Online Marketing Blog

Slashdot posts a link to an article on NewScientist.com regarding a Google patent that has garnered so much attention in the SEO world. The article describes how Google will use a variety of factors to determine the quality of news sources to rank news stories rather than the current method of date posted and keyword relevancy.

“The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google’s database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.”

Yahoo News is out of beta and live. We first posted a overview.

Tag: Yahoo News

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch posted an excellent article regarding the ongoing reputation issues that the Search Engine Optimization industry has been experiencing. In particular, this article brings up the frequent disconnect between web designers and SEO efforts.

If you’re in the business of SEO and you’ve worked with web design or interactive shops, undoubtedly you’ve heard comments like, “your SEO makes the site ugly”. A lot of the time this comes off as elitist and arrogant because data is rarely offered to support the notion that adding text links or modifying title tags has a negative effect on site conversion.

Abundant data is available on before/after search engine optimization, where a site has significantly increased rankings, visitors and conversions. I am not saying great design is less important than search engine friendliness, but I am saying that profit generating web sites incorporate a combination of critical design and requirements for optimal search engine visibility.

Since the Google has started testing publishing ads on selected blog site RSS feeds, Feedburner Burning Questions blog has posted support for the ad format. As Google’s RSS ads program expands and your Google AdSense id is approved for use with RSS ads, FeedBurner will offer the option to display Google Ads in your feed. You can manage the display of ads using the feed template admin with options including: determining the frequency of ads, ability to prevent ads on short posts and whether you want ads or not.

For blogger.com blogs, that are already using Feedburner to create a RSS feed from the default atom feed provided with blogger.com accounts, this will make it very easy to test out Google RSS ads.

Tags: Feedburner, RSS, RSS Ads, Google RSS

Yahoo! is launching a new contest targeting small businesses. Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson will award one small business that has demonstrated its ability to “think big” with 10 million free ad impressions across the Yahoo! network.

The goal of the contest is to promote the range of search advertising options available with Yahoo. Entries will be accepted between April 28 and May 20. Found on MediaPost

Tags: Yahoo, Yahoo Contest, Virgin, Richard Branson

I was reading a post of a great Small Business Marketing Blog called Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch. I noticed he had posted about Marketing Sherpa’s call for nominations on best marketing blogs. There’s even a category for “Best Blog on Online Marketing”.

He showed examples of his blog’s rankings for “Best Small Business Marketing Blog” on several top search engines. Pretty impressive.

Since there’s a category for “Best Blog on Online Marketing” I thought I would check our rankings for: “online marketing blog”. Below are rankings for http://Online Marketing Blog on the top search engines for “online marketing blog“.

• Yahoo – #1
• Google – #1
• Ask Jeeves – #1
• MSN – No love from MSN. In fact, you won’t find any blogspot.com blogs ranked at MSN.

A great article was published today by DMNews, “RSS Gives Marketers Uncensored Channel” that overviews a few practical examples of RSS as an effective marketing tool/channel.

Of course, part of the reason I like this article so much is that they gave my company, TopRank a nice quote:

“I think you’re going to see RSS begin to appear on marketers radar by Q4 of this year and really take off the following year,” said Lee Odden, president of TopRank Online Marketing, a Web marketing service provider.

If you want to get an excellent overview of RSS as a marketing tool, definitely check out “Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS” by MarketingStudies.net

Tags: RSS, RSS Marketing, Blog, Blog Marketing, SEO

There’s a good article at ClickZ on the sticky situation of corporate politics and SEO for bigger companies. “When Corporate Politics and SEO Collide“. It emphasizes the importance of the unique communication needs of a bigger company with interdepartmental participants affected by a SEO project. Project management skills are as important as SEO implementation skills.

This sentiment is reinforced by Stuntdubl’s post yesterday: “The best ¬ìSEO¬ís¬î are really a culmination of a variety of very diverse skills brought together to improve a business or organization¬ís marketing performance in the online arena. Top SEO¬ís are “project managers” and meta-webmasters”.

LonghornBlogs.com is running a test of Google Ads in its RSS feeds. LonghornBlogs is the first beta and other “alpha” testing sites should come online soon. Nice coverage on this at eWEEK

Tags: Google, Google RSS Ads, RSS

GoogSpy is a new third party tool that lets you put in a companies name and return what Google Adwords they are targeting. This is great if you want to see what keywords your competitors are targeting. It can also tell you where a company ranks naturally in the top ten for certain keywords.

How does it work? According to the press release “GoogSpy.com is powered by Velocityscape’s flagship data extraction product, Web Scraper Plus+. It extracts 500,000 search results per day from Google and loads them into the GoogSpy.com database.”

Check it out now though, the logo looks very similar to Google and it’s functionality may raise red flags at Google. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google’s lawyers step in.

Tags: Google, Adwords, GoogSpy, Velocityscape

The Findory news and blog search/aggregation site has changed it’s home page layout to a tab format. Now you can switch between news and blogs pages by clicking on tabs at the top. The news/blog/web search option is now at the top right. General categories display on the right and selected posts appear in the main part of the page.

If you’re new to Findory, it’s a news and blog search site that personalizes the information displayed based on the searches you perform and the links “articles’ you click on. This is a welcome feature considering the large number of news and blog sites available. If you want to track a particular blog, like SEO Online Marketing Blog, you can bookmark the unique url. Findory offers RSS feeds for news and blog categories as well.

Significant changes to Google AdWords are in store in the next few weeks:

* Target users by site – pick which sites your ads appear on, allowing you to view who Google content partners are.
* New max CPM bidding option – The CPM ads will compete with traditional AdWords ads with a minimum CPM of $2.
* Additional ad formats – banner, leaderboard, inline rectangle, skyscraper, wide skyscraper.

SearchEngineWatch:
“What we’re expecting customers to do here is open themselves up to all of the types of opportunities at Google,” said Tim Armstrong, vice president of ad sales for Google. “This will be a way to keep the scale but use the feature to also target.