Online Marketing Blog

Susan and I made it to Sydney, Australia early this morning and go to watch the sun rise over Eastern Australia during the descent. After a few hours getting through customs, then getting our bags x-rayed on the way out and then getting checked again to get into a line to get to the exit of the airport, we made it outside for the line to the taxis. It might have been a lot of hurry up and wait, but we were just thankful to be outside in the fresh air.

After getting into the Chicago Hilton, a familar place from SES conferences, I walked the 3-4 blogs to the Columbia University campus where Bulldog Reporter was holding the Advanced PR Technology event. Greg Jarboe and I switched the time of our session with Katie Paine so she could make a plane to Dubai.

Regrettably I did not join the event in the am when it started and missed a number of fantastic speakers including Debbie Weil, but I did get to meet her for the first time. We are fellow bloggers over at Business Blog Consulting. Shel Israel blogged about Phil Gomes presentation here.

Not many additions this week although we have quite a few in the queue. Most of them are very new blogs and need to get some more content before we can add them. Here’s the updated search marketing blogs list, the OPML file and the text list.

• V7N Search Marketing News - Peter Da Vanzo blogs on search marketing industry news and recently some great how to’s.
• RedFly Search Engine Marketing Blog - Dave Davis offers some great insight as a “solo seo” from Ireland.
• ContextWeb Internet Advertising Blog - John Ebbert writes about online and contextual advertising with info for publishers and advertisers.

Day one of the Minneapolis High Rankings seminar went well and I think the presentations were well received. One thing I think I did not emphasize is that the speakers are not only subject matter experts, but they’re skilled at instruction as well

Matt Bailey reinforced himself as one of my favorite speakers and I recommend that you travel to wherever it is that he’s speaking next to learn about analytics and usability. If nothing else, you can enjoy his Star Trek “red shirt” hypothesis.

I started doing site optimization work around 1997ish but didn’t start taking on my own clients until 2000. We started TopRank in 2001 and some of our SEO clients are companies I’ve worked with for 7-8 years. That’s a lifetime in internet time, getting to know their business, hitting success goals and receiving referrals for even more business.

The services we offered then and the services we offer now are quite different and one of the issues agencies have to deal with when auditing client hours vs revenue is to decide where the business is profitable and where it’s not. Client business models change and vendors are expected to change along with the clients in order to best serve the client’s needs.

By now the High Rankings SEM Seminar team has infiltrated our city of melting snow and is preparing for the all-out assault on SEO, PPC, Analytics and more for the benefit of the local marketers wise enough or fortunate enough to attend.

The fun begins around 7:45 am or so for registrations at the Crown Plaza downtown Minneapolis and the ball gets rolling around 8:30. It looks to be a very good sized group. Actually, it’s an ideal size - small enough to be able to interact with all the other attendees and speakers over two days and large enough for a variety of interactions, comments and feedback.

I nearly missed mentioning this. Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips does an interesting form of interview where he asks two people the same questions and posts their replies as a sort of “face off”.

In the past he’s done this with Darren Rowse and Jeremy Shoemaker as well as John Chow and Matt Coddington. This week he did such an interview with Rand Fishkin and myself, which might have been better if it were with Rand and Danny or Rand and Matt Cutts, but hey I’m not complaining.
It’s not much of a faceoff since SEOmoz gets 10 times the traffic Online Marketing Blog does. Despite that, many of our answers are quite similar with the exception of the questions about reading just one blog and a one word description that describes the reason for blog success. Thank you Daniel for the exposure!

Threaded email discussion lists are a bit old school communications in contrast to the rise in popularity of blogs and RSS. However, there are several of these channels that serve as a sort of digital watering hole for some of the most experienced search marketers who dispel invaluable insights.

For large segments of the internet community, email remains a preferred discussion tool. The platforms most often used for such lists these days seem to be Google Groups and Yahoo Groups.

A long time client of ours is re-doing their web site after 5 years and we’ve been in discussion with them about the need for a SEO migration plan. The developer wants to use a new platform for the site, meaning urls are going to be different. This is an ecommerce site with thousands of product and category URLs so the move to the new platform needs to be executed correctly or it could go very badly as far as search engine visibility.

Shortly after explaining this to our client I was reading a prominent PR web site that listed various resources to “digital PR” articles. I clicked on one and came upon this from Entrepreneur.com:

One of the things that often happens with people in the search marketing industry is that after being in the business for a while and attaining a certain level of expertise, it becomes easy to take for granted that not everyone in marketing and business is consuming and digesting as much information. References to strategies and certain tactics do not have the same meaning, because of the dependencies on previous knowledge.

Aaron Wall published a number of nifty custom buttons for Google Toolbar in the past and now that Google Toolbar 4 is out, he’s posted a very nice collection:  Google Toolbar SEO Buttons under categories such as:  Link reputation/popularity, domain age, on-page content analysis, competitive analysis, blog link search, official search engine blogs, a nice collection of SEO related blogs and a “how to create your own buttons” tutorial. Nice.

March has been a bit crazy so far as we’ve been rolling out an enormous SEO campaign for one Fortune 20 client and are in the final stages of signing another. On top of that, March will be a speakorama on blogs and public relations.

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting for the IABC chapter in Minneapolis at St. Thomas University with Sarah Bjelland, a VP from Wells Fargo. The event was called, “Delivering Insight into Business Blogs” and I presented on social media in general, trends with business blogging, applications for blog software in a corporate communications strategy and best practices for corporate blogs.