The document provides practical tips for increasing traffic to corporate websites using both earned and paid techniques. It recommends optimizing websites for search engines through techniques like improving page titles, meta descriptions, and URL structure. It also suggests regularly publishing targeted content, engaging audiences on social media sites, encouraging discussion on blogs, and measuring results to improve engagement and conversions. The key takeaways are to audit websites for SEO improvements, publish and syndicate content widely, engage in brand discussions, and continually test and measure performance.

1. Practical Tools for Increasing Traffic to Your Corporate Website Using “Earned” and Paid Techniques November 17, 2008 Presented by Chris McBride, CEO, Savory Cities www.savorycities.com

2. SEO “Starter Guide” Create unique, accurate page titles Make use of the "description" meta tag Improve the structure of your URLs Make your site easier to navigate Offer quality content and services Write better anchor text Use heading tags appropriately Optimize your use of images Make effective use of robots.txt Be aware of re="nofollow" for links Promote your website in the right ways Make use of free webmaster tools Take advantage of web analytics services

3. Regularly Publish Targeted Content

4. Go To Where Your Audience Is Promote your RSS feeds Offer email updates: Cross-post links to your content on top social bookmarking and social media sites: Cross-post to micro-blogs: Syndicate your images: Syndicate your videos:

5. Image syndication with targeted anchor text = top ranking

6. Video syndication with targeted titles = competitive ranking

7. Encourage Discussion on Your Blog and Beyond Respond quickly to user blog comments and email inquiries Track relevant discussions with web alerts Join the discussion on influential blogs Engage friends and followers on Twitter

8. Be human Be informative Be entertaining Be responsive (leverage search) Early Twitter success: Starbucks 11,752 followers “ Starbucks is the largest buyer of Fair Trade Coffee. Read Dub Hay's blog about this: http://tinyurl.com/64vsth ” (TwitterFeed) RileysCafe 194 followers “ Our first official "Twitter Tuesday” is tomorrow (11-11) all day: 25% off your bill (not your tip people). Spread the word! See you there!”

9. “ Twitter truth: reputation is just not # of followers, its # of followers x avg posts per day. ” - fredwilson

10. Target Influencers with BlogAds What works: Engaging image Strong testimonial Mirrors blog format Provocative copy Lots of link options See also: Federated Media Publishing, Feedburner (Google), Weblogs Inc., Buzzlogic

11. Barter and/or advertise with email marketers

12. Measure Results Set up a free web analytics package Email reports to key stakeholders Identify and improve on key metrics, e.g. bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. A few options: Google Analytics, Clicky (targeted to small sites & blogs), Feedburner (blog stats), 103bees.com (SEO keyword analysis), Clicktale (form usability, heatmaps)

15. Resources Google's SEO Starter Guide: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html Successful Blogads with comments: http://ww3.blogads.com/examples/nominees TwitterFeed: http://www.twitterfeed.com Local restaurant's 'Twitter Tuesday' draws social networking fans by Jeff Raasch: http://www.gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081111/NEWS/711119929/1001/NEWS Google Website Optimzer: 7 Free Resources: http://www.grokdotcom.com/googlewebsiteoptimizer/