Four out of five dentists agree that most people would rather skip that cleaning and five out of five agree that people would most definitely rather skip a root canal. Unfortunately for me I had been doing both and the time had come to rectify the situation. Now I’m not a person to fear the dentist. But I’m also not one of those people who loves to tell people how much the enjoy going to the dentist. But at this stage in my life, when I needed the root canal, I was young, had no disposable income and zero dental insurance. That forced me to do something I never want to do again, bargain shop for my root canal.

Lucky for me I found a really cheap (I mean cheap) dentist near my apartment. Those that know Charlestown, MA in the early 90s will only need to hear one statement: I went to the dentist next to Johnny’s FoodMaster. Skipping all the gory details it was a train wreck of an experience that led me to have to get all the work redone a year later, when I had obtained the holy grail of dental insurance. Since that time I’ve been religious about my teeth and visiting the dentist, but the experience did make me dread those six-month trips.

Dentists have come a long way in how they treat their patients. Lobbies are now filled with video games for kids, light flows into large windows, free wi-fi is touted on signs and some places even allow you a personal television while sitting in that chair. None of these appealed to me (well the video games, but it was seemingly looked down upon for me to school those seven year olds in Mario Kart). They all seemed to be more about throwing a technology at a problem that was more psychosomatic than environmental.

Last week I had my six-month cleaning with a new dentist. Our old dentist no longer accepted our insurance, so we were moving the whole family over to this new practice. One bonus was that it was closer to our house, and they also had all the nice amenities that dentist offices are seemingly forced to provide by the ADA these days. But it was the first question I was asked when I sat down in the chair that morning that changed my dental experience forever:

“What is your favorite band?”

Those that know me understand this is a difficult question for me to answer. Like many of you it is really hard for me to classify one band as my “favorite”. Ask me who my favorite artist is and I can answer that immediately (the clue is in the name of this blog), but a band, well that has so much to do with your exact state of mind. And my state of mind at the time was a mix of melancholy, scattered thoughts and a twist of nostalgia for home. It only made since for me to reply:

“This morning, I’d say it’s Wilco.”

It was the next response that inspired this post and should inspire your business. It is simple. It is personal. And it changed my experience at the dentist forever:

“I just build a Pandora station for you, let’s listen while we get started getting those teeth cleaned.”

Brilliant. I spent the remaining forty minutes focused on what song/band would pop up next and sporadic conversations with the dentist about music. We even entered  into a bit of “name that tune” against one another, where she got Modest Mouse’s “Missed the Boat” in about three notes. When it was over I was nearly reluctant to get up, but I certainly did not pause when scheduling my next six-month appointment. I wonder who my favorite band will be that morning.

Spending the past week at MarketingProfs B2B Forum it was evident that the transformation is already happening, albeit slowly. This show focused on marketing best practices with a sprinkling of social media and left behind the short-lived legacy of social media focused shows. The latter had promoted personality and ego, which is not sustainable. The former is all about substance and education, which brings people back for more. During MarketingProfs I sat in six sessions and in all but one of them social media was an after thought or simply a part of a larger process. Even during the Boston Social Media Breakfast there was much more focus on practical communication and marketing methods than talk of “using Twitter for lead generation”.

This shift makes obvious sense and it will take a few more years for social media to exit the hype cycle, but doesn’t is seem like we’ve been here before? Remember eMarketing? Email marketing? Direct marketing? Eventually they move from being a short-lived yet enthusiastic fad and into a function of a greater practice. In this instance, marketing.  Social media, although extraordinarily useful outside of marketing, has now rightfully started to move from fad into fade.

Thou Protest Too Much

Now don’t fret, this is a really great sign for those of us who believe that social media is a good marketing technique (hand raised emphatically). During the MarketingProfs conference I listened to people give me terrific pointers on better trade show marketing, building communities online and offline, creating brand advocacy and building better content. Not once did I have to suffer through another “social media case study” or a set of slides pontificating the “confusion prism“. We have begun the move towards making social media a more respected function of business, rather than a set of caricatures trying a little too hard to defend the practice.

