Online Marketing Blog

Companies that take their search engine visibility for granted or that ride the technical SEO loophole/manipulation train often get a hard smack back to reality when their online sales disappear. Orders start to slip or fall off the map altogether and the IT team red alert phone rings off the hook with calls from the business owner, “What the hell happened to our rankings???”

You can imagine Google being brought up in a browser and searches for “search engine optimization firms” and similar queries are place to find a SEO consultant to “quick fix the problem”.

The real “problem” is that there is rarely a quick fix for the kinds of issues that result in a dramatic change downward in search visibility. The exception being the removal of an errant robots.txt file placed to disallow all engines from crawling a site during development.

Today on this fine Friday ladies and gentlemen, we have a BIGLIST SEO blogs update for you slanting a bit toward agencies but not without some flavor from Germany and the Jungle. Read on:

• AdCenter Community -  This is Microsoft’s official support blog for AdCenter advertisers.

• Mediadonis – Germany based Marcus Tandler writes about his search engine industry and often hilarious personal experiences – mostly in English but sometimes in German.

• MediaVision Blog – This is an agency blog with numerous contributors writing about online marketing and search engine industry news, observations and malarkey.

• The Jungle Map – Charlotte, NC based Hippo Internet Marketing guy Corey Creed writes this agency blog with a fun design about SEO, PPC and business in Charlotte.

With so many “Web 2.0″ technologies coming in to play with web design and online application development, the effect on the search engines’ ability to find, crawl and index content becomes an issue. As such, this session moderated by Kevin Ryan included deep dive advice from Chris “Silver” Smith, Lead Strategist from Netconcepts and Ambles Kwok, a Senior Engineering Manager from Yahoo Canada.

Chris Silver Smith was first up and gave examples of Web 2.0 technologies including the idea of folksonomy and tagging by showing a tag cloud from Delicious. It’s an alternative method of navigation based on user defined keywords assigned to a piece of content.

If you’ve been in the search marketing industry for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly encountered a wide variety of conflicting or outdated advice. Since “how to” information in so many other industries is often presented as an absolute, many people look for the same kinds of static and perpetual rules with search engine optimization. The problem comes from not discerning SEO myth and speculation from fact which can be a very costly mistake.

Moderated by Matt Van Wagner, this session (SEO Don’ts, Myths and Scams) included some of the most experienced SEO practitioners in the business with Jill Whalen of High Rankings, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit and Lyndsay Walker from WestJet.

My first time in Toronto did not disappoint. It was brief but very busy with plenty of sessions to choose from during the day. Here is a collection of my favorite photos taken during SES Toronto this week:

Matt McGowan, Joe Dolson and Todd Malicoat enjoying some pre-conference conversation

Kevin Ryan getting the most out of Google’s Bill Tighe during the Advanced Paid Search Panel

Chris Silver Smith really gave up the goods during the Web 2.0 and Search Engines Panel.

SEO myth-buster Jill Whalen tells it like it is as Matt Van Wagner thinks, “Damn, she’s giving away my secrets!”

Jeff Quipp, Jennifer Osborne, Emily Spence and Richard Zwicky working the exhibit hall

Yahoo’s booth complete with Wii and a big push for SearchMonkey

I’m back from SES Toronto and wanted to share the presentation on Twitter with readers that weren’t at the show. Fellow presenters @davesnyder and @chriswinfield did a great job and the audience received a deep drill down into many aspects of Twitter.

In the end, Twitter on it’s own and with it’s uptime issues isn’t anywhere near as productive as it is in combination with third party tools like Twhirl, Summize and Twitturly. Return on effort from using Twitter really depends on how you use it. The mileage will vary based on your goals, how much you give and to what extent you use Twitter in combination with other socnets like Facebook, LinkedIn and offline networking.

Here’s my presentation hosted on Slideshare:

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Last week at the PRSA Digital Impact conference I met Steve Rubel, SVP Director of Insights from Edelman Digital and famous (sometimes infamous) PR blogger at Micropersuasion. He presented “2008 Digital Trends: Open Files” which talks about the framework Edelman uses (Faint Signals, Watch List and Hallucinations for tracking digital/social media trends.

Read my live blogging notes below or you can view the entire presentation over at Slideshare or Rubel’s post about tracking digital trends here.

Mass vs Micro. It’s less about reach and more about impact. Mass reach is dying. Micro is blogging, Twitter, Friendfeed etc. Even if people are not producing content and media, they’re impacted by it.

This panel at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference includes Heidi Sullivan and Jay Krall of Cision and Jason Falls of Doe Anderson and who writes Social Media Explorer.

Heidi starts out a with a poll: How many comments for media relations? and How many have created a social profile for a client? A small number of hands raise for each question.

Jason: What are three things you want to know?

1. Less tools and tactics and more to how you’re applying this, illustrating the value of it
2. More about blogger relations
3. Strategy and context. Enough about tools. Are blogs for every organization?

The TopRank team works really well together, bringing to each team meeting various areas of expertise and interest, which makes for a well-rounded environment here in our Lake Minnetonka office. We know how to play off of everyone’s strengths and ensure our clients are fully serviced based on their needs and objectives by those who can best take on that role.

Below is a list of our favorite online marketing tips , which – as a team – makes us stronger than each individual.

• Build Out Social Relationships Gradually – Social media and social networking are not “dump and run” tactics. Relationships need to be built over a long period of time in a venue that enhances the product or service you are promoting, which is when the promoted piece gets the most positive attention.

I guess you could call this the “International Edition” of the BIGLIST Update of search marketing blogs as we have multiple countries represented including SEOs and PR professionals from the UK, New Zealand, Netherlands and USA. There’s plenty of flavorful writing, advice and tips so read on:

• Searchwritten – Netherlands based Ramon Eijkemans started this new blog as a study in content SEO, a topic that’s near and dear.

• 123 Social Media – Barry Hurd promises to educate business professionals on how to maximize the best in online marketing and technology.

• Ben Wills – While Ben doesn’t post as often as many other blogs on our list, his analytical, strategic, and pragmatic focus on online marketing is worth the read.

Innovation, creative problem solving and passionate interest in the subject matter are a big part of successful internet and social marketing – the topics of prime interest to readers of Online Marketing Blog. Those same characteristics apply to organizations and individuals working to make strategic business and marketing changes for the future.

In particular, these values are reflected in the upcoming PUSH 2008 conference in Minneapolis June 15-17. In the very busy run up to the conference, PUSH founder Cecily Sommers took the time to answer a few questions about PUSH and The Fertile Delta event.

With all the sessions, speakers, networking and photo-snapping going on in the last 2 days at SMX Advanced in Seattle, it’s surprising any attendee got anything else completed at all.

While I didn’t attend every session (can’t be in three places at once – just not possible for this girl ) I managed to get to quite a few where I learned a lot of valuable information and got a feel for what everyone was talking about.

The main theme I noticed in Seattle this week was the idea of value, and how to increase value. With the idea of the recession looming over our heads like a dark cloud, there are many people who want to see their dollar going as far as it can.