DMA08 Las Vegas Internet Marketing Roundup
Monday, October 13th, 2008
TopRank Online Marketing has been fortunate to present at the Direct Marketing Association annual conference for 4 years in a row and a 5th appearance several years before that. (See photos from DMA07 here) Over 10,000 marketers attend the DMA show making it the largest marketing conference in the world and with this year’s show being held in Las Vegas, it should be another great event.
The DMA has traditionally been known as an organization steadfast in marketing principles and rooted in traditional marketing education but has made quite a bit of progress in the online marketing space with it’s Search Engine Marketing Certification program and upcoming attention to social media. In fact, this year’s DMA08 show includes online marketing sessions on:
- Affiliate marketing
- Consumer generated content
- Blog marketing
- Email marketing
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Online public relations (TopRank)
- Search engine optimization
- Social networking
- Web analytics
That lineup of conference programming is really filling out and offering companies that “get” direct marketing, an opportunity to really dig in to many aspects of internet and search marketing you could only previously get at events dedicated to SEM.
People speaking on Internet and search marketing topics at DMA08 include: Heather Lloyd Martin of Successworks, Graeme McLaughlin of BCAA, David Berkowitz of 360i, Olivier Lemaignen of Intuit, Randy Peterson of Proctor & Gamble, Dave Lloyd of Cisco, Paul Bruemmer of Red Door Interactive, Craig Macdonald of Covario, Duane Forrester of Microsoft, Jeremy Schoemaker, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts and Andrew Beckman of Location3 Media.
I do plan on a bit of blogging during the week, so hopefully I can get a few interviews in along with session liveblogging.
On October 16th, Matt Bailey and I will be presenting a series of Search Engine Marketing primer workshops (actually, mostly Matt) on SEO, blogs and online PR. Post conference workshops are smaller and give attendees and speakers a much better opportunity to get specific and get into meaty Q/A.
Matt will be talking about SEO and Blogs and I’ll be focusing on none other than online public relations. But of course, I couldn’t leave out some aspect of blogs as marketing and PR tools since they can be applicable to just about any digital marketing effort.
If you’re attending the DMA08 conference in Las Vegas this year, be sure to check out these post conference intensives. I suspect many attendees will be able to justify the expense of at least part of the conference just by the information we’ll be providing. Here’s more info on the session I’m presenting:
Search Marketing and Online Public Relations
The future of organic search optimization is heavily influenced by the effect of combining SEO and online public relations tactics. Online marketers stand to gain a distinct competitive advantage by leveraging media consumption trends and understanding how SEO and PR intersect through optimizing news content such as press releases and online newsrooms. Learn results-focused PR tactics such as pitching bloggers and online media as well as proactive online reputation management and PR analytics.Date/Time 10/16/2008 9:30 AM - 11:30 AMRoom LV Hilton Conference Room 7-8
There’s obviously a lot more going on at DMA08 than search and internet marketing with hundreds of sessions, keynotes, pre and post conference events and special activities. You can read our past coverage of DMA here and while I don’t think there’s anyone officially blogging the event, there is a frequently updated news feed at MyDMA365.
Please let me know in the comments below or via Twitter if you’re attending and we can have a DMA08 Tweetup!
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Wish List for Twitter
Friday, October 10th, 2008
Microblogging is hot with the shiny new object set and as the practice of Twittering extends beyond early adopters and gets more mainstream media coverage, the crowd will get hungrier for more functionality. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry for more Twitter functionality now. Check me out onTwitter here.
Whether the enhancements come from all the amazing third party Twitter applications or from Twitter itself, I really hope many of these updates happen soon. Here are a few items on my Twitter wish list:
- Ability to categorize and tag people so you can interact with each group individually (read and post) as well as to the entire group of followers
- Stats! post frequencies, web traffic & sources, rate of following/dropping, message topics, most common domain names getting linked to, most common urls getting clicked on, time of day, etc all with various time ranges
- Follow on the profile links. For God’s sake! It makes no sense for Twitter to hoard the link popularity yet receive the benefit of the community generating content.
- Enable a “social roll” list of links in the right column to the other social sites you’re a member of so followers can see where else they can connect with you
- Ability to place custom messages or links to ads if I choose in the RSS feed
I expect that some or all of these enhancements might be available through third party applications, but they are so disparate and unconnected, it’s risky to rely on any one of them - at least in a business sense.
