Online Marketing Blog

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

Hacking New Media – T.L. Pierce

Social Media Optimization – David Wilson

Emergence Media – Daniel Riveong

Web Strategy by Jeremiah – Jeremia Owyang

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

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”.

My favorite blog pinging service, Pingoat, has been acquired by another company. No details are available at the moment but I’m hoping the move is a positive one. I also hope they bring back automatic pinging.

This is the second acquisition for Pingoat this year. Back in march, Tim Phelan took over Pingoat. Tim kept the service up and running while brining a few advancements, but nothing major.

I’m hoping the new management will continue to grow Pingoat and I look forward to future advancements.

[tags]pingoat, ping[/tags]

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.

There were 104 SEO companies and 62 PPC agencies profiled. You can buy the guides individually at $199 each or as a bundle for $249. Also, you get both a PDF version immediatley for download and a print copy is mailed to you within 24 hours.

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)
• VIII – “Just because MSN search is stupideth dost not giveth thee permission to link spameth them”
• X – “The link schemer eats from a bountiful table today, but the link farmer eats for a lifetime”

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?

Update:  I am a bit red in the face for not mentioning Search N Sniff, a similar service launched by Jonathan Nelson a week ago.

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

If I look back over all the blogs I read, most have photos associated with their posts. Maybe not every day, but quite often. It makes me wonder, do photos increase the number of subscribers to a blog?

If you stop and think about it, there are two kinds of people out there, the analytical/text people and the visual people. There are those than buy the New York Time’s best seller books and those that would prefer a magazine with less reading and more pictures. So, with that in mind, if your blog posts don’t include images, are you just targeting one audience then?