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 Business Blogging Articles
REI boosts sales via keywords
Thought Leaders on Marketing Blogs - Part 2
Experts reveal their top most effective blogging tactics and talk about what business bloggers must do to be an accepted member of the blogosphere.
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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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Thought Leaders on Marketing Blogs - Part 1
How do you make a solid business case for blogging for marketing? What about managing upper management’s expectations on the outcome? Should you hire a professional blogger to write your company blog?
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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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Optimal blog posting frequency
My friend and colleague Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing Blog posed an interesting question to me and a small group of other bloggers whom I hold in high regard (Tris Hussey, Paul Chaney, Wayne Hurlbert, Yvonne DiVita, and Dana VanDen Heuvel). Her question was this:
What is best practice for scheduling posts?
If you’re not going to post 5 days a week, should posts be scheduled consistently for the same days of the week e.g., if you’re posting 3 times a week Monday-Wednesday-Friday? How do you feel about mixing up posting days? One week post M-W-F and the next week post T-TH-F. Or does it really matter? For the most part are the only blogs that are doing a consistent schedule the networks?
What a great question! And what great answers from the group. So great, in fact, that it evolved into a podcast group Skype-conference call that we conducted just yesterday. The 53-minute audio recording should be ready soon. I’ll post it when it is.
In the meantime, my take on the issue is this: as far as retaining your readers, frequency is not nearly as important as recency. A couple weeks of inactivity makes the reader feel like nobody’s home. Conversely, having the latest post be only a day old makes the blog appear “fresh”. Personally, I don’t like keeping feeds in my newsreader that haven’t had recent activity.
It also depends on the type of blog you have. A “writer’s blog” (as defined by Seth Godin) doesn’t need the same level of recency or frequency as a “news blog” (also defined by Seth in the same post).
Relevance overrides both recency and frequency. Searchengineblog.com recently posted (paraphrased) “I’m going to stop posting about SEO for several months but I’ll post about my vacation”. Making such an announcement wrecks even more havoc on recurring readership levels than two months of inactivity, because the blogger is in a sense inviting his readers to unsubscribe from his RSS feed. After all, how many of them would want to read irrelevant I’m-touring-the-world posts? My guess, in this time-pressed world of ours, is not very many.
As far as gaining new readers, the trick is getting noticed by the “connectors” (using Malcolm Gladwell’s terminology) in the blogosphere and then getting them to link to you. Again, this isn’t necessarily an issue of frequency. One blogger could post to his/her blog once per week and be more successful at getting coverage by A-list bloggers than a prolific blogger who posts many times per day. This could be achieved a number of ways. Linking to other bloggers can get you noticed by them. Mentioning their names could get you noticed by them (see my recent post where I described the name dropping tactic). Already having some of them as friends helps too. 
A lot of the blog entries floating around in the blogosphere strike me as “filler.” I strive to have this blog be filler-free. I only blog when I have something I believe to be valuable for you, my dear readers. I won’t blog about “Adobe acquires Macromedia” unless I can come up with a unique angle that would deliver real value to marketers who read my blog. Unique commentary, I believe, is key to the value proposition. Last week for example I blogged about “how to search engine optimize your podcasts” - something I believe has not been adequately addressed by bloggers. This I’m hoping will get some coverage in the blogosphere because of its uniqueness. “News blogs” can get away with less unique and practical posts than “writers blogs”, but they tend to make up for it with volume - increasing the frequency.
Finally, posting too frequently increases the ephemerality of your blog posts. Mike Davidson made the insightful comment:
“The relative importance of the feed vs. the site depends almost entirely on the ephemerality of the posts. Scoble?Ĵs posts are extremely ephemeral because he a) has so many of them, and b) only comments briefly on each item. Their place in history is rather fleeting, in other words. In the case of a more traditional blog, you have far fewer posts with more in-depth writeups. In this case, the site is of utmost importance and the feed is merely a notification technology.”
With all that said, Wayne Hurlbert has an interesting case study to share of how he doubled his blog traffic by doubling the number of posts per day from one to two. Have a read. (Paul Chaney makes the point that “every blogger is different, the way we write is different, and our personalities are different,” so there’s no right or wrong answer here and of course your mileage will vary.)
Bottom line of all this: the blogosphere is still the Web and the basic online marketing principle of testing everything, rather than just believing whatever I say, still applies.
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Getting noticed in the blogosphere part 2
As a follow-on to yesterday’s post about getting your blog noticed by influentials, i.e. A-List bloggers, I thought I would describe a scenario just recently presented to me.
I have been asked by analyst Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research if I would be willing to blog about their upcoming boot camp on integrated marketing on May 5. It’s a full-day intensive workshop being held at their offices in Cambridge. I said “Sure, I’d be happy to mention it, but I don’t think it will get picked up by other bloggers and thus it won’t spread through the blogosphere.” So the effectiveness of such a promotion strategy is limited.
A-List bloggers, like everyone else, are forever tuned in to the station “WII-FM” - What’s In It For Me. As such, Forrester’s message would be much more contagious, if there was a “free prize inside,” so to speak, for the bloggers who read my boot camp “plug.” In other words, the way to spread the word about the Forrester boot camp is for Forrester to make an irresistible, exclusive offer to bloggers who blog about the boot camp.
For example, what if Forrester gave away some exclusive piece of research that normally only their clients have access to? It doesn’t have to be an entire report, just something exclusive and something bloggable. Like a “scoop” on an upcoming report. Or a synopsis of key points or perhaps a mini report. Now what if the bloggers who blog about this integrated marketing boot camp get access to this exclusive information as part of the deal? In fact, what if Forrester Research turn this into an ongoing program, kind of like how Microsoft is wooing influential bloggers with their “Search Champs” program (where they hand-pick influencers and fly them to Redmond to wine-and-dine them and to discuss how Microsoft might improve their MSN search engine).
Hmm… “Forester Research Champs.” Sure, they’d be buying off bloggers. But everybody would win, including blog readers. Bloggers get access to exclusive research early and often - as long as they agree to blog about Forrester. It is an interesting proposition. Forrester, what do you think?
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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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Business Blogging Teleconference
What happens when Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer gets such blogging and marketing luminaries together over the phone as Seth Godin, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel, Steve Rubel, Debbie Weil, BL Ochman and Toby Bloomberg? An amazing discussion about the possibilities and future of marketing blogs, that’s what! Produced by MarketingProfs.com.
Read the Executive Summary: part 1 and part 2
Download the Transcript: PDF (600 K)
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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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