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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Google is a Republican

Okay, I get it, Google is not an individual. But Google is treated like one all the time. How many times have you heard someone say, “Google says that you should design Web pages to be fresh, relevant and unique,” or some such thing? Since Google is often referred to in the third person (operative word being person) I thought it would be good to dive into the political leanings of Google, since we’re so close to the election. It didn’t take long for me to come to a conclusion: Google is a Republican.

Not only is Google a Republican, but Google is a conservative Republican. Let’s look at the overwhelming evidence to back this up, shall we?

First, Google rewards achievement, which is a central tenant to conservatism and Democrats and liberals punish achievement. We can look to the current tax code and Barack Obama’s tax plan for evidence. In our current tax code, the more money you make, the higher the percentage of your income you must pay to the government, clearly punishing success.

Barack Obama takes this one step further in that his plan will provide tax breaks to “95 percent of American workers” while increasing taxes on those making over $250,000.00. The problem is that this is a mathematical impossibility. I hate to get Socratic here, but in order to grant a tax cut, what must first be present? Taxes! If some 40% of income earners don’t pay income taxes, how then can they be granted a tax cut? By giving tax credits (payments) to non-income tax paying citizens, they have received not a tax cut, but welfare. This is a central tenant of Marxism, perhaps best expressed by the Popular Marx quote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Google rejects this line of thinking. Google will reward well written ads by charging them less for each click. If two ads compete for the top ad position and are both willing to pay the same amount for the position, then Google will reward the more successful ad the top position. It does this by examining the click-through-rate of the ads. Whichever ad has the better click through performance wins. This provides incentive both to the winning ad manager to continue top performance and to the loser to do a better job in hope of reducing click costs. This represents the core of conservative thought: rewarding achievement provides incentive to all involved in the marketplace to either maintain high performance, strive for higher performance, or both.

Second, Google embraces limited governance. Conservative Republicans favor a limited role of government while liberal Democrats strive for greater government control and involvement in all aspects of human endeavor. Examples of the liberal proclivity for large government abound.

Barack Obama has proposed $990 Billion in new spending according to the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Almost a trillion dollars! The trillion dollars is spread across dozens and dozens of new government programs, not the least of which are nationalized heath care and making tax credit payments to people who don’t pay income taxes (welfare). The increase in the size of government for his health care plan alone would be immense. When we consider the hundreds of billions spent on other new programs, the growth of government can be nothing short of rampant.

Conservatives favor a limited role of government as defined in the US Constitution. Our Constitution lays out specific enumerated powers thus limiting government. That which is not specifically allowed is either delegated to the states, or prohibited altogether. What makes the Constitution so elegant is its simplicity.

Google emulates the US Constitution and the conservative adherence to it. The Google Webmaster Guidelines are a set of 31 guiding principles for Webmasters to follow. It is a simple, clear text that fully explains the function of the Webmaster as it relates to a successful Web site. The US Constitution consists of the original body and 27 Amendments. These two documents are similar in that they lay out the rules of engagement between the government and the governed – Google and the Federal government and Webmasters and US citizenry, respectively. That conservative Republicans tend to favor adherence to the Constitution, and Google provides no coercive dictate to Webmasters, they are quite similar in behavior and guiding principle.

Third, Google emphasizes Capitalism. The idea that the free market will naturally identify quality entities and push those entities into achievement is yet another core philosophy of conservatism. At every turn, Democrats seek to manipulate markets and override the natural market.

There is no better example than in the current housing market crisis. Going back some 30 years, the Democrat party laid the foundation for this crisis and did so by artificially manipulating the market place. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) sought to provide mortgages to under served areas, specifically the inner city and low income neighborhoods. There was a good reason for being under served – the people who lived in these areas could not afford mortgages! The government passed a law that forced banks to make an effort to lend in these areas, nonetheless. The CRA was strengthened under Bill Clinton, making compliance mandatory. Any bank out of compliance would be prohibited from engaging in mergers and acquisition, securities dealing, and other profitable activities. In short, the government compelled banks to provide mortgages to low income buyers. In doing so, the banks became saddled with billions of dollars worth of bad loans. Fast forward to 2008, we have a government caused meltdown in the banking industry because of regulation and a trillion dollar taxpayer financed bail out. Large government caused the problem and large government is further exacerbating the problem by disallowing the natural tendency of the market to correct the situation.

