This is a guest post by Brad Shorr. Check out his earlier posts on How to Hire Your Social Media Marketing Partner and How to Hire Your SEO Partner.

It’s very difficult for small and mid-size firms to select the right interactive marketing agency — as evidenced by how often agencies get fired, and how frequently client-agency relationships subsist at a low level of productivity and mutual satisfaction.

The best way to prevent agency angst is to select the right agency to begin with. Here are 25 selection criteria to help you do this. I’ve listed the most important ones first, followed by several others that are also important for agencies that get passing grades on the first set of criteria.

A couple of side notes:

1. First, a quick definition of terms: An interactive agency is one that provides a full suite of digital services that typically includes SEO, paid search advertising, email marketing, social media, mobile marketing, and branding support. Web development could be part of the mix, but not necessarily.
2. Second, a bit of disclosure: I work for an interactive agency, one that works primarily with middle market B2B’s in industries like sustainable packaging and mobile credit card processing. This is good, because it gives me a great deal of insight on what works and doesn’t work in terms of client-agency dynamics. It’s bad because some readers might perceive this article as an infomercial. I’ll do my best to be objective; my guidelines should apply to just about every type of business.

25 Key Criteria for Choosing a Marketing Agency

Highest Priority Criteria

1. Follows industry best practices. In my mind this is the number one selection factor. How does the agency decide what strategic and tactical activities to undertake? What industry sources inspire and inform those decisions?

2. Has a documented process. Marketers know how to talk the talk. But slick presentations don’t translate into effective execution; for that, the agency needs a systematic set of procedures for every one of its service offerings. Ask to see them.

3. Has a flexible process. Processes are vital, but inflexible processes are recipes for relationship disaster. Experience tells me that on one level, most businesses are the same in terms of marketing needs. But on another level, every business is unique. A good agency knows how to balance efficiency with flexibility. Ask the agency and referrals for examples of how that issue has played out.

4. Use of subcontractors. Does the agency do all the work in-house, or does it rely on subcontractors for key functions? The more of your work that gets farmed out, the less it is under the agency’s control – and your control. Subcontracting arrangements can lead to serious execution problems including miscommunication, missed deadlines, and cost overruns.

5. Establishes objectives and evaluation criteria. One of the biggest relationship killers is the situation when the client wonders, month after month, whether the agency is producing results. It’s crucial for the agency and client to define objectives and evaluation criteria before inking a deal. Can the agency lead that effort? Is this a priority for them?

6. Assigns a relationship manager. If 10 people from your firm are talking to 10 people from the agency, confusion reigns and it’s just a matter of time before the entire regime goes down. It works best when the agency has a relationship manager in place to serve as a conduit for communication. If the agency is vague about how communication will be handled, it’s a red flag.

7. Provides relevant case studies. Has the agency produced documented results for similar organizations?

8. Willing to start with a trial project. Rather than starting with an expansive and expensive contract, clients and agencies are better off testing the waters with a trial project. This approach narrows scope, reduces risk, and provides a safe way for both parties to get comfortable working together. Is the agency open to crawling before it walks?

9. Has strategic thinkers. Some agencies are pure technicians: all tactics and no strategy. Unless you have a total grasp of fundamental interactive marketing principles, a lack of strategic guidance from the agency will inevitably lead to a misapplication of effort and poor results.

10. Value to the agency. Cut through the sales pitch and find out: How important is my firm’s business to your agency? If you are a small fish in a big pond, you likely will pay maximum prices for minimum service.

11. Can they say no?  Forgive me for saying this, but the client is not always right. It’s not in your interest to hire yes men. You want a partner bold enough to challenge your thinking and tell you when are heading down the wrong path. Ask for examples of when the agency has said no. Many client-agency relationships fall apart because the agency followed a client’s wishes against its better judgment.

12. Receptivity of your own staff. Just because your firm’s leadership is enthused about the new agency doesn’t mean your staff will welcome it with open arms. Many relationships disintegrate because of resistance at the all-important ground level. Is your staff on board and ready to embrace a new marketing approach?

Second Tier Selection Criteria

13. Proximity. Long distance relationships that depend entirely on email and phone communication seldom hold up over time. If you have a narrow requirement, such as a PPC campaign manager, it could work, but for multifaceted engagements, there will be times when face-to-face meetings are necessary. How will a remote agency handle those situations?

14. Stability. “Here today, gone tomorrow” occurs all too often in the world of interactive marketing. How long has the agency has been in business? Is it profitable? Does it have a business plan? Funding? What kind of employee turnover does it have? Client turnover?  These are questions you must ask.

15. Horizontal scalability. Suppose you start an engagement with SEO and email marketing, but down the line want to add social media or try PPC? If your agency can’t handle those services, you will be forced to hire multiple agencies or start all over again, neither of which is a great option.

16. Vertical scalability. As your business grows and marketing gathers steam, can the agency handle your more complex needs? Going back to #10, this is a danger of being the biggest fish: if you’re so big to the agency that you are all they can handle, you could outgrow them. This issue needs to be examined carefully.

17. Access to top management. As I said in #6, having a relationship manager is beneficial. However, if that person becomes a roadblock between you and the agency’s leadership, you will have a difficult time sustaining the relationship or salvaging it if serious problems arise.

18. Referrals. Agencies should be able to provide referrals. If they can’t or won’t, it’s a red flag.

19. Credentials. Does the agency have any industry-accepted certifications, such as being an AdWords Partner? What formal training has agency personnel received? Who specifically has been credentialed and trained?

20. Ongoing education. How does the agency keep current with the rapidly changing landscape of interactive marketing? Do they go to seminars and conventions? Do they hobnob with industry thought leaders? If your agency uses out of date techniques, its work will produce poor results or even backfire.

21. Know who is on your team. An agency with a staff of 100 sounds great – unless only two people are assigned to your account.  You’ll want to understand who’s going to be on your team, what their roles are, and how much time they will devote to your account.

22. Office tour. Seeing is believing: a tour of the agency’s office will tell you a lot about its culture, efficiency, and stability. For large-scale engagements, this is a must-do activity.

23. How well do they market themselves? If the agency touts itself as an SEO dynamo, and their site ranks poorly – it’s a poor indicator.  Similarly, if you’re looking for branding help and the agency’s website is incomprehensible – red flag. I do give this criterion a low priority, however, because for whatever reason, I know of many really good agencies that don’t do a great job of marketing themselves.

24. Attractiveness of fee structure. Without taking sides on the issue of hourly versus project fee structures, I think it’s important that you are comfortable with whatever system the agency uses. If not, you’re liable to have concerns in the back of your mind all the time about being overcharged or underserviced. Either way, you won’t be happy.

25. Web development capability. If the agency has can build and support websites, it’s a good tiebreaker. All other things being equal, the more work that can be pushed out to one agency, the better.

Over to You

• What factors are most important to you in evaluating a marketing agency?
• What factors would you consider in addition or instead of these?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media at Straight North, a Chicago-based Internet marketing agency. Brad has also worked in-house for a large industrial firm and as a freelancer. Follow Brad on Twitter.

[ How to Select an Interactive Marketing Agency is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Anita Campbell.

When my company, Small Business Trends, LLC, first purchased BizSugar in the summer of 2009, the best way I could describe it was as a miniature version of Digg, except that BizSugar focused soley on sharing information geared toward small and mid-sized businesses. This is still true. But as BizSugar has grown over the last couple of years, it’s also become a small business networking site where business owners can discuss issues, get and give advice, and gain insight into the ins and outs of running a small business.

As the site has changed and evolved, so have I, both in my understanding of how the site functions best, and how to help it continue to grow. If you’re considering acquiring or building a user generated content site, here are a few things I’ve learned that may help you.

Learn to Use the CMS

BizSugar is built on Pligg, an open source content management system. The great thing about it is that it’s free. The not-so-great thing is that it’s not quite as user friendly as WordPress. It has fewer plugins and a lower level of functionality, but the benefit is that it’s geared toward managing a user generated content site, so it
makes sense for BizSugar. Pligg has improved a lot since we acquired BizSugar, but we had to learn many of its quirks. We tried working with a few developers who said they knew the software, but in reality, they didn’t. Because it’s not as popular or widely used as WordPress, it’s difficult to find developers who know Pligg well.

We were fortunate to find a developer well versed in PHP, and who was willing to take the time to learn Pligg with all its idiosyncrasies. We invested in him learning the software, and he’s now a full time employee. Whether you learn it yourself, or find someone who knows it or is willing to learn, and whether you use Pligg, WordPress, or some other CMS, it’s essential to be able to fully administer the site from the back end. Take the time to learn which features to use and which to ignore because they don’t fit your strategy, or your market.

Work on Building a Community

A community does not build itself. Many entrepreneurs and companies will launch a community site only to be disappointed six months later when nothing much is happening on it—when it’s a ghost town. You have to bring energy to it, and you have to “prime the pump” at first, until enough people know about the site that momentum builds on its own.

In order to accomplish this, we implemented initiatives like our Contributor of the Week, where we interview and recognize valued community members. We also run contests on BizSugar to bring attention to it. And we highlight top contributions in our weekly “Top 10″ newsletter. Reward your members for contributing and participating, and your community will not only grow, but thrive.

Actively Manage the Site

Many people think a web business runs itself. I know of very few that do. The idea of “passive income” is an alluring one, and there may be some ways to create that, but a small business networking site isn’t one of them. For instance, Pligg sites are magnets for spammers and those who try to manipulate the voting, so you have to actively manage the site, or it will be overrun with spam, effectively killing the community, and the site.

BizSugar sees more than 10,000 spam entries every day. The best way we’ve found to combat this is a combination of technological spam filtering and manual moderation. Automatic spam filters only go so far, so having a team in place to actively manage the site is essential. Without our moderation team, BizSugar would be destroyed by spam in the space of a week. Make sure you have a moderation plan in place before launch, or your site could be dead before it even really gets off the ground.

Remain Committed to Your Target Market

BizSugar’s target market has always been — and remains— small businesses and entrepreneurs. We’ve worked to stay true to that niche. Many people have suggested that we expand the site to include other topics such as entertainment, sports, and the like. But once you stray from the site’s original intent, it becomes far less valuable for your niche market.

Small business information isn’t as exciting as celebrity pics, and the business information would quickly get buried if we tried to expand into unrelated topics. We’d prefer that small business information shine and take center stage, and our members appreciate that because that is where their interest lies. We want BizSugar to be known as the place to find blog posts, tips, and advice from small businesses, for small businesses. It may take longer for your site to take off and grow in your chosen niche, but the end result will be worth it. And really, does the Internet need yet another celebrity pic site? Offer something of value, and your members will reward you for it.

Optimize Usability

Shortly after acquiring BizSugar, we redesigned the site, keeping it fairly simple. We made the navigation more prominent, and eliminated several extraneous features from Pligg. Just because a feature is included in the software doesn’t mean you have to use it. Also, by our moderators being ruthless in eliminating off-topic information or borderline, low-quality content, our users have only the best content available to them, and don’t have to slog through spam to find useful, actionable information.

We are continually working to improve BizSugar, to make it better and easier for members to use. Just a couple of the initiatives we’re currently working on are integrating Facebook and Twitter logins, and adding more community features. Some of the ideas for optimizing the site’s usability have come from our members. Because they’re invested in the site, they have an interest in seeing it succeed, and in helping us to improve it. We’re appreciative and grateful for the suggestions we receive from members. That level of interaction and interest in the site is a testament to the work we’ve put in to make BizSugar a useful, trusted site.

There’s so much more that goes into building a community site like BizSugar, but I’ve found these five lessons to be the most helpful in continuing to push the site toward success. BizSugar wouldn’t be what it is without the outstanding team I’m fortunate to work with, or without every member who contributes valuable and helpful information to the site every day. And that collaboration is really the most rewarding part of running BizSugar.

Anita Campbell is the Founder of the Small Business Trends website and CEO of BizSugar, an online community of small business owners.

[ 5 Things I’ve Learned from Running BizSugar is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by David Rodnitzky.

