Online Marketing Blog

If you’re looking for sources of information on search marketing, conferences can be a great resource. Or. if you’re a conference junkie like me, then you’ll find the SEOBook “Must See SEO Events” calendar exceptionally useful.¬† Some disclosure here, I am editing the calendar along with Aaron.

Some of the conferences listed include:

• Search Engine Strategies
• WebmasterWorld Pubcon
• ad:tech
• DMA conferences
• MIMA
• eMetrics Summit
• eTail
• Shop.org Summit
• Search Insider Summit
• OMMA
• Affiliate Summit
• SEO Roadshow
• SEO Bash
• And more

If you know of a conference that deals in some way with search marketing (SEO or SEM) then drop a comment. Regional events are welcome as well.

Yes dear friends, I’ve said it. Paid search can be a pain in the rear. But no worries, search engine marketing guru Andrew Goodman of Traffick and Page Zero Media promises to shed some light on the subject in conjunction with a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) seminar next week.

Goodman’s presentation, “IT’S NOT JUST YOU: PAY-PER-CLICK CAN BE A REAL BEAST” will cover examples of Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing challenges, SEM relations, click fraud, CPOs vs. market share growth, data privacy, auctions and more.

Members of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association and the local interactive community in the Twin Cities will be getting the lowdown on web analytics next week. Eric T. Peterson from the Visual Sciences division of web analytics firm, WebSideStory and author of several books on web measurement will be presenting, “Making Your Web Analytics Work. Hard”.

From the press release:

‚ÄúFew organizations fully realize the potential of their investment in web analytics technology,‚Äù said Peterson. ‚ÄúWeb analytics applications provide truly actionable data that can be used to positively impact an organization‚Äôs bottom-line but companies need to treat web analytics as a business process, not simply an ad hoc endeavor. My work at Visual Sciences, and my MIMA presentation, revolves around how companies can treat web analytics as a business process and dramatically improve the return on investment.”

I received an email the other day from a site called Search Engine Feeds claiming to be running a Favorite Search Engine Feeds vote for the next month or so. You can nominate your SEO or search engine related blog. If you’re in the mood, feel free to vote for “Top Rank Blog” near the bottom.

Posting has been REAL light lately because we are running at full speed here at TopRank. We’ve been very fortunate to sign on some fantastic projects in the past few months. The number of blog consulting and blog marketing projects has increased tremendously and I think it’s an indication from the business community that blogs are becoming more accepted as marketing tools and not just virtual podiums for pontification.

“Why Media Buyers Must Understand SEO” by Tessa Wegert over at ClickZ addresses how blogs and viral marketing are effective linking tactics and therefore important for search marketing.

Increasingly, I am seeing the creative aspect of search marketing growing in importance. SEO grew out of IT because so many technical issues existed causing sites not to rank well. Now search engines are better at indexing a wider array of file formats and more sophisticaed urls. Off page factors such as links are just as or more important as technical SEO.

Viral marketing and link bait are pretty much the same thing and it’s the creative side of search marketing that will generate the most value as the industry matures. Great content is the best linking strategy whether that content exists on your site or somewhere else and links back to you.