With Bruce presenting SEOToolSet Training this week, Susan, Virginia and Bradley host a show focused on speed on the Web. From Google’s recent push for site speed to the speed and dexterity required of communicating on the real-time, social Web, speed is becoming an increasingly important factor for Internet marketers and businesses online. Read Internet marketer Eric Enge post Will Google make page speed a ranking factor? for an overview of the many areas where Google has been promoting the need for speed, including the tools the search engine has provided to webmasters to help make Web sites faster.


Tamar Weinberg, a writer and consultant specializing in social media marketing, then talks to Virginia about her book The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. Tamar’s lauded book guides readers to develop a social media marketing strategy and then details the specific tools and platforms. She explains that the etiquette of social media marketing is just like social etiquette offline, and she also talks about the role of content and customer service within social media marketing. Her final recommendation is that businesses enter the social media space as soon as possible, though the effort can be gradual and cautious if bureaucracy and red tape stand in the way.

Susan and Bradley join Virginia in exploring the contents of The New Community Rules, focusing in on the appendix The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook. Originally published by Tamar on her blog, Techipedia.com, the popular post was included in her book because it accurately and succinctly stands as a social media marketer’s rule book for marketing through social media platforms. Community rules for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, social news sites, FriendFeed, YouTube, StumbleUpon, blogs and blog comments are all included in this definitive guide.

SMX Advanced last week introduced a number of discussions in the SEM industry. Matt Cutts’s comments about PageRank sculpting with nofollow could spur a show all its own, and is touched on briefly by Bruce, Susan and Virginia. Google’s JavaScript recommendations, attendance at the conference, and topics raised during the SEO Vets Take All Comers session, of which Bruce was a panelist, are also discussed. Of course, SMX Advanced centers around several inbound marketing techniques, including search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, and social media optimization. Inbound marketing is the focus of today’s show.

In his role as founder and vice president of product development at WordStream, Larry Kim plays a vital role in his company’s inbound marketing efforts. Inbound marketing involves getting potential customers to come to your business. In contrast, traditional or outbound marketing is all about getting a marketing message in front of a potential consumer. Another common way to think of the two marketing methods is push and pull marketing, where push marketing is more traditional and pull marketing is aligned with inbound marketing. Larry, is cautious of falling into the trap of espousing theoretical virtues of inbound marketing. Instead he offers pragmatic suggestions for improving inbound marketing efforts.

Susan, Michael and Virginia finish off with a look at the psychology of inbound marketing. There’s a very different scenario that happens when a customer comes to a business because they want to and when a business reaches out to a customer when that contact is unexpected. The proactive customer who is looking for a solution is in a mindset much better suited to performing a conversion. As outbound marketing becomes easier to block through technology like spam filters and DVRs, inbound marketing may prove a more reliable strategy in the future.

Bruce, Susan and Virginia start off the show by taking a look at a recent FCC ruling to open the unused frequencies between television channels for use as a national broadband network. The fight to open the unused frequencies, known as “white space”, was championed by companies including Microsoft, Dell, Motorola and Google. The ability to extend broadband penetration to under-served areas of the company could help bring U.S. Internet users up to speed. In 2007, the U.S. was ranked fifth in the world as far as high speed Internet access.

Jon Kelly, president of SureHits, then talks to Virginia about managing PPC bids and the challenges faced by large companies. SureHits manages ad accounts within publisher networks as well as on search engines. He shares a number of recommendations, including those from his PubCon 2008 panel Large Scale Bid Management. He says that keyword buckets are not a good method of management because they don’t allow for the necessary level of granularity. He also talks about the three actions that should be part of any PPC campaign: calculate the click value, reward the user’s choice, and watch the campaign data.

Wrapping up the show, Michael joins Susan and Virginia to review industry news. The big news of the week was that Jerry Yang stepped down from the position of Yahoo CEO and will be returning to the position of chief Yahoo. Baidu was in the spotlight for including unlicensed pharmaceutical companies in results and possibly accepting money in return for boosted rankings. And in a popular move Gmail rolled out themes.

