More and more website owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content. For example, if you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS ? Will other sites be considered the "real" site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results?

Websites and landing pages face very real trust issues - for consumers they can be a scary and uncertain place. Before people will take a desired action, their concerns and anxieties must be addresses. But how can you do this on landing pages when you only have seconds to establish trust? Tim Ash, SiteTuners CEO and bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization , shared how to effectively use the Four Pillars Of Trust and optimize your online conversion goals.

For mainstream media to survive, if not thrive, it must integrate with the social web and create engagement surrounding content. For social media to remain relevant and compelling, it must work in tandem with news organizations to create a symbiotic storytelling relationship. The future may be a stream with the authenticity of the social web and the reach of mainstream media. Lead by moderator Khris Loux, CEO & Co-Founder,

BJ Fogg, Director, Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University gave the opening keynote on day 2 of Search Engine Strategies San Francisco. BJ is perhaps best known for promoting the concept of "captology," a word he coined to describe the overlap between persuasion and computers. In his book, " Mobile Persuasion ," BJ proposes the theory that the mobile phone will soon become the most powerful channel for persuasion, more influential than TV, radio, print,

TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden gave a solo presentation at Search Engine Strategies 2010 on content marketing optimization. Following is a summary of Lee's comprehensive presentation including 10 essential steps for your organization to achieve success. The core of any search or social media marketing program focuses on content. But what exactly is content marketing? It's creating and distributing relevant content to attract,

The average conversion rate for a website is around 3 percent, but many websites convert at 10 percent or higher.  What are they doing right that you're missing? Bryan Eisenberg, NY Times Bestselling Author gave a solo presentation on the secrets of top converting websites and how you too can achieve high conversion results.   Following is a summary of his presentation. What exactly is conversion rate?  In essence,

Search Engine Strategies San Francisco is upon us and marks a watershed year for this event.  For the first time the annual August conference hosts in San Francisco and integrates with Connected Marketing Week, boosting an already large happening to an all-inclusive digital marketing experience.

Sponsored by JenKaneCo , well known social media evangelist  Brian Solis recently gave a presentation to an enthusiastic group of marketers in downtown Minneapolis to introduce the concepts behind his new book:  Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. The following is an overview of his presentation: Relations vs.

Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO gave the opening keynote of Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis.  Lee spoke on the intersection of SEO and the social web and provided key takeaways for companies on achieving success. As the social web and search engines integrate and innovate tighter, the intersection between search and social is growing more meaningful daily.

Web video is hot. Some say your chance to be a pioneer . How hot, and how much of an opportunity? Recent reports from comScore, consistently say more than 80% of the total U.S. Internet audience views online video in a given month. YouTube's fact sheet states every minute , 24 hours of video is uploaded to the network and 2 billion videos are being watched per day .

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google delivered the morning keynote on day two of Search Engine Strategies Toronto.  Maile discussed Google's approach to helping site owners shared answers to burning questions from the moderator and audience. The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions and answers from the session. How did you get to Google? I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on,

It's a common story: an online marketing professional returns from a conference full of exciting new ideas and tactics, only to fail at selling those ideas internally.  In many cases, marketing and IT/development professionals don't always understand each other, and as a result potentially high value projects stall out and never see the light of day. How can you get your marketing and IT teams working together?  The following panel of speakers moderated by Tracy Falke,

At the recent Minneapolis Integrated Marketing Summit, TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden moderated an exciting panel of a diverse group of SEO professionals: Alex Bennert â€" Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal Brian Kleisner â€" Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw Bill Leake â€" CEO of Apogee Results The focus of the panel was on search engine optimization best practices,

This week, we posted thoughts from a variety of marketing and web professionals on social media strategy before tactics . It's an ongoing debate, but the consensus among the marketing and PR crowd is clear:  strategy before tactics is the logical approach for businesses to take when engaging in social media. Sarah Evans provides a clever analogy: Would you pick up a phone and randomly dial 10-digits? Unless you're prank calling, probably not.

Sponsored posts have been a hot topic in the blogosphere and among marketers the last few years. What exactly is a sponsored post?  The simple answer is:  a company pays a blogger cash to blog about their product or service.  This is different than an advertorial since the blogger is paid cash to write the content as opposed to the sponsor creating the message. An entire cottage industry of companies such as IZEA,

At Online Marketing Blog, content marketing is frequently a hot topic.  And with good reason:  it's a vital skill for marketers. Not only do we at TopRank Online Marketing see great results implementing content marketing for clients, but the industry as a whole sees it as a clear trend.  Consider the following stats: 6 in 10 marketers plan to spend more on content marketing in 2010.

TopRank Online Marketing has been working with PRWeb providing SEO consulting services for nearly one year. PRWeb was founded in 1997 to help small businesses and communications professionals leverage the web to share their news directly with the public. As part of this process PRWeb lead the way for the "direct-to-consumer" press release, enabling companies to communicate their news directly to customers, prospects, analysts and the media. During the past decade,

Links are the lifeblood of the web.  Without fresh links, your website has no authority in the engines or consistent referral traffic.  Some companies and individuals appear to attract links without really trying.  Others struggle and never break through to the point of building links at increasing velocity. We've shared plenty of linkbuilding tactics at Online Marketing Blog and it's an ongoing popular topic for search marketers.

Last week, I was in Las Vegas for the LeadingRE annual conference and marketing technology event speaking on social media and SEO strategies for real estate professionals. It's always interesting to see where different verticals are at with their willingness to embrace social channels, and I'm pleased to report the top realtors globally are already engaging, or at the least starting to define their path.

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.] It's an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We've never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data. Surprisingly some don't initially like web metrics.