Do you represent one of the few healthcare institutions still afraid to step in the social-media waters?  Well, you can sit comfortably on the beach, but know that your rivals may already be there.   Not possible, you say?  Check Ed Bennet’s hospital social network list to be sure, which accounted for 441 hospitals as of November 15.

Susannah Fox, with Pew, says,

“They [e-patients] are part of the conversation. And that, I think, is an indicator of where we could be going in terms of the future of participatory medicine.”

Are you a part of the conversation?  See my prescriptions for how to boost your hospital’s online presence or Phil Bauman’s list of 140 healthcare uses for Twitter.

Interested in full-service healthcare online marketing?  See more reasons why you should be and case studies from Fathom SEO’s healthcare portfolio.

Photo courtesy of M. Keefe via Flickr

Work the headline the way a supermodel works the runway

You’ve got to OWN your headline to attract people’s attention–and Google’s attention.  The more competitive the keywords you’re vying for, the more important the headline will be to ranking on the 1st page of Google’s search results.  If you don’t know how to write a headline, try Copyblogger’s “How to Write Magnetic Headlines” or “10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work.”  Get keywords in your headline, unless you DON’T want your release to rank for them.   When needed, a generic description of your company that uses keywords can be used when no keywords match your subject matter.  Example:

• Keyword phrase: online marketing

• News release topic: Fathom SEO’s new website

• Keyword-lacking headline:  Fathom SEO Unveils New Website

• Keyword-including headline: Online Marketing Leader Unveils New Website

Pro tip: PRWeb says the ideal headline for Web distribution should be no more than 80 characters, including spaces.

Hit the hyperlinks

Use your links freely.  Pony up the $200 to take advantage of anchor text along with other SEO goodies.  Use strategic keywords where appropriate, and don’t be afraid to link several times to the same page, especially an internal page on your own website  related to the topic of your release.  PRWeb strongly recommends a maximum of 1 hyperlink for every 100 words, which it claims is the limit for inclusion within Google News.   Before submitting, test your links in the preview mode to make sure they are formatted correctly and pointing to the right websites.  After your wildly successful launch, check your website’s analytics to see how many visits you get from PRWeb or its syndication partners.  I have seen certain releases bring steady streams of referral traffic years after initial publication.

Pro tip: You can put hyperlinks in the introductory summary, the italicized sentence(s) preceding the release body.

Give your audience something good

This may sound elementary, but if your press release topic does not resonate with a broad enough audience, your ability to draw qualified attention in mass numbers will be limited.  Consider what you could announce that taps into the current cultural and economic climate.  Tying in your products/services to current events or killer statistics can be easy ways to garner mass appeal.  Releases about new products/services, special events, free stuff and/or price cuts also tend to do well.

Pro tip: Google Trends, Google Suggest, and Twitter’s “trending topics” use up-to-the-minute search data to show you what people are talking about and searching for.

Use the Tweetit Twitter tie-in

Speaking of Twitter … You need to have a Twitter account in order to use this function.  Enter in your account name, password, and a preview tweet to describe your release.  Don’t forget to hit “save.”

Pro tip: Customize your tweet by going beyond the scripted sentence (”See my press release here”).   Add a descriptive phrase or two about the subject matter, using keywords if possible.   Remember, your goal is to entice people to read the release after seeing your tweet.  Accounting for the automatically-added release URL, you have space for 100+ characters in the box: use it.

Put keywords in the URL

Found in the “advanced features” is another reason to go for the $200 “SEO visibility” level.  For a double dose of keyword relevance, include the most important keyword(s) in the URL as well as the headline.  There is a 25-character limit on each side of the designated slash, so experiment until you get the ideal combination.

Pro tip: Be sure to place underscores or hyphens between words.

Get visual

Show us your pics!  A picture (embedded) is worth … $200.  Images can be included as attachments (hello, company logo) and embedded in the release body as part of the “SEO visibility” level along with anchor-text hyperlinks and keywords in the URL .  Do you have a video on YouTube, Yahoo! Video, or Google Video? Provided the budget, go all-in for $360 and embed it in your release for some real sizzle.

Pro tip: Use the “preview” mode before the final submission to see what your release looks like on PRWeb’s console.  The image may break up certain paragraphs awkwardly or disrupt the text alignment; go back and adjust the text accordingly or use a different (or re-sized) image.

Keep it clean

Clean writing not only creates a positive impression, but  good grammar, punctuation, and spelling prevent giving the impression of being careless, uneducated, or unprofessional.  A news release may be self-promotional, but don’t make it a pure advertisement.  Stay away from marketing hyperbole and excessive CAPS or punctuation!!!!.  Nothing says “spam” or “teen-texting-on-a-mobile-phone” more.

Pro tip: PRWeb offers various press-release-writing tutorials.  Also, a gratuitous link to my previous tips for things to clean up in your online copy.

Show me the money (quote)

Solicit a quotation from somebody important to speak with authority about the press release topic.  Be sure the box in the “advanced features” is checked so you can have it stand out.

