Online Marketing Blog

Normally when related queries are suggested after doing a search on Google, they appear at the bottom of the search results page (SERP). I noticed this weekend Google is testing the display of other Google categories as well as related search queries above the right side column ads. (Outlined in red)

The example above shows a link to Google Products. However, other keyword queries generate links to other Google search products: Google News, Scholar, Blogs, Books, Video, etc. I am only able to create these results on Firefox using Google, not via MSIE or Opera browsers.

What does this mean for search marketers? Not a whole lot. But if Google started using the top right screen real estate to start showing links to more information, it could present secondary promotion opportunities in the same way that OneBox results do.

The phrases “search engine optimizaton” and “rankings” have gone hand in hand since the start of the search marketing industry. Agencies have gone so far as to use “rankings” as part of their name such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings, David Wallace’s “Search Rank” and of course, our company “TopRank”.

With the advent of personalization and impending changes with the interface of search results, the notion of ranking seems to be on it’s way out. In the past 3-4 years, most SEO consulting firms have been focusing on traffic and especially the past 2-3 years on conversions. Standard search engine rankings as a proxy to sales will become irrelevant, especially as other channels of search have emerged in popularity.

This week was my first MediaPost Search Insider Summit event and I was glad to have been able to participate. I’ve been a reader of MediaPost publications on and offline for several years and have been a big fan of the Search Insider, which is pretty much the only email format search marketing content that I’ll actually read outside of my ClickZ subscriptions.

To answer a question I had posted to Gord Hotchkiss in an interview last week, “What’s different about the Search Insider Summit conference from other search marketing related conferences?”, is that both the content and the conversations were weighted more towards the strategic side of search marketing. In fact, I overheard Gord at the end of the conference say he had more strategic discussions about the future of the search marketing industry this week than he’d had at any other conference.

Whenever I look at our huge list of search marketing blogs, I think several things, one of which is “so many blogs, so little time”. One way to cut through the clutter is to use a mashup or aggregator. There are many of these and I’d like to find out which of the search marketing mashups/aggregator sites below you like best.

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In case you’re not familiar, links to each of the aggregator/mashups is below:

There are lots of good posts out there that I don’t have time to dive into right how. But I wanted to share. Here are the ones I’ve seen recently.

Keeping your WordPress alive during a traffic storm
Using the WP-Cache plugin actually creates a static version of your pages so that the strain on the server becomes much less when traffic spikes.

Since Lifehacker seems to like Tumblr, now I think I have to check it out.  Have you tumbled before? Supposedly it’s like blogging, only easier???

Web 2.0 Awards are out! Included are all sorts of great services from social bookmarking to task management, travel and much more.

Weebly launched. It’s a new hosted blogging platform like Blogger.com or WordPress.com.

Normally we don’t really cover a lot of industry news here at Online Marketing Blog.  We leave that to the experts at Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Marketing Pilgrim. However, when a search engine reaches out with a particularly interesting message, we can make exceptions.

For example, the new “Ultimate Connection” contest from Yahoo Search Marketing which involves Ivanka Trump. I had to read that twice and thought it an interesting choice of celebrity.    Whenever I hear about search marketing contests involving essays, I always think of Marketing Pilgrim’s Scholarship, but such methods of promotion have been around a lot longer than SEO blogs.

Competitive Intelligence — One of the most powerful aspects of search engine marketing is the intelligence you can gain from it, both about your own brands and your competitors. Just how much can you find out about the competition? What tools and strategies should you use? Here you’ll learn how to gain or retain your competitive edge.

This session featured Patrick Lopez from iCrossing, Tom O’Grady from AdGooRoo, LeeAnn Prescott from Hitwise, Matt Roche from Offermatica and moderation duties were handled by Cam Balzer from DoubleClick Performics, who I interviewed early in the conference.

Overall, this session was a bit light, but it was great to get specific numbers from HitWise, as I would expect, and also both Tom O’Grady and Matt Roche did a great job explaining their products. Matt Roche offered an excellent strategic perspective on online competitive intelligence and he was a standout person on the panel.

I had a client recently ask me about a blog that was using TypePad’s domain mapping feature and it was causing duplicate homepage URLs for the blog. The first was to http://blog.clientsite.com and the second was to http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/. They were concerted that their Technorati rank and linking efforts were being compromised. And, of course, they wanted a fix.

I did some digging around it and it turns out that it’s the way the domain mapping was setup in TypePad that was causing the issue. It can be fixed, but there are consequences.

In the client’s TypePad account there are actually two blogs, each with a unique URL.

1. http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/
2. http://blog.clientsite.com/my_weblog/

Out of the two blogs above, #1 is set up as the ‘home blog’ meaning that it can be accessed via the main URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/) and the unique URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/).

I went the lazy but entertaining route and took some video of the “Search Insiders Tell All” session yesterday afternoon that included David Berkowitz, Aaron Goldman, Bob Heyman and Gord Hotchkiss.

Here the “Search Insiders” about personalization, brand stewardship, Google DoubleClick and the disparity in standards applied to search marketing that are not applied to TV or direct response marketing.

Here is a discussion of video search, advertising and marketing.

Day two of the Search Insider Summit was full of great presentations and commentary, so be sure to read the frequently updated MediaPost Raw blog.

Since many of the attendees of the Summit are the kinds of companies, marketers and agencies that employ various types of marketing channels, both on and offline, the opportunity to present examples and case studies of integration with search was ideal.

Some of the high level takeaways from this session include the importance for company marketers to set expectations when enegaging in an integrated campaign as well as the importance of coordination. Larger agencies that are capable of managing multi channel programs including search may have an easier time than a situation where a company uses multiple agencies to manage their various marketing programs.

We are all about the social media on this blog and our coverage of conferences with interviews, photos and below a few videos.

Here is the programming chair of the conference, David Berkowitz talking about how this is the biggest Search Insider Summit yet as well as the kinds of topics that drove the programming ranging from innovative search technology to click fraud to mobile marketing.

I also caught up with Cam Balzer of GoogleClick Performics oops, I mean DoubleClick Performics. As tempting as it was to ask Cam about Google’s acquisition of a company that provides natural and paid search marketing services, I kept it PC.

Cam moderated a competitive intelligence panel and he shares his insights about CI for ROI versus branding campaigns and does provide a well coached answer about Google/DoubleClick. You’ve got to love that media training.

The first of the breakout sessions was a choice between click fraud and this session on video search optimization. This was an easy choice since video optimization is an important component of social media campaigns and we like the social media here at Online Marketing Blog.

The session was moderated by Matt Spiegel of Resolution Media and speakers included: Chase Norlin from Pixsy, Scott Rhodes of VeoTag, Christy Tanner of TV Guide and Dan Perry from Cars.com.

Matt Spiegel: Is online video search for entertainment or other purposes?

Christy Tanner: Increasingly people are watching TV online and not conforming to old models of “turning on the TV”. There are also science, news and technology applications for online video.