Online Marketing Blog

Debra Mastaler, Christine Churchill, Jill Whalen at SES San Jose

I got a ping from another old school SEO, Jill Whalen recently about her next search engine marketing seminar. Jill’s group of instructors include: Scottie Claiborne, Karon Thackston, Christine Churchill, Debra Mastaler and Matt Bailey (who is also going to be doing one of the modules for the DMA SEM Certification.

Here’s a fun, short video of Matt from SES San Jose this past summer. (sorry Matt, you crack me up)

Jill and company are very focused on practical, takeaway tips for company marketers:

“Each speaker will build upon the info provided by the previous speaker, giving you a cohesive plan of action you can begin to implement as soon as you’re back at your office.”

The PG SEO (pre-Google) and master linker, Eric Ward has recently launched a new newsletter on link building called, The Ward Report.¬† I’ve seen the initial free-trial issue and it’s pretty good with topics including:

• Linking Fact, Fiction and Your Inbound Link Profile (INLP)
• Social Linking and Tagging
• Linking for Search Rank
• Linking and Publicity Opportunity Watch
• RSS To The Rescue

It’s a paid subscription and well worth it. Subscribers will have access to discounted training, how-to Podcasts, video training modules and other resources as well.¬† You can sign up for the Ward Report here or request the trial version.

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For the past week I’ve been beta-testing a new product from Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans of Text Link Ads called Feedvertising. Other beta testers include Jim Boykin, Phillip Lessen, Brian Clark and several others. This is a service that allows you to monetize your RSS feeds with ads. Text Link Ads will sell the ads for you, or in my case, I just put in ads for some things I’m doing with Marketing Sherpa. You can do it either way or both.

Not only is Feedvertising a potential money maker, but it’s also a clever way to cross promote other areas of your blog, company web site or other web sites that you publish.

There’s a very good tutorial on Feedvertising over at Tubetorial or you can check out the Feedvertising site.

The Microsoft Research Labs spinoff has launched their Flash based, social networking service, Wallop to compete with MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo 360, etc.

I reviewed Wallop in June of last year. At that time, Alfred Thompson commented that, “I don’t know what the official plans are but I would not expect to see Wallop open up as more than a research project.” Apparently plans have changed.

Wallop has also rounded up $10 million in venture financing according to seattlepi.com.

So many social networking sites, so little time.

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“Google to Jump Head-First into the Long Tail of Commerce”. Google Base will be incorporated more into regular Google search results in a move that will put it in direct competition with eBay. via Micropersuasion.

I’ve seen examples of Google Base within regular SERPs already with certain phrases such as, “search engine optimization services” where a “refine your search” box appears with drop down menus for skills and service type above the regular search results. Greg Niland mentioned seeing this earlier in the year, “Google Base Added to SERPs“.

I’ve heard that in the coming months, Google Base will appear much more often in natural search results and that the line between Google’s various services and the search engine will become more fluid.

The Pew Internet and American Life research project has issued another report on the the future of the internet with predictions that by 2020:

• Virtual reality will enhance worker productivity
• Tech ‚Äúrefuseniks‚Äù will emerge as a cultural group, living “off the network”
• People will continue to disclose personal information unknowingly, albeit for some personal benefit

There are other insights as well including the continued social inequalities and 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed.

Here’s a video clip of Lee Rainie from Pew discussing the findings on the Lehrer NewsHour show.

John Battelle has posted an excellent interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the subjects of webspam and human influences to search quality. Regarding “human contribitions” to search quality, for some reason, lately I’ve been wondering if Google will acquire or implement something like StumbleUpon?

In other Matt Cutts’ news, does he have an evil twin? via Barry at SEW

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Wow, Eight years! That’s an awful long time in internet time. I wonder how many PG SEO practitioners there are out there? By PG I mean, “pre-Google”.

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David McInnis of PRWeb dropped me a quick note this a.m. about a new strategic partnership between PRWeb parent, Vocus Communications and Business Wire that includes the licensing of a private label version of PRWeb for use by Business Wire clients.

“Vocus will create and host for Business Wire a co-branded version of the PRWeb direct-to-consumer and SEO service. Business Wire members may disseminate press releases so they will be indexed by major search engines, distributed to thousands of news sites, including Google News and Yahoo News, and delivered through more than 20,000 RSS feeds that collectively reach tens of millions of consumers and thousands of journalists daily.”

I received my “Join Facebook” email today and registered. You can join one of three networks: Regional, College or Work.

While several employees at our firm, TopRank have Facebook accounts and we may (or may not) have done some things with clients, this is the first time “playing around” with my own account. There’s quite a difference between Facebook and MySpace in terms of layout, customization options and functionality.

For more info from the source, check out this very interesting video interview by Bambi Francisco with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month after their little redesign fiasco. They discuss whether Facebook is hitting a ceiling, the deal with Microsoft and about opening up Facebook to regional networks.

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The Direct Marketing Association has officially announced their Certification Program in Search Engine Marketing today. The first modules are being offered at DMA06 in San Francisco in October. There will be two levels of certification focused on agency and in-house marketers:

• Level 1: Designed for individuals able to work under the direction of an advanced search engine marketer. These individuals would know and be able to employ current best practices in organic or paid search marketing.
• Level 2: Designed for individuals who are capable of devising, creating, and managing effective search engine marketing programs within agencies or as lead members of in-house marketing teams. At this level, individuals can seek advanced certification in organic or paid search.

A new WebSideStory study announced today shows that paid search has only a slight advantage over organic search results for conversions.

The study looked at more than 57 million search engine visits on Google, Yahoo and MSN and showed a median order conversion rate of 3.40 percent at business-to-consumer e-commerce sites for pay per click compared to a conversion rate of 3.13 percent for organic search results during the same timeframe.

This announcement is timely, because recently, someone on our MIMA-SM discussion list asked about clickthrough rates on organic versus pay per click ads in search results. It’s pretty common knowledge that most people click on the organic results, but this person was looking for a credible resource citing specific numbers.

So here’s what I found: