Online Marketing Blog

Photo from my trip to Tower of London

2/8/11 5pm CST: The Poll is now closed. Vote logs will be reviewed & if necessary adjustments will be made.  The final rating of the top 5 blogs will be based on:  A review of content, post quality & quantity, Links, PR & PostRank. A review of the top 5 and “lessons learned” will be posted on Monday 2/14.  Thank you for participating.

A while back I created a list of SEO blogs and continued to review and add a handful of blogs every week for about 2 years. I use “SEO” somewhat loosely, since most search marketers are adept at a variety of online marketing tactics including social, PPC, email and content.

What are the best Search Engine Marketing blogs to follow? Which are the most popular? The chart above from Feed Compare shows a comparison of the RSS feed subscriber counts published by Feedburner for: Google Webmaster Central (red), Search Engine Land (blue), Search Engine Watch (green) and our very own Online Marketing Blog (purple).

As evidence of how successful a well executed business blog can be, TopRank’s Blog has about as many RSS subscribers as top industry publication Search Engine Watch (37,517/37,028). It’s a great position for an agency to have that kind of reach and also to be able to bring first hand, successful business blogging expertise to our consulting clients.

It’s time for a new update to the BIGLIST review of SEO blogs. I started with a list of 15 new blogs in a queue for this update and four made the cut. Once a new blog hits our radar, we watch it for a few weeks before reviewing. Broken links, neglecting to post (far too many one trick pony SEO blogs out there) or design that makes content difficult to consume are all reasons not to be included. This update includes a mix of individual and agency blogs, all primarily focused on SEO.

Stay on Search - This update of the BIGLIST gives design recognition to Mark Thompson for his Stay on Search Blog. Besides offering a consistent post format with images and template, Mark blogs a lot of how-to and tips posts along with a much better than average effort at being truly useful. Great design plus great content = a blog worth subscribing to.

On this fine April Fool’s day BIGLIST foregos the tricks and brings you yet another collection of better than average SEO & SEM blog reviews. Over the past 2 years we’ve reviewed over 1,000 SEO blogs and we offer you 5 more to add to your RSS reader and get search engine smart.

Think Traffic – This blog by internet entreprenuer Corbett Barr  makes some serious promises: “…teach you the techniques, tools and knowledge you need to build real, sustainable web traffic without a big budget.”  Sounds pretty good to me. Corbett relates his experiences with past projects and growing an audience for Think Traffic to the benefit of readers.  This very new blog offers practical tips and is well designed enough to get our top listing for this week’s review.

Welcome to the post-Winter/pre-Spring version of the BIGLIST review of SEO blogs.  Snow is starting to melt and you can actually walk around outside (in Minnesota) without your eyelashes freezing together. We have a nice group for you to review so fire up your RSS reader and subscribe.

LyndiT blog gets our attention for great design and user experience in this BIGLIST update. Lyndi Thompson is a Social Media and Online Marketing Specialist and like me, is addicted to peanut M&Ms.  Besides writing about a mix of social media, SEO, web design and online marketing topics, you might be interested to know Lyndi lives on a mini farm, owns several animals including a donkey and supports some great causes in the Northwest.

Welcome to the newest  BIGLIST review of Search Marketing Blogs. We have a little bit of everything today ranging from Chinese focused PPC to the World’s Greatest SEO to a steaming pile of SEO Bull$#*t. Enjoy!

If you think your blog deserves to be included, then write a compelling and maybe humorous comment below. We’ll almost certainly ignore it but you never know.

The SEO blog design recognition for this week’s BIGLIST update goes to a newer blog from an experienced search marketer:  SEO Mofo. I like the clean, yet colorful (and irreverent) design of this blog by Darren Slatten, self proclaimed “world’s greatest SEO”.  Darren has a sense of humor, SEO and blog smarts and according to his bio, no social life.  That should mean some entertaining and useful blog posts – at least from what I’ve seen so far.

Welcome to a new BIGLIST review of SEO blogs. While it’s by no means a requirement for blogs to post daily or even every week to provide useful content to readers, it does take at least 1 post every 2 weeks to be included in the BIGLIST. We’re seeing a shift with many blogs to posting less frequently and yet most of those bloggers are active on Twitter or Facebook. Is there a connection? Are Twitter and Facebook reducing the frequency of blogging overall in the Search and Social Media Marketing industry?

Take a look at the new crop of blogs in this BIGLIST update and you can be the judge.

Welcome to the first BIGLIST review of SEM and SEO blogs for 2010!  What a year it will be. We reviewed hundreds of marketing blogs in 2009 and well over a thousand since we started the original list. Today’s BIGLIST update focuses on a few local search marketing blogs we’ve recently discovered.

Expand2Web Blog – The design winner for this BIGLIST Update Local SEM Blog Edition goes to Expand3Web by Don Campbell. This blog offers a rich mix of WordPress and Local search marketing advice as well as how to screencasts & videos as well as a podcast.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder and we know online marketers already like the BIGLIST of online marketing blogs reviews. This new update that is decidedly focused on search engine optimization should start your week off right.

While we have a good looking group this week, the Search Agents was the winner for the best looking Search Marketing blog. Not only does it offer a clever theme, but content and usability to boot. There are more contributors listed than most SEM agencies have in their employ. Content is balanced between SEO and SEM followed by everybody’s friend, Social Media. The Search Agents is the official corporate blog of The Search Agency, an integrated online marketing firm headquartered in Santa Monica, CA.

What a remarkable date today! 09/09/09.  Welcome to the UK Edition of TopRank’s BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blog reviews. Since I’m in London this week, (photo above was taken with my trusty 3GS iPhone) I decided to focus mostly on SEO/PPC and Social Media Marketing Bloggers here in the UK.  It’s a nice mix of search, social, web dev/design and analytics, so fire up your RSS reader and subscribe!

Our Featured SEO Blog this week is from Malcolm Coles. This is a personal blog by Malcolm Coles of Digital Sparkle that offers observations about internet marketing categorized mostly as good and bad reviews. He also focuses very specifically on newspaper web sites. If you want to know anything about UK based newspapers and their place within search engines this is the place to be.

This week I’ll try something a little different with our BIGLIST of online marketing blogs reviews and share a screen shot of the week’s best looking SEO blog to be added.

That honor goes to Mikkel deMib Svendsen who’s been blogging for a very long time, except it’s been mostly in Danish.

Recently, Mikkel decided to launch a SEM blog in English, which is great news if you know Mikkel.  At my first SES conference I recall seeing this guy in a bright red suit taking lots of photos and not sure who he was. Then after seeing him speak on a few panels quickly realized the deep search marketing knowledge he was offering.  Now you can get that insight online. This blog is a mix of both text and video SEO content, plus Mikkel has a new book on SEO you should check out.

Remember the Grinch? “Noise, noise, noise!”  Many marketers feel the same way about the plethora of search marketing blogs. We’ve been managing a list of over 500 search marketing blogs (BIGLIST) for the past 3+ years and know a little something about the category. SEO blog reviews are helpful, but some people want a qualifyer when deciding what’s noise and what’s worth checking out. That’s why we’ve assembled a top SEM blogs list ranked by RSS Subscribers. The first list is here.

Below is an updated list of 26 top Search Marketing Blogs with Google Webmaster Central dominating followed by upward movement by SEOMoz and Search Engine Land.  Online Marketing Blog, Marketing Pilgrim and Graywolf’s Blog have seen big increases as well. We’ve also added several blogs that made the 2,000 subscribers cutoff. Enjoy: