My first guest blogging was published yesterday. I discuss Conversion and Google Maps Optimization at the Conversion Scientist website.

Most of you know that I’ve started a new internet marketing firm called ionadas local. It provides search and social media services to local businesses. These will tend to be smaller businesses than the national brands I’ve worked with in the past.
As part of the ionadas local website, I have created the ionadas local Marketing [...]

Some of you have already heard, but effective immediately, I am taking a sabbatical from Apogee Search.

The economic seas for the last year or so have been quite rough, and the Apogee Search ship was buffeted just like everyone else. Going into this recession, the search marketing industry was rather arrogant. “We’re the trackable part of marketing,” we all said. “No one is going to cut back on us.”

Marketing geeks (like me!) should be sure not to miss my article in MarketingProfs, Seven Tips for Marketing Events With Paid Search. It was published today.
In the article, I explain how to get the most out of using paid search to promote events. Due to the time-sensitive (and time-limited) nature of events, they do require [...]

The Thursday (2nd day) keynote for PubCon South 2009 was given by Matt Cutts, head of the quality assurance team at Google. He was introduced by Brett Tabke.

Before launching into his usual Q&A, he introduced us all to Google Friend Connect API.

PubCon last week was a fantastic show. It had the strongest, most useful content of any search show I’ve been to in the last few years. The attendees were numerous and enthusiastic.
One area was curiously weak, however: the exhibitor floor.
There were less than fifty exhibitors for the entire show. Most of these were search engines, [...]

The final session of PubCon last week was the Search Engine Smackdown, with representatives of each engine giving a “State of the Engine” address, and then answering questions as a group. On the panel were Matt Cutts of Google, Sean Suchter of Yahoo, and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search. It was moderated by Brett [...]

The final round of Interactive Site Reviews at PubCon included a panel from the search engines themselves. It was moderated by Greg Boser and included Matt Cutts of Google, Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search, and Tony Adam of Yahoo Media.
Instead of taking notes, I decided to shoot pictures instead.

If you know of good coverage [...]

Here are a few links to coverage of my sessions at PubCon:
Universal and Personal Search – This Changes Everything

Kooshy
Search Engine War
TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog
Trinitude Network

Brand Reputation

SEO Roundtable
Bruce Clay Inc.
Online Marketing Blog
WebPro Business

From Michael Stebbins, CEO of Market Motive in the “Learning To Love Your Quality Score” session at PubCon:
For e-commerce advertisers, instead of deep linking your paid search ads, take visitors to the homepage and dynamically adjust the content of the page to match what they had searched for (within the homepage’s look and feel). You [...]