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How many times have you heard something like this: “We provide both SEO and SEM services”, “I do both SEO and SEM”, or some other variation of the same song?

I’ve heard it thousand times. And each time it makes me cringe inside. Surprisingly many times this phrase was uttered by people who were supposed to be SEO/SEM experts. Yet this phrase has no more sense than if a person says “I am an expert in both Online Marketing and Email Marketing”.

Email Marketing is one of the components of Online Marketing. If you’re an expert in Online Marketing than you should be an expert in Email Marketing, SEM, Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing and other online traffic generation methods. If somebody says that s/he is an expert in both Online Marketing and Email Marketing that makes me wonder how deep her/his expertise really is in the subject matter.

Now let’s get back to SEO and SEM phrases I mentioned at the beginning of this post. To put it politely, all those phrases are perfect examples of total and ultimate nonsense. Here is why.

What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, it’s an art or science (I’ve heard it both ways) of optimizing a site in such a way that it ranks highly in the organic search results for desirable keywords.

What is SEM? SEM is an abbreviation of Search Engine Marketing – an entire industry dedicated to driving traffic to a desired object through search engines and search-affiliated networks.

If you look at any major search engine, you see two different types of results displayed on search engine result pages for any popular keyword – paid results and organic results. Organic results are generated based on complex ranking algorithms which differ from search engine to search engine. Rankings for any particular site could be improved through thoughtful and skillful SEO campaigns.

Paid Search Marketing (or Paid Search Optimization, if you prefer) is responsible for the placement and optimization of paid results. Paid results could be displayed not only on SERPs (search engine results pages), but also on any other site that agrees to be a part of search network and displays relevant advertisement.

To make this concept a bit clearer, let’s look at Google, since it’s a world-dominating search engine. Google offers Google Adwords program for advertisers and Google AdChoice program for publishers (formerly known as Google AdSense).

Any website’s owner who enrolls in AdChoice program, agrees to display advertisement on his/her site for a share of advertisement revenue, so it becomes a part of search-affiliated network.

Through Google Adwords, advertiser may choose to display ads on Google SERPs only, both on Google SERPs and on Google –affiliated search network or on all Google properties.

Aside from search engine and search network, other worth-mentioning Google properties include Google places, Gmail, Google mobile network and Google social networks. So the task for paid search marketing expert is to figure out how to use company’s budget to get higher conversions and ultimately higher ROI by optimizing ads and landing pages and testing ad placement on all those properties.

Of course, the train doesn’t stop there. Both Bing and Yahoo have similar programs that could be used to extend company’s exposure through paid advertisement even further. As you can see, SEM consists of SEO and Paid Search Marketing. Yet in real world Paid Search Marketing is often confused with SEM. So when people say that they “do both SEO and SEM” what they really mean is that they “implement both SEO and Paid Search Marketing strategies”.

It’s OK to say that you’re SEO/SEM expert (essentially meaning that you’re an expert in both organic and paid search marketing). But it’s not OK to say that you’re providing both SEO and SEM services, since if you’re providing SEM services, you provide SEO services by default.

Hope this post helped you to clarify the confusion between SEO and SEM.

As always we are looking forward to read your comments and suggestions.

Tagged as: Abbreviation, adchoice, adsense, adwords, Affiliated Networks, Algorithms, Email Marketing, Expert In Online Marketing, Google, Marketing Affiliate Marketing, Marketing Email, Media Marketing, Nonsense, Online Email, paid search marketing, paid search optimization, Phrases, Placement Optimization, search engine marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Result, Search Engines, Search Optimization, Sem, seo, Seo Campaigns, Serps, Subject Matter, Traffic Generation Methods, Variation

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Interactive life-time communications are the corner stones of every social media strategy. To effectively use social media for your business, you should:

1. Filter all the noise generated in social networks and other media sources
2. Identify and sort relevant communications
3. Engage in conversations, build trust, and enhance positive image
4. Use call to action to generate conversions

There is a plethora of social media monitoring tools for every taste and flavor. They can be used to listen to social conversations and to identify important social reactions that require immediate response. Such tools vary in price and target market. They range from free tools suitable for small businesses to very expensive paid monitoring tools developed for Fortune 500 companies.

Commercial monitoring tools provide the mechanisms for advanced data analysis, help to identify influencers for your market and allow to design an integrated approach assigning tasks to different departments based on the nature of the initial social reactions.

For example, financial questions should be assigned to your financial department, user complaints and other issues to a support department, user feedback, product suggestions and reviews should be sent to a product development or marketing department, etc.

If you decide to go paid route there are over 200 monitoring tools to choose from. For starters, take a look at Radian6, Scout Labs, Trackur, Alterian,Vocus, and Sysomos.

