• Video Search Optimization
• Mobile Search Optimization
• Benchmarking An SEM Campaign
• Getting Traffic From Contextual Ads
• SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
• Social Search Overview
• SMO: Social Media Optimization
• Wikipedia & SEO
• Retailer Forum
• Search and Regulated Industries

2. Interest specific tracks. Along with a variety of content to pick from, SES provides tracks to give you a sort of iterative sequence of sessions, that can build upon each other. The tracks offered at SES New York include:

• Fundamentals
• Multimedia & Mobile
• Advanced Advertising
• In House
• Click Z Network

3. Networking. There are tons of networking opportunities at SES conferences. Networking with peers, competition (keep your friends close but your enemies closer) as well as prospects. Connecting with 2-3 or 20-30 new people at a single event like SES can help you create any number of new business relationships for recruiting new staff, outsourcing work, referring work and finding new prospects.

On top of all that, networking with other like-minded professionals can help you build that mastermind group to bounce ideas off of and share tactics, insights and what becomes the “real” learning opportunity. Search marketers produce an overwhelming amount of content with a significant signal to noise ratio. Befriending other smart marketers can go a long way towards zeroing in on the signal that comes out of sessions, after hours networking and after conference communications.

4. Sourcing content. If you’re a search marketing blogger, attending a conference presents a goldmine of content opportunities. Take notes from the sessions and write up articles. Take your camera and do some informal video interviews. Make Rebecca style comics or use cool tools like VoiceThread to present your photos. Here are a few tips for really milking the value out of content gained from search marketing conferences like SES;

• Take notes from sessions and use them to create 200-300 word blog posts
• Expand those notes into articles and submit the articles to one or some of the following: WebProNews.com, ISEDB.com, SearchEngineGuide.com
• Use the content outline from articles to create a PowerPoint presentation for: internal company training, client training or for use when speaking at an event. This can work the other way around too. Write an article, break it up into smaller blog posts. Or take your PowerPoint presentation and break it up into blog posts and/or articles.

• Interview other SEO/PPC attendees at the conference. Try a different angle than just the “popular” SEO/PPC rockstars. Possibly a series of subject specific interviews. Or interviews with uber talented, but not self-promotional SEO and PPC experts.
• Use photos and videos for your own social media promotion of your blog and company’s services
• There’s a lot more, but people pay us for that.
  

5. C’mon it’s New York! I don’t know about you, but whatever excuse I can get to visit New York again, I’m going to take advantage of. The problem is, it can be a bit difficult rationalizing the time away and expense to your manager or business owner using that reason, so stick with suggestions 1-4 above and you should be fine.

The early bird discount ends Friday March 23rd, so you’d better get more information on SES New York here or get registered ASAP.

For even more great insight, read Jim and Todd’s excellent advice on how to make the most out of search marketing conferences.
 

Many times, an organization is already capturing this kind of information formally or informally. All it takes is a few phone calls or emails to the right people/departments in the organization to start leveraging the insight that comes from those interactions.

Most often this kind of content comes in a question answer format, but it doesn’t have to be presented that way. Lists of tips, indicating trends or creating a series of posts based on a theme are all viable options. Q/A style content is also great for building up a FAQ, or frequently asked questions content. Doing so with keywords in mind for post titles and category labels along with attention to how you link posts to each other can bring significant SEO benefits as well as provide a great resource for people searching for solutions your company has to offer.

It’s really a win win win situation. Leveraging or re-purposing current activity for blog content saves the company a lot of time, the nature of the content is synonymous with the kind of information prospects and/or clients are looking for and aggregating the content with keywords in mind using a structured blog format makes it easier to find on search engines.

Obviously, the source of this kind of information needs to be anonymous. No client or prospect wants to see their name on a company blog after calling a help desk or sales office to ask questions and no business wants the legal implications.

Making the capture of Q/A content part of a normal business process can also fuel internal knowledge base or CRM applications. Sharing this information with support and sales staff via a central repository can be quite helpful for daily interactions and in many cases, is already a function being performed.

While many companies are interested in starting a business blog, the question of how to source content efficiently often stands in the way. Leveraging information capture and distribution activities that are already occurring within an organization is one of the best ways to find the most useful and productive content for business blogging.

• RSS Subscribers
• Network with other bloggers
• Get on other blogger blogrolls
• Syndicate content to other web sites/blogs

Media Relations – News organizations be they online or offline, mainstream or blog networks, are always looking for good content and story ideas.

• Develop a “go to” media list to announce company news and story ideas to
• Establish newsworthiness by producing consistently high quality editorial that meets the needs of the publications you’re pitching to
• Press release distribution via online wire services bring exposure via email and news search engines
• Be a trusted news source by creating relationships with the media

Email - Email newsletters offer an excellent channel of distribution as the publisher or in an advertising capacity.

• Start an email newsletter to communicate with clients, prospects and your target market at large
• Advertising & sponsorship opportunities exist on others’ newsletters
• Provide guest articles to other newsletters with a desirable readership profile

Social Networking/Media - Networking and word of mouth is the oldest kind of marketing there is and in many cases, still the most effective. Online tools for networking and sharing of information can be leveraged in concert with real-world networking to build an impressive level of connections.

•  LinkedIn is growing into a very worthwhile business networking platform
•  MySpace tends to be more personal, but offers topical networking opportunities
•  Facebook also offers benefits similar to MySpace in terms of topical networking
•  Real world events are often overlooked and in-person relationships are far more powerful
•  del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, digg, etc can serve as channels of distribution and networking

Forums & Discussion Threads – Whether you start a forum yourself, moderate, advertise or simply participate, the exchanges that occur within forums and discussion threads can build credibility that can be leveraged into building blog and newsletter subscribers.

• Owner
• Moderator
• Sponsor
• Participant

Most companies are already engaged with many of these channels but do they consider the impact on search marketing? Each channel offers stand alone marketing benefits, which should still be the primary reason to engage them. But many marketers do not consider the effect such connections can have on building an organized content distribution network and the corresponding effect on search engine visibility.

In the same way that organizations should incorporate keyword messaging across corporate communications, they should also make organized efforts at prospecting, developing and measuring the effects of distributing content through relevant channels with search marketing in mind.

The concepts here are nothing more than fundamental marketing, but realizing the effect networks of distribution can have on search can help marketers leverage existing marketing activities in a way that provides a distinct advantage and would make it difficult to competitors to catch up. 

