Online Marketing Blog

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.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land

Photo Credit Liana Evans

Online Marketing Blog is very fortunate this week to have a special interview with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor at Search Engine Land and long time observer/analyst/practitioner/advocate in the search engine marketing industry. Chris has been a instrumental influence in the growth of the search marketing industry with his 10+ year old search consulting practice, past involvement with Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies as well as his new role as Executive Editor at Search Engine Land, running the Search Marketing Now webcasts and helping to program SMX conferences.

In our continuing coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, we’re shooting periodic video interviews both in the speaker ready room and a few on the exhibit floor.

In this interview Steven Marder of Eurekster talks about how their Swicki product works both for online publishers to attract and monetize traffic as well as serve as a useful web site marketing tool for SEO efforts.

Going through proper channels, I was able to coordinate a short video interview with Tim Mayer of Yahoo. I’m a bit of a Yahoo fan and it was great being able to chat with Tim for a few minutes before we recorded on the various questions other speakers suggested.

In this video, Tim answers a few questions including:

• What’s in store for Yahoo’s version of Universal search?
• From Mike Grehan: “Why does my spam work so much better in Yahoo than it does in Google?”

While in the speaker ready room this morning, I had the chance to sit down with Michael Gray and Bryan Eisenberg for a quick discussion about social media marketing and the changes with the influence “friends” have on social news sites like Digg.

Does reducing the weight of votes from “friends” take away from the reason people engage with social media sites? Find out in the video:

When you attend conferences, read blogs or popular search marketing sites you’ll find plenty of subject matter experts in search marketing tactics ranging from search engine optimization to pay per click to local marketing and social media. It’s great to get those specific perspectives, but I get a lot of feedback from businesses that appreciate a more holistic approach to marketing online.

Recently, I was able to do an interview on the online radio show, Online Marketing with RSS Ray talking about an overall  approach to using social media, blogs and online public relations.

Spotlight on Search - Interview with Amanda G. Watlington, Ph.D., APR of Searching for Profit

Photo by Jeremy Zawodny

I first bumped into Amanda Watlington via AIM, (Association for Interactive Marketing) and then in person at a WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference several years ago. Further collaboration occurred through involvement with the next iteration of AIM, the Direct Marketing Association’s Search Engine Marketing Council, of which Amanda was a past chair.

Amanda is famous for her in-depth knowledge of blogs, RSS and podcasting and she has one of the first popular books on the subject. However, this long time marketer’s roots are in public relations and she also has an extensive background with search marketing.

Earlier this week Matt McGee of Small Business SEM blog did an interview with me about public relations for small businesses. Matt has had a lot of marketing experience so he asked some great questions that I think businesses small and large will benefit from.

Here are a few sample questions:

Are press releases better for traditional publicity purposes or for SEO purposes — or can the same release do both? How?

Spotlight on Search: Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

There has been quite a bit of buzz on the paid search marketing front with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform aka “Panama”. At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced the launch during a sponsored lunch. Dan Zarrella did a good a review of that session here.

Matt Cutts of Google was nice enough to take a minute to do a quick interview on his way out from the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. This was something we had coordinated via email before the conference, but I was lucky to catch him at the last minute.

Matt gives his take on Pubcon parties as well as the “Site Review” panel and sticking up for the mom and pop sites that make silly mistakes because they don’t have good information. Thanks for taking the time Matt!

Spotlight on Search - Interview with Google’s Adam Lasnik

One of the fun things about being involved with the search marketing industry is getting to meet really bright and interesting people. Whether they are long time SEO gurus, CEO’s of fast growing corporations or employees of the major search engines, this industry rarely disappoints with its variety of perspectives.

With the majority of search market share, most webmasters pay a significant amount of attention to Google. Google has done an increasingly good job of interacting with the webmaster community through the efforts of Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox as well as Adam Lasnik. After having the chance to talk to Adam, I thought he and his job sounded pretty interesting and he agreed to do a short interview.

Normally when I do interviews, I categorize them under “Spotlight on Search or Spotlight on Blogging”, but Chris Pirillo doesn’t fit in just one category. He’s a bit of a renaissance man when it comes to all the enterprising projects, ventures and activities he’s involved with.

Chris started Lockergnome in 1996 and hosted TechTV’s “Call for Help” show for 2 years. He hosts a popular conference every year called Gnomedex which has been sponsored by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. He’s written books, columns and many articles and he produces a popular online radio show.