Having the best prices and largest selection of products means nothing on the Internet if you don’t back it up with incredible customer service. Treat customers badly and you will be out of business – period! Bad customer service will get you banned from major advertising networks, skewered in organic results, and ridiculed on social networks. Here are the top ways consumers can crush your business online.

Advertising Bans

If consumers complain about your business, your money won’t be green enough to buy advertising online. Both eBay and Amazon uses customer reviews as a baseline metric of eligibility to participate in their marketplace.

On eBay, too many negative customer reviews will get a seller kicked off, or in eBay terms, the seller will be declared “Not a Registered User.”

[ Attack of the Consumer! The Many Ways Consumers Can Put You Out of Business Online is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Brad Shorr. Want more? See How to Hire Your SEO Partner from November.

After taking the social media plunge, companies quickly discover that it is vastly more complicated and time-consuming than they thought.  The normal response is,

HELP!

But companies must avoid a panicky response, because hiring a social media marketing (SMM) partner requires careful study. As I’ll run down in a minute, SMM involves a wide range of activities that require totally different skills. So,

• First, we’ll take a look at what the activities are, to help clarify the type of support you need.
• Then, I’ll review your best SMM support options.
• In conclusion, I’ll offer several suggestions of what to look for in a potential SMM partner.

Social Media Marketing Activities and Skills

There are any number of ways to slice and dice social media activities. This is basically how our agency organizes the work. (If I’ve left out anything, your comments and suggestions would be most appreciated!)

Pre-launch SMM Activities

• Strategy involves competitive research, benchmarking, messaging, audience identification, determining platforms for engagement, setting overall program and conversion goals, and setting up metrics. It requires experience and analytical skills.
• Setup and implementation involves setting up and optimizing company pages within each platform, designing landing pages for offers, and creating editorial calendars and syndication schedules. Required skills include web design, web development, conversion optimization, editing, and familiarity with the platforms.

Ongoing SMM Activities

• Content creation is original text, images, video or HTML content created for publication on Twitter, Facebook, the company blog, etc.  Writers need to understand SEO copywriting and have the ability to write in a conversational and engaging style. Skill in videography, photography and web design may also come into play.
• Content syndication involves the actual publishing and sharing of content on social media platforms. This requires a lot of organization and repetitive activity.
• Social media monitoring is the systematic procedure, ideally executed in real time, of scouring social platforms for mentions of your company and perhaps competitors or other topics. People doing this work need to be comfortable with repetitive work but also savvy enough to respond to tweets and otherwise represent the company on social platforms.
• Engagement and community building is the time-consuming task of connecting with relevant social media participants. It’s about finding the right Twitter followers, managing a Facebook ad campaign, and attracting blog subscribers and members of LinkedIn Groups. It requires creativity, experience with a variety of platforms, and very good communication skills.
• Optimization is a set of activities aimed at increasing the visibility of your social content on search engines and within social platforms. This work requires a basic understanding of SEO and keyword research, along with an intimate knowledge of the mechanics of how information is shared on the various social platforms.
• Reporting and continuous improvement involves capturing the appropriate social data (e.g., Twitter mentions, Facebook Likes, referred traffic), analyzing it, and then acting on the information. This is a strategic exercise that takes a fair amount of technical skill to set up.

Companies usually discover they have some, but not all, of the necessary resources in-house. They may have great strategists, but no personnel available to do the grunt work. More typically – at least in B2B – there are people who can handle day-to-day activities but nobody with a strong grasp of strategy or SMM best practices.

Once you know what you need, where do you turn for help?

SMM Support Options

• By now, most big traditional ad agencies have SMM departments. They generally fit well with large consumer brands, especially if they are existing clients. They have the ability to support you in any or all of the areas I just described, but are probably looking for a very broad scope of engagement. The advantage here is, or should be, full integration with all advertising activities. Possible downsides are cost and lack of flexibility.
• Fully dedicated SMM agencies are much smaller shops that focus exclusively or primarily on social media. They may specialize in B2B, B2C, particular size companies, particular industries or even particular platforms. They, too, are probably looking for broad scope engagements, but not necessarily. The advantage here is, or should be, a very high level of expertise and creativity. A possible downside is difficulty integrating with other marketing activities.
• Many Internet marketing agencies, including mine, offer SMM in addition to SEO, PPC and other widely used services. A major advantage here is solid integration with other Internet marketing activities. A possible disadvantage is less sophistication than what a specialty shop would offer.
• The world is full of freelancers who specialize in one or more areas of SMM. These people are, or should be, extremely knowledgeable in their area of expertise, and are also extremely flexible in how they work with you.  Flexibility is definitely an advantage; a possible disadvantage, not likely with the other three options, is that you could wind up with a team comprised of several outside and independent resources.

As I see it, these are the major options companies (or entrepreneurs) have at their disposal. Again, if I’ve left anything out – please share your knowledge with us in comments.

What to Look for in an SMM Partner

Understanding the types of resources that are available should help you identify agencies or freelancers that fit your situation. Once you’ve done that, here are ways you can drill down to the SMM partner that fits best.

• Size matters. You don’t want to be a small fish in a big pond. How important will you be as a client? It can be frustrating to be a small fish, but on the other hand …
• Scalability. The other side of the size coin is this: Can the SMM grow with you as your social media program gains momentum? I suppose the best advice is to be toward the top, but not at the top, of your partner’s client list.
• Can you be a happy cookie? Some organizations are eager to customize a program entirely around your needs; others offer fairly regimented, cookie-cutter programs; many more are in between. Make sure your SMM partner has a process that suits your taste.
• Are their resources in-house? Bringing in an agency or freelancer who then has to farm out parts of the assignment is a little too fuzzy and wobbly for my taste. Communication breakdowns and discontinuity can cause things to go haywire in a hurry.
• Communication. Speaking of communication … unless you have a zero-engagement strategy (and they exist), it’s a horrible idea to totally outsource your program: somebody (preferably somebodies) within your organization needs to interact with your community and guide strategy in order for you to attain any level of authenticity. With this in mind, you and your SMM partner will need to communicate on many levels, very often.  Chemistry is key.
• Expertise. Anybody can (and seemingly everybody does) claim to be a SMM expert. Don’t take such claims at face value; instead, ask for work samples, case studies, credentials.
• Relevant experience. Once you’ve established expertise, next find out if the agency/freelancer has achieved results in your niche or in a related niche. Get specifics: you don’t want to be an unsuspecting guinea pig.
• Documented process. Any SMM expert should have a documented workflow process. If this is absent, you will have constant trouble understanding what you’re getting for your money.

Over to You:  What factors would you consider most strongly when selecting a SMM partner?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content and Social Media for Straight North, an Internet marketing, Chicago based agency.  They work with B2B firms in industries such as military fire resistant clothes and food contract manufacturing.

[ How to Hire Your Social Media Marketing Partner is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

It’s my birthday and I have some great news!

In January of 2011, I said that I’d make our Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 subscriber only. And I did. Many loyal readers have checked in on the newsletter throughout 2011 to get both evergreen content, the content that typically embraces these monthly updates, in addition to something completely new, monthly digital trends – the stuff you use for presentations and proposals, for arguing that social media and online marketing does have a firm place in today’s landscape. The newsletter, which was sent within the first week of the month, would include new research findings from surveys conducted by research groups such as the Pew Research Center, new discoveries from a marketing firm’s eye tracking study, or data that was recently culled across a multitude of SEO agency case study reports.

This year, I am pleased to bring back our Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 thanks to an excellent sponsor, HubSpot. HubSpot has recently launched a most amazing Marketing Grader tool to help you measure the effectiveness of your website. Please be sure to check it out as it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever seen, and I would be saying that even if they weren’t a sponsor!

And now, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: the evergreen portion of my Internet Marketing best posts delivered straight to your doorstep on my birthday as you’ve come to expect year after year. Want the trends, news, and findings too? Sign up right now at a totally reduced cost for 2012 for a limited time.

SEO

• Quick and Dirty Competitive Research for Keywords: If you’re looking for keywords to target in your SEO campaign, this guide will tell you what to do with available online tools and websites.
• Internal Linking: The Benefits of Great Information Architecture for SEO: Sometimes you don’t have to beg other webmasters to link to you. Consider focusing your link building tactics internally — that is, on your site. Breadcrumbs, navigation, and related pages are a great way to start.
• Does Google PageRank Really Matter?: The answer is no, but it’s still a metric that is close to Larry Page’s heart. Think instead about social media traffic, good content, a cleanly coded website, slow progressive growth, and your site’s authority.
• SEO Checklist: 60 Essential Checks Before Launching a Website: Is your site ready to be launched? Ask these questions and then answer them.
• The Meta Description Tag: Are you using the meta description tag effectively on your websites? Here are some applications of meta tags and arguments as to why you should be using them.
• How to Do an SEO Audit: How well is your newest SEO client’s practices? Do an audit to find out. This audit will cover their keywords targeted, tools used, site architecture, backlinks, and other elements to make sure you have a full understanding of what the client needs to take action and do better.
• 10 Metrics to Check When Your Traffic Crashes: With Google consistently trying to provide the best search experience, your rankings may fall at any time. This is how you can evaluate where it happened.
• 12 Popular Keyword Organization Tips and Tools: This post contains a list of tools that help organize some unruly keyword lists and includes tools like Ad Group Filter, RKG Duck, Wordstream Keyword Grouper, Spyfu Keyword Groupie (obviously using a different “keyword group” name not to infringe on any copyrights or trademarks!), and a number of others.
• A Guide to Geocoding Images for Local SEO: Image optimization is a big part of a cohesive SEO strategy. Wouldn’t you want your image to be associated with local places? This is the article you need to make that happen.
• User Friendly SEO: These are the tactics that search engine optimizers should use to optimize for search engines and user experience.
• 8 Necessary SEO Steps During a Website Redesign: Every so often, we have to redesign our site. But how do we make sure the search traffic we had stays intact? Auditing the site and working out which keywords and links are the top performers is a given.
• The Heart of SEO: 8 Everlasting Truths: This is misleading; this is only part 1 so it has 4 truths. Part 2 hasn’t been posted as of the compilation of this report, but you should know that SEO is about a strong brand, that you must perform research, real value produces great results, and you must understand where to circulate the message to get the best results.
• Technical SEO: Tools and Approach: Which technical factors matter for SEO? This is a review of what tools (e.g. wget, curl, Xenu, etc.) can help you assess how well your website is performing technically.
• Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World: Duplicate content poses a problem for SEO because when two pages share the same content, one page may get indexed (the one you don’t necessarily want, perhaps) while the other gets hidden. This post is a somewhat technical approach toward dealing with duplicate content issues. It’s pretty exhaustive too. There’s even a 22 page PDF of the article in case you wanted to take it with you.
• New Edition of the Ranking Factors for 2011 is Now Live!: SEOmoz recently came out with a survey that asked many practitioners their experience with keyword rankings. This data is compiled here. This is the newest data since 2009.
• The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research: …and the tools you need to use to do a great job.
• Small Business SEO: 46 Experts on the Biggest Mistakes SMBs Make with SEO (and How to Avoid Them): What have small businesses done wrong in the ways of SEO? DIYSEO asked 46 experts who weighed in on many things, from forgetting a local focus, doing too much at one time, having bad quality links, not optimizing their online listings, and much more.
• How To Take Your Keyword Research to a Higher Level: This post explores what differentiates quality keyword research from the junk that you get from a tool. Yes, it will take time. Yes, you’ll be happy with the results.
• Infographic: SEO Salary Guide: If you’re looking for general salaries for SEO, this infographic might tell you what you can expect to be paid on average by city. If you’re looking for a good salary, you may wish to relocate.
• SEO Checklist for Local Small Business Websites: If you’re ever planning on starting a small business website, this is a decent but basic checklist of the considerations you need to make in order to make sure it’s well SEO’d. Have a look.
• Should I Change My URLs for SEO?: This beginner SEO question comes up often. And since it’s being touched upon in this post, I figured it’s worth including here too.
• Introducing:  The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors: All of this SEO in an easily digestible infographic.
• Bing Rankings Cheat Sheet: People still use Bing, so understanding what works for rankings on that site is important. Here’s a list of what Bing seems to prefer for those top rankings.
• SEO Best Practices for Restaurants and Eateries: I’m not sure how many of you readers actually have a restaurant or eatery (or know someone who does), but this was pretty solid advice.
• The Complete Google Panda Reference Guide: Google’s Panda update has left site owners and SEOs confused and befuddled, but this guide summarizes the history and explains how you can be successful despite this algorithmic update.
• The Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded: SEO is not the same today as it was 6 years ago. Today, we think about XML sitemaps, local integration, keyword usage in images, PR tactics, and so much more. Your strategies must employ content creation, community management, local/maps optimization, among others. How many of these new tactics have you adopted?
• How User Generated Content is Changing SEO: This is an analysis of how search results changed in the last year alone and how it impacts your business. Get more reviews, people! That’s one of many ways to be more visible.
• How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search: Why is social media so important? For those die hard SEO practitioners who don’t see the value in social, this article shows the last few months’ impact on search engine rankings. The more you share, the more likely the content will rank.

