Letter to a Friend from ad|tech San Francisco

So I find myself in San Francisco on a warm mid-spring night. I am attending yet another internet marketing conference (YAIMC), the second major event I’ve atteneded in two weeks. Like New York City, San Francisco feels like a whole world away from my sleepy little west coast town. In the case of this conference, the differences are even more pronounced. My background is primarily in search engine optimization and marketing and that makes me feel somewhat different than the other attendees, sort of less relevant. This show isn’t about search marketing per se. ad|tech San Francisco is primarily about media buying.
It feels like search is being a recognized but only as minor component with just two sessions directly relating to search. Back in November at the NYC ad|tech conference, search seemed far more important. Here, not so much. In New York, several sessions were dedicated to search optimization and search marketing. I feel like seismic shifts are happening all around me and that isn’t because I’m in San Francisco.
Perhaps it’s all the Google they put in the water around here but everyone seems to be talking about display advertising. As you know, Google is likely going to acquire a large advertising network called DoubleClick for $3.1billion. The announcement was made almost two weeks ago and now everyone who isn&rsquooogle is thinking deeply about the potential and/or the consequences. For hundreds of companies represented here, the deal could cause critical problems in the mid to long-term future. Many meetings of minds have converged here to talk about it.
A rumor has been circulating saying Yahoo! was going to fully acquire online advertising exchange Right Media for $600 - $800mm. Yahoo! currently holds a 20% stake in Right Media. I briefly met VP of Sales and Business Development Ramsay McGrory at Right Media’s cocktail party on Tuesday night. When I later asked him about the rumor, he suggested the media would know before he did but was adamant in saying he had no knowledge of a pending sale. Nevertheless the rumors persist with several people either asking me what I know, or telling me what confidential sources told them. That’s the problem with rumors. Nobody wants to be the one to substantiate them.
The business strategy for medium to large ad or content networks seems to be to merge, acquire, conglomerate or cooperate as partners in order to build larger content provision and distribution networks. Yesterday, Pixsy.com announced a strategic partnership with one of Europe’s leading advertising networks, ad pepper.
Earlier this week I met with the management team from media search platform Pixsy.com in their Bryant St. offices. CEO Chase Norlin and VP (corporate communications) Lauren Karp also spoke about the need to grow distribution networks through cooperation and partnerships, partially in reaction to Google’s growth. Under the agreement, ad pepper will use Pixsy’s technology to introduce a number of private-label customized video and image search engines. Contextual performance based ads from ad pepper will provide monetization opportunities.
ad pepper is both older and larger than Pixsy. It has been around since 1999 and serves over five billion transnational advertising contacts each month. Pixsy, which has been in business since 2005 is one of the best media search engines on the web.
The partnership between the two firms stems from the realization that the only way to compete with Google is to go full throttle, pushing your content to as many eyeballs as possible. While very few companies can cover the same sort of ground Google does, an immediate growth strategy for other media companies is akin to a survival strategy. Since Google virtually owns the house, smaller companies in similar markets feel the need to be bigger. In the case of Pixsy, bigger means far wider distribution of their media search technology and the integration of a network monetization method.
ad|tech is billed as “The Event for Interactive Marketers”. Interactive is an understatement and a half. Between the chaotic networking on the trade show floor, the scheduled speeches and sessions, the face to face power meetings with long-term partners and the packed-room parties, there are literally thousands of conferences happening at the same time.
