By Meg Archer, SEM Specialist

When a site links to you, what do you do? 90 gives advice on how to create a linking strategy that is beneficial to your SEO plan as a whole.

To implement a strong SEO strategy, businesses must create a relevant linking strategy.  To be most effective, sometimes businesses or agencies must use another site to syndicate content. As is often the case with third-party listings, this relationship can get tricky. But, if you follow some simple rules, your site will reap the benefits of well planned and executed SEO and linking strategies.

Most obviously, if your content is syndicated on a partner site, ensure it links to your original article. Simon Heseltine, director of SEO at AOL Inc. and writer for Search Engine Watch, supports this recommendation. “This tells the search engines the location of the original, after they determine its duplicate content.” If the syndicate includes a link back to your original content, not simply your homepage, this will build credibility for your site.

However, it is important not to have a link to the syndication on your site because this creates reciprocal linking. We strongly recommend against reciprocal linking because it often comes from link farms, is inorganic and can negatively impact your site ranking in search results.

By Amanda Jurgens, Account Coordinator

In today’s digital world, consumers are flooded with marketing emails.  How do marketers create email campaigns that stand out and avoid the dreaded “unsubscribe?”

Hours of design, copy and proofing go into sending a marketing email. But, if emails do not solicit a response, why open them? Even marketers are guilty of the mass inbox delete. Despite this, we still analyze open and click-through rates and wonder what went wrong.

Customers are inundated with emails. Nearly everything you buy online or in a store opts you into email marketing campaigns. Often, consumers end up on a list they were never interested in and certainly don’t care to receive nearly constant communication. In a study by ExactTarget, researchers found that 9 out of 10 subscribers later opt-out of email communication, citing that mailings are too frequent, contain repetitive content or are irrelevant because the consumer didn’t realize they were opting in to begin with.

So, as a marketer, how do you convince someone who has already expressed interest in your communications (whether intentionally or not) to take the next step and actually open the email? The answer seems all too obvious: by creating emails that your customers want to read.

Craft emails containing information that makes the reader’s job easier. It is as simple as that. Create emails that offer a reward, emails that make information easier to locate, or emails that offer some tangible value to your particular audience.

By Erin Wilson, Senior Account Coordinator

90octane offers up a little analysis on our favorite creative online marketing campaigns of 2010.

2010 proved to be a year for pushing the limits when it came to online media. With the enormous growth of social media and the ability of the consumers to use social media to interact with businesses, companies had to do something different to stand out. Below is the 90octane review of the most creative campaigns of 2010:

· Old Spice: The social media campaign created by Old Spice and marketing partner Weiden & Kennedy was a hit immediately. Making over 150 videos within a three day time period, the videos were tailor-made to the company’s fans on YouTube and drastically increased Old Spice’s interaction with its customers. Old Spice took ‘real time’ social media to the extreme and was able to increase Facebook interaction by 800%, website traffic by 300%, and made itself the most-viewed YouTube channel.

Posted By: Nicole Johnson, Account Manager

Don’t Discount Bing When Planning Your 2011 SEO Marketing Strategy

The buzz about Bing has saturated the online marketing industry over the past year, yet some marketers still are not paying much attention, and fewer still are taking action. We all know what Bing is, but not everyone knows how to change a marketing strategy to accommodate the growing search engine.

Despite marketing companies’ reluctance to evolve, a new partnership between Bing and seasoned search engine vet Yahoo (a.k.a YaBing), has positioned Bing for major growth in the coming year. We are already seeing changes, and Search Engine Land recently cited a study from comScore suggesting that Bing now controls 28 percent of all search traffic on the Web.

Bing can no longer be ignored. It simply isn’t enough to focus marketing efforts on search giants like Google anymore. According to a source with Search Engine Land, the search ad network Chikita has found that marketers who choose not to optimize their sites for Bing are losing out on as much as 9% of their potential search traffic—which could also translate into lost conversions!

ReviewerOfSites.com claims that Bing searchers are more likely than Google searchers to click on an ad or listing. They also claim that online marketers who fail to optimize their site for Bing are missing out on 13% of their potential click volume.

So what to do? There are a number of Bing optimization tips out there, but here are a few we thought were most helpful, courtesy of ReviewerOfSites.com:

• Check your robot.txt file to ensure that your site is allowing the Bing spider to crawl its content.
• The type of content on your site is also important according to the Daily Tech Post. Bing favors content that is between 300 and 500 words per page and gives more importance to the page title than to the page content.
• Check to make sure all site pages are actually being indexed by the search engine. Type ‘site:www.yoursite.com’ in the Bing search box, and hit Enter.
• Include Bing webmaster tools verification code on your site.
• Run your paid campaigns in Microsoft AdCenter to target Bing searchers.

Posted by: Amanda Rick, Senior Account Coordinator

Only 66% of businesses who use Groupon report a profit. Yet, according to the popular company, approximately 95% of these businesses would advertise again and new companies are clamoring to be listed. Have businesses stopped caring about profit margin or is there something larger at work here?

Online coupon sites, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, offer daily deal discounts for local businesses through their websites, email and mobile applications. Because the sites have a pre-determined purchase quantity, users feel a sense of urgency to grab the specials before they’re gone and to share the deal with their friends. And those purchasing the deals are not the only ones who benefit. These sites offer popular platforms that don’t charge companies to list deals; they simply take a percentage of the sales.