The show was immense and the experts were out in full force, so I’m going to go out on a limb to state that the best, most informative session at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2010 was “News Search Optimization.”  Moderated by Newsforce CMO Dana Todd, the panel included Brent Payne, SEO director at Tribune; Topher Kohan, SEO manager at CNN; Eleanor Hong, lead editor, SEO at ABCNews.com; and Allison Fabella, SEO and social media manager at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  News, as we know, is changing and agile communications companies are recognizing the need to optimize their content for search and social, local reach and mobile platforms. (more…)

Welcome to Marketwire’s collection of the some of the most interesting articles of June and July.  My top PR, SEO, and social media articles will surely get your mind going 100 miles an hour.

PR Articles:

1. PR Readers’ Choice Finalists and Winners
By: Arik Hanson

Arik publicly recognizes the top PR blogs in his second annual PR Readers’ Choice Awards.  Don’t just skip over to the winners, but take a look at the finalists.  There are a lot of gems in there as well.

Marketwire Advice: I recommend you subscribe to these blogs and follow them on Twitter.  It’s a great way to connect with thought leaders in the PR industry. (more…)

Our Sales, Customer Service and Editorial teams here Marketwire tend to get a lot of questions about link-building because press releases are a great way to build links on high-quality, authoritative websites. The links you provide in a press release or social media release are preserved downstream, whether your content is automatically republished or manually selected by an editorial team. It’s important to get embedded links right, so here are some of the top “do’s and don’ts” of link- building. (more…)

Gone are the days of writing content specifically targeted at search engines. The mantra “Content is King” has officially been replaced with “Relevant Content is Godly.”  Relevance is extremely important these days because focus has shifted from creating content that search engines understand to creating content that results in high-quality end-user experiences.  Engines have their secret sauce, but it has become abundantly clear that search engine algorithm changes are now increasingly prioritizing great end-user experience. (more…)

This article was recently featured on SearchEngineWatch.com.

Although YouTube isn’t the only option in video distribution, it’s hard to deny that if YouTube was a search engine, it’d be No. 2 in the world behind Google.  A strong argument could be made for producing and optimizing video for SEO results, especially if you think about how much time you devote to content marketing to garner rankings for web pages.  Given the amount of competition on the written web, ranking for video in YouTube may be much easier and — as an added bonus — top spots in YouTube often mean an equally attractive position in Google’s universal search results. (more…)

There’s been some confusion as to what real-time content really is, so let me help clarify: Real-time content happens when there is no delay between the time you type/write and the time you publish. It’s an immediate response to a comment or question. Think Twitter. What is not real-time content are blogs.  A blogger usually ponders, writes, then posts; therefore, the response time is not as immediate or instantaneous.

That said, how is real-time content optimized for search engines? Because of it’s instantaneous nature, is it even possible? Definitely! Here are a few tips to make sure your real-time content is SEO-friendly and searchable: (more…)

Blogging statistics are staggering.  June 2010 figures from WordPress (which powers the Marketwire blog) cite 11.4 million blogs hosted on their platform, with WordPress.com users publishing about 350,000 new posts on an average day (and their readers, in turn, leaving 400,000 new comments every day). With all that conversation, discussion, opinion, interjection and objection, it’s easy to see why many organizations think it’s best to avoid an already crowded arena. After all, their blog can’t possibly compete with all the rest.  It’s also easy to see why many choose Twitter and dismiss blogging (isn’t it just simpler and faster to say what you need to say with only 140 characters?). (more…)

I’ve never been in a room of more nervous marketers than when I sat down to listen to Mike Grehan of SearchEngineWatch interview Maile Ohye of Google Webmaster Tools at SES Toronto’s day 2 keynote panel.  On the heels of several algorithm changes to Google search, many in the crowd needed to hear reassuring words from the world’s most popular search engine for themselves.  Thankfully, Maile wasn’t dodging hot topics like Google’s Mayday algorithm update or Google’s Caffeine infrastructure changes, two hot topics at SES Toronto this year that promises to have significant effects on optimizing websites and news articles for search. (more…)

In a recent Marketwire-sponsored SEO and social media webinar, Sally Falkow made a compelling argument that any press release should do more than just distribute your news. Press releases are a valuable resource that can boost search engine visibility of your news and your corporate website. But how do you choose the best keywords that will give you high rankings in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing?

Here are four easy steps that will help you choose the best target keywords for your press releases: (more…)

My last post focused on how anyone can benefit from using press releases to boost SEO, but I purposely avoided mentioning multimedia and social media — until now.  In recognition of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, I thought it would be fitting to explain how multimedia and social media can become the best supporting players in your SEO effort, within the context of a few of this year’s nominated films. (more…)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the exposure of your website to search engines.  For those just getting their feet wet in SEO success might mean getting a website listed in Google for the first time, but for many, SEO generally involves campaigns designed to increase web traffic for select search keywords or phrases (“clean fuel technology,” for example) or even additional lead generation. (more…)

Marketwire recently changed the URL structure of client press releases on Marketwire.com so that the headline appears in the URL. This change affects all releases, past and present, regardless of the product or distribution, at no extra cost to our clients.  Old links are automatically redirected to the new pages using SEO-friendly  redirects, thereby retaining and potentially improving their page rank. (more…)