Designing a powerful, holistic and comprehensive online marketing strategy requires much more than just search engine marketing (SEM). SEM is powerful, yet the moment the ad campaigns are turned off, most of the traffic ceases. In order to get the real rewards of being online, one must engage and relate to the Internet the way the Internet prefers.
Being top in organic search is the holy grail of online brand promotion and protection; being top in organic search means both following some simple rules and best practices as well as engaging in blogger and online community outreach.
Below, I list some of the most important, yet often overlooked, facets of an search engine optimization (SEO) campaign
Domain Name Strategy
- Register domains for multiple years
- Private registration of domain names
- Register all domain extentions (net, com, us, org, etc)
- Register many variations of the domain
- Register misspellings and mistakes
- Domain Forwarding and Masking
- Register domains that counter brand
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy
- Site architecture is partly for Google
- Google Sitemap and other helpful tools
- Don’t take site structure change lightly
- Google’s “eyes” focus on where your eyes do
- Optimize CSS for Google and the search engines
- Site menus, tags and categories, titles, descriptions
- Search engines favor RSS feed supported sites
- Protective SEO strategy
- Regular site submission to the search engines
Online Community Outreach Strategy
- Defining online influencers
- Social bookmarking sites
- Forums, newsgroups, social networks
- Prospecting and activating bloggers
- Blog Community Outreach
- The blogroll and reciprocal linking
- Ping Servers and Pinging
- Corporate Blogging
Step-by-Step Online Messaging
- Defining your mission
- Modeling your message
- Targeting your audience
- Follow up conversation
Online Intelligence
- Finding, tracking, and following conversation online
- Defining online universes and communities of practice
- Defining online influencers and online influence
- Metrics and reporting
Online Marketing and Brand Promotion
- Blogger relations (BR)
- Online Advocacy
- Blogger Outreach
- Brand Ambassadorship
Business and Corporate Blogs
- CEO blogs
- Customer voice blogs
- Crisis PR blogs
- Brand blogs
- Marketing blogs
- Publicity blogs
- PR blogs
Complimentary emergent technologies
- RSS and syndication
- Podcasting and Videoblogging
- Flash, film, and game “virals”
- MMORPGs and Second Life
- YouTube, Revver, Google Video
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I think this is perhaps the best list I have found regarding SEO. I think the way it has been laid out helps, but does show people the complexity of seo work needed to obtain a great link structure.
Have bookmarked and will come back again, thanks.