....for those of you reading Searchblog in RSS and not watching ze Tweets....here are the Signals that I do over at FM's site. Weds. Signal: It’s a Good Day to Read The News Tuesday Signal: Location, Location, Location Monday Signal: Welcome to Summer, Now Get to Work You can sign up to get the Signal email, a daily roundup of what I'm reading...

“Qualified”, “showing intent to buy”, “high conversion rate” and many other phrases are used to describe search engine marketing.  As a $16 billion industry, Search Marketing including SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC ads (pay per click) represent a substantial opportunity for small businesses to...

Last weekend the news was conjecture about Facebook doing web search, today, the news is conjecture about Google doing social networks. All of this has been sparked by two well known Valley guys opining on samesaid...Kevin Rose, CEO of Digg, tweeted that Google was working on a "Google Me" social network (he since was "asked to take down his...

Google today announced another step in its protracted divorce from China - to satisfy regulatory and license requirements, it's no longer directly serving results from its Hong Kong based (and uncensored) engine onto its Google.cn site. Instead, it's directing users to the Hong Kong site, in essence, creating one more click for users to go through...

This research from Get Response tracks with my own experience: “A distinct minority of small-to-mid-sized-business (SMB) marketers use social media links or icons in their promotional emails.” And I’ll argue that even larger businesses do not consider steps like this…not instinctively. Marketers are so busy, we can sometime think in silos....

Web Analytics are a key indicator to the health and performance of any website, but online marketers often get lost in the complexities and details, forgetting how important analytics actually are and why. Analytics can provide a wealth of information but marketers often look at high level indicators such as: top content, bounce rates, entrance...

I'm not an Android user, yet (working on that), but if this piece is even halfway true, Google needs to respond, quickly, with a plan to fix the Android app store. I've heard over and over that Android's user experience, when it comes to apps, is terrible, and it's a major reason why folks love Apple. Signal over noise. Noise and dirt are...

I spent a fair portion of today at the O'Reilly Foo Camp, as eclectic an assortment of smart folks as you're likely to find anywhere. I wrote perhaps the first ever piece on Foo back in late 2003, and I've been trying to make it every year since. It's quite a confab. Today I asked a number of the folks I ran into the same question: "Is Apple a...

Well its finally here. The internet has finally made its own red light district. ICANN approved the creation of a .xxx suffix. The design for websites under this extension will be those with pornographic content, as ICANN officials have stated. The .xxx domain was first proposed in 2005. As expected,  it was rejected immediately, then un-rejected...

Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO gave the opening keynote of Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis.  Lee spoke on the intersection of SEO and social media and provided key takeaways for companies on achieving success. As the social web and search engines integrate and innovate tighter, the intersection between search and social is growing...

For the past 3 plus years, TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has been hosted by Minneapolis based website hosting provider, VISI.  When our past host shut us down without warning for getting too much traffic, VISI and Online Marketing Blog connected and worked out a sponsorship. VISI is the only company with an ongoing “ad” on this...

It’s that time of year again and the ClickZ Online Marketing Summit will arrive shortly to the Minneapple, Friday June 25th. The conference organizer has generously donated a free pass to the 1 day workshop for us to give away here on Online Marketing Blog. The agenda covers everything from Social to SEO to B2B Blogging to Email Marketing....

Recently I was called up for jury duty, which is not unusual in itself, but something happened that I found to be interesting. As a part of a potential jury pool for a DUI case in Phoenix, people in the group and myself were asked a set of questions about whether we could be fair and impartial. Afterward, potential jurors were brought in...

Companies are realizing the value in “brands as publishers” and are making real commitments to the creation of content in their online marketing mix. It’s no longer enough to provide fundamental features and benefits information about products and services to succeed competitively online. Consumers and of course, business buyers,...

Web video is hot. Some say your chance to be a pioneer. How hot, and how much of an opportunity? Recent reports from comScore, consistently say more than 80% of the total U.S. Internet audience views online video in a given month. YouTube’s fact sheet states every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to the network and 2 billion videos...