When you’re in preview mode, just as with embedded images, check for the highlighted quotation breaking the text alignment.  There are two ways to fix a rampaging quote:

• Change the selected quotation (provided there are at least 2 sentences) by toggling back-and-forth from the “advanced features” page to the preview mode.

OR

• Go back to the release body and edit the copy with extra line breaks or make other formatting adjustments.

Pro tip: If a company authority person is too busy or otherwise incapable of providing the quotation, write it yourself with attribution and ask the person to review/tweak it for their approval.

Now start spreadin’ the news.

Photo courtesy of Nicholas Kennedy via Flickr.

Use ‘Bid Adjustment’ Ad Scheduling in Google AdWords to Get an ROI Edge
By looking at pay-per-click trends you may notice that weekends bring in low-quality leads. You may have also noticed that on certain days of the week your cost-per-lead tends to spike and on other days of the week your cost-per-lead tends to drop. As a result, you do a few things to improve lead quality, total profit dollars and overall ROI.

Three Critical Questions When Evaluating Your Website’s Technical SEO
What is the most important element when building a house, an education, a sports franchise, etc? The answer is both logical and simple – a strong foundation. Once that foundation is put in place, adding snazzy details can really finish off a truly worthwhile product.

Do You Have a Handle on Search Engine Rankings?
Search engine rankings can be deceptive. You get a phrase in your mind and you check it out on Google or Bing and you’re impressed with a #3 ranking. Big deal. If it drives traffic and converts, then you’re on to something. In many cases, it’s just a ranking. Maybe you got 18 visitors, or maybe just 8. Did the ranking really make a difference to your bottom line?

A Great New Way to Make Friends
One of the biggest challenges for a successful YouTube channel can be growing a healthy base of subscribers and friends. Sure, sometimes the “magic” happens and one of your videos hits the perfect note at the perfect time, leading to an explosion of views, subscribers, and friends, but for the most part, growing this fan-base tends to be a very active process. It takes time to find the right channels to friend and subscribe to, as video titles and channel names don’t always utilize the terms you’d be searching for. Thankfully, YouTube has a new tool in the pipeline that should take some of the edge off of this time consuming task.

The City Club of Cleveland
850 Euclid Ave., Second Floor
Cleveland, OH 44114

Description
Your organization has started blogging, tweeting and updating your Facebook status, but is it working? If you’re like many communications professionals today, you may not be sure how to quantify the success of your social media efforts. Measuring social media is very different from what you may be doing to measure a PR campaign’s ROI. With social media, you want to be able to measure readers’ actions in response to your news, not just how many people read it.

Get ready to throw out your clips, circulation numbers and impression statistics and join us for an exciting panel discussion on social media ROI measurement. Our panel of Cleveland’s most savvy social media experts will provide you with advice on setting goals for your social media campaign and arm you with the tools you will need to generate both quantitative and qualitative results.

Speakers
John Heaney, Vice President, NESCO and Principal, Orange Envelopes
Dominic Litten, Senior Account Executive, Fathom SEO
George Nemeth, Chief Blogging Officer, Brewed Fresh Daily
Jason Therrien, President, thunder::tech

Moderator
Michael DeAloia, “Tech Czar”

Host/Sponsor
Business Wire, Cleveland

Well, there is another window of comparison in addition to the previous standards.  Google Analytics offers an easy way to see how your website stacks up to industry competition.

Benchmarking Report: "Visits"

Google Analytics Benchmarking: What it is

The “benchmarking” report in Google Analytics allows you to see how your site compares to other sites in your industry that have opted to share their data anonymously with Google via Google Analytics.  You can sort by size and business categories.  For example, you can compare your site to all sites in your industry, or just those in your weight class (classified by Google based on visits): small, medium or large.  Business categories can be broad (computers & electronics), narrow (hardware) or sometimes narrower (storage)

How to set it up

In Google Analytics,  the “benchmarking” report is the second item in the “Visitors” navigation, under the “overview” item.   In order to view the 6 reports, you will  need to be opted in to the anonymous sharing of your data with Google.   This may have been done during the  analytics account set-up, but if it hasn’t, you will be prompted to adjust your settings  in order to gain access to the reports.  Essentially, you give some to get some.  Google wants  you to share your data with its benchmarking pool so that it can build its ever-expanding list of vertical benchmarking categories.  In exchange, you get the reports.

Google Anayltics "benchmarking" location in navigation

What to do with it

Not sure how successful your SEO efforts are relative to your peers?  See in how many categories  you meet or exceed the industry average. Each individual benchmarking report also links to a corresponding report in Google Analytics that allows you to further analyze your own site.  For example, the “average time on site” benchmarking report links to the individual “length of visit” report for your site, so you can quickly see just how many visits to your site are above the 2-min. average Google says is the industry benchmark you exceeded in a given time period.

Benchmarking reports can be used to isolate areas of your website that need improvement.  If your bounce rates measure far above the industry competition, then you know you need to look at the usability of your top landing pages and see what more you could do to keep visitors on your site and convert them to leads and revenue.

