Online Marketing Blog

Monday was a bit of a late start for me to the conference but I went all caught up with emails, which is a good thing. I heard Juan Williams’ keynote was excellent and the good news is Sally Falkow blogged it.

I caught the tail end of Katie Paine’s blogs and social media measurement session and as always, she provided an abundance of information on all the things you can measure in the tricky space of social media. I know many search marketers will read that last sentence and think, “What’s tricky? Measure traffic and conversions!” which I can certainly relate to.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Have you been in the search marketing business for more than a few years? I am curious what your measures of success as a business are?

For some, it’ notoriety. It’s the pomp and circumstance of celebrity within their industry that gives them something to hang their hat on.

For others, it’s respect from their peers and certainly contributions to the growth of an industry are also perceived as indication of a company’s success. There’s also no arguing that financial success is an unmistakable yardstick from which to measure any businesses’ success.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Coming up very quickly next week is the Media Relations Summit in Washington D.C. and I’ll be bringing one of our account managers, Mike Yanke, who works with many of our public relations clients to learn from some of the best and brightest in the PR and media relations industry.

I’ll be joining fellow SEO/social media/PR practitioners Jamie O’Donnell and Sally Falkow, who are both flying in from California, in a session called “Media Relations Unbound: How SEO and Social Media Have Revolutionized Our Reach”. I’m speculating that Greg Jarboe is on yet another exotic island vacation.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Another fine harvest of search engine marketing blogs this week with some chicks, some Danish and ClearSaleing.

• SEO Chicks - Julie Joyce, Lisa Ditlefsen and Anita Chaperon are women, or as they prefer to be called, “chicks” who know SEO and PPC. They decided after a few beers during a London conference that it was time to get some female attitude into the SEO & SEM blogosphere and here they are with lots of great photos from the recent SMX conference.
• TwentySix2 Marketing Blog - Katy Orell and John Waddy of TewntySix2 have joined the search marketing blogosphere offering a nice mix of tips, tactics and industry commentary.

            Subscribe to this Feed

A great thing about this business is that it’s pretty difficult to get boring. The industry is in a state of constant change and the roles of marketers and what they need to do to serve clients also changes. There’s a lot to think about so Online Marketing Blog is curious, what’s on your mind:

            Subscribe to this Feed

Incisive Media announced this morning that Kevin Ryan, formerly CEO of Kinetic Results and one of my favorite columnists at iMedia Connection, will be joining Incisive Media as VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies. Kevin also made a post on the Search Engine Watch blog.

In essence, Kevin is filling the giant shoes that Danny Sullivan left and that’s a very, very tall order. Danny has made nothing less than groundbreaking progress in a very short amount of time with Search Engine Land and from all accounts, the SMX conference.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Search Engine Watch: Leveraging big business assets for better SEO visibility. Aaron Shear does a good job of summarizing how some of the unique qualities of big company web sites can be leveraged for search optimization. I can attest that big company SEO is a very different animal involving a whole different set of communication requirements not often involved with small company web marketing projects.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Ask.com has upgraded to a new interface called, Ask3D. The 3D makes reference to the three panels of information on the search results page. Ask X was the development playground for Ask3D and includes some interesting features including the display of search results from specialized data sources that are unique to the query.

At first glance, the big difference between Ask X and Ask3D is the initial interface. Ask X is a search box and nothing else. Ask3D provides categories for Web, Images, Ask City, News, Blogs and the extras: video, maps and shopping. The search results page is very similar with 3 columns.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Earlier today Yahoo Search Marketing announced they will now provide free, open access to the “Panama” search marketing application program interfaces (APIs) through the launch of the Commercial API Program. Commercial clients (big agencies) will also be offered optional fee-based, value-added services that come in three flavors: basic, advanced and elite.

Yahoo’s been busy today, because this evening I got the heads up Y!SM is rolling out quality based pricing across it’s paid search and contextual advertising networks.

Here’s the lowdown on quality based pricing from Yahoo:

            Subscribe to this Feed

In case you’ve been under a rock the past 6 months or perhaps taking a well earned internet hiatus, Danny Sullivan’s new conference series kicks off this week with Search Marketing Expo Advanced in Seattle.

You can be sure to see session by session coverage from Barry and his crew at Search Engine Roundtable. Matt McGee from Small Business SEM who will also be doing some conference coverage has already posted photos including a few shots from the MSN party as did Karl Ribas. Matt Cutts shares a few thoughts of the event here.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Nothing slowed down this week as far as finding and adding blogs to our BIGLIST of search marketing blogs. No runner ups this week.

• Create Business Growth - Christine O’Kelly writes about blogging, copywriting and small business marketing online.
• Hybrid SEM Blog - Joe Whyte writes about old school and new school SEO.
• WebMama’s Look at the Web - I’ve been watching Barbara Coll’s blogspot blog for a while now and recently noticed she’s publishing more consistently, qualifying her inclusion on the BIGLIST. Barbara writes about her observations on search marketing industry.

            Subscribe to this Feed

According to the Bruce Clay blog, Mike Grehan has joined Bruce Clay as VP of International Business Development. Congrats to both Bruce Clay and Mike as BC gets a very high profile SEO rockstar and Mike gets to continue flying around the world doing that SEO thing.

You may also recall that last week Bill Slawski joined Commerce 360. If you’d asked Bill what he’d be doing now a year ago, working for another company probably wouldn’t be it. However, Bill’s a very smart fellow and Li along with the Commerce 360 team are very fortunate to have him.

            Subscribe to this Feed