Conservative philosophy is flatly against social engineering like that found in CRA. It is not the government’s role to instruct banks who they can and cannot lend money – that is a function best served by the marketplace.

Google is wrapped in a Capitalist perspective. This is best exemplified by Google’s famed PageRank. PageRank is a measure of importance given to a Web page based on the number of other Web pages that link to it. A link from one Web page to another is considered a vote of confidence or a testimonial. There is no coercive mechanism that forces one site to link to another; rather the democratic nature of the Web itself encourages it. If there is a Web site about wrist watches, it is in its interest to link to a Web site about horology. By linking to a horology site, the watch site has provided a vote of confidence and the horology site will be rewarded with higher PageRank and thus, higher ranking in the Google search results pages. Because Google ranks pages from first place to last, by design it cannot make Web pages equal. Striving for equality is a tenant best found in liberal and socialist philosophy – here we are back at Marx.

These are but three examples of many proving that Google is a conservative Republican. Google rewards achievement, encourages hard work, provides ground rules but does not coerce, and is founded on the principle that the marketplace should determine who is best, and then be allowed to reap the fruits of being the best in market.

I’d like to see a debate between Google (the person) and Barack Obama. My money would be on Google.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

SEO Project

We're a month in to our accountant project. We're doing A-OK. Brad is getting some phone calls and with a nice high average customer value, all he needs is one new customer per month and he'll KILL his spend.

So let's take a quick snapshot of what we've done so far...

Last month was the month his site launched, so the activities were fairly predictable.

- Manual submission to the big three search engines
- Create an XML sitemap
- Set up Google Analytics
- Verify the site through Webmaster Tools
- Check that each of the major on-page elements were represented on each page and that the main keywords were present in each (title, description tag, keyword tag, H1 tag, body copy)

Through August, we began to get some backlinking going on. We went through a couple dozen credible directories and submitted for inclusion. Brad also updated his Linked In profile with his new site url.

Lastly, in August we launched a modest PPC campaign to test some responses. We're not only looking for conversions, but also for new keyword ideas, what hots and what's not - PPC, it's not just for clicks anymore.

Next month we'll look at some conversions and take a look at Brad's ROI. Since he's not paying for any of this SEO (but is buying his own clicks - I'm not THAT nice), his is all top side. But we can assign a value to the work that's being done. We're optimizing for a handful of local/regional terms - this would probably cost around $800/month for the SEO work. We'll use that as a benchmark for our SEO ROI. Stay tuned...

I have a new hobby site about Golf Information. I'll write up how that is progressing too from an SEO perspective. It's a pet project between my bro-in-law and me - he's a great golfer. I stink.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Local Ranking Test - Accounting Firm

Slacker! Okay, with 4 different blogs, a full time job as a search marketer, owner and director of a massage and skincare center, yes, sometimes I slack on one of my blogs. It has been 30 days since my last post, so I am in slackerville.

I've decided to make a bit a case study out of some recent SEO work. I have a good friend who owns an accounting firm. Brad has been running Intellisource, a business accounting firm in Virginia for the last decade or so and has really built up a nice clientele. To his credit, his business is thriving off of word of mouth alone. We met this past April to do my business taxes (for my Massage Center business). We started talking about search marketing. We decided that he should be pursuing it!

We're starting from scratch. Brad had his site designed from the ground up. Now the site is launched and there are several pages highlighting the accounting services that his firm provides.

Being charitable and friendly, I decided to do the old SEO thing for Brad and see what we can make out of it.

Today marks the first installment of our series - we'll follow the progress and see what we come up with. Since the starting point is zero, we'll keep an eye on traffic. I'll post periodically to let you know how we're doing!

Thursday, June 26, 2008

I talked to about 60 people yesterday in Philadelpia. Most were marketing types, VP's or marketing leads. There were a handful of Web designers and a couple C level executives. Like always, I sprinkled in a few straw poll questions throughout the 4 hour sessions...

I asked how many were using analytics on their site.

Nobody raised their hand.

Chaulking up the result to post-consumption, triptophan-induced apathy, I prodded a bit and got a few people to raise their hands.

Then I asked, "Does anyone want to share their conversion rate with the group."

Nothing.

I explained... A conversion rate can be about anything - number of visitors vs. sales; vs. Newsletter signups; vs. phone calls; vs. Contact Us forms submitted.

Nothing.

The few folks who claimed to have analytics installed had no idea what they were looking at, much less how to interpret the data into actionable intelligence.

This afternoon, I had the priviledge of attending a Webinar on KPI's given by Avinash Kaushik. It was a very insightful two hours spent going over the how's, why's and when's to Web analytics. The central proposition Avinash made echoed his blog title, Occam's Razor.

Sir William of Ockham is the fourteenth-century philosopher who is attributed this lesson in profundity: The simplest solution is usually the correct one.

Lesson one in analytics: Establish KPI's (key performance indicators) that are simple.

Lesson two in analytics: Make sure your KPI's say something about your ability to reach your company goals.

Lesson three in analytics: Use them. If you're not, how can you possibly know if you're headed in the right direction?

There are some very expensive analytics packages out there. For most companies I talk to, Google Analytics is a superb choice. And it's FREE. It'll give you more marketing information than you'll ever know what to do with. You won't even need it all. Based on today's lessons (thanks Avinash) just select the metrics that really mean something for your organizational goals and focus on them. Over time, your goals and corresponding KPI's will change and that's okay.

The first step is just to use KPI's and analytics in the first place!

Get to it...

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Support Those Landing Pages

We always hear SEO's talking about getting a page to rank. The topics are always the same - What keywords are associated with the page; where those keywords are on the page; how the various tags are constructed; how many links the site and page have. But one thing is so consistently overlooked..

What pages support the one you're trying to rank for?

Even a well constructed, movie star of a page, with a few good links to it is not likely to rank well if it does not have a great supporting cast. Each page that is the focus of an SEO effort should have a minimum of 4 pages of supporting content linked from it. More is better.

For example, if you have a site about Dalwhinnie Scotch (I just happen to be enjoying a knuckler full of the 15 year-old goodness as I write this) you'll need several additional pages of content linked by contextual text links on the Dalwhinnie Scotch page. The links could be topics/anchor text like:

distillation techniques
age of scotch
history of scotch
best scotch whiskey
what is single malt

If the Nav bar page is "Dalwhinnie Scotch" and that is the keyword that you're trying to rank for, you'll have much better luck if you have several (the more the better) supporting content pages.

The supporting pages do a couple of things. First, they establish subject matter expertise of he site author to both search bots and to users. Second, they help focus PageRank on the Nav bar page. Both of these move us closer to our goal.

When you create a set of supporting pages, be sure not to cross link them laterally into other categories on your site. This will create navigation issues for users and may dilute precious PR, when it should remain as potent as possible for the content page you're focused on.

Load up each SEO target page with supporting pages of great content. Over time, this strategy will pay off...big.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Anatomy of a Terrible Web Site

No, I have not seen it ALL, but if I haven't seen it, I've at least read about it, or so I thought. What I'm about to describe doesn't quite fit the traditional definition of spam. I think of it more like either a) grasping at straws or b) knowing just enough to be dangerous and then...being dangerous.

It all started with my trip on Tuesday to New York City. The trip was for an SEO seminar and had been planned for some time. Of course, I waited until the Friday prior to book my travel. There was a hotel that had been recommended and that I wanted to try. To save them public embarrassment and humiliation, they will go nameless - I'll call it instead the Midtown Park hotel. Here's what happened...

I found the site in Google by typing in the hotel name into the search box and, as expected, it appeared in the SERP. At least they ranked for their own name. Then I clicked into the site.

I was met with a splash page of sorts. It had a big "Enter" button in the middle of the page. I clicked. I was met with something that I thought might give me a seizure. It began with, er uh, music. The sound started with a clicking noise, then what might have been footsteps, then something like a dj scratching a record, followed by some syncopated, off-beat acid jazz. That was just the music. The screen was flashing and pulsing with different hues of reds and blacks, with words appearing and disappearing all over the page and in various font sizes and colors. One phrase read, "welcome to fashion." Uh, okay.

Immediately frustrated with the ridiculous user experience, I went back to the home/splash page. Once there, I found that there are six (6) choices the user may make: DSL Version, With Intro, Full Screen, Modem Version, No Intro, and This Window. I selected DSL Version, No Intro, and This Window.

Phew - that got me in without my grand-mal worries.

