Posts Tagged ‘SEM Discussions & Blogs’

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When I first learned the title of the conference being developed by the crew over at Search Engine Guide I thought, “Awe, how cute. It fits the puppy theme.” Even as I was tapped to be a presenter I knew that Unleashed was going to be different. After all, I had an hour and 15 minute session all to myself. Apparently someone thought more highly of me than they ought! But I didn’t fully understand how different Unleashed would really be from the norm of search engine marketing conferences.

First of all kudos goes out to Jennifer Laycock, Rachel Phillips, Vickie Evans and Robert Clough (who’s sole job was to stand around and look pretty. He failed.) who were all key to making Unleashed happen. Their dedication to every last detail created one of the best industry conferences I’ve ever attended. Everything from the pre-event networking, through to the very last session went off seemingly without a hitch.

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I’m just now getting around to checking my stats after posting Link Building Secrets Revealed on our site early last month. I thought I’d share a few stats:

The main page linked above was viewed just over 7,500 times. That’s not bad traffic. But who’s secret was most popular?

Here’s the breakdown on page views for each contributor’s page:

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In just four weeks I’ll be in Houston attending the most conceptually unique search engine marketing conferences of the year, Small Business Marketing Unleashed. But before I get to that I thought I’d provide a brief recap of Search Engine Strategies: New York.

Day Zero

I’ve been to New York once when I was in my late teens, visiting my sister on a military base in Buffalo. That was the closest I ever got to the Big Apple, until last week.

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Every year as the entertainment industry gears up for the Oscars, movie studios, directors and producers put out “For Your Consideration” ads in attempt to influence the voters. OK, maybe influence is the wrong word here. No, it’s not.

But before I put out my own For Your Consideration blog post/ad for my fellow teammates, let’s talk about what the heck The SEMMYs are. The SEMMYs are the brainstorm of our buddy M². While there are plenty of awards already for the blogging community, most honor the blog in total, rather than individual blog posts.

Mr. McGee has created the following award categories:

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Audio feed[audio:http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/blog-audio/social-media-branding.mp3]

Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of your my favorite store, go-green awareness issues, charity drives that “give back” to the community for every purchase made, TV screens playing music videos or news as you wait in line, and the list goes on.

None of these things lead directly to conversions but they do lead to higher company awareness and the good old fashioned fuzzy-feelings we get when we know that that we are valued as a customer. Most times we are probably not even be aware of these things on a conscious level. But the effect shows as we have a tendency to patron these companies more frequently than the other alternatives.

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I come into the office this morning and I see Stoney with a big grin on his face. He’s sitting straighter, chair pumped up just a bit higher (I swear his feet aren’t touching the floor) and he looks, well, bossly.

Not that he normally doesn’t look like a boss, but today, well he looks successful. Is it the shiny blue shirt he’s wearing? Is it the freshly polished shoes? Is it the fact that he just got paid in Friends and Seinfeld DVDs from his favorite people in all of search engine marketing (outside of his Reno SEO Team, of course)?

No, that last one was YESTERDAY. This is TODAY!

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A couple of years ago I took a riff of Seth Godin’s line “All Marketers are Liars” and drew another conclusion: All Marketers are Thieves.

It’s true, there is nothing new in marketing, it’s just old things repackaged in a new way. Brian Clark’s Teaching Sells course is really about this very thing. Take what others have done, put it in a shiny new package and you’ve got yourself a viable product.

Heck, I readily admit that our good friend Bob Loblaw is a ripoff of both Arrested Development and Burger King. You’ll have to read both of those posts to get the relation between the two.

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Site Clinic

The first session of the last day was site clinic, hosted by Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey. In this session, audience members’ web sites were reviewed from a usability and SEO standpoint. The site clinic brought about many good tips and ideas:

• Always have call to actions above the fold
• Keep higher ranking word links above the fold
• Stay away from blue text unless using it for links
• Give users a sense of place on every page by using breadcrumbs
• Use benefit-oriented copy to show users what your products would do for them
• Utilize a context rewrite module for long URL’s
• Check your site using Yahoo! Site Explorer to discover link structure

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Ask.com Keynote Conversation

Day 2 began in a non-exciting way as Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone answered questions during the keynote conversation. I originally had been looking forward to this interview – I’d never heard a major company CEO give a presentation. Much to my surprise, the interview seemed to be a bit more of an advertising commercial for Ask than anything else. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ask.com. From a usability and creative standpoint, it is by far the greatest search engine available (though I rarely use it.) In any event, the keynote conversation lacked much in the way of usefulness.

Link Building Basics

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Shortly after Sphinn sphunn its way out to the public there were a host of SEOs scrambling to help get the word out on their blogs, writing posts about the new “digg for SEOs”. I’m not much of a newsbreaker here so instead writing about Sphinn without having given it a fair test run, I decided to wait a while. Besides, the word was getting out, all I would have done is just added another “me too” post.

A few days after Sphinn’s release to the public, Matt McGee wrote a post about the Sphinn effect, providing some illustrations as to the traffic increases that were the result of a single story he posted on the site. I wanted to go a bit further and show my results after about two weeks of Sphinning.

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