It would be great if Twitter operated as an open source app like WordPress, where plugins and added functionality were all compatible with a single application (PC, Mac and Mobile versions of course).
What’s on your Twitter wish list ?
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SEO Basics: Are Directory Submissions Still Worthwhile?
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
Here’s another search engine optimization Q/A on on the topic of web site marketing via directories compared to search engines plus a bonus on the value of meta search engines.
These are real questions from a web site owner and due to the vintage nature of the topics, reflect the need for ongoing education and updates necessary for anyone involved in marketing through search.
What is the audience of the directories compared to the search engines? What is the benefit of being included in directories ? What if I only submit my website to algorithmic search engines and not directories: Does it really matter ?
Directories like Yahoo’s Directory and DMOZ.org have been cited by several search engines as logical places for inclusion as part of an effort to acquire inbound links. However, as of October 2nd, 2008 Google no longer includes this recommendation in their Webmaster Guidelines.
The audience for directories as far as direct traffic is minimal and niche at best. However, if a directory is well managed and offers specific categories for specialized niche topics, then it may be worth inclusion. As with any other kind of online marketing, if it’s good for searchers, it’s good for search marketing and SEO.
Submissions to algorithmic search engines are not necessary. Search engine spiders/bots will find your pages through links from other web sites. If your site does not have many other sites linking to it, then content based link building tactics will facilitate search engine spiders finding and including web pages in their search results.
Think of links as the electricity that bring your web pages to life in the search engines. Strong sources will deliver more power as will a large number of sources. The key is that they are topically relevant and created in a way that technically allows search engines to follow the links to your web pages. See “Ensure Your Site is Crawlable” for more on that.
What is the audience of meta search engines compared to algorithmic search engines?
Meta search engines like Dogpile and WebCrawler have niche audiences that rank at less than 5% of total search engine market share. According to comScore’s August 2008 report), the share of search distribution is:
- Google 61.9%
- Yahoo 20.5%
- Microsoft 8.9%
- Ask 4.5%
- AOL 4.2%
The reach and relevance of meta search engines is nominal for marketing purposes. Besides, meta search engines do not directly index web pages, they scrape search results from major search engines and present aggregated or filtered results. If your site is doing well in the major search engines, then it is likely doing well on meta search engines.
These SEO Basics Q/A are a bit of a departure from the industry trend topics on digital marketing that we typically post here on Online Marketing Blog. Please share your feedback as to whether you’d like us to continue posting them. We literally have hundreds of them.
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SEO Basics: Ensure Your Site is Crawlable
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Online Marketing Blog has always been about more than search engine optimization, covering digital public relations, social media marketing and plenty of other internet marketing topics. And yet, SEO is a core component of nearly every thing we do in our consulting practice.
For the web site owners and marketers fairly new to the site optimization game, we like to offer tips based on common questions overheard in the course of providing SEO and internet marketing services.
Question: “Ensure your site is crawlable” What would be, in your opinion, the basic conditions that need to be reunited for a website to be crawled?”
“Crawlable” means the links to and within your web site can be discovered and followed by search engine spiders. Spiders or bots are programs that search engines send out to find and re-visit content (web pages, images, video, pdf files, etc). If a search engine spider cannot follow a link, then the destination page will either not be included at all, or exist in the search engine’s database but not be included in the universe of web pages available to search results.
A few of the common issues that can make it difficult for search engine spiders to crawl a web site effectively include:
- Navigation links embedded in Flash – Spiders for most search engines do not typically crawl links within Flash files, although Google reports progress in improving Flash indexing
- Navigation links embedded in JavaScript or Ajax – Again, spiders like Googlebot have historically had issues with crawling links embedded in JavaScript menus but have made some progress. Links within Ajax web pages are still problematic for crawling.
- Embedding site navigation links within forms - Most search engine bots cannot fill out forms (except sometimes Google). If the user has to select and item from a drop down menu or fill in a form field to see content, that content is unlikey to be discovered and indexed by search engines.
