Online Marketing Blog

The personalization of search results is not the only way to target someone, you can also personalize your website to ensure your visitors feel engaged as soon as they arrive.

Gordon Hotchkiss gave some great examples and data behind personalized search and proved that I actually does work. Everyone remembers the golden triangle right? It shows how people use Google and where they actually click. Now, with personalized search and universal search enabled, the golden triangle changes quite a it. The focus shifts to the content targeted directly to the user and, if there is imagery in the results, the users start there. In their test, Gordon said that when personalized search results were given, users were 3x more likely to click on a results and much less likely to click on ads.

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?”

Universal search isn’t coming, it’s here. As searchers use their favorite search engine, they are seeing more than just web results. Movies, photos, news and much ore is showing up in regular search and you need to be ready.

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:

Our first video from Search Engine Strategies San Jose is with Dan Perry of Cars.com who talks about the value of attending search marketing conferences for in-house SEMs. He also promotes the SEMPO in-house search marketing event this evening where he’s the MC.

Hello Online Marketing Blog readers! My name is Mike Yanke and I am an Account Manager with TopRank Online Marketing.

Regular readers may know me as the guy who won the TopRank challenge with the blog post on Stephen Colbert’s marketing strategy, “Fish Wavers & Bridge Namers - How the “Greatest Living American” Reaches Unique Groups by Creating Unique Groups”. Regular lookers may know me as the guy who looks a bit like Brad Pitt in his sunglasses.

(Note from Lee: Everyone who meets Mike at SES, get a photo with him wearing sunglasses and post it on your blog with a link to this post. I will link back to you in a round up post!)

Hello loyal Online Marketing Blog readers! Dana Larson here, joining you straight from TopRank. I am the aspiring linking guru around these parts, trying to learn as much as possible while still kicking butt for our clients. It has been an educational and thoroughly enjoyable time with the TopRank team so far.

In just over a week, I will be heading to SES San Jose with my colleagues, Mike, Melinda, Thomas and our CEO Lee Odden. I cannot even begin to describe how excited I am for this conference. Finally, I get to put faces to the names I have been hearing every day since I started. I will get to network with seasoned SEO and SEM professionals and probably take in more information in three days than I did during one semester of college.

I wasn’t sure we’d be able to pull all the pieces together, but you should see five of our TopRank team at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose blogging sessions, networking and bringing a new perspective to the event coverage.

The TopRank bloggers will include a mix of of perspectives and experience with search marketing including myself, Thomas McMahon, Melinda Cayetano, Mike Yanke and Dana Larson. The newest addition to our Search Marketing team, Anthony Bloch, will just have to wait until SES Chicago or Pubcon (haven’t decided yet).