Online Marketing Blog

Andy Beal has put up a blog meme on his personal blog (I should have one of those but maybe not) about magazines being a window into knowing about a person.

I do subscribe to a few print magazines, but for the most part it’s because there are so many neighborhood kids selling subscriptions for school fundraisers that we get so many. For the most part, I like to get my info online. But it’s nice to have something in print once in a while, especially as Vanessa Fox says, for when you fly. Here’s a list of the magazines stacked up in the royal reading room as of this morning:

Google is always testing tweaks to their search results but today I noticed a very interesting feature that I think is called Google Categories. Below is a screen grab of SERPs for “dvd players”. “motorola cell phones” also triggered these results but things like “lawn care” and “art museums” did not. It’s obviously product focused.

Notice the bold headings on categories of search results including: Comparison Shopping, Reviews, Stores, References and Others. There’s also a link to turn this feature off at the top right, “Turn OFF Categories for these results”. There are other categories including Forums, News and Manufacturers.

TopRank is hiring for various SEO positions like mad right now and in the process of revising job descriptions to reflect changes in client needs and the industry, it became clear that, yet again, some skills have become far more important than others.

An example would be the importance of HTML and on-page optimization skills was very high in the early days of SEO, whereas link building and viral marketing/creative have become increasingly important.

Core characteristics for a successful search marketing career like being smart as a hell and an insatiable need to continuously learn new things will never change, but as you know, when an ordered list comes across my desk, it’s time for a reader poll!

As part of a blog optimization panel I participated in during a recent conference in Australia, I decided to forgo the bulleted list of blog plugins and recommendations that you typically see on such sessions in favor of something more personal.

The presentation focused on 3 of the biggest mistakes we’ve made with Online Marketing Blog in the past 3 years, why we made them (and why others do too), what we learned, what you can do to avoid them and the expected outcomes.

This format was well received, so I thought I’d share them here.

Big conferences like Search Engine Strategies NYC are great when you can get your boss to splurge for a week away, but if you can’t, (shame on you) then ClickZ Events might be a consideration.

Next up on the ClickZ schedule is, “Web Metrics: an online marketer’s best friend, or worst enemy?” at the Hilton, NYC May 2nd. This event includes sessions from the likes of Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg “Turning Data into Dollars”, Heidi Cohen “Competitive Intelligence” and Jim Nail who along with Shane Atchison is presenting “How to Measure Blogs, Buzz, & Brands”. Sounds like a pretty good program to me. There’s an early bird discount for that one if you register before April 20th.

I was able to do just two video interviews before my camera got dropped in a glass of water. I’ll have to explain that in another post.

Here’s Michael Gray, aka graywolf, just before our session with Todd Mailicoat and Neil Patel on “Social Bookmark Strategies” where he talks about tips for conference goers. Coverage of that session can be found at The Lisa, Search Engine Roundtable, Small Business SEM and CenterNetworks.

I also caught up with Mona Elesseily from Page Zero where she talks about Yahoo Panama pros and cons. Also two new Panama enhancements: Quality based bidding and being able to opt out of Yahoo’s content network.

Unfortunately I missed Day 1 of the SES conference but day two did provide a few opportunities for me to do a few short video interviews. Below you can get a glimpse from Bryan Eisenberg, Loren Baker and Dana Todd.

Bryan Eisenberg from Future Now and a two time best selling author, talks about all the resources his company has put together for Google Optimizer. His company has recently become an authorized consultant for Google Optimizer.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal steps up and talks about his thoughts on Search Engine Strategies as well as a tip on marketing with social media.

One interesting service that I learned about today was a site search service called Collarity. They offer a site based search service that can display community-clustered search results based on previous users actions. The service can also deliver optimized ads with the search results allowing publishers another way to monetize content.

An example of an implementation can be found at the My Fox LA site. I think there are multiple stories to tell about this service, both from a user perspective and the site monetization angle. The results are different enough that I think it may take users some getting used to, but it certainly invokes interest as an alternative to the ineffective site search that exists on most web sites.

Pummeled with work, I did not get down to the conference right away this morning. And no, it wasn’t for any of the reasons you might be thinking. I was in early last night - at least for New York. I did hear that some people were out til 5am though. That’s far too much fun for me.

I ran into so many great people on the way to the speaker room to register it took over an hour. Getting to the press room was no different (right next door). One of the great things about conferences is the networking. Although I didn’t think it was possible, networking can seriously get in the way of attending sessions.

The good people at Ask.com pinged me this morning that Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com announced support of autodiscovery for Sitemaps today.

WebProNews published an announcement about the search engines Google and Yahoo agreeing to work on a common sitemaps standard and the launch of sitemaps.org at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas last year.

The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. The updated Sitemap protocol has benefits for site publishers, the search engines as well as searchers. Ask.com is also supporting manual submissions of sitemaps via a ping url.

I arrived at the Hilton just in time to bump into Michael Gray and then Michael McDonald along with Rich Ord, the owener of iEntry, the parent to WebProNews. The first topic that came up of course, was the Vintage Tub and Bath party thrown by Allan Dick. This is an invite only kind of event and it is always enjoyable.

A big thank you goes to Allan, who is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

Here I am writing about the Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC and I’m in an airport in Minneapolis - go figure. Even though I’m not at the event physically, I’m certainly there in spirit. Here are the sessions during day one that I would be attending:

The 9-10:30am session is a tough one for me between Video Search Optimization and In House: Big SEO. Both are hot for our SEO firm right now as our PR agency expands its multi media and social media offerings with video and as TopRank continues to add very large companies as SEO clients. Bill Hunt and Marshall Simmonds always put out some great information and I would love to ask National Geographic as well as HP a few questions about their programs.