Lee Odden to Speak at Jill Whalen's Seminar

I am happy to announce that I'll be joining Jill Whalen and her super talented team of SEO and SEM instructors for the Minneapolis High Rankings Search Engine Marketing seminar March 15 & 16th.

From all the people that have attended the few local search marketing presentations I've done through MIMA, I know there are a lot of in house marketers and web designers in dire need of improving their search marketing skills. I also know there are quite a few small business and web site owners that could benefit significantly from some hands on SEO/SEM training.

The High Rankings seminar can deliver for both audiences.

Here's why: The High Rankings Search Engine Marketing seminar is two days of jam packed, practical information from experienced search marketing pros who make their living from SEO and SEM.

The impressive lineup includes:

* Jill Whalen - High Rankings
* Scottie Claiborne - Successful-Sites
* Matt Bailey - Site Logic Marketing
* Christine Churchill - KeyRelevence
* Karon Thackston - Marketing Words
* And some guy named Lee Odden from TopRank :)

Topics to be covered in the two day seminar include:

* Search Engine Optimization Overview
* Technical Design Issues
* The Nitty-Gritty of Writing for the Search Engines
* Social Media and Public Relations for SEO
* Effective Keyword Research
* The ins and outs of Paid Search (PPC)
* Copywriting Your Way to Success
* Link Building
* Measuring Success

Day one is made up of a sequence of sessions, each building upon the other - from keyword research all the way to web analytics. The day two workshop offers hands on instruction and site reviews.

This is not a giant Search Engine Strategies event where the speakers simply take 10 minutes to sell you their product or consulting services. This is practical, hands-on and actionable information.

What makes this even better is that there's an early bird discount (10%) for registrations by Feb 15th, 2007. If you're a reader of Online Marketing Blog, then you'll also benefit with an ADDITIONAL 25% off.

Click the following link for more information or register today.

The Best SEO Blogs

Amie, Thomas and I have been working in between client projects over the past week to refine the huge list of RSS feeds and blog urls from my RSS reader to share with our readers. Each blog and RSS feed was recently visited to ensure an accurate description, working URLs and post frequency.

After going through this many blogs, a few trends that stuck out include:

• Many blogs on SEO are not themselves optimized
• Bloggers suck and making it easy to subscribe to RSS feeds - help with RSS feeds here
• Anonymous blogs are not inherently interesting
• AdSense heavy blogs distract too much from content

Check out the big list of SEO blogs and the OPML file for importing into your RSS reader at Online Marketing Blog.

Tags: seo blog, search marketing blogs

SEO Video Interviews

Never one to disappoint in his conference coverage, Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing has published 4 video interviews with some of the top people in the search marketing industry. Enjoy!

Joshua Stylman and Peter Hershberg - Reprise Media
Gord Hotchkiss - Enquiro
Stephan Spencer - Netconcepts
Neil Patel and Cameron Olthius - ACSSEO

In other news related to Search Engine Strategies in Chicago, Danny Sullivan announced his new venture, Search Engine Land and ClickZ editor Rebecca Leib was named Danny's successor at Search Engine Watch.

Tags: Gord Hotchkiss, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg, Stephan Spencer, Neil Patel, Cameron Olthius, seschicago06, seschicago2006

Lee Odden Interview eMarketing Talkshow

In about 30 minutes I will be doing an online radio interview with eMarketing Talkshow about "Push and Pull Online Public Relations". I'll be talking with Cindy Turrietta about the market opportunity with online PR, explaining the concept of push and pull with examples of each as well as considerations on measuring results.

With all the buzz about optimizing and marketing with social media as well as the emerging meme in public relations on the social media news release format, there is an opportunity to help marketers better understand how these concepts can be applied in a practical manner.

Too often tactics get promoted as the latest and greatest trends without any substance or real world references. This interview is intended to provide a framework for understanding how marketers and public relations professionals can increase their reach and ability to be found by consumers as wel as the media by incorporating SEO concepts along with PR and social media.

You can tune in to the show by visiting the eMarketing Talkshow site at 4PM PST/6PM CST/7PM EST this Friday, December 1st. If you don't make it for the live show, the archives will be available in four segments when they are posted next week.

Tags: social media, push pull pr, online pr, marketing, public relations

YouTube Cashless with the Google Cow

Who isn't talking about this recent acqisition? Google BlogSearch, Technorati

$1.65 billion in stock is all it took to get YouTube over to the GOOG side.

Steve Rubel doesn't care and Mark Cuban says they're morons and that Google is crazy.

Another day in the search engine world......

Tags: youtube, google, googtube

Google's Blog Hacked

Google Blog announced today "About that fake post" that someone was able to get in and make a fake post about Google click to call being cancelled. Also commenting on this are Google Blogscoped with a screenshot of the fake post and ThreadWatch.

Brett Tabke Interview

Over at Media Posts' Search Insider there's a nice short interview with WebmasterWorld and Pubcon founder, Brett Tabke. A few highlights:

"Conferences must listen to what is going on with these weekenders and start to adjust the more formal conferences to get these people back into the process."

"Search engines are the current big muscle on the block. But they have one major weakness: they can’t exist without Web sites to feed them, but Web sites can exist just fine without search engines. Search is just about another form of traffic for Webmasters."

"I think we will see a day when a search service realizes that Aunt Sally’s phone number relates to a date notification of her birthday in such a way that it should send you to ProFlowers to buy Aunt Sally a birthday card."

"Organic search results are difficult for the average Web site to attain today. Organic optimization is becoming for professionals only."

Nice!

Too bad Rob got to Brett first. I was supposed to interview him last week but the biz comes first. I will be publishing an interview with Brett Tabke as well as several other search marketing luminaries at Online Marketing Blog in the coming weeks.