All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
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:
Along with other forms of media coverage on the topics of search and online marketing, internet radio has been a great source of content for listening live or via podcast. Some SEO podcasts and online radio are basic and others are very professionally produced. The content varies greatly as well from industry gossip to practical tactics.
Earlier this week I ran an informal poll with about 40 respected search marketers and almost half admitted they didn’t listen to podcasts much, if at all. In fact, some were publishers of podcasts that didn’t listen to other podcasts. Is is it the case that these people were so busy with clients, speaking, writing, testing that they didn’t have time?
If you’re an active feed reader, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of feeds in your reader at times. An easy way to slim down the number without removing any, is to show only feeds that have new posts.
If you’re using Google Reader, click on the Show: updated link. This will then hide any feeds and folders that don’t have something new to offer. Plus, as you read through feeds, once you have all items marked as read, they disappear from the sidebar. Not only does it make you feel a bit better about the number of feeds you track but it also helps those that have unread items stand out a bit more.
After reading Neil’s post about Pronet Advertising, Search Engine Land and Online Marketing Blog making Technorati’s Popular 100 list, I thought I’d search T’rati a bit more and noticed an Authority score starting to appear next to the blogs in the search results. I know a widget was released that blogs could use to show their Technorati score earlier last month I believe, but this is the first I’ve seen it on the Technorati site.
Here’s a screenshot:
The fun never stops with our ongoing search for interesting and informative blogs about search engine marketing. Open up your RSS reader/aggregator and invite this week’s entries into your blog reading party.
Manoj Jasra of the Web Analytics World blog and Enquiro has let me know he’is running a blogging contest this week. It’s somewhat like Marketing Pilgrim’s Scholarship where participants submit articles on various topics and prizes are awarded to the winner who sends the most traffic. This is a brilliant idea actually and it’s a win-win-win situation as well.
Readers win by getting great content, participants win because they get exposure and one of them gets “fabulous prizes”, and Web Analytics World wins because of great content along with the traffic driven by contest entrants.
In two weeks I’ll be in Florida for my first ever Search Insider Summit conference. This is an event held by MediaPost and chaired by David Berkowitz from 360i, who has been a regular contributor to the Search Insider email newsletter and blog for the past year or more. He also publishes a fine blog at Inside the Marketer’s Studio.
David and I have been fellow bloggers of the Chicago ad:tech conference the past few years and he has amazing writing talents as well as a very firm grasp of what’s new, hot and most of all, important in the search and online marketing world.
We’re changing hosts for Online Marketing Blog this weekend.
I never thought we’d need a dedicated server for a blog, but this blog will be moving over to a dedicated Dell Poweredge server with our new host VISI, who has been good to work with so far. In fact, they’ve gone way out of their way in terms of providing expedited set up since our our current host, Pair Networks, informed us yesterday they’re shutting our site down today. Yep, just like that.
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