At the recent Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Lawrence presented on a panel about viral marketing where he focused on using widgets as a way to drive traffic and links. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this session since I was presentingon a different panel at the same time, but Karen and Jolina did and they came back with excellent feedback. Multiple people mentioned this session to me actually, including Rand Fishkin in this video interview.

There’s no doubt in my mind that widgets are going to be gaining a lot of attention from creative online marketers in the coming months, so what better time than now to talk to someone who is already in the thick of widget marketing? Read on to discover what widgets are, how they work, see some widget examples, learn about measuring widget results, resources and what Lawrence’s opinion is regarding whether widget marketing is just a passing fad or tactic.

Tell us about yourself and how did you start working with widgets?

I’ve been running a large social network and consumer ratings community called RateItAll since 1999. My interest in widgets was sparked by seeing the success that other online communities (like MySpace) have had in allowing their users to embed widgets, and the related success that widget publishers (like YouTube) have had in pushing their reach out beyond the confines of their domain.

With the possible exception of Google AdSense, the growing widget ecosystem is the single largest development in web publishing that I’ve seen in my seven plus years in the business.

What exactly IS a widget and how do they work?

When I talk about widgets, I am referring to web widgets – chunks of embeddable code that can be grabbed on one site, and embedded in another. Depending on who you’re talking to, widgets can also be referred to as gadgets, modules, badges, or blog bling. One of the neatest things about web widgets is that you don’t have to be a developer to make use of them. Anybody who understands copy/paste is able to display widgetized content or functionality on their own blog, social networking profile page, or personal web site. It’s sort of like opening up the world of mash-ups to non-technical web users.

What are some of the benefits to using widgets and how can they help companies engage in viral marketing?

From a site perspective, widgets are all about providing your users with the tools to promote your business. A properly executed widget can spread like wild fire – introducing your site’s content / functionality to new users who may not have known your site existed. Widgets are especially interesting to me as a site owner as a means of acquiring new customers at a minimal cost, pushing my site’s reach out to all corners of the Web, leveraging my site’s existing content, reducing my site’s dependence on SEO, and providing a nice source of organic, one-way, inbound links.

How do you measure the effect of a widget?

Widget analytics is still in its infancy. Currently, you can get a rough idea of how many times your widget has gotten picked up by doing backlink searches on Google, Yahoo, or Technorati using the “site:” qualifier to isolate the big widget aggregators like MySpace. Inbound traffic from widgets can be measured by checking your log files. However, as of now, there are no off the shelf solutions to help widget publishers understand exactly how folks are engaging with their widgets. There’s a company called Clearspring that is working on this problem, and I look forward to seeing how they progress.

Is it possible that widgets are just a fad like link baiting and social media?

Your question assumes that link baiting and social media are in fact fads, which I don’t think is accurate. (Perhaps “tactics” would be a better characterization – Lee) At their core, widgets are really about providing more control and a better experience to web users. Specifically, they’re about giving users the ability to be able to call up specific content and functionality when and where they want it. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, I don’t think that widgets are going away. Even if the largest aggregagators were to make the unwise decision to start blocking widget embeds, other communities would step up to take their place.

People like being able to customize their online presences with widgets. It’s a way for folks to provide a better experience to their friends / readers, and a way to broadcast to the world a little bit about themselves. I see widgets as part of the larger movements of citizen publishing and customization – which few would argue are fads.

What are some good examples of widgets?

A widget that I think is great is the iLike widget. iLike is a social music discovery site that features an iTunes plug in that captures all of your iTunes listening behavior. iLike spits out a widget that displays your most recently listened to tracks, as well as your top bands overall. The widget is also a music player that allows readers to play samples of the songs from your own iTunes history. This widget is updated in real time, and is a great example of a widget that is powered by implicit, personalized data.

Bitty Browser is another widget that I like, that I think provides a glimpse of the next generation of widgets. Bitty Browser is an embeddable web browser, that allows publishers to embed mini versions of their favorite sites within the expience of another site. Unlike most widgets which offer snapshots of content, Bitty Browser enables a fully functional experience within the body of the widget.

A third widget that I’m a big fan of is the community widget provided by MyBlogLog. The MyBlogLog widget attempts to provide social networking functionality like user profiles and user to user messaging across various blog properties. Blog publishers embed the MyBlogLog code in their sidebars, and MyBlogLog displays thumbnail photos of the blog’s readers within the widget. Clicking on a thumbnail launches the reader’s MyBlogLog profile page, and allows basic social network functionality like testimonials and messaging. Readers are also assigned to blog communities based on their reading habits, and introductions are facilitated to similar readers.

What are some useful resources for people that want to know more about widgets?

Sexy Widget is my own blog, and focuses almost exclusively on widget best practices and widget reviews.

Mashable is a great Web 2.0 blog that covers a lot of widget related news, including Mashable Labs which has some good stats on widget penetration on MySpace. Richard MacManus over at Read / Write Web also follows widgets closely, along with other Web 2.0 stuff. Other widget focused blogs include Widgify, Flying Seeds, and Widgets Lab. The guy who I consider the leading proponent of widgets on the web is VC blogger Fred Wilson of A VC. His blog is cluttered with just about every widget under the sun, and he invented the term “microchunking” which I think was a precursor to the whole widget movement.

What was your favorite part about the recent Las Vegas Pubcon?

The best presentation that I saw at Pubcon was Rand Fishkin’s stuff on linkbaiting. The most useful off the cuff remarks came from Todd Friesen, AKA Oilman. He mentioned something in passing that has helped me a lot in how to think about leveraging internal links for SEO purposes. I thought Guy Kawasaki gave a great keynote. As usual with Pubcons however, the real value comes from late night conversations with folks like Werty, Caveman, Stuntdubl, Jeff Coyle, RogerD, and Martinibuster.

Tell us about your background. How did you get involved with blogs, RSS and starting FeedBlitz?

I first started blogging when I was VP marketing for an enterprise security software company, OpenService, about a couple of years ago. I was looking for a way to reach our prospects and customers more informally and more frequently than the traditional monthly newsletter or press release permitted. Setting up a blog was the obvious answer, and it worked well. The blog let us build a closer and more trusted relationship with our market, helped establish thought leadership, and brought good SEO benefits – carefully written, good relevant blog posts can often appear on SERPs relevant to the business.

