Online Marketing Blog

The WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference kicked off today with a short introduction to the conference by Brett Tabke and an opening keynote by Guy Kawasaki.

Apparently Guy really wants links as he sandwiched his very thoughtful and humorous presentation with requests for links so he can boost his Technorati ranking. Apparently he’s been hovering at around 46 and wants to hit the top ten.
He started off describing his backround working with Apple and Steve Jobs and very enthusiastic slant towards all things Mac. HIs recent book, Art of the Start is a best seller and serves as an interesting lead-in to his presentation, “The art of innovation”.

After what seemed like a very long flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas, Jolina, Karen and I have finally settled in.

I bumped into Jeremy Schoemaker when getting off the plane - I had not met him in person before and he seemed like a nice fellow.  On the way to the ground transport and not paying attention to where I was going exactly, we ended up in the limo area seeing Jeremy again. A towncar seemed like a pretty good idea considering the notoriously long waits for taxis here in Vegas.

Zippy is a new meta search engine that queries other major engines and returns results in a format most suited for Webmasters and SEOs. The site was launched in September by the seasoned SEO Dave Naylor, and provides some valuable tools for site optimization.

Zippy’s design is similar to Technorati’s new design, with a minimalist white background and lots of bright colors. The site is pretty easy to use, and has a slick feel with the help of some ajax. It took only a few minutes worth of playing around to really get a grasp on the functionality. However, a tutorial or features page, would be nice to help introduce the functionally to a new user.

Danny Sullivan has posted a very interesting and THOROUGH description of how the Search Engine Watch Blog had two different stories get major play on Digg and Google News at the same time. This provided an opportunity for a comparison and it was interesting to read that Google News sent significantly more traffic than being on the home page of Digg.

He does make the distinction that one event does not make the rule and that the Search Engine Watch blog is included as trusted news source in Google news. There are about 7,000 site included in Google News, so this isn’t a situation you can test on your own. Or is it? I’ve written before about how to get into news search engines, including Google News.

On my way to login to a neglected Google AdSense account today, I was presented with this screen:

A quick check of the AdSense Blog showed that this was 4 hours of planned maintenance.

Note to Google:¬† Maybe you could use the same language on the “system is down” page as you do on the blog? It might be more helpful to users.

This morning Andy Beal announced the winner of the SEM Scholarship contest he’s been running the past month:¬† Ben Wills for “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing“.

As one of the judges for the scholarship, you might imagine that an article about social media would attract my attention and it did.¬† Ben walks away a $6,000 scholarship prize, which in reality, will be worth far more because of the additional knowledge he’ll gain. One on one consulting with Andy Beal alone, is probably worth the six grand.
Ben is not the only winner in this scholarship promotion, Andy Beal and Marketing Pilgrim walk away with a ton of new inbound links, traffic, subscrbers and industry visibility.  Not that Andy needs any more of that.

Our public relations firm consistently uses the PRWeb Podcast service for our clients, but I’ve not taken advantage of the service very often for our own PR efforts with TopRank.

Yesterday for the second time ever, I personally used PRWeb’s Podcast service that’s available when you select a $200 or higher option for press release distribution. As with the first time, I was totally impressed.

The process is pretty simple. You order a press release to be distributed and pick the $200 level. As you go through the process of enabling or activating the various options for the release, you’ll have the option of scheduling a PRWeb Podcast. Pick a date and time that works for you and you’ll get an email with the phone number and access code.

A new keyword research tool called WordZe has launched this week and here is a quick review:

WordZe is a keyword research tool that shows detailed keyword searches, plus ways to track keywords well past their estimated daily search volume. The user data that powers WordZe comes from Internet portals and ISP logs from around the world.

“The tools that WordZe provides do more then just give users a general idea of how often a keyword is being search for, they also allow the user to track daily trends as keywords or industries fall and rise in popularity due to seasons or events in the news.”

Here are this week’s list of blogs/sites that I’ve added to my huge list of resources and blogs covering search engine optimization, new media public relations and marketing with social media.

Timboy - Tim Converse at Yahoo offers a great sense of humor and is sometimes referenced as Matt Cutts’ alter ego. One of my favorite posts of Tim’s, “Search Engine Optimization from Black to White“.

SpinThicket is a sort of Fark for public relations and advertising created by PR Firm Idea Grove,who also publishes the excellent Media Orchard blog.

Manoj over at Web Analytics World blog has announced the release of a new eyetracking study by Enquiro that takes an in-depth look at interactions with Google, Yahoo! and MSN using eye tracking methodology. Many search marketers are familiar with Enquiro’s original eye tracking report on Google. (pdf)

The new Google/Yahoo/MSN whitepaper covers:

• How We Scan a Listing
• Semantic Mapping
• Information Scent
• Thin Slicing
• Banner Blindness
• Growth of Navigational Search
• Impact of Bolded Search Queries and Icons
• Perceived Relevancy
• Golden Section Theory
• Portal Entry Success
• Interactions with Top Sponsored

Next week is the biggest, baddest WebmasterWorld Pubcon ever and I am really looking forward to it. This time around I will be speaking on two panels and will be bringing two of our account managers, Karen Sams and Jolina Pettice. This will be the first Pubcon, or search marketing conference for that matter, for both of them.

I am really interested in meeting people that work in the search marketing field whether they are SEOs, webmasters or search engine employees. I’ve removed my photo from the header in this blog but you can see what I look like below. Feel free to say hello!

One of the most satisfying and useful metrics for a blog is whether posts generate comments or not as well as the quality of the comments. With increased traffic and visibility comes increased interaction but it also attracts comment spam or comments of no value.

This blog is old enough and has enough daily visitors that a comment policy is appropriate. so here goes:

1. Comments are welcome and encouraged. There is no better metric of how much impact a post has with the readers and many times, it is the content within the comments that provides the most value. If you’re not sure whether to comment, go ahead. If you’ve crossed some kind of line, I’ll email you.