Online Marketing Blog

Several TopRank employees wore costumes for Halloween today and here are a few photos:

Princess Amie Krone - Operations

Beer Maiden Tabitha Anderson - Public Relations

Hockey Dude Jeff Nolan - SEO

Black Eyed Pea Thomas McMahon - SEO/Blog/Email

See, it’s not all work at TopRank - some fun is allowed from time to time. 

Happy Halloween!

The big year of 2007 is winding down and there are more than a few conferences coming up. It’s been a busy year for TopRank speaking events with our involvement in the search, direct marketing and public relations industries. Here are our remaining speaking events this year. We hope to see you there:

Nov 1, 2007 - Bulldog Reporter’s PR University - Teleconference
“Boosting Web Traffic: Best New Ways PR Can Supercharge Websites to Drive Investors, Journalists and Customers to Visit Online”

Nov 30, 2007 - Advanced PR Technology Conference - San Francisco, CA
“Press Release Optimization” and “Corporate Site SEO”

On the heels of the PRSA conference last week, the topic of how search plays a part in online PR effectiveness has continued to enter into the increasing numbers of discussions we’ve been having with companies working on figuring out where to best leverage their 2008 marketing/PR dollars. It’s that time of year again.

Now more than ever, PR and media relations efforts can benefit from attention to how search engine visibility influences consumer perceptions and the way both consumers and the media find information online. With an increasing variety of search types to choose from including standard search like Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as well as platform or content type specific search such as news, blog, image, video and options within social media web sites, brings new opportunities to optimize content.

Learning the basics of search engine optimization isn’t difficult, it’s time consuming. SEO consultants can offer a variety of services but in the end, web site owners will appreciate the SEO services they’re getting much more if they educated themselves on the fundamentals.

The nature of marketing web sites has continually evolved from a focus on optimizing text to include an array of digital assset optimization such as images, audio, video and content delivery formats like RSS and mobile. Regardless, there continues to be a significant value in basic SEO.

It’s a light week for the BIGLIST of search marketing blogs but good all the same.  Enjoy!

• Search Engine Experts Blog - Harry Joiner is an executive recruiter in the interactive and new media space, which also includes search marketing. In this blog he writes about industry news and topics of particular interest to SEO and SEM.
• An Internet Consultant Speaks -Scott Hendison covers a range of topics rooted in SEO but including general web marketing topics to  PR to blog marketing tactics.

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MyBlogLog Glamour Shots

As both an active participant (first and foremost) and a consultant in the ways of social media, it occurred to me that we should engage the communities of interest we’re involved with for tips. Who better to get tips on social media from than people who are actually USING social media?

Online Marketing Blog, which has a top 50 MyBlogLog community, is fairly active and even interviewed MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer. Today I pinged the members of our MBL community and within a very short period of time received about 20 responses. Here are 17 that made the cut and one of our own.

From time to time we run Reader Polls on a variety of topics ranging from “Biggest Concern Related to Search Marketing?” to the “Strongest Signals of Credibility for a Marketing Agency”. Some of the polls get quite a few votes and some get very few. For example, the “Favorite SEO Podcast” poll received over 500 votes whereas the recent poll about whether Minnesota needs a SEM organization received only 21.

Since so many people took the time to show their preferences, we wanted to share the results for each of the past 14 polls:

By now, I’m not sure how many people DON’T have a Pownce account, but in case you do not and are interested, link here, oops :)  I mean leave your email in a comment below and I’ll send you an invite. I have about 30 or so. After that, the Pownce invite giveaway is closed.

For the uninitiated, Pownce is a microblogging format similar to Twitter where you can also share files.

I just returned from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) International conference being held in Philadelphia where I participated on a panel, “Social Media, What Every PR Practitioner Needs to Know” with Rob Key of Converseon, Nicco Mele of echoditto and Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications who handled moderation duties.

Fifteen minutes before the session, the room was packed with people eventually standing against the back wall and it was clear that both the room and the topic of social media were going to be hot.

Fellow DMA and Search Engine Marketing Council member and friend Mike Moran recently asked if I’d be interested in doing a podcast series on Internet marketing and of course I jumped at the chance. Mike has previously shared an article here on “Why Search Marketing is So Hard“.

There are 8 podcasts in the series and they cover a range of internet marketing and new media marketing topics applicable to any business that’s trying to understand online marketing. For most of the podcasts, we use Mike’s books, “Search Engine Marketing Inc” written with Bill Hunt and Mike’s new book, “Do It Wrong Quickly” as starting points for discussing a range of topics related to how internet marketing is changing and what organizations can do to take advantage.

A week on the road can really back things up like email and BIGLIST seo blog updates. Better late than never though, so check out this week’s additions for your weekend RSS reading pleasure.

• SemAngel - Gary Angel, President and CTO of Semphonic, writes about all aspects of web analytics for search marketing. This is a great example of a thought leader and subject matter expert blog.
• Search Engine Optimization Journal - With roots in old school direct marketing, Nick Stamoulis has been involved with internet marketing for over 10 years and writes specifically about SEO.

Google Webmaster Tools is a great resource for any site owner. It’s designed to inform webmasters about how Google bot is interacting with their website. It gives detailed information on broken links, popular keywords and how often Google is stopping by. It’s Googles way of giving site owners the information that they need to be successful.

The Setup

Getting started with Google Webmaster Tools is not to difficult. The first thing you’ll need is a Google account. Since all Google services use the same login, you may already be setup. If you have Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, iGoogle or one of the many other services, then you are ready to go. If not, sign up for a free Google Account.