Online Marketing 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?”

One of the most common ways people find new blogs is through links on blogs they already know about. Below is a collection of links to various rankings of the top blogs on topics related to search engine optimization and marketing online. I have no problem disclosing that Online Marketing Blog is on these lists or had a hand in their creation.

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!

• SEOBook.com – 1.7 million links
• SearchEngineWatch – 1.3 million links

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.

Like many bloggers I look at stats pretty often and since we started using the most recent version of Google Analytics, I’ve been able to get a better handle on what kind of content generates the most interest (and inquiries) as well as traffic sources, etc. In fact, I just checked this morning and see for April to June 28, 2007 the 5 most popular resource pages (in terms of traffic) were:

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:

• RKG Blog – Alan Rimm-Kaufman of the Rimm-Kaufman Group blogs about various online marketing news items and tips along with his own commentary.

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.

One of my biggest complaints about many search marketing blogs is that they don’t promote RSS subscription information prominently and they don’t offer multiple ways to access archived content. Search Engine Land does a super job of making it easy to find past content which is a big plus.

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:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/onlinemarketingseoblog

This is yet another example of why you should use your own domain name for both the blog and the RSS feed from day one. Doing so gives you control over whether you want to change hosting or blogging software platforms in a way that is fairly transparent to readers. Otherwise, you’re stuck doing what we have to do here, and ask readers to make the change instead of the change happening in the background.

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:

http://www.technorati.com/chartimg?q=www.blogaddress.com

&days=60&width=420&height=200&type=url
(url is broken to 2 lines)

For example, to create the graph image above, I used the following URL:

http://www.technorati.com/chartimg?q=www.toprankblog.com

&days=180&width=420&height=200&type=url
(url is broken to 2 lines)

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:

Since I’m one to have fun with lists, I thought I’d take the Search Marketing Blogs by Feedburner RSS Subscribers list and see what their Technorati scores were. I am assuming “authority” is an indication of inbound links withing a certain amount of time. The higher the number, the more authority.

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.

• SEO Content Solutions – SEO savvy copywriter Christine OKelly writes about SEO, SMO and a few other acronyms we writers like to throw around.
• SearchGrit – Marios Alexandrou writes a lot about search engine optimization as well as the search marketing industry.
• Vaughan Marketing – Shane Vaughan, VP of marketing for Balihoo and former Global Search Marketing Manager for HP, writes about his experiences with search marketing.
• On the Trail – Twin Cities based web analytics guru, Mike Keyes writes mostly about web analytics with a few personal tidbits.