You’ve probably heard the old saying, “if you build it, they will come,” but as many web startups know – this is very often not the case. The vast and saturated state of the web just doesn’t allow for it – content either can’t be found or doesn’t rank high enough over the competition. So, web startups must turn to various forms of web marketing in order to get their brand out to the target audience. A savvy web marketer will combine concepts from a few different fields such as branding, search engine optimization, social media marketing and advertising to create a complete marketing package.

In this carnival, we’ve collected posts from around the web that reflect this concept in fresh and unique ways. Much thanks to all those who participated!

Crisis Planning: Prepare Your Company for Social Media Attacks

A lot of people spent some time this week monitoring the deforestation and sustainability debates taking place on Nestle’s Facebook fan page. Whether you participated or not, this situation has plenty of lessons to offer the web marketing community.

Jeremiah Owyang, notable Customer Strategy guru, pointed out that any web marketer must be ready for attacks on their brand through social media. By adding transparency to your brand (via Facebook & Twitter accounts), you’re inviting the consumer into your world, but don’t be surprised if a few critics show up too. As the post suggests: “Prepare for the worst, live for the best“, a task best accomplished with a documented community response strategy.

Seven Golden Link Building Strategies

Link building is no small part of web marketing. Getting your links in the right place and seen by the right people can help your site rank better for keyword searches, and can also drive valuable traffic to your site.

The folks over at Cemper.com posted a great guide to building links recently. And with the millions of “Best Link Building Guide Ever” posts out there, that’s saying something. Link building is hard work and even harder to get started. These 7 strategies help you do both. I find #3 (Compare Competitor’s Backlink) and #6 (Build Trust) the most important to follow. How about you?

How to Best Measure Social Media Marketing ROI

At this time last year, marketing managers were asking for, nay, demanding a way to measure their return on investment (ROI) for social media marketing. Well, ask and you shall receive. There are many tools online these days that can help you to measure the ROI of your social media presence. But it all depends on how you plan to turn Tweets to dollars, so to speak.

The Web Marketing Group of North Yorkshire, England, posted some interesting data recently – revealing that only 16% of those engaged in Social Media Marketing worldwide measure their ROI. The survey also points out that these marketers only measure the “vanity metrics” like traffic, page views and click through rates. Try taking it a step further to see if these metrics turned into sales.

Your Social Media Success Will Be Defined By What You Ignore

Social Media is a field of intense noise and clutter. As a web marketer, it’s very beneficial to implement a social media strategy into your campaigns, but your success will depend on how well you can organize the noise.

Our friends at Simply Zesty, an Online PR & Social Media firm, are at the forefront of web marketing, dealing with social media services every day. If there’s a new strategy or web tool out there, they’ve heard about it – but that doesn’t mean they hop on the early adopter bandwagon. Author Niall Harbison proves why it’s important to say no to the latest social media fads in favor of paying attention to the audience you’ve spent hours and hours building on Facebook , Youtube, or Twitter, etc.

Notes from a Newbie: From PR to SEO

SEOmoz posts great web marketing content to their blog daily, but some of the most fascinating posts come from their YOUmoz blog. YOUmoz is a creative way of adding user generated content to SEOmoz that facilitates discussion and allows for users to promote themselves.

A recent post from Tom Mcloughlin chronicles a very important lesson learned as he transitioned from the traditional Public Relations world into the realm of Search Engine Optimization. He expected a harsh learning curve and tons of nerdy data crunching, but what he got was a field that wasn’t all that far off from his roots in PR. The fundamentals of SEO aren’t that different from PR, again reminding us that web marketing has many elements that blur together the traditional fields of advertising, branding and marketing.

Are You Sending Your Clicks to the Right Place?

Another important part of web marketing, and one we’ve dealt with in the past at MetaSpring, is Affiliate Marketing. Many of our projects involve a focus on Ecommerce, so we understand the importance of presenting the consumer with a call to action that works.

As this post by Ion Interactive clearly points out, there are two important questions you should answer in any pay-per-click campaign: “Where should I send the clicks, and are the clicks ‘ready to buy?’” In order to help you sift through the various options, Ion Interactive presents five places you should consider sending these clicks right off the bat.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Design

Thanks again for joining us and reading the great posts from this month’s Carnival. A special thanks to all those that put the posts together. We enjoyed connecting with you and discussing some of the Web Marketing trends out there today.

For next month’s Carnival, we’re going to revisit the our first topic: Web Design! Designers are always coming up with new and interesting ideas, so we’re sure to have some great posts. If you have a Web Design post or a suggestion for a topic that you’d like to see discussed, make sure to let us know at media@metaspring.com.

