I can now say that we have been providing search marketing services for a decade. That’s right, April 18th is the day that we celebrate as our birthday. At least it is the date where we obtained our first trade name and opened a business checking account here in Arizona.
What started with a three hour flight delay and three gate changes at the airport turned out to be another great SES, this time in New York City. While Irma and I were supposed to arrive in New York from Phoenix at about 4:30 pm, we actually did not get to our hotel till a little after 8 pm.
I love my career – running a search marketing firm. I get to take on exciting challenges in an industry that is constantly changing and evolving. Search marketing is a fun and rewarding career. That is not the only reason why I love the fact that I’m a search marketer but also because I could have one of these jobs instead.
Matt Cutts started a firestorm this last Saturday by inviting people to use Google’s spam report form to report paid links. Many are interpreting this as a sign that Google is having difficulty detecting which links are paid and which are not. Others see it as Google taking another step to dictate how we should run our web sites and even our businesses. Although I can respect the fact that Google wants to protect its own search algorithm and ultimately their business model, I think they have gone a bit to far with this one.
I am just barely back in Phoenix after SES New York and what do I see all over the place in my feeds this morning? News that Google has won the acquisition of DoubleClick. The price tag rivals their recent acquisition of YouTube – $3.1 billion in cash! I don’t typically like to rehash news but this is big. So what does this mean for Google advertisers? What does it mean for their competitors? A few summaries from various sources that might provide a clue.
How do you get the search engines to recognize the content of a site when it is all Flash? That was the topic of a late night discussion some of us search marketers were having in the Hilton bar last night . I won’t disclose the exact details of the site we were discussing. I have written before on the problems that Flash sites impose as far as a site’s search visibility. Because flash is composed of highly compressed graphics and/or video, the text that is often contained within the Flash elements are invisible. Furthermore if a site is completely Flash, meaning everything is contained with the Flash object – the graphics, the navigation, the content, even the interface, then engines have a difficult time understanding the topic of the site and is some case experience difficulty in crawling pages (if they exist in the first place).
Having worked with companies both large and small for almost a decade now, I have learned that there are fundamental principles that both parties must follow if they are going to have a successful SEO relationship. And that is what SEO truly is – a relationship or better yet, a partnership between the two parties. Like any partnership, there are do’s and don’ts that each party must practice if the relationship is to be a success. While not a complete list, I have put together ten important things to practice in order to have a successful SEO relationship.
One can pretty much assume that if someone steals your copy, they are not too bright. The content thief is not intelligent enough to write or develop something on their own so they pilfer someone’s else’s hard work. However there are some that are in a class all by themselves. Not only are they too stupid to write their own content, they neglect to remove references to the place where they originally stole the content.
That is the lesson that KinderStart.com has learned as their case against Google is thrown out of court by Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The judge also imposed yet-to-be-determined sanctions on KinderStart legal counsel Gregory Yu for making unsupported allegations against Google.
I came upon such a question today on Search Engine Watch Forums. It is not the first time it has been asked – “Can I include my competitor’s names in my SEO strategy? Will I find myself in any kind of legal trouble?” Or even, “Is it ethical?” Sure you can do it. It is your site – you can do what you want with it. Yes, you may find yourself receiving one of those nice little cease and desist letters. As for ethics, that would depend on what your ethics are.
