Online Marketing Blog

Gone are the days of the whole family, ages 6 up to 50, sitting around in the evening watching the same television show, focusing in on the same characters and - consequentially - the same advertising messages. What a typical family evening looks like these days is the elementary age child playing hand-held video games, the teenager finishing homework online, and the parents reading the evening paper. And all of this is going on while each individual person is sitting in front of their own television set watching whichever show or video they want.

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Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies Expo in San Jose got off to a really fruitful start with Danny Sullivan giving us a lottery tip. His session, Introduction to Search Marketing, gave us good examples on how to buy tickets and win big in the search engine lottery.

Emphasizing the importance of title tags, meta tags, meta keywords, Danny explains many ways to optimize a site to be found more easily by all visitors, human or otherwise. He discussed how to research the best keywords to place in the content for your site, stating that if you don’t have enough time to do a huge amount of keyword research, “go with your gut”. You know your users. You know your site. What would you search for to get to your site?

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In 1981 when legendary Minneapolis agency Fallon first opened their doors, a full page ad was run in the Star Tribune, Minneapolis’ primary daily, alerting the local business denizens that a new ad agency was promising to help them outsmart the competition, rather than outspend them. The concept of quality score as it relates to PPC ads always reminds me of this anecdote from the traditional ad world.

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Going through proper channels, I was able to coordinate a short video interview with Tim Mayer of Yahoo. I’m a bit of a Yahoo fan and it was great being able to chat with Tim for a few minutes before we recorded on the various questions other speakers suggested.

In this video, Tim answers a few questions including:

• What’s in store for Yahoo’s version of Universal search?
• From Mike Grehan: “Why does my spam work so much better in Yahoo than it does in Google?”

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Online Marketing Blog’s coverage from day one of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007

Day 1 at SES San Jose began with the “no more horsing around” session, “Public Relations Train Wrecks in the Interactive Biz: Disaster Can be Avoided”, moderated by Kevin Ryan, VP & Global Content Director of SES & Search Engine Watch.

For those that remember my introductory post, this session held special interest, for, in my role as an Account Manager handling the Public Relations initiatives of several client firms, I constantly strive to ensure the phrase “train wreck” is the furthest concept away from not only my own personal vocabulary, but my client’s business psyches.

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Universal search isn’t coming, it’s here. As searchers use their favorite search engine, they are seeing more than just web results. Movies, photos, news and much ore is showing up in regular search and you need to be ready.

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While in the speaker ready room this morning, I had the chance to sit down with Michael Gray and Bryan Eisenberg for a quick discussion about social media marketing and the changes with the influence “friends” have on social news sites like Digg.

Does reducing the weight of votes from “friends” take away from the reason people engage with social media sites? Find out in the video:

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Our first video from Search Engine Strategies San Jose is with Dan Perry of Cars.com who talks about the value of attending search marketing conferences for in-house SEMs. He also promotes the SEMPO in-house search marketing event this evening where he’s the MC.

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Online Marketing Blog’s coverage from day one of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007

Who is the biggest engine? Who’s growing? What verticals are better than others and what does this all mean? Those were a few of the questions talked about in the the Search Landscape session.

It should come as no surprise that Google continues to dominate the market share. Actually Bill Tancer at Hitwise said that that bit of news has been in his last 10 presentations on the search landscape dating back to 2004. Google’s been growing and continues to do so. Within Google, web search is the most visited with 70.28%, YouTube at 10.61%, Google Image 6.5%, Gmail 6.16%, Maps 1.65%, Video 1.14% of traffic according to Bill. He also felt that Yahoo and Ask were up while MSN decreased.

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The TopRank team arrived in San Jose about noon and it was the first time I’ve been on a flight in six months where there wasn’t some sort of delay. Luckily, we scored exit row seats for everyone on the way here, hopefully it will be that way going home as well.

After getting settled at the Fairmont, THANKS JOE MORIN!, and bumping into Mike McDonald from WebProNews, we headed over to Gordon Biersch for lunch. As usual the outside courtyard was very nice as was the food. Bumped into Mike McDonald from WPN again. Is he stalking us?

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We have quite a haul of SEO blogs this week and with Search Engine Strategies coming up, search marketing enthusiasts will no doubt be looking for new sources of information on topics of interest as well as conference coverage.

• ClickZ News Blog and ClickZ Experts - The newly designed ClickZ web site continues to offer first class coverage of the search and interactive marketing industry as well as insight from leading industry experts.
• DigiTales Blog - Microsoft’s UK man in the know, Mel Carson blogs for BrandRepublic on all things related to digital marketing. Unfortunately, Brand Republic has decided you must login to see the full posts.

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So what is the coolest new viral campaign online and why? Check out www.ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com and then come back here.

There isn’t anything on the page, is there?

Certainly not that photo of Aaron Eckhart that can be found by removing “too” from the URL: www.ibelieveinharveydent.com

There’s simply a message saying “Page Not Found”.

Do you feel like me the first time you viewed this site, thinking that you must have missed part of an exciting new campaign for the upcoming Batman epic “The Dark Knight”, of which Harvey Dent, Gotham’s DA and future criminal mastermind “Two Face” would, surely play an integral role? Do you feel compelled, like I did, to search out a forum for more?

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