Online Marketing Blog

With so much uncertainty due to inflated promises, bad press and a fast changing industry, what “signals” of credibility do companies look for in trusted internet marketing partners and resources? Our gift to you today is an annotated list of 25. In one way or another, TopRank is involved with all of the following marketing and PR tactics either for ourselves or for our marketing and public relations clients.

But I’m also curious what Online Marketing Blog Readers have to say on this topic. Let’s have a little vote shall we? After the list there is a poll so you can vote for your favorite.

Demand for talented search marketers is high and the number of educational opportunities has increased proportionately. We have a reader poll this week to get an idea of our reader’s conference involvement. See below.

Some prefer a structured training program like SEMPO Institute, DMA SEM Certification or Bruce Clay’s training program. Others prefer to compliment those programs or augment on the job training with industry seminars such as Search Engine Strategies and ClickZ Events, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, SMX, Search Insider Summit and the variety of vertical, regional and industry specific conferences that are now including search marketing in their programming.

Some of the best advice I ever received starting out in the business world concerned the value of networking. Online communication tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter as well as mainstays like IM and email make it easier than ever (sometimes too easy) to network with other like-minded individuals.

Search marketers tend to be a tech savvy lot so I suspect many Online Marketing Blog readers are likely users of these online communications and networking tools. But which ones? Which are most productive? That leads us to this weeks Reader Poll question:

A participant of the DMA Search Engine Marketing Certification program emailed me with some feedback about the program (very positive) and also posed a question about what industries need the least amount of education about search marketing. What industries are hiring in particular? Which I thought was a great question.

Many search marketing and interactive marketing agencies focus on certain vertical categories, so I don’t think you’d get too many consistent answers. However, if a hundred more different agencies, in-house marketers and consultants participated in such a survey, I think we’d get some pretty interesting data. And that leads me to this week’s reader poll:

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.

Since attending, blogging and speaking at industry conferences is a big part of my own search marketing agency’s marketing, I get to attend a good number of events in a variety of cities. One of the nice things about having events in the same city is that you get to know the city better each time. For example, you can never go to New York City too many times (as far as I’m concerned).

With any kind of online marketing you need a place to start. Find out what kinds of search queries people are typing into the search box and you’ll know what kind of content to optimize, create and get links to.

For the most part, keyword research software and tools fall into a handful of categories. Paid and free are two as well as those that are specific to SEO or for PPC. There are a few dominant players in each category but with some interesting innovations in the past year or so it’s worth re-visiting what’s out there and which tools our dear Online Marketing Blog readers prefer.

A great thing about this business is that it’s pretty difficult to get boring. The industry is in a state of constant change and the roles of marketers and what they need to do to serve clients also changes. There’s a lot to think about so Online Marketing Blog is curious, what’s on your mind:

Last week we ran what turned out to be the single most popular TopRank® Reader Poll ever on favorite SEO podcasts with over 380 votes. It was a tough competition with 4 podcasts running neck and neck, but the winner is the Strike Point podcast with Dave Naylor and Mikkel deMib Svendson. Beginning SEO Podcast (which I did last night) followed in second with Danny Sullivan’s Daily Search Cast in third.

Now for this week’s poll, we’ll turn to another popular source for information on the search marketing industry, email newsletters. Of the many sources of information on search marketing, email continues to be a channel that I use for quick news scans on industry news and particularly for articles.

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?

Whenever I look at our huge list of search marketing blogs, I think several things, one of which is “so many blogs, so little time”. One way to cut through the clutter is to use a mashup or aggregator. There are many of these and I’d like to find out which of the search marketing mashups/aggregator sites below you like best.

It’s been a while since we’ve done a Reader Poll Roundup, so today I’m listing a summary first and then the day’s poll in a separate post. With the polls we’ve been running just about every Wednesday on Online Marketing Blog, the voting turnouts and selections have been interesting but the commentary has been even better.

Whether it’s deciding what the best sources of information on search marketing are to the most important skills for practicing search engine optimization, these polls offer a glimpse of what’s on the minds of our appreciated readers and possibly the search marketing industry at large.