Meetings are an important aspect of ad|tech shows. The conference hall the trade show is being held in has several balcony areas and a central café/meeting area. I have had the opportunity to meet hundreds of new people and actually speak with dozens of them. I have a pocket full of business cards, pages of interview notes and have given hundreds of my own business cards to others. ad|tech, like all major marketing conferences is the place to meet a good cross-section of the web publishing and advertising sectors.
I spent most of my day on the trade show floor exploring the booths and interviewing some pretty interesting people. I didn’t get into many of the sessions, and whenever I did, I was only able to hang around for a few minutes before running off somewhere else. Luckily, Lisa Barone, Sr. Writer at Bruce Clay Inc. is here and has been publishing excellent stream-of-consciousness coverage of the sessions she’s been to. We’re republishing a few of them in the coming editions.
There are a lot of start-up social networks here. Everyone’s building a better social network and I think I spoke with at least six of them. The online marketing industry is changing, at least as most search marketers knew it. Now that richer, more robust media files can be created and distributed by pretty much anybody, new methods of storing, classifying and finding information are necessary, hence the advent of the social network. What started as a way to represent user-specific communities is quickly becoming a dominant model for building communication platforms.
There is not a lot of pure search in social networking. While there are several components that can be affected by effective SEO or SMO, social networking, by and large, is driven by the members of the various social communities themselves. Display advertising works well in social networks, as do other revenue models such as auctions, paid-subscriptions and expanded paid features. A number of attendees I spoke with are giving up on the traditional search engines, especially the PPC engines. With rapidly rising costs per click and a subsequent decline in ROI, many advertisers are looking for other ways to spread their ad-spends. Purveyors of rich media content, display and banner advertising are seeing, (for lack of a better pun), banner years.
This week, talk of PPC or CPC is replaced with speculation on effective CPA (cost per action), CPM (cost per thousand), and the virtual commoditization of CTR (click through rates). The most serious ad-buyers here can tell you exactly where the best click trough returns will be found at any given time. Some have the ability to instantly shift enormous ad-spends on a minute-by-minute basis to eek the maximum margin on their (or their clients’) investments.
During the trade show, I stopped by the ISEDN.org booth to give one of the two reps a break. The activity in and around the booth was so heavy two people had to be present at any given time. During the two hours I spent in the booth, I probed people about their experiences with traditional PPC programs. I found far more interest for the flat-fee contextual ads offered by the ISEDN.org at this show than any previous SES or ad|tech conference. Advertisers are looking for a solution to the rapidly rising costs of their campaigns and the flat-fee method struck them as fairest (and safest) of all.
Many writers in the search marketing community have been predicting changes to the market in the coming years. Much like the warnings of the dire future circumstances to come due to global warming, these changes are often not apparent until they are actually happening. After the second day of ad|tech San Francisco, I get the sense that those changes are starting to happen.
Perhaps the biggest thing I have learned since being here is there is a lot for me (and likely many other search marketers) to learn about another side of the online marketing sector. There is a renewed interest in display ads in the greater marketing space. Despite the obvious differences there are serious synergies between search and display advertising. As the online marketing industry matures, those synergies are likely going to cause greater conglomeration in the industry, much like the one undertaken (for good or for ill) by THNK inc. two years ago. That’s a lot to think about going into Day 3.
Tomorrow is the last day of the conference and the trade show. At 5, the lights go out on ad|tech and nearly ten thousand weary attendees will make their ways home. I will be home on Friday around noonish. Hope the cat’s not too ticked at me for being away so long again.
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By Jim Hedger

