"SEO is dead." Making a statement like that is a great way to generate lots of traffic, and comments, as Micah Baldwin and Mike McDonald have recently demonstrated. But it's still nonsense. As I noted in my comment to comment Michah's post on Learn to Duck, articles like this have been appearing since at least 2003, so if SEO is dying, it's an awfully slow death. It is changing, however, as Google's plans for search personalization are rolled out. Using factors such as geographic location, "preferences" as indicated by your search history, and even integration of tools like SearchWiki and Google Friend Connect (nicely explained by TechCrunch ), Google will customize search results for each user. This means that, very soon, your site may show up at #1, #5, #12 or some other spot for any given search term depending on who is doing the searching. Already, automated position-checking tools like Rank Checker and SEO Chat produce erroneous res...

Aaron Goldman over at MediaPost just posted his 10 Reasons Search Marketers Should Be Thankful . In terms of the research, the links, and the thought put in behind it, this is an outstanding post. Search may not be recession-proof—links to a post Aaron wrote about a month ago where he provides research demonstrating how and why search marketing will remain strong through this downturn. Google's free keyword tool and Insights for Search tool—the keyword tool is hardly new, but has been upgraded, and is much more robust than it used to be. And Insights is just a lot of fun. Google Analytics is enterprise-ready —a recent post from Jeff Campbell that delves into the latest enhancements added to Analytics and why these make it now competitive with top-shelf analytics packages. New Study Reveals Untapped Billions In Search Marketing —some interesting research here on the growth potential for paid search. However, "hold-outs from the paid search Stone Age" seems a rath...

On the occasion of the 300th post on the WebMarketCentral blog, and to see how things have changed since the first 100 posts , here are the 10 most popular posts of all time so far. #10: The 8 Layers of a B2B Web Marketing Plan , October 8, 2008 The most recent post to make this list presents B2B marketing as a series of concentric layers, with SEO at the core then moving outward from highly measurable online direct response tactics to broader brand advertising. #9: Best of 2007: Articles and Blog Posts on SEO (Part 1) , January 28, 2008 Summaries of and links to a dozen outstanding articles on SEO from some of the top pros like Lee Odden , Jon Rognerud and Danny Sullivan . Also, I think, the first time on this blog I made the case that SEO is far from dead. #8: Web 2.0 Social Tagging Sites, Part 7: The Best , June 26, 2007 "Based on two months of testing across a half-dozen B2B websites and blogs, these Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites produced the best results, in terms of driv...

This content has been moved to Best of 2008: Blogging for Business on the Webbiquity blog. ***** technorati tags: great blog name, common blogging mistakes, best place to host your blog, blogging for business, Smarter Than Your Average Blog, Steph Auteri, Lee Odden, Darren Rowse, HubSpot, Mike Volpe, Michael Gray, Jeff Quipp, Danny Dover, ProfitBlogger, Praval Singh del.icio.us tags: great blog name, common blogging mistakes, best place to host your blog, blogging for business, Smarter Than Your Average Blog, Steph Auteri, Lee Odden, Darren Rowse, HubSpot, Mike Volpe, Michael Gray, Jeff Quipp, Danny Dover, ProfitBlogger, Praval Singh icerocket tags: great blog name, common blogging mistakes, best place to host your blog, blogging for business, Smarter Than Your Average Blog, Steph Auteri, Lee Odden, Darren Rowse, HubSpot, Mike Volpe, Michael Gray, Jeff Quipp, Danny ...

The trends are clear: as the economic malaise deepens, GDP growth heads into negative territory and unemployment rises, marketers are slamming the brakes on any program that is offline / branding and shifting whatever dollars they have left in their shrinking budgets to online / direct response. Last week, MarketingSherpa published two charts showing the shift from offline to online spending, and from brand advertising to direct. Then yesterday, they released this chart, providing detail on the shift in tactics. The temptation to move in this direction is obvious—but temptations can be dangerous. Shifting resources to social network interaction is smart, and likely would have occurred to some extent even without a recession. Emailing to house lists is another no brainer, though it has to be done with caution; if overdone, unsubscribes will increase and your house list will shrink. As for the next two tactics on the list, paid search and telemarketing, the only surprise is that...

Creating a successful viral marketing campaign has been likened to hitting home runs—you never know which at-bat is going to produce one, so the key is to make a lot of trips to the plate. Put another way, there is no magic formula for producing a viral campaign, you just have to try different concepts. There are, however, certain characteristics that will either increase the odds of viral success, or doom it to failure. Simplicity: engaging with your campaign should be easy and intuitive. Most of us have too much to think about already: deadlines at work, paying the bills, juggling schedules—interacting with a viral campaign isn't something we should have to put a whole lot of thought into. If your concept requires too much thought, the only people it will catch on with are those who have nothing better to do. Originality: if an idea feels too familiar, it won't go anywhere. There are about a zillion variations of whack-a-mole games, for example. This concept was very cl...

This is the second of a two-part series. Part one covered what Twitter is and why it's cool ; this post discusses Twitter etiquette, tools, and speculation about its future. How to Twitter Properly Like any other social setting, Twitter has its own etiquette. This can be confusing to new users. (And, as you can see by spending more than a few minutes on Twitter, it's apparently elusive to many long-time users as well.) Margaret Mason has written an outstanding primer on Twitter etiquette , offering advice such as watch your ratio ("If only a few people follow you, but you follow a thousand or more, many people will assume you’re a spammer. That’s because you probably are. Go away, spammer."); never Twitter if you're drunk or high; and most importantly, "remember that everyone can hear you." The brilliant Mike Volpe of HubSpot takes a different approach to offering his advice in 5 Things On Twitter That Annoy the Crap Out of Me . His practices-to-...