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the search marketing industry for any length of time, you've undoubtedly encountered a wide variety of conflicting or outdated advice.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,

The TopRank team works really well together, bringing to each team meeting various areas of expertise and interest, which makes for a well-rounded environment here in our Lake Minnetonka office. We know how to play off of everyone's strengths and ensure our clients are fully serviced based on their needs and objectives by those who can best take on that role. Below is a list of our favorite online marketing tips , which - as a team - makes us stronger than each individual.

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.

With all the sessions, speakers, networking and photo-snapping going on in the last 2 days at SMX Advanced in Seattle, it's surprising any attendee got anything else completed at all. While I didn't attend every session )can't be in three places at once - just not possible for this girl :(( I managed to get to quite a few where I learned a lot of valuable information and got a feel for what everyone was talking about.

While there is still a debate over the effect of the recession we are in, or even if we are in a recession at all, it seems most companies and individuals are preparing for it the best they can. Talks of budget cuts and conserving resources are on everyone's minds these days. So where does search marketing fit in to all of this? Our expert panel this morning at SMX Advanced - consisting of Jon Miller from Marketo , Russ Mann of Covario ,

Day 1 at SMX Advanced has wrapped up quite nicely. Below are some of the session highlights and the gorgeous Bell Harbor Conference Center. Danny Sullivan opening the show this morning in Seattle. Everyone milling around, getting ready for the first of this mornings sessions Blow Your Mind Linkbuilding Tactics panel this morning B uilding Value for your SEO Business session,

Watch out link-and site-buyers alike! Matt Cutts is in town! For those of you know don't know )is there anyone out there who doesn't?(, Matt Cutts is the head of Google's web spam team; which means any secret we are hearing at SMX Advanced, Matt is making sure the shady tactics aren't working anymore next week. Beginning with a pop culture comparison, Matt states that risky link building behavior is a lot like Milli Vanilli.

Technical issues flavored the beginning of this session at SMX Advanced in Seattle. However, "oopsies" notwithstanding, Blow Your Mind Linkbuilding Tactics was informative with plenty of advice for gaining the authoritative inbound links web sites need to rank well in the search engines. The session was packed with link builders looking for new and cutting edge linking information. While we listened, Roger Monti,

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.