Spotlight on Search Interview: Mel Carson Microsoft Advertising If you attend Search Marketing industry conferences, you've no doubt run into the ever optimistic and charming Mel Carson from Microsoft. When I was last in London, Mel connected me with an excellent Fish n Chips that the pubs around Trafalgar Square couldn't get close to. Mel is active as an advocate of Microsoft Advertising ,

TopRank Online Marketing is proud to be a founding sponsor of the first Minnesota Blogger Conference . Tickets for this event "sold out" within a few hours and there are over 100 people on the waiting list. Thanks to conference founders Melissa Berggren, Arik Hanson, Suzi Magill and Katie Schutrop, it's already one hot event. The date is Saturday, Sept 11 )the day I fly to Hong Kong( and the location is at CoCo MSP in Saint Paul .

Aaron Goldman is an accomplished digital marketer that I know through MediaPost's Search Insider Summit conference. He reached out to me while writing his new book, "Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google", and asked if I'd like to contribute. Such a request is a great honor to me but unfortunately, I never did end up sending anything to Aaron even though he was incredibly patient and went out of his way to make it easy.

I was reading a copy of the Inc 500 issue on my flight back from Dallas this weekend and came across an article about a seasonal online retailer that was "penalized" right before the Holidays for paid links and estimated the loss of organic search visibility at $4 million in sales. Now he's "thanking" Google for the spanking because he's mended his ways and is reborn as a social media enthusiast.

Army Golden Knights: SFC Dave Herwig )@gkdave(, SGM Steve Young )@gksteve(, LTC Joe Martin )gkjoe( My presentation on how to leverage Social Media SEO to improve the reach and effectiveness of blog content for marketing at OpenCa.mp DFW this weekend ended up being a lot of information in a very short period of time.

OpenCamp's Sunday schedule included presentations on blogging that included Chris Pirillo , Brian Clark and myself. I caught up with Brian before he gave his presentation to give us a little preview. John P. ended up using the video as the segue between Brian and I as we changed microphones. Watch as Brian talks about the importance of planning content and understanding its purpose in order to be effective with blog copywriting.

At the OpenCa.mp conference in Dallas this weekend I was able to re-connect with Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome and the Gnomedex conference )We've interviewed each other in the past(. We both jumped out of the same airplane with the Army Golden Knights last week and are also speaking today about blogs at OpenCa.mp . I caught up with Chris to talk about his take on SEO and social media.

The first content session I'm attending at OpenCamp is by Gio, aka Giovanni Gallucci, a longtime search and social media marketer based in Dallas. The topic is "Blackhat SEO" and the room is packed! The session was cut a bit short due to technical difficulties with getting the conference started and Gio took it in stride and was both entertaining and informative - the right mix for a morning tech crowd.

Army Strong Stories is a program to draw attention to the real life and experience of being in the Army through soldier stories communicated via media socially. Recently Greg Swan of the Minneapolis Public Relations firm, Weber Shandwick, that is behind the Army Strong Stories campaign contacted me with a compelling opportunity to create my own Army story: "Would you like to go skydiving with the US Army Golden Knights?" Who are the Golden Knights ?

Dave Roth works as Director of Search Marketing at Yahoo. That means Dave is a Search Engine Marketer that works for a search engine. I've known Dave for several years and we finally decided to do a video interview. Watch the interview below to learn what a search marketer that works for a search engine does, especially the challenges and opportunities in communications on search marketing performance in a large company. Click here to view the embedded video. Of course,

QR code on the side of a building? Geek cool. Last week the West Coast Search Engine Strategies conference moved from San Jose back to its roots in San Francisco. It was a well attended show )5,000+ in 2009 vs. 6,000 in 2010 registrations(, despite the illusion created by the voluminous Moscone. As part of Connected Marketing Week, SES included a great mix of sessions. In fact,

More and more website owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content. For example, if you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS ? Will other sites be considered the "real" site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results?

Thanks to Ray 'Catfish' Comstock for providing the title of this post with his opening remarks during the session. Joining Comstock on this panel, moderated by Seth Besmertnik, CEO, Conductor, Inc.: Crispin Sheridan, SES Advisory Board & Sr Director of Search Marketing Strategy, SAP Bill Hunt, SES Advisory Board & President, Back Azimuth Consulting Guillaume Bouchard, SES Advisory Board & President, Back Azimuth Consulting As a good writer and analyst,

Websites and landing pages face very real trust issues - for consumers they can be a scary and uncertain place. Before people will take a desired action, their concerns and anxieties must be addresses. But how can you do this on landing pages when you only have seconds to establish trust? Tim Ash, SiteTuners CEO and bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization , shared how to effectively use the Four Pillars Of Trust and optimize your online conversion goals.

What's the quickest way to catch a fish? Offer the right bait. What's the quickest way to get a B2B marketer to an SES session? Title it 'B2B Marketing Tips .' What's the quickest way to get you to read this post? By diving right in to the top 5 tips shared: Your conversion goals must become more sophisticated** Yes, probably even yours. For the simple reason that you should always be testing and always be experimenting with something new.

For mainstream media to survive, if not thrive, it must integrate with the social web and create engagement surrounding content. For social media to remain relevant and compelling, it must work in tandem with news organizations to create a symbiotic storytelling relationship. The future may be a stream with the authenticity of the social web and the reach of mainstream media. Lead by moderator Khris Loux, CEO & Co-Founder,

Ultimately, to measure Search Engine Optimization )SEO( success, you aren't necessarily looking at individual metrics - you are looking for a connection between the metrics - and the resulting affect on revenue. If my lead seems to negate the name validity of the SES San Francisco session, 'Meaningful SEO Metrics,' it is completely unintentional. Moderated by John Marshall, CTO of Market Motive and SES Advisory Board Member,

Let's get this out of the way. 100% accuracy does not exist in website analytics. Repeat. 100% accuracy does not exist in analytics. What does exist in analytics is data - lots of it - and with this comes fear. Fear of looking at the wrong data. Fear of where to start. Fear of analytics failure . This fear will only dissipate with knowledge.

Take a deep breath if you feel one step behind in terms of mobile Search Engine Optimization )SEO(. If the crowd size for the session Getting Mobilized! Mobile Marketing Strategies at SES San Francisco is any indication, you are in quite good company. The session, moderated by Paul Cushman, Senior Director, Mobile Sales Strategy, Yahoo!, featured on its panel: Cindy Krum, Chief Executive Officer, Rank-Mobile, LLC Sandeep Aggarwal, Managing Director, Internet & Software,

It's been several years since I have seen TopRank CEO Lee Odden contribute to the panel ' SEO Through Blogs & Feeds ,' so I was eager to sit in on this session to close out my first day at this year's SES San Francisco. Joining Odden on his panel, moderated by Craig Macdonald, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Covario, was PRESSfeed President Sally Falkow. As Odden states,