Online Marketing Blog

This Friday starts an exciting journey for the next 10 days or so. I will be leaving for San Francisco on Friday to the DMA06 conference in San Francisco until the 18th. I was just in San Francisco a few weeks ago for a SEO video shoot with AllBusiness.com.

On Saturday I’ll be doing one of the four modules for the DMA’s new Search Engine Marketing certification program. Then on Monday I’m doing a “Blogs, RSS and Podcasting” panel with Amanda Watlington and Stephan Spencer. My presentation will be about using blogs for public relations. On Tuesday I’ll be doing a search marketing lab where a panel reviews web sites from the auduience and that evening I’ll be participating on a panel on using RSS for marketing.

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Recently I’ve seen some predictions that with the direction search engines are taking, search engine optimzation is going to become obsolete in 5 or more years.

That’s not too risky of a prediction, since 5 years is literally the half-life of the entire search engine optimization industry. Five years is a lifetime in internet time.

Do I think SEO will die a slow death? I think a slowdown in the impact of current SEO methods is a more accurate assessment. That’s not much of a prediction either, is it? The rules for effective SEO change more often than the rules for just about any other industry I know.

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The 2007 report from Marketing Sherpa is out on search marketing benchmarks. Last year’s edition showed that SEO agencies beat in-house SEO by 300%. The new edition provides information from 3,944 marketers, agencies, and affiliates on PPC and SEO campaigns as well as eyetracking “heatmaps” to better understand how users view search results pages and ads.

The guide also includes five special reports:

• Search & Shopping
• Search Marketing & Public Relations
  
• Vertical, Second Tier, Local, and Pay Per Call Search
• Click Fraud — Perception versus Reality
• Search Eyetracking Study Year Two
  

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Directory submissions used to be a very big part of most search marketers traffic and link building efforts. That’s changed a great deal in the past few years or so but some directories are still important and have been consistent in their quality guidelines and ability to offer link/traffic benefit.

A short list of our favorite directories include:

• Yahoo Directory
• DMOZ (albeit grudgingly - just submit and forget about it)
• Business.com
• Microsoft bCentral Small Business Directory
• JoeAnt
• BOTW.org (oldest directory on the web)

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As blogs become more important sources of information and competition for users’ time and attention against mainstream media, many marketers and public relations practitioners continue to stumble about the blogosphere like a bull in a china shop.

Online Marketing Blog gets about 5-10 pitches per week on average, which provides more than enough of a sample on how blogs are getting pitched these days. What’s the verdict? It doesn’t look good.

A few of these pitches are right on or just lucky. Many are simply crap. Some come from friends but never make it to a post. Some are from complete strangers, but are very relevant and get in. Some are borderline where I’m interested, yet I never hear from that company again.

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The local interactive marketing association I’m involved with here in Minneapolis, MIMA, has launched a new interactive marketing blog that covers some industry news and particularly the good things happening in the midwest interactive marketing space.

Yesterday we had the annual MIMA Summit which went off very well. There were great speakers, a sold out venue, great networking, the best bag of schwag I’ve seen at any conference-anywhere, super food, tons of giveaways from companies like Target and of course some drinking, a bit of electronic-performance art from Popular Front, more networking and libations. A good time was had by all and the feedback has been excellent.

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The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association annual Summit starts in about an hour. This year’s event is sold out and there’s an excellent mix if speakers. With lots of sponsors this year, there are a ton of giveaways as well.

One of our pr firm clients, The Web Marketing Association and Web Award will have their CEO, William Rice start things off with the morning keynote presentation. Bill has run the Web Award competition for 10 years and the program has reviewed over 9,000 web sites in that time. His presentation will offer insight into what makes an award winning web site and he’ll also present industry vertical data compiled over the past 10 years.

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Phillip Lessen points to a very handy tool from Google called searchmash that appears to be a test interface for Google search results providing text SERPS in the left and matching images on the right. Each search result offers a dropdown menu of options that are normally presented as text links plus options for how you want the link to open.
What’s fun is that you can drag and drop the search results, ie, reorder them.¬†¬† You can also pick from text/images or all images.

Looks like someone’s 20% project I guess.

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Are you the next big thing in search engine marketing? Then head over to Marketing Pilgrim for Andy Beal’s new Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest.

Andy asked me if I would be interested in judging articles submitted and of course I said yes! Other judges include: Rand Fishkin, Mike Grehan, Jennifer Grappon & Gradiva Couzin, Kim Krause Berg, Robin Nobles, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and David Warmuz. You can read the press release, or check out the details below:

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Ask.com has announced this morning the launch of an upgraded version of Ask Sponsored Listings with improvements based on advertiser feedback and a new API to allow search marketers to create customized tools.
Here are some of the new features:

• Daily Budgeting
• Variable Refill Amount
• Hourly Billable Data
• Bulk Upload Enhancements
• Dashboard Reports

Looks like Ask is stepping up in the world and with 66% year over year growth in searches (2005 to 2006) according to Nielsen/Netratings, there’s a lot more overall search market share left to take from MSN and AOL.

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I hadn’t noticed this before, but there’s a slick little video on the main Search Engine Strategies page that expands when you mouseover it featuring shots of the conference, testimonials from several well known SES speakers, a few Incisive people and some commentary from Danny Sullivan along with “cameos” from many other people you see at all the SES shows. The comments that there are no other shows that focus just on search seem a bit over the edge since there is obviously the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference growing by leaps and bounds.

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