It’s safe to say 2009 and 2010 were breakout years for social media. Our last Digital Marketing poll showed 6 of the top 10 tactics as social media complemented by search engine marketing and email.  Slimmer marketing budgets and mass media attention have inspired a rush to many types social media marketing tactics bringing a certain...

54 Billion. That’s what Forrester Research predicts for US B2B Social Media Marketing spending by 2014. As a living example of a B2B company that fully leverages blogging and social media in our online marketing, TopRank Marketing has a lot of first-hand insight that we can share with clients. I know there are many B2B marketers that are...

One of the biggest fears for web site owners that have long relied on search traffic for new business is a sudden drop in search engine rankings.  Some webmasters are experiencing this very situation as a result of Google’s recent Mayday update (Matt Cutts video). In most cases, it takes a lot for a tenured web site to mess up it’s...

I'll be traveling this next ten or so days, both for work and vacation, and not posting much here. However, I want readers to know I've read all the comments on my last Apple post, and plan a pretty detailed response once I come back. Thanks for reading and I'll see you in these pages soon.

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google delivered the morning keynote on day two of Search Engine Strategies Toronto.  Maile discussed Google’s approach to helping site owners and shared answers to burning questions from the moderator and audience. The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions...

Images as an asset for organic search results and search engine optimization are often overlooked.  Images can drive traffic through image search as well as inclusion in universal search results. There are actually several dimensions to image optimization that involves better placement in search results, optimization for user experience and in...

It’s a common story: an online marketing professional returns from a conference full of exciting new ideas and tactics, only to fail at selling those ideas internally.  In many cases, marketing and IT/development professionals don’t always understand each other, and as a result potentially high value projects stall out and never see the light...

There are many intersections between earned media and organic search engine rankings, so it makes sense that they would work well together. The PR industry is in an interesting situation right now with so much of the traditional media world moving to digital media.  Whether they admit it or not, journalists rely on PR professionals for a pipeline...

Google released the Caffeine Web indexing system on June 8th, which according to Google, is 50 percent fresher search results from its previous index and contains more content than ever. This development is on the back of the Mayday update which here at Metamend we wrote about recently. The basic explanation of how Caffeine works, is that it...

I've written extensively about iAds here and here, and one question I raised has to do with Apple's policies with regard to third party data and ad networks, in particular AdMob. As All Things Digital notes today, Apple this week "clarified" its policy with regard to third party networks, and it's hard to read it as anything other than a direct...

Here's the deck I used to open the CM Summit yesterday. Enjoy! Opening Slides by John Battelle, Monday June 7View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time. PS - all the presentations are available on our CM Summit channel here.

The most tweeted Slideshare of the show so far is Mary's presentation. Here it is for your reading pleasure! Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley ResearchView more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.

It almost sounds magical–a system with an on-demand supply of incredibly cheap labor (pennies for many tasks) that is available by simply posting a request on a Web site. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and other crowdsourcing sites have revolutionized the way companies do intensive manual labor on computing tasks. So, you might want to...

The CM Summit kicks off next week on Monday morning with an interview of John Hayes, CMO for American Express. I've come to know John through my work at Federated, and I am certain this session will be lively and full of insights.   American Express is one of the world's premiere brands, consistently ranked in the top 25 by marketing...

Thanks to Andy at Beet for asking. My post earlier here goes into far more detail. I do look rather querulous, do I not? It must have been the sun.

A mayday situation is one in which a vessel, aircraft, vehicle, or person is in grave and imminent danger and requires immediate assistance. To many online entities, Google has put their long tail search referrals in imminent danger. Each year, Google changes its algorithm anywhere from 350 to 500 times and if you are too narrow in your...

Google has put their search focus into real time results and while this would seem to be advantageous in most situations, it appears that in the case of Twitter and Search Engine Optimization for example, Bing has the advantage. Bing handles real-time search results separately from normal search results and segregated these results into their own...