B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

I’m off to San Jose in about 1/2 hour. Thomas and I are flying out a little early so we can have a little time to check things out before the conference. Am very excited about this conference as I will have the opportunity to interview some key players in the search marketing industry.

I’ll be covering about 2 sessions per day over at Search Engine Smarts – AllBusiness.com and I will be posting interviews and overall conference observations here – as in Yahoo and Google parties.

I already have a great interviews on deck to be posted shortly with Gavin Appel, VP at Hitwise, who was kind enough to do a demo of both Keyword Intelligence and the Hitwise competitive analysis product.

Yahoo has formally announced on the Yahoo Search blog that they are rolling out a beta of their Yahoo Publisher’s Network (YPN).

“Yahoo! has launched a beta network in the U.S. for small- and medium-sized publishers. Currently available through invitation only, as Yahoo! tests and refines the new platform, small- and medium-sized publishers can easily sign up online and access new revenue sources and enhanced Yahoo! content through our new self-serve platform. Our goal is to extend the beta to more publishers by the end of the year.”

This news was initially leaked yesterday morning by Stefanie Olsen on News.com as, “Yahoo to launch blog ad Network“. This is some pretty important news as it puts forth a significant effort by Yahoo to compete with Google’s AdSense program that offers a self serve service for publishers to monetize content rich web sites.

Here are the top RSS aggregators
according to IT Facts:

My Yahoo!	59.02%
Bloglines	10.42%
Firefox Live Bookmarks	4.20%
NetNewsWire	3.74%
iTunes	3.37%
iPodder	2.38%
NewsGator Online	1.82%
Pluck	1.59%
FeedDemon	1.56%
Reader not identified	1.02%

Good to keep in mind when deciding what “chicklets” to display on your blog.

Feedshake is an interesting tool that allows you to mix up and arrange multiple RSS feeds. via ResearchBuzz

SEW mentions that today AOL is launching a personalized home page feature called MY AOL. The new service enables you to personalize with RSS feeds, which are powered by Feedster. Now Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL are all offering personalized pages.

Along with the Craigslist Real Estate hack and the somewhat scary Hot or Not map, there’s a new hack of the Google Maps tool for Vlogs. “Vlogs” as in video blogs. Maps are a fun way to find web sites if geography is your thing.

If you’re really interested in the various manipulations of Google Maps, here’s a new Directory

Tags: Google Maps, Vlogs, Google Hacks

Yahoo announced an agreement with Boeing’s Connexion to offer in-flight search services. Yahoo’s ads will be displayed in search results. More from DMNews

Yahoo also announced a deal this week with Motorola to offer Yahoo content on mobile devices including iRadio. I met Ben Hill, Senior Director, Global Marketing; Motorola at the ad:tech conference in Chicago – VERY smart fellow with an amazing job. Good coverage on this at Search Engine Journal

Tags: Yahoo, Connexion, Motorola

Blog search engine Technorati CEO David Sifry was interviewed in BusinessWeek recently.

He makes some good points in that he doesn’t see search engines as competition and wishes them “good luck” when it comes to creating a blog-specific search engine.

“What Technorati is trying to do is looking at the Web in a different way. And the way that I like to think of it is, it’s like this big river, it’s like this conversation flow. It’s about people and conversations.”

Services like Technorati and the blogosphere in general represents a serious paradigm shift in the way information is distributed and organized. The rate at which search engines update their enormous databases seems quite slow in comparison to how quickly blog posts are available on Technorati. If blog search engines can continue to improve quality and do a better job of filtering out blog spam, I see no reason why more users wouldn’t migrate more of their search activity to the blogosphere.

Yahoo updated 360 by incorporating Flickr (happy now Thomas?) and feeds. Unfortunately I was only able to add a Yahoo Groups feed, but not a feed for the AllBusiness.com column I write or the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog. What’s up Y360?

The Flickr addition is very good news.

More details from the Y360 dev team blog – via Battelle although I first noticed the feeds option when I was reading Rustybrick’s 360 blog

Intelliseek has added features to the BlogPulse tools. I spent some time playing with the BlogPulse Profiles (Beta) tool. Here’s the skinny:

• Overview – Rank according to citations, post frequency and a rank trend graph
• Posts – A list of keywords used in recent posts (I did not find very accurate) and links to posts
• Citations – Broken out between citations from top-ranked blogs and all other blogs
• Trends – Post and citation trends let you see if there is a correlation. Interestingly, in the case of this blog there is no correlation.
• Sources – Lists recent news articles and blogs cited along with trend and track conversation tools for each link.

If you’re looking for alternative keyword research tools, check out Keyword Discovery from Trellian. It lists keywords that drive traffic to web sites based on their DMOZ site category classification.

Speaking of keyword research, Gavin Appel, VP of Search for Hitwise was kind enough recently to provide a demo and walkthrough of their new Keyword Intelligence product. I will be posting a review/article from that interview later this week.

Tags: keyword research, search engine optimization, seo

Karen and I went to the Battle for the HeArt last night in downtown Minneapolis and it was great. It was all about defining a new type of creativity because what was working, no longer is. People are blocking ads on the internet, switching channels during commercial breaks and not really paying that much attention to advertising. So, a new way of creating advertising is being created.

What it all boiled down to was interaction. If it’s not interactive, it’s not going to work as well.

Optimizing your press releases for important keywords is a great way to ensure visibility of your announcements via keyword queries on news search engines including Google News, Yahoo News, MSNBC Newsbot and Topix.net.

Search engine optimization techniques can be used with press releases as they are with any web document. Once your press release is optimized, using the right mix of newswire distribution services can have a significant impact on how effective your releases is at creating links.

Below is a list of press release distribution services that are search engine friendly and can offer an excellent channel for link building as well as getting your news distributed.

http://www.prweb.com/
http://www.prleap.com/
http://i-newswire.com/
http://www.webwire.com/
http://www.pressbox.co.uk/
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/
http://www.clickpress.com/
http://www.przoom.com
http://www.pr.com/
http://www.marketwire.com/

From the challenge of managing hundreds of web sites to modest interactive budgets, the “CMO Panel: Delivering Digitally” session offered excellent insight into how top marketing professionals manage online/offline budgets, agencies and initiatives. Overall, all panelists were fairly satisfied with their performance with opportunities for improvement focusing on either paid search or organic and keen interest in opportunities with blogs.

Panelists included:

• Catherine Muriel, CMO of E-LOAN
• Mike Moore, Director, Purina Interactive Group
• Steve Pinetti, SVP Marketing, Kimpton Hotel
• Benjamin Hill, Senior Director, Global Marketing; Motorola

Moderator Susan Bratton asked the panelists to grade their efforts at leveraging the internet for marketing. Each panelist graded themselves in the “B” range but for a variety of reasons ranging from an emphasis on PPC to search and none on organic and vice versa.