Online Marketing Blog

PRWeb is at it again with a new announcement on the addition of Technorati and PRWeb tags to the PRWeb news wire and press release distribution service. The press release, “Holy SHIFT! PRWeb Plays Tag with Social Media” comments that the new features will make it easy to add Technorati and PRWeb specific tags to your press releases.

The SHIFT Communications’ social media release was in part a motivator for the new services as the release from PRWeb states:

“If you spend the time to create a press release following the template
outlined by SHIFT Communications, all you have is an electronic
document unless you have a distribution platform that supports its
features. PRWeb is that platform,” said David McInnis, CEO and Founder
of PRWeb.

Piers Fawkes from PSFK sent me a heads up on his latest channel, Marktd which is a library of marketing articles weighted in importance by users. It works like digg or del.icio.us where users submit articles and others vote on them. Articles are displayed as “New”, “Latest” or “Top” based on votes. The categories range from BtoB to Word of Mouth with some Public Relations in between. But nothing about search marketing. Perhaps that’s a category that should be added?

Submit your marketing stories to Marktd.com

Yahoo SearchBlog has announced the update of the Yahoo MyWeb service. The MyWeb blog also offers feature details including:

• Top Tags and Interesting Today
• Finding Friends
• Searching
• Export

Yahoo continues to push further into the realm of “social search” and the implications for search marketing is significant.¬† The editorial relevancy that comes with the links as well as tags from the web at large promises to make searching a much different experience than it is now. Hopefully quality is one of those characteristics. But how will search marketers change what they do to help clients take advantage of the changing nature of search relevancy?

This is a re-post, with minor edits, from my blog, Blog on a Stick. I felt that it was worthy of posting here too.
-Thanks Thomas

For those that are just jumping into the blog world, or the Web 2.0 world for that matter, there is a new idea out there called tagging. Much like folders or categories, it’s a way of keeping things organized.

Lets start out simple with folders.

On your computer you have folders. Maybe a documents folder for paperwork, pictures folder for pictures and so on. You’ve probably even created your own folders. “Christmas 2005″ or “Work Documents” The idea is to keep your files organized on your hard drive. Simple enough.

Last night a PR manager from the New Yorker emailed me about the Terry Semel interview, so I watched it and put up a link to the actual video. I emailed a few SEO related bloggers about it and thought nothing more. (other than the interview being great insight into Yahoo).

While the bloggers I emailed did not mention the video, a few other sites did link to the blog post I put up about it including Digg.com (front page right now) and the Financial Times.

While I’ve had other things hit Digg and grow traffic as part of a SEO program, this was 100% natural. There was no suggested email to a large network of friends with digg accounts or anything like that. Not that I would ever do THAT.

This session covered Blogs, RSS and Podcasts with moderation duties performed by Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink.
First up is Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. “The Art of the Feed”.

The “elegance” in RSS is in the distribution possibilities: Desktop reader, email addon, web browser and mobile devices.

The art of RSS is evident in blogs, sites, pdc, vblogs, rss search engines and web 2.0 applications. (press releases via PRWeb)

Build your RSS feeds right the first time. Considerations:
- What do you want to feed? (content sources)
- How many feeds?
- How much content is needed to keep the feed fresh?
- How much content should you include in each feed entry?
- What kind of content will the feed include? test, audio or video?
- How will you ping the feeds at first and then on each update?
- How to measure performance?

Traffic, everyone wants it and is trying really hard to get more people to their site. Good news, there are creative ways to bring people in without doing a lot of work.

1) Social Bookmarking. It’s been around long enough that some people know all about it and have a tendency to just search del.icio.us or Furl for what they want. Social sites are basically like a user defined search engine. Are you listed? Make sure to bookmark yourself every now and then and add social bookmark links to your blog posts and/or web pages so others can bookmark you too.

Thomas has done it again. This time he’s created a social bookmark links creator to make it easy to add del.icio.us, digg, furl and more links to your blog.¬† A TopRank version is coming soon and I’ll post in more detail about how to use this excellent tool.

If you need a cool tool for creating RSS feed subscription buttons on your site, be sure to check out another TwisterMC creation: the Automatic RSS Feed Button Maker.

There’s an interesting thread at Performancing about SEO and PR, as in public relations, not page rank that offers different viewpoints on how search engine optimization and public relations work together and as stand alone tactics. Search engine optimization and public relations are not mutually exclusive tactics as is alluded to in the thread.

This is a particularly interesting concept as I am involved with both a PR agency and a SEO firm. There is crossover on the vast majority of client projects and we perform cross training to leverage that. For example, this week our SEO and blog marketer extraordinaire Thomas will be providing instruction on RSS and tagging to several of our public relations superstars. That knowledge will help us serve our PR clients with improved visibility wherever journalists are researching topics.

Spotlight on Search – Rand Fishkin

The next interview for Spotlight on Search is with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. Two interviews in one day? Well, the repsonse to my queries to interviewees has been fantastic. Plus, Rand has received some excellent attention in the media recently.

First, congratulations on the Newsweek article and for getting Slashdotted, twice in such a short period of time!

I remember reading in the Search Engine Watch forums a while back about how you were considering attending the Search Engine Strategies conference. It seemed shortly after you were explaining Google patents with Dr. Garcia on a SES panel. The growth of your visibility and involvement in the industry is impressive.

Lee: Please describe your background and how did you get involved with search engine optimization?

More Search Engine Strategies goodness from Chicago: SEM via Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging

Moderated by Danny SUllivan.  Speakers included: Jeff Watts – National Instruments, Andy Hagans – Text Link Ads, Aaron Wall – SEOBook, Jim Boykin – WeBuildPages

First up was Jeff Watts of National Instruments.  

National Instruments approach to community:

Traffic = Community + Search + Content

Very focused on content development. NI looks at community as a way to find out what people are looking for relevant to their web site.

Any conversation about community needs to start about buzz. Need to make sure you a part of the conversation. Alludes to Cluetrain:  "The conversation is going to take place, the issue is whether you choose to take part or not."