Online Marketing Blog

Next week Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conference comes to Chicago Dec 5-8. A few notes about this conference from today’s Search Engine Update newsletter:

• Record advance registrations – all your colleagues, clients and competitors will be
  there
• More sponsors/exhibitors than any prior Chicago event
• Best conference program ever for Chicago

TopRank Online Marketing will have two speakers at this event: SEO Manager David Temple and myself.

David will present on the Global Search Landscape day 1 along with Nacho Hernandez, Lucas Morea and my good friend Andy Atkins-Kr?ºger who is the Managing Director at UK based SEO/SEM firm, Web Certain and President of the SMA-UK.

According to a white paper on RSS (pdf) sponsored by Yahoo and Ipsos Insight, providing easy ways for users to subscribe to RSS feeds using their favoriate feed reader or aggregator can improve distribution of that feed.

Thomas, our SEO Designer and blog marketing guru, has made a very cool tool for quickly creating up to 14 RSS feed subscription buttons or chicklets for your blog.

Just fill in the blog title, blog url and feed url and the for will reply with code for subscription buttons to: Rojo, My Yahoo, Bloglines, newsgator, My MSN, Pluck, NewsBurst, searchfox, Google Reader, My AOL, del.icio.us, Feedster, Furl and Yahoo My web.

I must say, it is a very useful tool!

[Update: Thomas has added even more subscription buttons as well as bookmarking tools.]

Here’s a very happy online marketing Thanksgiving to you. Here are a few logos from search engines:

I guess MSN Search isn’t in the Thanksgiving spirit, or they just don’t get into the seasonal logo changes.

Happy Thanksgiving to Online Marketing Blog readers!

Lee Odden

Tags: thanksgiving, Google thanksgiving logo, Yahoo thanksgiving logo, ask thanksgiving logo

One of the great things about attending conferences is that you get to connect with old friends and meet new ones. At Pubcon in Las Vegas I bumped into RSS/Podcasting/Blog/SEO/SEM guru, Amanda Watlington several times.

Amanda speaks at a variety of marketing and technology conferences and recently published a white paper on the pros and cons of RSS advertising. She makes some excellent points about what adoption rates really are and the need for consumer education.

“As RSS advertising proliferates, the discussion is shifting from a debate about whether or not it is appropriate to include ads in RSS feeds to what is the best strategy for using them. This briefing reviews the main points made by proponents and opponents of RSS advertising, provides insights into what impact advertising is having on adoption of RSS and recommendations for those who are considering advertisng in RSS feeds.”

Frank Michlick posts about a trend in purchasing domain names citing articles from Business 2.0 and the Wall Street Journal.

Interestingly, last week at the Pubcon search engine marketing conference, I met people from two different domain name broker/buyer/management/monetization companies: Moniker.net and Oversee.net.

During my discussion with the fellow from Moniker, a prominent SEO mentioned he’d spent $1000 the night before (had to get his fix) buying up domain names for the purpose of parking them to monetize traffic.

To be honest, I had noticed people doing this, but did not realize the momentum it has gained as an advertising practice and method of generating revenue.

Update: Here’s an interesting site I found that offers a way to monteize your unused domains: http://www.trafficclub.com/

Ask Jeeves will be integrating GoFish’s multimedia search technology into www.ask.com.

The first phase of the integration is live allowing Ask Jeeves users to listen, browse, purchase, and download music, video, podcasts, audio books, movies, music videos, and ringtones.

Ask Jeeves is the first major search engine to partner with GoFish for multimedia content. With estimates on entertainment related searches at 20%, multi media content represents a relevant and growing market.

Tags: gofish, ask.com, multimedia search, search engine

The conference portion of Pubcon ended yesterday. Exhibitors pulled down their booths promptly at about 5pm. It would be great if there was more time in between sessions to visit the exhibit hall though. Overall, it was a great show and opportunity to connect with many of the leaders in search marketing.

Yahoo drew a lot of attention to the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) program and seems very committed to building a great program for publishers and advertisers.

Yahoo also announced the availability for blog publishers that are participating in the beta YPN program to place ads in their RSS feeds. That’s something that I will be testing with this blog very soon. Feedback is welcome.

Linking is still a critical part of helping sites rank higher in search engines and to drive traffic. This session included linking legend, Eric Ward, Jim Boykin of WeBuildPages and Bill Hartzer of MarketNet.

First up was Jim Boykin WeBuildPages. Jim decided not to speak from the podium and walk the aisle. Google Jagger update. Some did well, some not. Shortcuts are no good.

He presented a list of linking paranoia that pops up every time there’s a shift in rankings.

What does Google rank highly?

EDU, GOV
High TrustRank (lots of authority and .edu backlinks)
Huge and powerful websites sub pages (Amazon)
Old page that never changes, but gets steady links over time
New page on old stablished sites (good internal links)
Old sites that update and get a steady flow of backlinks that coincide with new content additions

Matt Cutts presented at Pubcon a very good Q/A. Barry Schwartz and Aaron Wall have very good posts on the session as I missed much of it. Instead, I had breakfast with Amanda Watlington, Eric Ward and Heather Lloyd Martin.

Here’s an interview Aaron did with Matt Cutts that’s a must read.

With about half of the audience being first time conference attendees, the questions were less about how to not get caught spamming, and more about Google in general. Cutts says Google going public has not affected people at the Googleplex, too much at least. Also that having Google stock explode in value has not changed him that much. Just that now he buys books whenever he wants.

In this session on day two of the Pubcon 10 conference, presenters provided very good insight into how podcasting and RSS are being used now and what’s in store for the future.

First up was Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit.

Sound files (podcasting) is not such a new topic. What’s new are the tools for production and distribution. Podcasting is growing fast. Avg subscribers per podcast 65. It’s not realistic to expect a large audience right away, it must be built up.

According to TDG Research, there will be 56.8 million users of podcasts by 2010.

How cane search marketers make money from podcasting?

• Content
• Advertising
• Publishing (RSS)
• Marketing Podcasts to listeners
• Tools such as directories to help listeners find podcasts

The launch of Google Base today is being covered to death today.

Details from Google Blog:

“Today we’re excited to announce Google Base, an extension of our existing content collection efforts like web crawl, Google Sitemaps, Google Print and Google Video. Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We’ll host the items and make them searchable for free. ”

This afternoon here at Pubcon in Las Vegas, Google has a meeting about an unannounced topic. Perhaps it’s about Google Base?

Tags: google base, google

This session was moderated by Stephanie Leffler of Monster eCommerce and included: Marshall D. Simmonds, Jeremy Sanchez, Chris Zaharias, Bill Wise

First up Marshall Simmonds from NY Times (About.com) who talked (very fast) about the complexities of search engine optimization for large publishers.

His employer, the NY Times also hosts several other publications adding to the size and complexity of their SEO initiative.

With the NY Times, he wanted to make it focused, but the NY Times ego created unrealistic expectations. As with many prominent companies, they equated their reputation in the offline world with justification for ranking well online.

Issues contributing to the complexity of big site SEO included: large amount of content, writers not familiar with web writing. rigid CMS and others.