First up, Veronica “Niki” Fielding, CEO, Digital Brand Expressions speaking on “SEO—Now More than Ever, a B2B Marketer’s Best Friend.” She actually talked about a whole boatload of stuff, but here are some key takeaways pertaining mostly to content:

Take heart marketers, if copy works for human beings, it will work for search engines. Write for people.

Also think about starting to incorporating multimedia, as all other things being equal, Google will rank your site higher because it wants to serve up more than text-based content.

More and more, it’s about refreshed content so you need to keep your website current. Again, all things being equal, meaning compared to a competing site that is just as optimized, continually refreshed content will train search engines to come to site more often.

Another tip: Every key word should have its own page of content on site that supports that keyword. Rule of thumb: For ever 250 words of copy, your keyword should appear five times,  written in a way that makes sense to a person. Search engine practices are always evolving but their goal always will be to create an ideal experience for person doing the search.

Blogs: Is it better to be host them internally on your website or externally, on a separate website? Answer: When it’s separate, it will be another site that will show up in the search rankings. However, if you don’t have a great way to continually refresh the other content on your site, then your blog should sit on your website.

Next, Larry Davis, VP of Marketing, PTS Data Center Solutions, spoke.

SEO has helped to increase sales; website search is the No. 3 lead source (20% of leads). The No. 1 source is from our sales folks. DBE also has been instrumental helping to improve experience for user once they get to the site. Hot point: The ongoing battle of visual appeal vs. content. Who wins? The answer: It depends on your audience.

For example, PTS customers are essentially engineers, CIOs, VPs of IT, etc.  They want content; information and education. The PTS website has over 300 pages of content, each optimized to a key word.  Does it work? If you search on “data center consulting” PTS comes up first over much bigger companies.

Trend worth watching:  Content syndication. This is content from partners that is syndicated on privately labeled web pages.

Caveats: Real SEO takes time to take effect. It’s an investment. Think months, not weeks, to start seeing a return. Black and white hat techniques may provide instant gratification but might not serve you long term.

Also, most SEO organizations don’t optimize their own sites because they don’t want their competitors to go to school on them. Check out their client’s sites instead. Similarly, if you do a good job, your competitors will steal or “scrape” your content, sometimes wholesale. To deter them, you can provide an abstract and make people log in to get the whole article. However, be sure to leave enough content outside the wall for the search engines to play with.

The SMR made its debut back in May 2006 and yet, almost two and half years later, there still isn’t a wide adoption of it from public relations or marketer’s alike. Some larger companies are using the SMR, but that’s about it.
If you take a look at the original design of the SMR, it really is a complete departure from what public relations & marketing professionals have had drilled into their heads for decades. And, if you aren’t involved in social media, a lot of the sections might make absolutely no sense. What’s more, if the reporters/journalists/editors you are targeting aren’t involved in social media, they might not get it either.
Here’s why:
Yep, the contact information, headline and subhead might all be the same and comfortable–but that’s where the comfort ends.
The additional sections include:

• Core News Facts (akin to the who, why, what, when, where, how, but in a bulleted format)
• Link & RSS Feed to Purpose-built del.icio.us page
• Multimedia
• More multimedia available by request (i.e. download white paper)
• Pre-approved quotes (okay, this is familiar, but the quotes are not within context of the release)
• Links to relative coverage to date
• Boilerplate Statements
• RSS Feed to Client’s News Release
• “Add to del.icio.us”
• “Technorati Tags/Diff this

If the above sounds like an alien language to you, you’re not going to embrace it, right? And breaking that 100-year old tradition is scary. Agreed. As well, with an SMR, the reporter/journalist/editor might need to piece the story together themselves. With all the cutbacks in the magazine and newspaper industries, that’s a lot to ask of someone who might already be overworked. Some times, they just like to publish the release as received. Of course, there are lots of times they don’t–but let’s stick to simplicity for now.
So, how can you make your news releases a little more social with a bit of a safety net (I mean, PR and marketing professionals are still held accountable for results last time I checked). Try utilizing PRWeb, Business Wire’s EON, or a similar service that offers a version of a “social” release. You can use your traditional release style, but optimize it for search, keywords, media (i.e. a video, podcast, website, brochure, etc.), and sharing (the social part). That’s a departure that’s not so drastic, right?
Recently, testing the waters of the “social” release pool, we tested two releases, one major news release in a traditional format over the business wire and one minor news release in an optimized “social” format over PRWeb.
The results?
The minor release provided 1,330 Google hits and 258 media downloads while the major traditional news release received 243 Google hits and no media downloads (because there wasn’t the option to use any). Again, no web analytics here for simplicity’s sake.
Are these two releases apples & oranges? Of course. But when budgets are tight and you are looking for the biggest bang for the least marketing buck, my bet goes to the “social” release because it provides:

1. Search engine optimization (you can optimize the release on the backend with keywords)
2. Hyperlinks within the release (inbound links to your site do wonders for natural search)
3. Tags (again, think searchable)
4. Media (a way to virally spread your work)
5. Sharing (a way for people to bookmark and share your news)

Is this a scientific approach? No. But, using a “social” release seems to provide more hits, traffic and shared media than a traditional, standard release.
Why is any of this important?
One, utilizing keywords might allow someone to find you that might otherwise not know you. Two, there is the potential that your news will be shared by people who do know you with people who don’t. Three, you can make the most of the money you spent on media (videos, podcasts, collateral, etc.).
What do you think? Would you try a “social” release? If you have, what experiences can you share?

According to the New York Times, a reporter for Income Securities Advisors in Miami found the article on The Sun-Sentinel, and then posted it to Bloomberg news, inciting a false bankruptcy report. From the NYTimes:

Richard Lehmann, the founder of Income Securities, said the company’s reporter discovered the article during a routine search on Google for information about bankruptcy filings in 2008. A link to the old Chicago Tribune article appeared as the first search item, bearing a current date, not its original date, Mr. Lehmann said. When the reporter clicked on the link, it navigated to the United Airlines article on the front page of the Sun-Sentinel Web site, next to a radar map showing the location of Hurricane Ike, Mr. Lehmann said.

The Tribune Company, which distributes news to papers including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, denied any liability:

“A Chicago Tribune story written in December 2002 regarding the United Airlines bankruptcy filing that year was apparently picked up by an investment advisory and research firm and republished as though it was current,” said a Tribune Company statement released Monday.
“The story was located in the archive section of the website of the Sun Sentinel in South Florida. The story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002.”

The Sun-Sentinel’s Deputy Managing Editor-Interactive was then consulted:

Joseph Schwerdt, deputy managing editor-interactive for the Sun-Sentinel, said internal tracking records show that no one had opened the original story file since 2003. The story would have been available via a search on the site, but no one outside the paper should have had access to the story file, Schwerdt said.

Trading was stopped at 11:08am and resumed at 12:30pm.
So who is at fault? It sounds like one of two things happened:

• Scenario A: The Tribune Company, or perhaps the Sun-Sentinel, has bad search engine optimization practices, posting today’s date on old articles. This would be completely unacceptable for a publisher of such size.
• Scenario B: The searcher did not realize that the default for Google News results is relevance, and not date. The searcher did not read through the article carefully, nor noted the quotes attributed to 2002. The searcher then reposted the article as current. This would be also be completely unacceptable.

As the article has been pulled from the archives, and it is highly unlikely that anyone took a screen shot, the truth might never be known.