In issuing the list, the firm said that the best strategies this year have been the ones that are directly related to establishing credibility, eliciting trust and directly targeting a desired demographic.

Credibility Most Important

Credibility is one of the most important things to establish in an online presence, especially in an economically challenging year, according to Ash Buckles, SEO.com’s director of search engine optimization. “When people are watching their money closely, they will only buy from companies and websites they trust,” he said.

Credibility, Buckles said, depends on how well a site is architected, how many other sites and networks link back to your site, how much social media and buzz surrounds a domain, how often a site goes down, how unique a site’s content is and how fast a site loads.

The top 10 list and commentary from SEO.com:

1. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Websites at the top of the search results are viewed as the leaders of their industry, and more than 80% of web users click on the first listings. Good SEO services will consistently deliver a huge return on investment.

2. Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn: Social media marketing engages customers on a personal level, and can rapidly create buzz around a product, brand or business. It can also be more cost effective than traditional forms of advertising and outreach, SEO.com said.

3. Keyword Research: Online, everything revolves around discovering what words and phrases an organization’s customers are searching for online.

4. Video Marketing: This is becoming more important both on-site and off-site. Videos help convert website visitors into sales. In the universal search results, people tend to click on links with videos more than those without -  even if the video link is ranked lower.

5. Online Public Relations: This builds credibility online, in the mainstream media and for potential customers. Online public relations can help create a lot of buzz about your site through bloggers and industry sites, and can boost organic SEO.

6. Link Building: A key element in search engine optimization. Search engines like “popular sites.” From the search engine’s point of view, a credible and popular site will have a lot of links pointing to it.

7. Blogging: Blogs provide additional site content (which search engines like), graphics and other viral content to disseminate information and tie in with social media. Blogs can build credibility by establishing a site as the hub for industry information.

8. Conversion Web Design: A good web design will keep visitors on the site and sell them products or services.

9. Paid Search Marketing: Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an extremely targeted strategy with measurable, immediate results. This enables a more efficient spending of marketing dollars.

10. Email Marketing: This is important to nurture relationships and retain existing customers. It’s much easier to keep old customers than to get new ones. Send good offers and valuable information that’s customized to their needs.

“Companies want to make sure every penny goes to something that produces results,” said Dave Bascom, chief executive of SEO.com. “For that reason, more and more money is being allocated to internet marketing because it’s measurable and has proven to increase ROI,”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/business/smallbusiness/12guide.html

Best, Edwin Dearborn

Best, Edwin Dearborn

Amid the endless pronouncements about social media — often shortened to “social” these days by consultants trying to sound like they know what they are talking about — is the reality that social media is not a solution, or a sure bet.

Social media can’t:

1. Substitute for marketing strategy.
   A Twitter campaign or a Facebook page that announces your weekly specials is not a marketing strategy.
2. Succeed without top management buy-in.
   Social media requires a way of thinking that includes willingness to listen to customers, make changes based on feedback and trust employees to talk to customers.The culture of fear (of job loss, of losing message control, of change) is ingrained in corporate cultures. Top management has to want to change.
3. Be viewed as a short-term project.
   Social media is not a one-shot deal. It’s a long-term commitment to openness, experimentation and change that requires time to bear fruit.
4. Produce meaningful, measurable results quickly.
   One of the complaints about social media is that it can’t be measured. But there are many things that can be measured, including engagement, sentiment and whether increased traffic leads to sales.Those results can’t be produced or measured in the short term. Like PR, social media marketing often produces its best results in the second and third year.
5. Be done in-house by the vast majority of companies.
   A successful social-media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content and contests into online marketing.You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience — a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.
6. Provide a quick fix to the bottom line or a tarnished reputation.
   Social media can sometimes provide quick results for a company that’s already a star. When a well-loved company like Zappos or Google employs social media, its loyal fans and followers pay attention.However, there’s a lot of desperation in a lot of corporate suites these days, and many companies seem been convinced that a social-media campaign can provide a quick fix to sagging sales or reputation issues. Sorry, nuh, uh.
7. Be done without a realistic budget.
   Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing.Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce and creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.
8. Guarantee sales or influence.
   Unless your effort can pass the “who cares” test — and most simply can’t — your social media efforts will fall flat.And unless you know how to drive traffic to your contest, video, blog, event, etc., you’ll have little more than an expensive field of dreams.
9. Be done by “kids” who “understand social innately”
   You can climb Mount Kilaminjaro without a sherpa guide, but why would you? Experience and perspective can make the trip easier, or even save your life.Companies trying to run social media without experienced consultants waste time, money and reputation on their efforts. And then, sadly, many decide that this new-fangled approach doesn’t work.
10. Replace PR.
    No matter how great your website, video contest, blog, Twitter strategy, etc., you still need publicity. Or you may end up with a tree falling in the forest and nobody hearing it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Best, Edwin Dearborn