Mediaboss Marketing

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

NEW YORK and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Drupal Connect and Canadian Drupal development firm North Studio announced Tuesday they have merged, creating the most diverse professional Drupal development, support and training team with a complement of over 75 professionals.

Both companies will continue to do business under their respective names, with each one respectively becoming the other's American and Canadian division.

John Florez, President and CEO of Drupal Connect, said North Studio's world-class Drupal design, development, SEO and training teams will complement Drupal Connect's elite Drupal development staff. "This merger will keep us on the leading edge of technology while remaining competitive with the huge demand for Drupal CMS," said Florez.

"We are delighted to be joining forces with one of the premier Drupal development and support companies in the world," said North Studio Vice President Karen Smallwood. "Drupal Connect has some of the strongest Drupal developers in the industry, and this partnership will allow both our teams to realize their full potential as the industry moves to mobile development."

Founded in 1999 in Victoria, British Columbia, North Studio is one of Canada's premier Drupal development and support companies. Its Drupal SEO and social media marketing division, Stikky Media, helps drive traffic to clients' sites, while Q College, North Studio's education arm, is the only government-accredited college in the world offering Drupal diploma programs. "Exponential growth and demand for Drupal development encouraged us to ensure professional Drupal training was part of our growth strategy," said Q College Vice President Alida Sinkelman.

Headquartered in New York City, Drupal Connect is a full-service Drupal firm offering Drupal development, training and staffing services. The company is engaged in projects worldwide including Sony Music Entertainment, Waste Management Inc., General Electric Co., A&E, the New York Stock Exchange, NBC Universal, Stanford University and the Carter Foundation. Drupal Connect was founded in 2009 by John Florez, who previously owned Drupal Staffing.

Please visit http://www.drupalconnect.com and http://www.NorthStudio.com for more information.

Read the original post:
Drupal Connect, North Studio Announce Merger

Talking to the Global SEO manager of a large organization with offices around the world, he was bemoaning the high turnover of staff and the difficulty of keeping people in SEO posts around the world with the right level of SEO knowledge and expertise to achieve their goals.

Its a challenge many organizations face. Thats not to say that these businesses are bad at retaining staff the very fact that they are global often means that they offer something special to the world. Their staff are often not moving onto other organziations either but simply are being promoted to a different position, team or department. Some, of course, are leaving the company too.

Another issue is that SEO responsibilities around the world arent often held by people who are dedicated to the cause of SEO. Mostly, they have other marketing tasks to handle too and have a relatively limited bandwidth for SEO.

Before going further, I have to declare two areas of personal interest. My company runs the International Search Summit with SMX and training programs. Im also a long standing fan of SMX and SearchEngineLand and first attended conferences by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman in 2003 in the UK and 2004 in the US. So this gives me something of a bias, but also I think a unique insight into the industry were all in.

In many sectors there have been studies into the value of training. I dont propose to labour this point I think were all aware of the rapidly changing nature of the business.

The value of keeping abreast of search engine and social media developments pays for itself many times over Im sure we all agree. You would think that investing in training would be a no-brainer but its still a cost and its value isnt always recognized. (My staff at this point are also nodding.)

We also have to recognize at this point that for those working in international SEO the challenges are particularly tough. No one speaks 20 or even 10 languages well. If you see someone who claims that, I suggest you challenge it. So how can a normal human being SEO working internationally actually cope? Lets look at some strategies.

If you think Im about to say its a good idea to go to conferences, youd only be half right. There are conferences all over the world so you could quite easily send staff to the most local conference for them. I think there is a better strategy which Ive seen a few companies deploy.

A good strategy is to choose a big and wide ranging conference somewhere in the world and then to fly in the relevant staff from all over the world. Yes I can hear the sharp intake of breath and I know theres a little more cost involved with that, but the value is clear.

With all of the global SEO team in one place, they can discuss not just what theyve seen and heard but also their own issues. In effect you can organise a parallel conference for you own organisation alongside the main conference with the inspiration of the main conference in the teams minds.

See original here:
5 Tips For Maintaining International SEO Knowledge With Training

The just-released first series is all about Rank Tracker. The four videos are to demonstrate how Rank Tracker's most powerful features should be used to their full potential for dominating search results.

Minsk, Belarus (PRWEB) March 14, 2012

The first training video series is devoted to the much-hyped Rank Tracker. The four Rank Tracker video tutorials released today are to take users by hand through:

"Rank Tracker by Link-Assistant.Com is the rank checking tool of choice for 380k professionals in the SEO industry worldwide," says Viktar Khamianok, CEO and Founder, Link-Assistant.Com. "Among other factors that helped us achieve this level of loyalty is enhancing our SEO software with new features several times a month to echo all the latest SEO trends."

"Though Rank Tracker is pretty easy to use, it has grown to become so feature-rich that we want to make sure our users dont miss out on every function available in the SEO tool."

Visit http://www.link-assistant.com/video.html to get Rank Tracker's training videos.

New video tutorials on the remaining SEO PowerSuite tools are to be released early in April.

Stay tuned for the company's updates, read Link-Assistant.Com's SEO blog and get social with us on Facebook fb.me/LinkAssistant, Twitter @LinkAssistant and Google Plus gplus.to/LinkAssistant.

Also check out Link-Assistant.Com's Youtube account to watch all videos released by the company and their customers. SEO PowerSuite users often have their own helpful tips and tricks on using the software that bring great value to the whole community. Thus, Link-Assistant.Com encourages their customers sending short help videos theyll be shared with other users though Youtube.

*Defining the world standard for SEO software About Link-Assistant.Com:*

Here is the original post:
Link-Assistant.Com to Launch Its Training Video Series for SEO PowerSuite Software