Online Marketing Blog

What better follow up to our impressive list of internet marketing conference tipsters during SES San Jose than sage advice from one of the most visible people in the search marketing industry, Danny Sullivan. As co-founder of Third Door Media, parent to Search Engine Land, Search Marketing Now and the Search Marketing Expo series of conferences, Danny Sullivan is one of the most often quoted experts in the search engine industry.

Online marketing Blog readers may remember this interview with Danny Sullivan and Neil Patel before a SMX Social Media Conference. You can also find him on Twitter and his personal blog, Daggle

SMX West, in Santa Clara, kicked off today with a keynote from Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land.

Danny started off the conference by talking about the different generations of search, of which many of us have experienced, the generation we’re in now and where he thinks the industry might go next.

Here’s a quick rundown:

Search 1.0 – Keywords – All about the keywords on the page and what ended up as keyword stuffing for the large part.

Search 2.0 – Links – Search results followed the democratic process and ranked websites based on the number of links (votes) the website was receiving.

Search 3.0 – All content is good content – Universal/Blended search is where we are today. This is the search engines’ integration of news results, images, videos, etc into the search results.

One of the (if not THE) fastest growing conferences over the past year has been Search Marketing Expo. A real world compliment to the successful Search Engine Land blog, the Sphinn community and Search Marketing Now webinars, the SMX shows have brought both a familiar (Danny and crew) and unique flavor to the search marketing conference circuit.

SMX West is coming up fast on February 26-28, 2008 in Santa Clara, CA and offers:

• 50 different sessions
• 13 different tracks
• 3 different ways to attend (All Access, Networking or Exhibits-Only)
• 1 big satisfaction guarantee. If you register now, you’ll save $200.

There appears to be something for everyone with the 3 different show attendance options and a variety of topical and level of expertise tracks ranging from SEO Bootcamp to SEO 3.0 and 4.0.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media and Neil Patel of Advantage Consulting Services

Next week the next of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series kicks off in New York: SMX Social Media. Developed by search engine industry legend Danny Sullivan and social media guru Neil Patel, the agenda for this event mixes strategic direction with plenty of practical advice sessions ranging from social news to social bookmarking to social networking with a double dose of Wikipedia on day two.

Danny and Neil were good enough to take some time out just a week before the conference to do a short interview covering the adoption of social media marketing by old school marketers, social media as a stand alone marketing channel, breaking out the crystal ball on the future of social media and rating which of the most popular social media sites will be successful.

Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies Expo in San Jose got off to a really fruitful start with Danny Sullivan giving us a lottery tip. His session, Introduction to Search Marketing, gave us good examples on how to buy tickets and win big in the search engine lottery.

Emphasizing the importance of title tags, meta tags, meta keywords, Danny explains many ways to optimize a site to be found more easily by all visitors, human or otherwise. He discussed how to research the best keywords to place in the content for your site, stating that if you don’t have enough time to do a huge amount of keyword research, “go with your gut”. You know your users. You know your site. What would you search for to get to your site?

Incisive Media announced this morning that Kevin Ryan, formerly CEO of Kinetic Results and one of my favorite columnists at iMedia Connection, will be joining Incisive Media as VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies. Kevin also made a post on the Search Engine Watch blog.

In essence, Kevin is filling the giant shoes that Danny Sullivan left and that’s a very, very tall order. Danny has made nothing less than groundbreaking progress in a very short amount of time with Search Engine Land and from all accounts, the SMX conference.

I would be curious to hear from Kevin how he’ll address the inevitable comparisons and also what his plans are. How will he approach content strategy for the SES conferences and the SEW site? Whatever the answers, many eyes will be on him both internally at Incisive as well as the search marketing industry.

FeedBurner has an easy way of promoting a blog post though FeedFlare. FeedFlare simply adds a few social options to each post. You can choose to add a Digg link, del.icio.us link, ‘email this post’ option, share on Facebook and a few other handy choices. However, there are many more possibilities as you can create custom FeedFlares.

The other day Danny Sullivan put together one for StumbleUpon. He said it was quite easy as even a non-techie like himself can do it.

Here is how you’d get the StumbleUpon FeedFlare working for your site:

1. Log into your FeedBurner account.
2. Click on your feed.
3. Click on the Optimize tab.
4. Click on FeedFlare
5. Copy this URL http://searchengineland.com/stumble.xml and past it into the ‘Add new Flare’ box.

Danny Sullivan’s timing for announcing his new conference SMX during the Search Engine Strategies conference here in Chicago is as ballsy as it gets. The first SMX conference is in Seattle. Here’s the list of links for the new search marketing media empire Danny is building:

“Search Marketing Expo — SMX — is the new search engine marketing conference from Third Door Media, the company behind the Search Engine Land news site and the Search Marketing Now webcast series.”

I have no doubt what Danny is creating will become wildly successful. It certainly is interesting hearing speculation from various people in the search marketing industry ranging from an extreme, “Anyone who is involved with Search Engine Watch after Danny leaves will be hated by the search marketing industry” to a more practical, “There’s room for many media and conferences in this industry and those that do the best job will be the most successful.”

Danny Sullivan has posted a nice goodbye message over at Search Engine Watch. All  of the contributors will be going with Danny and Elisabeth Osmeloski will continue as Managing Editor.

It’s pretty amazing to think Danny is moving on but I guess that’s how things grow and evolve. Search Engine Land will be his new home for covering the search engine industry as of tomorrow.¬† You can read and leave comments over at the Search Engine Watch forums.

Danny Sullivan has announced his new blog, Search Engine Land, with Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz contributing. The blog officially opens Dec 11th. Now all Danny needs is a decent blog design.

Danny Sullivan has posted a very interesting and THOROUGH description of how the Search Engine Watch Blog had two different stories get major play on Digg and Google News at the same time. This provided an opportunity for a comparison and it was interesting to read that Google News sent significantly more traffic than being on the home page of Digg.

He does make the distinction that one event does not make the rule and that the Search Engine Watch blog is included as trusted news source in Google news. There are about 7,000 site included in Google News, so this isn’t a situation you can test on your own. Or is it? I’ve written before about how to get into news search engines, including Google News.

Looks like the king of search marketing will continue working with Search Engine Strategies.