Online Marketing Blog

This week’s The Economist magazine includes a feature called Technology Quarterly in which an article titled “Dancing with Google’s spiders” describes various aspects (good/bad) of search engine optimization including a few quotes from Matt Cutts of Google. (quotes at Threadwatch) I was interviewed for the article as well and my search marketing agency, TopRank Online Marketing was also mentioned.

It’s always interesting to see what gets used in an article when you’re interviewed. In my case, the quote used was one describing an un-common event where one of our clients dropped a substantial PPC spend (prior to hiring us) in exchange for straight SEO. While that SEO campaign has been very successful, it’s more common and appropriate to run PPC in conjunction with SEO.

Last week, Nick Wilson of Performancing mentioned their new blog metrics service has been in Alpha testing and will be released to public beta soon, as in tomorrow possibly.

I believe there’s a huge opportunity in the blog metrics and analytics space. Many blogs use free programs with limited functionality and some have been able to get into Google Analytics. However, the measurable outcomes for a content publisher, particularly a blog, are different than for an ecommerce site. Therefore Google Analytics and many other stats programs are not the best fit for blog metrics.

Spotlight on Search - Interview with Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs

When you think of keyword research services, the name that often comes to mind these days is Dan Thies. In developing his search marketing business, he was able to find a niche in keyword analysis and successfully progress that into search engine marketing and optimization training with SEO Research Labs and also a book, the Search Engine Marketing Kit.

In this interview with Dan, find out how he started out, his take on keyword research tools, common misconceptions about search engine optimization, search engines and SEO training.

There’s an interesting thread over at HighRankings Forums on Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery debating the accuracy, pros and cons of each. I’ve been a Wordtracker user for at least 6 years and have been dabbling with Keyword Discovery off and on for 2 or 3 years. Both have their pluses and shortcomings.

Of course, when I need to outsource keyword analysis, I just go to Dan Thies over at SEO Research Labs, who by the way, should be the topic of the next Spotlight on Search interview.

Update: Aaron at his newly designed SEOBook site posts a link to a free link building video from one of Dan’s teleclasses.

Spotlight on Search - Interview with Jill Whalen of High Rankings

One of the long-standing and popular voices on search engine optimization is without question, Jill Whalen. From back in the day, you might remember the Rank Write Roundtable that she published along with Heather Lloyd-Martin. Today, Jill is a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies, writes many articles, publishes the High Rankings Advisor newsletter, runs her SEO consulting practice High Rankings and has another company called Search Creative.

Jill’s High Rankings Forum has been a source of information for newbies and old hands alike for many years. I don’t get to visit the forum as much, but when I do, I always find some useful insights.

On the heels of MSN AdCenter’s demographic profiling aspirations, Google AdWords now offers demographic site selection with gender, age, and household income as the demographic categories available. The demographic information comes from ComScore. h/t Andy

Additional info from:

JenStar: “It will be interesting to see if advertisers find that the profiles are matching the resulting traffic from those sites. And I am sure some publishers will reverse engineer an AdWords campaign to see what demographic profile their own site is, and if it matches what they believe their traffic to be.”

Chris Pirillo gets the goods on search engine spam with an interview of an anonymous “search spammer” at the New York Search Engine Strategies conference. The voice is decidedly European, possibly German - yes, it’s German.

“At SES Chris interviewed one search spammer who asked to remain nameless while providing some interesting details about the inner workings of the search spamming world. On one hand the interview reveals some of the motivations for spamming the search engines. More interesting are the search spamming tactics these black hat marketers won’t employ because even they are annoyed by the end result.”

Microsoft’s Live.com is getting major upgrades (very slow right now) via Scobelizer and more details including RSS feed search over at Read/Write Web.

According to seattlepi.com:

“Although still in test form, Windows Live Search signals the future direction of the company‚Äôs efforts in the market. It‚Äôs slated to eventually replace the MSN Search service that debuted last year, when Microsoft set out on its own in a bid to make up ground in the search business.”

Measuring success of your online marketing efforts is a critical, but often underutilized in many web marketing initiatives. Recently I took a survey for Jupiter Research and one of the questions got me thinking about the different metrics that companies use:

• Brand impact (i.e., increased brand awareness, intent or favorability)
• Number of impressions
• Position of paid listing
• Number of clicks
• Ratio of new to returning visitors
• Amount of increased website traffic
• Duration of website visits
• Amount of increased traffic to physical store
• Amount of increased volume to call center

One of the areas of online marketing and PR that continues to gain interest is buzz marketing through blogs and similar consumer generated media. Blogs are many things including marketing tools and also voices to be heard. Consumer voices that provide insight into your marketplace. The availability and ease of communications and creative tools make consumer generated media a force to be reckoned with.

Today I noticed that Al Gore’s Current TV is looking for consumers to create commercials for its commercial sponsors (AdJab). I think you’ll see more of that as marketers and comsumers embrace the medium.

The Search Engine Journal “Search Engine T-Shirt Contest” will be announcing winners soon. Be sure to check out the entries in the comments section of this post.

This contest is a good example of clever link bait. It also shows some of the creativity on the part of SEOs in the industry.

Spreadshirt is providing the shirts, RustyBrick is providing the design and the judges are listed here. I’d share some of my favorites, but since I’m judging, I’ll wait on that until after Loren announces the 10 winners.

Most Sunday mornings I get up a little early and get some work done to lighten the load for Monday morning and that includes a little blogging. After being away all week last week I deciced to toss those plans and spend some extra time playing with the kids, which is A LOT more fun. I did get a few min to find some interesting posts though, so here are a few Sunday night links:

GDrive - All Your Data Are Belong to Us - via Threadwatch

Seth Godin presents at Google

Yahoo backs away from original content plans - via Cyberjournalist