Blogging

• Top 10 Attributes of a Successful Blogger: If you like writing, have good grammar skills, are creative, and have an entrepreneurial spirit, you might make a great blogger for yourself or your company!
• 21 Real Blog Metrics Your Company Needs to Track: Whether it’s pageviews, time on site, calls to action, or reader comments/votes, all of these metrics are helpful to fulfill certain goals, such as understanding how engaged your readers are, finding out where the readers are most interested, or whether your sales are being supported by appropriate content, so take a look at this post, reevaluate your blog, and see if you need to fix it up a bit.
• A Definitive Guide to Blog Content Scraping & How to STOP It!: Ever get your blog content stolen by another new blog who wants to get established? This is the definitive guide on how to handle that, from proactive stances to applying rel=”author” (plus full instructions on how to implement that) to finding out who is stealing your content altogether.
• Top Corporate Blogs: What are the best corporate blogs? SocialFresh ran a contest and picked their finalists. If nothing else, you should take a look at these corporate blogs and see where and how they’re doing it right!
• 10 Proven Tips for Getting More Engagement on Your Business Blog RIGHT NOW: There are lots of great tips on how to make a great blog, including not moderating comments, rewarding engagement, giving readers ways to connect with you, publishing posts around the time you get visitors, and more.
• 7-point Checklist For Bloggers Who Want to Create a Profitable Blog: As bloggers who want to monetize, a checklist can come in handy to see if you’re following the steps needed to drive your blog into moneymaking territory.
• Adding Revenue Streams into Your Website or Blog: How do you monetize your blog? It’s not only AdSense that you can use. Michael’s post should inspire you to make more money for your blog.
• 40 Dead Simple Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog: This post really has 31 tips for blogging, from design tips to writing post ideas to how to respond.
• 7 Habits of Professional Bloggers: Bloggers who do so professionally are willing to learn, creating a sustainable online property, creating content consistently, have self discipline, maintain integrity, have courtesy, and always aim to grow bigger.
• Ultimate Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization: There have been a lot of guides on blogging and SEO, but this is the latest and has good info.
• 5 Reasons Why Deleting Your Blog Posts Is Stupid: …or why Steve Rubel shouldn’t have done it.
• Neil Patel’s Guide to Blogging: This article touches upon the Neil Patel way of blogging — and he’s been doing it for quite awhile. He starts off with a list of how he crafts a blog content, how he chooses topics, social promotion, timing of the post, and more.
• 12 Flavors of Content to Attract Your Audience: Whether it’s video, webinars, long-form content, Q&A, whitepapers, or whatever else tickles your fancy, you can gain a big audience if you continue pushing compelling pieces of content.
• Using Authorship Markup to Increase Click-Through Rates in the SERPS: A new tag lets you identify authors in search engines and helps you get seen. This tag is rel=”me” or rel=”author,” and this article walks you through getting set up.
• How to Title & Tag Your Blog Posts: This post explains how to have blog titles that are keyword optimized for SEO and capture the reader’s attention.
• Creating a Corporate Blogging Policy? Here are Six Areas to Consider: Corporate blogging policies should surround the following areas: the general policy, policies for writers, and internal comment policies. Externally, it’s important to have a solid “about” page, the official blog’s comment policy, and bios/pictures for all bloggers.
• How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts with These 13 Questions: This article touches upon blogging from an SEO perspective, giving you questions and solutions on common SEO questions. The focus is high quality content.
• About to Publish a Post? STOP! Read This: This article follows the previous title tag post very well. It includes considerations for the types of things you need for good SEO (and again, attention) when publishing blog posts.
• 5 Lessons Fortune 500 Companies Can Teach You About Blogging: Some Fortune 500 blogs are really great. This is a post that looks at some of the high performers and gives examples on how you can do the same.

Marketing Automation

• A Guide to Marketing Automation: Inbound marketing tactics include marketing automation, a way to segment leads and scale personalized communications. This article introduces this element and explains how it helps a cohesive inbound marketing effort.
• 4 Ways to Get More out of Marketing Automation: A lot of my general audience doesn’t understand marketing automation, but did you know that it’s responsible for more than $300 million in revenue? Here’s how to maximize it.
• 4 Ways to Grow Your Business with Marketing Automation: Sometimes you don’t need to man everything in a marketing engagement. Automating your marketing efforts may be fruitful. Here’s what you can do to change your business course. Enjoy!
• How to Fail at Marketing Automation: …and four characteristics that work.
• 5 Disastrous Misconceptions About Marketing Automation: Marketing automation is not something you can do alone; you need to put it together with a strong inbound marketing plan. It’s about being active all the time, watching the progress of your campaigns as they go through their cycles. These facts are discussed in more depth in this article.

Link Building

• 10 Years of Link Building Advice: Link building advice can be hit or miss, but some link builders have given us pretty good advice even as far back as 2001. These golden nuggets are shared and discussed.
• Link Building 101: What’s link building? This is your introductory guide. (The next link goes even further.)
• How to Build Links: The Ultimate Guide: This is one of several really helpful link building guides, covering topics in social media, viral content, guest posting, news, link requests, face to face networking, and much more.
• A Guide to Long Tail Link Building: It’s always more advisable to target long tail keywords versus the broader ones (e.g. “travel,” or “jewelry”). This article explores how to get into this tactic and its benefits.
• Creative Tips for Link Building on a Shoestring Budget: One of the best ways to get links is via writing guest posts. How many of you actually do that?
• How to Train a Link Builder: It seems that there’s a lot of turnover in the link building space, so training new link builders will be a frequent occurrence.
• Notorious S.E.O: The 10 Crack Commandments of Link Building: Link building as seen from the Notorious B.I.G. angle. This is a really creative piece.
• 10 Ethical Ways to Buy Links: While some may argue that you need to nofollow links purchased via paid reviews (which is suggested here), link buying isn’t over and is a great way for many people to get the visibility they feel they deserve and the SEO value that may come from it.
• 25 Reasons Why Another Site Will Link to Yours: How are you getting links to your site? Are you being resourceful? Offering discounts? Publishing videos? Helping people make money? This and 21 other reasons are why those links are coming.
• Understanding Your Backlink Profile: Backlinks are important to find out the health of your site in search rankings. However, they could be manipulated. It’s important to analyze your backlinks regularly to see if there’s anything unhealthy going on.
• Kicking off a Linkbuilding Campaign with Questions: If you’re link-building for yourself or for a client, these are questions you want to have answered for a good understanding of what you’re doing and where.
• Link Building with the Experts – 2011 Edition: Every year, this interview series asking link builders about the trends in search engine optimization and how it impacts link builders.
• Into the Minds of Link Builders: Three link builders are asked tough and fun questions on tactics and strategy.
• Proven Ways to Use Content to Attract Links: This is part 3 in a series of posts that explain link building. To get good links, you don’t have to build brand new content. Repurpose! Add a new twist! Use forums. There are many ways to go with this.
• Link Building for E-commerce Sites: Anchor text is important when it comes to link building – you want traffic but also conversions. Here’s a good framework for making that happen … and it isn’t necessarily only for e-commerce sites.
• 10 Reasons Why Your Link Requests are Failing: If your requests are spammy, you don’t have clear messaging, the links aren’t converting to traffic, and you’re just building a link and stopping there and not focusing on a relationship, your requests will fail at generating the right response. It’s hard work. Are you prepared?
• Link Building in 2011: This is an interview with 2 known link builders on the impact of SEO and links.
• 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away (and Improve Your Brand Too): Want to build links? Here are 99 ways, from giveaways to community building to media connections to offering discounts and so much more.

Local Online Marketing

• Local Search Ranking Factors: David Mihm comes out with local search ranking factors every year, and his research is indispensable for those focused on local SEO.
• 9 Ways to Start a New Local Business Using Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, and Google: These easy (and mostly affordable steps) can put your local business on the map. The big investment in this case is time.
• 10 Unorthodox Ideas for Local Citations & Links: If you have a local business and want high rankings, these are some creative ways to move forward to get some nice links: hosting parties at the event, selling products for sale online and offering feeds for the products, integrating badges or writing a guide of local places in Foursquare, and more.
• Local SEO 101 Guide: Want to learn the basics of local SEO? Hire a company or check out this guide for how to DIY.
• Review Management: 7 Tips on Avoiding Bad Reviews: Don’t want a bad review? Here are some tactics to keep them off the Yelps of the world and affect you negatively. Communication is key!
• Local SEO Tracking: How to Track Offline Conversions: Whether it’s by custom URLs or custom phone numbers, offline conversions can be tracked thanks to a bit of analytics know-how.
• 13 Must-Have Tips for Local Search Marketing: If you represent a small business in a physical location and want big visibility, this guide will help.
• How to Make Awesome Landing Pages for Local PPC: Sometimes customization makes a ton of sense, and in local PPC, the more personalized the message seems, the better.
• 5 Tips for Content Marketers on Google Places Optimization: If you want your Google Places page to shine, fill out the information, encourage participation, use keywords, and focus on what you’re best at.

Branding

• 125 Tips for Building an Irresistible Brand: Ask yourself some questions, jot down your answers, and think clearly about what makes your brand tick to build an amazingly powerful brand.
• 10 Ways to Beat Online Obscurity: Are you a rockstar? Maybe not. But you can be if you’re willing to follow the tips in this article.
• How to Deal with Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand: How do you deal with “badvocates?” Here are steps you should take to close the gap and solve problems that can taint your brand.
• The 4 Layers of Online Brand Marketing: With your brand as the core, you then have a website, then content development and off page SEO, and finally social and reputation management. Are you integrating all facets of the pyramid to establish your brand?

