Outdoor equipment and clothing company REI used SEO to boost its sales after seeing its competitors achieve consistently higher rankings in the search engines than they were.
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SEO Copywriting
REI boosts sales via keywords
Search Lessons Learned: REI, Northern Tool Share Successes, Struggles and Opportunities with Paid and Natural Search
Annual Catalog Conference — Orlando, Florida
PPC and natural search engine marketing initiatives, when properly executed, can drive tremendous growth in traffic, sales and conversion rates.
- Hear from leading marketers about what’s gone right, what’s gone wrong, and opportunities that still remain.
- Gain valuable insights on the processes behind systematically optimizing an e-commerce site and effectively launching and scaling a PPC program.
- Learn best practice approaches.
- Understand the metrics that matter. And learn from two of the best in the business.
Stuart Larkins, Vice President Partner Services, Performics
Brian S. Klais, Vice President eBusiness, Netconcepts
Nathan Miller, e-Commerce Marketing Manager, Northern Tool & Equipment
Jennifer Rodriguez, Manager Online Customer Acquisition Programs and Strategy, Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI)
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Spam-free Search
It’s critical that you as a legitimate marketer dissociate yourself from the rising tide of spam - not just in the inbox but in the search engines as well.
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PR in the blogosphere
Public relations in the blogosphere seems to operate under a new set of rules than traditional PR. With traditional PR you hire a PR firm that has relationships with various journalists and media. With the new PR, you start your own blog (assuming of course you have something worthwhile to say) and you work to become one of the blogging elite. The goal is to get the more influential bloggers to notice you and blog about you. You wouldn’t just leave this to chance; you’d help the process along. If, for example, you want to catch Scoble’s eye, then you would say something interesting that somehow relates to Scoble and work in a mention of his name. Scoble, like many other bloggers, follows what’s being said about him in the blogosphere by subscribing to a PubSub search results feed for the word “scoble.” If Scoble likes your post, you could end up with a mention on Scoble’s link blog or, better still, on the Scobleizer blog.
Imagine telling a PR person 10 years ago that, in the future, the way to catch the eye of various journalists is to become a journalist yourself and then write about THEM, that PR person would think you were off your rocker. My, how times have changed!
As an up-and-coming blogger, you might be tempted to brown-nose the A-List bloggers. Don’t kiss up to them, but don’t denigrate them either. This isn’t necessarily a hard-and-fast rule, just a suggested guideline. Some bloggers are quite open to being taken to task. They even encourage it.
There is a line of course that shouldn’t be crossed. Always act in good taste. Scoble himself described, during our MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit last month on business blogging, how it really isn’t a “line,” it is more like a “membrane.” There is give-and-take, and flexibility with what’s ok to say in your blog and what’s not, particularly as you build rapport with different bloggers in the blogosphere and you build up your reputation. But don’t push too hard or too often, or that “membrane” may rupture!
Now I wonder if Scoble will blog about this post…
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Podcasting and SEO: How to SEO your podcasts
There has been plenty of discussion in the blogosphere about blogs and search engine optimization (SEO). Google in particular seems to love blogs. Blogs are rich in content, heavily linked, with links that tend to be contextual, and without much in the way of code bloat or gratuitous flash animation. In short, blogs are search engine friendly out-of-the-box.
But what about SEO’ing a podcast, the blog’s newest cousin?
Podcasting (where anyone can become an Internet radio talk show host or DJ) presents unique opportunities to the marketer/content producer that blogging does not. I expound on this a bit more in my recent MarketingProfs article but the benefits of podcasting from an SEO standpoint wouldn’t seem as obvious. Podcasts are usually audio content, so you don’t get all this rich textual content that the search engine spiders can snarf up. You also don’t get the rich inter-linking that happens with blogs because you can’t embed clickable URLs throughout your MP3 files.
Nonetheless, I believe you can SEO your podcasts. Here’s how:
- Come up with a name for your podcast show that is rich with relevant heavily searched-on keywords.
- Make sure your MP3 files have really good ID3 tags ?Į rich with relevant keywords. ID3V2 even supports comment and URL fields. The major search engines may not pick up the ID3 tags now, but they will! And besides, there are specialty engines and software tools that already do.
- Synopsize each podcast show in text and blog that. Put your most important keywords as high up in the blog post as possible but still keep it readable and interesting.
- Encourage those who link directly to your MP3 file to also link to your blog post about the podcast.
- Consider using a transcription service to transcribe your podcast or at least excerpts of it for use as search engine fodder. Break the transcript up into sections. Make sure each section is on a separate web page and each separate web page has a great keyword-rich title relating to that segment of the podcast. And, of course, link to the podcast MP3 from those web pages. There are many transcription services out there, where you can just email them the MP3 file or give them an URL and they send you back a Word document. Here’s a partial list of transcription services .
- Submit your podcast site to podcast directories and search engines such as audio.weblogs.com.
- Let people in your industry, such as bloggers and the media, know that you have a podcast because podcasting is quite new and novel. It will be more newsworthy and linkworthy than just another blog in your industry.
