Online Marketing Blog

This week I’ll try something a little different with our BIGLIST of online marketing blogs reviews and share a screen shot of the week’s best looking SEO blog to be added.

That honor goes to Mikkel deMib Svendsen who’s been blogging for a very long time, except it’s been mostly in Danish.

Recently, Mikkel decided to launch a SEM blog in English, which is great news if you know Mikkel.  At my first SES conference I recall seeing this guy in a bright red suit taking lots of photos and not sure who he was. Then after seeing him speak on a few panels quickly realized the deep search marketing knowledge he was offering.  Now you can get that insight online. This blog is a mix of both text and video SEO content, plus Mikkel has a new book on SEO you should check out.

There are many ways for company marketers to advance their knowledge in the digital marketing and PR space. A big part of TopRank’s consulting services are to provide clients with education so they can better implement recommendations and promote the advantages of SEO, Social Media and Optimized PR in house. We’re also active participants towards industry education on these topics through speaking at conferences.

September is the calm before the storm of speaking events for TopRank but October and November are packed with opportunities to learn strategy, hear case studies and understand specific tactics for implementation on the topics of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and Online Public Relations. Here are our upcoming events. We hope to see you there:

Oct 5, 2009 – MIMA Summit, Hilton Minneapolis

“Easy reading is damn hard writing,” opened chancellor Roy Williams at last week’s Wizard of Ads training seminar, ’12 Languages of The Mind.’

Never is this quote from Nigel Hawthorne (not Nathaniel Hawthorne, as it’s commonly credited to, per Williams) more apt than when you are a writer of any trade struggling to find that opening hook.

(To serve a personal example, the percentage of time I spent drafting this opening paragraph will exceed the percentage of time spent on any one remaining section of this entire post.)

SEO copywriting serves perhaps the greatest challenge when finding that hook, as we copywriters are encouraged to begin our posts with keywords as far up and to the left as possible in our titles.  (This post may be a bad example, as a blog that begins with ‘SEO Copywriting’ carries the promise of inherent fascination within.)

The transition from old to new technology creates both challenges and opportunities for communications professions.  The field of public relations is directly tied to the publishing industry which of course, is directly connected to business and consumer information discovery and consumption.  The migration from offline to online has left these industries in a state of flux and traditional PR becoming increasingly digital is no exception.

There are tactical challenges as well as strategic. For example, the shift towards digital communications means a new set of tools must be learned in order to accomplish today’s PR goals.  Now more than ever, public relations professionals need to familiarize themselves with a new arsenal of tools to adjust and thrive in a digital world.

As companies grow their confidence and familiarity with the social web, there’s a bit of a mental hurdle they pass in accepting that it makes sense for their organization. It’s not unlike 10 years ago when companies finally started to “get” the need for a company web site.  And just like a web site, building it doesn’t mean “they” will come, so the logicial next step is:

“Once you start a social media effort, how do you promote it?”

The reason for a company or brand’s social media participation, the audience they’re trying to reach, budget/resources and the actual social platforms being used will all flavor how a social media program can and should be promoted. This can be resolved with a few key questions that should be a part of a social media strategy:

Over the past few weeks TopRank has been conducting it’s own search of sorts, for a Senior Search Marketing Manager as well as a Search Marketing Strategist. One of the questions we ask is, “How do you stay current with tactics and strategies in the SEM space?”.  It’s a good question both for hiring agencies to ask as well as companies that are looking for SEM consultants.

Search is a changing marketplace. Whether it’s paying attention to the effect of Google infrastructure updates like Caffeine or industry aggregation like BingHoo, it’s important for companies that want to stay ahead of the competition and for SEM consultants to deliver first class services, to stay current. The question is, how to do that?  We offer 17 ways in our current Online Marketing Blog Reader Poll:

Earlier this summer I gave a presentation in Minneapolis at a ClickZ OMS event on building a social media roadmap with tips on blog marketing and using Twitter. It’s all very introductory if you work in the social media space, but if not, serves as a useful baseline for making a case for corporate social media participation.

Many companies are without confidence in how to use communication tools like blogs or Twitter and this presentation can serve as a good starting point for those tactics as well as for creating a social media strategy. There was good feedback at the event and I’ll do my best to turn it into a slidecast in the future.

SES San Jose is done and I mean done for good. The recent conference finished up last Thursday (with post conference training on Friday) and next year, SES will return to its roots in San Francisco. I think this is a great move for many reasons, but more about that later.

During SES  I presented a half day DMA workshop on incorporating SEO into social media efforts, moderated a ClickZ panel on real-time marketing, presented link building tips on a blog & feed SEO panel and participated on a discussion panel about white hat & black hat social media with Dave Evans as moderator and panelists:  Beth Harte, Chris Bennett and Dave Snyder.

Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2009 turned out to be an energetic week of presentations, networking and positivity for the search marketing industry.

The puzzle that is the ever-changing search marketing industry was brought closer to a solution through sessions on SEO, PPC, Social Media, Analytics and many other digital marketing tactics. To tap into that insight via TopRank’s liveblogging of the event, put your mouse over the puzzle piece topics below and click:

SES San Jose was rich with interactions and interested marketers flocked from around the country (and around the world) to get social, connect and learn.  It was clear from from attitude and attendance that the SEM industry is thriving.

Online Marketing Blog readers are well aware: news search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch.

What are the latest ways businesses and media are using content to tap into the power of news search?  Mark Jackson, SEW Expert & President/CEO, VIZION Interactive moderates this group to dig deeper:

• Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
• Allison Fabella, SEO Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR
• Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group
• David Radicke, Consultant, SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, Radicke eCommerce
• Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google

Mark led this session with a brief introduction of each speaker and quickly turned it over to let the panel members give their presentations.

You’ve heard the stories from the tech echo chamber. Posts proclaiming blogging dead and RSS too slow have been circulating around the web for the last year or so.  And yet the blogosphere remains alive and kicking, despite the early adopter pontification.

Not yet running a blog or syndicating your content through RSS feeds?  Your competition certainly is, and if you’re not there you’re missing out on a vital area that can boost your SEO efforts.

Joshua Palau, VP, Search, Razorfish moderates this panel of industry leaders (including TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden) to explore the unique advantages blogs and feeds offer to search engine optimization:

• Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit
• Dixon Jones, Managing Director, Receptional LTD
• Sally Falkow, President, PRESSfeed

Charlene Li is co-author of the business best-seller, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and gave the keynote on day 3 of SES San Jose.  She spoke on the intersection of search and social and discussed how to prepare for the future of search.  Read on for the highlights of her presentation:

How far have we come since 2001?  In just 8 years, we’ve gone from simple text links in search results to pictures, video and a rich user experience.

Imagine what will happen going forward into the future.  The engines are only going to keep innovating – and one of the trends is the integration of social and real-time into search results.