and generate content that you would find useful and that can be useful to others, not just ad based resources.

3. Utilize social media marketing to grow relationships with your contacts. This will give you returning users/buyers rather than just one time passer-byers who just increase your bounce rate and taint your metrics.

While over at the matt cutts web site, for those unaware, matt is a Google engineer and quite the popular resourceful character when it comes to SEO and Google. He’s a great guy and has worked on several projects with algorithm Guru Jerry West.

So while surveying matt’s newest updates, I came across a comment regarding PageRank and its importance. By the way, definitely check out matt’s google hacks book review it’s definitely worth a look for anyone wanting some tips on how to use Google’s free services beyond their boasted features.

Back to the comment, the user asked how important is PageRank.  I noticed that the comment was so dated that matt probably just didn’t see it as it was part of his archives, but what a great question!

Most people think that PageRank is link popularity and that if they plaster the web with hundreds of in-bound links, Google will have a parade and give them the oh so coveted PageRank.  Let’s be honest, that’s a pipe dream and many users simply build sites in order to sell link space to prey on these sad masses who think this is the way to Google’s PR heart.

What’s great about Google, unlike other search engines is that they do their best to tell you how important each factor is to your web site and how to gain a better position in their search engine.  Any good SEO Specialist has mosied on over to the Google Technology page and found out what exactly Google defines PageRank as:

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

The points that I found most relevant to DIY SEOers or those curious about how search works are highlighted orange.  Needless to say, keeping up with who your links, weighing link reputation and keeping records of added links…say a link inventory is a very good idea if you look at what Google is saying.

PR is very important, if your topic is considered important (i.e. highly competitive keywords), otherwise it’s safe to say, if you build it…SEO it, they may come, but PageRank doesn’t guarantee it.  Just look at the many web sites with high PR and low SERPs (search engine ranking positions).

Next I’ll discuss, faking PageRank and how it affects your link building efforts.

These days the term optimization is used quite frequently. Go to any industry related conference or gathering and even the most savvy marketers are discussing how they have to learn more about search engine optimization and search marketing, then referring to web site optimization and using the terms interchangeably.

I think that these terms need some clarification, as I’ve recently had several requests for web site optimization.

Here’s how the two are defined:

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the altering of web site titles, tags, and content and some times code & structure for the purpose of gaining better visiblity in search engines.

Web Site Optimization* is the development and testing of various content combinations in order to calculate the best method of presenting content to visitors in order to increase conversions.

*(Resource: Google Analytics Blog)

Now, if you take into account search engine marketing, which includes content and design testing, landing page development, and whose overall purpose increased conversion rates. Then web site optimization, coupled with search engine optimization, with the addition of link building, is what defines search engine marketing.

For more in-depth information regarding search engine optimization, web site optimization, and search marketing contact an experienced SEO Specialist.