Online Marketing Blog

OMB brings you yet another fine mix of SEO blogs that made the BIGLIST this week with a nice mix of association content, yellow pages, social media, straight out SEO and in-depth observations about information retrieval. And so without further adieu, here you go. Enjoy!

• SEMpdx Blog - The Portland Search Engine Marketing Professionals group promises to be the voice of the Portland search marketing community and uses the blog to publish association announcements, events, industry participation and observations. This is an excellent example of a Regional SEM Community.

A reader commented recently about not wanting to hire an entire agency, but rather an individual consultant for search marketing services. From a service provider perspective, I’ve tried it “both ways” so to speak, working at an agency, then as an independent consultant and now with our Public Relations and Online Marketing agencies.

There are obvious advantages and disadvantages to hiring consultants vs an agency engagement, but over time (10+ years) I think I’ve gained a fairly practical and experience based perspective.

As I see it, here are a few of the pros and cons of hiring consultants compared to hiring search marketing agencies.

The time has come dear OMB readers, to cast your vote for the best article in the TopRank Challenge contest. Participants were tasked with writing a post on a topic related to their area of responsibility and/or interest. I can assure you, cutting the selection to just three articles was not easy. Considerations included: relevancy to audience, content and style.
Please take a moment to read each of the posts below and vote for your favorite!

• Cut Through Communication Traffic Jams with Email Marketing - Julie Brue
• The Mobile Web - Optimizing and Being Found - Thomas McMahon

Have you noticed your blog has been dropped off the BIGLIST of SEO blogs? If so, you should know that we perform a periodic review of every blog on the list, nearly 400 of them, to ensure the blog is alive and active. No posts for 2 -4 weeks and it will be taken off the list.

Now on to this week’s update which includes two blogs and one very cool social media community for search marketing:

• Hamlet Batista dot Com - This SEO blog promises a focus on the more advanced search engine optimization tactics drawn from personal experience with SEO consulting as well as affiliate marketing.

Today Rob Key from Converseon pinged me on how fast their work promoting reforestation through a video as part of an American Express promotion hit the Google SERPs. The project is a great example of the power of social media for a great cause.

In just 4 days the video (Second Chance Trees) ranks #2 for the phrase “American Express Members Project“. It actually ranks higher than the Amex web site for the project, which is pretty impressive with over 4 million search results for the term. Maybe after indexing this blog, the link above it’ll be doing even better.

Inspired by Marketing Pilgrim’s past Scholarship contests (which resulted in this handy free e-book) where participants submit articles to be voted on, we decided to do something similar, but internally here at TopRank. An invitation to participate in a contest was sent to the team 2 weeks ago and 8 decided to take up the offer. Each participant has since submitted an article to Susan Misukanis and myself on a topic of their choice or from a list of suggested topics.

Susan and I have scored each entry for: relevance to audience, objective reasoning, accuracy and style, revealing the top 3 scoring articles.

Chris Boggs is moderating a local MIMA event, aka “Salon”, with reps from Google (Kevin Willer) and Microsoft (Saleel Sathe) tomorrow night and asked if I would join since the Ask.com rep had to bow out. It’s called “The Future of Search: A Holistic View” and should be pretty interesting. As a guy who’s involved with every organization and publication in the search marketing industry you could possibly think of, Chris is a very sharp fellow and I’m sure he’ll keep the engines on their toes.

I think it’s safe to say the idea of optimizing web sites for better rankings, traffic and sales is an idea that that has become pretty standard for most web site owners. Ranking well on search engines can provide an incredible amount of “free” traffic to a web site. Many companies base their entire business model on traffic from natural search results generating millions in revenue.

Due to the lure of the so called “free” traffic and monetary goals, many site owners, webmasters and web marketers succumb to short term strategies and find themselves chasing after the latest “trick” or tactic. Because search engines and traffic opportunities change often, web marketers can find themselves in a never ending loop.

This weekend I was able to get an invite (thanks Adam!) and try out Google’s recent acquisition, GrandCentral which is in private beta.

GrandCentral allows you to use one number to manage all your phones: home, cell, work, etc. The web interface allows you to manage greetings for each number, archive all voice mails indefinitely, setup notification preferences and many more options. There’s even a nifty phone spam option to filter out telemarketers and other unwanted calls. The basic idea is that if your work or home numbers change, you don’t need to update anyone because they would have your GrandCentral number.

It’s been a light week of sorts with the July 4th holiday and all, but the TopRank search for new and interesting SEM and SEO blogs never stops.

• Eyefall Search Marketing Blog - A group blog from the team at London based search marketing agency eyefall blogs about SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing.
• The Marketing Excellence Blog - Eric Kintz, Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for HP, offers his observations about CMO issues, corporate blogging, marketing ROI, viral marketing and web 2.0 topics.

When companies consider search engine optimization as a service, it’s important to understand that this kind of consulting comes in a variety of forms with the most popular being: phone consultations, site audits/reviews and ongoing SEO consulting.

Businesses that are very early in their stages of search marketing and not entirely “sold” on SEO as a channel seem to gravitate towards short term engagements. “Can we test SEO for a few months?”, they’ll say. Also, companies that perceive SEO as a set of IT and web development focused tactics also tend to see the promotion of a web site via search as a one-time set of recommendations.

A participant of the DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification program emailed me with some feedback about the program (very positive) and also posed a question about what industries need the least amount of education about search marketing. What industries are hiring in particular? Which I thought was a great question.

Many search marketing and interactive marketing agencies focus on certain vertical categories, so I don’t think you’d get too many consistent answers. However, if a hundred more different agencies, in-house marketers and consultants participated in such a survey, I think we’d get some pretty interesting data. And that leads me to this week’s reader poll: