Online Marketing Blog

Spotlight on Search Interview with Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media and Neil Patel of Advantage Consulting Services

Next week the next of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series kicks off in New York: SMX Social Media. Developed by search engine industry legend Danny Sullivan and social media guru Neil Patel, the agenda for this event mixes strategic direction with plenty of practical advice sessions ranging from social news to social bookmarking to social networking with a double dose of Wikipedia on day two.

Marketing Sherpa has formally announced their latest Search Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2008 with over 270 pages of fact filled goodness. For both in-house marketers and SEM agencies alike, this guide provides up to date insight into essential search marketing industry trends. Of particular interest to me was the special report on the challenges of bringing SEM in house. The trend is to continue using outsourced help with search marketing for part, not all of campaign implementation.

Also of interest was that the PPC and SEO disparity in budgets continues: Search marketers are spending about one-fifth as much on their SEO efforts compared to paid search

Spotlight on Search Interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Photo Credit Liana Evans

Online Marketing Blog is very fortunate this week to have a special interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor at Search Engine Land and long time observer/analyst/practitioner/advocate in the search engine marketing industry. Chris has been a instrumental influence in the growth of the search marketing industry with his 10+ year old search consulting practice, past involvement with Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies as well as his new role as Executive Editor at Search Engine Land, running the Search Marketing Now webcasts and helping to program SMX conferences.

Earlier this year I participated in an online focus group where questions were asked about various webmaster and SEO tools. The session was run by a third party and I was able to get them to admit it was for Microsoft. Tonight, like many others that showed interest, I received an invite to register from Nathan Buggia, Sr. Product Manager of the Live Search Webmaster Tools Team.

Similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools (Vanessa Fox interview here) and Yahoo’s Site Explorer tools (Tim Mayer interview here), the services included in this Beta of Microsoft’s Windows Live Webmaster Portal appear to be split up into three categories:

WebmasterRadio.FM and their sponsors did not disappoint with the right of passage for new SES San Jose attendees known as “Search Bash“. Hula hoops, Jersey Girls, Marilyn Monroe, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin, Sumo wrestling, go go girls and an open bar all night. Tell me that’s not a formula for an evening you’ll likely not remember but really wish you could!

And now for a few photos:

Brandy and Daron Babin

Vivid Nightclub

Chris and Danielle Winfield

Ken Jurina and Mike McDonald

Sumo Search Bash Style

Dave Naylor and David Brown

After a long day of sessions on day three of Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, some attendees mosied on over to the Yahoo Panama Book party for Mona Elesseily of Page Zero. It was great to see the support for her new report, “Mastering Panama - A special report on Yahoo!’s new search marketing platform”.

While I haven’t had a chance to do a full review of the book since last night, I have paged through it and it appears to be pretty comprehensive and very easy to read with plenty of ordered lists, “Action Items” and “Helpful Hints”. You can get your copy here.

In our continuing coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, we’re shooting periodic video interviews both in the speaker ready room and a few on the exhibit floor.

In this interview Steven Marder of Eurekster talks about how their Swicki product works both for online publishers to attract and monetize traffic as well as serve as a useful web site marketing tool for SEO efforts.

Raise your hands if you want to be a Search Marketer! This session I attended on Day 3 of SES San Jose 2007 taught us how to better educate those who want to start in the SEM business, and how the rest of us already in it should continue learning.

First, Pradeep Chodra, co-founder of OMLogic, spoke on the highlights of working in SEM. Some of those highlights include an exciting and adventurous industry, flexibility of where and when you work because the internet is portable and global, the fact that you don’t need a professional degree to be good at SEM and that the salaries can turn out to be very attractive if you work hard and know what you’re doing as a search marketer.

Day three of Search Engine Strategies San Jose started off with Danny Sullivans’ last keynote presentation where he talked to Marissa Mayer of Google, who was giving her first keynote. Overall they talked about universal search, touch on video, personalized search, iGoogle and the iPhone.

Marissa sated that they felt users were happy with the new universal search. A lot of work had to go into chainging the algorithm to incorporate the additional sources but they were happy. She did say that they had a long way to go yet and other sources, such as scholar, may be added in the future. Google’s goal with universal search is to be more like an encyclopedia with as much relevant information right at your finger tips.

Test: How many geeks (and proud of it) in this picture?

Wow, what a day! With the changes that have happened with Search Engine Watch and the SES conference in recent months, there has been speculation on how the SES San Jose conference would turn out. So far, so good.

Whether it was the improvement in lunch fare from crusty boxed lunches to the hot food (fajitas I believe) or the exhibit hall, the sessions or the after conference activities, everything has been running smoothly.

Here’s a roundup of Day Two coverage of SES San Jose from the TopRank blogging team:

Google did it again last night with a cast of thousands partying their way from 7-11:30 pm at the Googleplex. The rock ‘n roll theme with tattoo inspired artwork set the stage for another festive post conference event. There was dancing and buffets both inside and out, chess, pool, karyoke, meet the engineers and many, many kegs of beer/bottles of wine. Nothing ran out this time except the very cool looking T-Shirts.

Always looking to shake things up, the TopRank blogging team convinced Google security to cough up a volleyball and promptly started a game in Google’s sandy volleyball court.

Search engine optimization in English provides substantial challenges for most companies, but what about SEO in 20 different languages? When you drill down into it, there’s a lot “lost in translation” when most companies perform content optimization in different languages.

In this video interview from the Exhibit Hall at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, my long time friend Andy Atkins Kruger of UK-based WebCertain takes a few moments to answer questions about multilingual SEO as well as some of the common challenges that come about when optimizing content not only in other languages but also dealing with corporate speak in those languages.