Online Marketing Blog

I guess it’s the night for emails from the search engines. Yahoo sent out an email to Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers with a notice that Yahoo is now allowing them to request an invitation to upgrade. That’s an interesting spin isn’t it? Have your advertisers ask to upgrade? What it really means is a phased approach at rolling out the new program:

“Invitations will be sent in stages to U.S. advertisers over the remainder of the year and early next year. You’ll be notified of your upgrade date at least two weeks in advance. You’ll also be able to access a preview of what your account will look like after the upgrade.”

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An interesting email from the Google AdSense team came in early this am:

As our valued AdSense publisher we’d like to present you with a great opportunity to gain additional free traffic to your website through Google Base. Google Base is a place where content owners, like you, can upload information to Google. You describe and assign attributes to the information you submit and we use this meta-data to target search results to what users are looking for. In fact, based on your items’ relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.

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WebmasterRadio.FM man of many talents, Daron Babin, gave a little video interview at DMA 06.

Be sure to check out WebmasterRadio.FM for live interviews and the best Internet radio shows on search marketing.

I believe their next stop will be WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon conference in Las Vegas Nov 14-17, which will be one hell of an event. There will be four keynote presentations including John Battelle, Danny Sullivan, Guy Kawasaki and Jon S. von Tetzchner, the fellow behind the Opera browser.

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ClickZ is taking nominations for their 2006 Marketing Excellence Awards. Please consider toprankblog.com for the Marketing Blog category.

Larry Chase does it again with 11 excellent tips on increasing site traffic.

Windows Live Search adds Linkfromdomain operator.

Audio presentation: “Top 5 Search Marketing Opportunities for 2007: Real-Life Data from 3,944 Marketers”

Rand presents his summary of the Google ranking algorithm. You could also call this Google ranking factors. Nice.

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After announcing that PRWeb was going to discontinue their free press release distribution service, there was quite a bit of buzz in the search marketing and PR blogosphere. Some people considered it as suspiciously financially motivated and too soon after the acquisition by Vocus. However most people, myself included, believe this is an excellent move for PRWeb.

Too many companies were abusing the free wire service to send out less than credible announcements. I’ve always believed that the credibility of the newswire is almost entirely dependent upon the quality of news releases that they distribute.

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Later today I’ll be presenting here at DMA-06 on a panel called, Blogs, RSS and Podcasting with Amanda Watlington from Searching for Profit and Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts. Basically, my presentation will cover how blogs can be used as public relations tools in the context of “Push and Pull PR”. The presentation is broken up into:

• Opportunity
• Push and Pull PR
• Blog Optimization & PR
• Blogger Relations
• Case Study

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Normally when I do interviews, I categorize them under “Spotlight on Search or Spotlight on Blogging”, but Chris Pirillo doesn’t fit in just one category. He’s a bit of a renaissance man when it comes to all the enterprising projects, ventures and activities he’s involved with.

Chris started Lockergnome in 1996 and hosted TechTV’s “Call for Help” show for 2 years. He hosts a popular conference every year called Gnomedex which has been sponsored by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. He’s written books, columns and many articles and he produces a popular online radio show.

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The DMA06 conference is getting rev’d up with pre conference sessions Satuday and Sunday. The new search engine marketing certification program started on Saturday with Jeannette Kocsis, VP of Digital Marketing at Harte-Hanks, presenting on “Introduction to Search Engine Marketing” and I followed up with “Search Engine Basics”.

Unfortunatley, I was not able to sit in on Jeannette’s session, but Amanda Watlington said there was great feedback. Here’s the description of the module:

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Yahoo gives a new weather report that they rolled out a search index update but not any more detail than that.

There’s a particular phrase that’s very competitive on Yahoo that I spot check every time an update is announced (286,000,000 search results) and we have 2 of our sites in the top ten for the phrase. With this most recent Yahoo update, we dropped from #1 to #3 and the second listing moved up to #5 which is fine, but Yahoo is completely ignoring our 301 redirects and showing the wrong domain names.

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I recently did an interview with Neil Patel over at Pronet Advertising blog talking mostly about the SEO business, SEO and PR, social media optimization, blogging and about the future of search.
Speaking of SMO, Danny Sullivan sent me an email last night about participating on a social media optimization panel. I am very much looking forward to that. As you know, I like to talk about SMO. Unless something major changes, this will be the last SES Danny is involved with.

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Big news from PRWeb’s David McInnis to all PRWeb account holders last night.¬† Free press release distribution will cease as of Oct 23rd.¬†¬† The new packages are as follows:

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Here’s a list of blogs that I’ve come accross recently that I’ve added to my RSS reader that cover topics related to search engine optimization or new media PR and social media. Some of them are new, some have been around awhile and I am just now getting them added to my reader:

Yodel Anecdotal - Yahoo company blog (not the Yahoo Search Blog)

Read/WriteWeb - Richard McManus

CrunchNotes - Michael Arrington

Somewhat Frank - Frank Gruber (I know I’ve listed Frank before, but just to make sure since he’s a very swell fellow)

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