Online Marketing Blog

Last year at SES San Jose 2007, universal and blended search was the new thing going on in the background, and wasn’t really talked about in the sessions yet. Over the past 12 months, Google’s universal search and blended search has exploded across the internet. Everyone wants to know how to dominate the rankings on Page 1.”Let’s get pictures, video, local listings AND text results for my company all on one page!” Okay, no problem Our expert panel in the first session of SES San Jose 2008 takes us through the basics and the future of blended search.

What is the long tail in search? It’s all the smaller keyword phrases that refer traffic to your site. There may be only a few referrals, but all the long tail keywords can bring in more traffic and revenue than the larger, more popular keyword phrases.

Long-Tail Example: Head, or larger keyword phrases, could be printers. The long tail contains all the individual makes, models, sizes and types of printers.

What made this session good was that each presenter had a different perspective. Local, ad network, eCommerce and organic search.

Here’s our second tip in a series of posts during the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose on “Getting the Most Out of Internet Marketing Conferences“. This one is from Brad Berens, Global Content Director for the esteemed ad:tech conferences and iMedia Connection.

Brad also blogs about culture, new media, marketing and community over at Mediavorous.

First, accept that you can’t do everything– believe me I’ve tried! I’ve gone to events where I’m speaking, networking AND covering things up for a publication. That’s a 20 hour day and it shortens your life in a hurry. It’s important to think — before you get on that plane – about why you’re going and why you aren’t and make choices accordingly.

With Search Engine Strategies San Jose just around the corner, I thought it timely and appropriate to share insights on how you can get the most out of marketing conferences.

TopRank is very active attending, speaking and blogging a variety of internet marketing events, conferences and workshops. These aren’t the only reasons to attend a marketing conference though and the next 9 posts will offer some excellent insights from TopRank as well as a incredible mix of industry thought leaders that may just compound the value of your staff already attending plus motivate you to send more.

I promised myself I’d slow down on conference speaking last year and while I’ve turned down more offers this year than ever before, (and been turned down myself the one time I formally pitched) some really great opportunities have popped up.

Here are the upcoming conferences I’ll be speaking at for pretty much the rest of this year not including private company engagements:

Aug 20, 2008 - Search Engine Strategies, San Jose
Presenting: “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds”
Presenting: “News Search SEO”
Media Sponsor
TopRank is sending 4 bloggers to cover the event (Thomas, Jessica, Dana and Ashley)

The initial submissions of session suggestions for the Interactive portion of SXSW that made the first cut have been published. Now it’s up to the voting public to decide which sessions make it next. I’ve heard a bit of feedback from last year’s attendees on the quality of content in the search engine optimization sessions, so it will be nice to see what makes it this year. Tony Adam from Yahoo submitted a proposal, “SEO for Startups” and now it’s up for votes.

Welcome to the newest update of TopRank’s BIGLIST of SEO/SEM blogs, chock full of SEO, SEM and Social Media goodness. This week’s crop will help you stay up to date with industry news and the latest how-to’s on social media marketing, search engine optimization and agency online marketing best practices.

• Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing - Excellent group blog from Forrester on various aspects of interactive marketing from B2B social media to search marketing to research and industry news.

Last week I posted about situations where search engine optimization isn’t for sales and it sparked some interesting discussions. Most SEO efforts are directed towards lead generation and sales, but prospects and customers are not the only audiences for web content.

Fundamentally, SEO is about making the search engines’ job of crawling, indexing and ranking content easier, more useful to searchers. Companies publish many types of content to many different audiences. Most SEO efforts are oblivious to anything but leads and sales because marketing is the cost center paying for the SEO consulting.

When marketing web sites on the internet 10 years ago, people “surfed” the web, clicking on links between sites they already knew about, links from directories and review sites. Search engines like AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot, Excite, etc were around as well. Remember those?

People like Eric Ward pioneerd the practice of promoting web sites editorially resulting in links from these sorts of resources. Links had to come from relevant sources otherwise the traffic was irrelevant.

The BIGLIST update of SEO blogs comes to you this week on a Monday because, hey, that’s the way we like to change things up here at Online Marketing Blog. This edition of the BIGLIST Update is chock full of blogs that offer SEO how to’s and practical insights as well as a good showing of social media topics. Enjoy!

• Tim Nash - Very nice UK SEO blog from Information Architect Tim Nash on topics ranging from advanced SEO to programming with several good articles on SEO basics, snake oil SEO tricks to watch for and SEO training courses.

Originally written by Burt Bacharach, the song Do You Know the way to San Jose, la la la la la… didn’t actually come to fruition until the lovely Dionne Warwick won her first Grammy for Best Contemporary Pop Female Vocal in 1968.

Although I wasn’t around in 1968, I understand the anticipation Burt must have had waiting for this song to hit the main stream. I have been chosen as a TopRank blogger at the upcoming SES conference in San Jose, CA, (and yes, I have been singing the song for days now ) and the anticipation has got me on the edge of my seat!

TopRank is sending five team members to the SES San Jose Conference August 18th-22nd, an event we’re sincerely looking forward to, especially with 80% of the sessions new to SES.  Since this will be my first time attending the SES conference in San Jose, I am excited about all of the new sessions we will be attending.

My team mate Dana Larson has been to multiple search marketing conferences over the past year and is eager to discover what is new and different at next month’s event. Together, the two of us would like to share our “Top 15 Things Not to Miss at SES San Jose 2008″: