Archive: February, 2009

I was doing some grocery shopping the other day, walking through the produce department and inadvertently threw a couple of organic veggies in my cart and headed for the checkout. After digesting the rancid price tag of the free-loading organic items, I began to stew on the term organic. My veggies, as it turns out, are either, manufactured on large corporate-owned farms, or they are natural, meaning raw, of the earth, and decidedly unmanufactured. The same can be said for search results – those two links in a search results page, like two similar looking yellow peppers in a grocery store shelf, can be quite different.

Like my veggies, search page results fall into two different categories: organic search results and advertisements. Organic search results only appear in the search page results if they have an association with the user’s search string. In this way, the results are unmanufactured. Manufactured results are advertisements slipped into the search page by the search engine companies to look-like the organic search results. In this way, the advertisements are manufactured. When you contact an SEO firm, the power they possess is to increase your standing in the organic search page results. 

Back in the day when electricity was science fiction, the electronic communication paths we rely on today had not even been dreamt of, and so if you wanted to have an appointment with a person of means, it was standard practice to drop by in person and submit your “calling card” for approval. What a great way to chew up a day. But, in some respects, it is no different today – if you want your website to be noticed by the search engines, you must submit your website for inclusion, but it is how you submit the request that makes the all the difference. 

To be considered for inclusion in a search result, your website must be indexed by a search engine. And to be submitted, there are two paths: automatic submission, and manual submission. I’m not one for blanket statements, but it is safe to say that by-in-large search engines do not prefer automatic submissions. There are arguably a handful, or maybe even a half-dozen, big search engine players, and between them, they are bombarded with millions upon millions of automatic submissions every day. To try and dissuade the fans of automatic submissions, measures have been put into place that border on manual submission tactics, like requiring passwords and mandatory fields.

On January 5th of 2009, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) advised advertisers of changes to the YSM terms and conditions. And while we are all guilty of a little spin from time to time, bloggers included, Yahoo! spun a tale of empowerment in the cold depths of winter, saying that the main reason behind the change in YSM policy was to enable Yahoo! staff to perform account optimization without so much as a single exclamation of warning.

In the wake of the bleak chill of the January 5th proclamation came a foul wind of blogger furry – cold fingers in fair-trade coffee shops united in a chorus of chippie typing – and the battle lines were soon drawn across the boardroom table. Condemnations were posted Martin Luther style as bloggers railed at the established corporation for fleecing them with a scheme for raising campaign bids without consent or notification. Rumors began a steady churn and soon there where voices in the angry mob suggesting some account optimizations took liberties like shifting campaigns onto the lower-quality content network – an extreme violation of terms and conditions considering content network was apparently turned off within the master settings.

Online marketing forms the foundation of both Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. And while online marketing is only one sliver of an online presence – it should be noted that there are other forms of online marketing that can be quite effective at raising your profile and increasing your reputation. One such undiscovered gem is the practice of article writing which can be seen as article marketing. 

Whether you do it yourself or press into service a colleague or an available expert, it doesn’t matter, what does matter is that you produce relevant material that will leave the reader with a sense of gratitude and associate your name and brand with valuable information. Let’s look at it this way – your organization specializes in XYZ, and while there are a number of well-established firms offering XYZ services, you want to rise above the rest because you’ve been doing XYZ since the beginning of time and you’re tired of being lost in the pack. If you were to start pecking away at the keyboard and pour out your years of service to XYZ you might be surprised at the volume of valuable information that will flow out of your nervous fingers.