West Hall (“SI West”) on the U-M
Central Campus in Ann Arbor

“Dive in and stay local.”

That was the unanimous message from a panel of Ann Arbor’s digital marketers who gathered last Friday at the University of Michigan School of Information’s Career Development lecture. The lecture called, “A Day in the Life of an SEO and SEM Professional,” featured industry insights from Chad Wiebesick, Nate Lewalski and MetaSpring’s own marketing extraordinaire John Paul Narowski.

The lecture was part of a series of career development lectures put on by the U of M School of Information (UMSI), designed to help students stay up to date on trends and strategies being utilized in potential career paths. Search engine optimization (SEO) and Search engine marketing (SEM) are two of those trends that are rapidly expanding, with businesses of all sizes taking notice – especially the highly digital companies in Ann Arbor, MI.

Here are some of the concepts that each speaker covered:

Chad Wiebesick

Chad, President of the Ann Arbor Ad Club, nationally recognized author, and award-winning digital marketing strategist, had plenty to offer this group of future job applicants. Some of his key points included:

• SEO and SEM are growing, exciting fields to get into these days. About 60 billion dollars are spent in online advertising each year and that number is constantly increasing, so there is plenty of room to step into the market.
• Skills for those looking to get in this field or find success include analytical abilities, hard work and a desire to learn. Most SEO/SEMers learn on the job.
• Social media is now the 4th most popular internet activity, outranking email. This means that social media is the “go-to” way for communicating with peers. Email is becoming a very formal communications method.

Nate Lewalski

Nate is an Interactive Marketing Planner at Enlighten, an interactive marketing firm. Since graduating from Western Michigan University in 2006, he’s been immersed in the digital marketing field and so he wanted to discuss some of the trends happening (literally) right now. Here are some of his key points:

• Real-Time search is an up-and-coming space in marketing. Given the deals with Twitter, Bing and Google, advertisers, marketers and branding experts need to find ways to master this new concept and get results for clients.
• Digital media is extremely track-able and thus, an easy sell to clients.
• SEO/SEM is fun! Accounts are live and constantly being updated, so you can get results in real-time.

John Paul Narowski

JP began his discussion by recounting a few of his initial trials and tribulations as a young SEOer at Amish Tables in Ann Arbor. He followed this up with his thoughts on today’s trends and the lessons that he learns daily in his work at MetaSpring.

• The beauty of SEO is that you can learn from your results. By conducting optimization tests and beta trials, the internet can teach you how to gather clients and impact target audiences.
• SEO and SEM are only successful through “constant interaction”. SEO are SEM are processes that seemingly never ending…and that’s a good thing!
• Anyone looking to get into the emerging field of SEM/SEO should have a solid understanding of search engines and strategic thinking. As the industry grows though, these requirements will surely progress and mature.

An Informative Event

This career development lecture series was a great example of the proactive steps I begged the academic community to take in my Web 2.0 post a few weeks back. As an audience member at the lecture, I was impressed by the wealth of knowledge Nate, Chad and JP presented to the class and the size of the audience as well. About 25 students showed up ready to learn and discuss the growing field of SEO and SEM.

Special thanks to Joanna Kroll for assembling the panel. For more information on the University of Michigan School of Information and their Career Development series, visit their website at: www.si.umich.edu.

Additional Resources

• SearchMarketingNow
• OneUpWeb
• AdAge
• SEOMoz

One of the main debates in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) revolves around the type of tactics used to get results – this is the White-hat vs. Black-hat debate.

White-hatters tend to employ a more organic and genuine approach to link building, whereby links are generated through authentic, human relationships. Black-hat SEOers, however, often rely on bots and spammy tactics to derive inbound links and deceive search engine ranking algorithms.

On either side, most of the pros will tell you that one key factor in any good link building campaign is article marketing – the process (or art) of submitting original articles to online directories where they’ll reappear for others to syndicate and ultimately increase traffic back to your site.

With so much dialogue on the topic of article marketing and how it fits into the white-hat vs. black-hat debate, we’ve done our homework and have had the opportunity to put the concepts to work. We’ve learned what works best for us, and more importantly, what SEOers on either side should avoid. In this post, we’d like to share a few of those discoveries with you and let you in on part of our white-hat SEO process – getting your articles listed in directories to achieve maximum exposure.

