Online Marketing Blog

After a seemingly quicker than normal flight from Minneapolis into LaGuardia, Jolina and I then made it to the Sheraton in near record time. Monday begins what is the biggest SES show of the year: Search Engine Strategies New York. We’re both looking forward to this SES with great anticipation. Jolina blogged SMX West recently and will also be blogging the SES show.

We’ll be doing a mix of blogging sessions, taking photos and video interviews as well as participating in a few after conference events. Sessions I plan on attending Monday include:

Organic Listings Forum with Mike Grehan moderating and Jill Whalen, Dave Naylor and Greg Boser on the panel. Here we have an all star SEO cast available to answer questions about organic SEO. The audience will also have the opportunity to share their own tips and tools.

This week we did a bit of house cleaning and removed 37 blogs from the BIGLIST of SEO blogs – some of them from well known SEOs. One of the quality measures we use for inclusion on the BIGLIST is frequency of posting. If a blog gets stale, we say bye bye for now. Get your BIGLIST updates via Twitter.

This week’s update includes several SEO blogs new to our list and a few re-inclusions. Enjoy!

• John W. Ellis SEM Blog – John writes mostly about PPC, analytics, SEO and social media marketing with a bit of sports, travel and Nashville sneaking in from time to time.

• SEM Geek – Besides contributing at SMG, Greg Meyers writes an awful lot about paid search marketing including specific PPC platforms, analytics and overall marketing on the internet.

No, this isn’t a lame attempt at a keyword stuffed blog post title. I’ve been noticing over the past year a significant increase in the number of references to “online marketing” by SEO blogs, articles and news web sites.

It would be easy to say I am biased due to the name of this blog and our agency both using “online marketing” in the names. I’ll admit that I probably am.

When I started working on selling and marketing web sites in 1997, the catch phrase seemed to be “web marketing” since the most common reference at the time was “world wide web”.

Then about the time Al Gore’s “invention” of the internet gained popularity, the references to “internet marketing” seemed to take over.

With the TopRank BIGLIST at over 450 blogs, it can be a more than a challenge to read so many RSS feeds to stay current on SEM industry news. SEO blogs and news feed aggregators can make it much easier to track what’s going on whether its news, tips or events. This post highlights two services that have launched recently including Alltop from Guy Kawasaki and socialblogroll from Nick Wilsdon along with several others.

Alltop

Launched by Guy Kawasaki, Alltop is based on popurls and shows top stories for selected SEO blogs plus a preview pop up.

socialblogroll

Nick Wilsdon launched socialblogroll along the lines of a popurls style blog aggregator, but ranks them according to the number of links identified in blogrolls of the known SEO blogs. The more other SEO blogs link to a certain blog, the higher up it shows. Clever.

With the changes last year in the search marketing conference industry there has been disappointing side-taking and rumor mongering but also a healthy dose of optimism about what more competition will do for attendees. I would think the sustainability and success of any conference is in large part dependent upon attendees needs being met. Whether your primary business is interactive marketing, public relations, advertising or SEM, online marketing and PR oriented conferences offer a variety of benefits.

Because of Online Marketing Blog readers’ varied marketing and PR related interests, this week’s Poll aims to identify the top motivations for readers to attend marketing industry conferences:

In the film Hollywoodland, Adrien Brody plays a private eye tasked with determining whether TV star George Reeves, famous for playing Superman, did indeed commit suicide or, as his mother suspects was murdered. Brody’s character remarks that if the biggest headlines are insisting that Reeves’ case is indeed closed, the only way to reopen it is to sway public opinion to the mother’s side by manufacturing their own headlines, simply too large to ignore.

I was reminded of this scene, and how far we’ve come in a relatively short amount of time, while reviewing Andy Beal & Dr. Judy Strauss’ excellent new book “Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online.”

Here we go again with another BIGLIST update of SEO blogs. Enjoy!

• Hobo SEO UK – Shaun Anderson writes about a variety of search engine optimization related topics for his agency based in Scotland.

• SEM Blog ineedhits – If you’ve been in the search marketing game for a while, you may remember ineedhits who now online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.

• Brian Chappell – As a SEM and link building specialist, Brian posts tips, videos, reviews and plenty of Google inspired insights.

• BusinessOnLine Blog – Ray “Catfish” Comstock and Benj Arriola write a nice mix of SEO tips and industry observations on this company blog.

• I’m Not a Doctor – Stephen Peron blogs conversationally about SEO from San Diego and you’ve gotta love the SEO-inspired license plates.

Many companies narrowly define PR activities online solely as blogger relations when in reality, online public relations is so much more. To me, internet based public and media relations encompasses gaining editorial exposure on the web with sites like blogs of course, but it also leverages web based technologies, networks and platforms for developing and maintaining more efficient communication with the media. And by “media” I mean traditional media with an online presence as well as other influencers – be they bloggers, power social news users or social networkers.

Communication efforts might happen online, but the media exposure outcomes may be in print or the web. The question arises, if the connections are made and maintained online using online PR and social media tools, but the exposure is offline, is it still online PR? I say yes.

UPDATE: Survey Results on Top 10 Uses of Twitter are here.

Without question, the microblogging platform Twitter (follow me here) is a phenomenon many of our readers are exploring or trying to figure out. Whether you’re in search marketing, advertising, interactive marketing, journalism or public relations, there are many ways to use Twitter as a communications, networking and even a socializing tool.

Some people post the most benign information such as the mass fixation on Twittering while in airports. Others produce steady streams of thoughtful goodness, insights and links to content you simply won’t find anywhere else. Twitter can even be a productive marketing tool and if you look, you’ll find an amazing number of resources on it.

Every blog comes with comments and pretty much every blogger is basing their success on comments. Sure, they may say they don’t, but when you have no comments you feel like you’re just talking to yourself. So how do you get comments?

1 – Write posts that are conversational and something that people can relate to. If you write posts in a way that there feels like there is no room for discussion, then comments will be harder to get.

My wife is great at making posts people can relate to. She put out a post two years ago when she broke her leg and is closing in on 1000 comments from others that have broken theirs. She’s not a marketer, or a PR person, just an average blogger who happened to write in a way that people felt compelled to comment.

As a growing mid-sized online marketing agency, TopRank has had opportunities to interview well over a 100 people for various search engine optimization and internet marketing positions. We’ve been fortunate to hire and develop an amazing team of professionals. We’ve also experienced the flip side.

There are increasing numbers of resources from which to attract or find candidates whether it’s traditional online job boards like Monster.com, SEO job listings at SEMPO or sites dedicated to SEO recruiting. Making sure actual SEO skills and experience are in alignment with company/client needs is as important as setting accurate expectations for job responsibilities and work environment.