Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

Interview with Laura Lippay of Yahoo

Spotlight on Search Interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo

We’ve been on a bit of a “Spotlight on Search Interview” hiatus the past few weeks, but I can assure you this one is worth the wait. Today we have a very nice interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo Media Group. I first became aware of Laura’s SEO wisdom via her animated stick figure avatar in Jill Whalen’s High Rankings SEO forum. Dispensing excellent advice to newbies and old timers alike, Laura has gone from circus performer extraordinaire to Flash-superstar-wannabe to a dream gig as an in-house SEO for Yahoo. I want to say thank you to the exceptionally thorough legal and marketing folks at Yahoo for letting Laura do this interview. Now on to the good stuff.


Interview with Laura Lippay of Yahoo

Web Analytics Demystified – Interview with Eric T. Peterson

Spotlight on Search – Interview with Eric T. Peterson

When you think of authorities on web analytics, one person that should be on your list is Eric T. Peterson. Eric is currently Vice President with the Visual Sciences division of web analytics firm, WebSideStory, is the author of several books on web measurement and moderates several popular discussion lists on analytics. He also manages an excellent site on web analytics called Web Analytics Demystified. He previously worked as an analyst with JupiterResearch and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Business 2.0 and others as an expert on the topic.
Eric will be speaking at a MIMA event tomorrow evening here in Minneapolis so I thought I would check in with him and do a little interview.


Web Analytics Demystified – Interview with Eric T. Peterson

Interview with Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM

Spotlight on Search – Interview with Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM

Daron Babin
Photo courtesy Strikepoint Blog
There are many success stories on the web and one of the most interesting is WebmasterRadio.FM. The brainchild of Old, Old School SEO Daron Babin and his partner Brandy Shapiro, WebmasterRadio.FM has become the “go to” resource for live streaming radio and podcasts on all things related to search and interactive marketing.

After threatening Daron with sex, fame and a nice hangover, he succumbed to answering a few questions about how he got into the SEO game, what’s up with New Gen Media and his evil plan for a multi media search engine and delivery platform.

Tell us about your background, how did you get involved with search marketing?


Interview with Daron Babin of WebmasterRadio.FM

Live from the GooglePlex Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts

Next week there will be a “must listen” SEO Rockstars and Daily SearchCast show on WebmasterRadio.fm. The show will start out with Todd Friesen (oilman) and Greg Boser (webguerilla) and then cut to a 45 min Danny Sullivan interview with Matt Cutts at the GooglePlex and back to Friesen and Boser. The show airs Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 7:00 p.m. EST.

If you can’t wait and just need an audio fix of Mr. Cutts, then point your iPod over to Mike Grehan’s recently posted clip of a podcast interview he did with Matt Cutts at the GooglePlex last week. Of course there’s also this podcast interview with Matt Cutts that Chris Pirillo did at Search Engine Strategies NYC.


Live from the GooglePlex Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts

Interview with Jill Whalen of High Rankings

Spotlight on Search – Interview with Jill Whalen of High Rankings

One of the long-standing and popular voices on search engine optimization is without question, Jill Whalen. From back in the day, you might remember the Rank Write Roundtable that she published along with Heather Lloyd-Martin. Today, Jill is a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies, writes many articles, publishes the High Rankings Advisor newsletter, runs her SEO consulting practice High Rankings and has another company called Search Creative.

Jill’s High Rankings Forum has been a source of information for newbies and old hands alike for many years. I don’t get to visit the forum as much, but when I do, I always find some useful insights.


Interview with Jill Whalen of High Rankings

Friday Roundup Links

John Scott Interview. Talks about V7N SEO contest, being in the Wall Street Journal and Fun Uses of Coco Nuts in Japan – Search Engine Journal

Matt Cutts at SES NYC – One of the sessions he’s participating on includes Robert Scoble and Jeremy Zawodny, “Pundits on Search”. I will be speaking at Pubcon in Boston with those two in a session about Blogging. Should be fun.

Todd Malicoat on WebmasterRadio.fm – Todd and Greg Niland talk links and more. Todd is a linkMASTER and an all around great guy. This is a must-listen podcast.

Finding outsourced SEO help – WebmasterWorld

MSN Search updates search home page and search results. And as much as I am not a fan of MSN Search and rarely ever use it, I LIKE the new new MSN Search. Incidentally, Jensense has the scoop on ContentAds, the name of MSN’s new contextual ad program.


Friday Roundup Links

Linking vs Traffic

Excellent post at WMW by user sugarrae on the what is old and what is new about link building. It’s all about marketing, not just getting links. Via TW

If you like that, then you’ll definitely like the interview of master traffic and link builder Eric Ward. While I’m at it, I would be remiss not to mention Brett Tabke’s seminal work, “26 steps to 15k” as well.

OK, one more link about links/traffic: Here’s an excellent interview with Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads over at Search Engine Journal. TLA is fast becoming a top alternative to AdSense, YPN and other renenue generating programs for blogs and web site publishers. TLA is also offering a new service called Articlelinks. One question that comes to mind whenever I think about the notion of paying for links was answered:


Linking vs Traffic

Interview with Eric Ward of URLwire

Spotlight on Search – Interview with Eric Ward

If there is a ying and a yang to search engine optimization then many SEO professionals would agree that content is the ying and links are the yang. OK I’m simplifying, but work with me. Optimizing content without implementing a linking campaign is like trying to drive a car without wheels.

Linking is important for more reasons than building PageRank though. Links from high profile sites can drive significant amounts of traffic AND attract inbound links as well. In that field there’s one person that stands out as the prominent “old school SEO” authority on link building and that is Eric Ward.


Interview with Eric Ward of URLwire

Sebastian Interviews Google Sitemaps Team

Sebastian has an excellent interview with the Google Sitemaps team over at his Smart IT Consulting site.

Some excerpts:

“Sitemaps convey some very important metadata about the sites and pages which we could not infer otherwise, like the page’s priority and refresh cycle.”

And how Google Sitemaps work:

“Sitemaps are downloaded periodically and then scanned to extract links and metadata. The valid URLs are passed along to the rest of our crawling pipeline — the pipeline takes input from ‘discovery crawl’ and from Sitemaps. The pipeline then sends out the Googlebots to fetch the URLs, downloads the pages and submits them to be considered for our different indices.”

Matt Cutts adds:


Sebastian Interviews Google Sitemaps Team

Interview with Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks

Spotlight on Search Interview with Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks

A lot of buzz in the SEO community lately has been focused on the value of creating compelling content as if it’s a new idea. Writing web site copy that satisfies both search engines and users is nothing new to Heather Lloyd-Martin. She’s been an active proponent since the late nineties.

I first came across Heather’s copywriting wisdom a long time ago when explaining the Internet to potential clients was still common and the idea of Internet marketing and optimizing web sites for better search engine rankings was gaining popularity. Since then, Heather has been a very influential force in educating search marketers on the value of copywriting for the web, for SEO and most importantly, for conversions.


Interview with Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks