"How can SEO hurt your business?" asks Olga Taylor in an article at MarketingProfs. "Consider a site that is not user-friendly, is repulsive to visitors (or attractive to the wrong kind), isn't competitive, or is lacking a clear value proposition and the support required to respond to inquiries or follow ... more

"Why does content matter?" writes Erika Potter at the OrangeSoda blog. "It's simple: credibility. Without credibility, your chance of converting viewers into customers goes downhill fast. It's vital that visitors to your site see your online business as a trusted resource."  To help you ensure that your online content is credible, Potter ... more

You've heard of website community managers, but what about content officers? Those are the folks responsible for your site's content—what it looks like, what it reads or sounds like, where it goes in terms of subject matter or throughout the social universe. MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer Ann Handley has written a ... more

One aspect of being social is relaying information as efficiently as possible. But data is dense, and we have more of it to sift through than ever before. To help you get your data across in an eye-catching way that resonates, Fast Company offers a list of five tools businesses can ... more

In a post at Marketing Interactions, Ardath Albee recalls a B2B client who thought her proposed lead-nurturing messages might be too brief. Albee begged to differ. "[I]nundating prospects with more links and choices rather than improving the personalization, value and contagiousness of your email message is not the right answer," she ... more

Edelman's David Armano, an expert in idea conceptualization, has put together a chart that lets you graph your progress as a social media high-flyer in four steps: crawling, walking, running and flying. At which point might you find yourself? If you feel you're still in the crawling stage, never fear: ... more

Lisa Keller of The Loud Few liked what she saw in the "Q4 2010 North America Email Trend and Benchmark Results" from EEC and Epsilon. "Our average Click Through Rate (32.01%) and average Open Rate (40.99%) for our monthly tLF newsletters were far beyond the Business Products and Services General ... more

If your SEO and social media strategies run afoul of best-practices, you might have a bigger problem than diminished Google rankings: Your brand's reputation might take a very public hit. That's what happened after Adam Singer received this comment at his Future Buzz blog: "Small businesses should focus more on the ... more

Just as fixing technical issues at your website is an important part of search engine optimization, notes Joost de Valk in a recent post at the Yoast blog, so, too, is optimizing your site's overall structure. Site structure helps search engines understand your site's "topic" and more easily find and index ... more

You might not think of your blog's comment section as an integral part of your SEO strategy. But you should. "If you can get comments on your blog, you'll increase both your SEO benefits and your status as an industry leader," explains Diana Freedman at the HubSpot blog. "Each new ... more

"Although content marketing is a widespread practice across industries and company sizes, B2B marketers recognize the need to improve the effectiveness of their efforts," Roy Young notes in a recent MarketingProfs article. Young offers key insights for B2B marketers from the new MarketingProfs report, What Works in 2011: Content Marketing, ... more

When used improperly, email personalization can go horribly wrong, writes Dutch Hollis at Chief Marketer. "You could, for instance, thank the wrong person for a purchase or misspell a customer's name," he explains. "Mistakes like these leave the customer with a bad impression of your brand—quite the opposite of the ... more

"Go to this website, click that link, call this number, fill out that form," writes Lary Stucker at FreshClicks. "Anytime you ask people to do something, you are creating a point of friction," he warns. "Your audience will not continue unless the reward is greater than the friction they are ... more

Your About page is one of the most important pages on your site, says Lisa Banks in a post at the Site Reference SEO blog. Done right, it can help boost rankings and stimulate inbound links, she notes. Banks' interest in About pages was recently stirred by influential blogger Chris Brogan's ... more

One way to build trust is to position yourself as an authority on topics associated with your product or service. Blogging helps, but any blogger knows that expert blogging demands research, dedication of time, community management, consistent cross-marketing—and it can take months, even years, to gain an appreciative audience. So you say ... more

You know online content should have a more conversational tone than other marketing materials. But remember that "informality" isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. "Conversational style has room for plenty of variation," says Rick Sloboda of Webcopyplus. "For example, a conversation with your banker will differ from a conversation with your spouse." To ... more

Get ready! Here comes the new year—and another 12 months' worth of fresh blog content just waiting to be written! If that thought makes you shudder, you are not alone. Jimmy Wong, writing at the B2B Marketing Blog, agrees that "it can be a struggle to come up with ideas ... more

"Maintaining a blog that's consistently interesting and relevant isn't an easy task," writes Ann Handley at MarketingProfs. "It's a challenge to create consistently awesome blog posts, and it's a challenge to earn the attention of an audience." The solution, she argues, is a group blog that taps the expertise of ... more

"When you perform a search at Google or Bing, the results are significantly influenced by your physical location, even on queries where you don't specify a location," writes Ray Comstock at Search Engine Watch. "So if you're in New York and you search for [pizza], or [hot tubs] or [DMV], ... more

When comedian Michael Ian Black ignored a guest satisfaction survey from his stay at a Doubletree hotel, he didn't expect a nagging reminder. "We noticed that you did not have time to complete the survey," advised a second email on the topic. "We are concerned that you may not have ... more

For years, writes Stephanie Miller at the Deliverability blog, marketers have enjoyed the linear nature of the email inbox—your newsletters and offers sitting cheek-by-jowl with personal correspondence from a subscriber's friends. But you shouldn't get too comfortable with this privileged arrangement. "The world is changing," Miller says. "A new set of ... more

"You have a great website. It has beautiful images, a compelling theme and intuitive navigation, all designed to take eager visitors to complete descriptions of your proprietary products and services," writes Tami Wessley at Whole Brain Marketing. "The only problem is your website shows up somewhere after page 10 on ... more

In a recent post at the Content Marketing Institute, Elise Redlin-Cook asks the timeless question, "How do you find the best keywords for your audience?" Then she offers some timely advice. She recommends several online tools for novice and expert search marketers alike that can help simplify the process of researching keyword ... more

When we write for company blogs, we tend to focus on timely information that's meant to be read sooner rather than later. But Rohit Bhargava suggests the creation of "content time bombs" that linger in your archive, just waiting for someone to find them and set them off. "Content Time Bombs ... more

In a post at Email Marketing Reports, Mark Brownlow presents a screenshot that looks like a page from a 19th-century novel: lengthy paragraphs filled with sentences of uniform length. That, he notes emphatically, is not how your email messages should look. "In fact, you wouldn't read the words if that was ... more