Rescuing Pages from Google’s Supplemental Index

I found this interesting post from “Dr. Pete” at SEOmoz.org discussing his experience rescuing a client’s website from the vastness of Google’s supplemental index. Pete provided a great deal of detail on how he succeeded with his particular client. In this case the client was definitely in a bad state beforehand where even the most basic SEO strategies were not in place. The most basic fixes he implemented consisted of creating unique Titles and Meta Description Tags which in my opinion would definitely reduce supplemental results.
The gist of his posting is that the following changes seemed to have the most positive results: Shortening and increasing the search engine friendliness of the site’s URLsApparently when a 404 page was discovered it provided search engines with an improper response - essentially that the page was “A-okay” (a 200 server response). They fixed this issue which allowed many ‘bad’ pages to be removed from Google’s index. On a personal note I noticed this same issue with another client of mine recently by reviewing the client’s Google Webmaster Central profile… lots of valuable information can be found within that toolset - be sure to use it! He implemented a robots.txt file to block various parts of the site that provided duplicate content (such as print versions of articles, etc.). The impact on supplemental results appeared to be profound from his standpoint which makes sense. You see supplemental results will often occur when Google notices repetitive content within a website. After all, the supplemental results is by nature meant for results that are already found elsewhere or for pages that offer little or no value to Google. If you are concerned that your site has too many pages in Google’s supplemental index then I suggest reading and applying the advice in our instructional article “is your website search engine friendly - your personal checklist” because that article digs deep into many of the issues that also cause supplemental index issues.

