SES Toronto – Is Twitter A Time Waster?

Rahaf — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:43:32 +0000

I felt this panel was a little over specific. Maybe instead of talking about Twitter, the panel could have focused on micro-blogging trends. In fact, I would have loved to hear their thoughts on the entire market including friendfeed.com and other social aggregators that are forcing marketers to widen their social media strategy. I mean sooner or later, Twitter will be replaced by something else, but it’s the fundamental way that people are communicating that is really important.

What Twitter teaches me, (although no one asked me what my opinion was,lol) was how we are evolving to a bite-sized way of communicating. To me that will have a lot of impact on how I craft a communication strategy, brand identity and feel, and how I express those things to my clients. Anyway, the panel was a good intro to the variety of uses for Twitter.

Moderator:

Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

Speakers:

David Snyder, Search Strategist & Marketer, JRDunn
Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
Chris Winfield, President, 10e20, LLC

Dave Snyder:

Twitter Strategies:

Strive for transparent conversation and followers.
Share blog posts through RSS feeds
Train employees on Twitter, but don’t force them to use it.
Share industry links from content partners
Have contests and promotions via Twitter to increase sales.

“If you build a strong following, you’ll leverage your other social media campaigns effectively.” – Dave Snyder

Twitter Difficulties

The system is still unstable
Getting CEO buy-in is difficult
Managing the noise related to Twitter can be hard
Getting your message to break through all the noise.

Lee Odden:

Twitter Uses

You can use twitter to get out of jail.
You can use twitter to propose marriage
Crowdsourcing and Polling
Finding Information and People
Sharing
Managing and monitoring your reputation
Building one on one relationships with clients

Chris Winfield:

Chris did a great presentation on Twitter using…Twitter. I thought it was very clever. He went right to the source and asked the Twitterverse some questions about whether or not Twitter is a time waster. You can see the eloquent and funny responses from Chris’ presentation here.

The Consensus: It’s how you use Twitter that counts.

There you have it folks.

SES Toronto – 6 tips to improve your SEO strategy, Part 2

Rahaf — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:23:24 +0000

This is a continuation of the Introduction to Search Engine Marketing Panel. You can read part 1 here.

1. Keyword Research: The first phase in both SEO and SEM Campaigns

Jarboe: Dan Theis, wrote a good book about SEM, that’s been updated. One of the things that they say in the book is that the most strategic part of what you will do when planning a campaign is your keyword research. If you do it smart, then good things will happen, if you don’t do it, no other SEO trick will save you. It all starts with which keywords you want to select.

Ryan: So where are they keywords and where do you go for them?

Jarboe: One of the hard parts is thinking like your customer. One of the problems is that most of us grew up in a marketing world where we would create the slogan and then hammer it over and over and sooner or later they would remember it. That’s not how search works.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages
Brainstorm keyword categories that address your customer’s wants
Compile the brainstormed keywords for further review of traffic potential competition and other factors.

Keyword Research Tools:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Use for SEO efforts, just be precise because there are no broad matches in SEO keyword.
Google Trends: A visual representation that’s good if you want to show people how their keyword fares.
Microsoft’s AdCenter Labs Keyword Forecast: Projects keywords into the future for the next three months, but also gives a sense of demographics, who is searching for this word.
Trellian’s free search term suggestion tools : they have commercial features, but also a free version.
Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool.

2. Choosing the Right Keyword

Jarboe: Once you have this data, you might be tempted to go for the most popular term. Despite the popularity of one word terms, you might need to be smarter and precise and use two or three word terms.

Ryan: the closer you can match a term to the search intent, the better off you’ll be.

3. Website Design

Jarboe: Next you have to look at your web design. “Website design should avoid search engine stumbling blocks.” One easy way is to follow Goog’s design, content, technical and quality guidelines.

Not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages.
Allow search bots to crawl your site without session ID’s or arguments that track their path.

4. SEO CopyWriting:

Titles should be created by the marketing departments not IT-
Find a natural way to emphasize your key phrases in headlines and subheads.
Think of it as an inverted triangle. Put the most important information on top.
SEO copy writers also need to learn white-hat link-baiting techniques

5. Link Building

Jarboe: Link building is as hard as getting publicity from the Globe & Mail. The easy part of link building is knowing that you need them. The hard part is influencing the right people to give them to you. Don’t assume that they come easy. The quantity, quality and relevance of links count towards your rating.

Design content and guidelines that are clear.
Offer a site map
Submit to directories when you’re ready such as industry specific expert site.

Jarboe: Blogger community is excellent place to generate links.

On Using Multiple Vendors

Ryan: Does google analytics have too much information for a sales vendor? It might not be a bad idea to split it up and use different tools owned by different people, so that you can maintain control. Nothing good has ever happened from one entitiy having all the power and information.

On Taking advantage of Universal Search before it gets rolled out:

Ryan: SEO isn’t about text anymore it’s about every asset on your sight. You’re still ok since universal search hasn’t been rolled out yet, but you’ll want to understand what turns out when. It’s a great time, then when it’s completely rolled out. Now is the time to optimize your multimedia asset.

6. Using Other Advertising: Keywords are the Beginning

Contextual targeting
Placement targeting
YouTube
DoubleClick Digital
Google Audio Ads
Google Print Ads
Google TV Ads Beta

The Foush » blogging