- Don’t just get up on your soapbox. Have conversations with others, in the form of recorded phone interviews, and podcast those as well. Pick people who have great reputations on the web and great PageRank scores, and ask that they link to your site and to your podcast summary page.
This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of tactics. It is simply meant as a catalyst for creative thinking. SEO, in particular the link building aspect, isn’t about just following a set list of formulae. It is about creatively thinking outside the box and differentiating yourself in ways that make your site eminently more linkworthy than your competitors.
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Search Engine Optimisation - Black Art or Sweet Science?
Search Engine Room — Sydney, Australia
This panel examines the latest trends in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), focusing on keyword research, management and execution. Learn how to create an effective SEO campaign and attract the right customers to your site.
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Embrace and extend, courtesy of Yahoo’s Creative Commons Search
Yahoo’s just released a very cool new search engine called Yahoo! Creative Commons Search. With it you can search all the Creative Commons licenced content on the web. For those not familiar with Creative Commons, I’ve blogged about it before. In summary, it is an alternative to copyright, where some rights are reserved by the author, but not all. It’s as quick and painless as can be for the author: you simply fill out this form that specifies how you want your material used out in the marketplace and the license is generated to place on your site. For example, your license can require attribution, restrict to only noncommercial use, allow for the creation of derivative works, etc.
There is a wealth of content out there under a liberal Creative Commons licence that will allow you to reuse and repurpose that content in your own projects. But finding that content used to be hard work. (Actually there was previously another way to search, but it wasn’t as comprehensive, and it wasn’t from a major search engine). Now it’s just a search query away, thanks to Yahoo!
I can hear you asking yourself: “That’s all fine and good, but what use will I have with it?” Here are a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
- Collect interesting articles on a particular topic from different authors, write your own overview/summary to go with it, then assemble it all into an ebook and offer it on your site as a free download.
- Take information relating to a particular company that you would like to land as a customer and arrange it into a scrapbook, then post it on your blog and ask readers to contribute to it further. Hopefully the prospective customer will take notice of your initiative and of your interest in them. If not, bring it to their attention. (What a great, new spin on the standard “cold call”!)
- Augment your articles, white papers, etc. with excerpted content relevant to the topic you’re covering. For example, if you wrote a white paper about “How Google Works,” add Creative Commons-licensed photos and text descriptions describing their data centers.
- Identify keywords that you want to rank well for and create a mini library of Creative Commons-licensed content about that keyword.
These are just a few ideas, and of course you have to abide by the terms of each content-owner’s license. Idea #4, for example, would be considered commercial use if that library of pages were serving as landing pages to get searchers who find you to buy something. IMPORTANT: Don’t just assume that because it showed up in the search results, it’s licensed under Creative Commons. Some plain ol’ copyrighted material will have undoubtedly snuck into the index. No search engine is 100% perfect. I didn’t have time to test it out much myself, but it seems to pass muster with Tara at ResearchBuzz, so it must be pretty good!
An insightful reader on Slashdot commented that it would be brilliant if Yahoo! took the next step and launched a Bittorrent tracker that was limited to Creative Commons licensed content, with a centralized directory-style index. Bittorrent, if you aren’t familiar with it, offers super-fast de-centralized file sharing on a file-by-file basis. It can be used to download legitimate files, like a trial version of a software program or music under a Creative Commons license. To get started, you need to have the Bittorrent software installed on your computer, and you’ll need to have somehow obtained a Torrent file for a particular big file that you want. This Torrent file is tiny, and it contains information about how to connect with others who have parts of the file you want. But where do you find these Torrent files? That’s where a tracker comes in. More on Bittorent later, in a separate post.
With that, I’ll let you get on with using this new Yahoo! engine to “embrace and extend” to your heart’s content.
Oh, by the way… If you want to learn more the fascinating story of copyright law (no, I’m not kidding! The way Larry Lessig tells it, it really IS interesting!), check out Larry Lessig’s speech at OSCON, with audio syncronized with his Powerpoint slides. Larry is the brains behind the Creative Commons and an overall brilliant lawyer/author/blogger/Stanford professor.
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Search Engine Optimization Teleconference
In this teleseminar, Netconcepts’ founder Stephan Spencer heads up a 90 minute session with SEO thought leaders: Cam Balzer, Christine Churchill, Mike Grehan, Ammon Johns, Brian Klais, Barry Lloyd, Ian McAnerin, Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Eric Ward and Jill Whalen.
Learn about the rapidly changing world of search, find out where SEO is heading, discover new trends and opportunities, and listen while the panel explores the real issues facing the industry today.
Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2
Download the Transcript: PDF (300 K)
Produced by MarketingProfs.com
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Thought leaders discuss search engine optimization - Part 2
Where is SEO heading? What are the trends and new opportunities? And what are the real issues facing the industry?
A panel of 12 experts predict…
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Thought Leaders discuss Search Engine Optimization - Part 1
The competition is heating up as companies awaken to a universe of marketing opportunities - providing their customers can find them, that is!
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