Online Marketing Blog

There are a lot of data points that can be meaningful for tracking blog effectiveness. That is, tracking what happens when visitors arrive at and engage with your blog content. It really comes down to the purpose of your blog. Metrics for a blog that’s focused on making a web site more search engine friendly by adding crawlable content and attracting links is quite different than a blog that’s meant to build thought leadership or brand credibility.

The 4th annual SEMPO State of the Search Marketing Industry survey is now open. If you work client side, agency side or independent, be sure to take this survey and make your voice heard.

Online Marketing Blog has a category on SEMPO including observations from the results of previous surveys including: “Search Marketers to Spend $5.7 Billion - 2005” which seems so small now compared to the $18 billion or so.  There’s also,  “SEO More Popular than Paid Search” which was not so much an indication of budget allocation, but of the percentage of companies using SEO compared to PPC at the time.

Matt McGee recently reached out to a number of industry bloggers to be involved with a blog content award he’s calling “The SEMMYs“. Even though the SEJ SEM Blog Awards just happened, I thought I could at least be a judge - Matt being a good guy and all. If you read Small Business SEM, you’ll know that Matt picks the best blog posts of the week or so on a regular basis. He’s taken all of those posts from 2007 and categorized them to be voted on. This includes a few good posts from OMB like”Evaluating Client Search Marketing Readiness” in the SEO category.

It’s been a busy week BIGLISTers, but today we have a nice collection of Search Marketing Blogs for your weekend reading pleasure.

• Live Search Webmaster Center Blog - Official blog of the Live Search Webmaster Center team with just a little bit of a bias with SEOmoz and Search Engine Land as the only other blogs they link to.

• Dellanave - With a ton of success doing development and monetizing web sites, Shoemoney associate and fellow Minnesotan Dave Dellanave is making another go of the blogging thing writing mostly about tech but also SEO, SEM and related experiences.

In a recent study by Omnicom Group’s Brodeur and Marketwire about how journalists use blogs, it was found that blogs are are a regular source for journalists for improving the speed of reporting news as well as guiding tone, but not for improving quality:

• Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue
• Nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis
• One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs
• About one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page

What a year 2007 ended up to be for TopRank and 2008 has already started with a bang. We’ve been fortunate to work with small companies like Smart-Kit and Web Awards as well as some of the largest companies in the world including NWA, HP and McKesson. New clients for 2008 already include PRWeb, Radian6 and SPS Commerce.

Along with the tremendous growth we’ve experienced, TopRank has several positions open. Since Online Marketing Blog has such a talented group of readers, we’re curious if some of those readers have the right stuff or perhaps know someone with the right stuff to join our energetic, growing marketing company based in Minnesota. The open positions include:

We recently ran a Reader Poll asking what the hot search marketing trends will be for 2008. The new year is here and we now have good enough sample of votes cast (78) to share what Online Marketing Blog readers are thinking:

 What will be the big stories in search marketing in 2008?

Updated! See Below:

Search Engine Journal began announcing the winners of it’s 3rd Annual Search Engine Marketing Blog Awards today. Voting covered 19 different categories ranging from best conference coverage to best SEO blog. With that many categories, I’d be surprised if Loren posted them all in one day. It’s great link bait with this post as a testament. TopRank Blog was nominated in 4 categories which have yet to be announced.

TopRank started using social bookmarking as an active/passive content promotion method several years ago. In fact, here is a podcast interview I did with Rok Hrastnik in March 2005 discussing SEO, tagging and bookmarking. We’ve also been fairly successful at promoting a social bookmarking tool for blogs over the past 18 months or so, gathering 50,000+ links.

Leveraging the social behaviors and technology of social news and bookmarking sites can be very effective as an active content promotion strategy.

It’s Friday and the end of the Holiday bump that seems to make things move slowly. There’s lots to look forward to in 2008 and while getting an early start today checking rmail, feeds, Twitter, Facebook, etc the following links stood out:

Success with social media is very much centered on building profiles and one online marketing channel where profiles have been important long before social media became the latest online marketing poster child is forums. Danielle Winfield brings a nicely illustrated post on this topic, Ins ands Outs of Forum Marketing.

The Internet Marketing Ninjas instructional program including videos and tools conceived by Jim Boykin of We Build Pages, has officially launched. I think a lot of people in the search marketing industry will be wowed by the sheer volume of quality information that’s available. Currently there are a series of 12 videos from the likes of Aaron Wall, Shoemoney, Neil Patel and Jim himself. Plus, most of the famous We Build Pages SEO and link building tools have been taken offline and included in the program along with many of the private WBP tools.

The opportunities in the search marketing industry are as good now as they’ve ever been. With a new year many people working for agencies, just getting out of college or the military will be looking for careers and training that fits their need for a technical yet creative job that also doesn’t stagnate.

To help fulfill the growing demand for training and education in the search marketing industry, SEMPO Insitute has been created to provide structured, peer reviewed educational opportunities. The Institute is led by dean, Terry Plank and Online Marketing Blog is pleased to provide readers with this interview about how SEMPO Institute was created as well as the challenges and opportunities facing the search marketing industry.