Posts Tagged ‘SEM Discussions & Blogs’

Find out this Thursday!

Well, it looks like I’m the last one to the party! Both Matt and Rand have posted their reviews of SEMpdx. Me? Well, I like to take a day off first!

First off I want to thank the folks at SEMpdx for the invite. It was an absolute privilege to be asked to speak and even more so to be put on the same stage as Rand and Matt. This was my first time meeting them and both are terrific guys.

Overall, the event was a lot of fun and the organizers did a great job of putting it all together. Every presentation I attended was fantastic and I think that the attendees certainly got their money’s worth in information.

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Last week I read an article that blasted Rand for an article he wrote pointing out the differences between expert and novice SEOs. While I agree with everything written in that article, I think the author could, and should, have taken a better approach.

Most of the responses I’ve read from the author’s article was positive or in agreement with the criticism of Rand’s post but with some questioning the author’s motives or tact. I think it should be noted that Rand posted comments in his own blog stating that he has no hard feelings. Disagreements are just disagreements and most of us have disagreed with others more notable than yourselves from time to time. No biggie and Rand has taken the high road, if we are separating high from low.

And while the author wasn’t wrong, at least in my opinion, if I were to make this rebuttal, I would have gone about it a bit differently. In the article the author called out Rand as being ignorant of what truly separates expert and novice SEOs and that Rand simply exposed himself as an elite out of touch with the business. Those are strong words.

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Even the best of us in the business can sometimes go all elite and say something dumb. I love Rand of SEOmoz but I think he went swimming in the deep end of the elite pool without his floaties. You can read my full post about this over at Search Engine Guide in my post “When Good SEOs Go Elite“.

I don’t often link to other posts here but this was too good to pass up. Matt Bailey has a great post about fun analytics can be and uses Star Trek (TOS) to prove it. You’ve got to read it to believe it!

Early last month I posted our company’s 12-month SEO schedule as it pertains to our client campaigns. This is the information that goes into our proposals so the client has an understanding of what to expect. Just recently we have updated that schedule in a way to make things a bit more immediate for our clients and allows for less downtime.

That previous post I offered quite a bit of information so I won’t repeat that here but I will add some notes as to what changed and why.

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I’ve been confirmed to speak at SearchFest 2007 (SEMpdx). This is a one-day event in Portland Oregon for SEM professionals and business leaders “interested in maximizing their success in SEM.”

I’ll be speaking in the Advanced SEO session. I’ve decided to discuss Keyword Research and have created a presentation based on our e-book: Keyword Research and Selection, The definitive guide to gathering, sorting and organizing your keywords into a high-performance SEO campaign.

You can download the [Link no longer available] SEMpdx PDF here, which provides additional details of the conference, pricing, schedule, etc.

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As promised this is the follow up to a previous post in which I attempted to define exactly what qualifies one as an “SEO Expert”. Based on some great feedback that I received on the original post, we can now refine our qualifications a bit.

When we left off an SEO expert was defined thusly:
[For all things SEO; their opinion is valued and generally regarded as attention worthy.
They have a strong portfolio with an extensive history of sustainable success across many different industries. They have made valid contributions to the craft and have offered their unique insight into critical areas of the profession.

They have a professional level competency in the following areas: Click here to keep learning

Visit any SEO forum and undoubtedly you will find a heated discussion of Google’s dreaded “Sandbox” amongst the threads. The Sandbox is a well known, but as of yet unconfirmed aging delay implemented by Google; generally for newly indexed websites. The sandbox is experienced as an inability to rank for nearly any search phrase including one’s own domain name. The sandbox effect appears to have a widely varying time frame, with some websites being sandboxed for as little as 1 month, while others are sandboxed for as much as a year and lengths of up to 18 months have been reported.

Background
The sandbox is thought to be related to a March, 31st 2005 Google patent filing (Application #20050071741: Information Retrieval Based Upon Historical Data.). The patent document describes a variety of methods for scoring documents using temporal data which is stored in a document profile. The sandbox is quite possibly an aging delay which allows Google to build a historical profile for newly indexed websites.

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In the SEO industry, it’s pretty easy to badmouth other SEOs. Whether it be publicly, privately, unanimously or otherwise, I find that many times when an SEO bashes the work of another, they are doing so bases largely on assumptions. And we all know what assumptions do, right?

I’m just as guilty as the next guy, so I’m pointing no fingers. Though I often play devil’s advocate on things so I’ll stake out a position just for the sake of creating a good discussion. Recently on a forum which I frequent (and respect) a member posted something they saw another site doing. Without even considering why the “tactic” was uses many members started trashing the the site stating that whoever SEO’d the site didn’t know what they were doing and should be fired. It didn’t seem to cross anybody’s mind that the “tactic” in question may not have been any kind of tactic at all. It may have just been an oversight.

Over in another well-known forum SEOs are routinely bashed because they implement tactics that are routine in the industry but deemed “unacceptable” to the moderators of that particular forum. They feel it is their goal to out any and all such search engine “spammers” and many times do so without ever having considered the legitimacy of the strategies being used. Its simply something they don’t like, so therefore it must be wrong.

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