Lee Odden

Whether you are an old hand SEO and online marketer or a noob, large conferences like Search Engine Strategies offer a number of excellent benefits. Here are my top five.

Blogs can be very useful in support of public and media relations efforts and they are certainly excellent tools for making a site more search friendly with fresh content that attracts incoming links.

The content versus links debate has persisted for years where search engine marketing practitioners seem to side with one or the other when deciding which is more important for search engine rankings. What’s missing from that conversation is the need for a distribution network.

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. 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.

Today’s interview is with Phil Hollows, Founder and CEO of the popular RSS to email service, FeedBlitz. With an active circulation of 682,330 and 53,955 active feeds, FeedBlitz is likely the most popular RSS to email service available.

Today we have a very nice interview with Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo Media Group. I first became aware of Laura’s SEO wisdom via her animated stick figure avatar in Jill Whalen’s High Rankings SEO forum. Dispensing excellent advice to newbies and old timers alike, Laura has gone from circus performer extraordinaire to Flash-superstar-wannabe to a dream gig as an in-house SEO for Yahoo.

With so many blogs being created every day, it's a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them, so here is a "short" list of tips for marketing and optimizing a blog.

Blog search engine Technorati is now tracking nearly 27 million blogs and there are about 75,000 new blogs launched every day. How can a business blog stand out with this kind of competition? Like anything else, there’s no silver bullet answer. One thing you can do is to optimize your business blog using many of the same optimization tactics you would use with your web site. Business blogs can generate traffic without search engines, but WITH search engines it can be even better.

When you think of authorities on web analytics, one person that should be on your list is Eric T. Peterson. Eric is currently Vice President with the Visual Sciences division of web analytics firm, WebSideStory, is the author of several books on web measurement and moderates several popular discussion lists on analytics. He also manages an excellent site on web analytics called Web Analytics Demystified. He previously worked as an analyst with JupiterResearch and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Business 2.0 and others as an expert on the topic.

Undoubtedly one of the companies that has had a major impact on the convergence of public relations and search engine optimization is PRWeb. David McInnis and his talented team have created more innovations surrounding press release distribution than any other wire service.

ecently I had the opportunity get the scoop from WebmasterWorld and Pubcon Search Engine Marketing conference owner, Brett Tabke. In this interview, Brett gives an interesting perspective on RSS, insight into how web services can be the next "golden goose" of revenue and the good news that Pubcon is kicking things up a notch in terms of advanced content.

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

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

A lot of buzz in the SEO community lately has been focused on the value of creating compelling as if it's a new idea. Writing web site copy that satisfies both search engines and users is nothing new to Heather Lloyd-Martin. She's been a proponent since mid to late nineties. I first came across Heather’s copywriting wisdom a long time ago when it was more common to be explaining what the Internet was to potential clients, let alone Internet marketing. Since then, Heather has been a very influential force in educating search marketers on the value of copywriting for the web, for seo and most importantly, for conversions.

One of the most visible SEO pundits on the web is unquestionably, Aaron Wall. Aaron is a very unique individual in the SEO world since he is exceptionally knowledgeable and networked and has not overtly offered search engine optimization consulting services.

One of the great things about the SEO industry is the networking and opportunity to meet and collaborate with some of the smartest people you’ll find anywhere. Todd Malicoat, aka Stuntdubl, is certainly one of those people. He is highly regarded by many of the most prominent and talented SEOs in the industry. I’m happy to get 10 min of his time via IM once in a while, so getting him to answer 11 detailed questions on SEO is very much appreciated. Once you read this interview, you’ll see why.

Andrew Goodman is known as the guy who "wrote the book" on Google AdWords or at least that’s one of the ways I like to think of him. He’s authored/edited Traffick.com since long before blogs became popular, speaks at numerous industry conferences and also has a successful SEM agency, Page Zero Media. In this interview with Lee Odden of Online Marketing Blog, Andrew explains how he tossed in the towel on his PhD to become, gasp, an internet marketer!

Rand Fishkin is the owner of SEOmoz, a resource site for search engine optimization and consulting services. Two Rand has received some excellent attention in the media recently with a feature in Newsweek and was Slash dotted, twice in a week.

Working with client PR firms to optimize press releases often generates some interesting discussion and education about writing style and keyword usage. A lot of press releases seem to be written by budding poets or ex-ad copywriters trying to be clever with the reader. This does not always bode well for keyword based ranking in algorithmic news and search engines.

One of the most common problems ecommerce web sites have with rankings is that portions of their web sites are not included in the search engines. Several efforts have been made to make it easier for webmasters to have their web sites indexed more effectively. This article discusses efforts Google and Yahoo have made to augment current methods of discovering as many URLs of a web site as possible.