Online Marketing Blog

Technorati now offers a link count widget that provides visitors to your blog with a real-time count of how many links you have to a particular post. I read about this on another blog and I cannot remember which one - sorry for not hat tip.
Speaking of widgets, I’ve got a great interview with Lawrence Coburn of Sexy Widget blog coming next week. Lawrence did a presentation last week at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference that generated a lot of widget buzz.

Danny does a swell job of slicing and dicing search engine popularity stats across comScore, NetRatings and Hitwise.

SEMPO is running their State of the Search Marketing Industry survey again and I would encourage anyone working in the field to take a few minutes and fill it out. The survey provides excellent insight into the direction of search marketing budgets, tactics and trends.¬† I know I’m curious to see how it compares to the Marketing Sherpa Benchmark Guide 2007 data.

Also, there’s a giveaway for those of you that need that kind of incentive.¬† “As a thank you to everyone who participates in the survey, each respondent will be eligible to win one free full-conference pass to any Search Engine Strategies (SES) event in 2007.” SES conferences passes are in the range of $1200-$1500 so that is a nice prize.

Matt Cutts of Google was nice enough to take a minute to do a quick interview on his way out from the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. This was something we had coordinated via email before the conference, but I was lucky to catch him at the last minute.

Matt gives his take on Pubcon parties as well as the “Site Review” panel and sticking up for the mom and pop sites that make silly mistakes because they don’t have good information. Thanks for taking the time Matt!

A group blog I write for on occassion is hosting a carnival of customer service and invited the group to contribute. This is a business blog directed towards small and medium sized businesses on issues ranging from legal considerations to SEO. The invite made me think about how SEO can affect a customer’s experience with a site and it’s brand.

With the conference last week, I missed posting my weekly list of SEO, social media and online PR blog links, so let’s start off the week with a nice list. As a reminder, these are blogs that I’ve either recently discovered or recently “re-discovered”.

I have to say, the Pubcon conference last week was one of the better search marketing conferences I’ve been to. The overriding impression from just about everyone I talked to was that the content was great and the networking even better.

Below is a roundup of Online Marketing Blog’s blog posts, photos and videos from the WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas 2006. I have to say thanks to everyone that let me put my Sony CyberShot to the test and do these 1 minute “interviews”. :

Videos
Brett Tabke - WebmasterWorld
(Happy about the conference, speakers and the next one in Vegas)

I now have 5 of the 6 SEO interview videos I’ve shot here at the Las Vegas Pubcon.

Greg Hartnett - Best of the Web
Kevin Lee - Did-It.com
John Marshall - ClickTracks
Greg Jarboe - SEO-PR

I also have one with Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads but the file is too big for YouTube so I’ll have to get it up to Google Video this weekend.

Now we’re heading over to the actual “Pub” part of Pubcon at the Nine Fine Irisishmen bar at the New York, New York casino. Hopefully we’ll get more SEO videos there.

Danny Sullivan has announced his new blog, Search Engine Land, with Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz contributing. The blog officially opens Dec 11th. Now all Danny needs is a decent blog design.

One of the key components of the presentation I gave this morning at the Las Vegas Pubcon conference presented the idea of press release optimization and social media news releases in the context of push and pull. But before that, it’s important to understand the market opportunity with news search.

According to a report released by comScore, half of all internet users visited news sites in June 2006. Of the most popular news web sites, Yahoo News is #1 surpassing CNN, MSNBC and AOL News.

Wow, what a party! Yahoo had a very private, invite-only party last night at the Palms Towers in the Playboy suite.

Thank you to Yahoo PR for letting me bring Karen and Jolina from the TopRank team. This was their first conference and Karen’s fist time in Las Vegas. There were only 100 or so people invited to this party from a conference of several thousand, so it made quite an impression.

The Playboy Suite was quite a place. Here are a few photos:

One vendor you’re sure to see at virtually every SES and Pubcon conference is web analytics company, ClickTracks. I had the pleasure of speaking at a few DMA conferences at the same time as ClickTracks founder John Marshall and found him to be one of the most enthusiastic evangelists for web analytics in the industry. On top of that he’s really a very good guy.

John and his VP of Marketing, Michael Stebbins took out a few ClickTracks’ freinds for dinner on Tuesday night and it proved to be some of the best conversation. I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of networking after the daytime sessions are over.

I was very torn between attending this session and Big SEO, but I got a bit of both. Here’s the official session description:

“Today’s search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.”