Online Marketing Blog

What a crop of tasty SEO blogs we have for you today! Why bother working, when you can dig into some fine SEO reading? Heck it’s Friday, right?  Enjoy!

• Ask the SEO Guru – Bob Massa of SearchKing fame spells it out for you in plain English with comments like, “I don’t do SEO. I do online business development, with traffic generation being one part of that” and content like, “The Basic Concepts of SEO“.
• Clickfire Blog – Emory Rowland blogs about Google, webmaster issues, SEO and related topics.
• Shylock Blogging – Alexandru or “Alex” blogs about making money online which means the nitty gritty of site promotion.
• PalatnikFactor – Pablo Palatnik blogs SEM. SEO. Social Media. Branding. Marketing and News.

UK based e-consultancy holds periodic round tables meetings with agency and client side search marketers to discuss issues in the industry with a report published afterwards. The most recent September report, which highlights a number of search engine industry developments, SEO challenges and tactics motivated me to write this post. Many of the issues in the report are on the minds of in-house and agency marketers world wide.

Here are a few of the issues discussed and my own thoughts as they relate to each with a nice little rant at the end:

Editor’s Note: The next in our series of guest posts from SEM professionals comes from Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo. Marketo is a client of our PR agency M&O and provides B2B marketing automation software in the form of pay per click management, landing page optimization and integration with salesforce.com.

With Jon’s B2B software marketing expertise, excellent work both on his blog Modern B2B Marketing and as a contributor on Search Engine Land, I asked if he could write up a guide for search marketers that would provide actionable advice for readers on the topic of landing pages.

One of the most effective online marketing services M&O/TopRank implements for clients in addition to SEO and public relations is email marketing. Within our direct and email marketing practice there are several, very talented people responsible for this success, one of which is M&O co-founder, Julie Brue.

Whether it be list development, landing page QA or email analytics, Julie is an excellent campaign manager and client advocate. Below is an article Julie has been so kind to contribute covering some of the “whys” and high level “how to’s” of implementing a successful email marketing program.

In today’s ever changing and evolving world of blogs, IM, social networks and consumer disdain towards traditional advertising, it is a wonder how any marketing message reaches its intended audience. After all, each marketing message distributed is competing for the attention of its recipient with a multitude of other communication vehicles every second of the day.

See how committed we are? The BIGLIST is updated even though I’m on vacation this week. OK, it’s not an overwhelming list, just one:

• Wiep SEO and Link Building Blog – Netherlands based Wiep Knol writes about link building, social media and other link marketing related issues.

Regular blogging will resume next week when I’m back from vacation.

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A few months ago my husband and I were spending our free time cruising dealership lots after the dealerships had closed researching cars. However, we kept running into dead ends with dealerships who close their lots in the evening hours. Some of you might be thinking, “Why not shop for cars after hours online?”. We did that but still wanted to see for ourselves.

This got me thinking about how much business a dealership might be losing by not letting people cruise the lots in the off hours. We certainly didn’t take the time to go back to the dealerships during business hours, we just assumed they didn’t have what we wanted and kept on searching.

This week will be some light blogging for me as I’ll be on vacation for the rest of the week. We decided it would be a Cirque du Soleil – fest so where better to go for that than Las Vegas? We’ll see 3 of the Cirque shows there so hopefully it will satisfy any urges for peculiar French inspired circus acts for a while.

While in Las Vegas it’s possible, but unlikely, we’ll run into some of the search marketers speaking at the Shop.org conference. In fact, there’s one session on link building with Stephan Spencer and Eric Ward who I am speaking on the same topic with at the DMA07 show “Desperately Seeking Links” in Chicago Oct 16. Other SEMs on the Shop.org linking panel include Neil Patel from ACS and Rebecca Kelley from SEOmoz.

Early in my marketing career I sold classified advertising for a large and influential alternative weekly newspaper in the Twin Cities.

A true benefit of this job was experienced by friends of mine, met through occasional dabblings in the local comedy scene, who turned to me to get the word out about an upcoming show via a line ad on our back page.

Anyone familiar with an alternative news weekly’s back page is certainly no stranger to the type of ad typically represented there. Without providing too much in the way of detail, let’s just say that anyone – ANYONE – will say anything – ANYTHING – just to get found.

It was this type of environment that fostered a good friend’s idea for an ad regarding his upcoming sketch comedy show – which appears word for word, minus identifiable info, below:

Spotlight on Search Interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Photo Credit Liana Evans

Online Marketing Blog is very fortunate this week to have a special interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor at Search Engine Land and long time observer/analyst/practitioner/advocate in the search engine marketing industry. Chris has been a instrumental influence in the growth of the search marketing industry with his 10+ year old search consulting practice, past involvement with Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies as well as his new role as Executive Editor at Search Engine Land, running the Search Marketing Now webcasts and helping to program SMX conferences.

I’ve updated my Yahoo mash profile page a bit over the weekend and with the help of a few friends. Note: if you have some mischievous friends, you may want to turn off their ability to edit or “mash” your profile page or it might start sporting another company’s logo as your background image, as was the case on my profile for a few hours on Saturday.

Mash is very easy to use with drag and drop modules ala Facebook but with the unique feature of allowing others to add and/or modify modules or even visual settings, depending on the sharing settings. You get a short URL, mash.yahoo.com/leeodden is mine, for example, but you need to be logged in to Yahoo and have a mash account to see the content.

Not many additions this week, but we did do a bit of housecleaning. Fifty blogs were removed due to non-activity.

Also, our diligent maintainer of the BIGLIST was kind (too kind in my opinion) to note previously removed blogs which have now started posting regularly again. These are on probation but will be added back in for now. Otherwise, if you’ve been dropped, you’ll need to email us to be added back.   Welcome to the BIGLIST people!

New additions:

• SEO Fast Start - Dan Thies’ place to build a network of like minded students of SEO with a handy e-book and an occasional rant on search engine conspiracy theories.
• SEOptimise PPC & SEO Blog – Patrick Altof blogs his observations on the major search engines as well as topics related to search engine optimization, social media and PPC.

A lot has changed in the search marketing conference industry in the past year. The biggest news being the addition of Kevin Ryan to oversee Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies along with the departure of Danny Sullivan from SES to start his own venture, Third Door Media and the Search Marketing Expo or SMX series of conferences.

Additional news includes the success of new conferences like MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit, programmed by David Berkowitz as well as the reduction in conference dates for Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon down to one (albeit, temporarily) in Las Vegas. With the number of new and niche conferences popping up it begs the question as to whether the market demand can support so many events?