Online Marketing Blog

There’s all sorts of buzz about blogs lately and yet so many companies are still wondering what to do about it. In fact, there are a tremendous number of business blogs that are not realizing much of their potential visibilty on the web. Why? Because they’re not optimized.

This is very much the same scenario that occurred with web sites in the late nineties. Back then I worked with a company that sold web sites - lots of them. But after getting the site up and running, the traffic didn’t come by itself. So we figured out optimizing for search engines and that was the start of my SEO career. Blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.

Thanks to Phillip Lenssen, I have a Writely account to play with. Seems pretty cool actually. I can see how useful it will be for collaborating on the many group writing projects we have in our PR and SEO firm. We do use jot.com as a Wiki, but that’s more for spreadsheet collaboration.

The list of features for Writely is amazingly long. Whatever you might use a text editor for is applicable for Writely including creating blog posts, MS Word docs, PDFs, web pages, and even Open Office docs. There are tagging features and some cool right click options too.

Spotlight on Search - Interview with Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs

When you think of keyword research services, the name that often comes to mind these days is Dan Thies. In developing his search marketing business, he was able to find a niche in keyword analysis and successfully progress that into search engine marketing and optimization training with SEO Research Labs and also a book, the Search Engine Marketing Kit.

In this interview with Dan, find out how he started out, his take on keyword research tools, common misconceptions about search engine optimization, search engines and SEO training.

In my constant search for good online marketing information, one resource continues to deliver the goods. Since 1995, and that’s a million years ago in internet time, Larry Chase has providede an excellent newsletter highlighting useful resources for online marketers world-wide.

The Web Digest for Marketers offers both an Internet Marketing Resource Directory and an email Newsletter which has over 125,000 subscribers. There’s also an interesting Resource Guide that you get for free when you subscribe to his newsletter.

Aaron posts a great rundown on Google Toolbar 4 for Internet Explorer and what it means for search engine optimization.

He offers some cool SEO buttons that you can add to the toolbar as well as these interesting observations:

“If you have not yet started a Google account (or a few of them) it may be worth creating some such that you can leverage them down the road. Older Google accounts with longer search histories may be trusted to weight the end search results more than new accounts (similarly to how Google typically trusts old domains more than new ones).”

At TopRank we’ve been building Google & Yahoo site maps ever since each search engine debuted the service. However, recently I’ve been focusing on how to better automate the process and optimize my time spent creating site maps. I’ve researched and tried tool after tool until I came up with one that worked well for us.

It all started at Google. Google actually lists out a bunch of third party resources. How convenient! You can see them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

Ones listed under Programs/Code Snippets appear to be code that you add to your website to create your own sitemaps. What I was looking for is a program to create site maps for client sites, so those were out.

The next session I was able to blog at Chicago Search Engine Strategies was Advanced Search term Research Tools Moderated by Detlev Johnson of PositionTech.

Speakers included:  Christine Churchill - KeyRelevance, Lori Weiman - KeywordMax, Shayn Ryan - LSI Systems, James Lamberti - Comscore, David Warmuz - Trellian

Christine was first up and started with keyword selection consideration for PPC and SEO.

Things to look at:

• Relevance
• Keyword popularity = traffic potential
• State in buying process
• Competition

Golden rule:  It’s not about the keyword YOU want to be found on. It’s about the keywords the end users are looking at.

I’ve been raving about Urchin to clients for quite a while at only $199/mo and now Google has decided to change Urchin over to Google Analytics and offer it for free. Wow.

The Urchin site is now redirecting to http://www.google.com/analytics/

According to Digital Inspiration blog, “the free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month but the limit is is removed if you’re also an active AdWords publisher.”

Also, Google Analytics is said to intergrate very well with Google AdWords to better measure paid search ROI and you can track up to 50 profiles.

I was looking through my notes from the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference and noticed I had not posted several of the sessions I had attended. This one is a new session on tools for search engine optimization. It will be repeated at the Chicago SES conference, so it must have gone over well. I know I thought so.

Many top search engine optimization firms and SEO savvy webmasters use tools to help them be more effective and efficient at SEO. There is no such thing as a one size fits all SEO tool that really works. But there are applications for specific tasks that can make certain aspects of SEO more effective and less time consuming.

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