Online Marketing Blog

SES San Jose week is nearly over one might say we’ve saved some of the best internet marketing conference tips for last with the ever enthusiastic and insightful Heather Lloyd-Martin.

Heather is Chair, DMA’s Search Engine Marketing Council and President of SuccessWorks. She also blogs about copywriting at SEO Copywriting.

Attend all the “search marketing site labs” or “search marketing clinics” you can find. During a site lab, a panel of experts review Web sites on the fly and discuss how to improve them for search positioning and conversions.

Here’s why they are so cool:

Lee and Rob at PRSA International 2007

On the marketing conference circuit, online reputation management is a hot topic now more then ever. Whether it’s search marketing, public relations or direct marketing, companies are trying to make sense of how to monitor and manage the brand impact of online conversations and their visibility in search results.

Last Thursday I did a national PRSA teleseminar with Kami Watson Huyse, “Reputation Management in a Google World” and tomorrow in Orlando, Florida the DMA’s ACCM conference is hosting: “Reputation Management: Protecting Your Brand in the Search Engines“, a session with myself and Rob Key of Converseon presenting. Moderater duties will be handled by Heather Lloyd Martin of SuccessWorks.

Wiley recently announced the launch of a new book, “Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus”, in which TopRank has an entire chapter on the subject of social media marketing for SEO and PR.

The list of internet marketing experts interviewed for the book include consultants, agencies, CEOs, PR professionals, client side bloggers and marketers. Topics range from paid search to online copywriting to online PR and social media marketing. The list of marketing experts includes:

Joan Holman, Greg Hartnett, Jacob Hawkins, Mark Oldani, Jeffrey Glueck, Lauren Freedman, Tamara Adlin, Steve Rubel, Greg Jarboe, Eric Ward, Jordan Gold, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Chris Baggott, Ed Shull, Brian Lusk, Lee Odden, Jill Whalen, Liana Evans, Perry Marshall, Kevin Lee, Paul O’Brien, Ron Belanger, David Fischer, Phil Terry and Patrick Duparcq.

“Writing for Search Engines” is a long standing session by Heather Lloyd-Martin and Jill Whalen. It’s a great session covering the basics of SEO friendly copywriting and a good primer for those new to SEO.

Search Engines are constantly improving their ability to sniff out the spam and de-value irrelevant links such as those from link farms. They are making the same kinds of improvements to the indexing, categorization and sorting of web pages in the search results.
In order to make it easier for search engines to do their job, it’s important to incorporate the keywords for which you wish to be found in your site content, title tags and meta descriptions. Now when people search for those keywords, there’s a greater likelihood that search engines will rank the web site higher than a competitor site who doesn’t have relevant keywords in the content and links of their site.

Here is a collection of short video interviews taken during day one of the DM Days conference in New York. The Direct Marketing Association has a variety of special interest groups called “councils”. One of them is focused on search marketing and appropriately named, the Search Engine Marketing Council, or SEMC.

I serve on the operating committee of that organization as does Heather Lloyd Martin of SuccessWorks, Mike Moran of IBM, Andy Wetzler of More Visibility, Jeanette Kocsis of Harte Hanks, Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Doug Garfinkel from Epsilon, Detlev Johnson of Position Technologies and Lisa Merizio Smith from the DMA.

To give direct marketers who read Online Marketing Blog a sense of what the SEMC is up to in regards to SEO and social media education opportunities, I decided to do a few interviews with those opcom members that I could find at the conference on day one.

The one session that I was able to blog at the ACCM show this week in Chicago was, “Top Three Search Marketing Opportunities for Merchants” which combined blogs and social media with paid inclusion and shopping search engines.

The session was moderated by Heather Lloyd-Martin, who opened up with: “There’s no secret sauce in search. But there are things that catalog marketers might no know about. There are things they can leverage.”

Heather asked the audience, “How many of you have B2B catalogs?” About a third of the audience raised their hands.

First up was Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit.

The Consumer’s Dilema:

More products and more marketing channels have not resulted in greater customer satisfaction.