Online Marketing Blog

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.

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.

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 Books (print) are often outdated by the time they hit the shelves and conferences are expensive.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.

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.

View outside the front window of TopRank’s office.

It’s not looking good here in Minnesota - lots and lots of snow coming down. I had everyone leave the office early today because all of the schools were closing and the roads are pretty bad.

My rear wheel drive 300c is no match for icy roads topped with a few inches of fresh snow. We’ll see if the six bags of softner salt I put in the trunk this morning do the trick or not to get out of here.

Lists are good and bad. They’re often subjective and almost always in dispute by those that don’t make the list. Being on a list is a form of promotion or marketing in my opinion. Get on a list and you’ll get noticed.

Whether it’s getting on Todd And’s Power 150 list of markting blogs (glad you could join Andy and Neil), on our own list of search marketing blogs or even the recently published list of top seo firms at topseos.com, I don’t see any downside to being on such lists.