Online Marketing Blog

 As a preview to one of the 3 sessions I’m speaking on at SES New York next week (March 23-27) I bring you this interview with my co-panelists Michael Gray of Atlas Web Services, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, Michel Leconte of SEO Samba and moderator Rebecca Lieb Lieb, VP of U.S. operations for Econsultancy, for the Blog and Feed SEO session.

These are specific, practical questions and answers about optimizing both blogs and feeds for better search performance from some of the smartest blog and Feed SEO experts on the web. 

If you’re a Twitter fan, please ReTweet: 37 Tips for optimizing blogs and feeds:   http://cli.gs/blogseotips

Please share 3 practical SEO tips business blogs should implement:

Rebecca Lieb: 

The abundance of Online Marketing Blog coverage of SES New York slowed significantly by Wed afternoon but there was nothing slowing down the SES NY conference, which had record breaking attendance numbers. Despite my TopRank blogging compatriot Jolina having Thursday off and myself moderating and speaking that day, there was plenty of action documented during the sessions day 1, 2, 3 and 4, at the Microsoft party and the WebmasterRadio.FM SearchBash.

I do want to thank Kevin Ryan from Incisive for having me involved on the speaking/moderator side of things. Despite being day 4, the heavily PR and SEO focused “Beyond Linkbait” session was packed and was covered by several blogs including: Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch, Search Marketing Standard and aimClear Blog.

The New Face o In-House Search included Ron Belanger as the moderator and Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International, Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit, Marshall D. Simmonds from New York Times, Bill Macaitis from Fox Interactive Media and Brendan Hart from National Geographic Digital Media.

First up is Bill Hunt to talk about what perspective companies should take when considering bringing search marketing in-house.

What are the best options?

• Outsource - Give everything to the agency
• InSource - Do everything in house. Few companies are actually doing this
• Hybrid - A mix

The hard questions start with: What are the objectives? Can we meet the objectives with this new approach? What level of management support do we have? Can we measure a program to show benefit? What is our bench strength? Can the program scale? Many in-house programs fail to scale.

B2B Search sessions (both organic and paid) can be few and far between, so any time it exists I’m sure to plant myself in the front row.  The B2B Tactics session was moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget

Speakers included:

Patricia Hursh, President and Founder, SmartSearch Marketing
Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc.
Adam Goldberg, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, ClearSaleing
Karen Breen Vogel, President and CEO, ClearGauge

With B2B SEO being a sweet spot for the team at TopRank, hearing from other industry leaders about how they have effectively executed for such companies is certainly relevant.

With 64%of search engine users searching for business information, it’s surprising that B2B isn’t more widely covered.

Day two rolled right along here at SES New York with great sessions well documented by an array of blog coverage. This includes our own Jolina Pettice who filed an SES inspired post on “Tips for Overcoming Client-Created Roadblocks” as well as session coverage of “Converting Visitors into Buyers” and the Orion panel on Universal Search. We also posted a video interview with Sara Holoubeck on current SEMPO news.

After the conference SES attendees dispersed and two events Jolina and I were able to attend included Alan Dick’s Vintage Tub and Bath Dinner at the Manahattan Penthouse and the (IMNY) charity party at the Black Finn bar. A highlight of the evening was the SEO Rap battle between Marcus Tandler and m0serious from PopLabs at the table Jason Calcanis and Danny Sullivan were sitting at (photo above).

The conversions track at SES New York continues to be packed with those wanting to increase the performance of their search marketing campaigns.

The “Converting Visitors into Buyers” panel was moderated by Aaron Shear from Boost Search Marketing and the speakers included: Mike Moran from IBM, Nigel Ravenhill from McAfee, Michael Sack from Idearc Media Corp. and Howard Kaplanfrom Future Now Inc.

I missed the first half of this session but was able to sit in on the second half and hear Mike Sack and Howard Kaplan give the audience ideas on increasing conversions.

Michael Sack started 0ff with a story about why milk is always in the back of the supermarket.

On day two of the Search Engine Strategies conference the expo hall has opened and I found my way past two floors of exhibitors to find the SEMPO booth staffed by the famous “free agent” and SEMPO board member, Sara Holoubek. In this video interview, Sara talks about the local SEMPO groups that are forming as well as her insight on the new SEMPO Institute Agency Certification.

You can read the reviews of SEMPO Institute’s “Insider’s Guide to Search Marketing” formerly known as the “Fundamentals of Search Marketing” and the Advanced SEO Course Review by TopRank’s Dana Larson.

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Yesterday proved to be an interesting kickoff to this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference here in New York. The Organic Listings panel was entertaining and informative as always and the Build Investment Interest in your SEO/SEM firm was an early indulgence for myself that offered great tips for those looking at the future liquidity and monetization for their agency.

Jolina weighed in with her posts on excellent sessions, Four Ways to Redfine the Customer and Three Tips for Successful Analytics. There was also a spontaneous goofball interview with Mike McDonald of WebProNews offering a few insights about the future of SES/SMX.

How to Build Investment Interest in Your SEO/SEM with an introduction by Anne Kennedy and a presentation by Patricia Hall, Investment Banker, Hallmark Capital. If you own and/or are running a fast growing search marketing agency and want to gain more insight into making your firm more valuable for acquisition/investment, then this session is for you.

What Wall Street looks at.

• Client list is important. Keep in mind, if you have big name clients now, what will you need to do to keep them.
• Nature of revenues. Are they one time projects or are they retainer based? One time projects can be good if you specialize and can go to all the other players in a category.

Organic Listings Forum with Mike Grehan moderating and Jill Whalen, Dave Naylor and Greg Boser on the panel. Here we have an all star SEO cast available to answer questions about organic SEO.

Mike starts out with a nod to St Patrick’s day. During introductions Greg says he’s a reformed black hat spammer.

Audience: To what extent does Google use user data and behavior and how relevant is PageRank?

Greg: PageRank is irrelevant. It’s not important the way it used to be. It’s important to get crawled and how often you get crawled. It’s “link juice”. Use no follow to sculpt your PageRank.

Dave: Getting links from high PageRank sites isn’t what it was. The more authority you have, the more “bonus” features you’re going to get from Google.

After a seemingly quicker than normal flight from Minneapolis into LaGuardia, Jolina and I then made it to the Sheraton in near record time. Monday begins what is the biggest SES show of the year: Search Engine Strategies New York. We’re both looking forward to this SES with great anticipation. Jolina blogged SMX West recently and will also be blogging the SES show.

We’ll be doing a mix of blogging sessions, taking photos and video interviews as well as participating in a few after conference events. Sessions I plan on attending Monday include:

Organic Listings Forum with Mike Grehan moderating and Jill Whalen, Dave Naylor and Greg Boser on the panel. Here we have an all star SEO cast available to answer questions about organic SEO. The audience will also have the opportunity to share their own tips and tools.

Next month I’m heading to New York to blog the SES NY conference for Online Marketing Blog where Lee is speaking on the “Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions” panel with newly elected SEMPO board member Chris Boggs and PR veteran Sally Falkow.

I’m over-the-moon excited to attend and have stumbled upon a tiny connection between the host city and the conference.

The industry that never sleeps will be placed smack in the middle of the city that never sleeps. While I’m not sure what kind of cosmic connection to make of this (and it’s not the first time so I’m pretty sure the earth won’t start spiraling toward the sun), I am curious to see how it all goes down and to share my insights with you.