Now I was in the site. All I wanted was the phone number, which I found. But being an SEO, I decided to have a look around...

Though it stared me in the face, I had to study it for a few minutes before I really understood what I was looking at. At first glance, it looked normal - I saw the head tag and the usual title tag and meta keyword and description tags. I expected to see the flash file directly below, after all, it was clearly an all-flash site. But I didn't see that - not at all. Instead I saw this:

frameset rows="*,0" framespacing="0" frameborder="0" border="0"

Huh? A frame set? Why? It's an all flash site, right? Yep. And a framed site too. Huh?

The frame set contained two frames, a main and a pixel. All sizes were set to "0." Then I saw the noframes tag, inside which was 1030 words of content. No matter what page you go to this is the code you encounter because of the unchanging url structure that is found in the flash design.

Yes, you have it right - it is an all flash site, dropped into a framed site, presumably to feed the bots something in the noframes tag, thus avoiding the lack of content issue encountered by all-flash sites.

To make matters worse, the tagging info that is present is also all wrong. The title is "The Midtown Park Hotel :::::: New York :::::::The Official Website" and the meta description is: "Official website of New York Hotel - The Midtown Park Hotel" Then the keyword tag contains 186 words, 37 of which are the word "hotel" or "hotels" and 19 of which are the word "New York." I wonder, were they trying to rank for "New York," "Hotel," or "Official Web site?"

This site makes so many mistakes I can't even list them. Both in terms of human usability and robot spiderability, this site does it all - wrong.

Yesterday morning, I reached out the senior marketing manager who runs the site. I invited her to come to my workshop as my guest. She declined. Out of the goodness of my heart I wrote up a quick summary of the SEO mistakes on her site and sent them in an e-mail. One of my colleagues chastised me saying, "You sent her a report worth at least a thousand dollars in consulting fees." Well, probably so. But it was such an egregious set of mistakes, I had to tell her.

Chalk another one up to a probably well-intentioned designer thinking they know SEO only to fire a bullet into their foot. Bruce Clay said it best when he said, "Google doesn't care if you shoot yourself in the foot." And so it goes - the Midtown Park hotel doesn't turn up in any of the keyword searches I tried. Of course they would have no way of knowing this, what without analytics.

It's almost hard to believe. But I suppose in all great mistakes there are lessons to be learned. This is no exception. It is a case study in what not to do when building a Web site - the anatomy of a terrible web site.

An "A" for effort, to be sure. One of my sharper colleagues only gave them a B+.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Designer or SEO?

There's just too many instances of this happening for me not to address it. Here it is once and for all: Web designers are not SEOs. Not at all. Not in any way.

Okay, to be fair, I am not a designer - no way, no how. I have no graphic creativity to speak of and my design coding skills are rudimentary at best. See, I have no trouble admitting this. So why does it seem like every other designer out there thinks he/she knows SEO just because they can make a pretty Web site?

I think I am walking dangerous ground here - I am not declaring war on designers. Rather, I just want to come to an agreement that we are different creatures with totally different skill sets.

Last week, I sat there and consoled (yes, that is the right word) consoled a guy who had just dropped $9,000.00 on a new site. 600 pages of FRAMES. I couldn't believe some designer did that to him. His site has virtually no chance of ranking well. Worse, the new site is displacing one with good rankings, both are live and no coherent re-launch strategy was put into place, so any rankings he did have are quickly going the way of the dinosaur.

Yesterday I did another consultation. A Law firm. They had an old site that ranked well for a couple of good keywords. The new site was launched and their rankings disappeared. GONE.

The firm partners crafted this e-mail to me - they had done their homework. There was a grand list of questions about the design of the new site and how it may have affected their rankings.

Questions like:
  • The old site had lots of text on the main page, the new site doesn't have as much. Should we put more words on the front page?
  • Does the design software make a difference - Frontpage vs. Dreamweaver?
  • During the redesign, we put up a temporary site with the exact same content. Could this make a difference?
  • We used to have links at the top and bottom of each page, should we go back to this?

The law firm got on the phone and emplored us to help. They thought they needed a redesign to get their rankings back.

I looked at the site and guess what? It looked great. The code was super clean; static html pages; wonderful use of CSS; javascript was all kept off page in external files; lots of great content; link structure looked sound; It was a well designed site, indeed.

So what was the problem?

