Recently, my friends and I have been hiking every weekend. It’s a great way to get some exercise in and it’s a fun activity to explore nature with friends. Not to mention it’s something that I can do with my dog on the weekend to give him a much needed energy release after being cooped up in the house all week. But, it wasn’t until I wrote a blog post for a client on Maine’s Waterfalls that I started to get really inspired.

Maine has a crazy amount of beauty and so many things to discover. But, the caveat to that is, in order to see a beautiful waterfall or awe inspiring mountain view, you first have to make the hike to do it. Hiking is NOT easy. In fact, many of the trails that are required to get to these Mountain Tops can cause you pain and exhaustion. However, once you hit that apex you get to stroll down and the endorphins kick in and it was all worth it.

But, the more you hike, the easier it gets. You develop your muscles, strengthen your heart and lungs and build endurance. In the end, it becomes more natural and more enjoyable.

SO, what does this have to do with web marketing success? EVERYTHING!

Social media doesn’t come naturally to everyone. I can’t count how many times we hear clients say that they didn’t know it was going to be so much work.  Blogging is work, creating content is work, posting updates takes time and imagination and it all has to be valuable and interesting information for your audience.

Waterfalls were my inspiration, what’s yours?  What is going to get you excited to put the work and effort in to get the web marketing and social media results that you want? You can look for inspiration for your posts in many places, did someone say something to you today that sparked an idea, did you hear something on the radio, did you read a blog or magazine article that got you thinking? Anything you hear, read or do can be used to spark an idea for a blog post or Twitter update.

Like with starting a workout or starting to hike, it takes time to adjust and adapt to your new activity until it becomes easier or a habit.  This also goes for web marketing.  Right now it may not seem like it fits in your schedule or it may not feel natural to you.  But, the more you do it the easier it becomes.  Create an editorial calendar for yourself and stick to it. Commit to posting one blog post a week or making 3 updates on Facebook a day. Do that until you master it and then add on the next phase of your web marketing plan.  Like with taking a hike, the first trail is the hardest and with every new trail (or marketing step you take) the easier it becomes.

Results! We all do this because we want the web marketing results.  With a hike it’s an amazing view, endorphins released from exercise, fresh air or a waterfall, with web marketing we want to get our message to the right people resulting in our end goal.  Whether that goal be more leads in the sales funnel, more people attending your event, more traffic to your website or better customer service web marketing and social media are just our tools to help us achieve those goals.

So, what are you waiting for? Find your inspiration, make the commitment, and take the first steps.

If you’d like help developing a social media plan for your business, or a personal trainer for your social media marketing to help you stay with it, flyte can help. Just contact us to get the ball rolling.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Hiking Web Everest

Dear Maine SEO,

We’re trying to decide whether we should set up a business blog or do pay-per-click advertising. Which will provide a better return on investment?

–Marketing in Maine

Dear Marketing,

We’ve never recommended putting all your eggs in one basket, be they proverbial or free range. Both blogs–which help with your organic search rankings–and pay-per-click (PPC) ads–which appear on page one–can help deliver qualified traffic to your website.

One way to look at this is the difference between cooking in an aluminum pan vs. a cast-iron pan. The aluminum pan heats up quicker, but it also cools off quicker.

PPC advertising is a lot like that aluminum pan. If you need to get page one results on Google or Bing, you just need to pay them and your ads will start running immediately. Same day results. That’s fantastic for sites that may not otherwise do well in the organic results, such as new sites or sites that rely heavily on Flash.

However, the moment you stop paying them–whether because you hit your daily budget or you’ve decided that PPC is no longer for you–that traffic stops just as quickly. You’ll get no more benefit out of the money and time you’ve invested.

Compare this to blogging: you may not enjoy much search engine visibility for the first few months of your blogging and you’ll be putting in a lot of work…we’d recommend 2 – 3 keyword-rich posts a week of 300 words or more. However, once you’ve established your blog and built up trust and inbound links, your blog stays hot like a cast-iron pan.

In reviewing the top ten traffic generating posts this month at our web marketing blog, five of the posts are at least a year or two old, the oldest one was written in 2006! Five years later and it’s still pulling in hundreds of new visitors each month…that’s a much better payoff than most PPC campaigns in our opinion.

So, if your budget allows it, we might recommend setting up a small budget for PPC, but develop develop a business blog for your long term success.

Rich Brooks
Now You’re Cooking with Gas

Photo credit: Jeremy Noble

This is a recap from a webinar SEOmoz did a while back, with Rand Fishkin. Follow Rand on Twitter here.