So the blog was great, but I wanted too get email updates going to push the content out to our readers. RSS was part of the blog, of course, but I wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible. RSS is tech heavy, unfamiliar to many and potentially user hostile, and I wanted a more familiar, comfortable way to reach our readers. In other words, email. Plus we had a five figure house list already receiving monthly email newsletters from us, so it made sense to get the blog to them using email since they were already used to hearing from us that way.

I signed up with Bloglet, which was the market leader at the time. It worked fine, But then I signed up with FeedBurner, and Bloglet didn’t like FeedBurner’s feeds. Say what? Support messages bounced and all of a sudden my pet project was at risk from an unsupported service that wasn’t playing nicely with my other systems.

I wasn’t about to let that happen. After extensive Googling and asking around I found a few alternatives, but none of them had what I really liked about Bloglet – it’s publisher features. I needed a service that let me manage my subscribers, and there was nothing else around that could match these criteria.

This was the perfect opportunity for me. I saw the complaints about Bloglet online, and the market gap that nobody was filling. And, as luck would have it, from some experimental work I’d done at home in the late nineties, I happened to have an embryonic email marketing system partially written. I figured that all I had to do was dust it off, get it fed from an RSS feed and I’d be done, and maybe others would be interested in using it too.

Well, the work was of course much more complex than I’d originally thought, that’s for sure. But that was the beginning of the project that became FeedBlitz. Many, many late nights later, once it was more or less ready, there still weren’t any products filling the gap. So I mailed a few people who had been public about their dissatisfaction with Bloglet, invited them to check it out, and it grew rapidly from there.

I should let you know, the first SEO service I started in 1998 was called Net-Blitz. So naturally I like the name you’ve picked. How did you arrive at the name FeedBlitz?

Really? It’s a small world I’d owned the domain blitzware.com for a while (but I let it go before FeedBlitz – drat!). As I was searching for a domain name all of the obvious ones had gone, and then I remembered Blitzware. FeedBlitz was available, I liked the “lightning” connotation of brightness, intensity, speed, and it hearkened back to the Blitzware name I’d used before. Perfect!

So now you have moved on from OpenService, gained some financial backing and are taking FeedBlitz full time. What are your plans for FeedBlitz? Feature enhancments? Where do you see FeedBlitz in the next year or two?

1) FeedBlitz will remain the Internet’s preeminent RSS to email service. We’ll continue to add more value and more capabilities, more easily delivered for publishers.

2) We will set the bar higher and higher in terms of the benefits we deliver for both our standard and premium services.

3) We will innovate and automate enterprise-class messaging and communications using RSS and “Web 2″ for all.

As I look at the RSS to mail market today, one of the core strategic decisions I have to take is deciding what we’re not going to do, because the realm of possibilities is so large. It boils down to this. Our mission is messaging using RSS and related technologies to underpin what we deliver. And our philosophy is to make your messaging work with whatever services you want to use. So you will see us enabling greater and simpler integration with third party services, instead of adding features or services that are already successful and prevalent in the broader market. We will stay focused, in other words. We’ll also make it easy for third parties to integrate FeedBlitz into their sites and services.

The next three months is going to see significant innovation from us on all these fronts. There will also be enhancements that make more use of content in a typical RSS feed. The FeedBlitz blog is the place to track new features and announcements. We’re also using some of our investment on a professionally redesigned web site that will be radically easier to use, as well as being easier on the eye.

FeedBlitz has become a very popular RSS to email service. How did you market it? What marketing plans do you have in the future?

Thanks! There were really two strategies at work. One was to make the most of the market opportunity created by Bloglet, so we made it utterly painless to migrate subscribers out of Bloglet and into FeedBlitz. (We’re an open system too, so publishers can grab their readers at any time).

Secondly, we worked directly with a few key bloggers who seemed to want the services we offered. We paid attention to them, used their ideas to improve the service, and so they’d blog about us and recommend us to others.

As a result, our initial success and work integrating FeedBlitz metrics with FeedBurner enabled FeedBlitz to be set up as FeedBurner’s email engine of choice last Fall. FeedBurner effectively became a channel for us, and that’s still the case for publishers wanting more sophisticated capabilities and customization.

Together, these three approaches delivered a phenomenal word of mouth / viral effect that just keeps on growing, with time and customer care being our #1 investments.

Going forward, we’ll be making the most of our partnerships and innovation to keep momentum up.

When we check our RSS stats, about 1/3 are from FeedBlitz, a 1/3 are from Bloglines and the rest from MyYahoo and other feed readers. Is that common for your subscribers?

It really varies. The FeedBlitz News blog’s readership is over 95% by mail. The more RSS-aware your readers are, the smaller the number of email subscribers you should expect to get. So, for example, a tech heavy blog talking to a tech savvy audience might see incremental circulation of order 10%. On the other hand, a blog talking to consumers about a hobby or family matters might get over 50% of their readership from FeedBlitz. But regardless of your content, everyone will see incremental readership because now you’re giving your readers choices about how to read your content.

Enabling readers to subscribe to your content using email takes advantage of a familiar medium. From a publisher perspective, it also makes it personal – you know the addresses of most of your subscribers. Those are all potential leads. RSS aggregators can’t tell you who is reading your content, so from a marketing and sales process, aggregator circulation is a lot less valuable than an equivalent email circulation count.

For the most part, FeedBlitz is used to convert blog posts that are published in a RSS feed to Email. What other applications and uses are you seeing?

The beauty of RSS and related technologies such as OPML reading lists is that FeedBlitz just works. As “Web 2.0″ grows, FeedBlitz will be able to deliver these innovative applications directly to users inboxes.

Indeed, many sites and systems are publishing RSS feeds, beyond blog posts. We’re seeing email updates of eBay auctions. People are using FeedBlitz to deliver their local weather forecast to their inbox every morning. Using FeedBlitz to track tags in, say, Technorati is a great way to automatically gather market intelligence about what people are saying about you (and your competition). We’re seeing users replace listservers and simple discussion groups with blogs and FeedBlitz – the content is richer, and less prone to spamming. And it sends blog updates too, of course.

We’re also seeing more traditional corporate marketers realizing that a blog coupled with FeedBlitz is a simple yet powerful combination that can do the job of much more expensive systems – but for much less time invested and at a better price point. It’s for these users that we are the only RSS to mail service that offers a blog-based autoresponder capability, for example, as well as the recently introduced “newsflash” broadcast option which sends updates to your readership that are NOT in an RSS feed.

As we move forward and enable even simper integration of FeedBlitz with other services, I expect our publishers will produce a swath of innovative applications that will incorporate FeedBlitz, and I expect that you will see much more FeedBlitz in places other than your inbox.

Please explain what’s behind FeedAdvisor and what has been the response to it? Any plans on making it into an open blog/RSS feed search tool?

FeedAdvisor is a new spin on searching and ranking blogs. It’s like Amazon.com’s feature that recommends books to you based on “People who bought this book also bought….” So FeedAdvisor looks at subscription patterns and says “People who subscribe to your feeds also subscribe to ….”

FeedAdvisor works because of the subscription patterns it detects. It’s time is yet to come, I believe, but Tom Evslin (our investor) and I have had some very interesting conversations about how it will grow. It can’t become just another search engine because (a) there are a lot of these about anyway, (b) generic search doesn’t have the subscription information that FeedAdvisor uses to analyze the data, so in fact it won’t work. Amazon’s feature is the same; they work from their sales patterns, and don’t incorporate (say) Barnes & Nobles’. As FeedBlitz grows and more users join, it will become increasingly comprehensive, and we will be able to build out the information in it to augment our other services.

Starting FeedBlitz and working with thousands of subscribers must have exposed you to some interesting and innovative blog and RSS marketing trends. What insights can you provide regarding marketing via RSS? What aspects of RSS marketing should companies be aware of most?

I think the thing to think about is not “RSS Marketing” but “RSS-powered marketing.” If you position programs based solely on content delivered to or in RSS then your return will be low and you may be disappointed unless you’re dealing with a very technical audience for whom RSS is old hat. For example, many are disappointed by ads placed purely in RSS feeds as they perform relatively poorly compared to other media. Targeting RSS as a niche medium isn’t the path to success.

On the other hand, if you build, augment or replace your marketing programs and technologies with services and products that use RSS as the underlying data mechanism, and simply treat your pure RSS feed as an integrated part of (as opposed to distinct from) your web marketing, you’ll do very well. Why? Not necessarily because it’s RSS per se, but because technologies that have RSS at their core are much more flexible, easier to use and just as capable – if not more so – then their older online or desktop cousins. For example, you can ditch your expensive content management system for a blogging platform. It’s faster, cheaper and probably better for most of us. Add FeedBlitz and your newsletter production is painless, more frequent, and automatically linked back to your site. Plus it’s a boon or search engines because now your content is changing rapidly and, thanks to trackbacks and comments, relevant blogs get a lot of high value link love, with other people – your readers – doing all the work for you.

The power of these technologies is illustrated by the fact that corporations are now building large, complex and content rich web sites solely on blogging platforms – the efficiency gains alone make this approach worthwhile for a lot of non-data driven content. That’s a clear trend that will only accelerate.

In the end, I believe RSS will disappear into the woodwork, just as HTTP and SSL and SMTP have now. It will become the glue that enables dynamic web sites and content to link together seamlessly. It’s the applications that use RSS that are key, not RSS itself. And the same is true for marketers. Ask yourself how you can take advantage of RSS to reach a more technically savvy audience or to automate otherwise tedious and repetitive tasks (e.g. newsletter production). RSS-powered automation and services enables us to spend more time doing marketing, and less time (and money) doing production.

What are some of your favorite business blogs and blogs about blogging?

I believe in actionable, relevant and practical solutions to practical problems. So of the well known blogs, I follow Fred Wilson, my investor Tom Evslin, Chris Pirillo, TechCrunch, Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, Guy Kawaski and Seth Goldstein (all by FeedBlitz of course). At the enterprise level I think Charlie Wood is on to something with his work in salesforce.com and RSS. I use Technorati and Google blog search for market and competitive intelligence.

Ssshhh, don’t tell anyone I said this, but I find most blogs about blogging to be very cliquey and practically irrelevant; I don’t read them. I don’t care about this video blogger or that format war or whoever such and such an A-lister has annoyed this week. It’s all too incestuous and irrelevant for me.

What 3 tips can you provide to bloggers that are considering or using a RSS to email service?

1) Why not? You’ll get 10-50% circulation boost, push content delivery, better SERP placement, gain lead information, develop metrics, all automatically.

2) Customize your emails to match your branding and messaging, and enable subscriber tracking metrics to measure your activity and effectiveness.

3) Don’t wait. It’s fundamentally free, takes only a minute or so to set up, just do it.

Some excellent insight and advice. Thanks Phil!

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

It pretty much started off at The Linus Group which was GH Multimedia at the time. I was doing primarily Flash & web dev for our sole client-type, biotech companies. The Flash stuff didn’t last long because scientists like structure and data, so my dreams of being a Flash superstar faded and I ended up really getting into the usability and analytics side of things, and I loved it. We were morphing GH Multimedia into a marketing company at the same time, and I was managing web marketing for the company as well. And that’s where the search part came in.I especially loved the SEO/M side of things and began picking up optimization projects on the side for non-biotech companies. Eventually I left The Linus Group and did consulting in SEO and User-experience on my own. Most SEOs say they love consulting (rather than in-house) because they can sleep late and work late and not change out of their pajamas for four days (which I enjoyed too), but I hated the biz dev and self-marketing side of things and I missed having people around and ended up talking to myself a lot, so I gave up consulting and CNET took me under their wing.

CNET was small enough that you know everybody and it was big enough that there were a lot of cool, interesting things going on. Plus CNET is right in downtown San Francisco so there is no lack of CNET happy hours, and you really get to know people by hanging out with them outside of work. Oh yeah, and it was an awesome SEO challenge.

Then I got a call from Yahoo! and they needed someone to build SEO into the process and help build SEO into new analytics tools and that’s exactly what I do. So I now make the trek to Sunnyvale for work in addition to Santa Monica a couple days a week – and its absolutely worth it. A venture capital friend of mine said to me once that he likes to surround himself with people smarter than him, and here at Yahoo! that’s exactly what I’m doing – there’s so many smart people and smart things going on here I cant keep up with it all. There’s a heck of a lot of work to do, and it’s an opportunity of a lifetime for me and I’m very excited to be a part of it.

I see from your Y360 blog that you once worked in the circus. SEO seems like a circus sometimes. Are there any similarities?

