I am a small fish in the Search Marketing Blogosphere, and I make no mistake about it. Let’s get that out of the way right now. SEM is a snowball, the Wild West, an unidentified organic lifeform frigging with colonists on LV-426 (nerd alert). One of the only ways to stay on the cutting edge of this strange new beast is to read a staggering amount of related blogs every day. It’s hard to get through them all, and taking a few days off leaves you with a backlog that makes it tough to try and put a dent in all the posts at all. My point is, I have to choose the personalities I spend my time with very carefully.

There are my trusted favorites, and my new fancies - all of whom have proven themselves to be sources of hard information and advice, and not just links to other people’s information and advice. Many SEO blogs point to other SEO blogs with little original content. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re looking for high-level industry happenings. But I have to concern myself with straight poopy poop dope, and little else. Practical tips and strategies that go into painful detail are what I need, and aren’t just general blabber about ’social media’ and how important it is right now. I have a housepet that could tell you that.

So as I make my bones as an SEM blogger, speaking largely at the moment into a vacuum, it’s time to decide what side of the road I want to stand on. I’d like to eventually be considered as some sort of twisted marketing resource, so my new SEO Tips category is thus born unto the Pony. I’m no knowledge hoarder, people. And with no further ado, here is the first:

The Yahoo! News RSS feed usually looks great when aggregated, as opposed to Google News which can look absolutely terrible. The Y! articles don’t usually double up from multiple sources, and the 100 word excerpts look like you painstakingly wrote them yourself. The best part is yet to come - the feeds are completely customizable. You can create an RSS feed, which is fully compatible with Squidoo, HubPages, Google Reader, BlogLines, etc. simply by typing in your desired keywords. Be sure to visit the feed customization page and bookmark it immediately (scroll down to get to the form). Here now are some practical applications:

• You can employ exact search criteria with quotes to pinpoint and filter content.
• Build a feed for your company or website name to monitor brand reputation around the web. Read it every morning.
• Use feeds on any number of social media sites where RSS is enabled for great updated content.
• Build Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, etc. about your company and filter in new Press Releases mentioning you automatically.
• Hook up easily locatable RSS feeds near the tops of your pages for easy syndication. This is a core best practice of social media marketing: make your original content easy to bookmark, vote, syndicate etc.

And, I’m spent. I sincerely hope that this - or some of my future battleground tips - set off a spark in your head that wasn’t there before you started reading. Although if you literally have sparks in your head, you probably have more important things to worry about.

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Dan just tagged me with some silly meme that’s going around like a nasty flu, but I’m a good sport (and complete narcissist) so I’ll play along. I am also in full agreement with Darren Rowse - namely that transparency lends to a better site visitor experience. So with no further ado, Toto - please pull back the curtain for a minute.

5 Things you Didn’t Know About Thirsty Pony (Dave Pye)

1. Dave is Canadian and was born in Ottawa, Ontario in 1973. I will be moving back to Toronto in early 2007 and am anxious to get in contact with any SEO enthusiasts that may exist in the T-Dot.
2. Dave has jumped out of an airplane attached to a tall German. The girl who jumped out of the plane right after me hit the side of a house and nearly died. I take this as a sign that I got off easy and am better suited for land travel.
3. Dave maintains over 35 websites, in varying degrees of incompletion and disarray. The one which makes the most AdSense revenue is a silly dog sweater site he made for his sister 4 years ago and rarely touches.
4. Dave loves movies and maintains several lenses devoted to his favorites, including: SlapShot, Blade Runner, Blazing Saddles, Rocky and Goodfellas. Believe it or not, Squidoo affiliate revenue actually pays my internet bill every month. Ladies, form a line to the left.
5. Dave and his friend Chris maintain a hockey fights blog that has been mentioned in the New York Times and too many related sport blogs to mention. We write regularly, interact with readers at every opportunity and introduced hockey podcasts this year which we try very hard to make funny.

And this is all providing, of course, that you give a rat’s behind. If not, enjoy some Tiny Prints Coupons. I have chosen to tag Jennie Smash as she links to me in her sidebar and I know she’ll come up with some worthy answers.

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By now there are Amish people who can tell you blog marketing can work wonders driving traffic and leads to your business. But after you take the time to build one on your site, don’t expect Shoeless Joe Jackson to immediately show up and start hitting runs for the home team. Blogging is hard work, and the internet is littered with the bones of thousands of abandoned ideas, usually with “ramblings” or “musings” somewhere in the title.

Momentum is a tough thing to perpetuate. For every day you don’t post on your blog, you can almost devise a mathematical formula that will exponentially measure the traffic you’re going to lose forever. If you aren’t naturally prolific, and you’re not paying someone else to keep your company blog oven fresh, there’s some easy rules of thumb that will help you through.

1. Write what you know: Start a blog on a topic on which you’re passionate and that you’ll be able to maintain without losing momentum. Your business is a darn good start, obviously. If you can’t write passionately about your own business, you should probably be collecting shopping carts in your local mall parking lot.
2. Find your niche: Focus on one topic, and don’t blur your subject matter. Use a sniper rifle, not a shotgun, and you’re more likely to attract and keep an interested audience. If your website sells a wide range of electronics, for example, pick one related facet of what you do and focus on that. Product reviews, free digital photography tips, etc. Maybe start a new domain that’s just a branded blog which links back to your retail site.
3. Make time to write: Not every entry needs to be the Winds of War. Link to an interesting article you’ve read and write a sentence or two summarizing or sharing your thoughts about it. You can even quote part of the original article Ask for some reader feedback on a topic relating to your business. Talk about a recent happening within the company or repost a press release. But, for the love of Bo Jackson, just do it!

