Online Marketing Blog

Whether you’re part of the search industry or just affected by it, you’ve probably not only grown used to change but are excited by it.

Attending a session this morning about personalized and universal search, we had a panel full of excited folks and audience members all bursting at the seams to discuss what these two types of search bring.

Panelists included:

Moderator:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk
Jonathan Mendez, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
Richard Zwicky, Founder and CEO, Enquisite
Aaron D’Souza, Software Engineer, Google
Bill Barnes, Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, Enquiro Search Solutions Inc.
James Colborn, Director, US Trade Marketing, Microsoft Corporation

It seems nearly every conference will have an overarching theme to it. (Rather, it seems the sessions I choose to attend at any given conference will have an overarching theme to them).

The final session I attended during Day 2 of SES Chicago, “SEO & Development: Get It Together” spoke further on what I had been seeing throughout the day, and served as a nice bookend to my first conference session, “Usability & SEO”.

The conference, moderated by Chris Boggs, included on its panel:

• Geoff Karcher, President/Owner of The Karcher Group
• Sage Lewis, President of SageRock.com

As the Global SEO Program Manager/Diva for one of the largest companies in the world, Tanya Vaughan from HP has a tremendous amount of responsibility and knowledge about enterprise SEO. We caught up with Tanya after the Enterprise Search Engine Optimization panel at Pubcon in Las Vegas to ask about her role at HP and to elaborate on a topic from the session, “progressive enhancement”, and what it means for SEO.

Be sure to check out the TopRank channel on YouTube for more SEO interviews.

Known by many as either “Mr. Social Media” or by friends as “Princess”, Neil Patel’s reputation for experimenting and developing new and cutting edge internet marketing tactics is known throughout the industry. At WebmasterWorl’s Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, we caught up with Neil to ask about what his company ACS does for clients as well as his latest social media manipulation - oops, I mean marketing tactics and experimenting.

Be sure to check out the TopRank channel on YouTube for more SEO Interview Videos.

With 10 years under its belt, LED Digest is famous with long time SEOs for providing an exceptionally productive platform for sharing ideas, tactics and insights about search marketing. The digest would not have it’s luster without the formidable moderating skills of Adam Audette and we had the chance to finally meet Adam in person at Pubcon in Las Vegas.

In this short video interview, Adam describes how LED Digest was started as well as a tidbit about Universal search.

Be sure to check out the TopRank channel on YouTube for more SEO interviews.

Wrapping up the day was Don Shultz, Ph D and professor at Northwestern University, who introduced attendees to what he calls the “Rodney Dangerfield School of Search Marketing“.

As a search marketer, do you ever feel like you’re under the magnifying glass to produce bigger, better, faster results? And results that don’t fit into traditional marketing measurements?

Don motivated the crowd by insisting that search engine marketers need some respect from traditional marketers within organizations. So, how do we get respect? Here are Don’s ideas on how we can change the marketing world.

Transition from static to dynamic marketing

Social Media Keyword Research is Here
Whether it’s a phrase entered in a search box on a standard search engine, on a video sharing site or tags assigned to your friends’ shared social bookmarks and shared images, the meaning and intent inferred by keywords is paramount to any kind of “pull” online marketing effort.

For search marketers, that means using keyword research tools on an ongoing basis in order to adapt to trends, seasonality and changes in what’s important to the target market.

On the heels of the PRSA conference last week, the topic of how search plays a part in online PR effectiveness has continued to enter into the increasing numbers of discussions we’ve been having with companies working on figuring out where to best leverage their 2008 marketing/PR dollars. It’s that time of year again.

Now more than ever, PR and media relations efforts can benefit from attention to how search engine visibility influences consumer perceptions and the way both consumers and the media find information online. With an increasing variety of search types to choose from including standard search like Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask as well as platform or content type specific search such as news, blog, image, video and options within social media web sites, brings new opportunities to optimize content.

Learning the basics of search engine optimization isn’t difficult, it’s time consuming. SEO consultants can offer a variety of services but in the end, web site owners will appreciate the SEO services they’re getting much more if they educated themselves on the fundamentals.

The nature of marketing web sites has continually evolved from a focus on optimizing text to include an array of digital assset optimization such as images, audio, video and content delivery formats like RSS and mobile. Regardless, there continues to be a significant value in basic SEO.

Fellow DMA and Search Engine Marketing Council member and friend Mike Moran recently asked if I’d be interested in doing a podcast series on Internet marketing and of course I jumped at the chance. Mike has previously shared an article here on “Why Search Marketing is So Hard“.

There are 8 podcasts in the series and they cover a range of internet marketing and new media marketing topics applicable to any business that’s trying to understand online marketing. For most of the podcasts, we use Mike’s books, “Search Engine Marketing Inc” written with Bill Hunt and Mike’s new book, “Do It Wrong Quickly” as starting points for discussing a range of topics related to how internet marketing is changing and what organizations can do to take advantage.

Drop a viral video into a sea of young and old, democrats and republicans, men and women and voters of all ages (with access to the internet, of course) and you have one of my favorite linkbait videos of the year.

So what is linkbait anyway? Cameron Olthius, CEO of Factive Media, defined it for the audience as content or a feature on a website that compels others to link to it from their website.

Linkbait can very quickly increase brand awareness and can drive a huge amount of traffic to your website. In order to do this, however, you need to make sure the content you are about to promote is link-able.

About every 2 weeks we get calls from companies that feel their growth opportunities are so significant, outside marketing vendors are expected to be paid based only on performance. I know there are some search engine marketing consultants that take on pay for performance or marketing partnership deals, but very few agencies that do.

It’s one thing for a consultant with low or no overhead to be able to spend the time it takes to build momentum on such a project but another thing entirely for an agency with capital expenses, salaries, etc to pay while the PFP program gets off the ground. While those issues can be overcome as part of the cost of the venture or risk, not having full control over web site functionality and design, after the sale actions and content can be problematic.