Actually, not at all. You can say that the ever-changing search marketing world feels like a circus sometimes, but really…we’re talking dudes in spandex flying out of a cannon versus quiet brainiacs sitting behind a computer all day. Let me just throw out a few things that come to mind from circus life & see if there really are any similarities:

Circus:

• Weirdoes from around the world
• Living on a train
• Flashy costumes
• Protests
• Accidents
• Love circles and drama
• Gay clowns and elephant turds

Ok so yeah maybe there are a few similarities. There’s that SEO guy that sends poop through the mail – I think he said he ranks for the terms [revenge] and [pranks] or something. Of course you certainly have weirdoes from around the world in SEO – thank God! It would be pretty boring if we didn’t. But I don’t think there’s enough love circles and drama in SEO. Too much gossip about no follow and not enough about who the Mayers dated if you ask me.

That SEO 101 video you did while you worked with CNET was pretty cool. Was that your idea? What other interesting methods have you used to evangelize or explain SEO?

Most of what I do or have done in SEO is not publicized. I’ve always focused on internal education & getting SEO integrated into the process from one man shops to large corporations. But that CNET video was to be the first in a series of SEO videos – I had some other videos listed that we were going to do that would showcase a little more detail on the most important high-level SEO topics (since you technically only get 2-3 minutes). But I was whisked away by Yahoo! and so now it’s up to the new SEO guy at CNET to carry on the tradition.

Internally, SEO education is a matter of working in with everyone involved over time. That said, there are so many great avenues for gathering your own SEO following & creating recognition for yourself: the SEO video space is wide open. The podcast space has opportunity as well – I would love to hear more podcasts on vertical topics, like interviews with people in search, or roundtables where you get a bunch of SEO’s in a room and debate technique and practices. When we all get together at conferences that’s all we talk about for hours and hours. Somebody should be recording those (hint hint WebmasterRadio ).

So now you’re working with Yahoo. Was that a big change? Please explain what you do there. Do you get to use knowledge of Yahoo ” secret sauce ” in your job?

It’s a huge change. Walking into the Yahoo! work space is like entering a new universe where there are mini cyber-worlds and strange machines running everywhere and 3-headed gorks walking by you and you’re just walking around in awe trying to figure it all out. I mix that view of it with my college experience where I hung out in computer labs all day and night and brainstormed ideas with my friends, and then add a touch of Hollywood for the Santa Monica trips, and there you have it.

Unfortunately, I don’t get any secret sauce from the Search people. I have to get them drunk and hope to get secrets out of them just like everyone else.

There’s always been some kind of debate over whether it makes sense to optimize for individual search engines, but recently there’s been more. What do you think about that?

Bottom line: you need to optimize for what makes you money. If your target market is techno geeks and you think you tend to get more referrals from techno geeks from Google Search, then see what you can do to get more quality traffic from there. But if that takes away from your Yahoo! traffic and you end up losing more money when you lose the Yahoo! traffic than you do by your gain in Google traffic, then it’s obvious what you need to do. This is not a guessing game – all your answers are in your data.

If there were 3-5 site optimization tips you were to recommend to web masters, what would they be?

1. Usability comes before SEO – better yet, they should work hand in hand. But don’t compromise your user experience for SEO. Unless you’re spamming, of course.

2. SEO isn’t just about H1 tags and title tags – more importantly, you need traffic. You need to be good enough, you need to be smart enough, and gosh darnit , people need to like you. Well, your site at least. In that respect, your client needs to see you as not just an SEO, but a strategist of sorts, and you absolutely HAVE to be a part of site building from the beginning concept stages.

3. You can listen to what everyone else preaches about what works for SEO or you can find out for yourself. Most SEO “facts” are just things they hear from other SEO’s which they heard from other SEO’s which they read in some article that who knows who wrote it, etc. Where are the cold hard facts? They’re in your data, people! Set up a tight analytics structure and go in and do things to your site and test the results for yourself. You’ll be the smartest (and richest) SEO on the block.

What are some of the most common “myths about SEO tactics” that you’re running into these days?

There always seems to be a lot of stuff going around that just doesn’t have real proof to back it up. I don’t really believe any of it until I can test it for myself. A lot of site owners, not necessarily SEO’s , seem to think that all they need to do for SEO is slap a couple of keywords in a browser title and an H1 tag on their page and they’ll see results. The lack of education of SEO’s and non- SEO’s alike is disheartening sometimes. We still have a lot of work to do on the education front.

And inciting SEO propaganda for linkbait isn’t really helping any. All those poor novice SEO’s are going to believe crazy propaganda headlines because they don’t know any better. If you’re going to write questionable Star Magazine-type stories about SEO, be sure to have proof to back up whatever you’re end point is.

What are some of the resources you rely on for information on SEO/SEM? Best practices, news, industry information.

I read the SEOmoz blog almost every day. Rand and his crew bring up a lot of good questions and a wide range of topics around SEO and anything that might be remotely related to SEO and successful site marketing and development. You can tell they’re really analyzing the search industry as well as the web space in general, and thinking about what’s next.I’ve got MyYahoo as my homepage so that a few times a day headlines from the feeds pop into my view and I’ll go check them out. There’s a range of feeds there from white and black hat SEO to Silicon Valley Web & Tech events to analytics blogs to weird news. The weird news one though always throws me off – I spend half a day reading about dumb robbers and one-eyed cats instead of spending quality time analyzing people’s ideas about no-follow and who’s dating who in the Valley (you know, the important stuff) To throw a few names out, right now I’ve got Valleywag , BayChi events, SEOmoz, SEW, Occam’s Razor, Instant Cognition, Eric T. Peterson’s Analytics Blog, In Search Of Stuff, Shanth Ideas, and a bunch more.

I also follow SD Forum Events – they have what’s called a Search SIG (Special Interest Group) every month in various places in the area, plus other really cool live forums around web 2.0-type topics and business intelligence topics. I’m a fiend for that kind of stuff.

And my car radio was broken for over year and I commute anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week, so I find every single search or industry or tech-related podcast I can find and load it all up on my Shuffle and listen to those while I travel. I haven’t missed a single Search Engine Watch, Webmaster Radio That’s A Wrap, Webmaster Radio SEO Rockstars , or Yahoo! Power Source podcast . I put books on my podcast too, although The Wisdom Of Crowds was just too much for my Shuffle to handle evidently, so I was driving to work with my laptop on the seat and the audiobook on my iTunes , with my earphones plugged into it, taking caution while shifting or moving my right arm because I kept knocking the earphones out.You might say I’m dedicated. Or perhaps obsessed?