Te people I talked with during the panels, in the hallway and at the functions had also been making the shift — or perhaps they had never bought into the fad. They provided me with amazing ideas and refreshed my thinking, but also surprised me with their titles. Hardly anyone introduced themselves as a social media consultant, expert, guru or some other nonsense. Instead I was talking with directors and vice presidents of marketing, heads of agencies and business development, small companies and large. Twice I even spoke with people who had removed social media from their titles during the past three months. They were searching for answers, not rhetoric. They were teaching, not preaching.

It’s about time.

Mark Amtower, the author, is a B2G marketing consultant and his resolution for 2010 was to be connected to at least one person, preferably three, at each of the top companies listed by Washington Technology by the end of March. Aggressive, most certainly. But Mark is a smart man obviously because he understands how to harness the interconnectedness of social media. Just head to the end of the article and presto, a hyperlink to Mark’s LinkedIn profile.

Nothing amazing at this point though, right? The magic actually didn’t happen until I connected with Mark on LinkedIn, that is when the addition of resourceful content, as usual, made it’s mark.

Within minutes of connecting with Mark there was a personalized response to me in my inbox. How do I know it was personal and not a really great form response? Pam had connected with Mark about an hour before and the emails were completely different. Nice touch. But here comes the move that I found to be brilliant; two invites to join groups that Mark had set up on LinkedIn, both extremely focused and full of resources.

Mark had gone from a random contact to a source of information in minutes and someone I was really looking forward to talking with and probably talking with about his services. Ultimately that was his goal through his resolution and he is making it happen by using some of the social media principles we have discussed here on the blog. But let’s rehash:

1. Be Accessible–Include links to where people can find you.
2. Integrate Social Media–Make sure you are integrating social into your byline articles, events, emails, etc.
3. Be Personable–There is a strong connection built quickly with personal communication.
4. Provide Resources, Not Promotions–Mark didn’t push me to a website that touted his skills, he introduced me to groups that can help me with my job.

Content is king and social media is the way to spread the word. Let’s all use Mark’s example as a social media best practice, whether for B2C, B2B or B2G.

Oh, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn too.

URL Shortening and SEO
Effective B2B SEO must be a passion and the way in which you dictate your URLs can go a long way in helping you optimize your key word. Check out what I can do when using BudURL:

Custom URL

In this case I’m minimizing a URL from the BreakingPoint blog and attaching our most important keyword to the short URL. Now whenever this URL is shared it will attach itself to our keyword and redirect to a page that has been optimized for that keyword. Although this is a win for SEO, it also helps you tell people more quickly where your short URL is going to take them if they click. This is becoming more important as we see malicious activity around short URLs. Use descriptive words to customize your URL in order to give you a SEO boost and help the people you are trying to reach.

Additionally in the realm of SEO and short URLs the choice to perform a 301 permanent redirect (versus the more typical 307 temporary redirect) can be very helpful. Again, BudURL:

301 redirects are better for SEO and actually Page Rank because search engines will assume that the destination URL will not be altered and they may actually cache the URL. On the negative side however it may also be cached by proxy servers and end up messing with your overall analytics, specifically click counts. The nice thing about BudURL is that they allow me to choose 301 or 307. Most of the time I use 301 redirects, since the page is not going to change and SEO is critical. However, I do use 307 once in a while for special campaigns that I know are for a limited time and therefore I want more accurate data around click counts. The key is to have the option and choose what is right for you, rather than simply using a generic service that offers you no choice.

