It’s very easy to make small mistakes with your company’s B2B SEO campaign that can have lingering effects on its long term success. Many B2B companies don’t even realize they are making these simple mistakes and can’t understand why their SEO campaign is under-delivering on their expectations. If your B2B SEO campaign seems to be suffering, double check that you aren’t accidentally making these 3 SEO mistakes before deciding to chuck your campaign.

1. Relying too heavily on industry jargon for your main keywords.
This is a common SEO problem in many B2B industries, especially for tech or software companies. You might rely too heavily on industry specific keywords (like “contact reasoning engine”) that don’t mean anything to your target audience. Instead of “contact reasoning engine,” they are searching for “call center analytics.” You have to remember to take user intent into account when conducting B2B SEO keyword research. You might be using industry approved jargon that your top competitors are also targeting, but unless you are taking the time to educate potential clients with your content marketing you can’t assume they know what those keywords mean or are using those them to search.

Obviously you don’t want to forgo all industry keywords, as those are important to building your credibility as an industry expert. However it’s important to incorporate related keywords that the average user might use to find your products/services.

2. Keeping your content on lockdown.
I’ve noticed that a lot of B2B websites keep a large portion of their content behind a login, trying to keep some content accessible only by their customers. While I understand wanting to provide unique and exclusive content for your current customers (as an added incentive), you don’t want to lock all of your content away. Anything that requires a login to be accessed can’t be read and indexed by the search engines; making is useless for your B2B SEO. If you are going to lock a large percentage of your content away, it’s important to balance the content scales by producing similar amounts of content that is crawl-able. A B2B business blog is a great way to consistently produce fresh content that is easily indexed by the search engines and you’re your brand connect with potential customers (they need content too!)

3. Failing to take your sales cycle into account.
You can’t rush your B2B sales cycle any more than you can rush your SEO. Most B2B sales cycles are much longer than the average B2C sales cycle. After all, it only takes 5-10 minutes to decide where you are going for lunch today while it takes 5-10 months to decide to purchase a $50,000 business software solution. Many B2B companies forget to take their sales cycle into account when measuring the success of their SEO campaign. You can’t begin to measure the effectiveness of your SEO until AFTER your normal sales cycle has completed.

Below you will find our favorite blog posts that are related to SEO, search engine marketing and social media marketing from this past week. Please feel free to visit each, we hope you find them as helpful as we do!

How To Decide If You Or Your Business Should Use Twitter [Infographic]
This post includes an infographic to help you determine how you are going to use Twitter or if you should stay clear.
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How to Attract Readers and Search Engines to Your Blog
This post includes tips for improving your blog’s appeal and making the most of your blog.
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Nobody Wants a Website
Websites shouldn’t be built for businesses; they should be built for the customer.
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Web Design Produces 353% Traffic Increase in Two Months
This post discusses how SEO matters in website design.
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3 Tips to Build Blog Momentum
This post includes three suggestions to reach the promised land of blog notoriety.
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The Difference Between Benefits and Features
This post states that the most relevant marketing content is focused on benefits.
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Getting Back to Basics: Marrying Social Media with the Basic Foundation of PR
All social media efforts should map back to your company’s business objectives in order to be successful.
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Top 6 Qualities of a Good Headline
Sharing blog posts in social media places more importance on the title of your posts than in the past.
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Digital timelines will force people (and brands) to think before they act
Facebook’s Timeline feature means that the rest of your life will be chronicled and archived publicly for the whole world to see.
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Social Clutter or Social Clarity?
This post provides tips to manage all that’s going on in social media.
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These were our favorite SEO, SEM and Social Media blog posts this week. Check back next week for more top posts!

We have compiled the latest news and updates from the big three, Google, Bing and Yahoo as it relates to SEO and the search engines overall.

WHAT’S NEW THIS WEEK WITH GOOGLE:
Rich Snippet Instructional Videos
Google has put together a series of tutorial videos to help get you started or fine tune your rich snippets which provide you with the ability to help Google highlight aspects of your page.

WHAT’S NEW THIS WEEK WITH YAHOO:
Yahoo! Opens Content Analysis Technology to all Developers
Yahoo! has opened up its content analysis technology to the world to help developers build their own fantastic experiences for their sites and users.

WHAT’S NEW THIS WEEK WITH BING:
Out with the Old, In with the New: Bing Takes Stock of 2011 and The Year Ahead
Bing shares the results of a survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults on how they felt about 2011 and how they plan to ring in 2012.

So there you have it, the latest news in search from Google, Bing and Yahoo. We will be bringing you more exciting updates and news related to SEO and the world of search engine optimization each week, so check back often!

Below you will find our favorite blog posts that are related to SEO, search engine marketing and social media marketing from this past week. Please feel free to visit each, we hope you find them as helpful as we do!

How YouTube Became A Community
YouTube never really felt like a place for community. It always felt like a way channel to distribute content but the latest updates change everything.
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What to Look for in Freelance Writers
This post includes a few tips to consider to find good external content contributors.
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4 Reasons To Partner With An Agency For SEO
This post includes 4 reasons a dedicated firm might be the better bet than hiring an in-house SEO.
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How To Respond To Negative Reviews
This post provides 5 tips for responding to negative customer reviews online.
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Google+ Business Pages – the Bad and the Brilliant!
This post takes a look at Google+ business brand pages.
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Top 20 Social Media Do’s and Don’ts
This post outlines 10 social media “dos” and 10 social media “don’ts” for business.
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Is your SEO copy crap? 8 ways to tell
If your SEO copy sucks, that means that it’s time to send it back to the writer and it fixed.
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Twitter: The New Résumé
This post outlines how employers are using Twitter when hiring.
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5 Ways to Turbo Charge Your Blog’s Traffic
Writing fantastic content is no longer good enough to bring traffic to your blog. This post includes 5 ways to make your blog traffic surge.
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How to Get More Customers with Local Search Marketing: 10 Optimization Tips
This post discusses ten solid tips to ensure any local business has the opportunity to outrank their competitors.
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These were our favorite SEO, SEM and Social Media blog posts this week. Check back next week for more top posts!

Every time a client asks me about how they can improve their PageRank, I have to cringe a little. Time and time again I have explained that PageRank is only one of 200 ranking signals that Google uses to determine where a site falls in the SERP. While PageRank used to be the Grand Poobah measurement of SEO success (and a major differentiating factor for Google), I don’t believe it’s as important today as it was back when Google was founded. So when a client tells me they only want me to focus on getting links from sites with a PageRank 7 or higher, I have to tell them that zeroing in on PageRank is limiting the long term potential of their link building campaign.

Here are 2 reasons why you shouldn’t let a PageRank govern your link building:

1. Google says you shouldn’t care so much.
A Google employee spelled it out in webmaster central back in 2009, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.” In another forum Google states “Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it.” If Google says you shouldn’t let PageRank affect your SEO, why would you let it dictate your link building?

2. You might miss great link opportunities
Believe it or not, there are sites out there that don’t have an 8 or 9 PageRank that are still great sites to get inbound links from (GASP!). Instead of looking at PageRank, see if that site targets the same audience as you and if a link from that site could potentially drive targeted traffic. Can you use that one link to build a relationship with the site owner? Instead of just getting one link, maybe you start submitting guest articles for their blog or have them write a review of one of your products. By deciding that you aren’t going to even consider a site below a certain PageRank, you are severely limiting your chances of finding a great link opportunity.

The best link building campaigns create links from a variety of different sources. They may be blogs, videos, webinars, social media signals, articles, reviews and so forth. Every single link does not have to come from a PageRank 8 site to be considered valuable to your SEO.

When you actually sit down and map it all out, optimizing a website (even a small one) takes a lot of work! Once you’re done with the actual on-site SEO, there is still link building to contend with, and I would argue that link building never really ends if you want to succeed in the long run. For site owners looking to manage their own SEO, it can get very overwhelming very quickly! But there is no need to panic. Here are 3 ways you can keep your SEO from overrunning your day.