All these tools differ based on price, quantity and quality of monitored sources, sentiment analysis, data crunching capabilities, and identification of important players in your market (also known as influencers).

Yet they all have one thing in common – they monitor important real time conversations and allow you to respond immediately thus engaging your social contacts. This way any issue or question can be addressed quickly which leads to increased customer satisfaction, product sales, improved company image, etc.

One or a few responses could be enough to address initial questions. Yet it’s certainly not enough to convert your prospect into customer. So the next step in social media marketing is to initiate a prolonged and hopefully uninterrupted conversation with your prospects.

There are only a couple options on how to do it. You can either send your prospects directly to a sales page or you can convert them into leads.

Sending your prospects directly to a sales page is not a very effective move. Your conversions probably will be rather low, and you won’t have a chance to nurture the relationship with your potential customer. Much better way is to convert your prospects into lead by offering them interesting products, webinars, seminars and other valuable information as an ethical bribe.

While there are tons of tools to monitor social media conversations there are not so many choices in regards to working with your leads. In fact until recently there were only two options – a signup form tied in with your autoresponder and RSS feed subscription.

Sure, you can put this form on the blog or website or you can create a set of landing pages with interactive elements such as videos and audios or cartoon characters. You have numerous choices of autoresponders, but at the end of the day it’s still the same option – a prospect has to provide you with a name and email address (or at least with email) to make it work.

RSS feeds subscription is a little better option conversion-wise since no email is required. Yet it’s much less effective in terms of reaching your customer. You can’t reach your customer proactively, you have to hope that s/he will open his RSS reader and notice your newest conversation. Not so good for either marketing or building a close relationship with your lead.

I’m glad to inform you that a third option for lead generation has just been created. For now it’s only working for Facebook users but I’m sure soon there will be similar tools for other networks. Yet again considering that Faceboook now has around 700 million users you will have more than enough prospective customers to work with.

There is a little tool that integrates with Facebook connect and allows you to capture email address of a lead without asking for it. All people have to do is just click a “connect with Facebook” button to watch your video or get your digital gift. Since this marketing is done within Facebook and for Facebook users, they are already logged in, so the lead generation occurs behind the scene, and conversions are through the roof.

You can read more details about this tool here: Hidden Opt-in App for Facebook

As always you’re welcome to leave your comments and suggestions.
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Opening image from birgerking on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: Communications Interactive, Corner Stones, Customer Satisfaction, facebok, facebokk, facebook, Financial Questions, Fortune 500 Companies, influencers, Interactive Communications, Interactive Life, Marketing Communications, Marketing Department, Marketing Tools, Media Marketing, Media Strategy, Media Tools, Monitoring Tools, New Tools, Positive Image, Product Suggestions, Sentiment Analysis, Social Conversations, Social Marketing, Social Media, Target Market, Time Communications, Time Conversations, Vocus

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Google just rolled out a new update for its pagerank parameter (on June 27 2011).

If you don’t know what Google PageRank is, it’s one of the parameters used by Google in their search engine ranking algorithm.

GooglePageRank parameter is dedicated to the calculation of different factors related to the authority of your site. In basic terms, it estimates the quantity, quality and relevance of incoming links for your webpages. The higher the PageRank the higher is a probability that the site has some quality backlinks.

The last Google PageRank update was in January 2011, so it’s been almost 6 months between updates. Until this year pagerank updates were pretty stable – usually you could see a new update every 3-4 months.

That pagerank update was related to the introduction of the new parameter in Google SERP placement algorithm known as Google Panda. January Google Panda update hit hard content farms, and it also affected many established article directories.

So if your site had a lot of backlinks from article directories, many of them lost value and as a result your PR probably went down during the January PageRank update.

I am not quite sure what was the target objective for the latest pagerank update but it seems several social networking sites had lost some of the PageRank. So may be Google is looking more closely now at Social SEO to decide what value to assign to the links distributed through social networks.

But this is only a speculation.

Funny thing is Google own PageRank went down from 10 to 9 which leads to the open question:
“How the most authoritative website in the world can lose a PageRank?”

Real Google PageRank

Important notice: when we’re talking about Google PR updates we actually are talking about Google Toolbar PageRank Update, and not about real-time PR updates.

According to Matt Cutts, Google actually updates its PR almost daily, so there is a difference between a visible PR that shows up in a toolbar and a real PR value that might change often and is known only to Google.

In reality the value you see on the toolbar and the value Google actually assigns to your pages might be quite different (or it could change rather quickly).

Real and Perceived Value of Google PageRank

Should you care about PageRank? Yes, but no more then you should care about your “Panda Rank”, for example.

PageRank is only one of hundreds parameters used by Google to define your ranking in SERPs. It’s not by any means the most important metric to define your rankings in search results.

