SEO

For a recent presentation at a corporate communications and PR conference, I polled my network of digital marketing and PR pros about the most pressing questions they’re dealing with when it comes to integrating Marketing and Public Relations. Since we’ve been working in the digital marketing and PR space at TopRank Marketing for well over 10 years, it was interesting to see  the diverse feedback from companies of various sizes and industries. But several themes revealed themselves that I think our readers will relate to. Thanks to feedback from Digital and Integrated Marketing Communications professionals like Corinne Kovalsky of Ratheon, Susan Beatty of Bremer Financial Corporation, Frank Strong of LexisNexis and Pam Didner of Intel, it became clear that one of the key questions organizations are facing is the need to break down silos between marketing and PR. To help answer that question, I think one of the most fundamental things to realize is that we’re all in the content business. PR and Communications drive a substantial amount of content creation from developing messaging strategy to content for newsrooms. PR content that can be optimized, socialized and publicized include: blog posts, press releases, case studies, social media content, newsletters, contributed articles, white papers, events (online and off).  Whether it’s text, image, audio or video, most PR pros are involved in content creation on a regular basis. Content is the currency for building social relationships that can boost earned media. Digital Marketing is tasked with demand creation and developing leads, and content plays an instrumental role in those and many other marketing objectives. From content marketing strategy to websites and microsites, content is the basis for effective digital marketing. We’ve covered content marketing tactics here before, but they can include blogs, landing pages, social media content, advertising, webinars, email and all media formats from images to video to audio. Understanding the role that content plays in reaching both brand awareness and customer acquisition goals, the opportunities for integration between digital marketing and PR become clear pretty fast. Align Goals When you look at common Public Relations focused goals, they often include: Boosting Awareness & Exposure, Influence & Positioning, Increase Mindshare, Educate Audiences, Thought Leadership, Reputation, Growing Networks & Engagement and even Increasing Sales. Often these goals are achieved through a variety of efforts that leverage or result in content. Digital PR tactics can range from media relations to gain editorial coverage in publications to events to working with influencers and social networks. Announcements, publicity, promotions and buzz are all the domain for PR and communications professionals. Some of the metrics digital marketers are held accountable to include increasing website traffic, leads and sales. Content Marketing goals also include revenue related objectives like order volume, frequency and profitability. Efficiency is also aligned with content marketing performance as measured by shortened sales cycles, referrals bottom line ROI on marketing investment. Since both marketing and PR both speak “increase sales”, it make sense that PR should be involved with content marketing in its planning stages to identify what’s “really” promotable from a media relations perspective.  Building publicity and media relations activities into the content marketing planning process will help marketing extend the reach of it’s message and improve marketing performance. At the same time PR will have early exposure to promotable brand content to successfully achieve media coverage and network growth vs. trying to make magic happen with last minute requests: “Can you send out a press release and talk to some bloggers about our new product future? It was released this morning̶

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Online video is huge and video viewing doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. If you're ready to advertise on YouTube for the first time – with one of those ads that pop up before you watch a video – then this basics guide is for you.

The post Yahoo! And Tumblr: It’s About Display, Streams & Native at Scale appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.The world is atwitter about Tumblr’s big exit to Yahoo!, and from what I can tell it seems this one is going to really happen (ATD is covering it well).   There are plenty of smart and appropriate takes on why this move makes sense (see GigaOm) but I think a lot of it boils down to the trends driving Yahoo’s massive display business. If there’s one thing we all know, it’s that a new form of nativeadvertising is spreading throughout the Internet. It started with Google and AdWords, it spread to Twitter and its Promoted Tweets, and Facebook quickly followed with Sponsored Stories. At FMP, we have sponsored posts and our Native Conversationalist suite, which we are scaling now across the “rest of the web” – the smaller but super influential independent sites that we believe are major suppliers of  ”the oxygen of the Internet” – the content that drives true engagement. Other companies are adopting similar strategies – Buzzfeed is building a content marketing network, and Sharethrough has moved past its “wrap a YouTube ad in a player and call it native” phase and into more truly native units as well. The reason native works is because the advertising is treated as a unit of content on the platform where it lives. That may seem obvious, but it’s an important observation. When a brands’s content competes on equal footing alongside a publisher’s content, everyone wins. Those search ads – they win if they are contextually relevant and add value to the consumer’s search results. Those promoted tweets only get promoted if people respond to them – a signal of relevance and value.  The same is true for all truly “native” ad products. If the native ad content is good, it will get engagement. The industry is evolving toward rewarding advertising that doesn’t interrupt and is relevant and value additive. That’s a good thing. Left out of this evolution, until now, has been Yahoo!. When you break it down, Yahoo! is a Very Large Display Advertising business, with a hefty side of search and a bit of this and that on top. And that display advertising business is going through a wrenching shift, as buyers move to more efficient programmatic channels (for a visualization, see my last post). CPMs (cost per thousand, the unit of value for display advertising) are rapidly declining for “standard display” units – the boxes and rectangles that built Yahoo! and much of the rest of the web. It will take a couple of years for those ads to A/evolve into new forms that are standardized and B/be driven by data and real-time programmatic rules in ways that brands can really trust (it’s already working for direct response, but that’s not the end game). Display will always be around, but as I said, it’s in a significant evolutionary phase, and the short to mid term reality is this: CPMs are dropping, and Yahoo! has a massive display business. At the same time, we’re all shifting our attention to mobile devices, and we’ve adopted the “stream” as our preferred method of content discovery and consumption. That stream doesn’t work so well with standard display. But it’s great for native units. Yahoo! is already shifting its home page and other content sections to a stream like interface. Tumblr offers only native ad units (founder David Karp lifted his strategy pretty much wholesale from Twitter’s “the ad is the tweet” philosophy). And Tumblr was built from the ground up as an activity stream. I’ll write another time about how I believe that display and native will eventually merge – via the programmatic exchange. For now, Yahoo’s move gives it an asset that its branded display sales force ca