Maintaining a company blog is a lot like having a puppy. If you don’t give it water it will die. Don’t adopt a blog until you realize the responsibility attached to keeping it alive. And if you’re still interested afterwards, remember my three simple tips. Housetraining WordPress is up to you.

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Update: 6/13/07

Straight from the horse’s mouth (Vanessa Fox):

“Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead. Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers. Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.”

Sorry to sound like Magnum P.I. - but I know what you’re thinking. Why are press releases and article distribution sites so very useful for SEO and branding, and yet you’re hearing warnings about duplicate content penalization everywhere you turn? Before Higgins releases the Lads, here are a few things you need to know.

If you’re up nights worrying about being penalized for offering an RSS feed or participating in other forms of syndication, you’re taking the term ‘duplicate content’ too literally. A press release or article which appears on more than one unrelated site is not going to get anyone penalized. The operative word here being unrelated. Not every website in the world can be 100% original, and multiple domains are naturally going to aggregate the same news, quotes and other content.

On the other hand, If you sell pet food, and you’ve registered petfoodrules.com, www.buycheappetfood.org, petfoodinmypants.net - and they all contain exactly the same content (copy, tags etc.) - now you’re playing with fire. And gosh help you if you’ve got them all on the same server/IP address. This is what is meant by duplicate content that can get you penalized. Pick one of the domains to focus on, implement 301 redirects on the others and stop being so silly.

If you’re very attached to your multiple domain strategy, and are of the opinion that penalization will never happen to you, bear in mind that one of two things is probably inevitable, at least within Google:

1. All of your domains will be banned except for one.
2. All of your domains will be banned, period.

That sort of a slap can be dynasty-destroying. You’ll return to square one in terms of search engine visibility and be trying to get your old job at the liquor store back. Know what duplicate content is, what it isn’t - and then don’t do it. For more detail on the science of DC, including a break down of the different levels of severity, read this fantastic article by Todd Malicoat.

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The World Wide Web is absolutely starved for content. I mean, collectively we just can’t get enough of the stuff. Spiders devour it, webmasters have to keep feeding the spiders, bloggers have to manufacture content daily or risk losing their audience, press release sites have to keep populating their distribution networks - it’s a feeding frenzy akin to that scene at the end of Piranha 2. So from a marketing standpoint, it pays to know how to throw as many bikini-clad coeds into the surf as possible. One of the ways to ensure some successful visibility for your original content is to understand the difference between a press release and an article.

Online press releases are meant to relay newsworthy information about a company, product, service, event, etc. They are more often than not self-serving, strategic marketing tools. This doesn’t have to be a negative connotation, as many businesspeople want to stay current on happenings within their own company, industry or to keep an eye on competitors. If your press release is hot news, i.e. you work for Mozilla and your release is entitled “FireFox 2.0 Released Today”, in addition to PR networks you may also stand a change in SMO tagging sites like Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us. If you manufacture rollerskates in Toledo, and your release is entitled “ACME Rollerskates Hires New Product Manager”, then maybe don’t bother. Skip ahead to the articles section.

Popular press release sites and distribution networks include PR.com and PRWeb.com and both paid and free submission options exist. It’s worth it to pony (no pun intended) up the money for increased visibility within the networks and to get yourself a hyperlink (not part of the free option) in the process. Totally free PR services - which include hyperlinks - do exist including OpenPress and PRLeap.

Online articles can be about almost anything. If they are written well, and perceived by readers as an interesting and objective source of information, they can spread online like wildfire with a little help from our new friend social media. SMO success depends greatly on your subject’s position and article title. People love lists, and personally I have had great success positioning client-related articles with Top 10’s and the like. Don’t angle your article around the premise “Why You Should Buy Air Conditioners From Us”. Put one together called “How to Store Air Conditioners During Winter” - or better yet, “Top 10 Tips for Winter Air Conditioner Storage”. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Here is a great list of article release sites and distribution networks. Articles are great fodder for Digg and other social media sites due to their versatility and the potential for creative license above the boundaries of what has to constitute a press release. Before you submit an article to the various networks or a social voting site, post it on your own website via a news page or blog. If you’re taking the time to produce original content, repurpose it on your own domain. And again - don’t write an article that is blatantly marketing your company. Write an objective resource that relates to your product or services and then attach a subtle URL to your site near the bottom.

Just don’t ask me why I didn’t entitle this post “Top 5 ways to Write a Successful Article” or something. Obviously, I need to start taking my own advice. And to stop watching Piranha 2.

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Blog this, and blog that. You’re sick of hearing the word. You’ve met 7-year-old kids who have told you your company needs a blog. What the heck are they, exactly - and why do they make a difference to your marketing mix?

At its simplest definition, a blog is little more than an easily update able, content management system (CMS). At it’s most effective, it gives individuals and groups the ability to become authorities in their chosen field. Coupled with a service or retail based website, an objective and original blog of quality can drive scores of relevant visitors who may then convert to customers, employees or new friends.

But how do blogs relate directly to SEO and SEM in general? The original content your company creates is ideally updated every few days. Indexing spiders are more likely to visit, and look favorably upon, websites that have changed somewhat each and every time they drop in for a visit. This will increase spidering frequency, and also improve your legitimacy in the eyes of the major algorithms. Not to mention all of the unsolicited incoming links that objective resources effortlessly attract.

Make it good and make it frequent. Add good, niche subject matter and the rest just may take care of itself. Alternately, you can always go back to knitting dog sweaters.

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