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By Ross Dunn

Yahoo! Acquires the Rest of Right Media

Concluding a story first published here as a rumor from ad|tech on Thursday April 26, Yahoo! has announced it will purchase the remaining 80% of the Right Media Exchange for approximately $680mm in cash and stocks. Yahoo! had already taken a 20% stake in the company with a strategic investment in Right Media in October 2006. Based in New York City, Right Media is the largest emerging online advertising exchange. By brokering advertising across the tens of thousands of publisher sites associated with the exchange, Right Media helps publishers monetize their ad inventories and webmasters monetize their sites. Founded four years ago, Right Media uses an open auction system which allows publishers and advertisers sell and purchase online ad placements in real time. “The acquisition of Right Media will further Yahoo!’s goal to create the industry’s most open, accessible and vibrant advertising marketplace, which will help democratize the buying and selling of digitally enabled advertising,” said Terry Semel, chairman and CEO of Yahoo! in a press release. “This acquisition is an important step in our long-term vision to build the industry’s leading advertising and publisher ecosystem. We believe that Yahoo!’s open approach is a clear differentiator from others in the industry and provides significant benefits to advertisers, publishers and Yahoo! itself.” As the largest online publisher with one of the largest ad networks Yahoo! will increase both the distribution power and inventory depth of the Right Media Exchange. “What we look forward to do as an owner is put more inventory into that pot to help create a more vibrant exchange and create better pricing for everyone,” said Semel. According to the press release from Yahoo!, Advertisers will have greater inventory and audience options from Yahoo! and other participants in this exchange, as well as increased control and visibility into the buying process.Publishers will be able to bundle their own ad inventory with Yahoo!’s inventory and the exchange’s inventory - thereby boosting demand and generating the highest returns for each ad placement.Advertising networks will reap the same benefits as advertisers and publishers, and additionally, the exchange will benefit those ad networks with unique value propositions, giving them an opportunity to compete with the largest players, thanks to reduced friction and increased transparency.For Yahoo!, this more open approach will allow the company to increase liquidity, allow advertisers to more efficiently ascertain the true value of display ad inventory, and generate greater returns for Yahoo!’s own display inventory. It will give Yahoo! a new channel and inventory for excess demand and provide an opportunity to derive more value from non-premium inventory. “Right Media will be the crown jewel in Yahoo!’s battle against Google,” said Leron Cohen, founder of Quired Media, an ad broker working through the Right Media Exchange. “For us, this is good news. I hope Right Media sticks to being the open and fair marketplace that has made it (and us) so successful over the years.” CEO and founder of Right Media, Michael Walrath added, “We share Yahoo!’s vision of a more empowered marketplace, where efficiency, transparency and accountability in online advertising become the norm. We are very excited by the prospect of becoming part of Yahoo!, the market leader in display advertising, as it looks to revolutionize the media buying and selling landscape.” In an open letter to Right Media advertisers and publishers, Walrath writes, “It’s important to reiterate publicly that the acquisition will in no way afford Yahoo! any unfair advantage in the Exchange. A level playing field is one of the foundations of the Exchange and its success–it remains level. The fact that the Right Media Exchange will operate as an independent division of Yahoo! ensures this.” Yahoo! plans to sell all non-premium ad space on Yahoo! through the exchange. While many in the industry will see the purchase as a reaction to Google’s pending acquisition of Double Click, Yahoo! had already started the process in the autumn of 2006. Google’s entry into the display market merely accelerated what appears to have been planned for some time. “Yahoo! is the largest online publisher and one of the leading ad networks on the web, and we believe it is in our strong financial interest to make sure there is a widely adopted, neutral, frictionless exchange that enables publishers and advertisers to benefit from a basket of the best solutions rather than having to accept a single solution from one of the larger players,” said Susan Decker, head of advertiser and publisher group and CFO of Yahoo!. “Furthermore, as the industry’s partner of choice and as a leader in both search and display advertising, we believe that we are well-positioned to rally the industry support to make the promise of Right Media a reality for the entire digital media community.” Yahoo! will host a conference call to discuss the deal at 11AM eastern time today. A live webcast of the conference call can be accessed through the Company’s Investor Relations website at http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/mediaRegister.cfm In addition, an archive of the webcast can be accessed through the same link.

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By Jim Hedger

How to Compete with the Big Boys

Every business needs to do everything it can to stand out from the crowd, to differentiate itself from the competition. This is a major challenge for companies that sell substantially the same thing as their competitors.