Goals of successful information Architecture

• Semantically logical structure (Zoo animals –> African Savannah –> Lions) – If your site architecture is logical, your users will spend more time on site, find what they want easier, and convert more often.
• Minimize click depth (not JUST for search engines!) – so that users and search engines can reach any point on the site in a minimum number of site. Usability and SEO best practices are nearly identical.
• Maximize usability of navigation

Tips for Semantically Useful Navigation

• Initially design without keyword research – so that you aren’t bias in the way you organize by the keywords you discover. Rand suggests first organizing your content the way it makes sense to you and then incorporate the keywords that make sense for search engines, where they make sense.
• Add  in keyword research based modifications to your draft IA
• Validate architecture/path with non-SEOs – make sure that your navigation still makes sense to non-SEOs and non-web users

Tips for Minimal Click-Depth

• Imitate the ideal navigation pyramid – in the first example, you’ll see you can get to 1 million pages with three clicks; in the second, you can only reach 150,000 pages with three clicks.

• Broad linking at top levels – at the top level, link to very broad categories; link to popular subcategories from the homepage. Rand uses Metacritic as an example.
• Editorial categorization > user-defined (hack: multi-level HTML sitemap – like this page at Rotten Tomatoes)

Tips for Usable Navigation

• Obvious navigation elements (like with MailChimp)
• Naming Conventions that Make Intent (not like Media Temple) – don’t use language no one outside your company won’t understand
• User & usability testing (using something like Silverback 2.0)

Avoiding Common “Big Site” Problems

• Duplicate content issues:
  • Rel Canonical tags (although sometimes it isn’t perfect) – you’ll lose a tiny bit of PR, but you’ll save yourself before bad things happen. Rand always suggests using the rel canonical for the absolute URL of pages for your article/blog/products section(s).
• Google Webmaster Tools – use to ignore duplicate content
• SEOmoz web app

Scraping and Re-Publishing

• Scrappers (good or bad) that take content can be shown instead of original content.
• Employ absolute URLs (as in <a href=”http://www.seomoz.org/blog”> anchor </a>) not relative (<a href=”…blog”> anchor </a>)
• Don’t go overboard with bot blocking

Incomplete Indexation

• Don’t look at the site: command and compare it day to day. (Read this post by Rand.) Use track referrals instead.
• Check page “types” that don’t receive traffic (see this post by Rand)
• XML sitemaps – helps search engines crawl large websites
• Content syndication (use the allintitle: command)
• RSS feeds
• Twitter for indexation

“Search Results” in the SERPs

• Create category “landing” pages
• Remove obvious traces of “search” on landing pages

Faceted navigation

• Rel canonical can help
• Use AJAX to reload pages
• Watch out for Google crawling Javascript
• Offer facets only to loggin-in/cookie users

Q&A

Sorry couldn’t stick around for the whole webinar, but here are two juicy tips:

Google Image search – less a new algorithm than a new interface. Text around image seems to be doing better than alt text.

Want a copy of Rand’s Firefox bookmarks? Here they are!

The following is a selection of takeaways from the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Find conversations around the conference on Twitter.

I apologize for those of you who kept up with my pseudo live blogging yammering last week. I’m taking some time to make some observations and actionable takeaways from the conference. If you want to skip ahead to something you’re especially interested in, the following are the topics covered:

• Real Time & Social Search
• Google’s Keyword Research Tools
• What’s new with local search?
• Location Services: The new local search?
• Facebook SEO
• Actionable Metrics and Diagnostics
• Demystifying Attribution
• SEO & Competitive Analysis
• Analytics for Social Media

Real Time & Social Search

Realtime search is simply about ‘hacking’ human interest – a very different way of looking at search than we’re historically used to. What is your audience interested in? Find out and be involved in that conversation.

Metrics that matter:

• Follower counts
• List inclusions
• Retweets
• Trending topic
• Clicks/pageviews

Want to know if a status or tweet “works” for your audience? Use the “Mom” test. As in, would your Mom understand it?

Google’s Keyword Research Tools

This session was tough; and by that I mean the audience was tough on poor Baris from Google. [Note to self: never get a room full of geeks fired up about the tools they use.]

