Online Marketing Blog

Thanks to Amie for helping with this list of blogs we’ve been collecting and reviewing this week (and some from last week). This latest round of blogs have also been added to the big list of search engine marketing blogs.

• Rothman Marketing Blog - Israel Rothman writes about internet advertising.
• SEM Clubhouse - Christine Churchill, Jim Gilbert, Mike Churchill & Jeff Martin from KeyRelevance’s blog about search.
• WebConnoisseur - Dustin Woodard‚Äôs thoughts on search, web analytics and the web in general.
• Charlotte Internet Marketing - Keith Schilling’s Big Brush Media Blog.

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An attorney from a prominent, 200 lawyer firm calls me up (message) saying he’s been referred by two very credible sources. And they are exceptionally credible. Most of the time when this happens, it’s a law firm looking for internet marketing services. In fact, earlier in the day another local law firm called about exactly that.

Anyway, this attorney and I play phone tag and we finally connect. He wants to have me come to his office and speak with their ecommerce/technology group and talk about Google advertising. He asks if I can sit in on an informal lunch and ask me questions about search marketing. Just for an hour or so.

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The super popular social bookmarks tool that Thomas created last year has recently been updated. We’ve been keeping him exceptionally busy with “client projects that are fun, interesting, challenging” for quite a while, but he was still able to sneak in a quick update and added several social news and bookmarking services.

New services added:

• Google Reader
• Diigo
• Netscape
• DZone
• Squidoo
• Looklater
• RecommendzIt
• Segnalo
• StumbleUpon
• Mr. Wrong

Several of these should have been added a long time ago, but hey, we’re busy helping clients.

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You like sports? You like travel? Check out Fan with a plan.

Coremetrics is launching big updates including: [update] Sorry, I can’t mention the things Coremetrics is launching because their PR firm pitched me with information that they did not want published. And no, I was not under any embargo. Note to Lewis PR: get up to speed on pitching bloggers asap or it could be a lot more embarrassing than this.

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Cameron Olthius recently posted about the rise of “made for digg” sites, a phrase coined by Ethan Kaplan, who points out Knuttz as an example. Alister Cameron looked into the Knuttz site and gives a breakdown of how this site funnels visitors in such a way to encourage digg votes.

Knuttz is basically a blog that shows clever photographs and interestingly enough, has had 14 stories hit the front page of digg in about the past two weeks.

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Since TopRank does quite a bit of blog consulting and we’re responsible for the maintenance of several employee blogs as well as most of our client blogs, the importance of keeping blog software updated is very close to home.

Recently there were a number SEO blogs that were defaced due to an exploit though older versions of WordPress. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but I bet those bloggers will be sure to keep their versions of WordPress up to date. Below are 6 reasons anyone with a blog should keep up to date:

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It’s pretty common knowledge that talented SEO professionals are in high demand. Agencies, companies and businesses that would not normally offer search marketing as a service are looking for SEO, SEM, copywriting, analytics and coding professionals. As a result, companies are offering a variety of enticements or perks to attract and keep quality individuals.

If you are a search marketing professional, (management, acct management, production, support) What are the perks or benefits that make you the most satisfied with your job? Note, this is not what attracts you to change jobs, but what are those perks that make you want to stay, even the oddball reasons.

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Communication is key in business relationships as much as it is in personal relationships. Most of the disappointments that often happen in client/agency relationships have to do with faults in communication. Not being able to empathize with another’s perspective can make things troublesome pretty quickly.

Below are some real and some tongue in cheek considerations for why SEO firm and client relationships can get shaky:

Top 5 Ways SEO Agencies Piss Off Their Clients:

1. Agency over promises and under delivers
2. Agency uses tricks and gets client site penalized by search engines

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Dan Rosandich sent me this cartoon. Apparently he runs a service that you can use to automatically populate your blog or web site with cartoon images via RSS or JavaScript with a daily cartoon. They’re not all about search engines or SEO, but some bloggers might find it to be an interesting way to add content. More at Dan’s cartoons.

Fantomaster used to post SEO related cartoons and Chris Pirillo’s bLaugh offers a web 2.0 slant on their cartoons. Rand uses them in his PowerPoint presentations as well.

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Yesterday I posted a link to aimclear’s blog about his frustrations with getting Yahoo geo targeting features to work for him. A thread had also been started at Search Engine Watch forum which apparently has been pulled, but thanks to Google cache, I was able to grab some of the info.

Basically, ackmnmn from aimclear says that a support person at Yahoo informed him that Yahoo recognized some aspects of geo targeting were not working and that Yahoo would be disabling geo targeting or parts of it.

In the same SEW forum thread, YahooSarah chimed in with:

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Note from Lee: Another contributor to Online Marketing Blog, Karen Sams who also writes her own blog at Media Relations Blog, makes her debut in this post about the ongoing challenge to gain original content for clients. Fresh content isn’t only necessary for making web sites attractive to search engines, but it’s also a critical component for marketing efforts in any channel - including Karen’s specialty: Public Relations. Read on to find excellent tips on how to make the most out of limited content.

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Aren’t you glad I didn’t include an image with this post? OK, so SEO isn’t rocket science, but it’s not a colonoscopy either. Well, maybe GooogIe thinks SEO is rocket science, but what do they know.

What’s with the cliche’s? Cliche’s are simply a way to hide innuendo which was the case when this Dave Pasternack -  SEO/rocket science guff all started. Some of the arguments in this debate are not entirely without merit so I’ll take a humorous and a somewhat practical approach to explaining a few.

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