Online Marketing Blog

If you’re looking for one of the most influential and “wicked smart” voices in online marketing, Ann Handley is an easy conclusion. Add a sense of humor and brilliant writing skills and she’s easily #1 in my book. A journalist and co-founder of ClickZ, you’re more likely to know Ann as the Chief Content Officer for the wildly popular MarketingProfs which boasts over 388,000 subscribers. Ann is also co-author with C. C. Chapman of one of my favorite marketing books, Content Rules.

A perk I enjoy most from blogging and working in this industry is getting to meet and know smart marketers. Smart + funny just takes it to another level and you can count on Ann for plenty of both. Along with the accomplishments, contributions, influence and energy she brings to our industry, Ann is genuine and grounded, plus she’s not afraid to “tell it like it is”. I appreciate those qualities a great deal.

I’ve been connected via the social web with Brent Payne for several years and we finally met in person at SES Hong Kong. Working for the Tribune companies as Director of Search Engine Optimization, Brent has been able to make a significant impact on news web sites like the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times.

In this interview, Brent shares his experiences with how optimizing news content for search engines works as well as the challenges and results from training journalists on how to use keywords to improve traffic to news content.

If you work with a media company or online publisher, do you train writers, reporters, editors and journalists on how to optimize content with keywords? Have you tried and had great results? Have you tried and met strong resistance?

The opening keynote presentation at SES Hong Kong featured none other than Avinash Kaushik, co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Analytics Evangelist for Google.

In this video interview, Avinash talks about the value of communicating analytics information in more meaningful ways. He gives examples of metaphors he’s used to present important analytics information that helps others better understand the meaning and implications of the data. There are lessons here for companies that report tabular data with no insight and little creativity in communicating insight.

What creative ways have you found to communicate web analytics insights? Have you had nightmare experiences with web analytics reports?

Check out Avinash’s “must-read” web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor, here.

Spotlight on Search Interview: Mel Carson of Microsoft Advertising on How Microsoft Does Social Media and the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance

If you attend Search Marketing industry conferences, you’ve no doubt run into the ever optimistic and charming Mel Carson from Microsoft.  When I was last in London, Mel connected me with an excellent Fish n Chips that the pubs around Trafalgar Square couldn’t get close to.  Mel is active as an advocate of Microsoft Advertising , especially via social media channels and at conferences to the Webmaster and search marketing community. His work is global and very interesting. With the Bing and Yahoo convergence, I thought it was time we did an interview – and he agreed.

At the OpenCa.mp conference in Dallas this weekend I was able to re-connect with Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome and the Gnomedex conference (We’ve interviewed each other in the past). We both jumped out of the same airplane with the Army Golden Knights last week and are also speaking today about blogs at OpenCa.mp.

I caught up with Chris to talk about his take on SEO and social media.  He had pretty strong opinions about people who are too aggressive and not always relevant in the social connections they’re making.  This is what he had to say:

You can find Chris online by Googling “chris“. How’s that for the effect of links on search engine visibility?

Dave Roth works as Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo. That means Dave is a Search Engine Marketer that works for a search engine. I’ve known Dave for several years and we finally decided to do a video interview. Watch the interview below to learn what a search marketer that works for a search engine does, especially the challenges and opportunities in communications on search marketing performance in a large company.

Of course, we couldn’t talk to someone like Dave at Yahoo without mentioning the transition of search results to Bing over on the Yahoo site. What does this mean for SEO? What does it mean for Paid Search?  What’s the fate of Site Explorer and where does it fit within Bing Webmaster Tools? Is SEO good or bad for search engines? How much of a signal does social media provide search engines? We discuss these topics and more.

I started interviewing people in the search marketing industry long ago (inspired by Aaron Wall) as a way to provide access to search marketing practitioners, pundits and employees at search engines. Beginning in 2005 with this interview with Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld & Pubcon, interviews with search marketing types have been posted here covering a variety of search marketing topics.

The search engine marketing industry changes often, so it’s pretty interesting to see some of the predictions made in some of those older interviews. Below are 10 more recent SEO interviews from client side practitioners or search engine employees that you can get a lot of value from in terms of understanding how facilitating SEO works in organizations, SEO and social media, resources, tools and specific SEO tips.

Photo credit hayzlett.com

Jeffrey Hayzlett is the former CMO at Kodak and author of “The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?”. You might have seen him on Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump or speaking at a variety of industry conferences. He hails from South Dakota and considers himself a cowboy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any photos of him online with a cowboy hat.

I connected with Jeff yesterday morning to talk about his success with social media, corporate change, Kodak, ROI and his upcoming keynote presentation at SES San Francisco.

Jeff, it was great to finally “meet you” on the Beancast recently and thank you for inspiring the idea behind a pretty popular blog post “Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media” which has had well over 1,100 retweets and multiples of that in page views.

Sometimes we learn best about doing things in new and innovative ways by understanding them in terms of something we already know. Stories provide useful context and perspective and that’s exactly what David Meerman Scott has done with his latest book that’s just been announced: “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History“.

A longtime fan of the Dead, David co-wrote the book with HubSpot co-founder and fellow deadhead, Brian Halligan to share the brilliant innovations the Dead brought to the business of marketing music and building an incredibly passionate community of brand enthusiasts.

While we were both speaking at the Vocus User’s conference in Washington D.C. last month, David took a few minutes with me to do the following video interview on his new book:

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 and answers from the session.

How did you get to Google?

I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on, I went into information retrieval and then joined the department of defense.  Then I took some time off, and eventually joined Google.  I’ve now been at Google for 5 years.

After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking).  The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update.  What exactly is that it?

Spotlight on Search Interview with Michael Nguyen, SEO Strategist for Shopzilla & Bizrate.com.

Helping companies with very, very large web sites increase sales through improved search engine performance takes a unique type of person. Think equally strong left and right brain lateral thinking.  Heavy doeses of technical savvy plus creative problem solving are essential.

Shopzilla and Bizrate market millions of products and Michael Nguyen’s SEO responsibilities for those sites are substantial. In this interview Michael talks about Google’s recent MayDay update, a SEO checklist, his top resources for staying current in the field and the unique challenges (including duplicate content) that come with optimizing huge web sites.

Spotlight on Search Interview with Matt Evans of Monster.com

There simply is no substitute for well rounded experience over a period of time to give a search marketer perspective and the skills to handle a variety of problems. Add to that “sink or swim” SEO training and you have a guy like Matt Evans, SEO Manager at Monster.com. In this interview, Matt is generous with sharing his experiences working agency side and in-house, insights toward code SEO, the new Google design, social media, advice for marketers that want to enter the Search Engine Marketing field and how SEO is a lot like Rugby.

You’ve worked both on the agency side and now as an in-house SEO Manager for Monster.com. Can you share a bit about that journey and what are some of the big differences between working on the client side vs. agency? What do you like most about working in Search?