If Yahoo was an animal, what would it be? And you?

(For my fellow Neverending Story fanatics): Yahoo is kinda like Falkor flying around all over the place and surprising you with what it knows (plus the big dreamy brown eyes), and I’m kinda like the beasts at the Gate to the Southern Oracle, firing my SEO data analytics & best practices at you and making sure you pay attention. Or else…

Thanks Laura!

1. Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!
2. Obtain and install customizable blog software – WordPress and Moveable Type are my favorites.
3. Customize blog look and feel templates – aka design.
4. Research keywords and develop a glossary – Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.
5. Optimize the blog:

* Template optimization – RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, HTML code, Unique title tags, URLs, Sitemap
* Add helper plugins specific to WordPress or MT
* Create keyword rich categories (reference your keyword glossary)

6. Enable automatic trackback and ping functionality.
7. Create Feedburner Pro account and enable feed tracking.
8. Setup Google acount for Sitemap, validate and prep for future submission.
9. Identify authoritative blogs, web sites and hubs for outbound resource links and blogroll.
10. Format archived posts, related posts.
11. Enable statistics for tracking – Performancing, Google Analytics, ClickTracks.
12. Submit RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories / search engines.
13. Engage in an ongoing link building campaign.
14. If podcast or video content are available, submit to Podcast and Vlog directories.
15. Submit blog url to paid directories with categories for blogs – Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW, JoeAnt.
16. Optimize and distribute a press release announcing blog.
17. Request feedback or reviews of your blog in relevant forums, discussion threads. If you have a resourceful post that will help others, point to it.
18. Research and comment on relevant industry related blogs and blogs with significant centers of influence.
19. Post regularly. If it’s a news oriented blog, 3-5 times per day. If it’s an authoritative blog, 3-5 times per week, but each post must be unique and high value.
20. Monitor inbound links, traffic, comments and mentions of your blog – Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse, Yahoo News, Ask Blogs and Feeds.
21. Always respond to comments on your blog and when you detect a mention of your blog on another blog, thank that blogger in the comments of the post.
22. Make contact with related bloggers on AND offline if possible.
23. When making blog posts always cite the source with a link and don’t be afraid to mention popular bloggers by name. Use keywords in the blog post title, in the body of the post and use anchor text when you link to previous posts you’ve made.
24. Use social networking services, forums and discussion threads to connect with other bloggers. If they like your stuff, they will link to you.
25. Remember when web sites were a new concept and the sage advice to print your web address everywhere you print your phone number? The same advice applies for your blog.

Of course if you don’t want to do it yourself, you can always have a blog consultant do these things (and more) for you, but I realize that there are quite a few personal bloggers as well as small business bloggers looking for this kind of information. I hope it’s helpful.

With blogs, there exist as many or more optimization opportunities to optimize as with a web site. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for business blog optimization are readily available. While there are an abundant number of blog optimization tactics available, this article will focus on a short list that can make a difference for any blog – business or personal.

Why optimize your company blog?

• Increase rankings of the blog on BOTH regular search engines as well as blog and RSS search engines
• Increase traffic to the blog from multiple sources such as social search (Yahoo MyWeb, Google Personalized Search) and social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Digg, Furl or Blogmarks)

A blog is just a website that uses a content management system, so most standard SEO tactics apply. There are also optimization tactics specific to blogs.

• Consider keywords when writing your blog post titles. Some blog software allows plugins that can suggest keywords. Otherwise, you can use Google Suggest or one of these free keyword suggestion tools: Digital Point, SEO Book or the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Keywords should NOT determine your content.
• Optimize the template. Make sure post titles appear in the title tag and append the title tag (hard code) with the most important phrase for your blog.  Example: 
  “Blog Post Title Here – Your Blog Name Here”
  “Your Blog Name Here” should be included on every blog post title tag automatically.
• Use the blog post title as the permalink. If you’re using keywords in the blog post title, then they will occur as anchor text in the permanent post link. While you’re at it, just make the post title a permalink.
• Make it easy for your blog readers to subscribe and include RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” in a side bar or on a dedicated Subscription Info page. Here’s a handy RSS Feed Button creation tool.
• Optimize Categories. When you create categories for your blog, be sure to consider keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate.
• Social bookmarking sites can be excellent sources of traffic to your blog, so be sure to make it easy for readers to bookmark your blog posts. You can do this by adding some code to your blog template for each of the major social bookmarking sites. Here’s a tool for social bookmarking links. Here’s another tool that uses icons instead of text links.
• Ping the major RSS feed and Blog search engines each time you post. This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you’re using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic or Pingoat.
• Trackbacks. Be sure your blog software is configured to send a trackback ping to blogs that you cite within your posts. Pay attention to press releases distributed by PRWeb. If you cite a release and ping the trackback link, the press release will in turn link to your blog. This is better for driving traffic than for link popularity.
• Comments. When you make comments on other blogs, they need to add value. Do NOT comment just to get a link. Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter.  Do NOT use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.
• Submit your blog to RSS and Blog directories. Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, BOTW, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Microsoft bCentral, etc) that have categories for blogs.
• Link building.  Whenever you publish your website address, be sure to publish your company blog url as well.  Be attentive to link opportunities for your blog as you would your web site. Remember that a useful resource like a blog can be a lot more attractive to link to than many company web sites.  As you establish a good syndication and distribution network for your business blog, your linking strategy can shift from push to pull. Pull strategy linking means that you can achieve significant numbers of new links simply by publishing new, useful content.
• Offer RSS to Email. Anywhere from 10% to 40% of your blog traffic can come from individuals that perfer to read blog posts via email. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz, Squeet, Zookoda (this one is more for using blog posts as a weekly newsletter) or RMail.
• Use blog analytics. Tools like Feedburner Pro will provide you with basic information about your feed subscribers, referring traffic and most popular posts. Regular web site analytics tools like ClickTracks or a blog stats specific tool like Performancing Metrics will give you information about the actual blog web pages. Monitor your blog stats as you would your web site stats for trends, problems and opportunities.
• Offsite tracking – Use RSS feed subscriptions to running keyword searches for terms relevant to your blog. Tools include Google Alerts, PubSub, BlogPulse and IceRocket .This will help you become aware of mentions of your blog so you can respond in comments and take part in the dialogue. You can also establish networking relationships with other like-minded bloggers, thus enhancing your content distribution network.

