Many of the prominent SEOs/SEMs in the world of search have specific recognizable traits that they are well known for. These may involve fashion, what they like to drink or even things they have done at conferences. I thought it would be fun to put together a trivia game to see how knowledgeable the community is in recognizing some of these folks.
As an owner of a full service SEM (Search Engine Marketing) firm, there are two things I love – word of mouth referrals and partnerships with traditional agencies. How can one not love these two means of acquiring new business? Word of mouth referrals is as old as the dinosaurs. As a consumer, you buy a product or receive a service that you are just absolutely thrilled with and you tell everyone you know. Not quite as old is the process of SEM companies who partner with agencies, whether those agencies specialize in PR, web development, traditional media (print, radio and video), etc. Very similar to word of mouth advertising, partnerships allow you to tap into an existing customer base who has already put their trust in the agency you are partnering with.
This Thursday, those of us in the United States will celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. While I am thankful for my family, faith and the many blessings that have been bestowed upon me, I thought it would be fun to put together a list of things I am thankful for related to the world of search. These include tools, resources and even influential people. Search marketing has come a long way since I first entered it in 1997. With its evolution, there are many things I’m thankful for that help me to do my job well on a daily basis.
In an announcement last week during PubCon, Las Vegas, Danny Sullivan revealed his new home, Search Engine Land, where he will continue to do what he has been doing for the past ten years – covering the world of search. Along with that announcement came the news that Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz would also be contributors as well. Danny will leave his current home, Search Engine Watch by the end of this month. Will Chris and Barry also be leaving? The answer is yes. Chris Sherman’s contract with Incisive, owner of Search Engine Watch, expires at the end of this year and Barry was never under any contract.
A Search Engine Watch thread reveals that Microsoft is banning sites for participating in spammy link exchanges at MSN and Live.com. This type of reciprocal linking is usually conducted with the attempt to artificially inflate the link popularity of a site and as such, assist in improving its rankings in the organic search results. While this is not the first time a search engine has taken action against link exchange schemes, it is the first that I have seen where the engine clearly explains why the site was banned.
Announced at PubCon in Las Vegas, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to come together and accept a standard protocol for submitting web pages to their crawlers via site maps. Google was the first to develop a site maps program where one could submit a feed to the Google index and not only ensure their pages are crawled but identify any potential problems. Now MSN and Yahoo follow suit. A new site (Sitemaps.org) has been launched that will contain more information on the subject.
Real estate agents face some of the toughest competition in the search space. Thousands of agents all competing for the same of near-identical key phrases and trying to capture one of ten spots when shooting for the first page of search results. How can they gain an edge over the competition? What will it take to set their site apart from the masses?
Friend and fellow moderator at Small Business Ideas Forum, Matt McGee, has put together a three part interview with Jon Glick, Senior Director of product search and comparison shopping for the shopping search engine Become.com. Prior to joining Become.com in 2005, Jon spent several years with Yahoo! as a key member of their search team, and was integral to Yahoo’s launch of its own search engine in 2004. Matt accidentally ran into Jon at the 2006 Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, out of which was born this three part interview.
I came across an interesting article today at MarketingVOX regarding the tremendous growth of social media. In the month of September, one out of every twenty U.S. Internet visits landed on one of the top 20 social-networking websites, nearly double the share of visits compared with a year ago. This according to a new study released by HitWise. Out of the twenty sites, MySpace is the undisputed leader receiving 82 percent of those visits. Not too much surprise there.
The Inside AdWords Blog makes an announcement today that another update is coming in relation to the quality of advertiser’s landing pages. Two changes will take place in how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. The first involves incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as they do for ads showing on Google and the search network. The second involves improving the algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.
