by Stone Reuning Though the likes of Facebook and Twitter have taken the marketing world by storm, many of our online experiences though still start through search. With well-known brands and small businesses alike now using social media marketing in earnest, it’s worth exploring how to get more from your company social pages, namely helping them rank higher in online searches, alongside your corporate website. After a few tweaks, your social media pages can give you more opportunities to dominate page one of Google and other search engines. Here’s an example. If you look at our properties, SEO Advantage isn’t only our company name – it’s also an important keyword and source of traffic for us. So we want all our web properties to dominate for that term. If you seach on “seo advantage”, you’ll see first our corporate website , then our Facebook page , our Twitter profile , our reviews on Kudzu , our marketing blog , our LinkedIn profile , and also a press release or article we’ve recently written.  The best thing is that most social media platforms allow for some customization that lets you optimize them, even if the standard no-follow tag applies to links. Here are 5 things you can explore across the various social media platforms you’re currently using

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by Mike Moran If you have a business-to-business (B2B) Web site, you’re probably tired of all the trite advice you see out there from experts who are clearly speaking to those in the business-to-consumer (B2C) industry. I mean, each time you read these opinions about what you should do, do you find yourself asking, “How is that realistic in my B2B business?” And you might be wondering where the really smart B2B marketers look for their new ideas. And the answer is…those crazy B2C Web sites.

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by Stoney deGeyter The only way to avoid hearing criticism is to be deaf or dead. The only way to avoid being criticized is to never have been alive. As history books have shown, even the dead can’t escape criticism. So, those of us who are alive must simply learn to deal with it; even as we often try to avoid it. As much as we hate it, criticism isn’t all bad. Criticism, regardless of how it was intended, can help us adjust and adapt to situations. It can provide useful insight, justified or not, into our lives and give us the opportunity to become a better person. Rarely do we enjoy hearing it, but criticism is a needed component for growth as a person.

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by Manoj Jasra Search Engine Strategies is less then a month away and this year it’s taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, to get some insight into his session on PPC and SEO best practices–specific to B2B. Read our conversation below: [Manoj]: Your session at SES is related to SEO/PPC strategies with regards to B2B , how does LinkedIn become part of equation? [Andrew Chang]: Millions of people visit LinkedIn each day to connect and re-connect with colleagues and business associates. Our members come from all walks of life – accountants, financial advisors, attorneys, web developers – and they are well-connected and active professionals that many B2B marketers are trying to reach. For this reason, we built and launched our own self-service PPC advertising offering called LinkedIn DirectAds ( http://www.linkedin.com/directads ) that allows anyone with a LinkedIn account to place text ads on prominent pages and target those ads to only people you’re trying to reach.

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by Manoj Jasra Search Engine Strategies is less then a month away and this year it’s taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with Andrew Chang, Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, to get some insight into his session on PPC and SEO best practices–specific to B2B. Read our conversation below: [Manoj]: Your session at SES is related to SEO/PPC strategies with regards to B2B , how does LinkedIn become part of equation? [Andrew Chang]: Millions of people visit LinkedIn each day to connect and re-connect with colleagues and business associates. Our members come from all walks of life – accountants, financial advisors, attorneys, web developers – and they are well-connected and active professionals that many B2B marketers are trying to reach. For this reason, we built and launched our own self-service PPC advertising offering called LinkedIn DirectAds ( http://www.linkedin.com/directads ) that allows anyone with a LinkedIn account to place text ads on prominent pages and target those ads to only people you’re trying to reach. A quick example of how this works: One of our most successful customers is an e-learning company that’s trying to attract the attention of primary school teachers to sign up for a Master’s degree program in Education. Over 214,000 LinkedIn members have identified themselves (in their LinkedIn profiles) as being in the “Primary/Secondary Education” industry. Within a few minutes, the e-learning company created a text ad and start displaying the ad only to those 214,000 members when they visited LinkedIn.

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by Mike Fleming Now that you’ve chosen your keywords to create ad group themes , you want to have ads that will move targeted users from whatever they’re doing online to being aware and interested in your product or service. Remember, since the Display Network operates by completely different rules and the users are in a completely different state of mind, the ads should be different than Search Network ads. With Search, users are somewhere in the buying funnel ; whereas with Display most of the users are likely not in the buying funnel at all. Therefore, the goal of the ads in the Search Network is to persuade the user that your solution is the best choice out of all of their options to make their life better; whereas the goal of the ads in the Display Network is to make users aware that you have a solution that could make their life better. Here a some general characteristics of ads that are effective at starting users down the buying funnel: 1. Benefits – It’s not about you or even what you’re offering. It’s about the improvement of the user’s life in a way that’s more valuable than the cost associated with the purchase .

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by Jennifer Laycock   Earlier this week, I explained the concept of micro goals in regards to social media and why it’s so important to track such a large collection of seemingly insignificant numbers. I walked you through both the universal micro goals and how to establish campaign specific micro goals. Today, it’s time to look at how those numbers can be of value to us over the span of a social media campaign. Looking for What Works and What Doesn’t The single biggest benefit of tracking things on the micro goal level is the ability to quickly identify the areas of your campaign that are performing well and the ones that aren’t. Micro goals are all part of the wonderful world of metrics and each of them acts as a clue in the mystery of campaign results

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by Miriam Ellis I couldn’t help him. After 45 seconds of conversation with a local business owner who phoned me out of the blue, his voice literally quivering with rage, I knew my words could bring scant balm to his personal inferno of a Gilead in which the negative review had been left and the whole world, he was sure, was laughing at him. I never know what squirrely local search scenario I will find myself embroiled in when I pick up the receiver these days. This unfortunate gentleman had apparently come across a popular article I wrote last year that summarized business owners’ capabilities to edit, remove or respond to user reviews in the diverse top review entities. He wasn’t looking to hire me, he just wanted some advice and I’m usually game for that, though I like it better when it seems like the caller will actually take my advice after taking some of my time. My hopes were not strong for this when I hung up the phone. The basic scenario was that the business owner had received a bad review on Google, was sure he knew who had left it, was convinced it was left out of personal vindictiveness and wanted the review demolished and the reviewer punished

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by Jennifer Laycock A few weeks ago I wrote a handful of articles on how to develop a proper social media strategy by developing goals , breaking those goals into supportive goals and matching goals to appropriate tactics . Those three articles outline the foundation that needs to be laid for any good social media plan, but your job doesn’t stop there. In fact, if you want to do things properly, your job is just getting started. First, let’s quickly recap what your process would look like if you were to map it out based solely on those three articles. For each of your primary goals, the process might look a little something like this: You would have started with your primary goal, broken it down into supportive goals, matched those goals to appropriate tactics and determined which social media outlets best allowed you to implement those tactics. After a few weeks or months, you’d sit down and ask yourself if you’d met your primary goal. There’s really nothing wrong with going about the process this way, but there is a better way

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by Stoney deGeyter Note: Recently I’ve gotten some ribbing from friends and colleagues about my exceedingly numerous multi-part posts. In order to wean myself off my favorite form of not-having-to-think-about-what-I’m-going-to-write-about-next, I’ve combined all 12 parts of this series into a single post. Enjoy! Part 1: Guilty of Crimes No One Committed A lot of people subscribe to the “Guilt by Association” theory in online marketing. This theory suggests that you are who you associate with

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