Thanks again to all contributors who took time out of their busy days to write for Search Marketing Standard and help our readers get the most out of their online marketing endeavors!

1.  11 Free Press Release Distribution Sites To Try In 2011 by Rebecca Appleton on January 10, 2011

Online press release distribution is an easy go-to activity for any site needing a quick profile boost and guaranteed link backs. Identifying a suitable topic and then writing a release that conveys the news in a professional, engaging manner is often the most difficult part – it is a skill and one often littered with failed attempts before the perfect formula clicks. Having done the hard work and mastered online news releases, it’s important that the outlets you select for distribution do your PR justice ….

2.  DIY SEO, Where Do SEO Newbies Begin? by Jaan Kanellis on April 28, 2011

Sure, Do It Yourself SEO can seem very daunting at first sight, but once you put together a plan of SEO action steps for yourself it can be much easier than you think. One thing I tell most of my clients is SEO is not rocket science. The are clear rules and reason that websites get ranked well in the search engines ….

3.  The Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing Social Media by Nick Stamoulis on August 15, 2011

Social media is becoming increasingly more important for business.  In addition to being a branding and relationship building tool, a social media presence now contributes towards your search engine ranking.  Google and Bing have both confirmed that “social signals” are factors in the ranking algorithms.  While some companies have fully embraced social media, others have remained hesitant, until now.  Social media can no longer be called a fad.  Social media is a powerful tool that’s here to stay ….

4.  Mobile SEO: 3 Tips To Make Your Desktop Content Mobile Friendly by Bryson Meunier on September 14, 2011

Many brands love Usablenet because it allows them to get a mobile site up quickly and with limited resources by formatting their desktop content for mobile users. However, there can be many pitfalls in doing that.  Staples’ mobile site provides us with an example of some of these problems. If you are thinking about using a transcoder like Usablenet to make your desktop content mobile-friendly, follow the below three tips. They will help you avoid the pitfalls, and make your content search-friendly as well ….

5.  6 Best Practices When Designing For The Mobile Web by Rebecca Appleton on March 22, 2011

Mobile web design may still be in its infancy but with a predicted 1.7 billion mobile internet users by 2013, you can’t afford not to have a mobile website. Although it hasn’t been around long, a few hard and fast rules for best practice development and optimization have been established ….

6.  SEO In 30 Minutes Or Less: Leverage Facebook To Juice Up Your SEO Results by Tom Shapiro on May 10, 2011

Marketers often treat SEO and Facebook as separate silos. However, there are many ways to leverage insights from one to improve results in the other ….

7.  Mobile SEO 101: 5 Quick Tips by Ben Leftwich on July 27, 2011

Mobile search is growing at a ridiculous pace (30x growth in 3 years), but most companies still aren’t optimizing their site for smartphones and other mobile devices.  As mobile becomes the primary way users access the web, it’s essential they can easily find your site and navigate around it once they arrive.

8.  7 Years Later – Top Internet Properties 2004-2011 by SMS Staff on August 22, 2011

The other day, I was reading the press release that comScore sends out every month with a listing and analysis of the top 50 online properties and I got to wondering how far back these monthly updates went, and what an earlier version might reveal. A quick visit to comScore’s press release archive showed that they had stored such items since 2004, and a simple search found the corresponding release for the month of July. The methodology of the collection of the data looks the same, and the actual material is provided in a similar set up of tables highlighting different arrangements of data. So I think it’s relatively safe to compare the results of the two — July 2011 versus July 2004 — and make a few observations about what has changed and what (if anything) is remarkably the same ….

9.  5 Lessons Harry Potter Can Teach Your Business About Magically Magnetic Content Creation by Tom Shapiro on July 15, 2011

Are you addicted to all things Harry Potter? Or are any of your friends or family members? Chances are, someone in your inner circle is a Harry Potter nut. (I know I am!)  There’s something magnetic about the Harry Potter series that sucks you in and keeps you there.  So many of us wish we could live in Harry’s world.  Ironically, it’s not magic that draws us in. It’s actually a number of wildly effective content strategies ….

10.  State Of The Industry: Affiliate Marketing In 2011 by Owen Hewitson on April 14, 2011

This year marks a higher level of maturity for affiliate marketing, with the industry now sufficiently established as an integral part of the online marketing mix.  A testament to the health of this channel, US affiliate marketing spending is predicted to reach $4 billion by 2014, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 16% from 2009 through 2014 (Forrester) ….

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Looking at the stats over the entire year, it’s interesting to see that some posts from days gone by still resonate strongly with readers. To that end, here are the top 10 most popular blog posts with our readers in 2011. In the next blog post, I’ll highlight the 10 posts written in 2011 that were most popular with readers.