Short URLs and the Power of Measurment
The beauty of services like BudURL is that they provide a plethora of data around click-through, IP address, browsers and more. Combine that with your web analytics and back-end it with your CRM system and you have a very powerful tool. Recently one of the web analytics packages we use, GetClicky, launched their own URL shortening service. The company even joked on their blog that this seemed a bit crazy since there are hundreds of options out there already. However, using a Clicky.me URL I not only get the custom URL option as before, it integrates completely into my web analysis dashboard and I can dive into individual short URLs:

Now I can see not only how many folks clicked on the link, but how much time they spent on the site, average actions, what search term they used to find the link, what site referred them and more. When you scroll down you also see each individual IP address AND all the action those folks took on the site, including if they reached any of your business goals. Ultimately we have back ended the process into SalesForce.com and can track the success of short URLs on our business.

They may be tiny, but short URLs are a highly powerful B2B marketing tool when you know what to look for out of your service.

Part II on alt tags, header tags and Flash optimization.

Part III on video SEO, self-sustained SEO and using content aggregators.

I’ve really enjoyed spending the week diving deeper into SEO and social marketing. Today we are going to look at how to use better SEO practices within your public relations activities. Many of these tips you may already know about, but they are still important to do each and every time.

1) The Press Release: Your Writing

I’m lucky because I have used MarketWire for the past several years nearly exclusively as my wire distribution vendor (more on that below), just recently my rep Hallie sent me some info from Google that really helps in your news release writing for SEO:

• Do not include a date or time in your news release headline or it could be purged from their system after only 3-days of being indexed.
• Example of what could be purged: “Company XYZ Reports Fourth Quarter and Annual Results for the Year Ending December 31, 2008″.
• Your revised headline could read: “Company XYZ Reports Fourth Quarter and Annual Results”.
• Ensure your headlines are not too long or too short. Currently, the headline must be between 2 and 22 words. Keep in mind 1 word could equal 5 characters so the minimum is 10 characters and the maximum is 110 characters for Google to index your release longer than 3-days.

These are very specific tips obviously, but they go to show the little things that you can do when writing your news releases, allowing your information to be indexed for a much longer time. Additionally you must also take into account much of the information we wrote about in Parts I, II & III around hyperlinking key phrases within your news release. This is important for two reasons. First for when you put the news release up on your corporate site it is already optimized, but also when you put it out over the wire it will provide you with a SEO boost…that is if you are using the right wire.

2) The Press Release: Wire Distribution

When I was working on the PR agency side of the business I typically would tell clients that there reall was not much difference between news wires and at the time, pre-Google, that was mainly true. But today not all wires are created equally and much of the difference may come down to SEO power. What should you look for you may ask?

• Do they allow embedded links at no extra cost?
• Can you set multi-word tags?
• When embedding images can you alter the alt tags (remember Part II)?
• Is it easy to combine video onto your news release page?
• How much of their distribution actually picks up the hyperlinks when they cover the news?
• Do they provide RSS feed, permalink and keyword cloud navigation?
• Can they distribute automatically to other online distribution sites such as iTunes, Second Life, Twitter and YouTube?

Of course SEO should not be your primary reason for choosing your news release distribution, but you certainly need to be asking these questions. Additionally, start tracking results you get for different key phrases while using different news wires, could be a great way to measure the impact directly.

3) The Press Release: Posting Outside of the Wire

Nothing wrong with putting your information out on any other services, especially when you can see an SEO boost and the price is right (free!). PitchEngine and Scrib are two terrific places to put up your news releases after they go over the wire and onto your website. PitchEngine allows a variety of options including embedded links, video, images, tags and for a cost the ability to embed their system into your site as a social media newsroom. This can be a great tool for getting more views of your news and SEO, but at this point I have not been sold on it’s ability to actually “pitch” the news.

Scribd is one of my favorite sites because it allows you to upload a bunch of different documents including presentations, data sheets and yes, news releases. Much like many of the other sites I’ve discussed in this series Scribd allows you to have personalized URLs so you can use your main keyphrase for that news release from the start. Additionally Scribd actually shows you the last time Google indexed your page when you look at the document, an immediate way to see how relevant the document is to Google.

