Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides quick tips for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and six-step plan for getting started.

You might call me a fast-follower when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I resisted for some time because the prospect of researching and sorting through hundreds of keywords and applying techniques to outwit Google’s ever-changing algorithms seemed so daunting. I can barely spell algorithm, after all. Then a slew of industry surveys showed that anywhere from 80 to 90 percent or more of B2B tech buyers start their research and buying process on Google.

Well, that was a wake-up call. So, last year I made SEO a higher priority. I shifted the funds from online advertising into SEM and a ReachForce role-based database build. (That way, I could cover both my Inbound and Outbound bases.) I also maintained my investments in PR and some key sponsorships to cover the brand awareness and drive Inbound traffic. Then, I pulled resources and funds that had been spent trying to keep up with endless campaign design and development, and re-focused them on social media and SEO.

It’s truly amazing how quickly you can get results like Page 1 Google rankings when you focus resources on boosting a particular page ranking. Here are a few tips to help you do the same:

• Invest in the right tools: There are literally dozens of free and low-cost SEO tools that you can use to get a lay of the land and assess your best SEO prospects. Of course, Google provides several like Google Suggest and Google Trends. Another one of my favorites is WordTracker. And, a new tool I am using right now is HubSpot. HubSpot’s CEO Mike Volpe makes a great case for SEO in the HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog. More about that another time.
• Don’t just go for the highly competitive popular terms. Consider niche or long tail keywords terms. There are dozens of keywords with significant search traffic that have little competition. Optimize for all of them and the numbers add up.
• Integrate your PR and SEO efforts to ensure inbound links from press releases support your strategy.
• Make sure your “anchor text” on in-bound links is optimized to provide the greatest SEO value.
• Optimize with a conversion strategy in mind.
• Leverage your “educational” assets for landing pages and social media sites like hubpages.com, scribd.com, flickr.com and others.

Here’s a quick plan for getting started:

1. Information Gathering Session: Just like data cleansing, it can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to SEO. Pull together a team to discuss and prioritize objectives and scope your initial project.
2. Research: Review your marketing objectives, competition, and your web site and blog to get a lay of the land and identify low-hanging fruit.
3. Produce a plan and guidelines for optimizing your top five web or blog pages. This should include recommendations for URLs, internal link building, meta tags, page content updates, blog cross-linking and a conversion strategy for each of those pages.
4. Then begin to build your inbound links to those pages by leveraging other sites, partners, blogs, social media sites, portals, and other high-value (not spam) paid link directories like Yahoo.
5. Review and Revamp: After the pages have had sufficient time for Google Indexing review the project and results, and adjust the components of the program if necessary.

I realize this post presents a fairly simplistic view of SEO. It is, in reality, a very complex and overwhelming discipline. But this is a quick plan for hopping on the moving train. You will, of course, learn more through trial and error and there are numerous online tutorials that will help you hone your skills.

Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an eight-point litmus test that B2B marketers and bloggers can use to evaluate their blog posts for Search Engine Optimization and relevance to business objectives.

I’ve stepped in to blog for Network Performance Daily recently since our full-time blogger was vacationing in New Zealand. For the 99.8% of The B2B Lead readers who live outside the network engineering universe, Network Performance Daily is the NetQoS corporate blog. It’s rated in the top .99% of all blogs and received great coverage including this piece in Computerworld. And, it’s also driven a great deal of interest in and revenue for our company. So, we must be doing something right.

One thing we haven’t done right (until recently) however, is to stay on track with our core audience and our company interests. Blogging is, after all, a conversation and conversations often stray off track. The allure of technological innovation was just too great at times and we were sucked into the dazzling world of iPhones and flying cars.

Clearly, it was time to get the blog content back on track to share network engineering tips, news and analysis with our core readers so that we could improve our sagging reader loyalty numbers. This was my goal when I stepped back in to blog for NetQoS, but what I discovered was there were far more benefits to staying on track with the content than just improving readership.

