Today’s guest post is written by John Trader.

The race to the top of search result pages is getting more fierce as search engines drive more and more traffic and revenue to businesses.

Last June, Google, Yahoo, and Bing announced a new initiative called Schema.org  to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages.

The goal was to allow webmasters and SEO experts to improve how their websites appear in search engine result pages (SERP), increase click through rates (CTR) for higher visibility, and drive more relevant web traffic.

Creating this common vocabulary was seen as an immediate boon for site owners who previously had to struggle with adding HTML markup to their pages in different formats according to which search engine they were targeting. Continue Reading »

Brian Meeks returns! Brian has delusions of novelist, which he feeds by writing the Henry Wood Detective series (Available soon and on his blahg).

Search engine optimization is all the rage these days. In fact, if you don’t practice SEO, you obviously don’t ‘GET IT’ and might have poor personal hygiene.

There are two common reasons cited for avoiding SEO; both completely unacceptable:

1. What the hell is SEO, anyway? This is not an acceptable answer because 23 percent of all tweets and Facebook posts are related SEO, according to a number I randomly selected while typing this sentence. Therefore, everyone should know what it means by now. Plus, it was in the first sentence. So this excuse, much like Latin, is a dead issue. Let’s move on.

2. I am too lazy. This is the excuse I often use, and by often, I mean every single day of my life as I write my blog posts, without thinking about how I can drive traffic to my steaming pile of drivel. I prefer to worry about the quality of the content. This is wrong of me. Continue Reading »

Sean McGinnis consults with small to mid-size customers about DCAL – Digital Customer Acquisition and Loyalty. He blogs about SEO, Internet marketing, social  media, leadership and a variety of other topics at 312 Digital.

At face value, the new Google +1 seems like their latest foray into the world of “social” but it’s really much more than that.

The +1 button is an incredibly important play for Google, one that will help build the future of their algorithm if widely adopted by Internet users.

Let’s step back for a minute and then I’ll explain.

Search Engine Progress

Search engines got their start by returning the most relevant documents to a search query. But relevance is a very easy thing to spoof, and search engine spam became rampant. So, search engines developed a method of calculating authority by looking at the number and quality of inbound links to your site. Today, essentially search engines return sites that are both relevant and authoritative. But authority can be manipulated and gamed too, so spam continues to be a problem for search engines. Continue Reading »

Nicole Ashton asks on the Arment Dietrich Facebook wall, “How do we get on the first page of Google without paying an arm and a leg?” I have three resources for her, ranging from free to $500 per month. Which resources do you recommend??

(If you’re receiving this via RSS and can’t view the video, click here)

Out of all the speakers I’ve seen this week, Gini is definitely at the top.  (And I’m only half saying that because she is my boss and I’m sucking up.)

Quote of the day: “You only have the perception of control.

YAY! She talked about our response campaign!  Be out there. Be commenting on articles, regardless if you are in them.  You can now do your own media relations.

Social media gives you a seat at the proverbial table.  You can now track PR and you can tell your bosses what kind of effect your work has on sales. Continue Reading »

The last session of the day I chose to attend the panel about mixing search and integrated marketing. This workshop each panelist gave a 10 minute presentation and then went on to questions.

Most of it was what we already know so, for this post, I’ve pulled the key points from all of the presenters.

• Search is a marketing tactic, just like TV, print, email and other direct campaigns.

• Test fast – learn fast. Test your messaging and/or offers and to see what resonates with your target audiences online…quickly.

• All conversions don’t need to take place on your Web site.

• Integrate paid search into earned media. (Search and display work 15x better than search alone.) Continue Reading »

This session was fun because it was all Q&A, but you could only get your questions answered by using a certain Twitter hashtag.  This sucked for me because the WiFi at the conference is terrible and I wanted to save my phone battery for my walk home (I live in NYC and it looks different at night. Trust me, you’d save your phone battery too).

BUT… I ended up using my phone to post a hashtag tweet.  I admit it, I wanted to see my face on the screen – I carry mace so I’m OK.

Overall, some of the questions/answers were somewhat beneficial.

Question from audience: If you have a client that won’t share their tracking information with you, what would you do to prove your ROI?

Answer from panel: Fire the client.  In this industry and this day and age if you’re working on SEO, you don’t want to get yourself into a situation where you can’t win.  Work on the value upfront and develop benchmarks together. Continue Reading »

You have to love a keynote speaker who shows up in a button down and jeans. I wish I had the cajones to do that!  Avinash Kaushik, author, speaker, analytics evangelist, and Google pro, began his speech by talking about his blog Occam’s Razor by saying, “It brainwashes you into thinking like I do.”

If you don’t know Avinash, he is the author of “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” and “Web Analytics 2.0”. He has a great sense of humor, which comes through when he talks about his books. He relays that Wiley & Sons approached him about writing a book about his blog. He said he couldn’t understand why anyone would pay for content that is already free on the blog. But, he learned after his first book was translated into several languages, “People like paying for free things all around the world!”

Following are the takeaways from both Molli and me. Continue Reading »

In all of my years working with Web guys, I’ve never found someone as good at search engine optimization (SEO) as Nick Harrison at Dashal. Watching him work SEO is like watching a carefully choreographed ballet. Everything he does has a part and, when it all comes together, you suddenly own not just the first couple of listings, you own the entire first page. I asked him to share his wisdom here…SEO for bloggers.

When asked about SEO, most people will tell you they have no clue how it is achieved, even after reading everything they can find. In fact, most people don’t realize they can do things on their own to improve their site’s SEO with nominal effort and knowledge.

But I’m not going to lie to you, SEO isn’t easy. There is a lot to know and most of that knowledge is obtained by doing it, rather than reading about it. A true SEO professional spends a lot of his time learning how the search engine spider thinks, what it likes to eat, and what makes it feel warm fuzziness. So, I am not going to write a 300 page blog post and teach you every intricate detail about SEO. What I do share is that you can improve your blog’s SEO without being an expert coder or reading five books to understand only about a third.

Here are five key points and tips that will help increase your blog’s SEO as soon as you start: Continue Reading »