The buzz about SEO in the public relations industry has grown tremendously over the past 2-3 years. Press releases in particular, have been the easy target for promotion as candidates for optimization. With the growing use of Google and Yahoo News, optimizing press releases have been an easy way to gain prominent visibility in the short term and in some cases, long term visibility in standard search engines.

This week might as well be called "social media week" with the NewComm Forum, SMX Social Media and the Web 2.0 Expo all happening at pretty much the same time. Companies worldwide are trying their best to make sense of the emerging landscape of social technologies and the new book, Groundswell , from Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester does a fantastic job at just that.

Good things come to those who wait and dammit, we've been waiting a good long time for some new search marketing blogs worthy of addition to the BIGLIST. You can still get updates by following the BIGLIST Twitter account as well. Enjoy! WebmasterRadio.FM - Our friends from WebmasterRadio.FM have joined the cool kids and started a blog. Jody from WMR posts that you can now watch the live video stream, chat with all the other WebmasterRadio.FM listeners,

Thanks to the response received )@gyutae @AlbertMaruggi @AnnBernard @briansolis @martinbowling( from a Twitter post ) follow here ( on the topic of social marketing vs direct marketing, this post invites your opinion. In a recent strategy session, some colleagues and I were discussing a promotion where one position was to focus on a direct marketing approach and another position involved social media, networks and communities. Compared to direct marketing efforts )snail mail,

After 10 plus years in the SEM business, it's a bit of an understatement to say that the nature of SEO is constantly changing. Those changes involve both the search engines refining the way they sort and display search results as well as consumer search behaviors. A simple example would be a year ago, searching Google would return mostly web pages in the search results. That same search today might include videos, news items,

Photo Credit, CC Chapman At last year's DMA07 Annual Conference, I had the good fortune of giving half of a workshop on social media with renowned author, speaker and new media marketing guru, Joseph Jaffe . Too many marketing pundits don't "walk the talk" and I found this not to be the case with Jaffe. A brilliant marketer who dares to challenge established marketing groupthink and advocates experimentation,

M&O PR 's Kevin Sawyer and I are now finally back in the office after two jam packed days of Media Relations Summit. Public and media relations professionals, academics and business communicators from across the country gathered at what is known as the largest event for media relations in the world. Kevin blogged the event over at Media Relations blog and I made a few posts here and many more on Twitter .

In the opening keynote at Media Relations Summit, the legendary TV journalist and interviewer, Charlie Rose , had the tables turned and became interviewee with the famous PR guru, Howard Rubenstein. Rubenstein: Why are your interviews so revealing? How do you get your guests to reveal so much? Rose: The thing about a story' Describes the recent news over the weekend about the Clinton campaign manager getting sacked. People that do what I do want to advance a story like that.

The day two Media Relations Summit lunch keynote is given by Mike Moran , a distinguished engineer from IBM, who starts out with a question: Did Robert Scoble make you feel technologically stupid this morning and now you're thinking you have to listen to an engineer? Mike admits he can't be Robert and neither should we. "You have permission to sip from the new web 2.0 world, rather than drink from it like a fire hose".

This session at Media Relations Summit includes Tac Anderson from HP, Jennifer Cisney from Kodak and Robert Scoble from Fast Company. First up is Tac Anderson from HP, who shares a specific example of a tactical execution of a blog. HP has had bloggers for 3 years. 60+ blogs. Example of using a business blog as a competitive response. Xerox announced a change in pricing. Charging more for the printer and less for the consumables - ink and paper. The next day,

Our client visit to San Francisco last week fell right next to the Media Relations Summit conference happening this week at the Westin St. Francis on Union Square. The near crossover meant a weekend in one of my favorite cities. As one of the largest conferences dedicated to media relations, this event attracts an array of public relations practitioners including the top PR agencies in the world,

I discovered several of the blogs on this week's update via all the new Twitter followers we've been getting at the leeodden and the BIGLIST accounts. Welcome to all of our new friends! 70% of the blogs queued up for review this week didn't make it to the list, but what we do have is a nice mix of social media, SEO and online marketing topics for you to choose from: Jacob Morgan - A nice mix of social, viral,

It's pretty common in the interactive, advertising and PR agency world to outsource components of an engagement where the lead agency does not have specific domain expertise. Those scenarios are often structured by the client who is already working with other vendors or the lead agency bringing in outside expertise. For the most part, it's pretty transparent what is outsourced and what is not. Is this the same in the search marketing and especially, the SEO industry?

Recently internet marketing legend, Larry Chase of Web Digest for Marketers asked for a contributed article on marketing with social media. Unlike many SEO focused social media marketing practitioners which tend to emphasize promoting stories to go "hot" for traffic bursts and ancillary links, TopRank focuses on a long term mix of Branding/PR/SEO tactics to engage in discussions and promotions within social communities. To make the article more social,

Ah yes, we skipped a weekly update of our SEO blog review for the BIGLIST. Conferences in New York will do that to you. This week we have the usual social media trend as well as SEO with one re-inclusion. Social Media Mom - Social media consultant Kristen Munson sports some nifty red pumps on her avatar and in between doing mom things also blogs about, you guessed it, social media! Cruces - Michael Myers, COO of FreshCurrent,

There are many reasons social media can be a productive marketing channel or platform. Rather than emplying it as a tactic du jour, the purpose should dictate strategy and the tactics used for reaching desired goals. A few common outcomes for social media marketing efforts include: Gain insight into a community of interest -You can run all the customer surveys you want,

The abundance of Online Marketing Blog coverage of SES New York slowed significantly by Wed afternoon but there was nothing slowing down the SES NY conference, which had record breaking attendance numbers. Despite my TopRank blogging compatriot Jolina having Thursday off and myself moderating and speaking that day, there was plenty of action documented during the sessions day 1 , 2 , 3 and 4 , at the Microsoft party and the WebmasterRadio.FM SearchBash .

The New Face o In-House Search included Ron Belanger as the moderator and Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International, Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit, Marshall D. Simmonds from New York Times, Bill Macaitis from Fox Interactive Media and Brendan Hart from National Geographic Digital Media. First up is Bill Hunt to talk about what perspective companies should take when considering bringing search marketing in-house. What are the best options?

On Thursday I'll be presenting on a panel, " Beyond Linkbat: Getting Authoritative Mentions Online " with Chris Boggs and Sally Falkow. Sage Lewis will be moderating. I think this type of session is very timely as search engines begin to put more and more emphasis on higher quality and editorial link sources and less on sources that are easier to manipulate. Increasing competition online also means online branding and influence increase in their importance.

Day two rolled right along here at SES New York with great sessions well documented by an array of blog coverage . This includes our own Jolina Pettice who filed an SES inspired post on " Tips for Overcoming Client-Created Roadblocks " as well as session coverage of " Converting Visitors into Buyers " and the Orion panel on Universal Search . We also posted a video interview with Sara Holoubeck on current SEMPO news.