All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
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:
So much information, so little time. Between IM, RSS, Facebook, Twitter, Sphinn, blogging and work, it’s amazing there’s any time left for “old school” activities like email.
The beauty of RSS is that you can subscribe to a pretty good list of search marketing blogs and stay up to date on industry news as well as emerging trends. In the course of daily business, I am often asked, “Which SEO blogs should you subscribe to?”
Today Rob Key from Converseon pinged me on how fast their work promoting reforestation through a video as part of an American Express promotion hit the Google SERPs. The project is a great example of the power of social media for a great cause.
In just 4 days the video (Second Chance Trees) ranks #2 for the phrase “American Express Members Project“. It actually ranks higher than the Amex web site for the project, which is pretty impressive with over 4 million search results for the term. Maybe after indexing this blog, the link above it’ll be doing even better. 
Perusing feeds for search marketing blogs this evening I noticed a claim/post by Rand about one million links to seomoz.org and that is indeed what Yahoo Site Explorer reports. The posts goes on to explain how to achieve such “linkableness” and ends with a collection of search marketing blogs and the number of inbound links for comparison.
Since Online Marketing Blog was not included in the list, I thought I’d throw up that same list with OMB included. You’ll see us sandwiched between John Battelle’s Searchblog and Search Engine Roundtable. Not a bad showing by any standard. Thank you to all the sites that have linked to us and especially our many new and long time readers!
If you’re a regular reader of Online Marketing Blog, you’ll know we like to tweak things on a pretty regular basis. I send such refinement requests to Thomas, my blogmaster, just about every day. “Make this bigger, make that smaller, add xyz plug-in or check on something with our host VISI”. I’m sure it’s annoying but it’s what he gets paid for.
What a week! With most of my time spent at the DM Days conference or sitting in a plane (not flying of course, just sitting on the runway waiting for the stars to line up or whatever control towers are using these days to give the OK for takeoff) I had little time to poke around for new SEM and SEO blogs for our list.
Regardless, we have six additions for this week’s update including two from the UK, two from my home state of Minnesota and one from Massachusetts:
Larry Chase of Web Digest for Marketers, a newsletter that’s been published since 1995 and has over 40,000 subscribers, asked me recently to do reviews on a list of 15 or so search marketing blogs. Larry only has guest writers 2-3 times a year, so I was very honored to say yes.
Some of the blogs on the list I read daily and some once every few days. It was fun digging deep into each blog because it really gave me a chance to weigh a variety of factors ranging from content, frequency, freshness, usability, design and overall personality.
We started Online Marketing Blog in December 2003 using Blogger and the feed was run through Feedburner. Recently we had that old RSS feed redirected to the current blog running on Wordpress. This redirection through Feedburner of the old feed to the new feed only works for 30 days and then the old feed dies.
Just in case there are some long time Online Marketing Blog RSS subscribers from 2003-2004 that have not updated which RSS feed they subscribe to, be sure to use:
Just a quick post this am about one of the common questions that came up during Media Relations Summit. It was a question about how to now find the Technorati graphs that show incoming links. I guess a lot of people don’t trust or feel comfortable with Technorati’s “Authority Score” which is a bit like the Google Page Rank score given in the Google tool bar.
The way to generate a graph of inbound links to a particular blog, is to use the following URL where you replace “www.blogaddress.com” with the blog URL you’re interested in:
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