The problem was that clearly, the designer THOUGHT they knew something about SEO. They may well have read SEO for Dummies or some other basic guide. But the re-launch killed them.

The re-launch process made about every major SEO mistake one could make.

  • The new site was launched under a "ficticious domain" while under development
  • There were no 301 redirects done for the existing urls
  • Existing backlinks were ignored

Redirects killed the rankings star. Buggles eat your heart out.

Every single deep-link backlink now 404's out. There was a duplicate content issue with the new site and the old site - they were live simultaneously.

What's the point? The point is that this designer lost the rankings for this client. They did so because they did not have the SEO expertise to handle the site relaunch and migration. Although they have basic on-page SEO under control, this is a TINY part of what SEO is.

These are two examples of many, many examples I could provide. Since they both came up in the past week, it was worth an entry.

I'm not declaring war on designers, quite the opposite: I want them to work with us. Accept that they are not SEOs and let us do our thing. Engage us BEFORE launching a new site, so that catastrophic errors can be avoided.

Designers and SEOs are different creatures. Let's accept that and move forward!

Friday, April 25, 2008

New Orleans - ECMTA

Just returned home from New Orleans for the Ecommerce Merchants Trade Association show. The ECMTA Summit is by and for people interested in selling things online. Uh...that would be me...

On Wednesday I gave two presentations - first, SEO 101. It was an hour long session where I went into the basics of search engine optimization. In common fashion, I spent the first 30 minutes or so talking about what to focus our daily efforts on. I could tell some people didn;t understand the connection to SEO when I first started, but by the end, they were all drinking the proverbial Koolaid.

Almost every person from every business I talk to has the same focus - sell more! But there is a problem inherent to this: If you're focusing on selling things to the wrong people, you're going to be making a TON of effort, with limited results.

Instead, business owners and marketers should be focused on WHO they are selling to, not the sale itself. Which is the easier sale: A guy comes and knocks on your door and says, "Hey, I'm interested in what you have to sell." Or, walking down the street and tapping a guy on the shoulder and saying, "Hey, are you interested in what I have to sell?" It's absurd, right?

Well, sometimes you have to use an absurd example to drive home a very simple, though often-overlooked point. Focus on who you're selling to, not the act of selling, and sales will happen naturally and with much less effort.

So - we take this important lesson and apply it to search marketing. Let's focus our efforts are driving targted traffic and sales are a natural extension of that.

The second session I presented in was Advanced SEO. This was a little more fun because we talked about the fun stuff - how spiders work, Nigritude Ultramarine and all kinds of seo-geek things.

Overall, there was much positive feedback, so I think it went well. Our sales team from Network Solutions closed some business, so it was well worth the effort.

New Orleans was exactly as it was pre-Katrina. Bourbon Street was still Bourbon Street, as evidenced by my hangover on Weds...

Thursday, April 3, 2008

The Networking Deal

Okay, so I have to try it... Today I'll be headed to a lunch meeting of Business Networking International here in Reston, VA. I'll let you know how it goes!

BNI has chapters all over the place. Basically, you pay a couple hundred bucks to join plus a modest monthly fee. For that, you have regular meetings with other members who come together to swap leads, introduce new business ideas, introduce people, etc. Members are encouraged to bring guests - that's what I'll be today.

I'll be going as a guest of Brad Howe from Intellisource Financial Services. Brad is an accounting extraordinaire (he does my coporate and personal returns). IFS has a Web site currently under construction. Guess who is advising him on his yet-to-be-launched SEM campaign? We'll keep tabs on how it goes...

I'm headed out in 45 minutes, stay tuned!

Friday, March 21, 2008

Presenting to the Presenter

Oh we have fun...on every trip it is always fun to get in front of business owners, do a presentation and have fun doing it. Sometimes (not always!) the sessions end in applause - there's no better feeling.

So... This week I went to Search Engine Strategies in NYC. How FUN! What was most interesting was watching other industry types presenting their material. I have to say, since I have been doing so many seminars to thousands of people, I had a perspective that many in attendance probably do not share.
I went into each session thinking, "What can I learn from this guy" and "What presentation techniques can I learn." I learned a lot with this in mind...
First and foremost, it occurred to me what value really means. There were a few presentations that were the very definition of VALUE. For example, Benu Aggarwal, founder and president of Milestone Internet Marketing gave a fantastic 15 minute presentation on local search. She was part of a three person panel. While the others were good, they were theoretical in large part, while Benu went into specifics of what to do to optimize for local - I wished she'd had more time!

