Online Marketing Blog

Danny lays down the vocals, in this tryout for American idol promotion for WebmasterRadio.fm. Absolutely hilarious!

He also lays down the sarcasm in a response to Wikipedia moderators removing links that he added.

Tags: Danny Sullivan, Webmaster Radio, Wikipedia

I just received a review copy of the new book, Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with Adsense, AdWords and the Google APIs by Harold Davis, author of 20 books, (Googleplex Blog) and published by O’Reilly. Companion site here.

Chapters range from SEO and affiliate programs to “Profiting from Adult Sites” (hmmm) and of course whole sections on Adsense and AdWords.

It’s a bit techie, but I’ve not had a chance to go through it fully. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to post a review here when I get around to finally reading it. If you’ve already read it, feel free to post comments.

Google is taking beta subscription requests for hosted Gmail accounts using your company or organization’s domain name. Just login with your existing Google account or create a new one.

What you get:

Gmail - 2 gigabytes of storage and search tools that help users find information fast.
Control Panel - Easily manage user accounts, aliases and mailing lists.

Very interesting. This should increase the number of Gmail users by a significant sum. More user data bonanza maybe?

More about the initial beta test with San Jose City College at the Google Blog

It’s an interesting labor market right now in the field of search marketing. Interactive, Advertising, and Ad Agencies as well as companies are bringing more SEO/SEM staff in-house. Many SEO and SEM firms are growing and adding staff as well. Unfortunately, some of the larger search marketing companies lock staff down with unreasonable non-competes or they operate in churn and burn mode, and don’t value their clients or SEOs nearly as much as they should.

With my SEO firm, we’ve worked hard to build momentum and service to our clients and we’re literally getting more inquiries than we could possibly handle. So, TopRank is currently hiring for several SEO positions which are described on the TopRank careers page.

This is some cool news I missed yesterday. Fellow SEO blogger Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick) of the famous Search Engine Roundtable blog and SEO forum, accepted a role as News Correspondent at the Search Engine Watch blog. Gary Price, who previously held that responsibility has moved on to Ask Jeeves. I can’t think of anyone more deserving. You can read his first post here. Congratulations Barry.

Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Summit is coming up in Chicago April 20th and 21st.

Scheduled tracks include: B-to-B, Ecommerce, Int’l, Newsletters, Delivery and List Growth.

There will be 21 Case Studies from real-world email marketers (big and small) including American Airlines, IBM, Doubleday Entertainment. Plus, practical, expert advice on:

• email delivery (panel includes AOL)
• Creative & newsletter design
• growing your opt-in list (with quality names

It’s not all work though, some networking and play is in store with a Gala party at the House of Blues celebrating the winners of the Email Awards.

There’s an excellent interview at iMediaConnection with Ron Belanger from Yahoo about the intersection of search marketing and branding. A good quote from Belanger on the merits of SEO and SEM for branding:

“The first step in the branding story is brand awareness, and search is becoming the top way in which brands are introduced to consumers. If a company is not there in search, they will not make it into the consideration set moving towards brand preference and eventual purchase.”

Some interesting post Super Bowl activity this week:

Reprise Media announced their 2nd Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard where advertisers are rated based on how well they’ve integrated an online component into their Super Bowl commercial. GoDaddy.com, CareerBuilder, MI:3, Shaggy Dog, Blockbuster, Cars the Movie, Burger King and Cadillac Escalade received the highest ratings.

The NY Times chimes in about how the commercials have been given a second life (and extended advertising reach/value) through sites like AOL’s Best Superbowl Commercials, where millions of visitors have rated their favorite commercials, turning them into an effective viral marketing tactic.

Marketing Experiments has announced a “Back of a Napkin” business planning contest. They say they are are looking for the next ‘Google’.

The winner will get a jumpstart package worth over $100,000 and will get to pitch their plan to some of the leading VC’s. In that $100 large there’s $25k of PR for three months. Ahem. I appreciate the PR firm’s valuation of their services, but $25k for THREE MONTHS?

During 2006, MEC Labs (the group of researchers behind the Marketing Experiments Journal) will work with the winning idea to help launch their business.

Notice to search marketers: Your brand will not save you from the consequences of screwing with search engines. Lots of fun commentary on this one:

Google blacklists BMW.de - CNET News.com

Ramping up on international webspam - Matt Cutts of Google

BMW cheats search-engines, Google removes it from search results - Boing Boing

For Matt Cutts to point out a crackdown on international search spam, I suspect there has been a lot of it going on un-checked. Or at least not under as much scruitiny as English language sites.

Sebastian has an excellent interview with the Google Sitemaps team over at his Smart IT Consulting site.

Some excerpts:

“Sitemaps convey some very important metadata about the sites and pages which we could not infer otherwise, like the page’s priority and refresh cycle.”

And how Google Sitemaps work:

“Sitemaps are downloaded periodically and then scanned to extract links and metadata. The valid URLs are passed along to the rest of our crawling pipeline — the pipeline takes input from ‘discovery crawl’ and from Sitemaps. The pipeline then sends out the Googlebots to fetch the URLs, downloads the pages and submits them to be considered for our different indices.”

Matt Cutts was recently interviewed on WebmasterRadio.fm’s SEO Rockstars show with Oilman and Webguerrilla.

Rand has posted some insightful take aways including Matt’s thoughts on Sandbox, BigDaddy, linkbait and that v7ndotcom malarkey.

If you need more Matt Cutts, then listen to this previous interview, also at WebmasterRadio.fm and of course, you would do well to visit his blog, where he provided an update on Bigdaddy recently.

Bigdaddy is the rollout of some signigicant infrastructure changes at Google and to see Bigdaddy search results compared to current results, try this. Although Matt says, “I‚Äôd expect a new data center to be converted to Bigdaddy roughly every 10 days”, so a normal search on Google.com will likely return Bigdaddy style results.