Archive: August, 2007

A couple of years ago, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times Journalist Stephen J. Dunbar experienced a series of epiphanies, brainwaves that would change the way they and others think about the effect of trends in popular culture on the social and economic lives of Americans. The book they wrote, Freakonomics was published in 2005 and peaked at the #2 spot on the NYT non-fiction list. It was, and still is, an important work of theoretical sociology mixed with concrete economic thinking.

Levitt and Dunbar drew some some startling conclusions while taking a decidedly wonky look at modern socioeconomic factors such as; The economics of drug dealing (an impoverished career choice for most as it turns out), the role legalized abortion has played in reducing crime in US cities, and the socioeconomic patterns of naming children.

Around the same time, major US newspapers began to really feel their own economic pinch as classified advertising dollars began moving from print to digital mediums. This was about when the New York Times began it’s ill-fated subscription model for feature columnists and important articles, a policy they are likely to abandon in early September.

Sometimes the world acts in mysterious ways. For most SEOs and their clients, “the world” has traditionally been defined by the Top10 placements found on the front pages of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Sometimes the world is just not big enough.

My last post involved social networks and SEO for social media. While this has been an overly hot topic for the past six months, it only recently reached a tipping point at which working social media became an essential service for well run SEO shops to offer. The tipping point(s) as I see them rest on two specific social media properties and their affect on way people use search and search engines.

The first is Facebook. Though Facebook is a relative newcomer, its rise in popularity has been extraordinary as it rapidly displaced MySpace as the critical place to find or be found. Over the last sixty days, Facebook have seen one of the greatest growth periods of any major online application. In the past two months, Facebook has acquired hundreds of thousands of new individual users and, more importantly, user-generated network groups. These network groups focus on commercial, political, social and personal issues and provide a platform for networking, discussion, mass-communication and ultimately, some form of action.

As sure as the sun shines behind the clouds on a rainy day, a major shake-up in the search marketing industry is coming soon. The signals are being sent and received  through-out the various sectors of search and online marketing. Change in any marketplace, when it does come, is often swift, brutal and merciless. For some SEO practitioners, this one will be especially so. While the search marketing industry has been bracing for change for at least a year, the movement is now picking up speed and gathering momentum. As SEOs, our working-world is going to look very different this time next year.

The biggest change is the death of “traditional SEO”

Dead is taking it a bit far. SEO is not exactly dead. A better way to describe it would be to say it dyed.

SEO has evolved so far and so quickly in the past six months that it as a practice is hardly recognizable from its humble roots, much like a Neanderthal placed beside any given Homo sapien. The thread that ties the past to the present is search. Everything still comes down to some sort of search.  Nevertheless, the traditional view of SEO services is over. Having languished in a virtual state of stasis for most of the past year, the concept of traditional, SERP based SEO went to rest sometime in the early spring.

[note: This is a big week for one of our founders, Richard Zwicky. Nearly two years ago Richard created a new and separate firm, Enquisite Search Metrics. TODAY, they release one of the coolest PPC Ad-Spend analysis and reporting products on the market. Though the two firms are separated by an important and very real firewall, I had to put this in our blog today, if only to say congratulations to our arm's length buddies next-door.]

The PPC networks collect an enormous amount of data detailing the characteristics of each and every click-through. Unfortunately, they do not provide advertisers with enough information to fully analyze their online advertising spend. To make matters a bit more confusing and potentially costly, industry estimates of invalid click activity and outright click fraud range from the 0.02% rate of click fraud claimed by Google to the 15.7% most recently claimed by Click Forensics. Clearly there is a need for clarity.