Online Marketing Blog

I was able to do just two video interviews before my camera got dropped in a glass of water. I’ll have to explain that in another post.

Here’s Michael Gray, aka graywolf, just before our session with Todd Mailicoat and Neil Patel on “Social Bookmark Strategies” where he talks about tips for conference goers. Coverage of that session can be found at The Lisa, Search Engine Roundtable, Small Business SEM and CenterNetworks.

I also caught up with Mona Elesseily from Page Zero where she talks about Yahoo Panama pros and cons. Also two new Panama enhancements: Quality based bidding and being able to opt out of Yahoo’s content network.

The good people at Ask.com pinged me this morning that Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com announced support of autodiscovery for Sitemaps today.

WebProNews published an announcement about the search engines Google and Yahoo agreeing to work on a common sitemaps standard and the launch of sitemaps.org at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas last year.

The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. The updated Sitemap protocol has benefits for site publishers, the search engines as well as searchers. Ask.com is also supporting manual submissions of sitemaps via a ping url.

MyBlogLog has been taking the blogosphere by storm the past few months, even before the acquisition by Yahoo. However, MyBlogLog is not a recent phenomena, it started out as a blog statistics service by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson in March of 2005.

I’m a fan of MyBlogLog (TopRank Community) and despite some of the infrastructure issues related to their increased popularity, am very optimistic about what the resources brought on by Yahoo will do for the community.

Yahoo! has announced that on Feb 5th, they will be introducing a quality score to the Yahoo Search Marketing ad system, “Panama”. To date, placement of ads on Yahoo and their network have been based on bid price alone. From the press release:

“The quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system and its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time. Ads of higher quality will generally receive better placement on the results page.”

Yesterday I posted a link to aimclear’s blog about his frustrations with getting Yahoo geo targeting features to work for him. A thread had also been started at Search Engine Watch forum which apparently has been pulled, but thanks to Google cache, I was able to grab some of the info.

Basically, ackmnmn from aimclear says that a support person at Yahoo informed him that Yahoo recognized some aspects of geo targeting were not working and that Yahoo would be disabling geo targeting or parts of it.

In the same SEW forum thread, YahooSarah chimed in with:

Spotlight on Search: Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

There has been quite a bit of buzz on the paid search marketing front with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform aka “Panama”. At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced the launch during a sponsored lunch. Dan Zarrella did a good a review of that session here.

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.

When the Yahoo Publisher Network blog editor Michael Mattis asked me to write an short marketing article for small businesses I knew exactly what to write about. As much as anyone, I am a proponent of new and interesting online marketing strategies like using social media for marketing, but I am also a firm believer in tried and true tactics, such as promoting one’s site offline.

After going through the routine hoops with Yahoo, the article has published on the YPN blog today, “Signal to Noise“. The article covers the basics as well as a few new, low cost tactics including:

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.

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.

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.

Lately I’ve noticed a few mainstream web publications making concerted efforts to solicit user generated content. Enabling consumers to submit news gives media access to millions of potential stories they might otherwise not know about, or not have a scoop on. I know our local (and likely national) public radio station has been soliciting user generated content and news stories for at least a year and so do some TV stations. Also, Topix.net allows users to interact with news stories on their forums which, according to Topix.net founder Rich Skrenta, has enabled a big boost in traffic.