Online Marketing Blog

I was recently taking a survey from Jupiter or ClickZ (I don’t recall which) and one of the questions asked about measurement of success for search marketing. While a lot of what you hear from search marketers involves talk about fundamentals ranging from links to rankings to visitors and conversions, the answers offered in this survey included a pretty interesting mix:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Building buzz
• Search share of voice
• Improving brand favorability
• Increasing intent to purchase
• Maintaining brand exposure alongside competitors
• Engagement with rich media (i.e. video, animation)

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Here is a list of the week’s blog posts on Online Marketing Blog focusing on SEO, blogging and business of search marketing.

SEMPO Board of Directors Nominees (Lee) - Voting begins Feb 6.

Search Marketing Blogs Update 012607 (Lee) - 18 new search marketing blogs added this week. We’re now at 350 and Todd Malicoat added a new CSE.

Friday Search News 012507 (Lee) - Googlebombs, Interviews with Bruce Clay and Marissa Meyer of Google.

Content vs Links (Lee) - This debate is missing the most critical concept: distribution.

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It’s that time of week again for new additions that have been added to the big list of search marketing blogs. This week we have 18 blogs bringing the total to about 350. I would love to add Brett Tabke’s blog to our list, but he doesn’t post very often and there’s no RSS feed.

Thank you to Todd Malicoat for making a new Google Custom Search Engine using the list. He’s actually added it to the sidebar of his Stuntdubl blog, which is pretty cool.

• eConsultancy Internet Marketing & News - Group blog from the team at eConsultancy.

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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.”

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One of the most critical early achievements for a successful search marketing project is to gain company-wide support on the client side. Without buy-in from the team members that live and breathe the client’s industry, a successful campaign will be difficult.

In our experience, it’s the client staff that interact with customers that have the best idea of what those customers want. They know the pains and issues faced; they understand the solution that the customer is looking for.

A successful search marketing program taps into the needs of the customer. This is how to grab their attention. Without understanding those needs, engaging them can be problematic.

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Aren’t you glad I didn’t include an image with this post? OK, so SEO isn’t rocket science, but it’s not a colonoscopy either. Well, maybe GooogIe thinks SEO is rocket science, but what do they know.

What’s with the cliche’s? Cliche’s are simply a way to hide innuendo which was the case when this Dave Pasternack -  SEO/rocket science guff all started. Some of the arguments in this debate are not entirely without merit so I’ll take a humorous and a somewhat practical approach to explaining a few.

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There are an increasing number of conferences that are available for those wishing to expand their knowledge of search marketing, web 2.0, online advertising and interactive marketing. Conferences are not only great for gaining knowledge, but especially for networking, recruiting, business development and lead generation.

With so many conferences available, how can you choose the right one? There are a number of considerations ranging from topics to location to cost and even venue. Referrals and word of mouth recommendations are a great source of information as well. To stimulate some conversation on the best conferences to attend and the different reasons why, please vote below for your favorite conference and we’d love to hear why in the comments.

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It’s time for this week’s update on search marketing blogs. Again, there has been a large number of requests and also quite a few new blogs discovered by trolling blogrolls and MyBlogLog.

Not all the new blogs we learned about this week will be added today. There are just too many. We’ll try to moderate the number of new blogs posted to about 30 per week.

Please note: While we wait until Friday to post all the new blogs reviewed for the week, the RSS feeds for new blogs are added throughout the week. ie, the OPML file is updated just about daily.

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Since the posting of the big list of search marketing blogs, several people have contacted me about having created a custom search engine via Google Custom Search Engine using the list of blogs. So far there are:

• Alister Cameron - Search Engine Marketing Search Engine
• Marc Ohmann - Internet Marketing Search Engine
• Joe Williams - Search Engines According to Category: SEO, Social Media, Black Hat, Linking, Web Design. Lots of work went into this one!

Update:

• Megite “River of News” format - TopRank Blog News
• Eurekster Swicki (A-M only) - Search Marketing Blogs

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The list of search marketing (and related) blogs last week drew a ton of attention and quite a few inclusion requests. There were a few blogs that I tried to find but could not (crazy concept for the SEO community) and now there are several that popped up via comments, emails and trackbacks that I will be adding.

Tips for getting on this list:

1. Write about marketing online, especially search marketing
2. Content and/or commentary on news should be unique
3. Post recently. If you haven’t posted in a month, it’s unlikely I’ll add you. If you only post once a month, that’s unlikely as well

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Editor: Here is the master list of search marketing blogs maintained weekly.
In the latter part of last year I had been sharing blogs that I came across and decided are worthy to add to my RSS reader. Topics of these blogs, as you might guess, concern search engines, search engine optimization, online PR and social media. I realize calling this a “must read” list is a bit ambitious, but I do have to say that if I had enough time to read them all, I would!

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A bit of a short week this week and I’ve come across a nice collection of search marketing blogs as well as one very good journalist blog. Enjoy!

Optimize and Prophesize - SEM goodness from Jonathan Mendez. I bet as many times as I’ve greeted Jonathan with “hey man” and “what’s up guy?”, he probably thought I didn’t know his name.

SEO Theory - Michael Martinez. How in the world did it take me this long to find Michael’s blog? Michael (used to write) for SEOmoz, but there’s plenty of good SEO advice here too.

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