1.  What Is The Average Conversion Rate? by Kevin Gold

Editor’s Note: Even though this post is from 2007, it continues to be our most popular post and the advice contained within is still largely valid today. If you’ve been looking for a solid conversion rate number, check this post out first.

2.  11 Free Press Distribution Sites To Try In 2011 by Rebecca Appleton

Online press release distribution is an easy go-to activity for any site needing a quick profile boost and guaranteed link backs. Identifying a suitable topic and then writing a release that conveys the news in a professional, engaging manner is often the most difficult part – it is a skill and one often littered with failed attempts before the perfect formula clicks. Having done the hard work and mastered online news releases, it’s important that the outlets you select for distribution do your PR justice …

3.  11 Article Marketing Sites To Try In 2011 by Rebecca Appleton

Article marketing has stayed a key online marketing and SEO ingredient for a number of years as other fads have come and gone. Its stalwart success can easily be traced back to the fact that it’s an activity that generates results. Done properly, article marketing can boost traffic, stimulate sales, build link popularity and establish the author as an expert or thought leader in their particular niche …

4.  DIY SEO, Where Do SEO Newbies Begin? by Jaan Kanellis

Sure, Do It Yourself SEO can seem very daunting at first sight, but once you put together a plan of SEO action steps for yourself it can be much easier than you think. One thing I tell most of my clients is SEO is not rocket science. The are clear rules and reason that websites get ranked well in the search engines …

5.  When To Use Subdomians Vs. SubFolders by Garrett French

A subdomain looks like this: ducks.birdies.com.  Consider subdomains only if your site is enormous (thousands of pages) and you have the time to build links for the subdomain, as it will be considered a separate site by search engines. Subdomains, if grown with content and outside links, as if they were separate sites, can link to and increase the rankings of your primary domain …

6.  5 Free Must-Have Keyword Tools by SMS Staff

Whether you are doing search engine optimization, social media optimization, or running a pay-per-click campaign, the right keywords are the basis of any successful marketing effort. The two leaders in the field of keyword research have always been WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. Both are great tools and both are reasonably priced, especially if you’re serious about search marketing. However, for smaller businesses that are just getting their toes wet in the waters of online advertising, a free, bare-bones solution might be the answer. Here are five free keyword research tools I find to be useful … [Editor's Note: Add Wordstream's free keyword tools in here too!]

7.  The Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing Social Media by Nick Stamoulis

Social media is becoming increasingly more important for business.  In addition to being a branding and relationship building tool, a social media presence now contributes towards your search engine ranking.  Google and Bing have both confirmed that “social signals” are factors in the ranking algorithms.  While some companies have fully embraced social media, others have remained hesitant, until now.  Social media can no longer be called a fad.  Social media is a powerful tool that’s here to stay ….

8.  URL Structure And SEO by Rebecca Appleton

The URLs of your website are a lot like the bricks and mortar of your house – they hold the different layers and materials together and give a coherent shape to the entire structure. URLs essentially underpin your whole site; without them there would be no means of traveling from one page to the other or joining various pages together to gather a coherent collection of web pages into a single website ….

9.  Mobile SEO: 3 Tips To Make Your Desktop Content Mobile Friendly   by Bryson Meunier

Many brands love Usablenet because it allows them to get a mobile site up quickly and with limited resources by formatting their desktop content for mobile users. However, there can be many pitfalls in doing that.  Staples’ mobile site provides us with an example of some of these problems. If you are thinking about using a transcoder like Usablenet to make your desktop content mobile-friendly, follow the below three tips. They will help you avoid the pitfalls, and make your content search-friendly as well ….

10.  I Like The Facebook Button, But Will SEO? by Chris Stiner

Just recently Facebook implemented a web-wide “like” button that has raised a lot of eyebrows across the SEO industry. Within the first week of being operational, over 50,000 websites have already added the button with the anticipation that the new “social link” will keep them tapped into the ever-changing and elusive social crowd. Before I go into the potential problems the SERPs are having with this new form of linking, let me explain in brief what the button is all about.

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In her article, “Guest Blogging To Build Influence And Exposure,” Ann Smarty provides a solution to the problem for those sites that feature a blog as part of their architecture — guest blogging. When done right, guest blogging can be a mutually beneficial exercise — the guest blogger gets extra exposure by being published on different sites and the website owners get fresh content that will help them attract searchers and please the search engines.

Ann offers a discussion of the benefits of guest blogging and then moves right into a step-by-step guide to the process, with a number of tips offered along the way. If you have been looking for guest blogging opportunities or you are a blog owner in search of guest bloggers, this article will give you the framework you need to make that quest a reality.