Google’s got a great suite of (totally free tools) for your keyword research pleasure:

• Wonder Wheel
• Search-based Keyword Tool
• Insights
• Traffic estimator
• AdWords Keyword Tool

On the (new and improved) Google AdWords Keyword Tool, here are some things you need to know:

• The search-based keyword tool is on it’s way out. Soon you’ll only have the ability to use the AdWords Keyword Tool.
• The numbers are rounded, but they’re accurate to Google’s search volume.
• Keywords are only included in the tool if they are bid on in AdWords; so while that’s a ton of keywords, it’s certainly not going to be everything. However, search volume in the KWT is actual searches, not ad impressions.
• Keywords are filtered out with a commercial filter and a privacy filter.
• A few things in the works: a bug that’s causing a number change between being logged in and logged out, statistics based at the city/state level (soon), a keyword tool with all of Google’s raw data (next year)
• You’ll get different results using punctuation vs. non punctuation, so do separate searches for each.

What’s new with local search?

Like PageRank for all websites, Google has PlaceRank for Google Places.

Google Maps algorithm is based on citations, which include:

• Links to the website
• Mentions of website domain in plain text
• Mentions of business name
• Mentions of business street address/place
• Mentions of business phone number

There are a ton of tools you can use for local search: some for time saving, others for competitive analysis. Find a comprehensive list of local tools here.

Where possible, always include as much information about your business as possible (specifically phone number and address). This might be social media, local listings, and more.

Location Services: The new local search?

Location-based apps are popular because they help clarify reputation for a local business.

What not to do:

• Messing with names – stuffing keywords
• Call tracking numbers
• Address social climbing
• Category lapses
• Missing data elements
• Insufficient distribution

Yelp

• Keep in touch with your customers and respond quickly
• Keep it positive and respond to negative reviews
• Yelp’s algorithm is smart in protecting businesses from rogue accounts that make negative reviews.

Facebook SEO: Free Ways to be Found on Facebook

Optimizing Facebook status updates:

• Status update doesn’t appear on public page, unless you plan ahead and do some research to have them show up
• Appears to be private/controlled page, search for the “open” page
• Include popular keywords
• Tag referenced pages to increase presence

Optimize your page code for Facebook using open graph code.

Free Tricks to Boost Your Fans

• Charity – donate money to a charity to acquire fans
• Must be a fan to comment (or even see) wall; for every comment, we’ll give money
• Create exclusive content – “visible to connection” tag (If you want to see (coupons, % off, deal), then become a fan) Use it for: coupons, sales, etc.
• Typical method – “Find us on Facebook” = NOT GOOD; fix = use QR code instead, use for FB places too

[As a sidenote, there's also some great information on Facebook optimization here.]

Actionable Metrics and Diagnostics

Google Webmaster Tools has multiple uses:

• Get email forwarding to receive site alerts of malware notification or crawl error alerts
• Keep track of terms you want to rank well for and watch them in the search queries
• Check for errors and duplicate resutls

Optimize your website using:

• Competitors’ titles and snippets (search engine/meta descriptions)
• Write content that matches your search queries
• Check your page speed

Demystifying Attribution

What this boils down to: it’s hard to find out where a sale first originated. Was it an AdWords ad they saw? A link from another site? Like I said…it’s hard, but doable. If you’re math savvy, you might enjoy figuring it out for yourself by reading the full post, otherwise some of the kind presenters are super smart and would be able to help you out: Efficient Frontier, ROI Labs, ClearSaleing, and Range Online Media.

Also, this is a great article from SEOmoz on how to use Google Analytics to find out first touch attribution.

SEO & Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses are great for new (or new to you) ideas, gaining insights, and gathering metrics. Before you start the analysis, make sure you ask some key questions. Then, there are ton of tools you can use in your arsenal for competitive analysis and those can all be found here.

Analytics for Social Media

Good social media analytics boil down to your goals: what are you trying to accomplish? Fantastic; now you have your goals, backtrack. How can you track your social media activity and engagement in an effort to meet those goals? There are a ton of ideas for what and how to measure at the original post.

Other recaps around the Interwebs

• Search Engine Land
• flyte blog
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Managing Greatness
• Outspoken Media

Nicki Hicks
Still digesting

The following is a recap from a session at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East. Follow the conference and this session on Twitter.

Social Media Analytics with Jack Bauer

Preparation is key. Start with a social media checklist.

Part 1: Discovery

Identify your business objectives

• Increase brand awareness
• Increase brand trust
• Increase interaction with customers
• Increase brand loyalty
• Sell more [your service/product]
• Better understanding of user behavoir

What characteristics do you want associated with your brand?

