Online Marketing Blog

Coming up fast (February 19-21) is the 2008 Search Engine Strategies show in London. It will be my first time speaking at an event in London and luckily I’ll be involved with 3 panels that are spot on with the marketing consulting work we do at TopRank.

The two panels that I am presenting on are concurrent Wednesday, Feb 20 with “News Search SEO” starting at 10:30 a.m. followed by “Blog and Feed SEO” at 11:45 a.m. I will also be moderating the “Brand and Reputation Management” panel on Thursday at 3:30p.m. Below are more details on those sessions.

Later this afternoon Thomas and I will fly out to Search Engine Strategies in Chicago where I’ll be covering some sessions, doing more video interviews, taking lots of photos and the best parts: learning and networking. I will also be sitting in on the Social Media Optimization panel with Neil, Rand, Andy and Todd.

The session topics I am most interested in involve social media (of course!) as well as video optimization, B2B, big site SEO/SEM, regulated industries and conversions/analytics.

Thomas from TopRank (see his video on YouTube here) will be posting coverage of at least one session per day here at Online Marketing Blog and I will be posting 1-2 per day plus videos and photos. You can see post conference videos here and conference photos here.

The DMA06 conference is getting rev’d up with pre conference sessions Satuday and Sunday. The new search engine marketing certification program started on Saturday with Jeannette Kocsis, VP of Digital Marketing at Harte-Hanks, presenting on “Introduction to Search Engine Marketing” and I followed up with “Search Engine Basics”.

Unfortunatley, I was not able to sit in on Jeannette’s session, but Amanda Watlington said there was great feedback. Here’s the description of the module:

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing: Explore search engine marketing and what it takes for a marketer to achieve search engine marketing results. Learn how to identify ethical search engine marketing practices and how search engines define spam. Learn how to shape the business case for search marketing for your business, and how to staff this valuable marketing function.

The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association annual Summit starts in about an hour. This year’s event is sold out and there’s an excellent mix if speakers. With lots of sponsors this year, there are a ton of giveaways as well.

One of our pr firm clients, The Web Marketing Association and Web Award will have their CEO, William Rice start things off with the morning keynote presentation. Bill has run the Web Award competition for 10 years and the program has reviewed over 9,000 web sites in that time. His presentation will offer insight into what makes an award winning web site and he’ll also present industry vertical data compiled over the past 10 years.

That time of year is here again and the annual event held by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association called “The Summit” promises to be even bigger and better.

There’s a fantastic lineup of speakers and sessions including two keynote presentations: One from William Rice of the Web Marketing Association and Michelle Collins, a blogger for VH1‚Äôs, Best Week Ever. Other sessions include:

• Web Writing
• Web Analytics
• Brawny Academy
• Making the Grade
• Ask the Email Experts
• E-Commerce Opportunities
• Site Architecture
• Consumer Generated Media
• Paid Search
• Online Advertising
• Internet Marketing Toolbox
• Can Web 2.0 Change the World?

I would link to the session details, but the promo page was done entirely in Flash with one movie. It’s a very cool sitelet, but not too link or search engine friendly.

Monday morning I’m off to New York for the DM Days conference. I will join several other members of the DMA Search Engine Marketing Council including: Heather Lloyd-Martin, Amanda Watlington, Detlev Johnson, Kevin Lee, Mike Moran, Jeanette Kocsis and Matt Bailey as well as John Marshall in presenting two sessions that provide a wide range of specific recommendations for a DMA member site.

Topics include: creating a business case for search marketing, web site evaluation, technical optimization, user-experience, content optimization, web analytics, pay per click, online pr and integrating web marketing with other media. I guess it’s sort of a SES “pimp my site panel” but without the hats and it occurs over two sessions.

More info:

I made it over to the monstrosity, McCormick Place yesterday am and navigated the labyrinth of halls to finally find the search marketing room for ACCM. It was nice to see some familiar faces. The FMI and 4 other food shows were occurring in the bigger part of the McCormick so people were everywhere. Cabs were not.

The 15 Sizzlin Hot Search Marketing Ideas session debuted to a standing room only crowd I’m happy to say. After I don’t know how many back to back sessions, Heather Lloyd-Martin bubbled with enthusiasm and insight as moderator. I don’t know how she does it really. There was literally zero time between sessions.

Next week is ACCM, the Annual Conference for Catalog, Internet and Multichannel Merchants at the enourmous McCormick Place in Chicago. I’ll be speaking on a panel called 15 Sizzling Hot Search Ideas for Merchants along with Lisa Papageras of What on Earth and Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing with moderation duties handled by Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks.

As I am prone to do, my presentation will incorporate SEO into blog marketing and press release optimization as part of an overall ecommerce SEO program. This will be my first time speaking at ACCM so it should be fun. I know I’ll be looking forward to hitting at least one Chicago steak house with my RSS guru pal from accross the pond, Rok Hrastnik. Maybe Gibson’s, Morton’s or Ruth’s Chris.
Last time I was in Chicago for SES in December, Andy Atkins-Kruger and I hit up Gene and Georgetti’s (classic) and Harry Caray’s (so so). If you have suggestions for some great Chicago steak houses, leave a comment.