Online Marketing Blog

As reported on Techcrunch, Scobelizer, Problogger and others, you can now see (albeit maybe not 100% accurately) how many Google Reader RSS subscribers there are for a particular blog. There appears to be some discrepancy between Google Reader subscribers reported by Google Reader and those numbers reported by Feedburner.

We’ve previously published a list of search marketing blogs by Feedburner RSS subscribers, so for fun I thought we’d post that same list of SEO blogs by Google Reader subscribers:

• John Battelle’s Search Blog – 35,976
• Search Engine Watch – 5,862
• SEOmoz – 4,589
• Search Engine Land – 3,910
• Search Engine Roundtable – 2,843
• Pronet Advertising – 2,308
• ShoeMoney – 2,238
• Search Engine Journal – 2,181
• Online Marketing Blog – 1,952

Online Marketing Blog is fortunate to have readers all over the U.S. and world wide, but this post is geared towards search marketers here in Minnesota and the upper Midwest. Although, it would be great to hear opinions from others that have been in a similar situation as what’s described here.

There’s been a bit of buzz over the past year, very slight at first, and recently it’s been picking up around the idea that the midwest or Minnesota at least, needs a dedicated search marketing association. I know there are many, many super talented, experienced SEOs as well as paid search pros that have either kept their networking and collaboration to very small, tight circles or rely on national events and the connections that technology has brought through IM, social network sites and the ever unproductive microblogging formats like Twitter, to stay connected, collaborate, network and share.

Next week starts one heck of a week starting with DMA07 in Chicago, the largest marketing conference in the world.  On Tuesday afternoon I am speaking on a panel called “Desperately Seeking Links Baiting, Buying and Socializing for Links” with Stephan Spencer, Seth, Besmertnik and Eric Ward.

Then on Thursday, I will be presenting as part of a post conference workshop on new media, specifically social media, with Joseph Jaffee of Crayon. Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning Joseph is covering blogs, podcasting, video casting and Second Life/virtual worlds. Thursday afternoon I will be presenting on social bookmarking and SEO as well as a grab bag session on Yahoo! Answers, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. I might have picked a slightly different mix of applications to talk about but then again the topic selection wasn’t my call.

On the cusp of one amazing week, TopRank’s blogging team brings you another fine batch of SEO/SEM blogs to be inducted into the BIGLIST.  There are a few gems in here so be sure to fire up your RSS reader and start subscribing.

• Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog – The team at Vancouver BC based Elastic Path, an ecommerce platform, blog all angles of conducting tansactional business online ranging from general marketing to usability to social media. There’s are also a series of podcasts from last summer worth checking out.
• Dawud Miracle – Dawud Miracle is a web designer who blogs about, yep you guessed it, web design. But the reason his blog is on this list is that he also touches quite a bit on online marketing including components of SEO such as copywriting, linking, social networking, blog marketing and many other topics which gives a different perspective than most SEO-only blogs.

With the release of WordPress 2.3, tags are now a standard part of all WordPress bogs. However, many new bloggers don’t know the difference between tags and categories so I thought I’d elaborate.

Categories are the different areas of your blog. They are the sections that you want to break your blog into. Categories will continue to gain more and more posts over time as you post on them often. Think of them like the main services or main product categories on a website.

If you have a site all about sports, your categories may be: Football, Baseball, Golf, Basketball and Hockey.

Tags are words or phrases that are specific to individual posts. They are items that will give the post additional exposure. Tags differ from categories as they are words or phrases that are less often used.

The buzz in the search marketing media and increasingly, the business press, on the importance of unified or universal search is gaining momentum and is unavoidable. Small and medium sized business web site owners and webmasters are now presented with the challenge of making sense out of the recent rash of search engine interface and functional improvements and how to adjust their online marketing efforts accordingly. Many are not sure what to do. Hopefully this short guide will shed light on the fundamentals and give some basic direction on next steps.

About every 2 weeks we get calls from companies that feel their growth opportunities are so significant, outside marketing vendors are expected to be paid based only on performance. I know there are some search engine marketing consultants that take on pay for performance or marketing partnership deals, but very few agencies that do.

It’s one thing for a consultant with low or no overhead to be able to spend the time it takes to build momentum on such a project but another thing entirely for an agency with capital expenses, salaries, etc to pay while the PFP program gets off the ground. While those issues can be overcome as part of the cost of the venture or risk, not having full control over web site functionality and design, after the sale actions and content can be problematic.

October is by far my favorite month here in Minnesota, and unfortunately I have to leave it for a couple of days. However, the time will be well worth it as I will be representing TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog by blogging the SMX Social Media conference in New York City on October 16^th and 17^th.

Being in the thick of marketing and promoting web sites using social media my entire time at TopRank has given me a sincere appreciation for those who have achieved real expertise with results to back it up. With Danny Sullivan’s SMX conference, the interactivity of it all and getting to know others with similar interests who may actually be able to add value to my own knowledge is something I am looking forward to.

For a new blogger, getting comments or trackbacks is exciting. However, some of them could be automated spambots filling up your comments with links to sites you wouldn’t want your visitors seeing. Spam plugins can do wonders at stopping spam, but some manual work is required. Here are a few tricks to help new bloggers identify possible spam.

1- What name did the commenter leave? Was it Sam or Jill? Or was it Used Cars or Baby Blankets? Most spammers use keyword phrases as they think it’ll help out their site; which it won’t.

2- What URL did they leave as their homepage? Does the URL look like a laundry list of keywords? http://www.shop-for-ipods.com/ipod-deals/best-ipod-prices.htm. Trying to hard is an indication that the link may be spam.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media and Neil Patel of Advantage Consulting Services

Next week the next of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series kicks off in New York: SMX Social Media. Developed by search engine industry legend Danny Sullivan and social media guru Neil Patel, the agenda for this event mixes strategic direction with plenty of practical advice sessions ranging from social news to social bookmarking to social networking with a double dose of Wikipedia on day two.

Danny and Neil were good enough to take some time out just a week before the conference to do a short interview covering the adoption of social media marketing by old school marketers, social media as a stand alone marketing channel, breaking out the crystal ball on the future of social media and rating which of the most popular social media sites will be successful.

I’ve had the idea in my head for a few weeks now to do some querying of people in the search, PR and social media marketing industries to get an idea what sorts of charities and non-profit causes they’re spending time, resources and money with. In the past, a lot of this kind of activity seems to get the most attention when it’s a response to a terrible event as opposed to a persistent effort. I’m an optimist on this in thinking that a large number of SEM related agencies are actively involved in a variety of such activities.

Editor’s Note: I am excited to introduce the next in our series of guest articles from IBM Distinguished Engineer Mike Moran.

The credentials list on Mike is a mile long including 20+ years experience in search technology, co-author of the best selling book “Search Engine Marketing Inc” as well as his recent book, “Do It Wrong Quickly“, 4 patents on search and retrieval technology, a sought after speaker at SES, DMA and AMA events and a great blogger with Biznology. Even though he’s one of the busiest people I’ve ever known, Mike stole some free time on a plane to write this post on the difficulties of search marketing for readers of Online Marketing Blog.