• Great customer service
• Convenience
• Low prices
• Refreshing

How much time and resources are you willing to invest?

A few stats

• 67% of Twitter users who follow a brand, are more like to buy that brand’s products
• 60% of Facebook users who like a brand are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend
• 74% of consumers are influence on buying decisions by fellow socializers

Part 2: Understanding your Audience

Listening – your parents were onto something

• How are your customers using social media
• Where are they participating?
• Are they currently interacting with companies via social media?
• What are they already saying about you?
• What is their activity level on each social network?

Part 3: Defining KPIs

• Define KPIs specific to each business objective
• Cool social media marketing analytics
• Use KPIs to measure, like:
  • Share of voice – Brand mentions/total mentions
  • Audience engagement – Comments + Shares + Trackbacks/Total Views
  • Conversation reach – Total people participating/Total audience views

Examples of Actionable KPIs

• Number of people in a specific location who follow us on Twitter
• Reduction in support costs
• Number of product improvement suggestions from Facebook fans
• Increase in product reviews & ratings
• Reduction in sales cycles

Other KPIs to consider

• Volume of consumer-created buzz
• Seasonality of buzz
• Rate of virality
• Embeds/installs
• Increases in searches
• Rankings improvemnts
• Demographics
• Interaction/engagement rates
• Number of interactions
• Store locator views
• Registrations by channel

KPI Evolution

• The key to successful social media measurement is asking questions

Part 4: Tools for Insight

• Scout Labs
• Radian 6

Configuration Tips

Setup separate searches for:

• Brand mentions
• Product mentions
• Events
• Promotions
• Competitors
• Product launches

Taylor Pratt, Raven Internet Marketing Tools

Social Media Metrics

Content-oriented social media

Consumption = branding and organic social media presence

Benefits

• Traffic
  • Unique visits/page visits
  • CPM revenue
• Visibility
  • Branding/buzz
  • Links
    • Long tail traffic
    • Search rankings (leads/sales)
• Stickiness
  • Newsletter/RSS subscribers
  • Return visitors

Quantitative Metrics (KPIs)

• Engagement
  • Comments (Not including spam, but do include negative comments)
  • Social votes/bookmarks
• Consumption – traffic count
• Micro-conversions
  • Subscribers
  • Fans/followers
• Virality
  • Social shares/mentions
  • Links

Granular Metrics: Links

• Volume of links for a number of pieces of content
• Amount of links based on number of visits
• Shift in link count over time
• Competitive link growth
• Links by category/topic
• Links by social channel

Micro-conversions/Engagement

• Bookmarks
• Downloads
• Favorites
• Feedback
• Forward to a friend
• Groups
• Install widget
• Invite/refer
• Uploads
• Wishlists

URL shorteners

• bit.ly
• Google URL shortener (Goo.gl)

Comment engagement

• Bring social comments into your blog with Disqus
• Conversion rate = # visitor comments/# pieces of content
• Compare to regular content vs. promoted content

Google Analytics

Google URL Builder

• Create trackable link (Google URL builder)
  • Campaign name
  • Promotion start date
  • Delivery method
  • Medium
  • Format
• Shorten your trackable link
• Add your shortened trackable link
• Track your URL in Google Analytics

Advanced Segments

• Segment social visits from regular visits through Advanced Segments
• Tie Advanced Segments to Goals

Other GA social analytics sources

• Content > Content by title > Entrance Source
• Click Map (content overlay)
• Infographic tracking through GA
• Google Social Analytics - GreaseMonkey for Firefox/Chrome
• Google Analytics for Facebook pages – FBML markup

Social Sharing Measurement

• Facebook Insights (through Facebook page)
• Facebook Page Tool
• WebTrends Facebook Analytics Tool
• (Official) Twitter analytics
• Twitter sharing – how many people are RT’ing you?
• Delicious bookmarks
  • View history to see how many times a URL was bookmarked
  • Use SEOQuake plugin to see how your site is bookmarked overall
• YouTube Insight
  • Views over time
  • Demographic/geogrpahic breakouts of views
  • How many imbed codes were shared
• Social sharing measurement - ShareThis
• Social Meter
• PostRank

Data Use

• Start with a baseline measurement
• Then do monthly audits

Takeaways

• Social media metrics vary with strategies, goals, sites, etc.
• Track anything possible for insight
• Social media is not just about numbers
• Measuring social media does not = ROI for social media

Jordan Kasteler, BlueGlass Interactive Inc.