The average business does not have the resources of a multinational corporation that often uses its substantial marketing muscle to buy market share or to drive competition out of the marketplace. Big business also uses its deep pockets to flood various media with advertising, making them a pervasive presence.
The Web has always been an egalitarian environment where smaller companies could present themselves using the same techniques as the big boys, and if these companies did it well they could stand side-by-side with their competitive behemoths.
One thing that small and medium sized businesses should take some comfort in is that many large corporations are notoriously poorly run, relying on brawn rather than brain to get the job done. Many survive because over time they have acquired huge resources, become oligopolies, or they use predatory marketing practices to stifle competition.
As the Web becomes more and more a multimedia environment, corporations are starting to use their financial resources, and inventory of commercial assets and programming (not to be confused with computer programming), to deliver their marketing messages. The question is can smaller businesses compete, and if so, how?
Slipstream Marketing
Dr. Max Sutherland, a Marketing Psychologist and Professor at Bond University, has written about a concept he refers to as ’slipstreaming.’ Anyone who is familiar with motor racing or even bicycle racing understands that slipstreaming is a drafting method where a racer tucks behind a front-running rival reducing wind resistance and saving fuel and energy, and with a quick move, the challenger can slingshot past the race leader.
The clever implementation of slipstream style marketing campaigns can allow you to blow by your competition by using the momentum of well-known and instantly recognizable campaigns.

Slipstreaming references a collective audience memory, a kind of shared consciousness. Skillful execution draws ínstant recognition and an “Oh I Get It!” reaction without a lot of wasted setup or groundwork.
“Give Me The Same Thing, But Different!”
The key of course is how you make your version different. What’s the twist? Blake Snyder, a Hollywood screenwriter and author, writes about entertainment executives’ constant refrain, “Get me the same thing, but different.” What Snyder has learned and what he preaches is that movie moguls understand it’s easier to get people to go to a movie they understand and that was already a success, but the trick is making the new version different, that is different but the same.
If you think slipstreaming is an easy way to be creative you’re wrong. Being different but the same is not as simple as it sounds, but success can depend on it. Done poorly slipstreaming comes off as lame and imitative, but done correctly you appear clever and cutting-edge, and more importantly you deliver the marketing message in a way your audience will remember.
There are an endless variety of things you can slipstream: personalities, icons, slogans, music, advertisements, news events, pop culture phenomena, movies, television shows, commercials, and sporting events.
Personalities
One of our favorite personality slipstreaming techniques is the use of voice-over. It can be implemented as part of a video campaign or as a stand-alone feature. We have used sound-alike actors to portray Rod Serling, Sam Elliot, Steve Irwin, Paul Winfield, Tom Brokaw, and many others.
What makes this approach so valuable is that most people will relate to the voice as someone they know, or are familiar with, but not immediately recognize.
This method captures people’s attention with the familiar sound of a famous voice but without the cost of hiring the celebrity. Often the voice does not even have to be that close to the original, it’s the cadence, delivery, tone, and scrípt that makes people sit-up and take notice.
Cutting through the jungle of advertising noise is a challenge for everyone in business and this technique is a very effective method of getting heard and being remembered.
Television Shows
Another slipstream technique we’ve used is to play upon the audience’s knowledge and familiarity with certain television shows. We have created Web-videos, written scrípts, added dialogue and composed music that reminds people of the old ‘Twilight Zone’ series and the popular A&E show, ‘City Confidential.’
Commercials
One of our most successful Web-promotion campaigns was the ‘Multimedia Versus SEO Campaign’ where we took advantage of the well know Macintosh Versus PC television commercials. Nobödy needed an explanation or setup to understand what was going on in the commercials. We basically slipstreamed Apple’s television campaign.
Slogans
Slogans are another resource for slipstreaming and if you think only small companies slipstream, think again. The A&E Network used the slogan “Time Well Spent” for many years, while The Comedy Network slipstreamed it with their own twisted version “Time Well Wasted” - the same thing, but different.
Music
With the popularity of Hip Hop music, the milk marketing board developed a series of commercials with dairy farmers rapping to a catchy Hip Hop tune well prancing around their farm animals. Hip Hop was also slipstreamed by Smirnoff in their Raw Tea campaign and ‘Tea Partay’ viral video.
Pop Culture
With the popularity of poker and the World Poker Tour, we developed a Mike Sexton style character, host of the television show, for one of our projects. We’ve even created nostalgia radio-style audio pitches that hark back to the olden age of radio plays.
Movies
We created an entire campaign for a client based on the idea, “Life Deserves A Sound Track” where everyday situations were described in dramatic style with familiar voice-over announcers, which was our take on Will Ferrell’s hit movie ‘Stranger Than Fiction.’
Sports
We’ve created presentations using the personas of famous sports figures like Hall of Fame pitcher and broadcaster Dizzy Dean and Mel Allan. We created scenarios and scrípts using the voices and personas of World Champion racecar driver Jackie Stewart and one crazy scrípt fashioned in the style of college basketball analyst Dick Vitale.
Conclusion
As you can see from these examples, there are an endless number of ways to take advantage of the public’s shared experience. So the next time you need to come up with a new Web marketing campaign for your company, think like a Hollywood mogul: Come Up With Something That’s The Same, But Different.

