Online Marketing Blog

Readers of Online Marketing Blog for the past few months might remember our hosting trials and tribulations with a good but unprepared host and then the less than desirable activities of Pair Networks. We moved to a dedicated server with Minneapolis web site hosting company VISI for hosting OMB and since it’s been over a month I thought I’d give an update.

We currently use VISI for the hosting or our public relations firm web site, email and a dedicated server for Online Marketing Blog along with an array of support.

Last week we ran what turned out to be the single most popular TopRank® Reader Poll ever on favorite SEO podcasts with over 380 votes. It was a tough competition with 4 podcasts running neck and neck, but the winner is the Strike Point podcast with Dave Naylor and Mikkel deMib Svendson. Beginning SEO Podcast (which I did last night) followed in second with Danny Sullivan’s Daily Search Cast in third.

Now for this week’s poll, we’ll turn to another popular source for information on the search marketing industry, email newsletters. Of the many sources of information on search marketing, email continues to be a channel that I use for quick news scans on industry news and particularly for articles.

Tonight I’m recording a Beginning SEO podcast with David Brown and Brian Mark. I’ve known Brian through conferences for the past few years and I met David for the first time at SES New York. We sat next to the stripper pole in Epiar’s party bus (That’s David behind me) on it’s way to the Vintage Tub and Bath dinner party. Luckily for everyone, David and I stayed in our seats and left the dancing to Elisabeth.

While I don’t always have time to read the email newsletters on search marketing and interactive that I find filling up my inbox, there are those moments of RSS reading weakness when I revert to my old email ways. Here are a few articles of interest from today’s search marketing email newsletter crop.

The Death of the Page View - Dave Friedman tells the tale of the dying page view metric over at Chief Marketer, citing AJAX, RSS and widgets as the primary culprits. Funny, it’s those three that are making the web more interesting again. Suggested alternatives include: AJAX metrics and time-based ad serving as well as user-participation metrics such as comments left or number of media submissions. One thing is for sure, social media presents interesting challenges for metrics.

We have several overdue search engine marketing blog additions this week including those for 2 major search engines. The master list of Search Marketing Blogs has been updated. A big thank you to Danny Sullivan as several blogs were gleaned from the well-maintained blogroll over at Search Engine Land.

• adCenter Blog - The official blog of Microsoft adCenter.
• AOL Search Blog - The official search blog for AOL.
• Brian White - Googler on the search spam team blogs personal interests, but mostly Google. Think the Google spam team doesn’t know about the latest paid link schemes? Guess again.

Along with other forms of media coverage on the topics of search and online marketing, internet radio has been a great source of content for listening live or via podcast. Some SEO podcasts and online radio are basic and others are very professionally produced. The content varies greatly as well from industry gossip to practical tactics.

Earlier this week I ran an informal poll with about 40 respected search marketers and almost half admitted they didn’t listen to podcasts much, if at all. In fact, some were publishers of podcasts that didn’t listen to other podcasts. Is is it the case that these people were so busy with clients, speaking, writing, testing that they didn’t have time?

“titel” is “title” in German for you spell check enthusiasts.
Via Axandra Search Engine Facts newsletter, German company SISTRIX (translated link) has conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then analyzed the top 100 Google search results for each keyword to determine which page elements offered the most influence on rankings.

Nothing in the analysis will be new to long time search marketers, but since so many people new to search engine optimization ask for nice, concise lists of what’s important to rank well in the search engines, I thought I’d indulge.

• Keywords in the title tag

When I was at the Search Insider Summit a few weeks ago, there was a panel on video search optimization. One of the panel participants was Christy Tanner from TV Guide. It was interesting to learn about how most video search works and that there is a distinction between video hosted search and video search. The latter uses thumbnails and meta data for videos and points to wherever the actual videos are hosted.

In the late nineties, the current search marketing buzz words, “link bait”, “social media”, “search engine PR”, etc were nowhere near the lexicon of web masters tasked with promoting web sites. Sage advice of the day centered on evangelizing the internet as a channel first, and then focusing on web sites as the vehicle.

The logical question of, “How do I get people to visit my web site” from new web site owners would come up and advice often centered around using familiar marketing principles for web site promotion. For example, telling site owners to print their web site address wherever they were printing their phone number: on business cards, signage, direct mail and collateral, stationary, advertisements and even including it in hold music.

Some company web sites might like to characterize themselves as in need of charity, but that’s not what this post is about. Andrey Milyan has tagged me in a Charity Link Meme started by Skitzzo over at SEO Refugee. This is a timely meme as I’ve had a draft blog post sitting in my WP admin called “Alturistic Search Marketers” for a few weeks now.

Here are my five charity links:

• Breast Cancer Research Foundation - My mom had cancer and kicked it’s ass, hopefully forever.
• Doctors without borders
• Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust

With a bit of housecleaning, the big list of search marketing blogs has been trimmed down! Nearly 100 blogs were removed from the list this week. Removals were based on blogs that have not updated in the past month. This week’s additions include:

• AdGeek - Direct response copywriter Jeff Horsager offers a nice mix of marketing, optimization, email marketing and social media with an eye towards metrics and analytics. “If it can be measured, it can be improved.”
• Semfire - Based in Queensland Australia, Christine Parfitt writes mostly about paid search with some natural optimization as well.

If you’re an active feed reader, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of feeds in your reader at times. An easy way to slim down the number without removing any, is to show only feeds that have new posts.

If you’re using Google Reader, click on the Show: updated link. This will then hide any feeds and folders that don’t have something new to offer. Plus, as you read through feeds, once you have all items marked as read, they disappear from the sidebar. Not only does it make you feel a bit better about the number of feeds you track but it also helps those that have unread items stand out a bit more.