Online Marketing Blog

You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.

Here is the button:

Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.

WordPress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://www.toprankblog.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>

JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://www.toprankblog.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>

I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.

[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]

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.

After the recent site relaunch, I had some good feedback on the design and I’ve been working away at updating things.

Today you should see an all new header design. It has been lightened up, cleaned up and should look better across the board.

I’m still working on a few things so feel free to leave your feedback in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

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.

The event promotion rightly emphasized the search engines’ participation on the panel and since I’m being added the night before the event happens, no one will expect to see me there. I hope the Ask.com fans are not too disappointed. I’ll just have to say I’m there to channel Gary Price since he’s been so good about providing us the latest and greatest Ask.com developments.

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.

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith WordPress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

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.
• Dosh Dosh – This anime spotted blog written by Maki, a Political Science and Philosophy student in Toronto Canada, is all about making money online and along with that comes posts about professional blogging, affiliate marketing, get-paid-to programs, advertising networks and social media monetization.

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.

There are serious flaws in the thinking that improving on-page content optimization as a single exercise is going to deliver the ongoing competitive advantage possible of improving bottom line sales that most companies have in mind when they hire an outside resource.

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:

Perusing feeds for search marketing blogs this evening I noticed a claim/post by Rand about one million links to seomoz.org and that is indeed what Yahoo Site Explorer reports. The posts goes on to explain how to achieve such “linkableness” and ends with a collection of search marketing blogs and the number of inbound links for comparison.

Since Online Marketing Blog was not included in the list, I thought I’d throw up that same list with OMB included. You’ll see us sandwiched between John Battelle’s Searchblog and Search Engine Roundtable. Not a bad showing by any standard. Thank you to all the sites that have linked to us and especially our many new and long time readers!

• SEOBook.com – 1.7 million links
• SearchEngineWatch – 1.3 million links

As blogs become more widely used, so does the idea of a blog search engine. I’m getting asked more often about how to rank high in sites such as Technorati and Google Blog Search. Where as it’s really easy to rank high, it never lasts.

Blog search engines rank blogs on a few different factors including authority, relevance and time. Time is the biggest one. If I post right now about “blog optimization” I’ll be #1 in Technorati for that phrase! However, if someone posts five minutes after me, I’ll be bumped out of first place. As the day goes on, and more people post with the phrase “blog optimization” in their posts, I’ll continue to move down the list. As you can see, it’s really easy to be #1 but you’ll never say there.