Online Marketing Blog

It’s all part of doing business in the industry, but I’ve been dealing with more and more parasites lately, so here’s my new definition:

• Competing agencies that do not specialize in search marketing, but are too lazy to learn. They leech off of your information and good nature for their own betterment offering nothing in return and call it “co-opetition”.
• Prospects that try every trick in the book to suck how-to information out of you in the name of “learning about the SEO process”.
• Content spammers, copyright and trademark hacks who will take every last opportunity to rob you of your brand and content.

Something I’ve been noticing the past few months is an increasing number of web sites that do not use www. Either this is a trend that’s full force and I’ve missed it (busy with SEO clients) or it’s a trend picking up steam. Or maybe it’s a techie geek sort of thing as most of the sites I’ve noticed are a bit geeky. And they would take that designation as a compliment I think.

First I noticed Glen Stansberry’s excellent blog was shortened to just lifedev.net. Then Thomas aka TwisterMC’s new blog, bloggerdesign.com did the same thing.  And just today I noticed Greg Hartnett (greghartnett.com) of BOTW has just said no to the www. It’s not just these sites though, I’ve noticed many others too.

Some of our favorite Google people were in the media recently:

The Chicago Tribune did a huge piece on Google overall (hattip threadwatch) with a sidebar article “Meet Google’s Credibility Cop” on Matt Cutts.

I remember reading or hearing somewhere that Matt had worked for the NSA and this article mentions only that he interned with the Defense Department doing some programming.

The article opens up with language like, “hucksters, spammers and other charlatans” when making reference to manipulations to rank better on Google. Search marketing folks will know that means tactics that are to the extreme and not legit SEO, but I am not so sure everyday business Joe and Jane will see it that way. Actually, the article doesn’t mention search engine optimization at all.

That time of year is here again and the annual event held by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association called “The Summit” promises to be even bigger and better.

There’s a fantastic lineup of speakers and sessions including two keynote presentations: One from William Rice of the Web Marketing Association and Michelle Collins, a blogger for VH1‚Äôs, Best Week Ever. Other sessions include:

• Web Writing
• Web Analytics
• Brawny Academy
• Making the Grade
• Ask the Email Experts
• E-Commerce Opportunities
• Site Architecture
• Consumer Generated Media
• Paid Search
• Online Advertising

Earlier this month Brian Clark of Copyblogger launched a new service called tubetorial. The site offers video and screencast “how to’s” on several topics including:

• Web development and technology tips
• Internet marketing strategies and techniques
• Legal issues for Internet content producers and marketers

More than that, Brian offers some great insight into Internet business models and the selling of information. Tubetorial produces videos on their own and are also accepting viewer submitted videos. I really liked the idea and pinged Brian for more info on tubetorial. (links were added by me)

One of the interesting and sometimes challenging things about working in the search marketing business is dealing with the amount of mis-information and lack of understanding about SEO and marketing in general.

When you have an abundance of new business inquires and don’t need to do much outreach through inside or outside sales, it’s a very different situation than a newer company trying to get into the SEO market and build up a base of clients.

With more established companies that have a good reputation in the marketplace and an established client base, less time is spent evangelizing the notion of marketing via search than helping prospective clients understand how their unique online marketing problems can be solved.

Read/WriteWeb has posted an excellent review and comparison of the major social bookmarking services. Digg was not included as they are considered a social news service. The bookmark services reviewed include: BlinkList, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, diigo, Furl, Ma.gnolia, MyWeb, Shadows, Simpy and StumbleUpon.

The result? Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon were the clear winners. I seem to remember something a while back about how StumbleUpon Rocks.

Personally, I like tend to use del.cio.us the most for work and StumbleUpon for more recreational surfing. But I have found some excellent resources for work that way.

One of the most frustrating things people encounter with search engines is doing product research. Hard as they try, the affiliate links, spam and irrelevant content plague search results. There are a number of recommendation shopping sites and recently popular social shopping sites available to perform product research, but the information is often narrow or biased.

There’s a new kid on the block called Wize that we’ve been working with and I have to say, it’s a pretty impressive research tool for consumer products. The site launced today and it’s worth checking out.

Unless there’s any doubt, I am a linking fanatic. I appreciate links like they’re gold. When I talk about link building with our team, I can never stress enough the importance of linking for traffic and SEO. To me, the best way to learn about link building is to get out there and do it.

However, if you’re new, you can save quite a bit of time learning from the wisdom of others’ experience. Here are three recent posts and one bonus link on link building I highly recommend:

Rand Fishkin presents his thoughts on why email is still king for link building.

In the course of perusing the internet I come across some excellent resources. Here are some great search engine and social media blogs I’ve recently added to my RSS aggregator:

SEO Blogs:

HitTail Blog - Mike Levin

SEO Egghead - Jaimie Sirovich

Reality SEO - Mike Valentine

Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners - Michael Duz

Capture the Conversation - James Clark and Jason Cormier

Johnon Competitive Webmastering and SEO - John Andrews

inter:digital strategies - Joseph Dolson

Marketing with Social Media Blogs:

Experience Curve - Karl Long

21 SEO Tips from Matt Cutts. Via SEO EggheadThe A to Z Guide to Getting Website Traffic, Part One
The A to Z Guide to Getting Website Traffic, Part Two

New Research Released on Blog Reach - via Micropersuasion

Windows Local Live

Pingoat Gets Acquired

Register for the MIMA Summit NOW.

Shoot My Blog!

PR Newswire Delivers Optimized News Releases for Mobile Devices - Press Release

FriendFury - Friend finder for MySpace
Hitwise US Data Center with LOTS of data

Search for your links in Wikipedia