Archive: October, 2007

Search Marketing Expo’s Social Media show (SMX Social Media 2007) opens today in New York. The show runs two days and will produce an extraordinary amount of information. The previous SMX Advanced in Seattle is widely considered one of the best search marketing conferences ever.

Live coverage can be found at:
– Search Engine Journal
– Search Engine Land
– Search Engine Roundtable
– AimClear Blog

Bob and Marlene are members of their local chamber of commerce. Bob owns a used car dealership and Marlene owns a travel agency. Both enjoy strong search engine rankings for their business websites. At a recent lunch event they found themselves talking about their websites while sharing a table with Rachel whose real estate website was no longer doing well in search even though she had once hired a search marketing consultant.

Rachel’s consultant told her that Google ranked websites based on links and because real estate is so competitive she should cultivate a large number of links. He called it the Power of Positive Linking or something. Since her business operates as part of a much larger real estate chain, those links shouldn’t be difficult to find but getting a lot of them might take time.

Based on his advice, Rachel set out on an ongoing link-trading mission. Any opportunity to trade links with a contact was taken, often successfully. Schools, bakeries, independent shops and small businesses, parents’ groups and service organizations link to and from Rachel’s site. She got a lot of links at the same time after getting involved in a couple different real estate link exchange programs. Over time she had acquired the number of links her consultant told her it would take to do well on Google or Yahoo but her rankings had dropped dramatically.