I suppose since we all have a different frame of reference, things that seem unimportant to me may be very important to others, but if I hear "content is king" one more time!! Okay, I am guilty of saying it too, but still - these rules don't apply to me.

I went into the "How to Optimize for Social Media" session and I only lasted about 10 minutes. The place was PACKED. I tried to get this on film, but I don't think the photos do it justice. There was not even "lean against the wall" space! Check out the view down the back wall...

And the front view - notice the people sitting on the floor in the aisle! Can anyone say, "fire code violation?!"

One thing was clear - Web 2.0, social networking, whatever you want to call it, was definitely the hot topic. My guess is that this is because video and rich media have really made their way into the mainstream of Web sites and the best mediums to publicize these forms of data is through social networks. But hey, what do I know... All I do know is that people were devouring the info presented.

Great show - see you next week from sunny Miami, Florida!

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Search Marketing, John McCain and Life-Saver Machine Guns

The Dallas SEM presentation was just a blast. As seminars go, this one was made interesting by a few reasons...winter weather in the burbs, John McCain visited our hotel, and I got my picture taken in a 1962 British tank. Huh? That's what I first said too...
I left Dulles Airport on Monday morning and the weather report said to expect 70 degrees and sunshine in Virginia. Of course, I land in Dallas and it is cold and rainy. Murphy and his darn laws... Anyway, I got to spend the day at my cousin's house, just outside of town. Jeff is always got a project going on of some kind. Well, I was delighted when I found out that he had a tank in his garage! He picked it up from a re-enactment enthusiast and fixed it all up. The machine gun on top is equipped with a nitrose hook up - it can shoot a life-saver some hundred feet! I couldn't resist, so I mounted up and checked out the radio head gear...


Well, after checking out the military vehicle and a nice visit with my cousins, Aunt and Uncle, it was back to work...

The weather in Dallas was not so much a big deal until 5:45 AM Tuesday morning, when the presenter from Constant Contact dropped me a note that she'd be late arriving because of a road closure outside of town. Time to improvise, I did a four hour session instead of 90 minutes! She arrived later in the day and was able to deliver the e-mail marketing workshop in the afternoon.
The morning session was great - we had such a wonderful mix of people. I was pleased to meet the folks from 1 Stop Pool Supply - they sell all kinds of swimming pool supplies and accessories. In addition to their thousands of products, they have an impressive Google Adwords spend - I could probably learn a thing or two from them!


Did I mention that we found out at the last minute that John McCain was visiting the Fairmont the same day we were there? All day there were news people, secret service and the like running around - there was a definite buzz in the air.

All in all a great experience and I got to meet so many nice people. I got an interesting question about the use of the Meta Refresh, that I explain on the NetSol blog...

Next Week is NYC - the Big Apple!

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Dallas, Here We Come

Gearing up for Dallas! On March 4 I'll be at the Fairmont Dallas to present a workshop on search marketing. This workshop will be a little different because I'll be teamed up with one of the Regional Directors from Constant Contact.

This is a bit of a departure from my usual class... I'll start the day off and do about 90 minutes. Okay, so my 4 hour class is like a graduate degree smooshed into 4 hours...this workshop will be the four hours smooshed into 90 minutes! It is a LOT of material to absorb. But - it'll be well worth it. While I'll have to keep things at a fairly high level, I think most attendees will get a lot out of the material. I'll focus most time on constructing a spider (and user) friendly Web page.

After I do my thing for 90 minutes or so, my Constant Contact counterpart will present info on e-mail marketing. I'll be telling businesses how to get targeted traffic to their Web site; Constant Contact will explain how to market to them after the fact. It becomes a real end-to-end presentation.

I'm excited for the Fairmont - it is the first time we've done a seminar there and it looks really nice. As a bonus for this trip, I'll get to see a cousin I haven't seen for a few years - and he and his wife are having a baby...TODAY! Congrats Jeff & Alaina.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Boston SEO Seminar

Last week I went to Boston to deliver a pair of four hour workshops on search marketing (what else?!). The sessions went great - though I'm thinking about moving everyone to the PM session - people are SO much more awake!

