Archive: July, 2007

An old Zen saying goes, “the longest journey begins with the first steps”. Who ever came up with that ol’ saw has obviously not spent a great deal of time doing business travel. In reality, the longest journeys often begin with a red-eye flight.

I have spent the last five days in Seattle attending the first annual Search Engine Strategies Travel conference, held Thursday and Friday (of last week) at the beautiful Seattle Waterfront Marriott.  Late tonight, I head to SeaTac for a long flight into Chicago that will put me on the ground somewhere around 5AM central.

The point to putting one’s body through such stress is obvious. Search marketing demands a devotion to constant learning and upgrading in an environment that is constantly changing. From my experience, the very best way to stay on top of these changes is to hang out with the very people who make them. This industry is populated with some of the smartest and nicest people one could ever have the deep pleasure of meeting. SES Travel 07 was an exceptional experience (and good for the Metamend family I might add). AdTech Chicago should be even better (though I will be the only Metamender present :( …)

The topic of Usability and SEO has come up again, this time in an exchange between Usability expert Kim Krause Berg and the social content network Sphinn. A post titled, “Search Engine Marketing is Bogus for Sites that Simply Don’t Function“, prompted Sphinn to create a specific category for Usability related articles.

Kim has talked and written about Usability for years. She is one of a dozen or so recognized experts in the field and runs the popular discussion forum Cre8asite. While saying there was no place for her in a community made up primarily of her peers might seem a bit dramatic, Kim has consistently lobbied the search marketing sector to take usability issues as seriously as they take the latest fluctuations of Google PageRank values.

Usability, which is far more important than PageRank rarely generates the degree of discussion it deserves. It is certainly an important facet of overall website marketing and an enormous consideration for good SEOs.
SEO can be loosely defined as increasing a website’s position in organic search rankings by improving or adapting several critical elements elements of documents in and related to that site. That’s a basic definition anyway. For professional SEOs, that basic definition has evolved to include services meant to improve sales or conversions.

A couple of days ago I wrote a long article at the SiteProNews.com blog titled “Yahoo! to Shed Sacred Cows?” in response to comments made by Yahoo!’s new CEO, Jerry Yang. Earlier this week, Yang wrote an open letter to anyone interested in Yahoo! outlining impressions and ideas that had formed in his 30-days as chief exec. Promising action after a 100-day strategic planning period, Yang suggested changes are coming and that there would be no sacred cows.

I was asked my thoughts about Yang’s comments on WebmasterRadio yesterday during the first ten minute segment of my show, The Alternative. Unfortunately, the question came in the middle of the segment and I wasn’t able to fully answer the question. I’m not even sure I scratched the surface.

What does Yang mean when he says there are “no sacred cows” at Yahoo! anymore? What is, or was, sacred in Sunnyvale? Is Yang promising a core shake-up of the company he and partner Dave Filo started a dozen years ago? Does it come down to who shows Jerry the money?

The first great but difficult thing about working in Search Engine Optimization is the fact that the field is constantly changing. Nothing stays the same in search for very long, a reality reflected in the SERPs. As the sands are continuously shifting, SEOs need to remain on top of new technologies, techniques and online marketing opportunities.

Business networking and information sharing are deeply rooted practices in the search marketing circles. When one SEO picks up on a new way of doing something, it rarely stays secret for long. A seemingly unnatural level of openness and communication is common in the search marketing sector due in part to the still relatively small size of the industry along with its youth. Search marketing is a business sector made for social media.

A quick definition of social media could read: Online applications designed to facilitate community building and information sharing through user-created and promotion of various forms of web content. There are social networks for virtually any community and interest one could think of. Built on user-participation, social networking has become both a personally charged pastime and a detail-oriented marketing device. Because content on social networks is usually developed and recommended by registered members who consider themselves part of a greater community, social networks tend to be trusted by users and spiders alike.