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By Jerry Bader

Citizen Consumer Beware, Gov’t and Institutions Leak Most

The latest news on cybercrime and ID theft is grim. Several recent reports suggest that criminal financial activity is growing faster than ever. The perpetrators are rarely caught but the damage they do accounts for billions of dollars a year. Many people think the criminals are found mostly online however, a story by published Monday in CanWest newspapers suggests that the majority of ID theft comes from poorly managed government sources.
According to a report by Symantec Corporation as much as 25% of the personal data stolen by ID thieves comes from computers in government offices. The health care industry and educational institutions come in second and third with 20% and 14% respectively. That means that over half of the personally identifying data used to usurp and exploit another person’s credit comes from off-line sources. It simply walks out their doors. Surprisingly, on 14% of the personally identifying information traded among cyber-criminals actually comes from hacking.
The executive editor of the Symantec report Dean Turner says, “The major cause is theft or loss — stealing hard drives out of machines. Governments have a wealth of information on various groups and individuals.” Thieves use micro storage devices such as thumb drives, data sticks and MP3 players to transport electronic information.
To make matters even scarier, there are different laws covering the responsibility to report data theft for government and private businesses. There are also differing regulations between national jurisdictions with the United States having far stricter reporting and monitoring rules than Canada or European nations. Canadian consumers are especially vulnerable.
In a high profile case from February of this year, the Canadian discount clothing store chain Winners reported a series of data thefts dating back to 2005! Though they had been aware of the issue for some months, there was no law requiring parent company TJX Co. to report it. In all, tens of thousands of Canadian consumers did not know their credit card information had been exposed for several months, in some cases, almost two years.
According to Visa Canada, credit card fraud accounts for over $300million in loses annually. That’s only in Canada, a nation with less than one tenth the population of the United States.
According to a recent US Federal Trade Commission report, there were 246,035 complaints of ID theft in 2006 making it, by far, the most reported type of fraud for a seventh year in a row.
Laptop computers stolen from US Veterans Administration facilities as recently as January of this year are said to have contained personal data on over 26-million current and former armed forces personnel. One theft in May compromised social security data on literally every service-person since 1975!
On the Internet, Symantec warns of malicious code added to some websites that can access information as it is entered by individual computer users. Saying this type of fraud is on the increase, Symantec warns online consumers to make personal security their priority. In an interview with Erika Morphy at TechNewsWorld, Symantec Security VP Alfred Huger said, “The trend has always been there — hackers have always been interested in financial gain. Now, though, it seems that every piece of malicious code on the Internet somehow ties back to data theft.”
Online fraud has always been around but now the focus seems to be on the theft of personal data. Huger said the trend became a solid underground economy in 2006. There are chat-rooms in which your personal information is sold. Credit card numbers can go for as little as $1! The glut of personal information available online has pushed the price of enough personal information to construct a believable ID down to about $14 - $18 per identity.
ID theft has a long history, one that is difficult to stop.
Jim Wilkins got off easily the first time. As reported last week by seMissourian.com, Mr. Wilkins was a victim of ID theft in 1996. He does not yet know the extent of the damage done when a series of preauthorized checks sent to him from California by the Bank of America were somehow intercepted and stolen in Texas. He does know that the BofA is taking responsibility for the $9200 in fraudulent checks written against his account.
Unfortunately, the Bank of America can’t help him recover issues dating back to a fraudulent student loan taken out against his name in 1986 or the $38,500 in child support payments someone using his ID owed the Seattle Child Support Enforcement Agency. Now age 59, Mr. Wilkens was first stung by ID thieves twenty one years ago. The damage to his credit rating has followed him ever since.
Imagine how it can affect young citizen consumers if their ID is stolen early. Getting the credit reporting agencies to alter records adulterated by fraud is extremely difficult, expensive and time consuming.
It can get even more complicated when private third party businesses hired by government agencies fail to provide adequate protection. In 2005, LexisNexis announced that the personal data of 32,000 users was stolen from a company it had acquired a year before, Seisint. Estimates of the number of consumers affected quickly grew to over 310,000 during the subsequent investigation. Seisint produced the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, better known as the MATRIX. Consumer citizens beware…
Protective Measures
There is very little one can do to protect themselves from government or institutional carelessness. Bits of your personal information are held by hundreds of civic, state, federal, religious, educational and financial agencies. In some cases, the theft is committed by employees. In others, it is committed by hackers.
Your first line of protection has to come from the government itself. Everyone has civic, state and federal representatives. Use them. Make their offices aware of the problem and, with the assistance of consumer rights groups in your area, lobby for stricter accountability from public institutions.
The next line of defense is your personal financial institution. Get to know your bank manager personally. Get his or her card and make sure they know your name. Your bank manager is a powerful ally to have on your side if you fall victim to ID theft. If you only bank online, this might be more difficult. There is something to be said for doing things the old-fashion way from time to time.
You are ultimately responsible for keeping your own financial records in order. Know the state of your accounts at all times. Keep receipts and records. When it comes time to prove you are victim of ID theft, you will be asked to provide your version of a financial history. If you can, you have a far better and easier chance of regaining control of your credit rating.
The Federal Trade Commission has a resource page for American consumers who fall victim to ID theft. On it is a sample FTC ID Theft Affidavit that outlines much of the evidence individuals will need to provide to retake control of their ID.
For Canadian consumers, the federal government publishes a lengthy FAQ that covers virtually all forms of ID theft at safecanada.ca/identitytheft_e.asp.
You are also responsible for keeping your personal information secure on your electronic devices. The Internet is as convenient for criminals as it is for you or I. Be absolutely certain your computer is clean at all times. This will cost you money. Putting your trust in free anti-virus, spyware or malware detectors is absurd. Remember nothing really comes for free online. Spend the money. Hopefully you’ll never know it was worth every cent.

