On occasion TopRank will get calls from prospective clients that ask about hiring multiple SEO agencies in an effort to get the "best of both worlds" in terms of best practices and performance through competition. On the surface, I suppose I could see how someone might think this might make sense but in practice, it really doesn't. The "two is better than one" philosophy might work when it comes to getting a second opinion from a doctor or a mechanic but with SEO,

Companies that take their search engine visibility for granted or that ride the technical SEO loophole/manipulation train often get a hard smack back to reality when their online sales disappear. Orders start to slip or fall off the map altogether and the IT team red alert phone rings off the hook with calls from the business owner, "What the hell happened to our rankings???

Today on this fine Friday ladies and gentlemen, we have a BIGLIST SEO blogs update for you slanting a bit toward agencies but not without some flavor from Germany and the Jungle. Read on: Seer Interactive Blog - Wil Reynolds and his team from Seer Interactive blog the gamut of Internet marketing topics ranging from SEO and PPC to branding and social media. Many posts are in-depth and very useful.

With so many "Web 2.0″ technologies coming in to play with web design and online application development, the effect on the search engines' ability to find, crawl and index content becomes an issue. As such, this session moderated by Kevin Ryan included deep dive advice from Chris "Silver" Smith, Lead Strategist from Netconcepts and Ambles Kwok, a Senior Engineering Manager from Yahoo Canada. Chris Silver Smith was first up and gave examples of Web 2.

If you've been in the search marketing industry for any length of time, you've undoubtedly encountered a wide variety of conflicting or outdated advice. Since "how to" information in so many other industries is often presented as an absolute, many people look for the same kinds of static and perpetual rules with search engine optimization. The problem comes from not discerning SEO myth and speculation from fact which can be a very costly mistake.

My first time in Toronto did not disappoint. It was brief but very busy with plenty of sessions to choose from during the day. Here is a collection of my favorite photos taken during SES Toronto this week: Matt McGowan, Joe Dolson and Todd Malicoat enjoying some pre-conference conversation Kevin Ryan getting the most out of Google's Bill Tighe during the Advanced Paid Search Panel David Silver Smith really gave up the goods during the Web 2.0 and Search Engines Panel.

I'm back from SES Toronto and wanted to share the presentation on Twitter with readers that weren't at the show. Fellow presenters @davesnyder and @chriswinfield did a great job and the audience received a deep drill down into many aspects of Twitter. In the end, Twitter on it's own and with it's uptime issues isn't anywhere near as productive as it is in combination with third party tools like Twhirl, Summize and Twitturly.

Last week at the PRSA Digital Impact conference I met Steve Rubel, SVP Director of Insights from Edelman Digital and famous )sometimes infamous( PR blogger at Micropersuasion . He presented "2008 Digital Trends: Open Files" which talks about the framework Edelman uses )Faint Signals, Watch List and Hallucinations for tracking digital/social media trends.

This panel at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference includes Heidi Sullivan and Jay Krall of Cision and Jason Falls of Doe Anderson and who writes Social Media Explorer . Heidi starts out a with a poll: How many comments for media relations? and How many have created a social profile for a client? A small number of hands raise for each question. Jason: What are three things you want to know? Less tools and tactics and more to how you're applying this,

Innovation, creative problem solving and passionate interest in the subject matter are a big part of successful internet and social marketing - the topics of prime interest to readers of Online Marketing Blog . Those same characteristics apply to organizations and individuals working to make strategic business and marketing changes for the future. In particular, these values are reflected in the upcoming PUSH 2008 conference in Minneapolis June 15-17.

I guess you could call this the "International Edition" of the BIGLIST Update of search marketing blogs as we have multiple countries represented including SEOs and PR professionals from the UK, New Zealand, Netherlands and USA. There's plenty of flavorful writing, advice and tips so read on: Searchwritten - Netherlands based Ramon Eijkemans started this new blog as a study in content SEO, a topic that's near and dear.

The search marketing industry is rich with acronyms: SEO, SEM, PPC, ROI, SERPs )even LMAO( as well as buzz phrases such as "search engine optimization" and "social media optimization". Do we really need another? One of the few things to be counted on in search marketing is that there will be change. That change comes in many forms including search engine algorithm changes )albeit more gradual than large, single events(,

At the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Toronto, I'll be presenting along with David Snyder and Chris Winfield a hotly anticipated session called " Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool ?". With the fast growth and uptime growing pains, debates about Twitter are plentiful so let's settle it once and for all with a Twitter poll: Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

With over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, there is a tremendous amount of momentum and motivation for businesses to take advantage of all the marketing, PR, support and revenue opportunities that business blogs can bring. Sometimes it seems there are more "blog consultants" than there are business blogs due to the ease of using free blog software like Blogger or Wordpress.com/Wordpress.org.

Here we SEO again with a bi-weekly update of TopRank's BIGLIST of SEO blogs . The list must be hot because we've been receiving requests just about every day over the past few weeks. Of course, that's not the best way to get on the list if you've read the guidelines. Links are always a good way for us to find you or being listed on other SEO blogs' blogrolls is a good way too. This of course, your blog is about search engine optimization,

Companies large and small spend significant proportions of their revenue on branding efforts as well as those things that influence customer perception of brand like product development, support and customer service. While there is debate about who "owns" a brand, the company or it's customers, partners and employees, it can be agreed that there is tremendous value and equity in a company's brand.

Someone that I've wanted to interview as much as Robert Scoble is Guy Kawasaki. Guy is an enthusiastic promoter and marketer which are qualities Online Marketing Blog readers can appreciate a great deal. In this interview, he talks briefly about his most recent project, Alltop as well as changes he would make to Twitter, business blogging advice and a curious admission that he doesn't understand SEO.

Lee and Rob at PRSA International 2007 On the marketing conference circuit, online reputation management is a hot topic now more then ever. Whether it's search marketing, public relations or direct marketing, companies are trying to make sense of how to monitor and manage the brand impact of online conversations and their visibility in search results. Last Thursday I did a national PRSA teleseminar with Kami Watson Huyse,

The results of our poll on how Online Marketing Blog readers use Twitter are in. We had over 220 responses, which isn't a bad sample considering this blog is fairly niche with a modest sized )and very smart( audience. Below I've listed the poll results and a few comments on each. )39%, 87 Votes( Sharing links to items of interest to your network - Not surprising since the speed of reach on Twitter is so fast. As soon as you find something interesting that's linkable,

Tonight interactive gurus from General Mills, Best Buy, Target, Fingerhut and Gage will convene at an event hosted by MIMA to discuss: Duality Reality: Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise ? As a preview, I reached out to Douglas Pollei )left( of Social Media Club Minneapolis and VP of Internet Strategy and Corporate Development for IKANO Communications who helped get the panel created and panelist Jim Cuene )right(, who is Director of Interactive at General Mills.