Online Marketing Blog

It looks like the SEM blogosphere is on a roll because we have a nice varied collection of search and online marketing blogs for the BIGLIST this week.

• Ranked Hard SEO Comic – Get your funny on with this quality SEO comic about the mythical “Ranked Hard” SEO agency, from folks at Big Oak.

• THINKing – With trends toward media creation, optimization and promotion the thoughts that Harry Hoover, Mark Harrison and Brant Waldeck publish about advertising, creativity, marketing & PR become very relevant for the next generation of search marketing.

• Pandemic Blog – Founders of Pandemic Labs, Matthew Peters and Brennan White write about their passions: viral marketing and social media marketing.

Google Analytics is a great program that can do a lot more than most people realize. Here are a few features that you may not know about:

• Capture internal search stats. This is a newer feature of Google Analytics and a very nice one. Not only can you see what a visitor put into your internal search box, but what page they were on when they made the search and what page they chose in the search results. Any internal search will work as long as it passes the search variable through the URL. Here’s a short video interview with Google’s Brett Crosby on some of those features.

During the PRSA International Conference I had the opportunity to talk with Eric Schwartzman about the interplay of search engine optimization and online public relations. There’s plenty of sage advice for PR professionals interested in leveraging SEO tactics for public and media relations in the interview (Eric interviews Lee), so if you have 25 minutes be sure to click the link above and listen. Otherwise, here is a paraphrased accounting of our talk:

How can SEO can help an organization raise awareness?

People are looking for information, they use a variety of types of search such as Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as the predominant channels. There’s also news search , blog search and search within social media sites. Any time something can be searched on, that’s an optimization opportunity. Increasing awareness comes from making it easier for people to find you when they’re looking for information.

Recently I’ve had several discussions with a reporter on how small businesses can effectively use blogger relations and PR to market themselves. Out of that conversation came another topic about Online Reputation Management – not for companies, but for individuals.

There’s a tremendous amount of content and in some cases debate, being generated in the search marketing and public relations communities about the need to measure brands and reputations online. The first step in a ORM program is to start monitoring and there are some pretty incredible and often times costly software tools emerging to do that.

That’s all fine and good for measuring brands or companies, but what if the brand is you?

Spotlight on Search Interview with Matt McGowan of Incisive Media: Search Engine Watch, ClickZ, Search Engine Strategies.

The Search Engine Strategies conference in New York undoubtedly one of my favorites and the next SES NYC show is coming up fast, March 17-20, 2008. Since SES has changed its format starting with the New York show, I pinged Incisive Media’s Marketing VP Matt McGowan with a few questions on format, speakers, Yahoo/Microsoft, recession and his 5 top reasons for attending a SEM conference in the Big Apple.

Matt, this is our first time interviewing you. Can you share a bit about your background and how exactly you became the “007 VP of Marketing” for Incisive Media and what you do? (Make it good because we’ll do our best to make sure this interview ranks well on Google )

While doing some research for a presentation, I was checking out the WordPress.com site on “types of blogs” looking for creative ways to categorize them. And what did I come upon, but this page which separates blogs types into two overall categories of “popular” and “banned”. Guess where SEO blogs fall? Sigh.

Even our dear WordPress which so many search engine optimization professionals sincerely love and prefer as a blogging platform, is misinformed or at least, subject to making sweeping generalizations. This is the “banned” category:

And here are some examples of blogs that are banned from WordPress.com (all of these fall under the general heading of “spam blogs”, or splogs, and we will be deleted as soon as we find them or they get reported):

This week’s BIGLIST update of SEO and social media blogs is pretty close to being the best batch of new blogs I’ve seen since we started publishing the list a year ago. What a great collection of resources! It really makes our industry better by having more and more people blogging their ideas, insights and even letting a few “secrets” slip out now and again.  Check it out:

Trail of the Fire Horse – Another excellent Canada based search and social media marketing blog comes this time from the very smart/savvy Dave Harry aka “the Gypsy”.

Search Enginuity – Clay Fisher is the Global Director of Search Marketing at Monster.com and he writes about search marketing industry news as well as paid search and analytics on a very cleverly named blog.

Earlier this week we started a poll on what online marketing tactics our readers would use most in 2008. The polling plug-in allows for only one choice and over 100 people have responded so far. We’ll keep the poll running for another week or so, but here are the top ten tactics rankings so far out of 35 listed and the percentage of votes for each.

With the vote count at over 150, I’ve updated the top ten as of 02/13/08:

• Blogging (27%)
• Email marketing (16%)
• Search engine optimization (14%)
• Pay per click (9%)
• Social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) (5%)
• Blogger relations (4%)
• Online public relations (3%)
• Viral marketing (3%)
• Free content (white papers) (3%)
• Corporate web site (3%)

Monday night, Jessica and I represented TopRank at a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Event in Minneapolis.

In the first of a series entitled ‘Conversations About the Future of Advertising’, Jan Leth from Ogilvy & Mather gave a presentation entitled ‘Dada, Data, Alpha and Beta’ in which he highlighted how marketers can take advantage of the digital age.

In particular I found interesting, the idea of momentgraphics versus demographics. Marketing of years past would have concluded that we need to know the age, race, income and interests of each of our prospects.

Momentgraphics focuses on the periods of time in which we need to target prospects. For example, someone searching for the phrase ‘cold medicine that works in less time’ is the prime target for a company producing cold medicine. The demographics of that person are irrelevant because we know they are in a ‘target moment’ making them the target market.

What will you do to improve your online marketing performance in 2008? There are so many options, challenges with agency selection plus a moving target when it comes to knowledge/expertise. Without previous campaign performance statistics, it can be a real challenge deciding where to allocate marketing dollars for the web when you’re looking at expanding into new areas of promotion.

Whether your success metrics are branding, traffic, lead generation or sales, the right strategy and mix of tactics can make or break a business that relies on internet channels. What ARE the best upcoming channels? We’d like to know your opinion in this week’s Reader Poll:

[Minor edit: Be sure to read the comment thread below for a response from the agency CEO.] An employee of an  Interactive agency sent out pitches to a number of bloggers this morning promoting a “viral video” that I wanted to share. Mind you, I’m not going to share the actual video because it’s sick, racist and violent. “Man makes racist insults, gets asphyxiated and beaten to death by young Asian girls and their parents while another man obliviously chats on his Bluetooth headset nearby.” If you’re into that sort of thing you can find it on your own.

What I AM sharing is the pitch email and a few screen shots. I get so many pitches each day even though there’s nothing on our contact form to indicated we’re interested in being pitched. It’s so easy to just click delete and move on to the day’s work.

Coming up fast (February 19-21) is the 2008 Search Engine Strategies show in London. It will be my first time speaking at an event in London and luckily I’ll be involved with 3 panels that are spot on with the marketing consulting work we do at TopRank.

The two panels that I am presenting on are concurrent Wednesday, Feb 20 with “News Search SEO” starting at 10:30 a.m. followed by “Blog and Feed SEO” at 11:45 a.m. I will also be moderating the “Brand and Reputation Management” panel on Thursday at 3:30p.m. Below are more details on those sessions.