The complete article follows …

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Highlighter, a recently released, free WordPress plugin is good news for all blog owners who are keen on improving their visitors’ experience and getting them more engaged. It is bundled with very useful features for expanding options to share and comment on inline content, including:

1.  Commenting by highlighting text

Users don’t need to go to the end of the post to comment — they can do so as they read, and their comments will be attached to the text they selected. These comments appear at the end of the post, too, but by giving readers this new option, you are making your conversation with them even more tangible.

2.  Sharing by highlighting text

Social networking will be specifically simplified with the help of this plugin since the need of copying and pasting selected parts of your content into, for example, Twitter, will be faster and more efficiently done. Highlighter will automatically fill out a new social network post with the phrase that has been highlighted and the URL of the web page it came from.

You can watch the video at the project’s website (http://highlighter.com) for more detailed information on how to install and customize Highlighter.

Aside from the plethora of features, Highlighter could actually replace the need for other social media plugins and simplify the look of your user interface overall. It will, of course, depend on your personal needs, but one thing is for sure — the conversation happening between you and your readers will be far more insightful and valuable, and it’ll come closer to being a real conversation after all.

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Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation

Even the most experienced of journalists and copywriters with years of experience behind them and professional qualifications to their name frequently call upon style guides, thesaurus and grammar references. Languages changes and is such a fluid thing that rules regarding syntax change often too. Not all of us are taught the basic principles of grammar and punctuation at school, and even those that are will often benefit from a refresher course every now and then.

Keeping punctuation and grammar aids at your side when writing website copy is a good habit to get into. Most word processing programs will also provide spelling and grammar checks as part of the software package, so there is no real excuse for mistakes to seep through into published copy. Any mistake or obvious error in spelling, punctuation and grammar can shake buyer confidence. If you can’t get the basics right, what does that say about the attention to detail given to your products, services and customers?

Are you sabotaging sales?

Good website copy works alongside a well-designed site, ease of navigation and a quick and simple checkout system to promote strong sales figures. A website littered with spelling or grammar mistakes can quickly turn buyers off and destroy the hard work, time and money that have gone into developing other parts of the site.

Likewise, product descriptions that are uninformative, brief or bland are guaranteed to send visitors elsewhere. Just one or two sentences per product may limit the likelihood of glaringly obvious grammar or spelling problems, but will do little to turn a potential client on to your company. As a rule of thumb, aim to write at least three detailed paragraphs about every product or service listed on your website. Be clear and concise – you don’t need long, rambling, descriptive website copy, but succinct descriptions of specifications, capabilities, materials and unique selling points. Even bullet point notes can work well and actually stimulate sales. The short, truncated presentation of information is easy for the reader to glance through and digest, the most important points do not get lost amidst filler copy, while the uncluttered design works well on devices such as cell phones.

Tone

Striking the right tone, while also checking spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity of information and relevance of detail is not easy. It is absolutely critical though – too corporate and the information can come across as dry and stale, but too informal and you risk losing the respect of your audience. As always, competitor websites are an invaluable source of inspiration. Studying the way they approach product descriptions may give you a much clearer idea of what you want to achieve with your own site. Even sites not related to your industry can help set the tone – pick a high profile site such as Amazon and more often than not, you’ll get a lesson in how it should be done.

Check and Check Again

Even Lois Lane had an editor, so don’t be afraid to ask others to check your web copy before it goes live. It’s common to become so familiar with your own work and writings that you read straight over mistakes and miss grammatical faux pas no matter how many times you may check your work. Ask a colleague or friends or family to read through, acting as your own collective sub-editors. Adding this safeguard will slow down the production of website copy, but fewer errors will slip through the net, helping you to present exactly the right first impression.

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Guest blogging simply means writing a blog post to be published on a blog that is not your own. Even niche industries have at least a handful of blogs dedicated to some aspect of the field, so it should be relatively straightforward to find a suitable outlet for your blog post. As a guest blogger, there are a number of advantages to be enjoyed, not least of which is a link back to your own website. For the blog hosting the post, there is the benefit of fresh new content to help push forward SEO efforts.

Of course, for guest blogging to be a successful and sustained online marketing activity there needs to be a strategic plan in place and a determined course of action set. Simply sending blog posts to any and all blogs you find will be counterproductive and could end with your brand being associated with spam. To get the most out of guest blogging follow these simple steps…

1.  Do your research

Pick your guest blog destination with care. Just as you would assess a site for relevance, quality and frequency of update when carrying out a manual link building campaign, the same rules apply to guest blogging. The best blogs are ones that you are already familiar with or the blogs of people you know, but you can also look at blog rolls and search online for suitable blogs related to your industry. Create a shortlist of at least two or three to approach initially rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket. Make sure that the blog is updated frequently as this will help give your inbound links a certain cachet, and read through recent postings and reader comments before submitting a guest blog request to check you are comfortable with the tone and topic of updates.

