Online Marketing Blog

Networking has been a core tactic for building and marketing businesses long before the internet came of age and certainly even more so with the explosion of services such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Ning. Web technology and the mass appeal of making connections online makes social networking an attractive channel for businesses that want to extend their word of mouth reach, credibility and influence.

While there’s plenty of buzz about social networks (socnets), most companies aren’t quite “wired” for enganging social communities just yet. Amidst all the shiny new objects of Web 2.0 web applications, it’s important to understand which networks are influential and relevant. Hence, our Reader Poll:

WordPress 2.6 comes with a feature that adds captions to images.  It looks really nice in the WordPress editor, but if you don’t have the code, it won’t look as nice when you publish your post.

The good news is, all you have to do is add the following lines of code to your theme’s CSS file.

/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions */

The BIGLIST update of SEO blogs comes to you this week on a Monday because, hey, that’s the way we like to change things up here at Online Marketing Blog. This edition of the BIGLIST Update is chock full of blogs that offer SEO how to’s and practical insights as well as a good showing of social media topics. Enjoy!

• Tim Nash – Very nice UK SEO blog from Information Architect Tim Nash on topics ranging from advanced SEO to programming with several good articles on SEO basics, snake oil SEO tricks to watch for and SEO training courses.

• seogadget – London based Richard Baxter’s Ubuntu, SEO and geek stuff blog with plenty of screen shots and how to posts.

You’ve probably picked up that this week is about SES San Jose from Dana and Ashley’s “15 Things Not to Miss at SES San Jose” followed by Jessica’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” post.  I am also headed out to sunny California next month. There’s plenty to take in on a trip to the Golden State including the beautiful weather, celebrities, good wine, and, of course the Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Here are a few of the sessions I’m planning on covering:

More Customers, Fewer Costs – Why Marketing to the ‘Long Tail’ Makes Sense
Who doesn’t want more customers and fewer costs? Isn’t that a business’ dream? This session will be interesting as there have been recent stories on how the long tail is not as effective as we once thought. I still believe in the long tail though.

Originally written by Burt Bacharach, the song Do You Know the way to San Jose, la la la la la… didn’t actually come to fruition until the lovely Dionne Warwick won her first Grammy for Best Contemporary Pop Female Vocal in 1968.

Although I wasn’t around in 1968, I understand the anticipation Burt must have had waiting for this song to hit the main stream. I have been chosen as a TopRank blogger at the upcoming SES conference in San Jose, CA, (and yes, I have been singing the song for days now ) and the anticipation has got me on the edge of my seat!

TopRank is sending five team members to the SES San Jose Conference August 18th-22nd, an event we’re sincerely looking forward to, especially with 80% of the sessions new to SES.  Since this will be my first time attending the SES conference in San Jose, I am excited about all of the new sessions we will be attending.

My team mate Dana Larson has been to multiple search marketing conferences over the past year and is eager to discover what is new and different at next month’s event. Together, the two of us would like to share our “Top 15 Things Not to Miss at SES San Jose 2008″:

1. Your flight there. Ha!

For the 5th year in a row, MarketingSherpa has published their Search Marketing Benchmark Guide which has been completely re-written and edited including results from the Marketing Sherpa members search marketing survey, other studies performed over the last 12 months and “best of” research provided by over 50 respected sources.

The SEM Benchmark Guide is helpful for marketers looking to get a handle on the state of the SEM industry, trends, strategies and tactics.

If you’re a data enthusiast, there are 215 charts, tables and eyetracking heatmaps to help illustrate what’s happening in search marketing and what companies need to be paying attention to. There are also several good case studies. This particular edition is formatted into 5 sections:

You don’t have to look too far online to see more and more people using social bookmarking services and news sites. Content publishers from blogs to mainstream publications like Minneapolis Star Tribune are looking for ways to make it easier for readers to save and share content.

There are a variety of tactics including social bookmark links, icons, multi-purpose buttons, browser add-ons, bookmarklets, other tools and scripts that can used to encourage visitors to promote content. The question is, how are people using them?

[Note from Lee: Please welcome Ashley Bruce, the newest member of TopRank's Online Promotions team who is making her first blog post at Online Marketing Blog with this Lionel Richie inspired post about improving  qualified traffic through online marketing tips.]

Internet marketers often have to get creative when it comes to solving client web site traffic and sales problems. Inspiration from friends and family, movies, or even the smooth sounds of the local adult contemporary radio station can be useful.

Take this longstanding frustration: Online marketing efforts can sometimes produce an increase in website traffic that is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in conversions. While more traffic is almost always positive, it does little good if the majority of site visitors aren’t seriously interested in the products or services being promoted.

TopRank’s SEO Team in Paintball Gear

As much as companies find the need to outsource part or all of their SEO efforts, many do not have a clear picture of the value that comes from hiring an agency versus a full time, in-house SEO. While many consultants and some agencies offer “value meal” pricing and packages, the cost for a search engine optimization effort will vary based on the scope of the project, hours allocated, client side resources, web site technology and competitiveness of the market.

Web site managers that balk at monthly SEO retainers claiming they could hire a full time person for those costs to do SEO in-house don’t really understand all that’s involved with marketing a web site through search engines. Client side SEOs are more Project Managers than they are implementation experts and often get burdened with related tasks on top of continued internal education and evangelism. It’s a lot for one person to do and do well.

For Bay Area folks and social media enthusiasts the world over, “Social Media Club” is well known as an upstart organization looking to promote the goodness of social media as well as advance the knowledge of businesses trying to figure out where social media might fit into their digital marketing plans.

Today SMC co-founders Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells announced a new interim Board of Directors to take SMC to the next level.

Additionally, there are 42 bloggers, marketers and entrepreneurs currently working as part of the interim board tasked with charting the organization’s future direction until SMC reorganizes as a new entity and holds an election amongst its members for a formal Board.

Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason. Some days they are even successful. In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues. It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 – The iFrame – The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load. It seemed abnormally long. I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.