Posts Tagged ‘SEM News & Trends’

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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:

1. Peter van der Graaf: 4,461
2. Maurizio Petrone: 2,536
3. Patrick Altoft: 1,828
4. Hamlet Batista: 1,782
5. Rand Fiskin: 1,566
6. Eric Ward: 1,419
7. Jim Boykin: 1,228
8. Michael Gray: 1,063
9. Debra Mastaler: 1,043
10. Bob Gladstein: 931
11. Peter da Vanzo: 801

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Speaking of publicity, I don’t know how much weight this has, but I got my name mentioned in an article on PCWorld.com. In the Internet/How-To section an article written by Jon Rognerud, Maximum Customer Reach in 2008, provided a passing mention of my name and an article I wrote, Content is Dead, Community is King Now.

The article is mostly about using RSS feeds to gain traffic, providing five RSS traffic tips. There wasn’t much context to the mentions and I certainly would have enjoyed the link, but its fun to see nonetheless.

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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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)?

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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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The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned.

Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that’s a story for another post.

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If you’re like me, (and for your sake I hope you’re not even close) you love the internet in a totally unnatural way. You live it and breathe it. It’s what makes you whole and gives your life purpose.

See? Pretty scary.

But there are times when I’m on the internet, and for some reason I don’t feel fulfilled. These are times could be best described as walking barefoot in the most beautiful, serene, pleasant garden imaginable… and stepping on a slug.

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It seems as though the search engine landscape continues to grow. Recently, at SES 2007, I learned that the top four engines make up nearly 98% of all searches. This communicates to me that adding another search engine to the mix isn’t going to create a great difference. Sites like Ask.com have chosen to become more unique in its search style. The design is more eye-appealing than Google, and actually has much to offer. In this Google world we live in, it’s imperative that smaller engines fill a specific niche to help gain market share.

Enter Tafiti beta.

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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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Fundamentals Track, Tuesday 4:45 - 6:00 PM
Successful Site Architecture

Moderator: Barbara C. Coll, CEO, WebMama.com
Matthew Bailey, President, Site logic Marketing
Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Strategist, Acxiom Digital

Of all the sessions today this is the one I am most looking forward to. I believe site architecture is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Actually, it’s about making your site search engine friendly… SEO comes later but you can’t SEO effectively without being search engine friendly first. Barbara Coll pointed out a site that she said has the best site architecture she’s ever seen. I took a quick look and, um, well, respectfully disagree. I saw a number of things that were not very search friendly. But maybe she doesn’t get on the web much!

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