Online Marketing Blog

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.

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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.

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TopRank’s Melinda Cayetano and Dana Larson attended the Women in Search Luncheon with over 50 in attendance. TopRank is proud to have been a co-sponsor of the event along with Danny Sullivan. TopRank wanted to give recognition to Jill Whalen and Kim Krause Berg as being key influences for us from waaaay back when to get involved with the search marketing industry. Amanda Watlington and Heather Lloyd-Martin were also great motivators and facilitators for us as well.   I’d say it’s worked out pretty well so far.

Mike Grehan stopped by.

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Going through proper channels, I was able to coordinate a short video interview with Tim Mayer of Yahoo. I’m a bit of a Yahoo fan and it was great being able to chat with Tim for a few minutes before we recorded on the various questions other speakers suggested.

In this video, Tim answers a few questions including:

• What’s in store for Yahoo’s version of Universal search?
• From Mike Grehan: “Why does my spam work so much better in Yahoo than it does in Google?”

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While in the speaker ready room this morning, I had the chance to sit down with Michael Gray and Bryan Eisenberg for a quick discussion about social media marketing and the changes with the influence “friends” have on social news sites like Digg.

Does reducing the weight of votes from “friends” take away from the reason people engage with social media sites? Find out in the video:

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Our first video from Search Engine Strategies San Jose is with Dan Perry of Cars.com who talks about the value of attending search marketing conferences for in-house SEMs. He also promotes the SEMPO in-house search marketing event this evening where he’s the MC.

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Spotlight on Search: Interview with Mike Grehan

Photo credit: webmoxy

One of the most popular categories of content we publish at Online Marketing Blog is the interviews. Recently, we ran a poll asking OMB readers for suggestions on people we should interview in anticipation of SES San Jose. There were some great suggestions and I’ve just started contacting a few folks as well as their mega company PR depts for pre-approval.

A book author, popular columnist at ClickZ, sought after public speaker and man about town, Mike recently joined the Bruce Clay organization as VP International Business Development and even more recently, was named the chairperson for the 2008 Search Engine Strategies conference in London.

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Our plan is to bring multiple TopRank team members to SES San Jose next month and each will be blogging different sessions. This will free me up significantly to do video interviews, take photos and other more creative conference coverage. Everything will be posted here at Online Marketing Blog so be sure to tune in August 20-23rd if you’re unable to attend SES San Jose.

So, my question to you dear Online Marketing Blog readers, is what search marketers would you like to see text and/or video interviews with? What are the top 2-3 questions you’d like asked?

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Eric Enge says Link Building is a Permanent Investment and I wholeheartedly agree

Another Eric (Holter) has posted his Websmart Newsletter in video format and provides a nice introductory explanation of web analytics (Urchin and Google Analytics) and how you can use that information for site SEO.

Yet another Eric (Marcoullier) says goodbye to MyBlogLog. Congrats on your success Eric and enjoy your family!

David Wilson of Braveheart Design posts a great interview with Rohit Bhagava on social media optimization.

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For the past 5 years or so, Marketing Sherpa has published a buyer’s guide for SEO and recently, SEO/SEM firms. The initial guide ranked the search marketing companies which caused a bit of a stir, since it’s hardly a consistent industry to measure. What followed was a report that was less of a guide to SEO and SEM firms per se and more of a guide about the industry and tips for choosing an agency. The listings for each SEO/SEM firm were self reported.

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iContact, formerly IntelliContact, secures $5.35 million in funding. iContact is a tool to create, send, and track email newsletters, surveys, and RSS feeds. Congratulations Ryan Allis!

Louise Rijk posts a great article on Social Media Marketing over at the Yahoo Publisher Network blog.

Todd Malicoat is at it again with 8 Simple Rules for Social Media Marketing in Business to Business Markets.

Gord Hotchkiss shares more wisdom in his Search Engine Land column with a post on, “The Slums of Search“. I think it’s safe to say you can count on one hand (after a serious shark bite) the number of people in our industry with Gord’s level of understanding about search engines and searchers.

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Yahoo Panama is on the upgrade path today with several new features to help advertisers streamline account management:

Move/copy keywords: You can now move and copy keywords from one ad group to another without doing the copy/paste/delete thing. On the Ad Group page under the “Campaigns” tab, you’ll now see a “Move” button which will allow you to move or copy keywords from one ad group to another ad group.” Note that there is still a 1000 keyword limit per ad group.

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