Content Marketing/Development/Copywriting

• 3 Ways to Get Great Content from Your Boring Business: Shannon Paul suggests three ways to make your boring business exciting to prospects: through problem solving, through creativity, and by being the media.
• SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics (Content Development): This is definitely one of the best articles in this year’s report. This Distilled guide to creating viral linkbait and infographics should not be ignored. It talks about how to brainstorm contnet to gathering data to presenting it with visual appeal to sharing the final copy.
• Linkbait and Content Marketing: And now, a great walk-through of the mindset you need to be in to provide some amazingly great viral content that people will share and which will drive links to boost visibility for your business.
• What to Look for in Freelance Writers: When you’re hiring a writer to produce content, you want to create a good business relationship with clearly communicated deliverables (which is the case in more than just writing engagements). Don’t commit to long term engagements unless you’re really sure about the writer, though.
• Making the Leap: Egocentric to Empathy in Content Marketing: Sometimes you need to look at your company in the eyes of someone else: your customers. Once you do this, you can engage differently and get a different view of how to market. This post explains the process of how to think like your customer.
• 5 Reasons Copywriters Need to Get Data … or Get Out of the Business: If you can put numbers and accountability on your copywriting skills, you are a winner. The future sees copywriters as having more responsibilities in analysis, since writing content nowadays just isn’t enough.
• The 7 Deadly Sins of Content Promotion: Don’t be greedy. Don’t be gluttonous. Don’t show envy. Each of these sins is dissected as a strategy, a problem, and a solution.
• 6 Content Tips: How to Write When You Have Nothing to Write About: I got a comment on my blog that other day from someone who felt she wasn’t inspired to write anything for her blog. But there are so many things you can write about! While this won’t have you scribbling notes (okay, typing posts) for months, you might be inspired to improve upon your content development strategy for good SEO. The more original content you have, the better your SEO. Always remember that.
• A Kick Ass Guide to Growing Your Website Traffic Online: From platform to linking strategy, this guide covers everything needed to build a site that is networked enough for some good traffic.
• 10 Steps to Writing Better Content : I love this tip – “write drunk, edit sober.” Aren’t you more creative when you’re a little tipsy?
• 6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work: Is your infographic going to resonate with your audience? By doing research among a social audience, communicating with your designer, getting outsiders’ opinions, including links, and publishing the infographic with all of these considerations intact, your infographic can travel far.
• A Quick and Dirty Guide to Content Marketing: Whether you’re creating written or video content, cornerstone or spicy content, content that tells stories or solves problems, there’s an approach that will suit you and your readers. This article touches upon different content marketing angles and email autorepsonders to sell yourself and your services.
• Copywriting Essentials from A to Z: From Action to Zing, here is what you need to keep in mind for a great copywritten piece of content that will grab the attention of the people who you’re looking to connect with.
• Great Content for SEO: Simpler than You Ever Imagined: Build a survey, send it to your customers, record their responses, and leverage it to build what people want (via search, of course). Simple, right?
• 21 Ways to Create Compelling Content when You Don’t Have a Clue: You can steal ideas, borrow name recognition, get inspired, and do so much more to create some really good content that works.
• Infographics or Articles: Which Type of Content is Best for Your Idea?: This article takes a deep look at infographics versus linkbait articles and explores why you should do one (or the other).
• A 5 Minute Guide to More Persuasive Copywriting: Or in five words: Write for a real person.

PPC Marketing & Paid Search

• How to Write the Best PPC Adverts: PPC ads is a bit of psychology, so you might want to consider some tips to make them clickworthy. Then again, you also need a great product!
• Paid and Organic Search: Why the Marriage of Both is Important: After looking at analytics from a year’s worth of client data, Razorfish determined that you should buy keywords even if you’re in position #1.
• 25 Tips for Giving Your PPC Campaigns a Boost: Whether you’re using Facebook PPC or Google AdSense, you may want to follow some tips to maximize ROI (with minimal effort).
• What Visible Quality Score isn’t Telling You: There will be things you’ll need to monitor yourself when it comes to the quality score. Geography, for example, comes into play here. There are things you can try to see better impact of your ads.
• 14 Things to Ask Before Starting a PPC Project : These are questions for PPC practitioners to ask before starting work on the campaign.
• How to Write the Best PPC adverts: Five years has taught this now seasoned PPC pro how to get qualified leads through the sponsored search results.
• The Secret of the Quality Score:  I didn’t catch this post until February even though it was published in January, but it’s good stuff. Your quality score is determined by the probability someone will actually click through to your ad. There’s some interesting data and findings here.
• 5 Common PPC Optimization Mistakes: This is a great read for newbies especially.
• Why Display Is Changing The Value Of Search: As someone who does a lot in paid advertising, I take solace in knowing that display advertising is apparently going to be the future of search — coupled with retargeting. Display advertising looks to increase over time, especially from eMarketer studies and available data.
• When Should You Delete a Low Traffic Keyword?: If you have a really difficult and overwhelming PPC campaign, you may want to tidy up low performing keywords. Here’s an analysis of the impacts of doing so.
• How to Use Google AdWords to Reach the People Who Didn’t Click on Your Ad: This is called remarketing and is a brilliant use of banner ad campaigns — stalking! It’s also the reason for this reddit submission. See, it’s really good.
• Are You Creeping Out Your Customers With Remarketing?: Remarketing campaigns are pretty powerful, but if you’re chasing your followers everywhere they go, they may get spooked. Think about frequency caps to limit your ads, use different offers/themes, refine your ads with topic targeting, and use negative audience lists. Remarketing is great if done right!
• Start Collecting Your Cookies! Setting up Remarketing Tags 101: Remarketing is the hottest PPC method yet, and here’s how you can get started to launch and monitor your new campaign.
• How to Acquire Demographic Insights from Your Remarketing Campaign: Using data given by your campaigns and Quantcast, you can paint a picture of the people your remarketing campaigns are targeting so that you can make your marketing message resonate better.
• 43 Paid Search Signals You Need to Understand: These are the signals that reflect the user who is searching and the behavior of the user and thus must be understood for maximum gain.
• 9 Tips for Using Product Listing Ads: Here is advice on taking advantage of Google’s new ad format which should be a great opportunity for advertisers and for end users.
• 8 Best Ways to Find Negative Keywords: Whether you’re using someone else’s keyword list as inspiration (why not?) or monitoring what’s being said (or not) in the media, you can definitely find negative keywords for your campaign to avoid paying for that which would never convert.
• 3 Awesome Remarketing Ad Strategies: Have you ever seen an ad unit … EVERYWHERE? That’s remarketing. And if it converts, that means it’s been successful. Here’s how you can make that campaign work.
• Should You Buy PPC Ads for Your Brand Keywords?: There are many reasons why you should buy PPC ads for your brand keywords (so yes, the answer is yes!) Here they are.
• What PPC Practitioners Should Know About Robots.txt files: To prevent low quality scores and unapproved ads, PPC practitioners need to know about robots.txt files. Here’s how you can identify and solve that issue.

Public Relations

• How to Create a Good Blogger Pitch : This is the best blogger outreach post I have ever read.
• The Front Page Isn’t What it Used to Be: This is a simple reminder why you can’t rely on your website alone. You need to be firmly grounded on all major platforms serving as the “new front page” and aim for placement throughout these new mediums.
• 9 Essential Tips for Warm Blogger Outreach Pitches: Every so often, I share a blogger outreach article because people always do it wrong. My key takeaway from this article is to do your research. No, seriously. People pitch me all the time despite the fact that I clearly say I don’t want pitches. Obviously, the research part is overlooked. I wonder how much traction those PR campaigns really get if that’s the case?!
• Blogger Outreach Guide: How to Get Started: If you’re tasked with doing outreach on behalf your client or perhaps for yourself, it’s important to find the right people. This guide gives you tips on creating that pitch and finding people who can seek out the right people — your community manager.
• Recommendations for Blog Commenting as a Marketing Strategy: Blog commenting can be a great way to market yourself and your business if you do it right. This writeup explains the benefits and illustrates best practices for making it worth your time.
• 8 Tips for Blogger Outreach: Networking is important, but how do you reach the influencers you’re looking for? I blogged about this last year, and while those points are incredibly valid, so are these: flattering people on Twitter, finding them on a social network (especially if you can’t locate the email address), searching for opportunities via Twitter, and other lesser-known tactics are discussed.
• Outreach Tips and Tricks to Increase Efficiency and Effectiveness: If you’ve done any personal outreach, doing something above and beyond can certainly help make that campaign a bit more effective for you. The suggestions here are quite smart yet simple to implement.

Social Media

• Why Most Social Media Departments Fail: This is my own post and most popular post on Techipedia this year, highlighting some case studies encountered by myself and colleagues on why social media sometimes just doesn’t work for companies. Hint: it’s in the approach and communication, not in the fact that viability isn’t possible in some industries.
• Process: A Pragmatic Approach to Social Business: A social media planning process requires 8 full steps to execute and measure effectively: education, research, strategy, planning, implement, manage, measure, renewal.
• Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps: This is a HUGE list of great tips to make your site social friendly. Tips like minimizing obstacles to comment, displaying voting icons after the article, having a well-written title, and more are discussed in this lengthy article.
• Why Social Media Departments Fail: This post speaks from the heart (and is my own) on why social media marketing initiatives are completely useless without goals and a cohesive marketing plan.
• How To Find The Perfect Network For Your Content Promotion Campaign: Today, we look at all of the social media sites out there to see what’s worth promoting where.
• 14 Best Practices for Long Term Social Media Success: These are the traits that successful online businesses exhibit day in and day out: they have governance and rewards, guidelines, a training program, an editorial program, a mission and purpose, and they serve their customers and prospects.
• 10 Considerations When Creating a Social Media Policy: If you ever need to create a social media policy, look at this list of advice for things you may need to consider:  an understanding of chain of command, disclosure information, monitoring of usage, and much more.
• 21 Types of Social Content to Boost Your SEO: Viral content helps build links. Whether you write something that’s passionate, that’s controversial, that’s epic, that lists a bunch of great resources, and that’s visual, you can definitely reap benefits if you truly understand what a social audience is looking for.
• Who Should Represent Your Brand on the Social Web?: Whether you create a social media council that integrates many team members or you take it on yourself, humanizing the brand is a primary goal for social media, since it’s all about human interaction. How do you approach it?
• The Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist: Social media influences SEO, so this post tells social media marketers how to best craft your social messages to yield the best SEO value for search effectiveness.
• Tracking the KPIs of Social Media: With social media analytics, you should track traffic, fans/followers/ social interaction, and how well the content is performing. Here are tools on how you can do these measurements.
• Social Media for Small Business: 6 Effective Strategies: Businesses starting in social media may need this most, but I think it is valuable to any business. First, the customer is always right. (Well, almost.) Second, sometimes you have to pay. Third, followers are just a number. Fourth, [constant] self promotion won’t help you. Fifth, benefit from expertise. Finally, there are people you can hire to help.
• An Insider’s Guide to Social Media Etiquette: I’ve written about social media etiquette myself, but this one makes it more business-centric, like not using logos (if you’re representing yourself as a person, not a company, that is) and refraining from retweeting praise about you. This is good stuff.
• Don’t Abuse Social Network Pings: Social media gives you ways to connect with people you know easily, but there are certain etiquette rules to take into consideration.
• Social Media for SEO vs. Customer Engagement: You should be doing social media for customer engagement (relationships) but also for SEO value. Are you coordinating both efforts? Are you doing both?
• How to Grow Social Media Leads: New Research: The more you blog, the better it is for your leads. Also, the more Twitter followers you have, the better you will fare as well in leads. They call that social proof. You also get better results with a larger Facebook fan base. Do these findings surprise you?
• Social Media Consultants, Experts, and Gurus, Oh My!: Earlier this year, I worked on a campaign with a client who wanted nothing more than LOTS of new followers. He didn’t know why he wanted it, but he wanted it. Naturally, it felt odd to just build numbers for him, and I gave him the explanations as to why. This is the blog post that I could’ve used before the campaign to align expectations. Numbers aren’t everything.
• 6 Areas of Your Business that Should be Listening: Amber Naslund and Jay Baer show the benefits of listening across sales, marketing, customer service, R&D, HR, and management.
• The Rules of Social Media Engagement: It’s important to put rules into place when you involve yourself in the social media space. It makes you more productive as a company. This post includes 25 guidelines that you should consider when crafting those company policies.
• 9 Companies Doing Social Media Right and Why: Here are some good case studies of businesses who do social media the right way. What’s your business doing?
• Secrets of Social Media Revealed 50 Years Ago: Research by Ernest Dichter in 1966 has found that there are 4 motivations that people use to communicate about brands: product involvement (a great experience), self involvement (sharing information about oneself), other involvement (desire to help others), and message involvement (a great message). Do you think all of this is still the same today? This and other discoveries still hold true.
• Optimizing Social Media Campaigns for Search: Together, search and social are extremely powerful. Come up with ideas, get your external content on your main site, get tracking in place, optimize, and consider load times to create a powerful social and search machine.
• Your Secret Weapon for Standout Social Media Success: In a real time world, your response times need to change. That means when someone wants your attention on social media, you better reply within minutes. This post includes the various desired response times for a variety of channels.
• The Number One Least Asked Question in Social Media…Why?: Why are you as a business engaging in social media? Why should your customers follow you? Because you rock? Do your customers think so?
• 50 Kloutless Ways to Get Value from Twitter: …or any social network, really. Summary: network (the verb).