The important thing to remember is that no matter how many optimization tactics you employ with a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you’re optimizing. 

Blog Optimization Resources:

Business Blog Consulting – Blog Marketing
Online Marketing Blog – Blog Marketing

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.

Please share a bit about your background

I’ve worked in the web analytics field since 1998 when I started at WebTrends as a webmaster. Since then I’ve worked mostly as an analyst (WebSideStory, JupiterResearch) and currently head up the Strategic Services group at Visual Sciences (a division of WebSideStory.) I’ve written three books on the subject of web analytics–Web Analytics Demystified (Celilo), Web Site Measurement Hacks (O’Reilly) and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators (self-published in PDF format only)–and have founded a few web analytics “community” groups–the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups and Web Analytics Wednesday. You can learn more about my activity in the web analytics community at www.webanalyticsdemystified.com.

What do you think are some of the most significant unrealized opportunities for companies regarding web analytics?

Most companies aren’t realizing the full benefit of their investment in web analytic technology because they’ve failed to assign proper/enough resources to the task of “improving the web site.” Measurement tools are a critical piece of the continual improvement process–basically working to improve your site incrementally rather than hoping that a massive redesign will solve your problems–but too few companies are leveraging this opportunity effectively.

What are some of the most common mistakes companies make regarding measuring web site performance?

Not taking the time to clearly define their business objectives and activities before they start generating “reports” that they push out to people. In my experience folks don’t need more reports, they need the “right” reports that speak directly to the business problems they’re trying to solve. The act of clearly defining value the web site is supposed to deliver and then mapping those goals to measurable clickstream helps clarify which data and reports are valuable at the strategic and tactical levels.

What are a few of the most important new trends companies should pay attention to regarding the future of web analytics?

At the recent Emetrics summit in Santa Barbara, one thing I was really impressed by was the fairly dramatic increase in the quality of questions people were asking from 2005 to 2006, which leads me to believe (at least in the microcosm) that the overall level of web analytics maturity is increasing. Given that there is already some pretty sophisticated technology out there, I think the most important trend that we should all watch for (and encourage) is how companies think about this type of technology and the impact it can have on their overall business.

Can you recommend educational resources for companies that want to improve their practical knowledge about web analytics?

Sure. I personally really like my site, www.webanalyticsdemystified.com which is about to get an overhaul and has links to tons of web analytics resources, jobs and community events like the Web Analytics Forum and Web Analytics Wednesday. Another good resource is the Web Analytics Association, our communities “professional association”.

You’ve written some excellent books on web analytics. (Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks, The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators) What are some resources you rely on for information on web analytics regarding best practices and up to date information?

Well, the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups helps me keep my finger on the pulse of the larger community. I subscribe to a number of different RSS feeds written by “web analytics bloggers” like A. Clinton Ivy (Instant Cognition) and Minnesota’s own Mike Keyes (Ciceron). I read Jason Burby, Bryan Eisenberg and Neil Mason at Clickz and have a persistent Google search set up for the keywords “web analytics” which uncovers a bunch of interesting articles every week. Now that I’m at Visual Sciences, I also rely on our customers who, by and large, are a pretty sophisticated group of companies.

What are your favorite search engines?

Google. I pretty much only use Google.

Thanks Eric!

If you are in the Minneapolis – St. Paul area this week on Wednesday, be sure to come and see Eric speak at the MIMA (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) seminar, “Making Your Analytics Work. Hard.“. The event will be held on the 50th floor (Windows on Minnesota) of the IDS tower in downtown Minneapolis. More information is available at the MIMA events page.

While I’ve used PRWeb in one way or another since 1999, it wasn’t until 2003 that my company impelemented press release optimization for both our SEO and public relations clients. In the past 2 years PRWeb has grown immensely and has led the way as a Web 2.0 wire service. Many new online wire service companies have sprung up trying to emulate the services of PRWeb and a good number of “old school” wire services have added the kinds of services to their mix that were originally pioneered by PRWeb.

While we bump into each other at Search Engine Strategies and other conferences thoughout the year, PRWeb CEO David McInnis and I participated on a public relations panel together for the first time at the recent Boston Pubcon conference. He presented an array of new services available including: PRWeb podcast, press release trackbacks, free high res image hosting and many others.

As a CEO of a very fast growing company, you can imagine how busy things can get. However, David recently took the time to answer a few questions about how PRWeb was started, the addition of recent patent pending services, new social bookmarking, content recommendation and expert profile ranking features, changes in PRWeb metrics, the PRWeb editorial and Q/A process, the launch of the PRWeb Evangelist program and McInnis’ answer to my “loaded question”.

Tell us about your background and how did you start PRWeb.com?

I completed my BA in International Business from Texas State University in 1995, but my career experience comes from the marketing and database technology industries. Having a background in marketing has given me unique insights into the world of public relations and has helped me to identify areas where the marketing and public relations disciplines should converge online. Having the technology background has been a great advantage to PRWeb because the marketing side of my brain can conceive things that the technical side can build.

I founded PRWeb in the early days of Internet chiefly as a disappointment I experienced with one of the larger wire services. I spent a lot of money to get my message out to the media and, apart from a few online places that picked up the wire feed, I did not see any results. No media coverage. No increased visibility. Just disappointment. While I was out mowing my lawn one day, it came to me: There must be a way to market press releases on the Internet and monetize that traffic through advertising; remember the $40 CPM rates? I did the math and got really excited. I could create a free service and take in tons of corporate and organizational news, and market that content through a search engine optimization strategy. Okay, we did not call it SEO back then and Google wasn’t even on the radar yet, but the final idea was to make this news content highly visible online and capture the ad revenue.

We have remained constant in PRWeb’s goals and mission from our early days. Our goal was, as it is today, to help our users get the maximum visibility for their press releases and corporate news. The idea was that by driving traffic to our users’ news releases, we would serve their needs (increased visibility for their press releases) and our needs (the need to drive page views and associated advertising revenue). Here is what we found: We were only successful on the first half of that equation. While we drove tons of traffic to online press releases, we were never successful in monetizing that traffic using advertising revenue.

In 2000 and 2001, I decided to build on our success and continue to build a toolset for maximizing our users’ press release visibility online. We dropped our advertising-based revenue model in favor of something completely new, especially to corporate America; voluntary financial contributions. Essentially, we asked our users to contribute financially to the service while we continued to build our suite of visibility services. The response from our user base was overwhelmingly positive. We reinvested every available dollar to build the very first online visibility platform for corporate news content.

