SEO Blog

Last month, the president and co-founder of New York based search marketing company Did-It.com Dave Pasternack, wrote an article for DMNews titled, “Troubled Times for SEO Firms?” The piece builds from the premise that SEOs are self-styled Jedi-Knights who sell common sense expensively repackaged as search engine secret sauce. In it, Pasternack rails against high-priced SEO consultants and practitioners who bill clients on a month-to-month basis. He describes SEO as a front-end process requiring a one-time service.

Pasternack’s original piece tried to conclude on a conciliatory note by stating, “Whatever the outcome, smart marketers will continue to invest in SEO in a way that makes best sense to them, and the best SEO firms will remain in demand, because there remain thousands of commercial Web sites out there in need of basic search engine optimization.”

The piece got under the skins of a bunch of SEOs and Pasternack received a lot of critical response from a number of them, myself included. In a DMNews follow-up, Pasternack replies to critics in an article aptly titled, “An SEO Critic Answers his Critics”. Pasternack again goes on the attack, this time using a medical practice as an …

It is a beautiful and rare occurrence but when snow comes to this part of Canada, it comes with a wallop. A 36-hour blizzard hit the province leaving up to 48-centimeters of snow in the suburbs of Vancouver and about six to eight centimeters of snow across the southern tip of Vancouver Island A cold air mass from Alaska has replaced the tropical one from Hawaii we normally enjoy.

Victoria is, for the most part, shut down today as driving anywhere is treacherous. The snow started falling early yesterday morning. As the day progressed the intensity of the snow increased. By 1PM, visibility was cut to about ten feet with a dense wall of white powder
obscured trees, utility poles, parked vehicles and anything else drivers would normally steer their cars away from. Even if they could see the object, drivers don’t stand a chance in these conditions, especially drivers conditioned to driving in our normally ice-free climate. The snow stopped falling early this morning.

This post is what could be called a strategic leak. If this was the real story, truth be told, you’d have known it. Leaks need to happen from time to time and this being a Friday afternoon most American businesses forgot; this is the perfect time for a leak.

I am working on what I and other search journalists and webmasters working with me consider an extremely big story. I have been developing it for over a month now and am almost ready to go public with it. It has nothing to do with this blog other than this post appearing here.

I have been publicly hinting, asking questions, pushing sources and recording voices about this story for the past three weeks and have thus placed myself on the radar screens of some interesting people. In many ways the story is hardly a secret anymore.

Today, it is time to gently release a bit of pressure that has been building up over the past thirty-some odd days. This post is a bit of house cleaning before the mainstream media and industry giants get their hands on the story.

One website, three search engines, dozens of target keyword phrases and a limited number of documents with which to make a difference. A technique that works well with MSNLive might not work well at Google or Yahoo. The client, who measures expectations by what he or she can see, is waiting for their site to appear, attract attention and start converting. They are often unconvinced by thinking that sacrifices placements on one engine for others perceived to be of higher value, especially when they are long-term users of the one being sacrificed.

This is one of the challenges facing search engine optimizers when working to get great organic placements. These things take time, and in previous years, much of that time was spent waiting for spiders to show up and record the SEO’s work. Old-time SEOs can all remember trying to professionally explain the spider-cycle while only “mostly-understanding” it themselves.

The development of Google Sitemaps took all of the guesswork out of getting content into Google’s index. The XML sitemap acts as both an updater and a scheduler, saving Google a great deal of resources by feeding Google scheduled updates and inviting Googlebot on a scheduled basis. Sitemaps are basic common sense on any number of levels. That they grant permission-based access to site content will undoubtedly benefit Google in the future. Google Sitemaps marked an important stage in the evolution of common sense content submission.