Of course, I knew there was a strong connection between the blog and SEO ranking. I also knew the blog was a great tool to attract readers and prospects to download content from our web site. But, until I actually dug in and crafted my own posts, I didn’t really understand the “magic” and how to create a repeatable process to boost SEO rankings which inevitably drive demand and brand awareness. So, with a few posts under my belt and a dramatic boost in SEO rankings for a couple of valuable keywords, I put together this quick litmus test for ALL future NPD posts.

I know that most blog and social media purists will violently disagree with these tips. They will argue that one should not be blogging with marketing and sales interests in mind. Last time I checked, however, I didn’t live in a Socialist country. And, my ego isn’t important enough to spend hours pontificating about topics without at least something to gain. We are all blogging with an objective in mind. I believe they key is in the “intent” of the post. If your goal is to be found, to educate and to attract a following of potential new customers without making false promises, then the following litmus test should help you to keep your posts on track with objectives:

1. Topic must be relevant to your target audience and—even better— to our company and product or service offerings.
2. Topic should be educational, controversial, timely or related to a news event. Bonus points for link-bait articles like posting a list of valuable resources, expert interviews, how-to’s, special reports, etc.
3. Post must begin with easy-to-understand and keyword-rich title (not just a cleverly worded headline). The goal is to communicate what the story and takeaways are about before the reader has to read the story.
4. Must contain links back to prior blog stories, an important corporate web page, press release or a white paper with more information. The exact keywords that are linked to those pages should correspond with the SEO terms for which those pages are optimized.
5. Post must be tagged with right keywords for SEO and content so that it can be categorized and found.
6. Posts should include our thought leadership messages where appropriate.
7. Post should include a list of tips that can be linked to from within the blog.
8. Post must challenge readers to take action in the last sentence—ie. continue the conversation, seek more information or spread the word.

So, that’s my quick list. I’m sure there are more. I’m sure some of these may become too cumbersome to apply. But it’s worth a shot. I mean, what is the value of a Google Page 1 listing to your company? With 80 to 90% of buyers starting their search on Google, I’d recommend giving it a shot.

I’d like to hear about your experiences with blogging and SEO. Importantly, what has been your success in achieving the coveted Google double listing?

As the new year begins you may want to take a look at your web strategy. For many companies this is the most important medium used to reach their customers. Jeremiah Owyang offers an extensive list of Web marketing tactics that might help you better hone your online strategy.

If you feel like you are completely lost when it comes to blogs, here is a great post on the basics of blogging from VR Marketing blog.

Here are some key takeaways and a few of my own thoughts:

• Be sure to link back to your corporate site, this is especially important if your blog has its own url. (One major reason to start a blog is because it can increase your search engine ranking)
• Tag each post with categories. This will help your readers find what they are looking for and help boost your search engine ranking as well.
• Blogs are a great medium for customer feedback. Write a post that gets your customers talking (and commenting) or put a poll on the blog to survey readers on a specific topic.
• Always moderate your comments. There is a lot of SPAM out there and you want the comments section to be a true dialog that is not interrupted by SPAM. It is ok if someone disagrees with you, do not block that comment because it can get people talking. Comments are boring if everyone agrees and there are no new ideas.
• Avoid “shameless self promotion.” Blogs with interesting, relevant, and up-to-date content will gain a loyal following. Don’t try to trick your readers and sneak in a sales pitch. Be transparent or risk loosing readers.
• Be sure to include keywords in titles and within relevant content for search engines.
• Your blog can be a great supporter for your PR efforts. Post an excerpt from a press release on the blog or reuse blog content for PR ideas.
• Don’t just put your blog out there and expect readers to come. Be sure to leverage your database of customers to let them know about it.
• Make sure your posts are up-to-date. They recommend twice a month but I would say at least twice a week. In a world of instant gratification, we are used to getting what we want when we want it. If your most recent post is two weeks old, I probably won’t be checking in again anytime soon.

CRM Mastery just reported the availability of a new report on B2B Search Marketing best practices. The guide is based on survey responses from 144 marketing agencies currently managing paid search and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts for business-to-business clients.

