Online Marketing Blog

MyBlogLog has been taking the blogosphere by storm the past few months, even before the acquisition by Yahoo. However, MyBlogLog is not a recent phenomena, it started out as a blog statistics service by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson in March of 2005.

I’m a fan of MyBlogLog (TopRank Community) and despite some of the infrastructure issues related to their increased popularity, am very optimistic about what the resources brought on by Yahoo will do for the community.

In order to find out more about MyBlogLog, I contacted CEO Scott Rafer through the MyBlogLog messaging tool and he surprised me not only with a quick reply, but a yes to answering a few questions. I was rather impressed and appreciative of this considering how busy he is right now. Most people active in the blogging world will know Scott Rafer’s name from having previously worked with Feedster.

When KeywordRanking was still in business, our Minneapolis SEO agency used to get calls about once a month from disaffected clients asking how to get out of contracts and to see if they were getting value for the $2,000 being spent. Most of those situations were the result of overzealous sales people, cold calling businesses and making promises that were a bit ambitious.

In most cases though, the business owner had not allowed enough time for their SEO and link building to gain momentum. Even quality SEO firms can suffer if expectations are not set correctly.

Now that the subsequent iteration of KeywordRanking (MarkeSmart Interactive) is no longer doing business as usual, we are getting contacted again by companies looking for reliable, trustworthy and results oriented SEO vendors that can help improve their sales online. This is on top of the 2-5 daily inquiries we get from other sources.

On Jeremy’s show tonight over at WebmasterRadio.FM, “Net Income”, he and Andrea interview Brian Axe, AdSense Product Manager. It’s a great show that starts out with quite a few clarifications of Google AdSense changes in terms of service ranging from not displaying images next to ads to the review and reinclusion process. Too many for me to list here, so be sure to listen to the full podcast.

A few notes from Jeremey:

• Google is not against arbitrageurs but rather respect it as a business model.
• Confirmation that not only is YouTube doing revenue sharing but it will be apart of AdSense.
• Leaves the door open that they have plans for Blogger video blogging with AdSense revenue sharing through YouTube.
• Explains smart pricing and how it works.

Wordtracker now offers a free keyword research tool – hat tip to SEOBook. Remember “hat tips” all you selfish, link hoarding bloggers out there? (no, I do NOT mean Aaron)

Yahoo Site Explorer adds new features

Andy and Jeremy, back and forth, back and forth about MBL. This is a good example of a blog post that is not well thought out before posting (on the part of Jeremy Zawodny). Using the word “spamming” and Andy Beal’s name in the blog post title was flat out lame, whether there was an objection to Andy’s contest or not.

Mike Moran on making a business case for search marketing

Serph’s up at ACS – new social media search tool – I hope to do a review of this later in the week

Yesterday one of our account managers emailed me about a very nice hit (mention in an article) for a media relations client (way to go Bill!) in a prominent technology publication. This pub has an online version and the topic was pretty provocative.

I did a quick search on Google blog search and noticed a significant number of blogs buzzing about this topic. It would be a great opportunity for the client to participate in those threads of dialogue and present their unique perspective. Doing so with a blog post to link back to offering more details would be a great way to connect with a community that cares deeply about the topic. Except one thing. The client doesn’t have a blog.

Explaining search engine optimization to newbies is something that anyone with sales or account support responsibilities at a search marketing or interactive agency is going to have to get good at. I used to spend a lot of time using the notion of “organic” and the whole “making fertile ground, planting seeds, nurturing, cultivating, watering, air, sun, bear fruit” kind of analogy but it gets old using the same description all the time.

The best way to explain the notion of optimizing web sites for search engines can vary depending on the starting point. For people stuck in 1999 SEO land, where it’s all about meta tags, submissions and SEO as a “one time” event, an explanation of the need for fresh, themed content and an ongoing pursuit of inbound links can become the focus.

When the first iteration of this blog went live, there was no intention of doing anything but documenting resources and sharing information. For a short time, we ran some Google AdSense ads and then participated in the beta of the Yahoo Publisher Network for a while. We even had a few image ads.

But ads just didn’t seem right so with the exception of very small sponsor text ads for the RSS feed, there is no advertising on this blog. I suppose one could argue the whole thing is an ad, but not in an explicit way.

Steve Rubel reports today that Wikipedia entries now appear in Google OneBox results. Just add “info” or “information” to your query and the first results will be from Wikipedia if there’s a match. Will an entry in Wikipedia be what a DMOZ entry used to be? Perhaps in more ways than one.

For a great resource on how to take advantage of marketing opportunities via Google OneBox, I recommend reading Brian Mark’s blog, The OneBoxer.

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Here is a list of the week’s blog posts on Online Marketing Blog focusing on SEO, blogging and business of search marketing.

SEMPO Board of Directors Nominees (Lee) – Voting begins Feb 6.

Search Marketing Blogs Update 012607 (Lee) – 18 new search marketing blogs added this week. We’re now at 350 and Todd Malicoat added a new CSE.

Friday Search News 012507 (Lee) – Googlebombs, Interviews with Bruce Clay and Marissa Meyer of Google.

Content vs Links (Lee) – This debate is missing the most critical concept: distribution.

The Lowdown on Web Designers and SEO (Lee) – Why your web designer didn’t make your site search engine friendly.

Recommendations for Collaboration Software (Lee) – Looking for tips on cross platform hosted email and calendar software.

SEMPO has announced the list of nominees for the 2007 board of directors.

It’s that time of week again for new additions that have been added to the big list of search marketing blogs. This week we have 18 blogs bringing the total to about 350. I would love to add Brett Tabke’s blog to our list, but he doesn’t post very often and there’s no RSS feed.

Thank you to Todd Malicoat for making a new Google Custom Search Engine using the list. He’s actually added it to the sidebar of his Stuntdubl blog, which is pretty cool.

• eConsultancy Internet Marketing & News – Group blog from the team at eConsultancy.
• DFWSEM Blog – Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association.
• Search Anyway Blog – Chris Ridings? and Sanjay Mayar blog about search and affiliate marketing.

Google bombs GoogleBombs

Dave Temple interviews Bruce Clay

Gord Hotchkiss interviews Marissa Meyer at Search Engine Land

SEO Consultants offers URI Valet service which allows you to check the “quality” of a page based on a number of technical factors

Eric T. Peterson is doing a free web analytics webinar in conjunction with the American Marketing Association and Aquent.

Personalization of search and its implications for SEO

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