Integrated Online Marketing

I have seen a lot of articles and reports recently talking about what Google is doing to the SEO world.  What does this mean for the future of online marketers, or marketing consulting?  It means that they need to start branching out, and fast.

SEO doesnt meant link building and on site optimization anymore.  It means that you have an intergrated and diversified online "portfolio" so to speak.  Agencies need to start moving that direction.  Instead of offering services that silo certain activites like link building, social media, pr, etc... it should move in the direction of doing it all together, at the same time.

Lets Start with Some Google Searches

I was thinknig of planning a trip to Phoenix to visit family, so I took a reasearch detour. Recently looking at some marketing companies in phoenix, I came across one specific internet marketing company Phoenix, which would obviously have a lot of competition for online marketing agencies (just like any major city would), but at least these guys have started pushing the right pieces of the puzzle.  Social media, video, seo, graphic design and some other more traditional pieces that are part of the multimedia type program.  This company is just one of the many- the issue being that they offer the full suite of services which is what a company would need.

If you google "internet marketing companies phoenix", you get the typical search results of top 3 (netwirks.com, adwebdesigns.com, digitaltraffic.com), local search pack, and more organic results. The top three all look the same to me, and dont have great websites.  Half of them offer a full multimedia search marketing suite, and half of them dont (or they might but I can really tell).  The other internet marketing companies in Phoenix have websites that all look the same and say the same thing.  I would prefer to see the messaging adjusted to a post-panda/penguin world.

I did plenty of "internet marketing in (city)" search across the US and found that most of them look the same.  Some do better than others, but I tend to get the feeling that a lot will start scambling as clients take massive hits from low quality SEO services that are put on the Google chopping block.

Utilizing A Sitemap Index

Sitemap indexes are an effective way to organize the content from your site for search engines. The most common use of the sitemap index is for different media/content indexation, such as:

• Pages
• Videos
• News

Most SEM pros know the basics behind using it for different media and content types. One lesser known techniques around the sitemap index revolve around creating sections of your static content pages as part of your sitemap index. Examples of this could include:

• product pages
• review pages
• category pages

Success can come from creating asitemap from even your static content in order to improve the crawl effeciency and the number of indexed pages on your site.

Top Free Article Submission Websites

I think I may have posted some articles submission sites in my ultimate toolguide a little bit ago, but just as the internet and my skills evolve, so does my toolbox.

I went through and collected lists of article submit websites and have narrowed my list down the the easiest, fastest and most effective article submission sites I found. There are a ton of these type of stie around, but this list is good enough to get started.

travel notes.com

travelarticlelibrary

travelinghippo

ezinearticles

geckoe.com

isnare.com

e-articles.net

articlesubmissions.net

articlebase.com

amazines.com

articlealley.com

articlebin.com

articlecity.com

articlesfactory.com

articleworld.net

ideamarketers.com

goarticles.com

freezinesite.com

I have more useful tools that have popped up recently (meaning since the last time I posted forever ago) That I will continue to add to my list.

More Free Tools for Online Marketing

Since my last post on reverse marketing, I promised a master list of tools, and this is the beginning. I call my list I keep on hand the "Internet Marketing Bible". The packet of tools I have is about 20 pages long, so I will just touch on the best of the tools I have.

By far, the best overall free tool is Web CEO. It is a complete software package that tracks your websites and keeps statistics that you want. It can track your organic rankings over time for your keywords, keeps track of your linking strategies, can submit to search engines, tracks competitors, and more. I just use the keyword ranking and link tracking, since all the other services (PPC management and analytics) I use through Google and other sources. Great free tool!

Free Directory Submissions: www.freewebsubmission.com Lists the top 50 directories you can submit your website to.

Press Releases: www.prleap.com, www.24-7pressrelease.com These two sites provide a decent free press release service. Great for getting articles and PR and links. I would recommend paying the $30 or so however. Usually this small amount will get you to the top of the first page of releases on your release date.

RSS Feed creators: I am sure everyone by now knows what RSS is. A way to feed you site's content into other places on the net. Whether you use Blogger, other blogging service, or have a website, these two tools are very helpful in getting an RSS feed set up and running:
Feedburner: Hosts and creates an RSS feed address for any type of feed. Just type in your url and get ready to go.
Cut'n'Paste RSS Feed: After creating a feed in feedburner, use your new feed url in here and it will create the HTML so you can have your feed put into another website. Very easy to customize.

XML Sitemaps: www.xml-sitemaps.com is a great and easy tool to create your sitemap to insert into your website for Google and other search engines to see.

Keyword Density Tool: This tool from SEO Chat quickly analysis your keyword density for any given page. Optimal keyword density? Well, people say anywhere from 2.5% - 5%. I usually hover around 3.5%

Split Testing: AdComparator allows you to a simple multi-variate test on your own ads or creative. It allows you to enter in the different thing you want to test, and after entering in the information from the test it gives you your analysis. Great tool.

Live PR Tracker: Track your Live Google PageRank and see which Data Centers are logging what PR for your site. Interesting to see the difference sometimes.

Public Relations Advice and Tools: 101publicrelations.com/blog has some good discussion on public relations and the sidebar has some useful tools to check out.

Firefox SEM Extension: By far the most amazing and useful extension. It automatically give you the vital rankings (PR, Alexa, Backlinks, Directories, Indexed Pages) for every website right on a Google search results page. You don't even have to go to the individual websites. Just download the extension and every time you search on Google, it runs the results in a box just below every website. Brilliant!

Well, that's a good start. Next time I will post a list of Blog/RSS directories you cant submit your blog to for inclusion. Good luck!

Reverse Marketing to Maximize Online Reach

Think like a customer, market accordingly. That applies as much online as it does offline. Reverse marketing online can be very challenging. How do you get your information and products out to as many people as possible? Well, consider yourself a consumer, and the outlets you have contact with everyday (on the internet). Websites you know of, news sites, sports sites, RSS feeds, blogs, articles and commerce.

Now, in marketing terms, we need to find avenies to get our information through each of these channels. I cam updating my Free Internet Marketing Tools list. I provide one earlier on in this blog, and it was a useful list. however, I have much more useful tools now, and combonation of about 25 different sources and proffesionals. It will outline everything from publishing press releases to submitting your RSS feed to news sites around the world. Its quite the list. Be on the lookout!



**The sitemap experiment has gone well. I just assume that most of the negative feedback that I read in the Google Groups were the few who for some reason run into problems. I submmitted sitemaps for all of the websites that I manage, and have not had a problem. I can't really say that I have seen an improvement though. My sites were already indexed by Google, had decent PR and ranked ok. So I cant really expect that sitemaps will give me that large of a boost.

But, I also submitted my blogs into sitemaps. I also added a sitemap for each blog (just submit you Atom feed url into the url space in the sitemap submit menu). Since my blogs do not have much in terms of rankings, I will swee what difference that makes.