Online Marketing Blog

After the last session about advanced keyword research, SEMPO held a reception where they were to announce some of the preliminary findings of what Dana Todd called their annual "big ass survey". 

The SEMPO state of the industry survey run last year provided some very interesting and insightful statistics about how marketers are using search marketing as well as future expectations.

The 2004 SEMPO survey indicated search marketers planned to spend about $4 billion on paid search, organnic and paid inclusion. The 2005 SEMPO survey reports that number to rise to $5.7 billion as announced by Kevin Lee of SEMPO’s Research Committee. Confetti flew at the SEMPO reception as Kevin announced more statistics out of the survey.

The next session I was able to blog at Chicago Search Engine Strategies was Advanced Search term Research Tools Moderated by Detlev Johnson of PositionTech.

Speakers included:  Christine Churchill - KeyRelevance, Lori Weiman - KeywordMax, Shayn Ryan - LSI Systems, James Lamberti - Comscore, David Warmuz - Trellian

Christine was first up and started with keyword selection consideration for PPC and SEO.

Things to look at:

• Relevance
• Keyword popularity = traffic potential
• State in buying process
• Competition

Golden rule:  It’s not about the keyword YOU want to be found on. It’s about the keywords the end users are looking at.

Here is the first session I was able to attend at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference: 
Earning from Search and Contextual Ads -  A session on how web site owners (content publishers) can monetize their content by carrying search results and contextual ads. Describes programs available and successful practices.

The session was moderated by Andrew Goodman of PageZero

Speakers included: Will Johnson - Yahoo, Scott Meyer - About.com, Jennifer Slegg - Jensense and Satya Patel - Google.

First up was Jennifer Slegg:  Making Money with Contextual Advertising.

Jen started out by comparing Google and YPN:

The use of news search SEO and marketing has grown significantly in the past 2 years. Search engine optimization practitioners as well as public relations firms are realizing (albeit the latter slower than the former) the value of optimizing electronic documents such as press releases, articles, white papers, and the syndication of those files as news and blog search engines grow their audiences.

A pioneer in the field of using search engine optimization in combination with press releases is Greg Jarboe. Jarboe is a veteran search marketer and public relations professional. He frequently speaks at industry conferences including ad:tech, Search Engine Strategies and WebmasterWorld Pubcon on the topic of marketing through news search engines. He is also co-founder of SEO-PR.

This is pretty cool - the December topseos.com ranking of search engine optimization firms has TopRank Online Marketing at number five.

Other top five designations went to: Zunch, SEO Image, iProspect and Bruce Clay. Congratulations!

According to the press release:

Each SEO firm is evaluated in terms of its:
- Competitive advantage
- Superior services and pricing
- Customer and technical support
- Response to client problems
- Innovations that set it apart from the competition
- Overall efficiency
- Overall performance

I guess I should get that gratuitous self promotion category created. Hey, like I said before, I’m a marketer.

I arrived in Chicago last night and had dinner at Harry Carey’s with Andy from WebCertain. We perused the conference Hilton pub afterwards and chatted it up with the attending SEO/SEM conference revelers. After short chats with Bruce Clay and David Warmuz of Trellian, it was off to bed.

Today should be a busy one and I plan on attending the following sessions:

Advanced Track - Searcher Behavior Research Update

Advertising Track - Earning From Search & Contextual Ads

Vertical Track - Global Search Landscape

Advanced Track - Advanced Search Term Research Tools

In just a few weeks, Online Marketing Blog will be 2 years old. Dec 28 to be exact. It started out as a blogspot blog using Blogger (still ranks #1 for "seo blog" on Google ??) and I finally got it moved to it’s own domain name and WordPress in the past month or so.

I had the interesting experience of running across yet another site stealing content from my company web site recently. However, what made this different was that they were not resolved to take bits and pieces, they took most of it and are linking to a copy of my company web site from the footer of their web pages using my company name of all things.