2.  Making your approach

There are a couple of ways to make an approach to the blogger you wish to guest blog for. The first is to think of a topic and then write a post, sending the resultant piece to the blog of your choice on spec. The advantage of this approach is that you can immediately pique the interest of the blogger and give them something they can use immediately, increasing your chances of being published. The downside is that you will have to decide on your own topic with no guidance from the blogger as to what they may be looking for or even if they would like to use a guest blogger on their page.

The second way is to make contact with the blogger first by sending an email or making a call, asking if they have a need for a guest blogger. The upside is that you can discuss topics and be sure your post fits the blogs requirements and desires. The downside is that it can be hard to make yourself stand out using this method of introduction, particularly if the blog you are approaching is a popular one. If you do take this path, be sure to have samples of previous blogging to hand along with a couple of suggestions for your guest blog topic.

3.  Personal branding

Writing a guest blog post is a great chance to build credibility and authority and if you are blogging on a well known or high traffic blog, a real opportunity to start to establish yourself as a leader in your field. Spending time developing a really interesting blog topic and then researching your facts and opinions is key – in such a vast arena, standing out from the crowd is difficult, but a well-informed piece will help set your guest blog apart. If you have a controversial or unique take on a subject, don’t be afraid to let your feelings color your blog post, although you must of course be careful to remain professional and be a positive brand advocate for your business. Even if you feel strongly about a particular opinion, presenting a case for the other side as part of the post can also be a great hook and will again underline your credentials and knowledge of the subject.

4.  Links and Traffic

Getting a link back is likely to be a main impetus for guest blogging, so double-check before submitting the post that you can specify the anchor text and that your link will be a followed one. If possible, a short biography preceding the link works best as it gives a little more space for background information and can convince the reader to click through after reading the post. If you can include a link in the body of the text as well then do so, but check with the blog owner first and don’t be offended if the answer is no.

Regardless of the number of links you can harvest from your guest blog post, take comfort in the fact that you are also likely to benefit from an amount of high-quality traffic. If you have picked your guest blog publisher with care, the traffic you receive will be interested, engaged and potentially a new client for your business.

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The complete article follows …

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Those of you who subscribe to our newsletter will receive an email tomorrow (Friday, October 15th) with the link to a short survey asking your opinion on various items.  For those who do not yet subscribe to our newsletter or don’t want to wait, you can go to the link below and fill out the survey right now!

The survey should take no longer than a couple of minutes to complete and everyone who submits a completed survey will be entered into a draw for a $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com. You will only be entered once into the draw, so please only fill out the survey once.

Complete the Search Marketing Standard Online Survey

We will use the information collected to shape the form of Search Marketing Standard going forward. As many of you know, we recently added a digital version of the magazine to our lineup and began a premium subscription model, with access to online content that is only available to subscribers. Subscribers had asked for these two options in feedback to us, and so we’re going to the source again for inspired ideas that our readers want.

The survey will remain active for two weeks, so you have until end of day on Friday, October 29th to complete it in order to qualify for the draw. The winner of the draw will be notified by email on Monday, November 1.

We are very interested in knowing more about your opinion on what we currently offer and things you would like to see in the future on the site or in the magazine. All answers are, of course, confidential. Your email address will be removed from your responses once received for entry into the drawing and your responses will be viewed in aggregate with all other respondents with no way for us to identify individuals involved.

If you have any problems with completing the survey or wish to break the “seal of the confessional” and share any comments with me directly, please don’t hesitate to contact me at frances@searchmarketingstandard.com. As the Associate Editor of the magazine who is also involved in the website and other ventures associated with the property, I am greatly interested in how we can provide you with useful information that is also timely, interesting, well written, and from the pens of some of the biggest names in the industry. But I need your help to do so, and so I hope that you will take this opportunity to share your opinions.

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Anyway, since Fridays are a slow day, here’s a link to the interview. Mostly I want to call attention to the link not because it’s an interview with me (AWESOME!!!!) but because Tad, who has been in the industry for quite some time, talks about a lot of interesting stuff on his blog. It’s well worth a visit and browse of his post archives to see if you would like to sign up for his feed. Tad did contribute to an issue of Search Marketing Standard a couple of years ago where we focused an issue on International SEM, where he provided information on the state of the industry in Germany.

It’s probably time we did an update of that issue on International SEM — what do you think? Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see that, and have a great weekend.

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While everyone seems to have an RSS feed, the proportion of sites maximizing their feed’s potential is minimal. Many appear unaware that feeds can be optimized just like any other page on a site. Syndicated content is written in XML, which is very similar to HTML, and can be optimized similarly. The following are some helpful tips and strategies to implement for increased exposure, visibility, and readership of your RSS feeds.

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