Archive: August, 2007

What a way to spend a day. On Friday August 24, Four Metamenders, Three Enquisitives, a couple of amazing Metamend clients and I took part in the annual charity golf tournament held by the Vancouver Island Advanced Technology Centre.

The event, which was supported by Metamend as a hole-sponsor brought hundreds of representatives from dozens of Victoria’s most successful tech firms together, a rare and pleasant experience few of us get to experience often enough. It raised tens of thousands of dollars to go towards cancer research in our communities. Held at Bear Mountain, the premier golf resort on Vancouver Island, the event was an amazing success.

Metamend sponsored the straightest drive contest. A faint yellow chalk line stretched down the fifth fairway, starting about 100-yards in front of the tee-blocks. The golfer who put his or her ball closest to that line or, in case of tie, furthest won a $2500 website optimization and promotion appraisal. The golfer who struck furthest away from the line won a free sleeve of Metamend labeled balls. I promptly lost my sleeve on the following hole. To be blunt, nobody from either Team Metamend or Team Enquiste came close to winning that prize.

Metamend was founded in the late 90’s. That’s around the time when I started my career in search marketing. Back then, websites could be thought of as fairly linier environments where INDEX (or HOME) would be the top of a two or three level pyramid of pages. Content was relatively static and the search engines acted almost predictably.

Most small business owners working with SEOs considered their websites to act like electronic brochures. The E-entrepreneurial types opened online versions of their brick-and-mortar stores and the especially crafty started vast affiliate programs. For almost ten years, the web was wild.

Two years ago broadband access became the common home standard in the United States. That’s when the web became truly interactive and the days of the simple brochure website as an effective tool for small businesses and their search marketers were numbered.

Though the average small business website has become more sophisticated, the basic content / design philosophies of website as electronic brochure have not changed. A great deal of what is considered web design best practices comes from that time and many websites still seem stuck between then and the point two years ago when the nature of the web started to change.

Last week, a contingent of Metamenders traveled to San Jose to take part in the industry’s largest annual Search Engine Strategies conference. SES San Jose is a special event on the hectic convention circuit as it brings the best of the search marketing community together in the home of the major search engines, the Silicon Valley.

The intensity of shows like SES can not be adequately described. Exhausting, exhilarating, challenging and enlightening, SES is comprised of 60-unique sessions and several evening events. With over 8,000 other search marketers walking the streets in a four-block radius of the convention, it is easy to believe for five very long days that the search marketing industry really is the core of the world.

It is important to bear in mind that, though being treated to both an intellectual and physical feast of delights, everyone who attends such conferences is working from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep each night. The same can be said for the Metamenders. We worked hard at the conference with some of the contingent taking client meetings and others surveying as many sessions as possible.

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post, “SEOs and Social Media – The New World is Not Big Enough” that took a shot or two at Wikipedia. Part of my post was based on concerns expressed in the SEO community. Other concerns I hold stem from my experience with the Open Directory Project (DMOZ), another enormous site that became a public institution and carried extraordinary weight with Google.

For whatever reasons, the article seems to have resonated with readers and it has been reproduced and reprinted in several other venues. I can’t be certain exactly how it got to the desktop of Wikipedia Administrator “Durova”, but the day after I published it on the Metamend Blog, Durova contacted me to arrange an interview.

We met the next day in Google Chat. (btw… I have a rave review of Google Chat I need to write one of these days. It is an excellent IM client to conduct interviews in.)

Though I figured our IM conversation would last about 60-minutes, we were still chatting two and a half hours later. The interview produced 13-pages (10 pt font) of direct notes and is far too long to reprint in this blog. I have printed a full transcript of the Durova interview and an accompanying article over at SiteProNews.com this morning.