All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
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Search Engine Journal began announcing the winners of it’s 3rd Annual Search Engine Marketing Blog Awards today. Voting covered 19 different categories ranging from best conference coverage to best SEO blog. With that many categories, I’d be surprised if Loren posted them all in one day. It’s great link bait with this post as a testament. TopRank Blog was nominated in 4 categories which have yet to be announced.
TopRank started using social bookmarking as an active/passive content promotion method several years ago. In fact, here is a podcast interview I did with Rok Hrastnik in March 2005 discussing SEO, tagging and bookmarking. We’ve also been fairly successful at promoting a social bookmarking tool for blogs over the past 18 months or so, gathering 50,000+ links.
Leveraging the social behaviors and technology of social news and bookmarking sites can be very effective as an active content promotion strategy.
Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal has recently taken nominations for best search marketing blogs in a variety of categories. I am happy to say TopRank’s blog, aka “Online Marketing Blog” has been nominated in 4 of the 19 categories.
Thank you to friends and readers of Online Marketing Blog for nominating us! You can now vote for TopRank’s blog (5 for best!) in the following categories:
A lot of work can go into producing and promoting a popular blog. While we’ve made some progress in terms of raising the visibility of TopRank and have made a tremendous number of connections, I think we’re really only “half way there” as far as where we could be. Using blogs as a marketing and PR tool is a process of planning, execution, measurement and refinement like any other tactic. We’ll continue that trend with new features and design in 2008.
Anyone that reads Online Marketing Blog from time to time knows we do a bit of conference blogging. In fact, during 2007 OMB covered 14 conferences involving nearly 100 blog posts, over 1500 photos and 20 videos. Besides the conference sessions and after hours coverage, we also typically conduct interviews before the events, as well as video interviews during conferences.
The efforts of the TopRank blogging team have enabled Online Marketing Blog to become the first blog to secure an official media sponsorship for just about all major search marketing conferences including: Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, MediaPost Search Insider Summit and eMetrics Summit. OMB is also ranked by Advertising Age as one of the top marketing blogs on the web.
Readers of Online Marketing Blog may have noticed the “ranking” for our blog reported by the AdAge Power 150 widget has dropped from #12 to #43 or so the past week. I just wanted to assure new readers this is not because of any change in subscribers, links or traffic but due to Bloglines not reporting any of our subscribers.
Even though the Bloglines metric reported by AdAge is zero (we actually have over 1300 subscribers) OMB still ranks in the top 50 on the AdAge Power 150 with a score of 61. Add to that the 13 we’d normally get for the number of Bloglines subscribers and the score for Online Marketing Blog hits 74, which ranks us somewhere between #9 and #13 as there are several others with the same score.
If someone has a better photo, please link in the comments
On day three, the last day of sessions at WebmasterWorld Pubcon here in Vegas, I participated on a panel called, “Search and Blogging Reporters Forum” with Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal.
Moderation duties handled by Mike McDonald. Basically, it was a round table-style discussion about blogging in the SEO industry as well as blogging as a marketing tool. There were some good points about using blogs as a public relations tool as well as some debate about hosting team blogs separately or all under the company domain name.
As reported on Techcrunch, Scobelizer, Problogger and others, you can now see (albeit maybe not 100% accurately) how many Google Reader RSS subscribers there are for a particular blog. There appears to be some discrepancy between Google Reader subscribers reported by Google Reader and those numbers reported by Feedburner.
We’ve previously published a list of search marketing blogs by Feedburner RSS subscribers, so for fun I thought we’d post that same list of SEO blogs by Google Reader subscribers:
When talking with TopRank or M&O Account Teams about new clients, it is inevitable that I will ask if there is a blog involved. There are simply too many advantages to enabling a web site with fresh, themed content that is well structured for SEO benefits and that also offers a great platform for creative promotion, not to consider it in the online marketing mix. However, the mis-perceptions about what a blog is and is not abound, even with self-described “blogging experts”.
In the past I’ve written about blogger relations offering tips on how marketers or PR professionals ought to present their story ideas to bloggers. Pitching bloggers and print journalists are somewhat similar, but in the end, they can be very different things.
Here are a few “what you should not do” tips based on the 3-5 pitches per day we get at Online Marketing Blog:
Search engines love text and people love engaging content. This message was made clear during the SES session on Podcast & Audio Search Optimization where Daron Babin of Webmaster Radio, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit and Rick Klau of Google presented on the opportunities of search marketing with audio.
Audio search has come a long way and still, we’ve barely tapped into the full potential for audio content.
But why should we podcast? Watlington tells us that the value of audio content lies in its ability to create and foster an emotional connection with the audience. It is yet another opportunity to engage users while adding a human context to the message.
This morning, and I mean really early morning, I went about my weekly perusal of about 50 or so SEO and SEM blogs. For the most part this is a very informative and satisfying experience. However, there are a few barriers to blog reader experience that I feel especially obligated to point out. These observations are relevant for any business blog:
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