Social Networks

• A How-to Guide for Submitting Content to Fark: Chances are if you’re reading this, you may never see the need to submit something to Fark, a social news site for funny/odd news. With content on Fark being totally manually selected, it’s hard to get the attention of the editors. Here’s the type of content that works.
• Twitter for Brands: 6 Winning Strategies: Brands on Twitter may elect to take different types of approaches to be successful. Here are 6 that are taken by Ford, Zappos, JetBlue, and other well known Twitter accounts.
• 10 Ways to Get More ReTweets: This article analyzes some research from Twitter scientist Dan Zarrella to find out what and when you should tweet. Plus, the Twitter button helps too.
• Why and How to Use Facebook Comments for Your Blog: High quality comments? Yes, Facebook Comments allow for this. Here’s why you should enable them on your blog.
• How to Build the Perfect Facebook Page: Tim Ware is amazing at Facebook page design, and in this post, it shows.
• How to Succeed at Facebook Advertising: This blog post is a case study of a store that used Facebook ads. Some findings include leveraging endorsements of existing fans and use highly engaging content.
• How Small and Local Businesses Can Use Facebook: This is a really nice interview covering the benefits of Facebook. I especially like Greg’s detail.
• How to Improve Engagement on Your Brand’s Facebook Page: This report has been under scrutiny for being too basic, but Buddy Media says that the best Facebook posts are timely, concise, and engaging.
• The Ultimate Guide to the Facebook Edgerank Algorithm: News feed optimization is important if you want to pull in decent traffic from Facebook. Here are those algorithmic elements dissected so you can see more engagement and better return on your Facebook marketing methods.
• 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank and Exposure: Want more Facebook visibility? Encouraging interaction and sharing great content will help you get on your way.
• How to Improve EdgeRank on Facebook: This is an infographic that discusses the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm and shows how you can improve it.
• Facebook Edgerank: How I Increased My Facebook Edgerank Score to 141: This is a great case study of how a mommy blogger saw an increase in overall Facebook engagement.
• 5 Ways to Build a Sticky Facebook Fan Page: With case studies to explain how to do each, this post is a good primer to creating friendly Facebook pages.
• An Optimizer’s Guide to Facebook Ad Reports: Understanding Facebook advertising analytics can give you a leg up  on the competition. Here’s a huge chart for your perusal.
• How to Time Your Facebook Updates to Reach the Most Fans: When do people stick with and/or unsubscribe from your updates? When do updates disappear from news feeds? How do I measure the success of Facebook updates? These questions are explored in the article from PageLever’s CEO.
• Cost Per Like Campaigns On Facebook: The CTR, Conversion Rate, Reach Tradeoff: Do you want to see the best return on your Facebook campaign — the highest cost per likes? This article gives good direction on how to focus on Facebook PPC.
• Buying Facebook Fans is a Horrible Idea: While this isn’t really strategy at all and most of my reports contain that, I really like this fresh take on why buying FB fans won’t bode well for your brand. This relates how it will kill the algorithm that gives you status messages any visibility: EdgeRank.
• How to Build a Thriving LinkedIn Group: Making good choices and promoting well means you’ll see good LinkedIn group results.
• The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering LinkedIn: Well, we had a Facebook article, so we need one for LinkedIn. This is a good one that includes 20 hidden tricks, such as a vanity URL, optimization of your profile, tracking company buzz, using LinkedIn groups, checking in on updates, and much more.
• HOW TO: Optimize Your Company’s LinkedIn Profile: Did you know that you can optimize your LinkedIn company profile for multiple audience segments? That’s pretty powerful. Read about this and other tips on this Mashable post.
• 7 Quick Ways to Turn Your LinkedIn Profile into a Social Media Marketing Workhorse: Your LinkedIn profile can get you leads, connections, and so much more — if you actually do more than set it and forget it. This article shows you how to take your profile to the next level.
• 5 Tips for Using the New LinkedIn Company Pages: A lot of companies jump onto LinkedIn and create pages, but do they take advantage of everything, including monitoring? I doubt it. After reading this article, you might be taking a different approach.
• 16 Smarter Ways to Use LinkedIn to Build Your Business: From creating meaningful connections to mining your datastream, LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for business connections. Here’s what you can do to make the most of it.
• How and Why to Use Pinterest for Business: The new social network Pinterest is all the rage for those who love visuals. Here’s why it works for business and here’s how you can use it.

Usability

• A Client’s Guide to Usability: A good usable site is the one reason people will actually come back to you. This is the type of guide you send a client before you design their site so that they understand that a maze of difficult pages won’t get them any loyal visitors.
• The Website, the Webcam, and the Test Plan: Simple and Exciting Website Usability Testing: This has turned website testing into more of an exercise, with useful information on how you can apply this (based on a real case study) for your own website usability tests.
• How to Improve the Usability (and Conversion Rate) of Your Forms: Filling out forms doesn’t have to be arduous for your users. Consider some of these items to make the process simpler.
• Technical Site Audit Checklist: This is a GREAT checklist of the various considerations you need to address when launching a new website.
• Improve the User Experience by Tracking Errors: Are you doing any 404 page or other error monitoring? It’s something you should do so as not to upset your users. Here’s how to find and fix them.
• 15 Title Tag Optimization Guidelines for Usability and SEO: Your title tag is being read by users, search engines, and web browsers alike. How do you make them stand out and appeal to all?

Conversion Rate Optimization/Landing Pages

• A Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – Part 2: Part 1 of this guide was written on the site in November 2010, so feel free to check out the CRO link in the post. To succeed, the author suggests that you include calls to action, have credibility, write great copy, and much more. Oh, and yes, there will be a part 3 to this guide too.
• How to Implement a Conversion Rate Optimization Process: Like social media, CRO is one of those processes that takes time and energy to fine tune your performance for best results. This detailed post shows the tools needed to start, how to measure your results, what happens during the analysis phase, how you implement changes based on findings, and how to test these results. Not so easy.
• Testing, Testing, 1-2-3: A/B Tests Boost Creativity, Productivity, and Bottom Line: Small changes can help improve your sales, so it’s important to consider A/B testing as much as possible.
• A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing: An Introduction: With the preceding article, it only helps to learn a little more about why A/B testing is so important. Here’s your intro guide.
• 10 Site Tweaks to Make Your Customers Actually Click “Buy”: If you’re building an e-commerce site and want people to buy your product, big and attractive buttons with calls to action are the best way to ensure you get a buyer.
• Your Web Design is Killing Your Conversion Rate: Is your website or landing page design killing your conversion rate? You offer many choices or perhaps use the wrong background color. These things can hinder the effectiveness of your site and put a dent in your revenue.
• How Images Can Boost Your Conversion Rate: If you are looking to buy a product online, you probably prefer pictures of the item, especially if you’ve never owned something like it before. Right? This article includes lots of studies that show the benefits of images on product pages.

Affiliate Marketing

• 12 Ways to Pick the Best Affiliate Program: Looking to engage in affiliate marketing? There are dozens of programs out there. How should you choose the best? Consider product, competition, EPC, tools, and other elements to make the best educated decision.
• When to Launch an Affiliate Program: If you have an online marketing program that’s working well, it may be time to get an affiliate program on board as well. But do you have the staff to handle it? Can you handle the inbound support? These are questions to ask before you launch.

Brand Evangelism

• Inspiring Brand Ambassadors: If you’re looking to help get your customers to do word of mouth marketing for you, a brand ambassador program is something to look into. This guide lists the benefits and explains why and how you should proceed.
• Fans Aren’t Just for Rockstars: For big brands, it’s time to connect more closely with your customers. This is a process you can follow that makes that all possible.

Web Development

• Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed: This is a theoretical way to view UX, complete with why you cannot design it (it’s based on how the user interacts with the product). But you can design for UX.
• 7 Simple Fixes for Your Small Business Website: Does your site have good navigation? A contact page? A good About page? Title tags that are informative? Well, if not, it’s time to review these guidelines and create a website that truly will resonate with your prospects and customers.
• HTML5 and SEO: New Strategies for Optimizing Code: If you code for SEO, you’ll find that HTML5 takes things to a different level. This article discusses some tags you can do without (as they’re deprecated) and tags you should start considering instead.
• What Potential Impact Can HTML5 Have on SEO?: Each major element of code is dissected with some indications as to how it will fare with the search engines.
• Top 15 Free Things Every E-Commerce Website Should Do After Launching: Once you launch a new site, you need to think about product feeds, a sitemap file, getting analytics set up, and much more.
• How to Make Your Website Look More Legitimate: Beyond having a presence online that you are happy to share with legitimate pages and information, to be truly legitimate, you need to get a media kit, press mentions, social profiles, a reusable logo, and a website that looks very professional.
• Does Good Web Design Really Matter?: Do you hate some websites? Why? If your issues stem with bad design, you’re with 94% others who agree that design can make or break a website. Therefore, it’s paramount to create a design that really resonates with your potential viewers

Community Management

• 8 Ways to Deal with Negative Comments in Online Communities: There are many things you can do with negative comments: ignoring it, lawyering up, changing it to a positive discussion, removing the comment (and possibly banning the commenter), educating the customer, confess and beg forgiveness, fight, or own it. What are you?
• 8 Ingredients that Make a Community Manager: Who are the best community managers? They need to be passionate, available, and good communicators.
• What Does a Community Manager Do?: There’s no one-size-fits-all job description for a community manager. It’s actually a LOT of work. Here’s what it might look like, though.
• The 2011 State of Community Management: Year after year, this report has served as one of  the best resources for community managers. It covers strategy, leadership, culture, content, and so much more. It’s a 95 page report primarily based on survey findings of 109 individuals which you can download as PDF for your personal pursuits.
• How to Build a Great Contest: This is a case study of how a contest was run successfully via Twitter and Facebook. What contest ideas are you trying for your business?

Reputation Management

• Our Online Reputation Management Playbook: Ever search Google and see “companyname scam”? The writer has. Here’s how he successfully conquered this reputation management problem.
• How to Combat Fake Reviews While Managing Online Reputation: Who cares if you have some negative reviews? Try to get as many positive (legitimate!) reviews as you can and you’ll find that conversions will soar.
• Using Google Analytics to Monitor Your Brand: With a few tweaks, you can learn a lot about how your brand is faring across search results.
• How to Avoid Negative Reviews and Bad Publicity for Your Online Store: The more someone is unhappy about an experience, the more likely his friends have to hear about it. (Surprisingly, though, in this case, the store was unnamed even though the writer says that “word travels fast.”) Still, the lessons to take away from any negative experience is that marketing and customer service go hand in hand, and you could truly make a difference and prevent negative reputation marks against your business if you actually are proactive about what people are saying about you.

Web Analytics

• Using Regular Expressions to Group Keywords in Google Analytics: Did you know about the pipe, carat, dollar sign, question mark, or plus sign tools of the trade for Google Analytics? Well, take a look at this guide and you’ll learn a thing or two.
• A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics 5:  If you know about Google Analytics, not much has changed, but GA has been upgraded to version 5 and sports some new features. This article takes a look.
• Web Analytics: Frequently Asked Questions and Direct Answers: This article addresses FAQs such as how to sell analytics to a skeptical client in 30 seconds, why some keywords have 0 visits in Google Analytics, how to attribute offline sales to the online marketing, where to find competitive intelligence, and much more.
• How to Use Events as Goals in Google Analytics: Here are some tips on how to set up Google Analytics to assess engagement on your site.
• 11 Analytics Metrics that are Actionable: Focusing on the right metrics makes your life easier and your time more productive. Here are 11 metrics you should actually care about.
• Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value: Social media can’t be measured, you say? When you finish reading this article, you may disagree with that sentiment. Comments are the conversation rate, shares/retweets are the amplification rate, favorites/Likes/+1s are the applause rate, and your long term revenue and cost savings is your economic value.
• Using Google Analytics to Uncover Hidden Problem Areas: Have you seen your site’s analytics yet? If your website exists specifically for some ROI, it’s time you analyzed your top exit pages, high bounce rates, your site search, and site elements to determine if there’s anything needing improvement.
• Data Analysis 101: Seven Simple Mistakes that Limit Your Salary: This article looks at pretty charts (that aren’t particularly useful) and shows how you could totally create or construe the data incorrectly.

Domaining

• Practical Domaining: People buy domains for many reasons — for search traffic, misspelled words, exact match, and more. If you’re into the art of domaining, you already know this. If you’re not but want to learn, here is your introductory guide.

