Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important element of getting a website found by the Internet content reader. After all, without a reader to consume your content, there’s no reason for anyone or any organization to have a website, thus no reason for online marketing and SEO.

The reader, or consumer of content, normally uses some kind of search engine such as Google, Yahoo, MSN (or a whole host of others) to find the information s/he needs. But we as marketers must always keep one thing straight: SEO and search engine are only a mean to an end. SEO is not the end goal itself. It is the content that is the end that serves the readers. This is the reason why providing relevant, useful information for visitors to consume is a crucial step in the SEO process.

Think of it this way. Decisions you make and things you do to attract visitors to your site must be based first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors. If this is not the case, even if a visitor somehow finds your site, s/he can and will immediately leave if the content searched for does not exist. Good content attracts high traffic. Conversely, useless content repels visitors.

In summary, if you do nothing else but just concentrate on creating great and captivating content, you already have a winning SEO strategy in place.

So are you spending a good amount of time on developing great content as part of your SEO strategy?

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Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

One Secret to Successful SEO, If You Don’t Do Anything Else

Blogging can bring excellent and relatively quick search engine optimization (SEO) benefits to a company’s website. Catfish over at BusinessOnline has some great tips for marketers in the blogging department to help with search engine optimization (SEO). Called “3 Top Ways Blogging Enhances Your SEO Campaign“, the article touches on the 3 easy-for-executive-to-understand reasons why blogging is important for any corporation.

In a nutshell, the 3 benefits blogging can bring your business are:

• Blogging creates new content opportunities. With blogging, a marketer can write marketing content relevant to any desired marketing message or campaign with very little effort, and without messing up the main corporate website. For blogging to be effective, all blog content should be keyword focused.
• Blogging creates new internal link opportunities. Because of new keyword focused content being generated regularly, there are ample of opportunities for internal linking between keywords and other relevant blog posts and articles. And when you automate this process with tools such as the Cross Linker WordPress Plugin for WordPress (as suggested by Catfish), the benefits can be multiplied ten-fold, as older content are given new life with every new keyword linking back to them.
• Blogging creates new external link opportunities. Blogging by its nature encourages communication between readers and content creators. If your content is captivating, interesting and useful to others, they will want to link back to your source article, vote for or recommend your content to others on social sites, and subscribe to your content through RSS feeds.

These are all excellent reasons for companies to get into blogging. But there is an additional good side effect from a marketer’s point of view. Blogging provides a critical, yet almost forgotten basic skill a good marketer must possess: the writing skill.

Anyone and everyone can claim to have excellent verbal and written communication skills. But let’s be honest to ourselves and our customers, how much formal marketing communications do you as a marketer actually write? And how often? The fact is we get bogged down in everyday to-do lists and deadlines that we no longer write proper marketing communications. Blogging brings good writing back to marketing communications.

And you know the saying is still true. With practice comes perfection.

So are you and your organization blogging? If not, what are some of the hindering factors? Share your experience with us.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Blogging for SEO Benefits, Plus a Great Side Effect

So HubSpot gave us another very easy to understand and easy to explain term: Inbound Marketing. It wraps everything about Web 2.0 into a neat little package. According to the article “Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web“, the current recession is pushing the next wave of marketing on the Internet. And it’s a good thing. Evolution is good.

Marketers are seeing the value of Inbound Marketing. While we can’t totally do away with traditional marketing, or Outbound Marketing, marketers can certainly step up their Inbound Marketing with little to no additional costs. Considering these 3 key components that make a successful Inbound Marketing, one can see why it’s so powerful.

1. Content – Content is the substance of any Inbound Marketing campaign. It is the information or tool that attracts potential customers to your site or your business. Content is king.
2. Search Engine Optimization – SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your content. It is the practice of building your site and inbound links to your site to maximize your ranking in search engines, where most of your customers begin their buying process.
3. Social Media – Social media amplifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site.

The beauty of it is anyone can successfully put them to use at very low costs. You don’t have a budget for this? Or your budget has just been scaled down? No worry, you can still run an effective marketing campaign. Here’s a graphic comparing Outbound and Inbound Marketing, courtesy of HubSpot. If you work up a marketing budget for each side of the table, it’s not hard to see the budget needed to do the left side is going to overwhelm the one on the right.

Print ads, TV ads, cold calling, trade shows, email blasts will continue to cost a bundle to do. On the other hand, blogs, eboks, viral videos, SEO, webinars and RSS are all very affordable to start or even expand in activities. To be fair, Inbound Marketing does require specialized knowledge and skills, and this is a good thing. It forces marketers to move with the time. It will weed out strong marketers from the weak ones. It’s the natural law of survival in the business jungle.

Pounding your message out to the customers? Not too effective anymore and too costly. Attracting customers coming to find you? Now everybody wins.

So consider these. Inbound Marketing costs much less than traditional marketing. It has better targeting with self-qualifying customers. And it is an investment with  word-of-mouth and viral effectiveness.

If it’s not already in your marketing game plan, then you may as well make Inbound Marketing your new year’s business resolution. But don’t wait. Start today. Remember, you don’t need a budget to do this.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Who Doesn’t Want Inbound Marketing?

Thank you for visiting Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Marketing Autopsy Blog is a place to collect, share and discuss the good and bad marketing ideas, with special attention on enterprise social networking, new media, inbound marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. It’s also a place to collect new thoughts, tools and trends about the ever changing marketing world.

It is undeniable that in marketing it is critical to keep up with techniques, ideas and tools that are continually developed and made available. Learning must be unrelenting so that we can effectively serve our clients/employers in any business climate. There’s nothing like a great marketing campaign executed efficiently, with innovation and creativity, on time and budget, with measurable results and buzz, all while achieving established goals and our client reaps the benefits.

Today online marketing strategy is even more critical as inbound, social network and viral marketing give a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. In this environment, it is important to understand what to do as much as what not to do in inbound marketing and SEO marketing.

Critiques, suggestions and ideas are always welcome. Please subscribe to Marketing Autopsy Blog if you haven’t done so already. Also follow me on Twitter @cuonghuynh.

Cuong Huynh

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

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