Weekly Open SEO Vault Round-up

Good morning and TGIF to everyone! What’s on your plate for this spring-like weekend?

I’d like to start doing a weekly round-up for you because I find myself culling through tons of newsletters, emails and blogs to find the latest and greatest in content marketing and SEO copywriting. So I thought since I’m doing the work anyway, I might as well share it with all of you so you can start your weekend that much sooner!

OK, here’s what happened in the search industry this week:

Yesterday (March 8th) was International Women’s Day — a day dedicated to celebrating women’s contributions around the world. Cheers to us all!

Last March, Google launched the “Panda Update” to weed out low-quality content from its top search results. Here is a cool infographic created by Search Engline Land & BlueGlass that shows how Panda works and the various updates from 1.0 to today’s 3.2.

SMX West 2012 took place this week and copywriters were urged to take note: Keywords Exposed as Secret to Success.  Described as “one of the foremost people in the keyword research industry,” Christine Churchill, President of Key Relevance, took the stage and asked the crowd, “What is keyword research and how do you do it? How much keyword research is enough? When should you do it?”

There will be much more to come next week as I get into a solid groove. In the meantime, please feel free to buzz me about anything you think we should know about for next week’s round up!

Have a great weekend

~Aimee

SEO & SMO: What’s the Difference?

Good morning! Ahh, it’s a gorgeous day here in Guelph. The sun is shining, the mercury is on the rise and my windows are wide open. Birds are chirping and my cats are stalking chippies from this side of the screen. It’s a feel good day!

I plan to spend some time outside in the fresh air, so today’s post is a quickie

You may have heard folks talking lately about social media optimization and the “death of SEO.” The truth is that SEO is still very much alive. SMO is alive, too. One is not overtaking the other though — they remain two very distinct entities and each has its rightful place in your overall marketing campaign.

What is SEO?

Simply put, SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website so that its pages show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages). SEO drives traffic to your site via search engines (primarily Google). The most common methods used to achieve this are by selecting keywords and making alterations to HTML code, such as titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, headers and microdata. SEO is often referred to as onsite optimization. The carrier of traffic in this case is the search engine(s) and the target is your website.

What is SMO?

SMO (social media optimization) is the process of sharing content outside the four walls of your website. The carrier in this case is the user (or many users hopefully) and the target is, well, anywhere and everywhere. When optimizing for social media, you’re not trying to drive traffic to your website, you’re trying to get people to carry content away from your website and share it with other users. The goal is to spread your content as widely as possible by various social media channels, including Twitter retweets, Pinterest pins, Facebook likes, +1s and YouTube views. Social media optimization is also known as offsite optimization or social media marketing (SMM).

Hope this clears up any confusion there may have been around SEO & SMO.

Now go enjoy another happy hump day!

~Aimee

In a world filled with too many choices…