Mediaboss Marketing

(PR NewsChannel) / June 21, 2012 / ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.

PRSA SEO Workshop

PRSA Tampa Bay is hosting a workshop on how to write press releases for maximum social media exposure and search engine optimization (SEO). Located at the St. Pete Hilton Bayfront, the June 21 workshop will feature an interactive, how-to session led by Glenn Selig of PR NewsChannel. The workshop is part of the PRSA 2012 Sunshine District conference.

During this one-hour workshop attendees learned how to write press releases for search engine optimization (SEO) and various social media. Press releases are not for journalists any more, said Glenn Selig, founder of PR NewsChannel. Theyre a great way to reach consumers and your potential clients.

Workshop attendees also participated in an interactive session, teaching them how to identify key words, twitterfy their press releases, and connect with consumers through social media.

I feel confident knowing that I am armed with the SEO tools to hit the ground running, said Sally Johnson,workshop attendee.

Incorporating SEO into press releases increases visibility, attracts customers, potential partners and improves website click numbers. These kinds of SEO pre-conference workshops offer invaluable training for maximizing press release effectiveness. Writing press releases with SEO in mind is becoming a core skill set for public relations professionals industry-wide. The PRSA SEO workshop is one of many held during the #Sunshine2012 Conference in Tampa/St. Petersburg.

Watch video of the PRSA SEO Conference in action: http://youtu.be/Z4gqxAQWl3Y

About the Sunshine 2010 Conference: PRSA Tampa Bay hosts Sunshine 2012 district conference for PR professionals. The conference included workshops on PR and social media best practices.

About PRSA Tampa Chapter: The Tampa Bay Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) is one of the states largest professional organizations for public relations practitioners. Serving nearly 200 members across west central Florida, chapter members hail from business and industry, counseling firms, government, associations, hospitals, schools, professional services firms, and nonprofit organizations.

Read more:
How to use social media and SEO so your press release gets the job done

Summary: Search Exchange is an Internet marketing conference you dont want to miss! Mark your calendars, because its coming up soon.

If youre an Internet marketer, then youre going to want to mark your calendar for July 23-25. For the third year in a row, Search Exchange will be taking place right here in Charlotte, NC. This year, there will be speakers from Microsoft and Google, as well as a whole slew of industry heavyweights, such as Wil Reynolds, Neal Rodriguez, Jim Boykin, Steve Plunkett, and many more.

Check out the following excerpt from Wil Reynoldss presentation last year regarding link-building:

Besides the fact that the conference is held in my home town, one of the reasons I prefer it over others is because of the intimate setting its held in. The primary benefit of that is the openness of dialogue that transpires and the juicy bits of info you get from it. For instance, last year, Rand Fishkin shared a really great tip about getting videos to rank in Google but he asked the room to promise not to tweet about it (and we didnt). In that regard, Search Exchange is somewhat akin to a well-kept secret, but I dont think thats going to last much longer.

If youd like to attend, then head on over to the Search Exchange Web site where you can register. Ticket prices are as follows:

3-day event ticket: $500 1-day event ticket: $250

As for the agenda, here are the topics that will be covered each day (click to see who will be speaking on each day):

Day 1: SEO Day 2: Social Media Day 3: Analytics and PPC

And last of note, yours truly will be presenting this year (day 1, in the 10:00-10:45AM time slot)! The kind folks running Search Exchange were gracious enough to allow me to discuss a topic that should blow the minds of those attending. If youve kept up with any of my past coverage, in relation to the types of information Im capable of digging up with search engines, then you have at least some idea of what Ill be discussing. If not, however, then prepare to be shown a completely different side of Google, Bing, and the world of search in general.

See original here:
Search Exchange 2012: SEO, social media, and more

When it comes to SEO, most people understand that a website must have content, "search engine friendly" site architecture/HTML, and meta data (title tags andmeta descriptions).

Another meta element, if implemented incorrectly, that can also trip up websites is robots.txt.I was recently reminded of this while reviewing the website of a large company that had spent considerable money on building a mobile version of their website, on a sub-directory. Thats fine, but having a disallow statement in their robots.txt file meant that the website wasnt accessible to search engines (Disallow: /mobile/)

Lets review how to properly implement robots.txt to avoid search ranking problems and damaging your business, as well as how to correctly disallow search engine crawling.

Simply put, if you go to domain.com/robots.txt, you should see a list of directories of the website that the site owner is asking the search engines to "skip" (or "disallow"). However, if you arent careful when editing a robots.txt file, you could be putting information in your robots.txt file that could really hurt your business.

There's tons of information about the robots.txt file available at the Web Robots Pages, including the proper usage of the disallow feature, and blocking "bad bots" from indexing your website.

