Online Marketing Blog

I was able to sit in on a DM Days site review clinic yesterday with Detlev Johnson and Amanda Watlington who provided great advice to the few audience members. The site owners literally received multiples of their conference admission price in consulting advice. One site had thousands of pages hiding content from the search engines (unintentionally) because of JavaScript. Another was submitting an incomplete sitemap file to Google.

Here is a collection of short video interviews taken during day one of the DM Days conference in New York. The Direct Marketing Association has a variety of special interest groups called “councils”. One of them is focused on search marketing and appropriately named, the Search Engine Marketing Council, or SEMC.

I serve on the operating committee of that organization as does Heather Lloyd Martin of SuccessWorks, Mike Moran of IBM, Andy Wetzler of More Visibility, Jeanette Kocsis of Harte Hanks, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Doug Garfinkel from Epsilon, Detlev Johnson of Position Technologies and Lisa Merizio Smith from the DMA.

The DM Days 2007 conference kicked off with a keynote presentation starting with DMA President and CEO, John Greco. The keynote was titled, “Next Gen Interactive: How Marketers are Optimizing the Power of Social Media to Connect and Deliver Results”.

With technology evolving, customer preferences changing and competition that is sharper than ever, the focus of this year’s DM Days event was on “What’s Next?”

Greco sees direct marketing as more than an industry, as a core process. Rather than “direct marketing” he sees it as “marketing directly”, which is the ability to engage individual customers with relevant and timely interactions that provide the information and offers they want using any of a variety of channels.

After a few days home in Minnesota I’ve gone on the road again to the DM Days conference in New York. Just two hours sitting on the tarmac this time.

The DMA Search Engine Marketing Council has quite a bit going on between sessions on search marketing, informational events and there will be presentations on the DMA search marketing certification program as well by the coordinator of that program, Dr. Amanda Whatlington. There’s also a one day seminar here in NYC after the DM Days event, “Search Engine Marketing - The Basics” on June 27th from 9-3:30.

Larry Chase of Web Digest for Marketers, a newsletter that’s been published since 1995 and has over 40,000 subscribers, asked me recently to do reviews on a list of 15 or so search marketing blogs. Larry only has guest writers 2-3 times a year, so I was very honored to say yes.

Some of the blogs on the list I read daily and some once every few days. It was fun digging deep into each blog because it really gave me a chance to weigh a variety of factors ranging from content, frequency, freshness, usability, design and overall personality.

With any kind of online marketing you need a place to start. Find out what kinds of search queries people are typing into the search box and you’ll know what kind of content to optimize, create and get links to.

For the most part, keyword research software and tools fall into a handful of categories. Paid and free are two as well as those that are specific to SEO or for PPC. There are a few dominant players in each category but with some interesting innovations in the past year or so it’s worth re-visiting what’s out there and which tools our dear Online Marketing Blog readers prefer.

We started Online Marketing Blog in December 2003 using Blogger and the feed was run through Feedburner. Recently we had that old RSS feed redirected to the current blog running on Wordpress. This redirection through Feedburner of the old feed to the new feed only works for 30 days and then the old feed dies.

Just in case there are some long time Online Marketing Blog RSS subscribers from 2003-2004 that have not updated which RSS feed they subscribe to, be sure to use:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinemarketingseoblog

The High Rankings Seminar is going to be in Denver June 28 & 29. If you’re anywhere in that part of the country and want to get a good, hands on and practical guide to search engine optimization and paid search, the High Rankings seminar is a good fit.

When this event came to Minneapolis Jill asked me to do a session related to social media and other indirect ways to drive traffic to web sites. I had the opportunity to see Jill, Christine Churchill, Karon Thackston, Scottie Claiborne and Matt Bailey do a super job of engaging the audience with their hard won wisdom and answering very specific questions. I had another invite for Denver, but two events in one month are enough for me.

David Brown and Brian Mark invited me to do an interview with them for the Beginning SEO Podcast recently. The interview was sliced and diced a bit according to the questions and have been posted over the course of this week. Here are the posts so far:

• Industry Conferences
• Does Page Rank Matter and Why Build Widgets?
• Who Can Really Benefit from SEO Consulting?
• Analytics Tools for Blogs
• NoFollow
• What’s One Thing New Site Owners Should Do?
• Competition

There are only two blogs to add to this week’s update of the BIGLIST of search engine marketing blogs.

• Search Marketing Expo Blog - Danny Sullivan’s new conference series has a blog with a nice group photo and roundup of conference coverage from the first SMX event in Seattle.
• Cam Balzer’s Web-Cite - Cam Balzer from DoubleClick Performics, a recent Google acquisition, writes about and “cites” topics and items of interest, many related to search marketing and web 2.0.

At the past two conferences I’ve spoken at, Search Insider Summit and Media Relations Summit, one of the popular topics that has been floating around the after session meet-ups and dinner conversations concerns the changing nature of search optimization. Some speculate SEO is on the way out. Others say social media is the new SEO.

Whatever the speculation, companies need to figure out how to best adjust their search marketing strategies to maintain a competitive advantage. One way to do that is to focus the right proportion of effort on standard text optimization as well as the optimization and promotion of all other digital assets.

Just a quick post this am about one of the common questions that came up during Media Relations Summit. It was a question about how to now find the Technorati graphs that show incoming links. I guess a lot of people don’t trust or feel comfortable with Technorati’s “Authority Score” which is a bit like the Google Page Rank score given in the Google tool bar.

The way to generate a graph of inbound links to a particular blog, is to use the following URL where you replace “www.blogaddress.com” with the blog URL you’re interested in: