5 Questions with….Lee Odden

Lee Odden - Top Rank Marketing

There are 3 situations in which I perform speaking or training tasks. The first is speaking at conferences like Pubcon, Search Engine Strategies, DMA or PRSA events. Blogging, social networking and speaking at events pretty much makes up the bulk of our marketing efforts. Topics at conferences tend to focus on what will draw attendees and what conferences have come to associate TopRank with: SEO and public relations, blogging, social media and online reputation management.

I also get hired to speak or do training for certain conferences or associations such as the Direct Marketing Association with the Search Engine Marketing Certification program, or the 2-day Social Media Smarts workshop.

The third type of speaking or training event I’m often involved with is when companies want to bring someone in to speak at a company event on up and coming topics and strategic focus for search, PR and social media or to do in-house training of interdepartmental teams.

You have often pointed out the necessity of having good fresh content on your blog. Have you ever had writers block? What options does a blogger have when they just can’t seem to focus?

Writers block rears its ugly head a lot more often than people think. I’ve been actively blogging for over 5 years and sometimes it’s not just writers block, but a time and resource issue. TopRankMarketing.com is a respected company and we’re pretty busy. That makes me busy and sometimes spending the kind of time I would prefer on writing and researching a post simply isn’t available.

The way to get around focus or time issues is to be proactive. I keep 10-20 draft posts in our blog at any given time. Rather than sitting down and writing a 1000 word post in one sitting, which still happens at 3 am from time to time, I add to them over time. That makes it a bit easier from a resource standpoint. We also do regular features which are easier posts to do, but also things people look forward to such as reviewing SEO blogs each week, running Reader Polls, interviews or crowd sourced posts from Twitter and LinkedIn.

We know Search Engines are always changing there dynamics and because of this Web Marketing companies always have to be on there toes. I preach that being interactive online is at least equally as important as SEO. What do you think? And what should we watch for in the SEO future?

Yes, being social online is very important as a standalone marketing activity but also because the byproduct of being social creates content. That content might get passed around, attract links and motivate bloggers and journalists to write about you.

As long as web developers keep making web sites that don’t play well with search engines, there will always be a need for SEO as its traditionally defined. What I think you’ll find after talking to other long time SEO consultants is that keyword expertise and pull marketing insight is invaluable in many other online marketing disciplines ranging from public relations to social media. Anything that can be searched on can be optimized. As long as people can search, there will be a need to SEO.

Future SEO is taking more of a well rounded approach to marketing online rather than focusing exclusively on standard search engine rankings. Everything from Universal search to personalized to social search makes what was previously a 2 or three dimensional discipline a multidimensional expertise.

If I was starting a new e-commerce site today with some SEO friendly features already built in, what software should I be considering?

The answer to that question needs some budget insight first. A 500 product store online has different needs than a store with 5 million SKUs. The fundamental features to look for are: unique and editable title tags & meta description tags, ability to include descriptive text on top level category pages, sub category pages and of course, individual product pages, dynamic population of alt text on images, intuitive URLs, flat site architecture – avoid too many levels deep, ability to export HTML and XML site map files automatically, and many, many others.

Also, no matter what, an ecommerce site can benefit via SEO with a blog. Ecommerce site blogs can present new products, tips on using products, solicit customer generated content, run promotions and offer product support information.

What do you do when you have some spare time to yourself? Any hobbies?

Spare time? What’s that? I spend as much time as I can with my 3 little musketeers plus a bit of travel, cooking, working out, watching movies, games, some sports and gadgets.

Tags: blog, conference, consulting, content, craig sutton, ecommerce, interview, lee odden, SEO, speaking, toprank

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.