We wrote about this topic recently on The B2B Lead (Understand Your Google Adwords Spend and How to Boost ROI) where we advised readers to treat Google AdWords leads differently. We advised readers to think of them as “seeds” or early indicators of interest and conduct further contact discovery to build out a buyer profile.

The report underscores this advice: “According to respondents, certain B2B trade characteristics – including the length of the sales cycle, target audience attributes and search engine dynamics and features – lead to different goals, strategies and tactical priorities for B2B search marketing.”

Download the full report at www.business.com/info/b2bsearchstrategy08.asp. Or read more about this topic in the ReachForce white paper entitled, Making the Invisible Visible – Accelerate SEM Leads To Revenue.

Contributed by Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist, NetQoS

The B2B Lead features a number of helpful articles on copywriting, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite tips for ensuring B2B marketing copy is relevant. As marketers we constantly try to write compelling copy that motivates people to take some sort of action. The trick is to write in the voice of our target audience; speaking to them using language they respond to. Sometimes we use focus groups or A/B testing to help with this; getting out in the field and talking to prospects/customers also helps. In the end though, the words we choose often amount to best guesses.

Keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Google Trends, and the Google Keyword Tool provide a wealth of insight into the voice of our audience. Using search data and trends can give excellent clues to the words people use to describe things. Talking to your audience, using the same words they search for themselves, puts you at a major advantage. For example, the other day I was crafting an email to promote a new webcast. Problem was, some people were calling it a webcast and others were calling it a webinar – which was it? What would more people respond to; a webcast offer or a webinar offer? I decided to use Google Trends to compare the search volume of both words. I figured the term that is searched more often will also be the term used more commonly in conversation. This term should also spark a higher interest if used in my email. So I quickly pulled up Google Trends and here is what I found.

This obviously made my decision easy. Split testing my email offers confirmed that using “webcast” got the better response.

Now, this is just search-driven copywriting in its simplest form. If you want to take this further, you can use the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker almost like you would a Thesaurus. For example, maybe you are promoting a “golf strategies” guide. If you plopped this keyword into the Google Keyword Tool, it would offer you numerous suggestions for related terms people are searching for. In this example (shown below) maybe you would be better off promoting it as a “golf tips” guide since that term is searched more frequently.

Hopefully by now, you are starting to get the idea. This stuff really works – I have personally seen higher conversion rates on landing pages and emails by using this strategy. If you are interested in reading more about similar ideas, Aaron Wall has a very interesting article on keyword research that is definitely worth a read.

http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/keyword-inspiration-aaron-wall-of-seobookcom-shares-his-secrets/

http://www.wordtracker.com
http://www.google.com/trends
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google AdWords can be a B2B Marketer’s dream, when leveraged and implemented properly. Not only can AdWords programs produce leads quickly, but those leads move through the funnel quickly and they cost less than traditional marketing programs. Or at least it feels like they cost less when you can spec a CPC of .50 to $1.00 per lead.

But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg, say the Search Engine Marketing experts at Apogee Search Marketing. They report business-to-business marketers can expect to spend anywhere from $85 to $100 per lead for Google Search Engine Marketing efforts. At NetQoS, we have a very successful Google AdWords program, but our cost per qualified lead runs at least $60.

When you’re spending that kind of money to generate leads, you really need a program designed to help you convert the junk leads to real opportunities. In the B2B Marketing world, in particular, it is likely that a large percentage of the people responding to your AdWords ads are researchers who are supporting a buying committee. Often, it is an assistant, a competitor or a Seymore, one of those guys whose job is to ask “can I see more?” but never to purchase.

ReachForce’s Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook advises Marketers to resist the urge to turn these leads over to Sales your Sales funnel, slowing down Sales productivity. That’s actually a best case scenario. The more likely scenario- is that Sales is simply tagging these leads “unqualified” before ever picking up the phone leading to gaping leaks in your funnel. These leads are really only seeds—an early indication that corporate buyers are in need of a solution like yours and are in research mode. That’s why it is vital to investigate these seeds thoroughly before handing them over to Sales. Before you do, you should have answers to questions such as what is the buyer need, is budget allocated, who else in the organization is charged with investigating solutions, who is the decision-maker, and what is the timeframe for purchase.