The WHY of Article Marketing

Article marketing is ultimately a win-win for everyone involved – as the directories grow, they rank higher in search results and see increased traffic; authors gain credibility and see increased traffic, both through the directory and the syndicates who’ve picked up the article; and like authors, syndicates gain a bit of credibility and see increased traffic, too.

The key to all this increased traffic is backlinks. Most directories allow authors to nest links within their articles and since syndicates must copy submission as they are, those links show up on every site that syndicates the article. You get links, the directory gets good, free content, and syndicates get to attract readers to their site, too. Win-win.

The HOW of Article Marketing

Once you’ve got a good article ready for marketing, you must select the most appropriate bundle of sites to submit it to. As all directories cater to a different set of readers and have different review processes, you’ll need to submit your article to at least a few different directories in order to achieve maximum reach.

Additionally, article review time can vary between directories so by submitting to several directories at once, you can extend the exposure cycle of each article.

The WHAT of Article Marketing

Many directories allow authors to submit a few additional details along with their article, usually a summary and resource field. Summaries show up in search results and thus should allow users to make a quick assessment of your piece. Unsurprisingly, a tactfully written, keyword-rich summary will get you noticed more often than not.

Resource fields can really boost link-building exposure by providing authors with a space to enter contact or background information and share links to their website and other resources. This is a great way to gain a few deep-links to your client’s site. For maximum exposure, you should try to tailor these details to fit each directory that you submit to.

The WHERE of Article Marketing

Article directories exist in both all-purpose and niche formats, and can either be free or paid for services – so you’ll need to do a bit homework to figure out which directories are best for your needs. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just be covering a few of the more popular and free all-purpose forums.

EzineArticles

EzineArticles is a leader in article marketing, some of their strong points are:

High Standards – The Ezine editors take the submission process very seriously. They maintain a high editorial standard in their guidelines section, allowing only the best articles to make it through. I’ve actually had to re-submit some of my articles up to five times due to minor discrepancies that the editors caught. There is no room for black-hat marketing in this system.

Expert Status – To ensure that only the best articles get in, authors are limited to eight submissions until reviewers have approved four of their articles. The review process can take up to eight weeks, but once four articles have been accepted – you reach expert status which allows for vastly more submissions. Expert status also gets your articles displayed on the EzineArticles “High Traffic” page – a great bonus for your client and a boost to link-building.

DoFollow Links – When someone republishes your article through EzineArticles, any links that you’ve included in the article are made into “DoFollow” links to help boost your search engine rankings.

Analytics – EzineArticles helps you track where and when your article gets syndicated with a very easy and helpful monitoring processes.

GoArticles

GoArticles is one of the directories that I couldn’t quite figure out. Here’s what I mean:

Maybe I’m just missing something, but if you’ve had any experience with GoArticles – please feel free to share your thoughts and tips in the comments!

ArticleBase

ArticleBase is my personal favorite. When I’m assigned an article to market, I save ArticleBase for last, like a dessert.

Fast, Quality Review – ArticleBase reviews and publishes articles at an amazing rate, while still maintaining high standards. While many of the free submission sites take up to eight weeks to review your article for editorial standards, ArticleBase’s review cycle is usually less than 24 hours.

HTML – ArticleBase outdoes GoArticles in this regard, allowing for much higher level HTML customization. ArticleBase allows three links in the body of the article and another three in the author section. Not many sites are this flexible.

Reach & Audience – As ArticleBase’s FAQ section is proud to announce, their site is growing rapidly. Although I submit articles to many directories, many of the ones that have been syndicated began at ArticleBase. As an added SEO bonus, content from the ArticleBase directory tends to rank pretty well in Google searches.

Analytics – Not many clients would allow you to work through the tedious and lengthy article marketing process without some sort of return on their investment. ArticleBase has great tracking metrics that help determine exposure and linkbuilding success for your client.

Preferences – Many site preferences can be saved, such as bios for each of the authors you set up. These saved preferences mean you spend less time on the busy work and more time optimizing your article.

A Few More Directory Sites We Like

• ArticleDashboard
• ArticleBiz
• ArticleCity

Additional Tips & Tricks

With all that said, we by no means know everything about article marketing, but we strive to keep up to date on the latest helpful hints – we’ve even set up a Google Alert keep us in the loop!

If you’ve got any experience in article marketing, we invite you to share any tips or tricks might have in the comment!

Many new websites hope to become the next Twitter or Google, but few have actually invested the time and research in coming up with the perfect domain name to guide them towards that level of success. To a person with little internet experience, ‘Twitter’ and ‘Google’ might sound like words a two year old made up, but in reality, they were deliberate and sound choices that have lead both domain names to become cultural phenomenons (and even verbs)!

