Search Engine Journal's Best Search Marketing 2006 LogoAs I wrote at Search Engine Roundtable, I am completely delighted we won the Best Search Engine Marketing Blog Award from Search Engine Journal. I am also honored that Search Engine Watch (the site I wrote at all year) and Search Engine Roundtable have come in first and second place for Best Search Engine News Blog of 2006, it really meant a lot to see our hard work appreciated by the community.

I can't be greedy, but I honestly wanted to win the Best SEO Blog of 2006 but Rand's SEOMoz took that, and we took second place - after thinking about it, they do deserve it. The quality, advice, transparency and honesty of Rand and company's posts at SEOMoz go unprecedented in the SEO Blog community, they deserve it!

Now to the Best Search Blogger of 2006...

Honestly, coming in third place kinda upset me a bit. I know, I know, I came in third to Danny Sullivan (the non-disputted leader of the search community industry) and Matt Cutts (the face of Google to the SEO community). But counting my posts, I often write about 20 blog posts per day, most on search (i.e. 15+) at two of the most popular search sites out there. I lose a ton of sleep and other personal things to give this effort to the community.

Now that is how I felt initially. But then I stepped back and looked at who I lost to. Danny Sullivan, heck, he has been giving his life to the search community for about 6 more years than I have. He definitely deserve the award more than I.

Matt Cutts, well, between fighting spam at Google, being an engineer, going to tons of meetings at Google, responding to forum posts, reading thousands of blog posts per day, and responding to a nice number of them, emailing worried webmasters, answering PR (press) questions and then writing some of the most useful and insightful blog posts at his persona blog... He probably sleeps less than me and Danny put together. So he should win this contest.

So overall, I am privileged and honored to have come in the third spot for that award and to win some and come close to winning some of the Search Engine Journal awards.

Congrats to all the winners and those who were nominated.

I hope people don't think I am a selfish and thankless individual from this post. I honestly, deeply, am very grateful for everything you guys have done for me. I am privileged to be in the position I am in. The least I can do is keep doing what I do and not complain about it.

Why did I post this? Well, I thought some people would like to see what goes through my mind with these contests. I bet it doesn't phase Matt, Danny, Rand or the others - but I use them as a meter to see if the content we are producing is useful to the community. And from what I have seen, we are doing an OK job. So thank you and I hope this post isn't taken the wrong way.