Online Marketing Blog

Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick) posts some good advice on making dyamic site urls more search engine friendly along with a link to a more detailed article on Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce Catalogs, which has a link to another good article called, “Dynamic URLs in the Eyes of a Search Engine“.

Here are the top RSS aggregators
according to IT Facts:

Good to keep in mind when deciding what “chicklets” to display on your blog.

Feedshake is an interesting tool that allows you to mix up and arrange multiple RSS feeds. via ResearchBuzz

SEW mentions that today AOL is launching a personalized home page feature called MY AOL. The new service enables you to personalize with RSS feeds, which are powered by Feedster. Now Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL are all offering personalized pages.

Along with the Craigslist Real Estate hack and the somewhat scary Hot or Not map, there’s a new hack of the Google Maps tool for Vlogs. “Vlogs” as in video blogs. Maps are a fun way to find web sites if geography is your thing.

If you’re really interested in the various manipulations of Google Maps, here’s a new Directory

Tags: Google Maps, Vlogs, Google Hacks

Yahoo announced an agreement with Boeing’s Connexion to offer in-flight search services. Yahoo’s ads will be displayed in search results. More from DMNews

Yahoo also announced a deal this week with Motorola to offer Yahoo content on mobile devices including iRadio. I met Ben Hill, Senior Director, Global Marketing; Motorola at the ad:tech conference in Chicago – VERY smart fellow with an amazing job. Good coverage on this at Search Engine Journal

Tags: Yahoo, Connexion, Motorola

There are rumors that Ask Jeeves is going to offer a PPC program. Apparently it will look similar to AdWords and will function based on keyword bidding along with some measure of relevance. Bids are to start out at 5 cents.

I wonder if there will be any patent infringement issues? More info at OnlineMediaDaily and Search Engine Watch

Tags: Ask Jeeves, PPC

I just noticed a post on Pocket-lint that a new podcasting search engine has launched, called podscope. Podscope is powered by TVEyes, a company that has been indexing TV and radio broadcasts since 1999.

Their technology makes every word searchable within a podcast and enables the audio indexing of podcast content as well as video blogs and personal videos.

It works pretty well. Search results allow you to expand an entry to display controls for play, pause etc and show the number of hits for each. The only part that plays within podscope is a snippet surrounding the keyword phrase, but there is a link provided to the source web site or feed if you want to listen or download the entire file.

As I was speaking with a prospective search engine optimization client today, I noticed a link in the footer of their web site to the web design company that created it. I followed the link to find out more information because you can often get a sense of a company by the type of web design firm they’ve used.

The web design firm site was straight forward and contained the usual information: design examples, about us, services, etc. When I clicked on services I noticed “search engine optimization” and on that page I found this description for “Doorway Pages”:

“A doorway page (also known as a beacon or magic page) is a page of text linked to your site to improve your search engine ranking. Basically, this is a page of text that mirrors keywords and descriptions throughout your site.”

Blog search engine Technorati CEO David Sifry was interviewed in BusinessWeek recently.

He makes some good points in that he doesn’t see search engines as competition and wishes them “good luck” when it comes to creating a blog-specific search engine.

“What Technorati is trying to do is looking at the Web in a different way. And the way that I like to think of it is, it’s like this big river, it’s like this conversation flow. It’s about people and conversations.”

Services like Technorati and the blogosphere in general represents a serious paradigm shift in the way information is distributed and organized. The rate at which search engines update their enormous databases seems quite slow in comparison to how quickly blog posts are available on Technorati. If blog search engines can continue to improve quality and do a better job of filtering out blog spam, I see no reason why more users wouldn’t migrate more of their search activity to the blogosphere.

Yahoo updated 360 by incorporating Flickr (happy now Thomas?) and feeds. Unfortunately I was only able to add a Yahoo Groups feed, but not a feed for the AllBusiness.com column I write or the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog. What’s up Y360?

The Flickr addition is very good news.

More details from the Y360 dev team blog – via Battelle although I first noticed the feeds option when I was reading Rustybrick’s 360 blog

Article: Search Basics and Best Practices according to Forrester – DMNews

Using blog search for business – Mark Cuban

MSN Virtual Earth while Google merges satellite images with map data in a Google Maps Hybrid

Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch publishes new book: Google Power

Make your own customized Google Logo

Now you can tag with IceRocket just like Technorati Tags

Tags: Mark Cuban, Ice Rocket Tags, Google, MSN

Google RSS Reader – Google has made its personalized home page a RSS reader. Via Rubel

Reminds me a little of MSN’s start.com and both Google and Start have the drag and drop feature which is pretty cool.

Tags: Google (IceRocket) – Google (Technorati)

TopRank Online Marketing is hiring. We are a Minneapolis, Minnesota based search engine optimization firm that works closely with Misukanis & Odden Public Relations. Our SEO practice through TopRank is experiencing tremendous growth and the following positions are open:

SEO Copywriter
The SEO copywriter is responsible for authoring or editing client documents according to defined keyword optimization goals. Responsibilities include web page copy, press releases, case studies, newsletters and occasionally support content needs for the TopRank company web site and blog.

Must have 2 years+ web site copywriting experience. Keyword research/analysis, public relations and blog experience a plus. Web page usability and WYSIWYG editor experience beneficial but not necessary (Dreamweaver, Front Page). Advanced web page keyword optimization tactics training will be provided.

Submit resume and project examples to: hr at toprankresults dot com