Online Marketing Blog

Newly added search marketing blogs I’ve added recently include the list below. Most of these are not new blogs, I’ve just not been a subscriber before.

SearchRank Blog - David Wallace
Joe Morin - Travels
IR Thoughts - Dr. Garcia - Mi Islita
Paul J. Bruemmer on Search
eTrafficjams Blog - Search engine optimization and marketing advice
techipedia - Tech opinion and news, with a sprinkle of SEO and social marketing

I’ve also created a SEO Blogs Search Engine using the Google Coop tool that includes all the blogs I monitor in my RSS reader/aggregator:

I am very happy to say 3 of our “Marketing for Results” clients made the Business Journal’s list of the 50 fastest-growing private companies in the Twin Cities this year. These are clients that outsource all or a very large part of their marketing and public relations to our agency, Misukanis & Odden. Congratulations goes out to: Writing Assistance, Magnum Technologies and DDL.

I don’t mention my other company all that much on this blog, but maybe I should. Our M&O group provides strategic marketing planning, media and public relations, direct mail, email, advertising, lead management and interfaces seamlessly with TopRank for integrated campaigns that also involve search marketing, social media, blogs and online PR. M&O works primarily with small/medium businesses whereas TopRank clients range from startups to Fortune 20 companies.

As I was discussing the challenges and opportunities with a new client SEO project recently with one of our staff, I realized how much times have changed in regard to how we generate and apply keyword research.

In the late nineties and ‘01 it was pretty much a process of mapping keywords to web pages, citing popularity and competitiveness. We used the KEI information provided by the WordTracker keyword research tool to uncover opportunities with ideal keyword popularity to competitiveness ratios. Things like keyword density, prominence, position, etc were mulled over for each search engine in excessive detail.

Today is the last day to nominate sites/services and blogs to the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards.¬† Don’t be shy and feel free to nominate Online Marketing Blog in the “Business/Marketing Blog” cagegory.

Using web analytics to quantify SEO work. Free online class today from ClickTracks’ CEO, John Marshall

G-man interviews Shoemoney at SEOMoz Blog.

Next gen of Googspy: SpyFu - Want to know which keywords your competitors using in their online advertising campaigns? SpyFu.com will offer nearly 20x more raw data than previously available on Googspy, with a ton of new features including Adword price and Domain spending estimates.

In a rare moment of vanity-search weakness (yeah right!), I Googled my name (Lee Odden) and was surprised to see an AdWords ad from salesforce.com. I am not sure why they would do that as there are so many other people in search marketing whose names are searched on more frequently, are well known, more prominent in the industry, etc.

Out of curiosity I started plugging names into Google (50+) to see which ones would pull up more ads from salesforce.com and the only other names pulling up salesforce.com ads were Danny Sullivan and John Battelle.

Looks like the king of search marketing will continue working with Search Engine Strategies.

Jim Boykin is taking a break from blogging and getting down to business, a very good idea worth exploring but sad because Jim puts out some excellent information.

Matt Cutts interview with eMarketing Talkshow

Jobs in Search turns 2 years old

New SEO candidate articles at Marketing Pilgrim

Putting Blogs to Work for Wall Street - CNET article on using blog and social media tracking services to give traders competitive intelligence on investor sentiment

Last week was quite a whirlwind with 3 presentations at DMA06 in San Francisco and then immediatley to Boston for 2 presentations to speak at a private conference being held by a client. We are doing a LOT more of that kind of speaking/consulting. Next up:

Nov 2nd: Visi Data Center 2.0, St. Paul
“The Truth about Search Engine Optimization” - Visi, the largest ISP in Minnesota, is holding an event to launch their new data center with St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman attending. During this event there will be presentations of interest to business and web site owners including my presentation on SEO.

RSS to Email service FeedBlitz has launched version 2.0 of the service. Lots of upgrades. via Blogger Design.

Google launches a new multivariate testing tool, Google Website Optimizer and is looking for beta testers.

Yahoo launches the new version of their sponsored search program, Panama.

Here’s a new e-book on social media (pdf) from spannerworks. This is a great companion book to the PR 2.0 Essentials (pdf) document from SHIFT.

Brian Solis publishes the next installment in his series about blogger relations: “Reaching The Blogosphere Part 4 - Writing and Distributing the News“.

There was a Q/A article in the Wall Street Journal’s StartupJournal site on search engine optimization that I’ve been meaning to respond to for a few weeks now. A good question was posed by a small business owner who was confused about “search engine optimizers” and whether they were worth it.

There seem to be two schools of thought from journalists on the topic of SEO. Those that slant it towards evil, worthless and shady. And those that check their facts and present those facts. I’ll let you decide what angle the writer from the StartupJournal was coming from on your own.

With Yahoo News being more popular than CNN or MSNBC, (comScore) there’s a tremendous opportunity for online marketers to gain visibility with consumers as well as those members of the media that research news stories, subject matter experts and press releases online.

News search engines crawl a defined list of trusted news sources and employ their own algorithms to determine ranking of stories. Yahoo crawls about 6,500 sources with very few if any blogs included, Google crawls about 4,500 sources including many blogs and Topix.net says they include 10,000 news sources including blogs.
Here are a few tips on getting visibility on several of these top news search engines:

When I attend or speak at conferences, I always, like to visit the exhibit areas to see how they’re laid out, scope out which search marketing agencies are exhibiting and to visit friends from other companies and search engines. While checking out the Interactive exhibit hall here at DMA06, I noticed a few things:

There were hardly any search marketing agencies. Kevin Lee was there with Did-It and I believe I saw iCrossing. That was it. Apparently SEOInc had a booth in the other monstrous Exhibit hall that was made up of list brokers, direct mail companies,etc.