The best domain names tend to combine a bit of search engine optimization, marketability, branding, linkability, authority, and distinction into one big mash-up. Each factor has its own advantages and disadvantages, so the trick is in finding the right balance for your purpose. Regardless of the purpose of your website though, it will be very difficult for users to find you without the right domain name. And while what exactly falls under “right” is up for debate, we can at least give you some tips to point you in the “right” direction – towards a domain name that doesn’t suck.

Branding Considerations

In many cases, the goal of starting a website is to create a digital space that serves as an extension of an existing brand. In other cases, a brand must be established for the first time through the website. In either situation, the success of the website begins with the choice of strong, representative domain name. Below are a few things to consider when selecting a domain to extend or define your brand.

1. Descriptiveness – Often, companies will try to get the exact name of their business for a domain name. If the .com domain is unavailable, they might consider ditching the .com and moving over to .net or .org, however this often leads to customer confusion (see #2 – Originality). In this case, you might take a creative approach by seeking out domains that reflect the identity of your site through a common industry phrase or illustrative wording. For example, www.ireallylikefood.com, allows for a relatively confusion-free way for a domain name to advertise the site and what they’re about.

2. Originality – Stand out from your competitors! Avoid choosing a name similar to your competitors. Search engines don’t like this and you may lose business when customers mistakenly go to the wrong address. This lack of diversity can be seen in the online flower industry where many businesses have been unable to uniquely brand their domain name, making it extremely hard for any one of them to stand out in the crowd.

3. Creativity – This is especially important for businesses known for their creativity, such as Google. Many aspire to follow in Google’s footsteps by inventing words (see Twitter or Flickr) that result in easily recognized brands. Of course the down side to creative names is that they might not immediately reveal the nature of the site.

SEO Considerations

Sometimes the selection of a domain name may be influenced by an SEO motives, in which case, the goal of the name would be to increase accessibility through search engines. The following factors are just a few things to consider when selecting a domain for SEO. And of course, a carefully crafted, SEO-minded domain name is only step one in the eternal quest for better search engine rankings, so don’t solely rely on a good name to get you to the top.

4. Distinction – Search engines crawl through the internet collecting details to help them provide their users with the most accurate results possible. When these crawlers reach your site, they consult your domain name for an initial overview of your site. A well crafted domain name can definitely help in your SEO strategy. For example, exclusively selling oranges on FruitCity.com is okay, but a name like OrangeCity.com is much better, as it includes the keyword “orange”, thereby reinforcing the target product anywhere it’s displayed.

5. The Hyphen Debate – Despite what you might have heard, domain names and hyphens can play nice. While not exactly user friendly, hyphens can help you rise to the top of search engine ranking pages (SERP), as the hypens help Google to extract the individual keywords in your domain name. For example, search engines will identify, and give you ranking points for, the keywords “baseball” and “gloves” in Baseball-Gloves.com, as opposed to the mash-up of BaseballGlove.com.

   If you are trying to maximize your website’s reach in the human market, hyphens might be a good thing to avoid. They confuse web users and are hard to refer back to. For example, compare the domains: oranges-for-sale.com and orangevendor.com. The same basic usability concerns apply to numbers – do you spell the number out or represent it numerically (Five vs. 5)?

6. Simplicity – When possible, try to keep your domain name under ten characters and the fewer words the better. Stick to easily spelled words and be cautious about using words in other languages, no matter how basic they are.

Acquiring Your Dream Domain

There are a number of online tools available to assist you in choosing and managing your domain name, a few include: DomainFellow, MakeWords, NameBoy, and DomainNameSoup.

Once you come up with the perfect domain name, you should immediately check its availability through a service like: GoDaddy, Network Solutions, DomainTools, or eNom. If your name is already taken, sites like these may be able to provide you with information on the owner of the site, offer similar alternatives, or help get you on a waiting list for later purchase.

These tips should help to get you started, but remember that you’re probably not going to succeed based on a good domain name alone. Content, SEO, customer support, solid functionality – they all play a part, and domain names can certainly be a critical factor.

Editor’s Note: Our guest blogger, Katherine Naszradi, is currently a senior at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, pursuing a career in marketing. She’s had extensive experience building social media campaigns and online brand identities through sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In her spare time she can be found traversing the Twittersphere as @krnasz, creating abstract works of art, and running with the bulls in Spain. Thanks Katherine, for a great post!