SEO is a hot topic as it is necessary for any marketing and PR plan to take shape. Unfortunately, Search Engine Watch reports that many are taken advantage of by SEO companies. Their recent post, “Moving Forward With a Broken Compass: A Plea to SEOs,” goes as far to say that what these companies deliver is borderline criminal. The writer of this particular post establishes his ethos at the other end of the spectrum of quality of work delivered. The author describes a time where he went to attend a regular meeting at his client’s conference room but mentions that he never saw past that front conference room. However, one day was different: “I was surprised when the client offered to take us for a tour of their entire facility to have us meet the people we had been actually been working for. The client took my co-workers and I around their office complex and warehouses. They introduced us to people we had never before met, stating things like ‘This is Bob from Company X. They didn’t have a job before the work you’ve done for us. We built Bob’s office and the warehouse for his company off the back of what you’ve been doing.’” Whether SEO delivers what it promises or not, this is beside the point. If you want traffic, buy AdWords. Megan Feil, May 20, 2013 Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Google and Microsoft have been facing up to each other all week over the Windows YouTube app which has yet to be settled - although Google's 'Cease & Desist' letter might hasten Microsoft's decision about whether to allow ads and prevent downloads. In other news, YouTube's 'Comedy Week' starts tonight - we can't wait!

The SEO practices you implement in site design that optimize for search engines should be invisible. Modern day web design success requires a multi-function, multi-skilled approached to ensure maximum impact for your business. Balance is key.

After several days of rehash about search, I am running out of energy for topics related to information retrieval. Hello, hello, search today is not much better than it was five years ago. In fact, when it comes to locating high value information, I think we are now regressing. I took a moment to read “Welcome to Google Island.” It’s a Condé Nate thing. I am okay with trendy writing, but at age 69 I think a trend is a Silent 700 terminal with a fresh roll of thermal paper. There you go, young folks. The main point of the write up is that Wired found the Google conference in mid May 2013 sort of disconnected from the mainland. I ignored the utopia stuff and I shudder when me too companies do the innovation thing. Here’s a passage which I marked with my trust yellow highlighter: “Governments are too focused on democracy and rule of law. On Google Island, we’ve found those things to be distractions. If democracy worked so well, if a majority public opinion made something right, we would still have Jim Crow laws and Google Reader. We believe we can fix the world’s problems with better math. We can tear down the old and rebuild it with the new. Imagine Minecraft. Now imagine it photorealistic, and now imagine yourself living there, or at least, your Google Being living there. We already have the information. All we need is an invitation. This is the inevitable and logical end point of Google Island: a new Google Earth.”  And I realized I believed him. I believed in him, even. Sure, he’s a weird guy living in his own world. But what vision! And I wanted Google to make my world look like its own. And I wanted to give it all my information, about everything in my life, even my most private shameful thoughts. I put the glasses back on, and took off my pants. We stood, naked, before each other with no secrets, no rules, and no shame. And I knew I never wanted to leave Google Island. Even if I could. I assume that the write up is Swiftian, but with Condé Nast one never really knows. Several thoughts: First, we are returning to the walled garden view of technology. Sure, there’s lots of talk about open, but big companies are gunning for lock in. Second, when outfits operate with sweeping visions, some of the faithful may not follow along. Even cults experience some attrition. Third, Google is embroiled in a dispute with England over taxes. The fix may be to set up a summit between England’s prime minister and Google’s chairman. Net net: Google is not an island. Google may be operating more in the Luxembourg or Monaco mode. The prince, I believe, is a strong advocate of the blue fin tuna. And Luxembourg is really into money. I am not sure the island metaphor is the right one. Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2013 Sponsored by Augmentext

Image from: Political Parties / shutterstock News and political blogs grew 11% in April with over 14 million Unique Visitors (UVs)–making it the one of the Top 20 fastest growing categories (according to Compete PRO). It was a busy news month–reflected in the second fastest growing site online: CNN.com. Below are ten of the news and political blogs with the largest increases in monthly UVs. The list naturally split almost evenly along party lines: six lean left and four lean right. The top two sites in the category both made the list: The Blaze, with over four million UVs and Politico with just shy of two million UVs. I noticed major differentiator between the liberal and conservative blogs on the list: their incoming traffic sources. The Liberal blogs[1] received more traffic from Google, while Conservative blogs[2] received more traffic from Facebook. All six of the liberal blogs on the list received more referral traffic from Google than Facebook. Google was the top incoming traffic source for all but one of the liberal blogs–The Ledge, which is a subdomain of NYTimes.com. Facebook was the top incoming traffic  source for three of the four conservative blogs. Facebook was not even on the top 25 list of incoming traffic sources for one of the conservative blogs, RightPundits.com. Not surprising, as their Facebook page only has  357 ‘likes’ [as of 5/17/2013]. [1] Liberal Blogs: politico.com, thelede.blogs.nytimes.com, good.is, firedoglake.com, americablog.com, globalvoicesonline.org. [2] Conservative Blogs: therightscoop.com, rightpundits.com, freebeacon.com, theblaze.com.