I first started sending out press releases through PRWeb in 2001and a lot has changed with PRWeb in that time, especially in the past year. What’s your plan for PRWeb and how do you plan on leveraging the Web 2.0 types of features you’ve been adding?

You were an early adopter. I guess you saw early PRWeb firsthand as we struggled to keep the idea alive.

Now, about Web 2.0. We are really pleased with our position in the industry. Since the early days of the Internet, we have expanded our staff to include a top notch development team, which is now headed by our Chief Technical Officer, Al Castle, and we have recently established ourselves as the only Web 2.0 enabled wire service.

Of everything that we have released in the past six months, I am most excited about our inclusion of TrackBacks and PingBacks into press releases and other Web 2.0 initiatives. We have even filed patent applications for our implementations of these technologies into a wire service and press release distribution platforms.

What’s next? We have a variety of initiatives that we are working on. Most of these technologies are tied directly to promoting online visibility of our users, their products and their services. I prefer not to get too specific on our product suite, but I can speak generally. Generally speaking, we are working on new social bookmarking, content recommendation and expert profile ranking using principles of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is more than the deployment of any one single service. For example, we saw recently that a service entered into a relationship with the leading social bookmarking platform to claim Web 2.0 status. Web 2.0 is much more complicated than that. It is about making your platform part of a larger application. We are working on APIs that will allow others to interact with our content in revolutionary ways.

PRWeb has really pioneered the notion of distributing optimized press releases. AT least one other major wire service has added this service after it become popular with PRWeb. There also many more wire services out there now than in the past 2 years. How would you characterize PRWeb: As as SEO tool, as a tool for public relations, both or something else?

I am glad you bring this up. PRWeb was the driving force for SEO optimized press releases. We built our platform from the ground up using sound SEO principles. Other services out there are trying to retrofit their sites to do SEO. We will see how that plays out.

PRWeb’s SEO value is a product of our mission to gain maximum visibility for news release content for our users. No, I would not characterize our service as an SEO platform. We are much more than that — and we are much more than a newswire, which is why last year we re-branded ourselves as The Online Visibility Company™. We have dubbed what we do as direct-to-consumer press release distribution.

PRWeb is essentially a new public relations function; a layer on top of existing wire services. By just using existing wire services, PR professionals are only doing half the job. The fact is that press releases can and should be re-purposed for the Web. This is all about making your corporate news work harder for you.

A lot of SEOs seem to confuse the distribution of press releases with the pickup or media coverage of a release. Distribution of the release is the means, not the end. What’s your opinion and what are some other common misconceptions you hear of from SEOs and online marketers about online PR?

Media pick-up is rapidly becoming an outdated metric. In fact, we are in the process of reworking our statistical reporting to de-emphasize the importance of this metric. In the current environment, it is more important to measure the consumers’ interaction with your news. This is much more valuable to all parties, including the mainstream media. TrackBacks, for example, give you instant feedback on your news and provide a jumping off point for the media. The discussion is right there.

Statistics are also tricky on a number of levels. First, low statistics bring into question the value of the platform and not the value of the message. Most releases fail because of the content, not because of the platform. Stats are also tricky because they don’t measure the effectiveness of your news in relation to other stories in your space. We are tackling these challenges right now. You will see new comparative metrics with our software release.

Some wire services often get knocked for poor editorial quality. What does PRWeb have in place to ensure quality standards?

Each and every press release distributed by PRWeb is reviewed by a human editor and scored with an editorial score of between 1 and 5. We also employ the delete and hold options as required. Our editorial staff works on a 24×7 schedule to assist customers with problem areas in their releases. Our Managing Editor, Kathy Sheehan, has established some tight guidelines for what can be distributed via PRWeb.

Also, it is technically possible to post a free release to PRWeb, but we no longer do any expanded distribution with these releases. In fact, we prohibit these releases from being spidered by search engines because we need to have an authorized sender as verified by a credit card payment.

PRWeb offers basic statistics on press releases including reads, pickup, prints, forwards, etc. You also offer keywords and referrer info for releases at a higher contribution level. Do you plan on adding or changing those statistics? Will you be offering any statistics in regard to the RSS feeds?

I have ideas on how to accomplish this, but there are problems in the RSS industry that make accurate measurement impossible. What we really need is a set of standards for RSS readers. For example, some RSS readers load every item description on load. This renders the inclusion of a tracking image useless. We will, however, be able to track click-through from RSS.

I see PRWeb listed as the official wire service sponsor of just about every conference related to search, interactive and new media. What are your long term marketing plans for PRWeb?

We will continue to support the conferences in our areas of expertise. We feel a sense of obligation to support these conferences because they provide value to our users. We haven’t done a whole lot of traditional marketing outside of the tradeshows. I can tell you this, we are assembling a killer direct sales team — very excited about that. We are also weeks away from launching our PRWeb Evangelist program, which will financially reward our long-time evangelists for building the PRWeb user base.

What are your favorite search engines and what are some feature improvements you’d like to see?

How can you not like Google? It is synonymous with search. I just heard a guy on the radio recommend to his users that they go to Amazon to “Google” an author. I had to smile.

I have an admiration for Ask.com. It has the ability to become the Southwest Airlines of the search space. It is my current start page.

As far as changes, I see interactivity creeping its way into search results in the future. We are already seeing some of these ranking schemes in the blog search space. I think it would bring an exciting element to search. Introducing human recommendation into search could be valuable. A9 can do this with the Amazon recommendation technology.

I worry about the longevity of PPC. As PPC gets more expensive, other technologies will emerge. Hey, banners never went away, but they are less important today than they used to be back in Web 1.0. I see the same shift on the horizon for PPC.

What are some of the resources you rely on for information on web 2.0 and online marketing? Best practices, news, industry information.

That is a loaded question. I really pay attention to what is happening in the blogosphere. This is where things are happening first. I do think that there is a lot of intentional misdirection in the search space. It takes common sense to weed through it all.

What’s the weirdest press release you’ve ever seen submitted to PRWeb?

The craziest ones never make distribution, and there are simply too many. Needless to say, our editors are kept entertained. (Come to think about it, maybe I should charge them to work here.) We have had everything from alien abductions to Andy Kaufman is Alive releases.

I like catchy headlines the best. The problem with headlines that get too clever is that they tend to lose SEO value.

Thanks David!