Video Marketing

• Video Posts: Are You Doing it Wrong?: If you ever blog about video, and many people don’t realize this, it’s not useful just to include the video without any detail. I can’t stress how many sites just let you submit the video without ANY detail whatsoever. Here are the steps you should follow to get people passionate about what you’re posting. The video alone still doesn’t cut it.
• 8 Ways to Maximize Your YouTube Marketing Results: With YouTube being a powerful search engine, it’s the go-to place for video marketing. Compelling videos coupled with a branded page can yield great results.

Email Marketing

• Top 10 Ways to Use Email Marketing Effectively (Email Marketing): Whether you’re focused on design, goals, or social media promotion, email marketing should be considerate of some of these elements so that you do create an effective campaign that works.
• 4 Steps to Understanding the ROI of Your Newsletter: By understanding email marketing metrics, defining a baseline using historical data, assessing ROI, and testing (and retesting, of course), you can learn much about how to improve your newsletter for greater engagement.
• 4 Mobile Email-Marketing Tips: People are reading their email on mobile, so it is important for you to think about mobile email marketing in the same way that you do regular email marketing.
• 5 Email Marketing Tips for Increased Open Rates: If you’re looking to get people to open those emails you’ve sent, you should make a good first impression, time your emails appropriately, format the email in such a way to avoid spam filter traps, get rid of those folks who just don’t read the emails, and continually optimize the sign-up process.
• Email is (Still) Important and Here’s Why: Email is my best method of communication, but so many people think that Facebook and Twitter have replaced that. (Oh, and phone calls.) Nope. Not for everyone. Email has suffered the fate of value theory — but for me, it’s incredibly valuable. Do you think email is dead?
• 7 Email Case Studies: Publishers Who Forget About the Fold: Did you forget about the fold? Your core messaging should be easily visible. Don’t require people to scroll down.This report dissects many emails and shows where they failed.

General Online Marketing (and everything else)

• 109 Ways to Make Your Business Irresistible to the Media: Want to be quoted in the media? You can be — just follow some of these steps, which include being social, thinking visually, launch a brand new product, write an e-book, give the interviewer control of the discussion, and much more.
• The Ultimate Small Business Website Guide: This guide is truly ultimate. It talks about the benefits of creating a website, how to plan one, how to set one up, how to integrate social media and email marketing, and how to review your analytics.
• Drip, Drip, Drip – Building Prospect Trust One Drop at a Time: A lot of websites fall into this trap of assuming someone checking out your site wants to buy now or later, but this thought process is fundamentally incorrect. It’s important to build relationships via your website for these people to convert when they’re ready.
• A Holistic Approach to Marketing: Integrating Social, Search, and People: A great online marketing initiative integrates search, social, and paid together.
• The Noob Guide to Online Marketing: This exhaustive article also contains a tremendous infographic that you might as well hang up as a poster on your office wall; it covers the gamut from social media to analytics to PPC, email marketing, lead gen, and whatever else. The “Wheel of Marketing,” as he calls it, has so many spokes.
• Jedi Mind Tricks: 17 Lesser Known Ways to Persuade People: Using support from numerous studies, these tips help you get what you want, which is great in business. For example, if something happens often enough, you’ll be persuaded. How many of you have friends or family that were Facebook holdouts but eventually joined due to the prominence around you? Also, did you know that men prefer email than face to face discussions? (This woman prefers email too.)
• 7 Repeat Business Strategies for Small Businesses:  Why does repeat business make sense? Because they’re targeted, easy to reach, cheap, and there’s no middle man. So here’s what you can do as a small business to get more repeat purchases.
• Marketing to Early Adopters: This is a great article from Mukund Mohan on how he identified adopters and reached out to them for his business.
• 21 Big Marketing Ideas for Small Marketing Budgets: I really like the tips in this article because they don’t require the deepest of pockets to implement. You’ll probably just need a community manager who can be active on blogs, message boards, social networks, and blogging to succeed at most of these tips.
• My Dad Taught Me Cashflow with a Soda Machine: …or how to teach your child to become a kick ass entrepreneur. The lessons you can pick up from selling soda are really applicable in business, and I love the approach.
• Tasty Ideas to Maximize Online Marketing for Events: This post explains how to promote an event with a model focused on Audience > Objectives > Tools > Tactics > Measurement. Plus, there are 27 great online marketing and public relations tactics that can help!
• The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur: This isn’t a bad article, but he should have used numbers and not roman numerals or whatever he did there. It also has a good number of questions and answers from readers.
• 100 Ways to Connect: Relationship building at its finest.
• 14 Best Practices for Brands to Grow their Audiences in Social Media: Successful brands have gotten to that point because they designed an effective channel strategy, constructed a listening framework, initiated training programs, served customers and prospects, among other things that kept them at the front of their customers’ minds and hearts.
• Know. Like. Trust.: This is a reminder of the failures of many businesses with their own marketing; they forget to get consumers to know them, to like them, and to trust them.
• Email Overload: The Secret to Getting Inbox Zero Every Time: Answering email is good customer service. Good customer service is good marketing. Why this falls on deaf ears for perhaps 85% of people I email to is beyond me. These are my personal tips on how you can truly conquer your inbox. As we speak, it’s over 3 months after that post was written and I still have nothing in my inbox.

Thanks again to HubSpot’s Marketing Grader for making it possible for you to enjoy these great content pieces again on Techipedia. Again, it’s a fantastic tool: it analyzes all of your marketing — not just your website — reviewing over 30 different factors and then providing an overall Marketing Grade on a 1-100 scale, including:

• Competitive Benchmarking: Is my marketing more or less effective than my competition?
• Lead Generation: Are my marketing efforts generating enough leads and sales?
• Mobile Marketing: Is my web presence optimized for mobile devices?
• Social Media: How effectively are we using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in our marketing?
• Blogging: Is my blog driving results that justify the time investment, or are we wasting time doing the wrong things?
• Overall Analysis: What are the strong points and shortcomings in our marketing?

Marketing Grader also outlines why you should take particular steps to improve and what your top priorities should be. With customized action items to help the top of your funnel, the middle of your funnel, and your analytics, Marketing Grader makes it easy for you to figure out your next steps.

Don’t forget that you can get this all monthly (plus more!) by signing up to my monthly newsletter, reduced 80% for a limited time

[ Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This last year Google brought a large number of algorithm changes to the table.  Although these changes helped increase traffic and rankings to many large corporations such as YouTube and eBay, it hurt a large majority of small businesses. According to Search Engine Land, some domains saw a 94% loss in visibility, and others were left picking up the pieces after they lost 80% of their keyword positions. Consider this graph by Sistrix, created to describe where mahalo.com’s keywords landed on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) before and after one of the Google algorithm updates:

Although there were several Google algorithm changes (some with more impact than others), all of them left businesses scratching their heads. One minute their tactics were working; the next minute they must change their approach entirely. If you found your business scrambling to stay afloat during these changes, you may not realize just how much treading you had to do to stay alive. In case you missed it through all the chaos, below lists all of the crazy Google changes that occurred in 2011and just what they all meant:

Top 10 Google Algorithm Changes of 2011

1. Jan. 28: Attribution Update – Designed to help reduce spam levels on SERPs. This specifically targeted sites with unoriginal content; a way to make sure these pages are not ranked higher than where the content was originally published.
2. Feb. 23: First Panda Update (Farmer Update) – Aimed at finding sites that write irrelevant content and then optimize it for rankings; often referred to as “content farms.” The launch initially impacted 12% of U.S. queries according to Search Engine Land.
3. April 11: Panda update 2.0 – This incorporated Google searcher blocking data. If a user blocked a site during a search, Google would then take this into consideration when determining the worth of a website.
4. May 9: Panda Update 2.1 – This update was very minor and many people did not notice a change. For this reason, the exact changes that occurred during the update were not discussed by Google.
5. June 21: Panda update 2.2 – Once again, Google focuses on what experts now call “scraper detection.” The update focuses on content that is duplicated without your permission, or scraped (diversion and then republishing).
6. July 22: Panda update 2.3 – This was another minor update that was pushed out manually. Google claims the update “incorporates new signals.” Quality score is determined now by a blend of unique content and link score for that content.
7. Aug. 12: Panda update 2.4 – This update stated that all algorithmic search improvements will be rolled out to other languages. According to Google, the change impacted 6-9% of queries. Oddly enough, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages were omitted.
8. Sep. 28: Panda update 2.5 – This was supposed to be a minor update according to Google. However, many small businesses lost visibility and traffic while many larger businesses, such as FoxNews.com, benefitted from the change. This caused an uproar from small businesses who saw it as a way to keep the “big names” on top.
9. Nov. 18: Panda Update 3.1 – This update was named “3.1” because many felt that some of the minor updates after 2.5 (labeled 2.51, 2.5.2, and 2.5.3) should have been labeled “3.0.” This update was considered a minor algorithm date refresh and didn’t get much attention.
10. Dec. 1: Ten More Updates Announced – Although the updates are over for 2011, ten more updates were announced for 2012. This will affect businesses in the coming weeks, so many spend their time now, in 2011, trying to get ready. The new updates are said to focus on keyword density, keyword relevancy, and broken links.

What the Updates Mean for Your Company

Each Panda update meant something different for each company. While some were hit hard by 2.5, others remained stable until 3.1 hit. However, it is safe to say that the majority of small businesses were affected by at least one of the Panda updates in 2011. The graph below was taken from Search Engine Roundtable and illustrates the types of sites that were hit hardest by Panda 2.5:

Unfortunately, many small businesses are still trying to recover from all of the updates. According to Search Engine Roundtable, over 70% of those who took their online poll reported that they have still not recovered. Nonetheless, 2012 is the time to take these Panda updates seriously and make SEO changes for the better. Consider a few of the ways your company can follow the new Panda guidelines:

• Create new and original content
• Promoting that content through social media
• Make sure that all links are relevant.
• Google also introduced the “+1” option for individuals and businesses to utilize. This overlaps with utilizing social media; it will help show Google that your site is popular.
• Do not duplicate/copy another site’s content. While this might be okay every once and a while with the sites permission, do not make it a habit.
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew. In other words, if you don’t have the funds or the staff to create new content for three domains, consider selling one. It is extremely important to listen to these Google Panda updates and try and abide by their standards.

Although it may take a while to get your sight back to where you want it on those Google SERPs, it will be worth it in the end. After all, Google makes these algorithm changes in order to give users the best possible experience while online. Your site should have unique content and it should have relevant links. There is no reason that only the well-known websites should make it to the top of Google. If you follow the rules and optimize your website correctly, you have just as much a chance to be seen as any other business.

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to merchant services. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including phone systems to small businesses and entrepreneurs for Resource Nation.

[ Looking Back on the Year of the Panda: Google Algorithm Changes is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post from James Bentham.

SMS, really?

As most brands and organizations now have a mobile optimized version of their website, the focus is now on encouraging users to travel to your site and interact with the brand itself in order to push increased revenue.

Experienced marketers will tell you that customers are much more likely to respond to campaigns that engage them on a personal level. The marketing strategy must be relevant and timely while meeting the customer’s individual needs. In terms of rate of response, the simple SMS dominates the market. It can add real value to a marketing strategy and continues to grow with the decline in consumer spending. Marketers are being forced to find ever more cost effective ways of engaging with users.

A few statistics…

When you break down the figures involved in SMS marketing, the results can be quite staggering. Here a few examples:

• 77% of the population of the world own a mobile phone.
• Of all the SMS messages sent on a daily basis, 98% are opened, with 83% opened within 3 minutes.
• While only 6% of marketing emails are responded to, SMS campaigns have seen as much as 45% response rates.
• In other words, SMS has a higher response rate from direct communication than telemarketing, email, or post.

