SEO, social media & banner campaigns: Russian Herald

This is still my baby and I can’t let go of it. RussianHerald.com is a community blog in Russian-speaking Calgary. Good writers talk about their immigration experience and share it with “green” newcomers. Both groups get along well. Read on…

The resource was born in 2006 when three Russian CMers, Maxim Bentsianov, Mark Sergienko and I decided to do some experimentation. Over the past few years I personally learned a lot about the web by managing this resource. SEO, social media, sharing, content development, community building, you name it. Here’s a few examples…

Banner campaigns

As one of the founders of RussianHerald.com (Russian community website in Calgary, Canada) I was responsible for developing advertising program for the website. My key efforts involved:

Researching and selecting ad serving products
Configuring OpenX ad serving product
Working on banner campaign management for over 50 advertisers
Banner implementation on the website (through invocation codes)
Developing ad serving reports for clients
Optimizing banner ad performance

Social media

In the efforts to make the site more socially driven worked with Mark Sergienko and Maxim Bentsianov on developing a BuddyPress-based community. In addition:

Optimized the website for social performance
Installed and configured social plugins
Developed and connected a network of sites

Organic search

Since inception in 2007 I’ve been working on RussianHerald.com to optimize the site for both Russian search engines (Yandex, Rambler and Google.ru) and North American (Google, Yahoo! and Bing). Ongoing tasks included:

Keyword research
On-page optimization
Link building
Website analytics review
Content development
Rankings tracking