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Read more in-depth about how good blog content can boost organic search in this article from Inc.com here.

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presenation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

Download and listen to the Audio recording: MP3 (34 MB)

For Immediate Release

Fortune 500 Company Adopts WordPress To Answer Credit Questions

Countrywide’s CreditDemystified.com Isn’t a Blog, or Is It?

MADISON, WI (Janaury 17, 2007) Web development companies are increasingly recognizing the potential of WordPress as a content management system (CMS). CreditDemystified.com, an educational site developed for Countrywide Home Loans, illustrates how a corporate microsite can successfully be adapted to the blog platform.

The microsite, developed by Netconcepts, is designed to help visitors become credit savvy by providing simple answers to credit questions. Although the microsite’s platform is WordPress, CreditDemystified.com is far from a traditional blog.

Countrywide Home Loans chose to work with Netconcepts because of the company’s experience developing search engine optimal sites (SEO).

“The SEO benefits of WordPress are obvious,” said Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts’ Founder and President. “‘Powered by WordPress’ is a phrase seen on millions of blogs. But one wouldn’t normally associate that phrase with any other type of website other than a blog. I predict that’s about to change as search marketers begin to appreciate the SEO benefits of running WordPress on microsites.”

Netconcepts’ own corporate site switched from a home-grown CMS to WordPress in August 2006 and showed a significant increase in traffic in the following months. Based on this experience, Netconcepts designed CreditDemystified.com to take full advantage of WordPress’ SEO power.

“We’ve equipped the site with all the SEO goodies like a tag cloud, tag pages, RSS, my SEO Title Tag plugin, and Technorati tags. One breakthrough was adapting the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to handle static pages, and not just posts,” Spencer continued.

The directive for Netconcepts’ website and SEO design team was simple, create a search engine optimized site using WordPress that doesn’t look like a blog.

CreditDemystified.com, designed to make credit information accessible and easily understood by visitors at a glance, has a wealth of credit related content covering credit repair to debt management. For many consumers, the topic of credit can be dull or intimidating, so the site includes fun and quick review elements such as the Credit Intelligence Quiz (CQ Quiz). The quiz provides a score, and includes useful information for participants to improve their credit knowledge.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

Webfeeds — XML files containing a list of late-breaking content items — also have a positive effect on search rankings by encouraging additional inbound linking. These could be blog posts, news headlines, new or best-selling products, clearance items, etc.

A feed will be in either the Really Simple Syndication standard or the ATOM standard and typically contains information such as titles, descriptions, Web addresses and publication dates.

By providing one or more feeds on your Web site, you can get syndicated onto other sites that wish to use your content to augment their own. This will result in deep links into your pages of late-breaking content. For example, Slashdot.org has news headlines and associated links syndicated onto numerous other Web sites, including Nanodot.org.

What is it about links that make them so crucial to search engine optimization? From the engines’ perspective, links connote importance. In a way, a link acts like a vote. A Web site with few inbound links won’t appear to the search engines to be worthy of a top ranking for any popular search keywords.

Not all links are created equal, either. A link from Jim-Bob’s personal home page won’t benefit nearly as much as a link from CNN.com. Furthermore, the anchor (i.e. underlined) text in links gets special consideration by the search engines: the keywords in that anchor text are associated with the page that is linked to. That’s why a search for “miserable failure” returns such politically charged results, even though the words “miserable” and “failure” appear nowhere on the HTML of those top-ranking pages.

Two great ways to acquire links with keyword-rich anchor text are blogging and syndicating your content through Webfeeds. It starts with naming your blog with your targeted keywords. Incorporating keywords into the titles of your blog posts and the titles of your RSS items also will yield a rankings benefit.

Over time, the major engines are going to use Webfeed technology in more sophisticated ways. Yahoo currently offers a Web-based aggregator called My Yahoo that you can add RSS feeds to with one click, using the “Add to My Yahoo” link that appears in some listings in the Yahoo search results.

MSN Search lets you subscribe to search results as RSS feeds. Some specialized feed search engines like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub let you subscribe to an RSS feed of search results that pull data from an index of Webfeeds, but I’m confident the major engines will offer the same sort of functionality.

Problem:

Although Steve Spangler has this great persona in the offline world, it wasn’t translating very well to the online world.

“Our ecommerce site was terrible. No, it was worse than that. The website was abysmal,” says Steve. “I was getting one million viewers a week on TV but I was ashamed to send people to our site. After a first re-design (by another company) there will still problems. They knew nothing about SEO or how to translate the Wow Factor into sales. They could make a site that was aesthetically pleasing but they didn’t know how to wrestle the credit cards out of people’s wallets.”

After researching the problem Steve discovered GravityMarket and began a dialogue that continues to this day.

Solution:

The engagement with GravityMarket began with a website audit. We evaluated their existing site and made a whole raft of recommendations on how to improve it or do it better, as far as usability, functionality, search engine visibility, and making the site stickier. All of this had the goal of changing the site so that people will want to return to it again and again.

Steve Spangler Science liked the audit so much they asked us to implement our recommendations through a site re-design which we did, vastly improving the functionality of their ecommerce shopping cart site, and getting every page into Google. The whole site was re-built from the ground up to be search engine optimal.

Steve comments: “GravityMarket taught us to do things differently, to think differently about our web content and to write differently. I realized I was searching for the wrong thing. I had to learn to see the invisible stuff behind the web pages that make them rank well in the search engines. I had to stop thinking like a cataloger and instead draw upon my TV skills from the Four O’Clock News, I had to grab someone’s attention and keep them from clicking off to another site and GravityMarket helped me realize this”.

We also wanted to convey how entertaining Steve was. We did that through installing fun product demonstration video clips on the site and then later through suggesting Steve start a blog. We helped Steve through the whole blogging process: evaluating blogging software, designing the look-and-feel, and training Steve on how to write for blogs.

“The blog came about when I came to the GravityMarket team with an idea for a site re-design and they replied with the blog concept. What’s more, their concept was going to cost one-third less and be more effective than my original idea. I thought this honest, collaborative approach was great and in retrospect the blog was the right next thing to do. It gave our site more punch. Now it will become the cornerstone of my new speaker website.”

The GravityMarket team also assisted with email marketing: email strategy, with template creation, delivery and tracking, ensuring the goals of increasing visibility and usability were adhered to at each step.

Results:

Steve Spangler’s ecommerce site has grown in the past 18 months with revenue increasing three figures to mid five-figures a month..

Steve’s blog, although relatively new as of this year has already achieved a PageRank score on a par with his ecommerce site.

“A detailed analysis of our print catalog marketing plan revealed a direct correlation between catalog distribution and increased web traffic. However, a survey of our top customers revealed that they turned to our website to get MORE information on a product that interested them. Our high-content website not only answered their questions but prompted them to buy additional products that “grabbed” their attention.”

“Together we worked to make a very successful arm of my business. I am a tough client and I don’t have a six-figure annual web budget. Why did I agree to publish information in this case study? Am I concerned about our competitors getting a hold of it? Sure. But I have trust in the GravityMarket team to protect our innovative ideas and creative marketing strategies. Anyone can hire a web design company to “open up shop” on the internet. But just because a store is open doesn’t mean that anyone is shopping or buying. They taught us how to turn shoppers into buyers and the key is to have creative ideas, to think differently and to be innovative. It’s easy for our competitors to imitate (and we see it every day), but the real secret to internet marketing is to innovate. That’s why our competitors will always be 8 month behind. Thanks GravityMarket.” - Steve Spangler