Roundup: Essential Online Marketing and SEO Blogs

April 25th, 2007

Search engine representatives

Industry news

SEO Bloggers

  • SEOmoz - Rand and his crew post about all sorts, but never fail to entertain or to stimulate discussion.
  • SEO Book - Aaron Wall shares insights and advice
  • Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal’s excellent resource with views and search news
  • Jim Boykin - CEO of webuildpages, and link ninja
  • GreyWolf - Offers the occasional gold nugget of information or opinion. Worth subscribing to.
  • Andy Beard - Niche marketing ‘opinion and attitude’
  • Dave Naylor - UK seo and supposed occasional grey hat - shares some great tips and insights

Grey and Blackhat blogs
(Because it’s important to keep up to date with what shady tactics are being used, and sometimes these guys share extremely valuable white-hat tricks and tips)

  • SEO Blackhat - News and opinion from the dark side of SEO
  • Blue Hat SEO - Eli is one of the most candid bloggers out there, often sharing detailed guides on how to make money and achieve results. Shame it’s often not using ethical methods!

Design, accessibility and usability, and other blogs

  • Seth Godin - Author of books about permission marketing and general buisness observations, you’ll never read a post on this blog which isn’t thought provoking and makes you question the way many companies run their business. Highly recommended.
  • Signal vs. Noise - The way all company blogs should be. Insights into business descisions, interesting opinions and interviews (chats), and some great advice on usability.
  • A List Apart - Explore the design and meaning of the web. Standards and accessibility gods
  • ProBlogger - Tips on blog writing, promoting your blog and monetisation. Worthy reading whether writing your own blog for profit, or creating a corporate blog for a client.
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Roundup: Beginners guides to SEO and Online Marketing

April 23rd, 2007

Taking over as Head of Online Marketing here at zoomzoom has very much been a case of landing at a full sprint - organising outstanding sales, updating clients.. and interviewing for a new trainee online marketing consultant have all had me tied up, along with keeping up with industry news from SES New York.

Anyway, I’d like to introduce Jason who comes to us fresh from the freelance side of web development to be subjected to a gruelling training regime which will turn him from an SEO beginner to a rankings king. I thought I’d take the time to hunt around for some great resources and share them here - the following links are highly recommended reading to those new to the industry.

  • SEOMoz Beginners guide to search engine optimisation - I’ve yet to see a clearer introduction to some of the fundamental basics of building an accessible, well optimised site. Essential reading for those new to SEO.
  • SEO Book Search engine marketing glossary - Stumped by the meaning of a ‘301′? ‘Long tail’? ‘TrustRank’? If you wanna play the game, you have to know the lingo ;)
  • zoomzoom Guide to Online Marketing - Ok ok, so we’ll blow our own trumpet - our guide was designed to give new clients a basic overview of the various areas of online marketing, and so is worth a read so that you’re aware of the various methods of marketing your site
  • SEOmoz Search engine ranking factors V2 - Now that you’ve learnt the basics, you’ll want to know what’s most effective with SEO, right? SEOmoz brought together some of the biggest names in SEO to give feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
  • Stuntdubl SEO Playbook - A great ‘advanced beginners’ guide and a wealth of links onto further reading on various aspects of SEO.

There you go Jason - that should keep you busy for a day or two! :)

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Google to own an SEM & SEO firm

April 18th, 2007

News bouncing around the blogosphere lately has been that Google is set to acquire DoubleClick, one of the largest advertising agencies online, for a cool $3.1 billion.

All very interesting in itself, with Microsoft making noise that Google is starting to look anti-competitive in terms of online advertising. Many are also wondering what this means for the large amount of CPM advertising that DoubleClick run and the massive advertising clients they have (You know, the ones who are too big and ‘corporate’ to have really considered AdWords yet, but we all worry about because if they jump on the AdWords bandwagon that can only mean an increase in costs for smaller advertisers).

Stephan Spencer, however, points out something unprecedented. DoubleClick own a large SEO/SEM agency called Performics. Therefore Google are about to acquire a company who charge clients to increase their search engine positioning… on Google.

What’s even more shocking? Google state “Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at this time.”

I can’t believe for a second that they’ll keep Performics, but if they do (and keep the SEO side of the business), they’ll have to maintain the shiniest of white-hat ethics and have no contact with Google engineers or other data-sensitive Google employees. Will that hurt the effectiveness of their campaigns? Time will tell.

If any Performics clients want to jump ship, zoomzoom are here for you! ;)

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