Why it Works

1. Speed: SMS messages are delivered almost instantly, with the user engaged in a matter of seconds wherever they are in the world.
2. Flexibility: The variety that SMS marketing offers is almost endless. Messages can deliver text alerts, subscriptions, broadcast advertising, competitions, campaigns for customer loyalty, customer profiling, cross-selling and reminders, the list goes on.
3. Response: As previously mentioned, SMS campaigns have a very high response rate. This can be put down to the ease and speed by which users can reply, with relatively little effort.
4. Personal: Messages can be easily customized to the demographic that they are targeted at, such as gender, age, location, activities, or preferences.
5. Cheap: Lastly, and potentially crucially, SMS messages are cheap. Costing as little as $0.05 (2.5p) per message, there are few other methods than provide such a strong ROI.

Implementation

There are far too many ways of utilizing SMS marketing to list, but to give you an example, here are a few examples of potential implementations.

• Promotions/Offers
• Customers love to receive offers, especially if they don’t have to work for them. SMS messages allow retailers to deliver promotions and discount vouchers straight to their mobile, based on previous purchases from the brand.
• SMS enables delivery of offers via geo-fencing, which means a customer may only need to walk by a store or relevant location to receive a discount voucher via text, as long as they are opted in to the scheme.
• Customer Profiling
• If you already have a database of customer details, a simple profiling campaign can boost a marketing strategy and increase the amount of customer data you hold at the same time. Incentivize the exchange of key customer information in exchange for a prize or a discount voucher. This could include iPad, clothing or meal voucher giveaways.
• Reverse Auctions
  • This involved giving something valuable away by allowing customers to make what they think will be the lowest unique bid for the product via text. Unsuccessful bidders receive a prompt to bid again, encouraging repeated interaction and numerous entries per customer.
• Receipts
  • Sending customers receipts via SMS not only helps the environment by reducing paper wastage, but also allows you to attach details on competitions, cross selling promotions or surveys for example.

Getting Started

So you’ve decided you want to go ahead with an SMS marketing strategy, but where’s the starting point? Here are four easy to follow steps to get your scheme up and running.

Contacts

The first step is to build up a database of customer contact details if you don’t already have one. This isn’t as tricky as it may sound, as again you can incentivise the process. For example, ask new customers to register online in return for alerts, complete surveys or enter competitions which require certain contact details. Once you have acquired this list, it is important to segment and profile your customers in order to target certain groups correctly.

Make your customers feel like they’re part of an exclusive text club, rather than just a boring mailing list, by offering premium and exclusive content. This is how you’ll persuade them to part with their contact details.

For best practice though, always remember to offer an “opt out” tick box in email forms so customers do not receive unwanted correspondence.

Personalize your data by segmenting the contact database into demographics and specific target groups. For example, by gender, age, purchase history etc. This will then allow you to tailor your campaign to certain customers, increasing response rate and relevancy for the user. Targeting the wrong user for a campaign can be severely detrimental to your brand image so this is really worth doing.

Copy

Texts are limited to 160 characters so you need to be concise and to the point when getting your message across. The simplicity of an SMS is its appeal, so don’t try to be too technical. Do make sure you include an unsubscribe option, usually via a text back.

‘Calls to Action’ are essential within marketing texts. Ensure that you’ve made it completely clear what you want the consumer to do after reading your message. This could be a phone number, a link to a mobile website and ideally a time frame which will create a sense of urgency.

Platform

Choose a platform that can deliver both inbound and outbound marketing campaigns. Ideally, this system should be flexible and web based, allowing you to either create the campaigns yourself from scratch or offer a managed service to guide you through the process.

Tracking Success

In order to maximize your continued success with your SMS marketing campaigns, it’s vital that you track and report the results of the initial scheme. Set goals before the campaign is launched and ensure you know which metrics you want to focus on, such as recipients received and number of responses.

Monitor these variables throughout the campaign and if you are utilizing a multi-step delivery system, you can dynamically tweak your message to improve response rates.

Final Thoughts

Although now a slightly dated technology and less glamorous than an all-singing, all-dancing mobile app, SMS marketing schemes still have a place in a brand’s marketing strategy. The balance of high ROI to relatively cheap implementation cost make it great value for money and a very personal way of interacting with customers if done well.

[ Is SMS Marketing Still a Viable Strategy? is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Like this post? Get my Internet Marketing newsletter, buy my book, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, and subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

This is a guest post by Harrison Jones.

Onsite optimization of websites is the most important factor in ranking better in search engine results. You can build all the links you want, but if your website isn’t optimized, Googlebot won’t be able to crawl the site properly. Over the past several years, Google and Bing have released guidelines for webmasters to make websites more crawlable. This is a consolidation of all the guidelines released by Google and Bing over the years to improve onsite optimization. Audits should be performed before the launch of any new website design, and at least twice per year to keep up with changes in industry standards.

Canonicalization and URL Structure

www or non-www, that is the question. Rather than wasting your time rehashing this topic, I have written a handy guide that explains URL structure best practices in full. To summarize the article, there should only be one URL used to get to the homepage of your website. Whether or not you choose to use www is your choice. Just make sure there is only one version, and it’s not followed by an index.php, index.html, etc… URLs should contain words only and no numbers or symbols. The words should be separated by dashes instead of spaces or underscores. All words should contain lower case letters. Each URL should contain a keyword phrase, and should be no longer than 5 words in length overall.

Content Optimization

Every page on the website should have unique, high-quality content using proper optimization techniques. Homepages should have a bare minimum of one paragraph of keyword-rich content. A good rule of thumb would be around three or more paragraphs. Without quality content, Googlebot will have a tough time determining the relevance a page has to the keyword you want to target. The title of the page should be contained within an h1 tag, and should include a keyword – preferably a keyword similar to the page’s title tag. Use plenty of keywords in the body, but avoid keyword-stuffing. There’s no real rule of thumb about keyword stuffing, but if it looks like keyword spam, it probably will be read as spam by Google.

Each page should employ a content hierarchy to establish importance of key phrases. Titles should be in h1 tags and only one per page. Subhead titles should be placed in h2 and h3 tags with a keyword included in it. Bolding and italicizing text within paragraphs will show importance of the phrase to search engines.  Linking to other pages on the website using good, keyword-rich anchor text as well as other trusted websites will also increase the value of the content. Every page on a website should have around one hundred links. If a page contains too many links, it will be penalized for being spammy. Non-navigation links on pages should look natural to the content. Follow this content optimization checklist before publishing content to ensure it is properly optimized.

Cloaking or duplicating content is a huge no-no for SEO. Cloaking content is a very risky practice which will get your website heavily penalized by search engines. Matt Cutts recently did a wonderful video explaining how cloaking works and why it’s bad. Duplicate content on pages is another way to get on Google’s black list. Internet leeches love scraping content from websites and reposting it on other websites to collect advertising money. Google grew smart to these practices, and changed the algorithm to filter out duplicate content. Even having two pages on the same site with duplicate content will get your site penalized.

If you absolutely must have duplicate content on your website, which is necessary in rare cases, use the rel=canonical attribute to tell the spiders to only pay attention to one of the two pages. Copyscape and Plagiarisma are two great tools for finding content-scraping leeches that stole your content. BluePay is a credit card processing company that has fallen victim to content scraping. The bottom half of this competitor’s page was completely scraped from BluePay’s homepage. Scary, isn’t it? To check for duplicate content within your own site, do a search for a snippet of your content within quotation marks. This will show you instances where your content appears twice on the website, and may point you to possible bugs on the site. If you do find another website that has scraped your content, you can fill out a request for Google to remove the content.

One last key point to mention about content optimization is advertisements. If your website is oversaturated with advertisements, Google may penalize it. If your website is about GPS tracking for trucks and you have text link ads about online poker, you might get penalized. Avoid creating a mosaic of advertisements on your website. Use ALT text with keywords liberally for all advertisements, links, and images. This will help search engines better understand the content.

Geo Redirects

Geo redirects are a great way for international websites to forward its visitors to the correct language version of the site. Keeping that in mind, it may be the worst SEO mistake of your life. If your site is accessed by going to www.mysite.com and all backlinks point there as well, why would you want it redirecting to www.mysite.com/en/index.html? By automatically redirecting people away from the root domain that all backlinks are pointing to, you will be cutting your link value in half. Create a language selection option on the homepage instead.

Image Optimization

Image optimization is a commonly overlooked practice, but it does carry a lot of SEO value if done properly. Read my article on image optimization best practices for a full guide on optimizing images. This practice is mainly important for getting images indexed in image searches. Add captions and ALT tags using keywords for each image. ALT tags should be no longer than 50 characters. Filenames should include keywords, and should be separated by dashes.

Internal Linking

Each page should contain around one hundred links per page. You may think that number is outrageously high, but it’s really not hard to achieve. Before getting started, run Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links on the site, and fix them. Make sure all internal links are text links. This is especially important with navigational links. Any halfway decent designer will be able to put together some nice text-over-image links with CSS. All category and main pages should be linked throughout the global navigation. Include footer links at the bottom of the page as a secondary form of navigation. This area should link to subcategory, terms of use, social media, privacy statement, sitemap, and contact pages. Be sure to use good anchor text for the subcategory links in the footer. Also be sure to include good links with anchor text throughout the page content. Breadcrumbs are another great form of internal linking, and greatly improve a site’s usability.

Microdata

Microdata is a little-covered topic in relation to SEO, but it does pack a powerful punch. Microdata creates a mode of communication between your content and search engine spiders. You can define the meaning behind sections, elements, and words on each page. This helps build a trust with search engines – especially Bing. I have put together a couple articles on this topic already. If you run an e-commerce site, check out my article on e-commerce microdata. If you run a B2B corporate site, check out my other article about corporate B2B microdata.

Noindex and Nofollow

Depending on the type of website you are building, there may be some pages you specifically do not want indexed or ranked for. Any irrelevant pages like terms of use, PDF files, privacy policy, and sitemaps should be nofollowed. Use your own discretion as to other pages you may want to nofollow. Site search results should also be nofollowed and noindexed. Site search results can be indexed, and will create duplicate content issues if you don’t add the nofollow and noindex attributes to them.

Title and Meta Tags

Title tags should be unique for every page, and contain a primary keyword phrase that is relevant to the page’s content. If you have room for two keyword phrases, separate them with a comma. If the site is a well-known brand, you may want to include the brand name in the title tag. Title tags should be 50-65 characters in length. If the string is longer than 70 characters, it will be cut off in SERPs.

Never use meta keywords. Meta keywords are used by spammers and scrapers all the time, so Bing has decided to flag all pages using meta keywords as spam. Meta descriptions should be included on every page. They should include a keyword phrase similar to the title tag. Descriptions should not exceed 160 characters in length. Never reuse the same description for two pages.

Webmaster Tools

Google and Bing Webmaster Tools have a few tools necessary for SEO. The most important tool is the sitemap submission feature. First, you will need to generate a sitemap for your website. Once you have generated a sitemap, upload it to the home directory of your server and submit it through Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Sitemap submissions will tell search engines that you have new content, and it should be crawled on a regular basis. Submitting RSS feeds to the sitemap will also carry a lot of SEO value since Google and Bing love RSS feeds. Both webmaster tool suites have an option for doing this.

Webmaster tools can also be used to set the crawl rate, check for crawl errors, and to instantly submit the site for indexation. If your content is updated on a daily basis, you may want to change the crawl rate to run Googlebot on a daily basis. Another great tool is the “crawl errors” feature. This will check for errors found while indexing the site. All errors found should be fixed immediately. If you have just launched a new design, site, or just write a very important blog post, you may want to consider using the “Fetch as Googlebot” tool. Bing’s equivalent is called “Submit URLs”. This will instantly index the page you submit and give it a nice bump up in SERPS, but beware – if the click-through rate is very low, that page may get penalized.

Website Architecture

Two or three clicks from the homepage is all it should take to reach any page on a website. Search engines are a lot like human readers when indexing pages. If it takes four clicks to reach a page, Googlebot will place low importance on that page. Likewise, a page reachable from the homepage will carry the most weight. When designing a site, determine the importance you want to place on each page, and create a content hierarchy for those pages when planning out your website. Pages containing your top keywords should be placed towards the top of the hierarchy while long-tail, less important keyword focusing pages should be buried towards the bottom. Now that Google indexes AJAX and JavaScript, there are lots of options to creating a navigation menu where you can implement an effective content hierarchy.

