Search and Social: What Marketers Need to Know About the Changing Landscape
Do you use social media and search to promote your business?
Are you wondering how the landscape of search and social is changing, and how to benefit from it?
To learn about the key changes in search and social, and how they impact your marketing, I interview Lee Odden for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.
It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.
The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).
In this episode, I interview Lee Odden, author of the book Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. He’s the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and the editor of Marketing Blog. Plus there is a killer SlideShare tip you’ll want to pay attention to.
Lee shares his insights into the world of SEO and content marketing, and the elements of his strategy that have contributed to his success. You’ll learn about the four categories of content that you must create for your sites, and tips for getting the most out of them.
Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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26 Essentials for Blogging Success: What You Need to Know
Do you want to be a more successful blogger?
Are you keeping up with the newest developments in blogging?
Whether you are new to blogging or you have been blogging for years, you will find insight in this article.
It covers 26 blogging essentials, in an A–Z tour of the blogosphere.
Each one has a full explanation, along with a link to further reading in case you want to know more.
Note: For simplicity’s sake, I assume you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform. Many of these essentials, though, apply to other blogging platforms as well.
#1: Akismet: Anti-Spam Plugin
One problem that every blog faces is spam. Shady Internet marketers will attempt to promote their products through spam comments and trackbacks, which create a poor impression for your readers. (Imagine seeing a building covered in graffiti and scrappy posters: it wouldn’t give you much confidence in the company that owns the building.)
Some hapless bloggers spend hours every month deleting a never-ending stream of spam. But Akismet, a powerful anti-spam plugin, will do all the hard work for you. By stopping spam comments and trackbacks, Akismet ensures that your blog comments section always looks attractive and welcoming to readers. As they explain:
Akismet monitors millions of blogs and forums, watching the methods and tricks used by spammers in real time. We know all about their spambots, comment factories, buffer sites and social engineering tricks.
5 Tips for Using Google+ to Boost Your Marketing
Are you wondering how to best use Google+ to enhance your marketing?
Google+ is quickly becoming an essential part of any business’s social media strategy.
It boasts a cool 250 million users! And this number is sure to grow very quickly as Google is making a Google+ account mandatory for all Gmail users.
It’s an audience marketers cannot ignore.
Google+ can help people learn about what makes your business tick -- your products, promotions, hours and anything else you want to share.
Google+ also plays a major role in search engine optimization (SEO) by making it easier for marketers to show up in search results—yet another reason to include Google+ in your social media strategy.
Here are five simple ways to give your business an almost immediate boost using Google+.
3 Ways to Use Social Media to Improve Your Search Rankings
Are you happy with the traffic coming to your blog or website?
Have you kept up with the changes in search engine optimization (SEO)?
This is essential for most businesses today.
Keep reading to learn how Google changes are making social media more important and what you can do about it.
Recent Google Changes Put Spotlight on Social Media
On April 24, 2012, webmasters around the world were dinged by the Google “Penguin” update—one of the latest in a series of algorithm modifications designed to weed out low-value results from the natural search engine results page (SERPs).
Google's Penguin algorithm update was a recent search engine change designed to eliminate spam from the natural search results.
Whether or not your website’s traffic flow was affected by this update, it’s important to understand what this change entails, why it came about and how you can compensate for it using social media marketing—as Google’s heightened focus on web spam is likely to result in similar updates in the future.
How Social Content Attracts and Engages More Customers
When you think of content optimization, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Do you think of keywords, links and search engines?
Or do you focus on useful content, interesting articles, engaged audiences and happy customers?
If you’re in the second camp, you’re clearly familiar with “the big picture” of optimization. But if you’re in the first camp, then stick around—sounds like you need a new perspective!
The most important thing we learned from the Google Panda updates in 2011 is that search engines are really serious about improving search quality and user experience.
Since then, the priority for site owners has been to create original, interesting and sharable content that attracts links from other sites.
Lee Odden has written his first book titled, Optimize: How to Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing. In the book, he takes a holistic approach to content and search optimization and proposes that companies should consider all of the digital assets, data and content they have to work with in order to make both customers and search engines happy.
Here’s what you need to know about the book.
5 Reasons Your Content Marketing Must Address Price
Do you openly reveal your pricing online?
The way people shop has now completely changed.
We know that if we look hard enough online, we can usually find what we’re looking for.
And that includes the price of any product or service.
Despite this reality, many business websites fail to address some of the most essential questions their potential and existing customers have, especially when it comes to the subject of pricing.
7 New Ways to Improve Your Google Rankings
Wondering how to respond to Google’s recent algorithm changes (known as Panda)?
Keep reading to find out.
A bit of history
In an interview with Wired Magazine, Udi Manber, Google’s head of search, said that Google will make as many as 550 changes to its search algorithm this year. One of the bigger changes happened this past winter in what has been called the Panda or Farmer update.
According to a report by Sistrix.com, within days of the update, a number of very large websites saw their Google rankings take a drastic drop. Sites such as Ezinearticles.com and Suite101.com lost 90% or more of their visibility on Google.