Social media marketing and SEO are intrinsincally linked and work together effectively, as long as you recognize the basic foundation of SEO and the different tools at your disposal. I have only scratched the surface on this topic through this four-part series but I look forward to diving into it again real soon.

Part II on alt tags, header tags and Flash optimization.

In Part III of our week long look at SEO and social marketing we are actually going to do a lot more on the edge of social marketing and look at some of the networks and tools that are out there that can really help your SEO, while also helping you engage more interactively with your community. This post assumes you read Part I and Part II and you are already started with hyperlinking your key phrases and optimizing your site, at least just a wee little bit.

1) Video is King

We are all using more and more video in our marketing efforts because it’s fun, expressive and impactful. One element of using video is hosting so that you can embed within your site/blog. If you are like me you’ve tried them all; YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv and more. Over the past few months I used each of these services, mainly to find one that had the best playback quality and viewer features. Going through this practice however I also found a major SEO difference with these video hosting sites. What to look for:

• Can you embed links in your description? This is an obvious plus and Blip.tv has become my go-to video site primarily because of this resource. Now look carefully because on Blip, without a Pro account, it seems as if you can’t embed links, but go ahead and use your <a href> tags within your video description and watch the links show up!
• Do you love Google? Because if you do, or even if you are just afraid of them, be sure to put your videos on YouTube as well. I’m not saying Google ranks YouTube videos higher because they own the site, I’m just saying it’s a good idea to cover all your bases. Plus it is still the most visited video site, so it really can not hurt.
• Can you organize? It’s great to put a bunch of videos up, but it is even better when you can create a “TV Station” or one stop shop for your videos. YouTube and Blip are my favorite for this, especially the personalization you can do on your YouTube page. Take a look at our page on Blip.tv:

• Can you mesh with other media? I’m really excited to use Flickr a bit more to post our videos, just looked into that this week on our BreakingPoint Flickr Page. Obviously the nice thing about this is we can incorporate two different mediums for folks, the bad thing is they only accept 90 second videos at this point. Watch for this site and others to use in the future.

2) Look to your Friend…Feed

A few months ago I wrote about self-sustaining SEO through the use of FriendFeed.

The BreakingPoint FriendFeed group we created just a few months ago was the number one organic result on Google and our blog was number two. What is so amazing about these results is the fact that we were not optimizing those two pages for this term, rather we had been focussing on a different variation, “network equipment testing” which is optimized for our home page.

The reason FriendFeed is the number one result is fairly simple and speaks to the complexity and sophistication of Google (yeah, I’m pandering to Google, so what?):

1. The URL has the keywords;
2. The page has several additional mentions of the keyword…but not too much;
3. The page is being constantly refreshed with content since it is coming in from our blog, Twitter feed, Flickr, etc;

Self-Sustained SEO! As long as FriendFeed is around and we are putting up relevant content to “network equipment testing” this will be a terrific way for our company to be found.

3) Scribd and SlideShare Can Help Too

You have a ton of content; white papers, data sheets, news releases and more. It is a shame to only have that content on your website, you need to share it with more people…and reap some SEO rewards! The two sites I would really encourage you to visit is Scribd and SlideShare and start uploading your content. SlideShare is certainly not just for slides, you can put up almost any document, including YouTube videos, and they have a really slick app so that people can access this content from your LinkedIn page. But one of the features I like the best about SlideShare is the ability to create personalized URLs for your content, for example this white paper we put up on reducing time-to-test, a huge SEO tool.

Scribd is still a bit new to me, but I really like how I can create a central repository for my content, similar to our video page on Blip. They also have personalized URLs and they actually tell you on the side of your documents the last time the search engine bots went through to index the page!! Very cool.

In Part IV I’m going to put on my old school PR hat and talk news release SEO, wire services, PitchEngine and more.

