Search Engine Marketing

This is a guest post by Kenny Hyder. Kenny Hyder is an Internet marketing consultant based out of Santa Barbara, CA. He has been helping businesses with their SEO and marketing strategies since 2004, and has had the opportunity to work with some of the biggest brands online including several Fortune 500’s. You can catch him on his main blog about Marketing, SEO, & Social Media or check out his new Awesome SEO Tools blog. He’s also pretty much always on Twitter.

In 2009, the scientific community treated search and social media marketers to what seemed like a never-ending supply of meaty and game-changing research projects, covering everything from information retrieval, to personalized search, to integrated SERP analysis, to studying user behavior on social networks. I decided to compile and share a list of my favorite Search and Social Media Marketing Research Projects of 2009. Hopefully, these research papers will inform and inspire your marketing efforts going into 2010.

By the way, if after reading all the papers on this list you find that you're jonesing for more, here are two great resources for marketers to find research papers on social media and search engine marketing:

Okay. I admit it. I'm a big ole' search geek. My life pretty much revolves around search. I mainly read search marketing blogs, have an SEO consulting biz on the side, and work full time for WordStream, where I'm surrounded by other search marketers all day, and we sell search marketing tools to members of the search marketing industry. So my search geekiness should come as no surprise.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to create a list and share some of the truly nerdy search stuff I’ve done that makes me an uber geek. Plus, this should help anyone who's on the fence, wondering if they are or aren't a search geek too. Because if you've ever done any of these things, then well...

You Know You’re a Search Geek if...

At WordStream, we're all pretty avid blog readers. We read a variety of search marketing blogs and subscribe to dozens of different RSS feeds.

So I thought it would be interesting to ask everyone at WordStream for a list of their favorite SEO, PPC, Internet Marketing and Social Media blogs, and put together a master compilation of our 50 favorites.

Think of this list as the “recommended” section from the staff at your local Blockbuster. Actually, are there even any Blockbusters left?

Anyway, here’s the extensive list I’ve compiled of our 50 favorite search marketing blogs. It's a good mix of industry standards and hopefully some little known, but great blogs you haven't heard of yet that you can add to your own Google reader feed.