Yet webmasters became so obsessed with PageRank that Google removed it from its Webmaster Tools at the end of 2009 just to prove that it’s not the most important factor in calculating SERP placement.

There are many sites with low PR that outrank their high-PR competitors.

And the only reason when you should really care about your PageRank is when you decide to sell links from your site. But in this case Google will catch you sooner or later and since it discourages paid links your site PR can go to 0.

Here is another interesting article on the topic: Does Google PageRank Still Matter?
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Opening image from on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.

Tagged as: 4 Months, Authoritative Website, Funny Thing, Google, Google Pagerank, google pagerank update, google PR, Google Search, Google Toolbar, Important Notice, June 27, Matt Cutts, Open Question, pagerank update june 2011, Panda, Placement Algorithm, Probability, Relevance, seo, Social Networking Sites, Social Networks, Speculation, Target Objective

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Social media strategies used by social media marketers can be divided on categories based on several criteria.

They could be categorized by:

• social network (many strategies could only be applied to one or several particular social networks, and they won’t work at other networks.)
• timeline (some strategies could be implemented quickly, and they produce results fast, other strategies require more time and resources)
• permanency (whether this is a one-time fix to generate more traffic and exposure or this strategy delivers long-lasting solution)
• complexity (is it a one-time step which could be repeated again and again or is it a multi-step approach?)

Today let’s take a closer look at specifics of multi-step social strategies. Such social media strategies concentrate on development of multi-step relation-building channels to increase conversions and ROI.

There are several components that should be properly implemented to ensure the success of a multi-step social strategy. Some of them are more important than others. But there is one component that is absolutely crucial for a success of multi-step social media strategy.

It’s the creation of highly converting landing pages. In practice landing pages are effective only if you implemented efficient built-in tracking and testing modules. And for these purposes it’s very helpful to have your own website or blog.

Social Media Strategies and Landing Pages

Of course one can argue that many social networks (though not all) give you tools to build your own landing pages, so you don’t really need your own blog.

First of all, not all social networks give you the opportunity to create landing pages.

Second, some of the networks that give you such opportunity, in reality only provide a section to insert built-in subscription form for your newsletter. And there is a big difference between a full-blown landing page and a simple signup form.

If landing page is built correctly, signup form is seamlessly integrated as part of the whole user experience. Visitor is provided with relevant information, which is often enhanced with rich media – audio or video, and sign up form serves as a logic conclusion for the landing page, not as an abrupt piece of somewhat relevant call to action. Landing pages which enhance user experience lead to much higher sign up rate and increased conversions.

Third, even if a social network allows you to build full landing pages, you have limited tracking options to analyze user behavior on such pages. And your ability to split-test different versions of a landing page on a social network to improve different conversions factors is slim to none.

Social Media Strategies: Do You Need Your Own Blog?

Your blog can help you to easily track your visitors and monitor various stages of conversions. You can implement very granular testing and tracking solutions tracking every activity on your blog. You can even see what part of the page has the most number of eyeballs, which links were clicked the most, and many other interesting parameters. This kind of detailed analysis is simply not possible if you decide to build your presence on one of the social networks instead of creating your own blog.

(If you don’t know how to build a website or create a blog, we can do it for you. The price is affordable for any business, so now there is literally no excuse for you not to have your own online presence.)

Social Media Strategies and Email Conversions

Let’s get back to signup forms and conversions. Aside from analyzing your visitors and signup rates, you also would want to know the open rate of your emails, have ability to test various professionally designed signup forms to see which one produces better results, split test different versions of emails you send to your newsletter subscribers to increase the ROI of your campaigns, and do many other things. It’s not as difficult as you think. Watch this video to see how you can do it yourself.

Automate Your Email Marketing with AWeber

Social Media Strategies: Social Network or Your Own Site?

There is one more argument against building your entire presence on any particular social network. If you’re relying on any third-party social network as your place of online business, you’re putting too many eggs in one basket.

You never know when a social network will change its rules and decide to take away your fan page or shut down your social account. Facebook, for example, is notorious in taking away “community pages” from people and organizations which put a lot of sweat and labor to make them popular.

Sure, Facebook claims that the outcome would be different if they would use a business-specific name instead of a general name for a page. But the thing is, it’s just one of their policies. Social media policies can change in a heartbeat, and if you’re an average user, you don’t have any say in this.

Conclusion: Social media sites are a good addition to your social media strategy but they never should be a key stone of your online presence. (Read Social Networking and Blogging for more details).

Tagged as: aweber, Blog, blogging and social networks, Closer Look, Complexity, Conversions, Generate Traffic, landing pages, Marketers, Media Strategies, Media Strategy, Newsletter, Opportunity, Own Website, Roi, social conversions, social landing pages, social media strategies, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Strategies, Social Strategy, Specifics, Step Approach, Subscription Form, Time Step, Timeline

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