First off, I must apologize for the radio silence for a number of weeks. Over half the month is gone already and I hadn't blogged once! Very naughty! I had a good excuse though -- I was super-busy with my move from New Zealand back home to the States. (Yes, that's right, back in beautiful Madison Wisconsin, in time to enjoy a second summer this year!) Now that the move's done, and all my conference hopping -- SMX, Internet Retailer, SES Toronto, and various AMA speaking engagements (last one is this Friday, btw) -- is nearly at an end (at least for a few weeks), I can take a breath and get back into blogging. Back to the point of this post...

Last month I had the pleasure of interviewing Marylynne Tosyali, who is the Director of Online Marketing at Direct Marketing Services Inc., the company behind Wards.com, HomeVisions.com, and several other online stores. We talked about their foray into blogging, about GravityStream (Disclosure: yes, they happen to be a client of ours), about paid search successes, and a bunch of other search related issues. It was a great interview, and I'm pleased to share with you the 45 minute audio recording...

Download / Listen to the interview (MP3, 44 minutes, 10 megs)

This is the latest in a series of podcasts for the American Marketing Association's "Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing" conference in Chicago.

Marylynne will be speaking at the conference this Friday (June 22nd). I'll be speaking there too, btw! :-)

There's still time to register. It's going to be a great turnout. Hope to see you there!

In this hour-long podcast, my conversation with Alan Rimm-Kaufman of paid search agency Rimm-Kaufman Group covers topics of paid search, natural search, books, economics and incentives. We dig deep into paid search, and Alan shares some real gems -- from quality score gotchas to daily caps to metrics. It was a fascinating discussion.

This is the latest in a series of podcasts for the American Marketing Association's "Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing" conference. Both Alan and I will be speaking for the AMA this Friday in NYC and next month (June 22nd) in Chicago. (There's still time to register for either one, btw.)

Download / Listen to the interview (MP3, 55 minutes, 13 megs)

I just had a very enjoyable dinner with my colleague Alan Rimm-Kaufman, founder of paid search firm, Rimm-Kaufman Group. We always have such thought-provoking conversations whenever we meet up. This evening was no exception.

At one point our conversation turned to Microsoft. What can they do about Google and Yahoo eating their lunch? Microsoft has become an "also ran" in the paid search space. They are so far behind in paid search (organic search, too, for that matter), that it's going to take a miracle for them to pull out from behind. Or not? Could they perhaps launch a devastating nuclear attack against Google, wiping out the entire paid search industry in the process? Believe it or not, the answer is "yes," and the approach would be surprisingly simple and inexpensive for Microsoft to implement...

Alan described Paul Bryant's "doomsday" scenario to me as follows (hat tip to Alan, btw)... Microsoft simply introduces a Google ad blocker to Windows (which works in IE and Firefox) and pushes it out through a Windows Update. And here's the kicker -- Microsoft turns it ON by default! Of course they will also have to block their own ads, so they don't get nailed under anti-trust laws.

Scary.

Last week I conducted a fascinating interview with SEM expert Alan Rimm-Kaufman. You can find the output of it here. Alan made many great points; this one, regarding common mistakes in Paid Search, really stood out:

Typical mistakes made by newcomers to paid search include using an insufficiently large term list, not understanding the strengths and limitations of their tracking systems, not customizing copy to match the search phrase, not having a firm grasp of their online acquisition economics, and not bidding wisely.

Typical mistakes made by more experienced search marketers include not separating their brand from their non-brand results in reporting and bidding; not understanding the (non)incremental value of their affiliate programs; mishandling dayparting; and overbidding on broad generic terms.

I encourage you to read the full interview.

BTW, Alan isn't the only large brain over at the Rimm-Kaufman Group. George Michie justed posted some excellent tips on giving your PPC campaigns a check-up, which should prove helpful in exposing your own PPC mistakes.

Search engine optimization will undergo a huge transformation over the next several years. If you want to hear me prognosticate, then you'll want to check out my article titled "The Shifting SEO Landscape", published on page 58 in the brand new DM News' Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing. Download the PDF of the Guide here (5.2 megs). Enjoy!

