aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Social media has crept into nearly every aspect of SEO to where it’s now quite difficult to imagine them disentangled from eachother. Keyword research traditional to SEO is being used to advise every tag, tier, and title in brand social media efforts. Go ahead and find me an SEO who says “I don’t do social media”,  they’re either speaking figuratively, are blissfully unaware, or have an extremely rare vendor relationship.

What do we now know to be true about SMO that we didn’t know 1 year ago or even 3 months ago? What social media principles have stood the test of time? Should we reignite a serious dialogue on ethics in social media optimization?

Search Engine Strategies New York 09 brought some of the best and most outspoken search & social media marketing figures together for the session “An Update on Social Media Optimization“, moderated by Search Engine Watch’s managing editor Kevin Newcomb. Read the rest of this entry »

In parts one and two we discussed the meaning of “avatar” and outlined a monitor & report approach savvy PR firms undertake: The “Walled Garden Forum Rat.” This post focuses on another common participatory profile: The “DoFollow Link Builder.”

This avatar profile is much more common than one might think. It’s also a fuzzy role, in terms of intent and ethics. Anonymous DoFollow link building avatars line the underbelly of social media link-juice mining, spooging points ostensibly awarded for participation.

Do a gut check. Have you ever sought out threads that pass link juice for comments and participated only to link build? Did you always participate using your own name and email, etc…? Are these really blog communities you care about? Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part 2 of our ongoing series, “Avatar Theory, Common Social Media Participation Models.” We’ve been gathering information confidentially for weeks from marketing peers regarding methods, objectives, risk, ROI and anecdotes as they relate to their social media activity on behalf of clients.

There’s a remarkable lack of agreement as to what’s cool and what’s not. We’ll be sharing commonalities in what we discover, leading up to my SMX East NYC presentation on the “What Is Ethical in Social Media Marketing” panel. It is not our intent to endorse or dismiss anyone’s practices, merely to present information which supports forming your own opinions as to best practices and ethics.

The Walled Garden Forum Rat Avatar is a social media persona designed to monitor the chatter stream of community corners not indexed by search engines. Usually flying below the radar by not revealing a corporate affiliation, this avatar model is only a reporter and does no selling whatsoever.  The hallmark is intelligence gathering. Read the rest of this entry »

[Marty Edit: An original version of this avatar theory post created a different kind of buzz than intended when published on the homepage of SEOmoz/blog earlier this week. In it I quoted Matt Cutts from, what he perceived to be, a private conversation.

I apologized to Matt after he publicly unsubscribed to SEOmoz as a result. For those who don’t know, he’s Google’s highly visible ambassador of spam reduction and when someone (in this case me) quotes something he said said about spam– it can cause a fracas. Read the rest of this entry »