The general rule of thumb is to make sure a robots.txt file exists at the root of your domain (e.g., domain.com/robots.txt). To exclude all robots from indexing part of your website, your robots.txt file would look something like this:

User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /junk/

The above syntax would tell all robots not to index the /cgi-bin/, the /tmp/, and the /junk/ directories on your website.

In the past, I reviewed a website that had a good amount of content and several high quality backlinks. However, the website had virtually no presence in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

What happened? Penalty? Well, no. The site's owner had included a disallow to "/". They were telling the search engine robots not to crawl any part of the website.

Read more here:
Proper SEO and the Robots.txt File

The last year or two has seen a big shift in the infrastructure that SEO agencies and in-house teams have had at their fingertips, as full campaign platforms have finally come of age.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been a data heavy enterprise, and any team with any coding ability at all pretty quickly started to hack together tools to deal with it. Pretty quickly, some of those companies realized they could offer those tools to customers directly, and suites such as SEOmoz's and Ontolo's were born, to name but a couple. The next step is obvious: integrate all the keyword and page optimization data for a particular site, along with link graph data and basic task management, and, hey presto, you have an SEO campaign platform.

And, the newest kid on the block is Dutch company SEO Effect.

Like most similar tools, SEO Effect has a lot to it, and a single review can but dip the toe in its water. However, two things impressed straight out of the box: the research tools and the flexibility of the system.

The flexibility starts just with creating an account and adding campaigns. Unlike most platforms, which have fixed packages, each allowing a certain number of campaigns and other resources, SEO Effect allows you to buy credits and then allocate them between campaigns as you need to. If you're an agency managing campaigns for sites both large and small, that's invaluable. There's a free trial as well, of course.

The flexibility also extends to the tools themselves. Many platforms shoehorn you into a certain way of work (that can't really be avoided), which can be a bit of a barrier for uptake amongst SEOs who already have fairly fixed ways of doing things. Whilst SEO Effect can't avoid that completely, they do the best they can, with many of the tools having both "basic" and "expert" mode, the latter offering a lot more options.

Almost all platforms now offer the ability to track trends in your data over time: keyword positions, your link graph, traffic data pulled in via the Google Analytics API. Indeed, some platforms, such as SEOmoz's don't do a lot more than that. Of course, SEO Effect has these basics, but what really impressed me with the ability to do actual research within the platform, and merge resulting data with an existing campaign seamlessly.

The tool is divided into four main areas:

Task management is also promised. Let's dig into the keyword research area a little to explore what the tool can do.

SEO Effect works around the concept of multiple, flexible assets within a campaign. So, for example, instead of limiting a campaign to a fixed number of keywords, you can have as many keyword research lists as you like, each containing as many keywords as you like. You can use these to research keywords for different topic areas, for example, or different products that you sell. Opening a new keyword research list gives you this screen, with options for geographic location and language:

Read the original post:
SEO Effect Keyword Research Tool [Review]

Another update, another dose of mayhem. This time the mayhem is called Penguin. As with all Google updates over the years, there have been winners and losers.

Before we start panicking, we should remember that for Google to survive and continue dominating in the next decade it has put in huge effort to keep its SERPs relevant, useful, and clean of spam. As a reminder, Penguin isnt the first major update Google has rolled out in the past 10 years:

We won't go into detail on each of these, as plenty has already been written about these updates on Search Engine Watch and elsewhere. Instead, lets focus on the one theme that runs through each of them: To keep spam in check. Granted, Googles definition of spam has varied, but generally they have done a good job of being vocal in the community through Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam team, and also through Googles own Webmaster guidelines.

Some websites are out to make a quick buck (not thinking of their customers/visitors), or they have been misguided by an agency or by some black hat SEO magician that its OK to use tricks. Here are a few of the things websites should avoid as outlined in Googles Webmaster guidelines:

Youre playing Russian roulette if youre engaged (or plan to engage) in any of the above tricks. Businesses who are in for the long haul should think a lot about their customers. Specifically, how can you:

With a mindset like this, the focus shifts from employing tricks like the ones mentioned above to a mindset of how you can publish quality content on a user-friendly website that makes users want to stick around.

As an in-house SEO, thinking of how to create value for your site visitors and employing ethical white hat SEO tactics should be on top of your agenda. And only if it is on top of your agenda will it filter down to other departments in your company. This will also ensure that there is no risk of turning to the dark side of SEO.

Lets look at what in-house SEOs can do immediately when an algorithmic updates like Penguin happen, and how to plan for the future so you dont get hit hard.

It can be a big blow to your business if you get hit by these Google updates. But avoiding SEO shortcuts, having a plan of action, and creating a long-term plan is a solid start. Think of this as your own SEO crisis management plan.

See the original post here:
Hit by Google Penguin? An In-House SEO Crisis Management Plan