- Lack of authoritative links into the web site. Search engines discover new web sites through links. Links from one site to another convey important information about the link destination and influence rankings. A lack of relevant links to the home page and interior pages of a site coupled with other factors doesn’t make the site “uncrawlable” as it does unlikely to be crawled any time soon or often.
If your site has say, 500 pages, but only 350 are getting crawled and included in the search engine’s public index, that means 150 pages are not working for you to attract traffic.
To solve these issues you can:
- Create navigation elements with search engine friendly CSS code that still offers much of the dynamic functionality often found in Flash, JavaScript and Ajax
- Create alternative navigation with text links elsewhere on the web page, either in the footer and/or in breadcrumb navigation
- Create HTML site map pages made up of 100 or less text links to important pages on your site. You can have more than one sitemap page for sites larger than 100 pages
- Provide search engines with a XML site map list of all the URLs from your web site that you would like crawled. This does not guarantee all URLs will be included, but it can supplement what search engine spiders find on their own. There are also useful reporting options.
Each major algorithmic search engine supports the sitemap protocol and offers services/tools for webmasters: Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Microsoft Live Webmaster Tools
- Encourage inbound links from authoritative web sites to your home page as well as to important (and linkable) content within the site. Cross link with anchor text between pages and make it easy for customers and spiders to reach all areas of the site easily.
If you’re developing a new web site, it’s important to make sure your web developers are not only designing and planning the site architecture for functionality, user experience and ease of site maintenance, but also for search engines. Getting SEO consultants or good SEO advice at the very beginning of a web site project can save considerable headache and expense down the road.
For some vintage crawler SEO advice, check out this post on improving site spidering from 2006.
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Monday Links: Greeking, Linking, Fishing, Social, Mobile & Engagement
Monday, October 6th, 20081. Geeking with Jonathan, no wait, “Greek-ing with Jonathan Mendez with the speaker, the listener and the argument in “Lessons in Ad Persuasion from Aristotle“.
2. Proactive Profile Linking. Social profiles and profiles of any kind can provide benefits as part of a Search Engine Reputation Management effort since they can rank well on brand and company names. Profiles can also provide a source of crawlable links. It may serve a company well to secure the profile names before the competition does. Two tools that will quickly check user names at multiple sites include: usernamecheck.com and the social media keyword check tool from Solo SEO.
3. Opportunistic traffic fishing. It’s common knowledge that advertising, editorial/media and even trending topics on the social web drive search traffic. However, SEO efforts with content and links take time to see results. Or do they? Combine keyword based social media monitoring (blogs, forums, MSM, Twitter, video, etc) with an authoritative blog, and you have an on-demand traffic source. When a topic relevant to your business and/or target market is warming up, publish corresponding optimized content via the channels picking it up. High profile blogs, optimized press releases, social news and Twitter are examples of quick ways to distribute search friendly content. The key is to monitor, have channels for promotion and the ability to act quickly. If nothing else, you can use PPC ads to capture such traffic. This tip inspired by “Use the News for Cheap Pay Per Click Traffic“.
4. How should your company engage the social web? Take a look at these 237 examples of brands using social media with tactics including: blogging, social networks, online video, podcasting, widgets, crowdsourcing, microblogging, photo sharing, virtual worlds, wikis, blogger relations, social bookmarking, social news, brand monitoring, discussion boards, social PR and user ratings/reviews.
5. Directories have been a toss up but now Google’s shying away. Google dropped ODP and Yahoo directories from their published guidelines. “Directory Links Next? Google Drops Yahoo and ODP from Guidelines“.
6. Always add Google Analytics campaign tracking information to your Tiny URL when promoting specific content on Twitter- from “Twitter and Google Analytics: What to Track“.
7. Need to find links without no follow? Do follow search engine.
8. Objections to mobile marketing? People DO search and buy on the mobile web and with the number of cell phones outnumbering computers it’s only going to get better. “Common Mobile SEO Concerns and How to Overcome Them“.
9. Now that she’s left Forrester, what’s Charlene Li up to? She’s started a new company called Altimeter Group and blogging at The Altimeter.
10. Web analytics guru Eric T. Peterson and my pal Joseph Carrabis have posted the product of their collaboration on measuring visitor engagement in a new white paper, “Measuring the Immeasurable - Visitor Engagement” (pdf).
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