Got Google Analytics?  What are you waiting for?  Go set up or check your benchmarking reports now.  Learn more about where you stand against your rivals.   Knowledge is power.

Panelists: Dominic Litten, Jess Baker
Moderator: Cathy Zapata
Location: Windows on the River, Bridgeview Room
Type: Luncheon

It has been a long time since our last event that covered search in a broad sense, but the search landscape has not been standing still. That means that we have a lot to talk about! Microsoft has a new search engine, video and social sites are more important than ever, and there are powerful new ways to measure and manage your campaigns.

Come learn from some of the area’s best and brightest as our panel discusses the tactics and strategies of SEO at a global scale.

Register for this Event

If you missed the announcement earlier today, Microsoft announced that they were bringing Twitter search to their Bing search results.  After finally playing with Bing’s new Twitter search results integration – for, oh, 10 minutes – Google announces on their own blog that they too will be adding Twitter updates to their search results.  What a coincidence!

From Google:

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

From Bing:

Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.

Also from the “not a coincidence” file, both search teams spoke (or will be speaking) today the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.  Take that Apple headlines.

RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my! (Official Google Blog)
Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You (Bing Blog)

Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced that it too had stopped using the meta keyword tag for search results. Web programmers figured that, since the last major search engine had stopped indexing it, the meta keyword tag was finally dead.

Not so fast. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land recently tested the policy by including a line of gibberish in his site’s meta keyword tag. Sure enough, Search Engine Land now shows up as the top result for “xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk” in Yahoo.

Yahoo issued the following statement after they found out about the test:

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

So meta keywords still do matter to Yahoo!. In fact, Yahoo!’s recently updated Help page encourages programmers to optimize the meta keyword tag. Even though the tag now receives the “lowest ranking signal” in Yahoo!’s algorithm, it’s still worth taking a few seconds to fill in 3-5 keywords and possibly giving your page a small boost in Yahoo!.

It is great to see Google offering practical tips to people or companies looking to improve their online reputation. As an online reputation monitoring strategist I am encouraged that Google is taking steps to educate their audience on this topic. Reputation management can be a daunting task for any company or search engine marketer looking to repair or improve upon negative publicity.

Susan approaches the problem at hand with three strategies. Here are some additional tips to help with your online reputation management campaign:

Think twice
If you decide to put your information online, it is crucial to determine the right keywords to use. Whether it is the name of a company, product, or individual – the key to success is to remain consistent. URLs for online profiles are typically derived from the user name you select, so be mindful of your final choice. Your Facebook, Twitter or YouTube account can rank right behind your website on a search for your company name.

Tackle it at the source
You noticed a forum post from 2004 ranking #57 on a search for your company name. If you are trying to get this post removed from a site to lower the ranking, the worst thing you can do is reply to the thread. Adding new content to the thread can increase the chance that Google will re-crawl this page and increase the ranking of the forum post. Leave it alone!

Proactively publish information
Be very careful to the way you go about responding to any reputation issues. If not handled correctly, a small campfire can turn into a raging forest fire. Don’t add more fuel to the fire if you can help it. If a blogger is not responsive to your rebuttal of false claims, consider taking the conversation offline with a phone call. Some journalists strive to post controversial topics, but make sure they aren’t denying your right to respond. I have seen a well written response denied by the journalist because they don’t want to cater to the reasoning of the company they slammed. As unfair as it is, it is a reality for a blog that has comment moderation.

Publishing new and positive content across the web is the best thing you can do to improve your online reputation. There are numerous social networks, wikis, article and press release websites that can be used to spread your name and positive image, along with improving your inbound links as entrance points to your website.

View more reputation monitoring articles by Fathom SEO.

Sizing Up The Stats – Benchmarking in Google Analytics
In previous editions of the NewsWire, we’ve looked at how to get the most out of Google Analytics. From establishing goals and drilling down to visitor profile data, there are many ways to refine the data so that you can see how your search engine optimization efforts are impacting your business objectives. At some point you may feel that you have a good handle on where you are, where you’ve been and where you want to go to improve a particular metric. But you are not operating in a vacuum. At some point you might ask yourself, “How do we stack up against the competition?”

Big Changes Coming to Email Deliverability
A recent report has shaken up the email marketing industry and confirmed what many people have suspected for some time now: Top ISPs are now starting to measure the open and click rate of your messages and are using it in conjunction with traditional spam-identifying tactics to grade your overall sender reputation. How will this affect you and what can you do to take advantage of it?

Put Search Engine Rankings in Perspective
It’s easy to get addicted to checking search engine rankings. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t check rankings for something. And yet, truth be told, companies working with search engine optimization agencies should spend less time focusing on rankings and look more at sales revenue.

Using the Rules of Shot Composition to Improve your Online Videos
Learn the shot composition rules you should be using to enhance the quality of your online video footage. Steve Kozak discusses the rules of shot composition and how they can improve your video footage.