1) Header Tags
As you know header tags are HTML tags that help dictate page structure with your text. Using an H1 tag you will see a dramatic difference in the look and feel of your text:

For example this is an H1 Tag

And this is an H2 Tag

I’m a wee little H3 Tag

And so on and so forth. In most cases you use H1 to define the title of your page and move on down the headers from that standpoint, helping you create a professional looking page that is easier to read. Beyond simply looks, the H1 tag also is an alert to the search engines that what you have placed within this tag is very important and that they should pay attention. The bot then measures your page by seeing if you H1 tag actually reflects what the page is about, amongst many other things that we will get around to, and will recognize your page as more relevant.

Let’s take an example of the picture to the left, the main products page for BreakingPoint. The H1 tag for this page, instead of simply saying “products” is “Testing Tools”. Why? Because that is one of the key phrases we are optimizing for this page. I see SO many companies use “products” or their product name as the H1 tag for this type of page instead of optimizing for this page with their main keyphrase in the H1 tag.

Makes sense right? So why not just make the whole page an H1 tag? Well, that is gaming the system and Google will punish you for doing things like this; punish you hard. It won’t work, in fact it will do the reverse.

2) Alt Tags/Image Tags

Does your site have a bunch of images? Screenshots of your product? When you post these pictures you probably know that you can add alt text into the HTML that describe the picture and for the most part people put something like <img src=”URL for image” alt=”Our Product Name”>. They are leaving SEO on the table by not using a keyphrase in that alt section. For example the alt text for the images in the above page each relate back to a key phrase we have identified for this page, including testing tools. Again, don’t go overboard and simply create a long list of key phrases for each alt, that will make your page seem irrelevant. The text should make sense and relate back to the page itself.

Mouse over the screenshot of our products page above, the link is taking you to our products homepage with the alt text of “testing tools”…make sense?

3) Flash is SWEET!

I love Flash, it’s such a great way to demonstrate a product or an offer. When done correctly it can be a terrific form of communication. However, for a long time, Flash was not readable by the search engines and therefore a complete waste in terms of SEO. That did start to change in June of 2008 when Google and Adobe announced that Google was now crawling and indexing Flash! Woot! As of now Google is only reading text and links from Flash so be sure to include some key phrase heavy text and any links that are in the Flash be sure they relate back to your key phrase matchmaking. Stay tuned in this area because it is certainly changing almost every week (and please give me any sort of advice, it is appreciated).

4) Blogging and your SEO

Time to start the great cross-over into how social marketing can really help you optimize, and quickly. In Part I we talked about linking key phrases to the correct page and mentioned you should be sure to do this throughout your own site. Not only for SEO, but for your visitors. The same goes for the blog of course! The beauty of a blog is that you are creating additional pages nearly every day, which also reside on another main page, an archive page, search page, etc. Blog posts get a lot of leverage when it comes to SEO, so be sure when posting to:

• Link key phrases to internal pages, while also giving link love to other sites…SEO karma my friends (plus a nice resource for readers).
• Use descriptive URLs that use the key phrases.
• In many blogging platforms the title is the <H1>, so use it smartly.
• Include descriptive and optimized text for the alt tags of any images.

Additionally as you are blogging you are commenting on other blogs…right? Good! Those comments provide an opportunity for you to link back to important resources for readers, and further your SEO initiative. Many blogging platforms allow <a> tags and other minimal HTML, use that to your advantage when blogging. If you are not sure try it and hit “preview” to see, I’ve found that often times it isn’t listed but the comment section will take HTML.

Before we move to Part III a quick warning. These are all guidelines that can help you optimize your site, but they should never be used as hard and fast rules that change nor dictate how and what you actually write on your site. People visit your site because you provide a product, resource or information that is important for them and if you move away from that because you really want to be found when someone searches for “poppin fresh” you are doing them a disservice AND won’t attract the right people. SEO is a fine balance of art, science, psychology and common sense.

In Part III we will dive into the importance of a 404 page, your site footer and using video sites for SEO.

