Archive for December, 2010
Avoiding Stupid SEO Tricks
Thursday, December 9th, 2010I’ve written before about how to spot and avoid SEO sleazebags—the type who give an honorable and critically important profession a bad name—in Just Say No to Bad SEO and The Wrong Way to Build External Links for SEO (which seems somewhat quaint and naive now only due to the recent rapid growth of link spamming).
The hucksters and snake oil salesmen continue to expand their bag of “tricks” designed to dupe business owners into buying magic SEO pixie dust instead of investing in real and time-tested but somewhat less sexy SEO tactics. If you want your website to perform well in search over the long term, steer clear of these gimmicks:
“Submit Your Site to 350 Search Engines!”
Good grief, why? First, Google and Yahoo+Bing account for more than 98% of all search traffic in the western world. Quick—name the fourth-largest search engine. Can’t do it without looking it up (probably on Google)? If you can’t name #4, why would anyone care about #200, or #250, or #350?
Second, direct submission of a site to search engines hasn’t been a crucial SEO tactic since the last century. Today, as long as a website is linked from pretty much anywhere on the web, the search engines will find it. Linking a site from social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon is now among the fastest ways to get it crawled.
“Get 1,000 Backlinks for $140!”
Sure, you can buy cheap links. You can buy cheap health insurance too, but do you really want to? The same warnings apply; any offer that seems “too good to be true” almost always is. Quality links take time, effort, and therefore yes, money, to obtain. Super-cheap links are at best from a bunch of PR 0 or 1 sites that provide marginal if any SEO value, and at worst are from link farms which risk getting your site banned from the search engines.
“Get a Free SEO Evaluation!” (spam emails)
Few if any reputable SEO firms promote their services through email offers of a “free site evaluation.” This type of offer is usually questionable. Often, it’s little more than a repackaged WebsiteGrader report, which anyone can run for free in less than five minutes.
Quality SEO firms tend to generate business through tactics like blogging, social media, referrals, and speaking at business events, not through unsolicited emails. As evidence of how unsophisticated some of these SEO spammers are, I’ve heard of instances where such emails have been sent to real SEO firms—which is like trying to sell a Whopper to the manager of a McDonalds, or a Chevy to Scott Monty. Trust these spammers with website optimization? As Forrest Gump noted, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
Effective SEO is a blend of art and science. A reputable SEO firm will be able to explain their tactics, provide a realistic timeframe for results, and have a track record of success. They won’t offer guarantees or “secret” formulas for success. And they won’t be found using the tactics above.
How PR and Social Media Can Work Together
Monday, December 6th, 2010Social media and PR seem like natural allies. Both are primarily focused on brand awareness, credibility building and image enhancement. Both are critical tools for dealing with bad news or crisis situations. Both require relationships with influential people in one’s industry to be effective. And both rely on the ability to tell an interesting story.
So why do corporate PR and social media efforts so often appear disconnected and out of sync? To be sure, some agencies and companies get it, and do an effective job integrating social media and PR efforts. But many organizations in both groups still treat the functions as separate silos—or worse, mix them awkwardly, damaging both efforts.
But integrated properly, social media can help amplify PR efforts, and effective PR can help generate social media coverage. It’s a virtuous circle that looks something like this.
In this example, a press release is distributed online, posted to the company’s Facebook and Twitter updates, and used to create a social media release (using a tool such as PitchEngine). Any significant online news site pickups of the release are posted to Twitter (it’s okay to repeat news a few times on Twitter as not all of your followers will see all of your tweets, just don’t overdo this) and to social bookmarking sites.
For SEO and traffic purposes, the press release and social media release link back to the company’s website/blog. The social media release also links back to the company’s LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
The social media release is used for blogger outreach. Since many (most?) bloggers are overwhelmed with pitches and unlikely to write about the company’s press release, the company uses the press release as a hook and offers to write a (informational, non-promotional) guest post on the topic. When a blogger publishes a guest post from the company, that post gets linked in the company’s LinkedIn groups, Facebook page, Twitter and social bookmarking sites. These links send more traffic to the blog (which the blogger likes) and spread the company’s fame.
Likewise, any other blog or media coverage, or bylined articles by the company, are shared via social media sites. Bylined articles will—and other blog/media coverage may—include backlinks to the company’s website/blog as well. And the website/blog includes social sharing buttons, making it easier for site visitors to share the company’s content with their connections across popular social networks.
PR and social media can also be used together to promote events, speaking opportunities, corporate presentations, video and other content.
Social media and PR can both be used to influence journalists and other influencers online. Smart companies and agencies are putting this together.
2011 B2B Marketing Trends
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010MarketingSherpa recently released its 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. You can download the executive summary for free (or pay $400 for the full report). The summary reveals no shocking surprises but a few interesting trends:
78% of marketers identified “generating high-quality leads” as their top priority, while 44% said the same for “generating a high volume of leads” (so generating low-quality leads is a priority for some marketers? Strange.). Both figures were up slightly, but similar to last year. As MarketingSherpa notes, “Year after year, the greatest challenge that B2B organizations face is generating high-quality leads.”
A slightly higher percentage of marketers than last year (41% vs. 39%) called “marketing to a lengthening sales cycle” a top challenge. This may be just a statistical hiccup or it may be due to the continuing economic slump. While there’s no reason to expect sales cycles to shorten, an improving economy next year should help stabilize the length of the decision process.
Generating PR “buzz” and having a product perceived as “cutting edge” were called significant challenges by only about a third of marketers, unchanged from last year. “Soft” benefits tend to take a back seat to harder measures like leads and marketing productivity during lean recessionary budgets, but should increase in importance as economic conditions improve and companies shift from a cost-cutting and expense minimization to growth mode.
Of eleven different marketing categories, all of those in which marketers said they plan to increase spending in 2011 are online activities: website design / optimization and social media topped the list with 69% of companies planning larger budgets in these areas, followed by virtual events and webinars, SEO, email marketing and paid search. The categories with the largest percentage of marketers reporting plans to reduce spending next year were high-cost offline tactics: direct mail, trade shows and print advertising.
Asked to specify which marketing tactics are most effective, more than 90% judged online activities such as website optimization, email marketing and SEO as somewhat or very effective—not surprisingly given the responses to the previous question regarding 2011 budget priorities. Tactics like telemarketing, PR and PPC advertising fell predominantly into the “somewhat effective” camp. But strangely, social media—one of the top priorities for increased spending next year—was viewed as “highly effective” by only 16% of respondents, while 25% said it was “not effective.” Why would otherwise highly sensible, ROI-conscious marketers spend even more money on a tactic that they don’t believe works very well? MarketingSherpa’s explanation:
“Social media is undervalued in terms of effectiveness and this is a result of the infancy of this marketing tactic and the low level of experience organizations have in execution when compared to more seasoned marketing tactics. As B2B marketers become more mature with their social marketing practices, their perceptions on the effectiveness of this tactic will improve.”
The study also found that direct mail was judged as a low-effectiveness tactic. However, both social media and direct mail can be effective if done right (though social media results tend to start small and build over time). Perhaps more of these marketers should seek professional outside help in these areas.
Finally, in what appears to be bad news for marketing automation software vendors, 60% of respondents reported having this application in place, while another 20% (likely purveyors of lower value / short sales cycle / low consideration items) said they no plans to implement such software. That leaves only 20% of the market left to fight over. Now, it’s possible that the survey sample was biased in favor of early adopters or that respondents were confusing email service providers with true marketing automation, but it’s also possible that this market is simply maturing faster than its leading vendors have publicly acknowledged.
Want to know more? Again, you can download the free executive summary or purchase the full report to get all the details.