The seminar was held at Metro Meeting Center in Boston. This is a FANTASTIC facility. I have done seminars at facilities all over the country and this one is the best. That's big - out of all the others, this one stands out.

When you walk in, there is a nice wide open area with tables (high tops and low tops) with comfortable chairs. Plenty of places to sit and network or have meetings. Turns out the Metro is IACC certified, which means it meets some very high standards - something to look for when organizing an event, for sure.

Did I mention the food? We're not talking cheap continental here...they had some spread! All kinds of food, hot and cold. Since I am a bigtime coffee snob, this set up really was spectacular. They proudly served Starbucks coffee - which actually tasted like Starbucks (big fan). They also had fresh honey and sugar sticks (like rock candy on a stick) to sweeten your morning beverage of choice.

The conference room had a sweet AV setup, with ceiling mounted projector, touch screen controls in the wall and plenty of power outlets in convenient places.

The sessions went well. We had about 85 people total, with about 30 in the AM and 50 in the PM. My snap-poll showed about 10% were Web designers, the rest were business owners and marketers. One guy asked me what I meant when I kept mentioning "paper clips." There's one in every crowd... Not ragging the guy, he really didn't know. I think this speaks volumns about search marketing - when businesses don't know what pay-per-click is, how can they grasp ideas like organic ranking strategy? And how on earth can they apply it to their businesses? That's why I do what I do...to help these folks understand the power that can be harnessed by a well thoughtout SEM strategy.

Boston was a fun venue.

Next I'll be off to Dallas. I had a great time there last Fall - this should be more of the same. Let's see how the Texans do with this!

The Consistency Precept - Part II

Over on the Network Solutions Online Marketing Blog, I wrote about the consistency precept. this is the idea that once you find a profitable keyword, you need to apply it consistently throughout each on-page element to a new Web page. This works - in fact, it is how I have made many pages on various Web sites rank. There is a corollary to this - the multi-word content page corollary...

When you are trying to rank for a specific word, sometimes there are other terms that are very closely related and mean the same thing. Most often, it does not make sense to create separate pages for two words that mean essentially the same thing. This comes up also with words that have different spellings, each of which may be correct, or at least accepted.

How do you spell "go-cart?"

Is it gocart, go cart, go kart, go-cart, go-kart, or gokart? Each of these words will have different measures of traffic and competition. So it will be up to the SEO to determine which one you should focus your efforts on. Or, possibly even use both versions. You'll need to be careful of course, because you don't want to come off as having poor grammer or spelling.

I did a quick test in Google to see what happens with these variations... in fact, you do get different rankings/results with "go-carts" vs. "go carts." Interestingly, go-cart produces a pair of YouTube results at the top of the SERP and Google Image results at the bottom of the page. "Go Cart" (no hypen) on the other hand, produces three product results at the top of the SERP, with additional "go cart" related products available via Google check out. Although you can click on the "images" button on the SERP to get images, there were no image results displayed.

This quick test showed that there is a difference in the smallest change in keyword.

In a less obvious example, you may well want to optimize a single page for two words that mean substantially the same thing: "Antiaging skin care" and "anti aging skin products." With this, you'll be covering many bases. Just select the one with a higher overall profitability and focus on that version. The sprinkle the secondary version in - perhaps an H2 tag and some of the body copy.

Sometimes, it doesn't make sense to optimize a single page for a single keyword. It is okay to focus on two words on one page. For maximum effectiveness, I wouldn't do more than that.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Small Business Summit

Last week I had a great time attending the Small Business Technolog Summit in NYC. I was representing Network Solutions and was asked to speak to the conference about, you guessed it, search marketing.

Before my talk, I was able to enjoy the conference and meet so many of the great people - both those who organized the show and those who were participating. I was most struck by how Web focused the attendees were. Though many of the companies represented were not necessarily Web-based, all of the talks seems to focus on how to use the Web. I actually wrote about this over on my Network Solutions blog.

I had the priviledge of speaking just after Ramon Ray. He is the most energetic and passionate businessman I have had the peasure of meeting. His message was clear and concise - things you need to do in buisiness to succeed. Not, you WILL succesd if you do these things, just that, it'll help you BIG TIME if you just get some basic pieces down pat. After this great set up, I was on... My friend and co-worker Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Networking Swami, got my SEM presentation on video.