The web team at Verizon Information Directories who operate the top online yellow pages site SuperPages.com, are really clued in to SEO. (I should know since they're one of our clients!). So you could imagine my delight when Chris Smith, who heads up the team there, accepted my offer to become a contributing blogger at Natural Search Blog. Chris has entered the blogosphere with a bang, contributing some awesome posts on SEO over the past couple of weeks:

• Need more traffic? Try Image Search Optimization
• New Domain Names for Brands - Very Limited
• Afraid of Click Fraud? Try Pay-For-Call
• Google Releases New Related Links Feature
• Plenty of Traffic
• Optimize your roof ads for Google Maps (a tongue-in-cheek post)

Great posts! The ones on optimizing for Google Images and on pay-per-call are particularly meaty.

I am looking for a couple more contributing bloggers for Natural Search Blog. So if you fancy yourself an SEO expert and would like to blog, please drop me a note at stephanmspencer@gmail.com.

If you've got a multi-author blog and those bloggers have their own independent websites, they'll probably want and appreciate getting links from you.

Include links to all your author's websites in your sidebar rather than at the bottom of your page, because footer links don't get as much weight by the search engines. Or better yet, only include your list of author links from the home page rather than making it a site-wide link, which will also get partially discounted by the search engines.

Within every post that they author, include a link to their site. That will motivate them to post more often.

Also include with each post a link to their profile page (hosted on your blog). Each author profile page should contain a link to that author's site, a biographical statement (taken from the "About Yourself" field in their profile), and the posts that they've authored. Here is my profile page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com, for example.

Let them define the anchor text of the link to their site, since anchor text is such an important element for SEO (see my Blog SEO Tip on Anchor Text). The way I did it for BusinessBlogConsulting.com, which runs on WordPress, I had them specify the anchor text they wanted in the Nickname field on their edit profile page and I used that instead of their name.

Using bold, strong, or emphasis tags within the body copy of your blog posts will help identify to search engines like Yahoo! which words/phrases should be given more weight. This is a useful technique for blog optimization. Notice that I made the phrase "blog optimization" bold in the previous sentence. That's an example of this tactic in practice. ;-)

Feel free to emphasize multiple phrases in your copy. Even make use of Heading tags if your post is particularly long. Just don't overdue it. If it seems overoptimized when you read it, then it is!

Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page's overall keyword theme. The posting date should never be within an H1 tag, because you're NOT trying to rank well in the engines for a date. Instead, wrap an H1 tag around your category name or tag name on your category page or tag page, respectively. Then make the titles of your blog posts H2 tags, so that on a category or tag page, the category/tag words can be the only H1 on the page and thus can convey greater emphasis than the post titles.

You could even take this idea a step further and make the post title display within an H1 tag if it's a Sticky post, and within an H2 if a normal post. (See my last post for more on the benefits of Sticky posts for SEO.) Check out this example category page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com where I did just that.

A "sticky" post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. The "sticky" feature is available in some blog systems by default (e.g. Blogger.com) and in others through the use of a plugin (e.g. the Adhesive plugin for WordPress).

Why would you ever want to make a post sticky? Because it's an easy way to improve the keyword prominence on a category page or tag page. If you're not familiar with the concept of keyword prominence, it's simply this: the higher up on the page your targeted keyword is, the better you'll rank. So, having keyword-rich intro copy that consistently appears at the top of a category page or a tag page will give you good keyword prominence and help you maintain a stable keyword theme for the page even when old posts fall off the page and new posts appear.

You can achieve this with a blog post containing your desired keyword-rich intro copy, categorizing/tagging it so that it appears on the desired page and making the post "Sticky" so that it stays on the top of the tag page. Back-date the post so it doesn't appear on the top of your home page, just on the appropriate category or tag page. With the Adhesive plugin, you should select the "Show Sticky Posts Only on Category Pages" option in the configuration settings to ensure that they never appear on the home page. If you're also using UltimateTagWarrior to create tag pages, you'll need to edit the following line (which appears twice) in the Adhesive plugin from:

if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category())

to:

if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category() || is_tag())

If you aren't able to make posts sticky for whatever reason, then a kludge to still get the desired effect would be to put your intro copy directly into your template/theme and use a series of if/then statements to determine which copy to display based on which category/tag is active.

UPDATE: Here is an example category page where I've added some intro copy in the form of a Sticky post.