Online Marketing Blog

I think one of the ways you can sum up the idea of social media optimization and marketing is: “traffic alternatives to Google”. As great as Google is, marketers are increasingly looking for alternative and/or additional channels for content distribution and marketing and consumers for sources of information and interaction.

Some have suggested social search as an alternative. I don’t think social search will ever replace search engines as we know them today, but I do think the rate of growth for major search engines will certainly be affected by the growing number of niche tools and media specific channels such as social networks, social bookmarking sites, personalized search, tagging, podcasts, video blogs, regular blogs and other “social media”.

Marketing Sherpa has released their 5th annual Buyer’s Guide to SEO and PPC agencies. The new report includes:

• In-depth profiles of 62 PPC agencies and 104 SEO firms include honest notes on which types of clients each works best with — and who should *not* hire them.
• Practical 80-page Shopping Overviews guide you through the budgeting, decision-making and RFP process.
• Easy Scan Charts let you compare-and-contrast dozens of search marketing firms at a glance. Includes factoids on pricing, staffing, and specialization. Great for creating your short-list.

Andy Beal notes the announcement that Danny Sullivan will be doing a keynote presentation at Pubcon in Vegas. That makes 4 keynote presentations:  Guy Kawasaki, Jon S. von Tetzchner of Opera, John Battelle and Danny. Wow, that will be some conference!

Here’s Brett’s interview with Danny posted today.

Eric Ward, the mac daddy link master or as Debra likes to call him, “LinkMoses” has published his Linking Commandments (part one). These inspired, toungue in cheek linking tips include pearls of wisdom including:

• II - “Thee who linketh in exchange for gold is Link Whore” *
  (linking in exchange for a return link may be marginally slutty)
• III - “Thou shall not social linketh thyne own site” *
  (nor send a memo to all employees telling them to digg it, or ask your children to link to your site from their MySpace space)

The well-known marketing testing site, Marketing Experiments is offering their next paid search management certification course. If you haven’t heard of the site, they’ve been around for ages thoroughly testing various aspects of web marketing. As a result, they have some pretty impressive best practices developed.

Outside of Google’s Advertising Professional, what other PPC or Paid Search certification programs have you used? I am curious what others’ experience has been.

John Battelle has launched a new Digg style service on his Search Blog called SearchMob. It allows registered users to submit articles and vote on them based on the Pligg content management system. via Google Blogscoped.

Similar services that I’ve found very useful include Piers Fawkes’ Marktd for marketing related stories upon which SearchMob was inspired and Constantine Basturea’s New PR for new media public relations articles.

It seems there may be opportunity to for many of these types of sites to emerge in niche topics. My question is, will they augment or compete with search engines?

Is Wikipedia the new DMOZ? asks Threadwatch.  Wikipedia Dominates Brand Search Results via Microperuasion

Axandra Search Engine Facts posts a nasty link spam trick for getting links on Slashdot.

Breakdown of Digg algorithm for scoring stories from Marketing Shift - via Axandra

24 Hours of Google Search - not new, but interesting

Get your daily fix of A Blog Node which also includes a very impressive list of resource links

I’ll catch hell from our PR people if I don’t mention somewhere that I am speaking at 2 and possibly 3 different sessions at the DMA06 conference Oct 14-19. The DMA annual conference is the largest marketing conference in the world.

One session is a 2 1/2 hour SEO 101 class on the search engine landscape and the other is on blogs, RSS and podcasting with Amanda Watlington and Stephan Spencer.

After that I’ll be doing a presentation on social media optimization for the eComXpo vitrual tradeshow Oct 24 followed up by a session on SEO for a local event, VISI Data Center 2.0 on Nov 2.

MIMA Summit 2006 Sitelet goes live.

Another journalist writes foolishly about SEO with trash like, “The easiest way to get a link is to rent space on a “link farm”, a simple web page that contains only links to other sites.” - via SEM 2.0

The New Influencers - A book in progress on blogs, PR and social media by Paul Gillin. via Steve Rubel

CIOs give blogs some credit. CIO Jury.

If you’ve been around the SEO game long enough to remember the I-Search discussion list, then you know how useful a resource discussion lists or groups can be. Several of the moderators and people involved with the I-Search list have gone off and started their own SEO and SEM discussion threads over the years.

In this age of blogs, RSS and social media, these lists can still be a very useful tool for staying current with the industry. Actually most, if not all are now RSS-enabled.¬† Below is a list of some of the SEO and online marketing discussion lists and their moderators that I’ve found to be useful:

Before I rush off to catch my flight back home, I am posting a few pics from yesterday’s happenings over at AllBusiness.com

The Producer and Director cracking the whip (not really)

The willing Guinea Pig

Outside my hotel

Pier 39

Pier 39

Sea Lions

Alcatraz (I missed the last boat!)
It was great meeting the folks at AllBusiness.com. They’ve just done a major overhaul of their web site, both on the front end and the back end. Be sure to check out the new site as well as the Search Engine Smarts blog and watch for the “Advisor” videos coming soon.

If you’re a social bookmark and tagging fan, then you’ll be interested in this post on jp’s domain, “Digg the Rigged“.¬† More at SEW.