As the internet continues to grow, it gets harder and harder to efficiently find new and relevant information. Luckily for us, Google saw this coming and developed a tool to help keep us informed – Google Alerts, a monitoring system for Google search results that periodically emails you when new content appears.

Lately, I’d been hearing a lot of talk about the Alerts service, but couldn’t quite grasp how they worked or why they’d even be that useful to me. Now that I’ve had the chance to play around with them, I’d like to share a few of their more practical applications with you. This guide will explain how to set up and monitor your Google Alerts, as well as show you how to deliver specific and relevant information right to your inbox.

What are Google Alerts?

Straight from the Google Alerts home page:

In addition to the above uses, there are a number of other interesting applications for Google Alerts in the business world. Next, we’ll be discussing how to set up and manage your alerts. If you are already familiar alert management, I’d suggest skipping ahead to the Practical Implementations section.

What sources are monitored?

Google allows you to keep track of six different sources of information, each with its own criteria for sending alerts:

• News, Blogs and Video – The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 10 news, blog, or video results.
• Web – The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 20 web search results.
• Groups – The latest Google results matching your query that appear within the top 50 Google Group search results.
• Comprehensive – The latest results from Blog, Web & News for your query – condensed into a single email.

Creating and managing Alerts

Although it is possible to create Google Alerts without a free Google account, it’s advisable that you use one as it will allow you to more easily manage multiple alerts. For the sake of this guide, we’ll assume that you’ve got a Google account and are already logged in.

Creating an Alert

Creating a new Alert begins with navigating to the Google Alerts home page.

From there, you’ll be able to determine the topic you’d like to monitor and type of alerts that you’d like to receive.

A brief description of each of the options follows:

• Search terms – This field indicates what Google will search for. You may enter individual words or entire phrases, and can include any operators already available in advanced Google searches.

  A Few Examples

  • Detroit Lions – Standard Google Search for the term Detroit and the term Lions
  • “Detroit Lions” – Will search Google for the entire phrase “Detroit Lions”
  • site:www.detroitlions.com – Would tell you whenever Google indexes a new page on the Detroit Lions website
• Type – You can choose which Google sources to receive alerts from. These include the six options described above: News, Blog, Web, Video, Groups and Comprehensive.
• How often – Determines how frequently you’ll receive email alerts. Options include: as-it-happens, once a day, and once a week.
• Deliver to – If you are logged into your Google account, this field will be pre-populated with your email address. Otherwise, you can specify the email address of your choice.

Once you click the “Create Alert” button, you’re Alert will be saved and you’ll be taken to your Alerts dashboard where you can manage all of your active alerts.

Managing Your Alerts

Editing and deleting your alerts is dirt simple with the Google Alert dashboard. If you want to remove alerts, simply check the boxes next to the ones you want to remove and click the delete button at the bottom of the page.

If you want to edit an alert’s settings, just hit the edit button to the right of the corresponding alert.

Practical Implementations

So now that you know the basics of creating and managing Google Alerts, let’s look at some of the neat things you can do with them.

SEO Campaign Monitoring

Google Alerts can be used to track the progress of your link building campaigns and even track where competitors have been fishing for links.

Here are a few examples to consider:

• link:www.yourwebsite.com – Will show you new inbound links to your site that Google finds
• link:www.yourcompetitor.com – Will show you where your competitor is getting new inbound links
• site:www.yoursite.com – Will show you which new pages from your website are making it into Google’s index.

Let’s take a deeper look at what our results might look like in the first case – using link:www.metaspring.com, we can see a few of the most recent inbound links to our site that Google has picked up from some of the blogs we left comments on.

Brand / Reputation Monitoring

Alerts can also be useful for keeping an eye on your reputation. In the below example, I am looking for anything that shows up with my name in it. The alert below was sent out when when a press release of ours, in which I was mentioned, gained syndication on another site.

Seeking Out New Stories

Another handy use for Alerts is for finding new information to share in social media. For one of our clients, we maintain a Twitter account focusing on interior design and often use the results found in our Google Alerts to help us gather and share useful content.

Additional Resources

While Google Alerts shouldn’t be the only place you should go looking for new information, they certainly help to automate some of the time spent in research. We’ve outlined just a few of the ways that we use Google Alerts, but we’d love to know how you use them – feel free to share in the comments!

And if you’d like more information on Google Alerts, here are a few more good resources:

• Google Alerts Help
• Google Alerts: Get Email Updates On Specific Topics
• Using Google Alerts To Help Your Business
• 10 Uses of Google Alerts For A Freelancer
• How to Use Google Alerts to Monitor Your Company’s Online Presence