Microscope by adamb_2006, on Flickr

While watching myself talk in a recent Hubspot video on B2B marketing and lead generation I made the comment about how SEO was one area I have learned the most about during my time with BreakingPoint. SEO was always something I acknowledged as important, like rain, but never understood how critical it was until I was looking at web log files every week. Near the very end of the video Pam O’Neal makes an important comment:

“80% of tech B2B buyers think they found you.” (MarketingSherpa)

It is such a fantastic statistic since most of us know that a lot of work goes into getting these folks to find you, and they don’t even realize how it happened. SEO and social marketing go hand-in-hand since social marketing is the single best way to optimize your site for search engines. The challenge for many B2B technology marketers and I’m sure others, is to know where to start. Last week I was on the phone with a company up in Massachusetts discussing a bit of social marketing SEO 101 and thought I would turn this into a mini-series this week. Today’s topic: Getting started with SEO.

Please just skip the rest of this post if you are into SEO, it will be very elementary, and in fact even my most sophisticated posts on SEO will probably be a fair bit trite to those actually in the SEO business, but they have worked for us and I’ve learned a lot of this from our in-house SEO experts. But hold up, this is a getting started list for SEO.

1) Determine your Key Phrases
No longer are we talking simply keywords any longer, you must have your key phrases. Think of it this way, when you want to be found by your core audience on Google, what did they just put in the search box? To start select 15 of these phrases. If you are having trouble go through your web analytic software and see what folks are using to find you (although this will obviously be tainted since you haven’t optimized yet!) and check out Google’s free Search-based keyword tool. Got your 15? Good!

2) Analyze your Key Phrases
Now head on over to Google AdWords Keyword Tool (registration required) or SEOMoz. These tools are going to analyze the key phrases you have chosen, tell you the level of difficulty in terms of optimizing, alternative phrases, average monthly search value for the phrases and more. This data will tell lead you to more thought out key phrases and a realistic understanding of the phrases you could ‘own’ quickly and those that are going go take a very long time (or perhaps never).

3) Let’s Play Key Phrase Match Making!
Now is the time to take your key phrases and match them with certain pages within your website. For example, let’s say you sell face recognition equipment. The key phrase “face recognition” might point to your home page and “face recognition security” might lead to your main products page. Create a spreadsheet that has your key phrases and for which URLs they are going to be optimized. Two things to keep in mind when you are match making; first find the page that will best fit the phrase and don’t pile up too many phrases on one single page (why this is important will become apperant in #4…speaking of which).

4) Simple Key Phrase Optimization
Because this is the “Getting Started” post, we are going to keep this easy because with all the other things you have on your plate even getting this far probably took a bit of time. In front of you is your key phrase match book; pick the first term, look at the URL(s) you are going to optimize for that phrase and make sure that page talks about, to, and includes that key phrase. Now, go to your press release section and search for this key phrase (most likely it is already included in several of your news releases), each time you see the phrase insert a hyperlink back to the corresponding URL for that key phrase. If you have a blog, do the same thing for that key phrase. Do the same for key phrase number 2, number 3, number 4 and so on.

5) Bonus Round: Meta Optimization
If you still have time you can now do a bit of backward optimization by going to each page within your site, digging into the HTML and making sure the , , and at the very least include the key phrases you just optimized for that page. There is constant discussion on the importance of each of these, but best be fully prepared and go ahead and optimize it on each page.

Follow these five simple steps and you will at the very least be a long way toward optimizing your own internal pages and hyperlinking for your key phrases. And remember each time you put up new content, a news release or a blog post to hyperlink those key phrases back to the corresponding URL (you should have your SEO playbook spreadsheet in front of you at all times).

Part II I’ll dive a bit more into Header tags, alt tags, the perils of Flash and footers.

Part III will start to introduce how to use social marketing tools and social networking sites to help you optimize for search engines, including FriendFeed which I like to call the automated perpetual search engine optimization machine.

Oh, and here is the Hubspot video so that you can make fun of the way I look: