SEO Content Marketing Roundup, Week Ending November 24th, 2010

E-commerce marketers give thanks as this week’s latest and greatest web writing news features Black Friday blurring into Cyber Monday, with high hopes of a retail surge.  Seasonal discussions about competitive content marketing, whipping your website into shape with SEO, and effectively engaging your prospects with social media abound.  You could say it’s a savory feast of marketing news and links, a veritable cornucopia of posts, a pun too many…Indulge, enjoy, and have a lovely Thanksgiving!

Content Marketing:

E-Commerce news is so stuffed with content (oops, sorry) as to qualify as its own subcategory this week:

Noting that the one-day tradition of Black Friday is no more, Google Retail talks Cyber Monday marketing and demonstrates how to check consumer trends (if you’re not already familiar with Insights).

Speaking of trends, 90-percent of retailers are planning to feature special online promotions on Cyber Monday according to this National Retail Federation survey. A wise strategy, as another survey posted at Tech Crunch shows consumers are choosing Cyber Monday over Black Friday.

Finally, Hubspot posts four immediate e-commerce solutions to boost holiday sales.

Other Content Marketing News:

Of course, content marketing isn’t all about the end game.  Great read on marketing content’s “customer lifecycle” is posted at Top Rank.

Limited resources for content marketing?  Solid suggestions for using “micro-content” are discussed in this post from Content Marketing Institute.

Is your website mobile friendly?  Check out tips for making it so at Copyblogger.

What metrics to use to judge where you stand competitively are discussed at Hubspot, while Jay Baer makes the case for integrated marketing metrics at Convince and Convert.

Another seasonal tradition is reflecting on the past year and projecting into the new one: this Search Engine Journal piece lists the things from this year that may well shape the next.

Strictly SEO:

A strictly unofficial but nonetheless intriguing 2010 SEO industry survey is posted at SEOmoz, which has also posted a monthly SEO action plan and a challenging professional SEO “litmus test.”

Google’s Instant Previews proved a buggy topic with Search Engine Roundtable discussing how the feature is messing up web analytics, and Copyblogger noting that it has collapsed searcher page view time from 3 to 0.3 seconds.  Yikes.

Words to the wise:  Matt Cutts advises SEOs to focus on where Google is heading, Ken Horst advises optimizing for Google Places,.

Meanwhile, Ross Hudgens discusses using Google alerts for link-building, and SEO for Bing vs. Google is explored at Six Revisions.

A great series, SEO is Undead, can be found at SEO by the Sea.

More glad tidings: a handsome benefit of SEO is more lucrative traffic, according to this iMedia Connection piece.

In search, the issue of exact domain names is discussed at Search Engine Roundtable, while Search Engine Land reports that Google’s now returning more results per domain for search queries.

Social Media Marketing:

Overwhelmed by your social media strategy?  Excellent remedies for your pains are offered at Social Media Examiner.

How do you tackle social media analytics?  Check out this post on segmenting your social traffic at SEOmoz.

Speaking of analytics, Twitter has launched its own and you can find out all the insights you might glean at Mashable.

Get real:  a great post about customer conversations is at Content Marketing Institute, while this Convince and Convert post discusses being social vs. doing social.

Finally, a seasonally appropriate social media forecast for the new year is posted at RINF.com.