Well, there’s definitely no shortage of Web Marketing-related articles floating around the net. In getting ready for this month’s carnival, we had a heck of a time just narrowing down our options! There were a ton of great marketing posts and a fair amount of game-changing news articles to choose from, but we think we’ve captured a well rounded bunch. So check ‘em out!

The 17 Commandments of Setting Expectations in SEO

In SEO, we frequently come up against people whose expectations are WAY out of line, but handling those misguided expectations can be a challenge. That’s why Wil Reynolds of the Seer Interactive blog decided to poll the experts on how they do it, which led to the creation of this awesome post and PDF.

Official: Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results

Earlier this month, Google launched a significant change to the way they display search results from a single site. Previously, only two results from a single domain would appear on a single search result page. Now, Google is allowing more results for a single domain if the query indicates a “strong user interest in a particular domain.” Google hopes that these improvements, “will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.” A lot of people are skeptical though, claiming this new algorithm creates an even large brand bias – what do you think? Has Google turned to the dark side?

The Predictive Power of Social Media

An interesting post from Dan Woods, of Forbes.com, discusses how cluster analysis of social media content can help us find the “unknown unknowns,” i.e., questions we wouldn’t think to ask.

Visualize this type of analysis as a display of circles that get larger and brighter red as the relationships get stronger and as the cluster is found in more and more documents. The circle gets bigger as the strength of the relationships grow; a brighter shade of red indicates the amount of documents involved. [...] The predictive payoff comes from seeing when the circles start to get bigger and redder faster and begin to provide clues to future trends.

Niche Analysis: Where to Start?

SEO campaigns typically begin with some sort of website analysis or audit, but depending on the nature of the site, it could be harder to get answers than you think. Dmitry Gushchin, guest blogger for the Daily SEO Tip blog, suggests a few nifty tools and techniques for analyzing these niche websites.

New SEOmoz Web App Now in Beta for PRO Members

If you’re not already an SEOmoz Pro subscriber, we highly recommend it as a great resource for some very powerful SEO tools and uber-informative pro-webinars. As if those features weren’t enough – they just launched the Beta version of their SEOmoz Web App, an automatic data tracking and recommendation tool with multiple campaign tracking abilities. We set up a few of our campaigns and have already discovered some great areas for improvement. Check out the post for a complete overview of how the app works.

Buzz Kill

TWiT‘s Leo Laporte recently had a falling out with the “vast echo chamber” that we call Social Media after he discovered that none of his Google Buzz posts from the last month had been seen by anyone – not even by himself. “No one noticed,” he said, continuing with:

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

While Leo’s given up on social media, we’re pretty sure that it’s here to stay, and that there is now and always has been significant value in keeping a presence. So what do you think? Is social media worth it??

Next Month’s Issue: Ruby On Rails

Thanks to all of you who submitted posts this month! We appreciate hearing from you and hope you’ll tune in next time as well. Our next carnival will focus on our favorite web framework: Ruby On Rails! Ruby On Rails is a powerful open-source framework, “optimized for programmer happiness” – and we sure do love it! If you’d like to submit a post for next month’s Rails carnival, please send it to media@metaspring.com.

Our first MetaSpring blog post in February of 2008 promised that our blog would act as a hub for communications between our company and the rest of the world. Since then, we’ve tried to stayed true to that commitment while also implementing some changes improve this communication.

The majority of these improvements have been pretty abstract, in terms of how we approach blog posts and what content is discussed. Well, we’ve recently launched a physical evolution of the blog in order to help our readers find the information that’s most relevant to them.

Our Creative Director, Ian Wilson, who oversaw most of the changes, explains:

We do a lot of different things for our clients and we like to share our knowledge and experiences in those fields with our readers through the blog. As our readership grew and we began to dedicate more energy to keeping the blog up to date, we quickly realized that breaking our blog out into more discrete categories would help our readers to more easily get to the content they want. On top of that we were also itching to update the design of our blog, so with that in mind we put together the three sections to focus on their specific topics and give our readers a little more eye candy.”

As Ian mentioned, the MetaSpring blog will now be broken up into four distinct categories, each with its own RSS feed (we’ll still have the cumulative feed available on the blog home page – so make sure to update your subscriptions):

• 

  Design

  The design process involves a lot of hard work and dedication in a constantly evolving industry. In this section, we’ll share advice on overcoming obstacles and keeping up with trends in the design world.

• 

  Development

  New trends in web and application development are constantly popping up, so in this section, you’ll find posts on new trends and technologies, code snippets, industry news, and a lot of Ruby-related goodness.

• 

  SEO & Marketing

  We are constantly exploring the marketing aspects of the web, and this is the home of our ruminations. Posts in this section will illustrate ways to capitalize on new methods to market your website or yourself on the web.

• 

  Company

  Are you a MetaFan? One of the best parts of a company blog are the conversations that spark up between the public and the organization. This portion of our blog will highlight some of the great things happening at MetaSpring, such as new job postings and site launches.

This new layout is designed to facilitate better discussion so if you are having any difficulties, please let us know. As we continue to adjust the style of the blog, you can look forward to the same high quality content. We’re happy that you’re here and look forward to many great conversations. Talk to you soon!

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!