Business Blogging Seminars

Moderator:
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

Panelists:
Tony Pecora, Become.com
Dwight Merriman, ShopWiki
Rob Gatto, Shop Local

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Times have changed over at the Googleplex. Over the past several years, those brilliant Googlers have made significant changes to the rankings and quality algorithms. They’ve launched dozens of new services, tools and websites. And they have evolved their business model. Their stock price is pays homage to that fact.

Have you been keeping up? Does Google still love your website as much as it did several years ago? Or has it found a new love?

Your site can get back in Google’s favor, once you understand what Google is looking for. Granted, much has changed in SEO, but still many of the tried-and-true SEO tactics still work. In fact, they work quite effectively. Some new tactics have emerged, like tactics for getting visibility in Google News. So have new hazards, due in large part to new, sophisticated types of search engine spam. Google, of course, has adapted their algorithms to compensate. Many sites have become unwitting victims of these Google algorithm shifts (e.g. the “Florida update,” the “Jagger update”, the “Google Sandbox”, etc.).

You will learn:

• What Google is looking for from a website & what makes Google tick
• The varying ways of getting visibility in Google (”one box” results, Google News, Froogle, Google Base, Google Blog Search, etc.)
• How to ensure 100% of your site gets into Google’s index
• How to design your pages to dominate rankings
• How to optimize your page copy
• How to track your results and ROI
• Where Web 2.0 fits in with the new Google

The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.

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Founder of In Perfect Order, Jessica Duquette is also a business blogger. In an interview with Netconcepts founder and president Stephan Spencer she encourages business bloggers to spend as much time connecting with other bloggers as you do on your own posts. “Visit their site, comment on specific postings that can then link back to your site, participate in blogging carnivals, quote excerpts from their sites and link to their sites and allow others to do the same from your posts,” she says. Smart business blogging involves making good connections.

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Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has graciously shared 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, and there are some gems in there. I’d like to piggyback on a few of Rand’s points:

• 1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) — I’d say that over 95% of the time, WordPress will do the job and will be scalable for future needs. I have yet to come across a client blog project that necessitated a custom-built blog software.
• 2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain — Rand makes a bold statement: “Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make.” I disagree. I can think of numerous examples where the blog is more trusted, more buzzworthy, and/or more linkworthy because it’s at an arms length from the company’s site. Consider the hypothetical example of an insurance conglomerate authoring a blog about getting a healthier lifestyle, in order to attract prospects to sell insurance to. Such a blog at Gettinghealthy.com sounds helpful and unbiased, whereas having it at metlife.com/gettinghealthyblog (remember, hypothetical example… metlife is just used here to illustrate the point) comes off as salesy and self-serving.
• 4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs — I’d just like to make it clear that you’re not doing this for link juice (most links in blog comments and forum posts have “link condoms” (rel=nofollow tags) automatically added). Instead, you’re doing this to increase your visibility to, and credibility with, bloggers who read those blogs and forums.
• 9. Invite Guest Bloggers — I really like this idea, and I’d like to add my suggestion that you also do phone or Skype interviews of guests and podcast those on your blog.
• 15. Archive Effectively — Rand highlights a tough balancing act: “For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). ” I find the “Optional Excerpt” in WordPress to be invaluable for achieving this balance. The Optional Excerpt is one of the fields in the Write Post form that most bloggers ignore, but if you use it, you can code your non-permalink pages (like your category pages) to display the excerpt instead of the full post or instead of the paragraphs proceeding a “more” tag in your post copy. That’s exactly what we’ve done on my company’s corporate site, which runs on WordPress — for example, all the testimonials listed on our Testimonials tag page display excerpts. That gives you more flexibility to summarize and highlight particular sections or keywords from the full post.
• 16. Implement Smart URLs — Rand says that “just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.” I would definitely agree with that. We too have evidence that a blog or site with rewritten URLs flows PageRank more efficiently throughout the site. So don’t rest on your laurels if you have a blog with dynamic URLs, even if your blog is fully indexed by the engines. Your pages will rank better if you rewrite the URLs.
• 19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days — What a great idea, to watch your traffic and increase your posting frequency and posting quality on days where your traffic is highest! It makes the best use of the traffic spikes. In fact, you might even want to hold back on publishing your very best posts and instead save them for high-traffic days.

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• 5 ways you can improve your online popularity today
• Turbocharging your visibility and accessibility
• What your competitor is not yet doing
• Beyond the basics of optimisation; ensuring serious traffic flow to your site

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For many of you, your email campaign lost the race even before it got out of the gate. Spam filters and email firewalls silently and unceremoniously junk your emails. Research has shown that fully one-third of permission-based emails don’t get delivered.

Even if your message gets past the filters, it doesn’t mean your email will be opened. Your recipients are brutal when it comes to slashing through the commercial messages clogging their inboxes. A split second decision will decide your email’s fate, based squarely on your From line and Subject line, and to a smaller extent, what’s visible in the Preview pane. After navigating these deliverability and openability hazards, you still have to get the recipient to comprehend and act on your message. A pretty tall order nowadays.

This virtual seminar is going to get “hands on” with reviews of actual email campaigns submitted by seminar attendees. Not all will be chosen, so give yourself the best chance of having your campaign critiqued: submit your entry early. Stephan is one of the most popularly and highly acclaimed MarketingProfs seminar leaders.

If you’ve ever wondered what you were doing wrong with your email marketing, or wondered what you could be doing better, then this is the seminar for you.

You will learn:

• How to write messages that are opened and read
• How to create subject lines that are the best they can be
• Best practices for your call-to-action and value proposition
• How to balance text and images
• When to use Text or HTML
• Whether your email is compliant with CAN-SPAM legislation
• Whether your messages will get past spam filters

The 90-minute seminar will include an extended Q&A.

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In this article written by Patricia Moore, author for NZ Marketing Magazine, Netconcepts makes the public scene, not for SEO, but for their marketing success.

Moore discusses how companies have had remarkable success in the competitive New Zealand export market. How are companies succeeding in this market? What or, perhaps more importantly, who should companies turn to in order to fuel their global success.

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This session explores how specialized blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines gather content and provides tips on tapping into these growing forms of traffic.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

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Search engines, Google in particular, seem to love blogs. This is in part due to the fact that search engines rely heavily on links for their ranking algorithms, and the blogosphere is rich with interlinkages. Bloggers constantly link to each other - through “hat tips,” “blogrolls,” “trackbacks,” and so forth. Furthermore, blogs tend to be heavy on content and light on search-engine-unfriendly features like overly complex URLs, frames, JavaScript-based links and Flash. I’ve seen new blogs quickly penetrate Google’s top results where a brandnew, traditional website might have languished in the “Google sandbox” for a number of months…

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Optimizing an ecommerce Web site for natural search rankings and sales traditionally meant fighting major political battles and investing hundreds of hours to significantly alter the Web site’s architecture, content, layout, coding and more - without clear ROI or results. In this session, we will outline a friendlier approach known as “proxy optimization” where changes can be made to a proxy of the Web site, and then migrated to the native site once proven in the marketplace. Hear case study results from top 100 retailers. This session will:

• Show an optimization approach that can better predict the effort required to optimize your site for target keywords
• Share lessons learned from top retailers in their usage of proxy optimization
• Explain ethical considerations in configuring an optimization proxy for maximum results

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