Read more about this topic in the ReachForce Funnelnomics Marketing ebook or in their white paper entitled, Making the Invisible Visible – Accelerate SEM Leads To Revenue.

Contributed by Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist, NetQoS

Most website owners eventually come to the conclusion that to have any success getting traffic to their site, they need to do one of three things: optimize the pages of their website (SEO), start a pay-per-click campaign (SEM), or do both. In an effort to save money, most people will tell you to go the free route first – that is, work to optimize your website and hope that your pages get indexed high in the search engines. I’m here to tell you a couple of reasons you may want to consider shelling out some money on a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign first.

For those of you with limited budgets, you may be asking yourself – why spend money on a PPC engine like Google Adwords before taking advantage of every possible opportunity to get free listings? My best answer to this question is that doing so will save you weeks or possibly months of frustration. How? When you begin optimizing your website, you have no idea what will drive potential customers to your site, let alone what will prompt them to buy. Sure, you hopefully will do some keyword research ahead of time, but you still won’t know which keywords will ultimately bring you the targeted, motivated traffic you are looking for. Aside from that, you have no idea if Google or other search engines will even list your pages anywhere near the top (check out the chart below to see why being above the fold on page 1 is essential in a competitive b2b environment). In the end you may end up spending a lot of time and effort waiting to gain that first page result only to be disappointed because you show up on page 10. Alternately you may show up on page 1, but end up getting the wrong type of traffic resulting in few or no leads/sales.

Eye tracking study: Areas of the page searchers focus on

Now let’s consider that you do the same keyword research, but set up a Google Adwords account first and wait to optimize your site. With Adwords you can be up and running ads in minutes instead of waiting days or weeks to get indexed by Google in the organic (free) listings. You can also guarantee visibility within the eye tracking sweet spot from the chart above. Now you can begin testing. You can test which keywords are getting the most conversions, which ad copy resonates best with your target market, and which landing page copy convinces people to fill out their information. Once you begin gathering this data, you can begin transitioning the things that work to your website; you can now be confident that your optimization efforts will not be a waste of time. It’s like having the ultimate focus group; people from all over are telling you which keywords they are interested in when looking for products or services you sell. You will now know exactly which web copy to add to your pages to get the most conversions – it is no longer a guessing game. Authors and publishing companies test book titles with Adwords before going to print. Entrepreneurs use adwords to test product ideas before manufacturing the product. Adwords is the ultimate market research tool; if you look at it this way, it is well worth the money spent. Of course this all depends on whether you use Adwords to its full potential and testing capabilities. My next article will discuss the first step to creating a successful Google Adwords campaign – Keyword Research.

Found this truly ironic interactive experience posted on Digg yesterday. It basically gives visitors a glimpse of what the famously clean Google user interface would look like if Google were to optimize it for its own search engine. Enjoy.

http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html

While prepping for my upcoming presentation on Viral Marketing for the Marketing Sherpa B2B Summit, I ran across this excellent posting on http://seo-space.blogspot.com/2007/09/14-best-practices-and-tips-for-video.html. Here are three of the 14 best practices listed in the article:

1. Make sure that your video clips are relevant and informative – For starters, ensure that your video provides useful and informative information. Videos that demonstrate step by step procedures are great, videos that express an opinion about a specific topic can be useful too. Videos that have nothing to do with your brand or service offering or are general or vague in nature will just confuse your audience.
2. SEO Video Optimization Fundamental Tip #1: Give your video a Catchy Title – Video can be used to bring visitors to your site. One way to get users to view your video is to give it a catchy title that contains a related key phrase that is relevant to your product, service or brand.
3. Use Video as a Portal to other Content on Your Site – Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and provide links back to related content and other videos on your site.

According to B2B Magazine, currently only 1% of the videos on YouTube are posted by businesses. But I can tell you from experience that viral video is a great tool for B2B Marketers for both brand awareness and demand generation. After I present the details at the B2B Summit, I’ll post a summary on how NetQoS executed a viral video campaign that generated over 66,000 YouTube views and more than $400,000 in opportunities.