1. 10 Mistakes Every Startup Should Avoid When Optimizing for Search Engines – Search Engine Journal
It’s no secret that a company’s online presence can help and maybe hurt their business, and this is especially true for start ups that are turning to the Internet to get the word out about their services or products. This list (while in no way exhaustive) is a great collection of some of the biggest mistakes that rookies make. Some of the mistakes listed include poor/no user interface and user experience, pages that take forever to load, funky site architecture, meaningless URL naming conventions, and skimping on content marketing and blogs. Of course, there’s also the ever-present “Don’t Ignore Social Media.”
2. Social Signals Are So Last Week – Use Infographics to Drive Real Leads – Search Engine Land
Will Scott, our very own CEO of SEO, has a post on Search Engine Land this week all about how infographics can affect your rankings, traffic, and leads. The piece details how one Search Influence client has benefited from the creation of infographics specifically designed with leads in mind. There’s also some fun stuff in there about the history or representing information visually.
3. Scalable content generation strategy: The online marketer’s formula for success – SuccessWorks
In this post SEO-focused copywriting agency SuccessWorks gives quite a few tips for planning and implementing a content strategy. The first point of planning, and what I think is the most important step of writing anything, is to keep the audience in mind — identify and then analyze who they are, how they get to your site, and what they do with the content. Once you know what your audience is looking for, audit your site and take inventory periodically to make sure that everything is fresh, applicable to your audience, and unique.
4. Be An Account Manager Super Hero! 64 Enduring Lessons for Success, Part 1 – aimClear
While this isn’t the whole list of 64 tips (it’s only 19, but the rest of the list will presumably be posted on the aimClear blog at some point in the future), the information given here is valuable to those just starting out or who have been doing it for a while. And the list is helpful for anyone managing any sort of account, from SEO to paper.
Some of the items are very basic and are actually life lessons: keep your promises, be a thoughtful listener, be confident. Some of these are enlightening more specifically to business, like don’t expose yourself to legal risks and don’t let your client find something out from another source.
5. 7 Lessons From 7 Years of Blogging – Small Business Search Marketing
Another list! Can’t you tell we love ’em here? And blogs, too! This one is a great reflection on lessons learned from blogging since 2006. The first is my favorite: Blogging is hard. With so many marketers and other blogs telling business owners how awesome blogs can be and a great one can really drive traffic, lots of people want to get into blogging for their companies. It can seem to some people that a blog is easy to throw together and doesn’t take long. This is absolutely not the case, and as the author reminds us, it’s completely ok to say that you aren’t ready for the type of commitment and work that comes with maintaining a quality blog with posts going up on a regular basis.