Website Design Mistakes

Three common web design errors that will wreck your website’s crawlability are frame usage, using all-Flash, and not setting up 301 redirects after moving content. Designers are not SEO professionals, so cut them some slack. Although, it is imperative that you review their plans before they implement any changes. If your designer wants to use frames, ask them if they plan on using Comic Sans while they’re at it. Much like Comic Sans, frames are completely outdated from a design and SEO standpoint. Frames require three html files to create the design while normal sites only use one html file. This confuses the heck out of spiders when crawling your site. Most of the time, none of the pages will end up getting indexed.

Flash is an eye-catching way to build a website, but if you plan on building an all-Flash site, then you might as well go sit in the corner, talking to a brick wall because that’s what you would be doing to search engines. Flash cannot be crawled, so don’t implement any site elements in Flash. Flash should be used sparingly, and for decorative purposes only. Another thing to watch out for is whether or not your designers set up 301 redirects after moving around any content. If they did, make sure they used 301’s instead of 302 redirects. If a page has already been indexed and gets moved without a redirect set up, it will come up as a 404 error, which will hurt the indexation of your site.

Website Security

Providing a safe and secure experience to your website’s audience will not only make them feel more confident in your site, but also search engines. If your company owns several domains, make sure none of the content is duplicated across the domains. If you run an e-commerce site, make sure a secure server version of the checkout process is available. Set up robots.txt to block certain pages from being crawled by spiders, but be careful not to block any pages that will hurt your internal linking structure. Check your website to make sure it isn’t infected by malware. Google Webmaster Tools has a free malware diagnostic tool. Web page errors will also cause search engines to mistrust your website. Run your site through the W3C Markup Validator to check for bugs that may cause indexation issues.

Summary

When performing a site audit, it’s helpful to create a checklist of violations to watch out for on the website. You can create one using this article, or you can use SEOmoz’s pre-made site audit checklist. Keep in mind that SEOmoz’s checklist is a few years old and is missing a few elements. Once the audit is complete, you may find it helpful to write up a list of structural recommendations with brief descriptions to help the client understand what you want to do for them.

Harrison Jones is an SEO Analyst at Straight North – a full-service Chicago marketing and web design firm. Harrison writes frequently about link acquisition, SEO, and video marketing. He has been published in several industry publications including Reel SEO and Search Engine Journal. Follow Straight North on Twitter for industry insight and conversations.

[ HOW TO: Guide to Performing Website Audits is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Brad Shorr.

Hiring an SEO specialist is one of the most important decisions you will make in your pursuit of online marketing success. It is also one of the most perplexing.

There are two enormous issues with search engine optimization that hinder your ability to zero in on the right partner:

1. Rapidly changing, constantly evolving rules. Google’s algorithm – the formula it uses to determine page ranking – has undergone significant changes recently, and I believe we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
2. Lack of industry standards. Lawyers pass the bar, doctors have diplomas, but SEOs have nothing of the sort to give you confidence in their level of training and talent.

With this in mind, the first two things you want to evaluate in a potential SEO partner are:

1. Methodology. Are they are using today’s SEO best practices or yesterday’s?
2. Results. Do they walk the talk? Are they surgeons … or butchers?

Let’s take these decision-making factors one at a time, and then move on to a few more very important factors that need to be addressed once these two are nailed down.

Getting a Handle on SEO Methodology

SEO is an extremely complex Internet marketing discipline, involving a great many moving parts – parts that are constantly changing, as I just said. Without an up to date blueprint for conducting your SEO program, results are likely to be subpar at best, and potentially counterproductive.

The first thing to do on is ask if the SEO has a methodology. If the response is a blank stare or some rambling, semi-coherent, jargon-laden ad-lib, it is a telltale sign that they have no systematic approach to strategy or execution.

Ideally you want to see the SEO’s methodology in writing. This should not be a difficult thing for the SEO to deliver, and you’ll want the document to explain:

• Strategy: How does the SEO determine the goals of your program, and how success will be measured?
• Onsite SEO activities: How much time is devoted to onsite optimization, and what specific activities are undertaken?
• Offsite SEO activities: How much time is devoted to offsite optimization, and what specific activities are undertaken?
• Keyword analysis: How, step-by-step, does the SEO evaluate which keywords to include in your program?
• Analytics and reporting: What information is collected in report documents, how is it presented, how often is it presented, and how will the SEO help you take action on the data?

Of course, unless you are very knowledgeable about SEO, you will not necessarily know whether the information provided is spot-on or miles off the mark. However, once you have a document in hand, you can ask questions about things that don’t make sense. You also have a way to do comparative shopping, and to validate the SEO’s approach by doing your own online research into SEO best practices.

Getting a Handle on Results

A lot of people (perhaps a greater than average number in the world of marketing) can talk a great game. But can they deliver? Over the years I’ve talked to many entrepreneurs and marketers at larger firms who have experienced disappointing SEO results. Most of them skipped – or went through the motions on – the very important step of checking references. Here are a couple of suggestions for doing it properly.

• Request case studies with details. Almost every SEO I know is a statistics junkie – it goes with the territory. You should be able to get something more detailed than “We got ABC Company on Google page one.” Ideally, you want specifics relating to what keywords were targeted, how competitive they were, and what changes in rankings were accomplished over what period of time. Most important, you want to see numbers relating to increases in non-branded traffic, because in the end that is what you are really trying to achieve with SEO.

• Talk to their clients. It’s always helpful to go to the source. If the SEO is ready, able, and willing to let you talk to their clients, it is a very good sign in itself. When you talk to the referral, have a handful of specific questions ready, relating to keywords, rankings and traffic, along the lines of what I described in the bullet point just above. If you fail to ask the right questions, you may not get helpful insights.  Believe it or not, a client can be “happy” with an SEO’s service without really understanding what the program looks like or even what results are being obtained!

Other Important SEO Selection Issues

If a potential SEO partner doesn’t pass the methodology and results tests, I don’t see much sense in taking a deeper dive. However, if you feel comfortable at this point, these issues should also weigh heavily in your decision.

The Right Fit

SEOs tend to specialize based on the size of the client’s business. When I was freelancing, I worked with entrepreneurs and small firms. I was a jack-of-all-trades, performing a number of onsite, offsite, research, and analytical tasks.

At the agency where I work now, we focus on the middle market, working with relatively complex firms that do things like credit card processing and GPS vehicle tracking. We have a staff that specializes in the various types of SEO activities, because the complexity and volume of work is too much for a generalist.

There are other SEOs staffed to handle large organizations with mid six-figure SEO budgets and tremendously complex needs. These shops would be ill suited to handle smaller clients, in terms of both responsiveness and execution.

The best SEO partner is one that targets your type of business. If the SEO has no particular preference in terms of client size, I would view this as a major negative.

Longevity and Stability

Achieving results takes a fair amount of time, so your ideal partner is someone who has been around and will be around.  Does the SEO have a long-term business plan? Adequate funding? Consistent profitability? Don’t be shy about asking questions along these lines. It may save you the extreme headache of having to start all over again six months or a year into your program.

Relationship Factors

The best results come when you, the client, are actively engaged. This means you will be communicating with your SEO on a regular basis. There will be disagreements and misunderstandings, challenges to overcome and opportunities to exploit. If you feel there is a good chemistry, it counts for a lot. If you sense that every phone conversation is going to be an ordeal – keep looking!

Over to You: What factors have I overlooked? What do you look for in an SEO?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North, a Chicago Internet marketing firm. He is an experienced SEO copywriter and content optimization specialist. Follow Brad on Twitter.

[ How to Hire Your SEO Partner is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Andy Havard.

Internet marketing strategies vary depending on the nature of the blog, brand, or business and alter with accordance to their physical and digital size and their particular niche. When it comes to marketing any organization, product, or service on the web, there tends to be three essential ways of doing so:

1. Dominating social media platforms
2. Utilizing Internet video
3. Driving traffic to websites

This three-fold plan appears to be a timeless marketing approach on the net, but how do you know you’re succeeding in these areas? How do you know your campaign is ticking all the right boxes?

The following article addresses the best practices for measuring and monitoring your marketing campaign in these three areas, and provides an easy to digest guide to some of the best tools for the job.

Broad Social Media Monitoring

Depending on how social your Internet presence is, you might only be interested in certain aspects of social media data. Let’s imagine your blog, brand, or business operates a wide variety of social media from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to StumbleUpon and Instagram.  The time it would take to collect such a wide variety of data could eat up a good chunk of your day. When you’re operating in this way, the most time- efficient data to gather is a broad overview of how your overall approach is going down on the ‘net.

A great tool to collect this kind of data is a site called Klout. Klout allows you to sign in and link up a variety of social media platforms. It takes in your activity and data from all of these platforms to give you an overall social ranking – the higher the better.

This kind of information is incredibly powerful as it updates you on how much influence you’re having on your audience and your network, while giving you a tangible indication of how big your online presence is in your niche.

Oh, and it’s completely free.

In Depth Social Media Monitoring

Klout is a great way of measuring overall influence in your niche and on your social media sites as a whole, but overviews still aren’t quite as valuable as the actual facts. Obtaining the true facts and figures surrounding your social media networks are the crucial pieces of information that alert you when your approaches are soaring like an eagle or rapidly plummeting back down to earth.

HootSuite is your essential tool for monitoring in depth social media analytics. Here’s a quick glance at the data it can provide.

You can add custom reports for a whole host of your social media profiles and even incorporate essential pieces of Google Analytics data. This information is incredible valuable as it indicates the actual impact of any new approaches you take to your social media profiles, be it daily updates, frequent photo and video uploads, or competition giveaways.

As you can see, HootSuite is also great for monitoring brand awareness amongst varying genders and age groups, which will be able to affect the approach you take to upcoming marketing strategies on your social platforms.

Internet Video Tracking

The only thing rivalling the popularity of social media on the Internet today is Internet video. Sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and On Demand Television Channels are enjoying staggeringly large online viewershipsevery day. Online marketers have gotten wise to this popularity and as a result of this there has been a huge spike in video uploads and new and exciting uses of video on the Internet.

These videos are all well and good, but they offer little value to bloggers, brands, and businesses if they can’t track the actual statistics of these videos. YouTube offers a great free tool to track these kinds of facts and figures through its YouTube Insight feature.

YouTube Insights can inform Internet marketers where their video strategies are being found, the demographics watching them, which videos are the most popular, and their Channel’s overall viewership. These pieces of data are fantastic ways to monitor the implementation of video approaches to new products, services, and the building of online brand awareness through video. By being able to assess the sheer popularity of specific video content, marketers can track what styles of video benefit their brand, business, or blog the best.

A great feature along these lines is YouTube’s Hot Spot feature:

Being able to spot what parts of your video content are boring your viewers and what parts are being re-watched again and again is crucial information when it comes to planning your next Internet video marketing strategy.

Precise Website Analytics

The uses of social media platforms and Internet video are all ultimately about driving audiences to one final website destination. Conversely, some organizations actually use their website as their home-hub for all of this activity by creating forums for social interaction, and embedding videos onto their website, doing away with any other website platform but their own.

Regardless of which approach is being used, a designated website is usually the final destination for any marketing strategy. With that being the case, the analytics of online users interacting and visiting such websites are imperative. This is where Google Analytics comes into play:

Google Analytics offers a huge array of monitoring tools for free users and even more for users willing to pay for their (rather pricey) Premium package. Above, you can (somewhat) see the array of free tools on the left and the very informative Visitor Overview in the middle.

Not only does this tool easily display the traffic generated in a certain time period, but it also informs the users where in the world these users are visiting the site from. In-depth tools within Analytics can also indicate if users came to your site through your other video and social media campaigns.

It’s crucial to notice areas like Page Visits and Bounce Rates as it clearly shows whether users are interacting with your website, taking in your message, and fulfilling the criteria your strategies had intended to achieve.

Not bad for a completely free tool, right?

Summary

By using these affordable online tools to track your Internet marketing strategies, you can ensure all of your approaches in the online world are ticking all the right boxes. Being aware of rises and falls in your content, online presence, and Internet influence will be exceptionally valuable when planning your next online marketing campaign.

Have you got any extra handy tools to share? Be sure to drop a comment and share your knowledge.

Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.

[ How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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