Online Marketing Blog

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.

One of the best known and now out of commission lists was the I-Search Discussion List, which I’ve written about before. In fact, there are remnants of the I-Search list in at least three of the discussion lists in this week’s poll, which hopes to both find out what lists OMB readers prefer as well as draw attention to some great sources of search marketing information.

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:

The text is small, so I’ll put it here:

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.

This happens with SEO or search engine optimization pretty easily. Chasing after the next “silver bullet”, whether it’s SEO and PR, social media, social networking or personalized search, can distract marketers from what’s important. The search marketing industry is one that can be counted on to change on a regular basis. Strategies, tactics and best practices will emerge as new channels of distribution evolve and consumer search behaviors change. Just look at the shift from offline news consumption and traditional media to online as an example.

FeedBurner has an easy way of promoting a blog post though FeedFlare. FeedFlare simply adds a few social options to each post. You can choose to add a Digg link, del.icio.us link, ‘email this post’ option, share on Facebook and a few other handy choices. However, there are many more possibilities as you can create custom FeedFlares.

The other day Danny Sullivan put together one for StumbleUpon. He said it was quite easy as even a non-techie like himself can do it.

Here is how you’d get the StumbleUpon FeedFlare working for your site:

1. Log into your FeedBurner account.
2. Click on your feed.
3. Click on the Optimize tab.
4. Click on FeedFlare
5. Copy this URL http://searchengineland.com/stumble.xml and past it into the ‘Add new Flare’ box.

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.

This week brings several more very useful and interesting search engine marketing blogs to our list with a nice smattering of blogs from the UK. Here is the updaed OPML file and plain text list.

• Beyond the Paid – Melissa Mackey who is a Search Marketing Director for MagazineLine and recent winner of a free pass to Search Marketing Expo blogs about search engine marketing.
• 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog – Online marketing articles on blogs / blogging, internet advertising, search engine marketing, social media, and web design / development.
• SEOPittfall – In-house SEO Stephen Pitts writes about a nice mixture of search engine optimization, paid search, social media and blogs.
• MasterLink Search Marketing Blog – Mark Barrera and Kimber Cook write about search engine optimization.

Re-Posting other peoples content is a great way to feel included in a conversation and get additional traffic. However, simply copying their post word for word won’t give any additional value to your visitors. So here are 4 ways to successfully re-post someone else’s content.

1) Your Thoughts. This is the easiest. Someone else posts on the best way to get traffic from Google and you post your thoughts. You can agree or disagree but it’s your opinion that makes it unique.

2) Expand upon it. Evey now and then, someone will write a nice short post that those that are familiar with the subject can follow along no problem. But others may feel lost. Expanding on someone else’s post to put in more details and make it understandable to a wider audience can be beneficial to a whole new group of people.

Search marketing moves fast. Keeping up to date can be a full time job so finding quality resources of information is critical to stay ahead of the game. Books (print) are often outdated by the time they hit the shelves and conferences are expensive.

Many newbies and experienced search marketers turn to forums as a way to share knowledge, speculation and socialize. But which forums provide good info and which are full of tin hats?

Which leads me to this week’s reader’s poll:

Update: I rarely add updates but this is important. Regrettably, I did not include Crea8asite Forums, which was purely an oversight.

Having co-workers that do public relations, they seem to have timing down. They know when to put out press releases for the most coverage, when the best time to call people is and what time is optimal to send out an email campaign to get the most responses. So that got me wondering, when is the best time to blog?

Being an avid blog reader, I’d have to say that it doesn’t matter to me when someone posts a story, I’ll get to it eventually. I tend to read feeds in the morning and early evening, but that doesn’t mean that I skip any or don’t put enough attention towards those that post at 1am compared to those that post at 8am. For me, I don’t think there is an optimal post time for someone else to catch my eye. But there may be for social sites as there are probably less incoming posts to Technorati or Digg later in the evening. This may give your post a little added exposure due to less competition.

Press releases were originally designed as a communication tool between company PR staff or public relations firms and the media. But now that online news sites such as Yahoo News and Google News contain such an abundance of press release content and RSS makes it easy to syndicate news, press releases can be effectively used as a direct to consumer communication tool.

Not only are press releases an effective tool for distributing content to the media and consumers, they can easily be syndicated creating a excellent opportunity to attract incoming links. Some of the press releases our SEO firm optimizes and distributes have gained as few as 30 unique domain name links and some have garnered over 500 – all from a single press release.

Wow, this week went fast! It’s time for the search engine marketing blogs update. Below are blogs that we’ve come across in our travels across the web. Also, here is the updated OPML file and the plain text list for use with custom search engines.

• SEO Critique – Thomas Schmitz’s Seattle based blog about search engine optimization.
• Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search – The title of this blog by Mike Blumenthal says it all.
• Cape Cod SEO – Small business SEO and PPC plus a little about Cape Cod from Derek J Edmond.
• That Girl From Marketing – Natasha Robinson blogs about search marketing, social media and industry news.
• Irish Wonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog – A blog about blackhat, general SEO issues and other things related to the life on the web.