Online Marketing Blog

A question that often comes up from people looking into search marketing involves the source of popularity data that many keyword research tools report. Below are notes on several of the most often used tools, paid and free. This is not comprehensive by any means, but very helpful for quick checking.

Wordtracker.com gets keyword data from Dogpile and Metacrawler which are a combination or collection of search results from various search engines.

Other web based tools like KeywordDiscovery.com get their information from ISPs that share aggregated Internet usage data of their users.

I received my first Yahoo Publisher Network check yesterday. It’s kinda cool getting checks from Google and Yahoo just for blogging. One strange thing about the YPN check though, for the payee it listed the company name I used to register my Overture account 4 years ago and not the name I entered when registering for YPN.

There are so many news feeds, email newsletters, company and pr firm pitches on new and interesting online marketing news that I get every day, there’s just not enough time to post on each one. Gets in the way of things like running a business and enjoying the family. Maybe I should take up Stuntdubl’s 12 step blogaholic program.

I’m not a fan (believe it or not) of making links-only posts to this blog, but, many of these items on search marketing, podcast marketing, blog marketing and RSS marketing may be of interest, so I have placed a links blog over at Online Marketing Resources.

Over on Matt Cutts’ blog, there’s rumblings of a Google update to happen in the next few days. Google makes updates of different kinds on a continuous basis, but he’s drawing attention to a particular update so it will be interesting to see what happens.

“Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; I‚Äôm guessing within the next few days. I still expect some flux after that though, just to let you know.”

Jim Boykin says he’s whipped up yet another SEO tool, and it’s so cool, it’s named “Cool SEO Tool!“.

Enter in a domain name and search phrase and you get the top 10 search results in Google, plus: Pages indexed in Google and Yahoo, Yahoo’s Backlink numbers, Allinanchor rankings, the age of the domain, and the # of occurance of the phrase on the page. Yes Jim, I like!

I do wish it allowed for a sub domain search though. Right now it’s limited to urls that start with “www”. More than 10 SERPs would be nifty too, but I can understand the load that could cause.

Last week Jill Whalen and I were interviewed by US News and World Report for about an hour each. If you do a lot of interviews or speak publicly on a subject, you can get a lot of info out in that time. The story ran today, “Small Business Watch: Searching for the Perfect Word can Pay” and it was interesting to see what came out of all that information. It was more like a blog post than a full article on search engine optimization, but hey, it’s a major news magazine so I’m not complaining!

I’ve been testing a very early preview of the Flock browser and so far it’s pretty cool. It is admittedly, very early and the Flock development team has clearly been working very hard to get an initial release out for feedback. Here are a few screen shots:

Flock Browser

List of del.icio.us feeds

Blog Post

I will spend more time describing specific features in a follow up post. Particularly a wish list and UI quirks.

Tags: flock, browser

If you want to learn search engine optimization from a proven expert, then check out the seminar Jill Whalen is offering:

Thursday, November 3 and Friday November 4, 2005, search engine optimization (SEO) expert Jill Whalen and five other expert presenters offer a two-day seminar on search optimization and marketing. High RankingsTM Search Engine Marketing seminar, to be held at the Philadelphia Crowne Plaza–Valley Forge in King of Prussia, PA, will teach attendees both basic search marketing fundamentals, as well as best practices and more advanced techniques. More information on the seminar can be found here.

Keyword research is a vital first step in any search engine marketing campaign. There are basically 2 types of keyword research software: keyword suggestion tools and keyword analytical tools. Many search engines have their own keyword suggestion tools which provide a list of related keywords but usually don’t indicate much more than the number of times that particular keyword was entered.

Keyword analytical tools, on the other hand, not only give you alternate suggestions to your keywords but also supply information on the number of times any particular keyword was typed into the search engines (based on their current data), how much competition you can expect for those keywords, and other important information. Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery is one such keyword analytical tool.

I recently joined TopRank Online Marketing as an SEO Manager where I’ll be handling our clients’ search engine optimization campaigns. TopRank takes a holistic approach to online marketing so I can focus on the SEO side while my colleagues manage other online marketing tactics. They have some great talent here, so it will fun to learn from everybody. The world of search engine optimization is constantly changing and I love the challenge of keeping up with these changes. After working in SEO for 7 years, it’s great to find a company that really understands online marketing and is very customer focused at the same time.

Today Chris Pirillo has launched a new, and very cool tag based search tool called Gada.be. I’ve been playing with it for the past week and it’s awesome. It’s a meta search engine that brings back search results from an amazing array of sources - using tags as a filter.

The time this tool saves in finding niche information is impressive and is evidence that, at least for now, tag based search can be effective. It’s also a great mobile search tool.

Excellent write up at TechCrunch.

Tags: gada.be, tags, chris pirillo

Last week there was some buzz about Yahoo launching a search results for news.

Search results appear in the right column and come from a limited number of blogs for now, but will incorporate the full index of blo.gs eventually. The blog search results also include Flickr images and links from My Web.