Some really good posts and information for Social Media and Wordpress integration

• Beyond TweetBacks: Introducing TweetSuite | Dan Zarrella – Nice plug-in for integrating Twitter and Wordpress.
• SocioFluid – another social bookmarking plugin for wordpress | ImproveSeo.info – A good looking plugin for Wordpress to display the social bookmarking buttons for digg, reddit, … I like the buttons because they are not too small and not too big.
• 10 Tools for the Social Media Marketer | Traffikd – If you are an avid user of social media and you are working to build traffic for your own website or blog with SMM, here are 10 tools to help make your work easier.
• SociBook Plugin For WordPress – Nice Wordpress plugin to share your posts on a ton of social bookmarking sites.
• 5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly – The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results requires that website owners and content publishers make their websites both search and social media friendly.( via Jeff Cohen @dgtlpapercuts on Twitter)
• Is Everything You Know About SEO Wrong? » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – “Do those old H1 tags still work? Actually word’s out, they don’t really count much anymore for SEO. Does quantity, power or diversity of inbound links take the hill for search engines ranking pages algorithmically for keywords? Actually, correlation data indicates that link diversity is a factor which has become more important.”
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online | Lateral Action – Breaks down the steps from acquiring web visitors to engaging them. Really awesome graph.

Technorati Tags: Content, Online, Online Content, SEO, SocBook, Social Media, SocioFluid, TweetSuite, WordPress

This week Andy Beal announced the winners of the 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship I was honored to be one of five finalists out of 31 entries. I didn’t win but congratulations are in order for Linda Bustos whose article 8 Stupid Things Webmasters do to Mess Up their Analytics is excellent.

I was surprised that I did come in first in total traffic since there where so many SEO/SEM professionals in the competition I thought I would be much lower in the rankings. It still got me a seat at the table and a single vote for my article which even in my own opinion was infererior to Linda’s I have added her Get Elastic ecommerce blog to my RSS reader it seems like she and her mates are very sharp.

Just for a record here’s a listing of the winners and their scoring:

Maybe next year I’ll have a shot but for now I’ll take a top five finish.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Contest, Marketing Pilgrim, SEM, SEO

I started linkrolling my bookmarks during during this weekend’s U.S. Open but soon became obsessed by Rocco and Tiger. So here’s my marketing, SEO, and social media links for last week.

• The Marketing of Fear – “The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.” My first “real job” out of college was working in financial services. Fear marketing worked, it also made me feel dirty, that’s why I switched career paths.
• Marketing Sherpa: How to Grow an Email List From Nothing to 2 Million Loyal Fans in 2 Years (Hint: Give Them Something They Enjoy) – I like the example of ice cream on your birthday. My wife always wants to go get her birthday club freebie on hers.
• Copy Blogger: How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% – The power of carefully choosing your words to elicit responses.
• Official Google Blog: Fresher Related Search Suggestions: “Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible — you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.” [via Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim]
• Poynter Online: Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers – Good list of traits for community management superstars [via Connie Bensen]
• How to Build a Useful Site @ chrisg.com – “Track where your visitors come from and what they are after, and if you can actually talk to them. If you know why visitors arrive you will be in a better position to make them happy.”
• Web Ink Now: Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy – David makes a good point, easy to find crap is still crap. Starting with good content and then optimizing for that content is the key. See my post at Marketing Piligrim thinking like a reader, a marketer, AND a search engine. Otherwise you have a one-legged stool.
• Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features : SEO Book.com – Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords. Aaron Wall riffs on the new Google Trends features.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. The supreme irony about this article is its length.
• SEO Tools. Link Checker. Check Backlinks for PR, Anchor & Nofollow – Tools for checking backlinks and their quality [via Chris Brogan]
• SEM Check – Service that provides an audit of your website from an SEO standpoint. (via Marketing Pilgrim)
• Andy Beard: Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search – If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient in response to Tim O’Reilly’s post.
• Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal – O’Reilly Radar – Great Quote from Tim O’Reilly : “Create more value than you capture” the most succint and sage advice I could ever give a commerical open source company [via Aaron Wall on SEOBBook]
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced – Suggestions for dealing with duplicate site content including sitemap specifications and robots.txt.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with duplicate content – How to deal with duplication of content as seen by Google.
• Google: we don’t know how to make money from YouTube – Times Online – Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon.
• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing -Amazing stats for how much credence we put in the opinions of people like ourselves — 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me,” according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.This has been growing steadily since 2003. People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Links, marketing, SEO

• OpenKM Document Management System | Open Source DMS – Home – OpenKM is an multiplatform application for document management based on open technology (JBoss + GWT + Jackrabbit).
• The Importance of Pay Per Click Account Structure – Dave’s riffs on how to create a PPC account structure.
• SEOmoz | How to Choose the Right SEO Vendor – Process for choosing the right SEO firm.
• ReadWriteWe | Want That Post to Go Popular? Here’s The Best and Worst Times to Post It – Jake Luciani has run 10k items on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx through the API of popularity ranking engine AideRSS to analyze the connection between popularity and timing.
• Tumblr and SEO: A Case Study in Rapid Response: SEO Speedwagon – Quick case study in how social media sites (more important, the conversations going on at social media sites) are enabling companies to interact with and respond to their users.
• goosh.org – the unofficial google shell. – A shell like interface for Google. Not sure why it might be useful yet.
• The 10 Best Linus Torvalds Quotes – From the father of Linux, funny guy for a programmer.
• Mozilla Developer News » Blog Archive » Second Firefox 3 Release Candidate now available for download – The second Firefox 3 Release Candidate is now available for download.
• Google Gadgets open-sourced for Linux – Google has announced the official release of Desktop Gadgets for Linux and is distributing the source code under the open-source Apache software license.
• Open Source Systems Management: Zenoss expands platform support, an interview with Mark Hinkle | Commercial Open Source Software – Roberto and I have a nice chat on systems management.
• Business templates and images – HP Small and Medium Business – If you use OpenOffice on the Mac or Linux you can’t use the .cab files from Microsoft. HP has a nice collection here.
  via the Web Worker Daily
• Link Lust: A Lesson in .Edu Link Building – Nice technique for getting those precious .edu links.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, SEO, Web 2.0

Aaron Wall at SEOBook has a good video on why SEO is a social Activity. Nice overview pointing out that the days of gaming Google is over and that SEO requires a good deal of human interaction and understanding to be effective. I like his example of sending some dirt to ValleyWag which got him a premium link (albeit with inaccurate spelling of his name).

It’s a well done SEO training video. What did catch my attention is that he mentions the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (which I am re-reading right now).

Aaron also recommends the work of Duncan Watts who I think does a great job of explaining the science of networks in his book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

The reason I am re-reading the Tipping Point is because of the Fast Company article “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” featuring Duncan Watts who is a network-science theorist working with Yahoo! I am trying to discern if Gladwell is a hypemaster while Duncan’s science might be more accurate. Read them for yourself but I have to wonder if Gladwell’s ideas will stand the test of time or if Watts alone has real insight.

Technorati Tags: Duncan Waits, Malcolm Gladwell, SEO, SEOBook, Six Degrees, Tipping Point, Training