Online Marketing Blog

Dan Rosandich sent me this cartoon. Apparently he runs a service that you can use to automatically populate your blog or web site with cartoon images via RSS or JavaScript with a daily cartoon. They’re not all about search engines or SEO, but some bloggers might find it to be an interesting way to add content. More at Dan’s cartoons.

Fantomaster used to post SEO related cartoons and Chris Pirillo’s bLaugh offers a web 2.0 slant on their cartoons. Rand uses them in his PowerPoint presentations as well.

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Google has a handy logo today in recognition of Marting Luther King Jr. Day and I was greeted by my 6 year old son singing a song about MLK this morning that I had not heard from him before!

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There’s a bit of a meme going around regarding the potential use of Google Reader as an alternative to digg. The idea is to be able to view the the most popular shared feeds. Steve Mermelstein starts out with a post, “Google Reader Could be a Digg Killer” which caught the attention of prominent bloggers Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble with nice roundup by Jason Lee Miller from WebProNews.

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Ron Belanger from Yahoo does a decent job explaining, “Engagement, Search and Social Media” in a video over at iMedia Connection. I like the context in which he presents social search - as a third channel to organic and PPC. Now if iMedia just offered some social bookmark links for the video!

WSJ posits a good question: “Google Tests New Ad Offerings — But Will Advertisers Follow?” In order to accomplish the transfer of ad dollars to other ad formats, Google will need to change existing mindsets about advertising in print, on radio and TV as being too expensive or complicated.

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For some good humor, check out the following posts by Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo and Matt Cutts from Google. Jeremey points out a striking similarity between the Yahoo and Google MSIE splash pages. Google has changed the splash page to something else by now.

Matt responds in that very politically correct and polite way that Matt does and then he points out how Yahoo has been copying Google’s PPC ad layouts.

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It’s been six months since Google launched their Finance offering and Google announced today that several new features have been added including:

• Enhanced Charts: Up to 40 years of historical data for US stocks is now available.
• Market Trends: A “top-mover‚Äù module on the Google Finance homepage now highlights the market’s top moving companies which are featured categorically by price, market cap, volume, and number of queries.
• Customizable Portfolios: You can now store multiple portfolios and upload information from other online portfolios with several customization options.

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Google’s posting a cool Edvard Munch inspired logo today based on his painting, “The Scream”.¬† Check out all of Google’s Holiday logos or these collections of fan logos.

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This was an open discussion session where users submitted their sites to get the Google ad copy critiqued and the landing page looked over for quality and usability. Tips included:

• Keep important information towards the top of the landing page.
• Be detailed and don’t just assume your visitors know your services.
• Simpler the better.
• Put simple URLs in ads.
• Try sentence caps vs small caps.
• Image quality on landing page matters. Make it look good.
• Whitespace is good.
• Bullet points give a great way for users to scan information. Long blocks are bad.

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Next up in our series of SEO videos from Search Engine Strategies here in windy and cold Chicago is Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg from Reprise Media. In this short interview they talk about the multiple sessions each of them are presenting as well as commentary on the search marketing industry.

Reprise Media also publishes a well-written blog called Search Views.

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In the tradition established this summer at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, there are more video interviews here in Chicago with interesting people that work in the search marketing industry. I’ve been shooting short videos with my trusty Sony Cybershot which you can see below.

First up is Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro who discusses a few details of their most recent eyetracking report which compares Google, Yahoo and MSN search results. Online Marketing Blog did a short review of this report in November.

You can find out more about Enquiro here and Gord writes a handy blog over at Out of my Gord.

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Bulk submitting your site to search engines is quite an easy task. Granted, it may sound spammy, but it’s not. This session covered things like XML site maps and paid inclusion options. Google gave an overview of their webmaster tools and gave tips like having separate XML site maps for different types of media (like mobile) and removing un-necessary information from the urls (like session ids). Yahoo talked about Yahoo Site Explorer and said that more features were on the way. They noted that a feedback area launched recently and it was a great way to put in your opinion on what was missing orbroken. It also comes with Digg like functionally so users can vote on topics. The more votes, the quicker Yahoo will consider working on it. Overall, XML site maps is the way to go to make sure you get all your URLs indexed by the major search engines.

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This was more of a speed intro to some of Google’s newer services. Topics included Google Analytics, Google Gadgets, Webmaster Tools and Personalized Search. Each presenter gave a quick 10 minute overview of their topic and it was hardly enough to really get to know much about each service. The real value of this session was in the question answer portion. I learned that Google’s personalized search is going to offer analytics in the upcoming weeks so that you can see what people are looking for in your custom search. Customized Google Analytics reports are also being discussed, however it’s hard to say when that may become a reality.

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