SEO/SEM
Getting Social With Big Brands
With engagement the new name in the metric game for marketers, brands are rabidly trying all that they can to build sites that foster any level of engagement with their customers.
Some are well-suited to creating their own community, while others would be wise to invest in leveraging pre-existing social networks like MySpace or Facebook. (Mashable has a post up listing several recent initiatives, including social networks from Reebok and Disney.) Recently, even musicians like 50 Cent and Kylie Minogue have begun focusing their efforts beyond MySpace to create their social networking platforms.
Coca-Cola is one brand that has been throwing a fistful of darts on the social media wall - hoping for something to stick. After failing to see the value in last year’s viral sensation “Diet Coke and Mentos,” and somewhat lackluster experiments in Second Life among others, they’re gaining some traction in their latest blog. What Coca-Cola is learning, as are other brands that are joining the conversation with their customers, is that it requires a longterm commitment to nurturing those relationships. Relationships, that quite frankly, need to built on their customer’s terms.
In-Bound Linking Vs. On-Page SEO
We have lots of clients asking for Search Engine Optimization. I wish I had had magic search engine ranking powers; but there isn’t a silver bullet to ranking in search engines.
SEOspace had a fantastic post on the value of In-Bound Linking Vs. On-Page SEO. I liked this article for two reasons:
1. It defined some of the process necessary to rank in search engines.
2. It highlights the symbiosis of In-Bound Linking and On-Page SEO
Check out the post here.
Search Engine Marketing as a Sales Force
At a recent meeting about how we could help a prospective client drive more traffic to her web site, she made an interesting comment:
If we are seeing new leads generated with our Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, let’s just bump up the budget ... we can spend more money there instead of hiring on new sales people.
We generally agreed with her assessment but, to really see Google and other search engines as a sales force, there are a couple of important things to keep in mind:
1) Make sure you are keeping tabs on the traffic you receive from any PPC campaigns. There’s a possibility that all this “great traffic” is leaving your site within seconds. Just as in a standard sales process, you need to qualify your PPC leads. Lots of visits should not signify success. Define success by if you are seeing more business, more links, etc.
2) Make some sort of attempt to calculate ROI. The easiest way to do that is to assign a value to achieving one of the goals you’ve set out to accomplish. For example, if a new lead generates $1,000 of business for you, how much would you be willing to spend on attaining another one? You may not have that sort of information available right now, but drive towards being able to justify what you spend on PPC campaigns.
Ted Leonsis’ Blog/SEO Strategy to Earn Web 2.0 Street Cred
Today’s Washington Post has an article (”For Ted Leonsis, a Quest to Find Himself Faster Online”) on Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL and owner of the Washington Capitals. It describes how he launched his personal blog, Ted’s Take, initially in an effort to control the results in Google on a search of his name (previously, results were “a hodgepodge of news stories"). It’s an interesting summary of using a blog and an intuitive SEO strategy to establish a specific reputation online. Here are the steps Ted followed:
- Define the blog - he decided the blog would be both personal and professional, presumably to reach the widest audience.
- Write often - Ted notes that frequency of updates is an important ranking factor, and often posts several times per day.
- Link out - The article implies that outbound links help ranking, but that’s primarily because they help ...
- … Encourage Links In - By linking to other popular bloggers like fellow sports team owner Mark Cuban, Ted’s earned links back to his blog, which both drives direct traffic and represents “votes of approval” in Google’s indexing algorithm.
- Name drop - Ted hints that his keyword strategy is to use the names of the famous people he deals with regularly in his posts and tags, presumably so that searches on those names will return his blog. That’s a challenging approach, though we’ve managed to make some good headway with a similar SEO strategy for ExecutiveBiz with their weekly “Executive Spotlight” feature.
With a Technorati rank of 12,390 as of today (compared to Cuban’s 107), Ted clearly has some room to make his blog more popular. That said, since Ted’s Take ranks #2 in Google search results for his name (behind AOL’s corporate bio), Ted’s primary objective has been achieved.
Ted told the story of launching his blog at an ExecutiveBiz event last May, where he described his motivation as more based on his curiosity and general interest in how Google works than any elaborate personal marketing strategy. During that talk he also gave a great overview of Web 2.0 and how it fits in at AOL. You can watch the entire Ted Leonsis / ExecutiveBiz Web 2.0 event video here.