Bruce, Susan and Virginia start off the show with a look at the search industry news. Google recently readdressed their paid search agreement with Yahoo, claiming that the deal will not harm competition, that ad prices will not rise, and that the two search companies will not have access to the other’s user data. Yahoo is in the midst of testing a makeover to Yahoo.com and has added a music feature to search results pages. Finally, Live Search has begun integrating Powerset into search results through Freebase Answers, enhanced Wikipedia captions and improved related search suggestions.

Virginia then speaks with Martin Bowling, CTO of Vec3, about integrated marketing strategies and the strength of social media. Martin will be speaking on the Protect Your Rep panel at the Scary SEO mini-con this month, and will award the winner of a contest a free two-night stay and registration for the conference. Martin shares some of the reputation management tips he will be making on the panel, as well as his findings on Google Suggest and how the feature could be harmful to online reputations.

Following up on some of Martin’s social media recommendations, Susan, Michael and Virginia talk about some of the social media don’ts. Don’t ignore or avoid social media. Don’t keep a bare profile or fake involvement. Don’t try to control the conversation. And don’t be pushy in promoting your product or services. In social media, the key to success requires being transparent, up-front and honest about your intentions.

Many of the hosts of SEM Synergy are attending SES San Jose. Live from the expo room floor, Virginia interviews three of the presenters.

Chris Winfield, President of 10e20, sits down first to talk about his presentation on Igniting Viral Marketing Campaigns. He explains what viral markeing is and the main places conversations are taking place online. He gives some ideas of good content and his tips for someone trying to start a viral marketing campaign.

Then, Cindy Krum, Director of New Media Strategies at Blue Moon Works, stops by the WebmasterRadio booth to talk about her session. Presenting on panel Death of the ‘.mobi’, Cindy explains why marketers should be interested in mobile. She talks about how mobile rankings differ, even among different mobile devices. And then she touches on the different site architecture solutions for addressing mobile search.

Wrapping up the show, Dave Snyder, Search Specialist at JRDunn.com and co-founder of Search & Social, talks about his session Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization. He explains what it is that companies can get out of SMO and where people should focus their visibility efforts. He then shares what he’s looking forward to in the search mini-con he’s organizing in October, Scary SEO.

Unfortunately, due to technical issues, this program is no longer available.

The hosts of SEM Synergy report live from SMX Advanced in Seattle, WA. Bruce Clay, Inc. sent a group to the conference and exhibition, including blogger-extraordinaire Lisa Barone, new writer and radio show coordinator Virginia Nussey, senior account analyst Gary Luke, the director of the new East Coast office Chris Hart, and of course, Bruce Clay.

The SEO and blogger known as Graywolf, Michael Gray, took a few minutes out of his schedule Tuesday for an interview. Michael was a speaker on two panels at the conference: Bot Herding and Give It Up. On the show he shares his perspective on how NOT to implement social media campaigns and the common mistakes he sees in the field.

Then Virginia sat down with Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect for Microsoft, about how he oversees the thousands of Microsoft sites. He explains how his team manages best practices, selects tools, creates reporting guidelines, and maintains quality standards for Microsoft.com sites.

The end of April saw the latest SMX show, SMX Social Media Marketing Expo in Long Beach, CA. Our Bruce Clay blogger-extraordinaire Lisa Barone caught a bunch of the action and posted it to the Bruce Clay blog. Social media is fast on the rise, representing a big part of users’ time online.

According to Morgan Stanley’s recently released report on Internet trends, social sites have reached a 16 percent share of global online time. This is even more remarkable considering the category wasn’t even included in the report three years ago. With the recently-exploding prevalence of social sites, marketers need to get up to speed on the power of social media sites and the ways in which they can be used for marketing goals. SMX Social Media was full of sessions to help marketers utilize the opportunities presented by social media sites, and Bruce, Susan and Robert discuss some of those valuable lessons.

Also on the show is Adam Audette of AudetteMedia and moderator of the Internet marketing discussion list, LED Digest. Adam and Robert talk about the value of email discussion lists, the relevance of email marketing, and common mistakes companies make in their email marketing campaigns.

At the end of the show our hosts delve into the obstacles of staying competitive and relevant in the rapidly-evolving online environment. With the intense level of competition and the up-to-the-minute potential of updated content, the Internet provides unique challenges for marketers trying to stay on the cutting edge. Bruce, Robert and Susan talk about how often company and client material is updated and what avenues can be used in order to remain visible to your audience.