If you’re well read on the basics of SEO and SMO then you’ve heard that “good content” and “lots of it” are key in making your online presence pop. This is very true but disparities do exist which you should consider.
I recently came across an article in the Spring issue of Search Marketing Standard which reminded me of the real-world consequences of poor link equity management.
These days search engine marketing firms (or SEMs) offering everything from SEO and Social Media Optimization to Branding and Article Syndication are absolutely everywhere. While a good percentage of the industry uses what is affectionately known as White Hat marketing strategies you should also be aware that there are many out there with very questionable marketing practices.
Social Media Optimization (aka: SMO) is a fairly new concept defined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. The concept of Social Media Optimization makes perfect sense with the emergence of Web 2.0 sites like myspace, digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and youtube; and essentially creates additional distribution channels for your web content. The result can mean omnipresence on the Internet.
In the world of online marketing the buzz words blog, spend, viral, and social media abound but with few exceptions there is a very important word missing … analysis. What’s the point of developing online advertisement programs, publishing articles, optimizing your meta tags, and increasing your inbound links if you can’t accurately and intelligently track the effectiveness of all your efforts?
Press Release Optimization and Distribution is an effective marketing strategy that has the potential to generate sales, leads, online/offline publicity, and increase the brand awareness for your product or service. Additionally, a well written press release that appeals to the media’s thirst for a good story and that is properly optimized with keywords that you want to rank for can naturally increase your back links (one way links); a search engine optimization tactic that is essential to rank high in the search engines.
Article syndication is not about writing a substandard article, paying a distribution service to spam several hundred article directories; and then driving the user to a horrible customer experience; usually a poorly designed website bombarded with Google Adsense.
How many times have you scratched your head in amazement over the results your competitors are getting in Google and Yahoo for keywords that you are trying to rank for? Don’t worry; it happens to all of us. The fact of the matter is that it’s not easy to achieve high rankings in the search engines; but it can be done.