1. Weigh time vs. return.
This is a very important tip for e-commerce site owners to think about. Let’s say your e-commerce site has 5,000 pages. I can speak from experience and say that optimizing 5,000 pages is not an easy or quick task. You can easily spend 50 hours combing your way through each page on keyword research alone. Tack on another 50 hours to actually write unique Meta data and optimize the content and you’re looking at 100+ hours of work!

For e-commerce sites, it’s important to weigh time vs. return so your SEO doesn’t take over your life. Which product pages get the most traffic right now? Which product pages produce the most revenue for your company? These are the pages you should focus on at the beginning. It is going to be worth your time to invest in the optimization of these pages because they provide the most value for your company as is. You can roll out the rest of your site’s newly optimized pages in batches over time. This way every page gets optimized but you don’t spend every waking moment of the next month worrying about it.

2. Take your campaign one step at a time.
I recently wrote a post about the SEO hierarchy of needs. To briefly recap, the SEO hierarchy of needs looks something like this: Content–> Keyword Research–> On-site Optimization–> Link Building. You shouldn’t move onto the next level until the first one is completely finalized! Jumping around from step to step is the easiest way to overlook important elements of your SEO.

For instance, if you don’t finish properly optimizing your site before you begin your off-site link building campaign, you are sending visitors to a site that isn’t prepared to handle an increase in traffic, nor does it have the tools in place to convert them once they arrive. Your great link building will actually hurt your SEO in the long run if your site isn’t optimized first. And how can you properly optimize your site if you haven’t conducted thorough keyword research on a page-by-page basis? SEO is a long term process; there is no reason to rush through each phase.

3. Get the fundamentals in place first.
Everyone is always on the lookout for the latest and greatest in SEO. But site owners shouldn’t be worrying about advanced SEO techniques unless they have the fundamentals soundly squared away. Make sure you have a clear definition of what white hat and black hat SEO are so you don’t accidentally annoy the search engines and find yourself facing a penalty. Take some time and train yourself to write a new blog post three times a week before you start worrying about how much you’re going to charge for ad space on your blog. Attend a few SEO training courses or free webinars and make sure you have the basics covered!

It’s not enough to get someone to read one of your blog posts once. If you really want your blog to succeed in the long term you want them to keep coming back! Aside from creating great content on a consistent basis (which is a must of any business blog) here are 4 tips for building a stronger rapport with your blog readers.

1. Share the comment love.
Even if they were just doing it for the link (although we all hope it’s really just because they love our blog), everyone who leaves a comment on your blog posts took a few minutes of their day to do so. Repay the favor and leave a comment or two on some of their blog posts. I can’t say I know many bloggers who don’t like seeing new comments! That kind of back-and-forth commenting is a great way to build a real relationship with your readers.

2. Invite top commenters to become guest writers.
If someone has been a regular reader and commenter on your blog for years, why not invite them to become a guest writer for your blog? Everyone is always on the lookout for new places they can post their content and fuel their own content marketing campaign. Plus, you get to benefit from their experience in your industry, provide a new point of view to your readers and maybe even attract new readers who are loyal fans of your guest author’s blog.

3. Feature their blogs.
Here on the Search Engine Optimization Journal, I publish SEO News posts a few times a week highlighting some of my favorite Internet marketing related blogs I’ve recently come across. I found the information in them valuable, so I know my target audience will to. This kind of content curation is a good way to build a stronger rapport with your blog readers and give them a quick shout out. Try writing a similar recap post and link to some of your readers’ blogs that you enjoy.

4. Connect with them on social networks
I do my best to thank and follow everyone who retweets my blog posts (and I’m sorry if I accidentally missed someone!). I want readers to know that I appreciate them taking the time to read and share my content. Your readers don’t have to share/tweet/Like/post your content so take the time to thank those that do!