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By Jim Hedger

Don’t Sabotage Your SEO Company

The average search engine optimization company is in high demand, and with rising pay-per-click costs and growing exposure of SEO in the mainstream media, this is unlikely to soon subside. Unfortunately, many organizations that willingly embrace SEO as a marketing tool also unknowingly sabotage the efforts of the search engine optimization company they have chosen. What follows is a list, by no means complete, of some of the most common errors made by companies that can harm their SEO efforts. Demand Rankings with No Changes to the Site It is a common assumption that search engine rankings are determined by a magical formula rooted largely (or almost exclusively) in technology. In reality, long-term search engine rankings are generally achieved through an equal mix of technology and updated website content. An ethical search engine optimization company will usually turn down work when told that under no circumstances can any of the visual elements or content of a site be changed. It is largely a site’s content—from the text to the images—that allows search engines to determine what that site is about. That same content also helps other sites and directories to decide whether or not a site is worthy of a link (and link popularity is, of course, a major factor in rankings). Many companies do not want to hear this, especially after they have paid a sizable amount of money to a web designer. The bottom line? That site built entirely in Flash for which you spent $50,000 is not going to achieve high rankings for a variety of phrases without substantial changes that will allow its content to be indexed by the engines. The truth hurts sometimes—but so can the cost of lost opportunities. Update the Website without Consulting Your Search Engine Optimization Company A very common and innocent mistake can have disastrous consequences. It generally happens when a webmaster is updating a website, perhaps simply adding a press release or uploading a graphic. Accidentally, the webmaster saves an older version of the site over the new version, removing many of the elements that the search engine optimization company had added to achieve high rankings. This can result in a loss of positions for which the search engine optimization company, of course, is blamed. Worse yet, since most sites are developed on a “test bed,” damage can be done when the site goes live. Test beds are not intended to be crawled by search engine spiders, and so responsible webmasters include instructions in the site code requesting that spiders not index the site—the Internet equivalent of a “do not disturb” sign. The major search engines dutifully obey this request on the test bed site. They also dutifully obey when these instructions are accidentally transferred over to the live site during an update. As you might imagine, the results from such an oversight are somewhat less than ideal. Once again, the search engine optimization company generally gets the blame. Since constantly accepting blame can be demoralizing, a good search engine optimization company monitors the code on all of its clients’ sites on a daily basis, analyzes any changes, and quickly reacts if anything potentially harmful has been done. In this way the website can be repaired before ranking losses occur. Link to Other Sites Everyone that has a website has received at least one email requesting a link exchange. Unfortunately, this type of exchange defeats the purpose of link popularity, and engines are starting to take notice. Since inbound links are essentially counted as “votes” for your site, a simple trade-off between sites does not necessarily indicate that those sites are advocating one another. Worse, if you actively link out to a site that becomes penalized (and sites that seek reciprocal links are likely to be very aggressive in their optimization tactics) your site can become penalized in turn. This does not mean that you should never link out to another site, especially if you believe that the site contains information that is of value to your visitors. Your search engine optimization company, however, should be given the opportunity to review any site to which you want to link. Additionally, a thorough search engine optimization company will frequently review the outbound links on your site, making sure that none of the websites to which you are linking begin using questionable SEO practices. This ensures that your site stays out of danger of penalization. Create Additional Domains There are legitimate reasons for wanting to have several domains mirroring your site (tracking the performance of offline website advertising, for example), but few, if any, are search engine related. If you are hoping to get a double listing for duplicate content on multiple domains, you are wasting your time—the engine will typically choose one version of the content and keep the other version out of its index. Not long ago, there was a danger of all versions of a website being removed from search engine results for having multiple domains with the same content. Most engines, as mentioned above, now will simply choose one of the websites and discount the others. The problem is that promoting multiple domains with duplicate content can water down your link popularity as it is spread over several sites. This obviously hinders campaign performance. Vanity domains can still be used, but they should redirect to a single version of the website using a 301 redirect. This means that if anyone adds an outbound link to one of your vanity URLs, your site will still get credit for the link. Try Your Own SEO Tactics The worst nightmare a search engine optimization company can face is when clients begin to see great results from the campaign and then believe that they should pitch in and help “accelerate” the results. Unfortunately, while the intentions are admirable, this is usually much like someone observing an auto mechanic screw on a radiator cap and believing that this observation now qualifies him as a certified radiator technician (and his tool of choice is generally a hammer). There is much going on in a typical search engine optimization campaign involving page elements, behind the scenes factors, linking strategies, and many other facets. If your search engine optimization company were to take the time to explain exactly how everything worked and why it was important, your campaign could take years. Many tactics, particularly those that SEO beginners might try, can put your site at risk of penalization. I suggest you steer the car and let your search engine optimization company fix the radiator. Change the Marketing Direction This may seem like an obvious issue that is easy to avoid, but often a search engine optimization company is the last to know that your company is no longer offering a certain product or service, that you no longer desire certain types of clients, that you are launching a new product or service, or that you are trying to drum up additional business in a certain product or service line. Organic search engine optimization takes time. When marketing issues like this arise, your search engine optimization company should be on your speed dial, so that it can be ready to take action based upon your current marketing strategy. There are many other ways in which to hinder the performance of your search engine optimization company, but the above list details some fairly common examples. Organic SEO, when done properly, offers one of the highest returns on investment of any marketing channel available. If you do careful vendor evaluation, your campaign should perform above your expectations, provided you trust your search engine optimization company and leave your hammer in the toolbox.
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By Scott Buresh

Ultimate Guide to Top Ranking in Local Real Estate Searches

The search engine local advertising market is booming, and it is only going to get larger and more important in the future as search engines learn how to better organize local listings, and 10 lb. phone books go the way of the dodo. So, what can you do about this boom in local searches? Get listed of course! I will start with Google as it is by far the most important, and serves more searches than any other service combined. Get Listed on Google Local 1. First, you will need to get a Google account. 2. Second, login to your new account and go the Google Local Business Center Page. 3. After you Type in all the information for your business, you will need to wait until you get a card in the mail from Google. This will confirm that your business is physically at the address you listed. As this post is primarily for individual real estate agents, you will probably run into your first roadblock when it comes to the address. Assuming you work for a broker and a larger company… for our example we’ll use Re/Max. If your Re/Max office is already listed in local.google.com, you will not be able to use that office address again for a personal business listing. This presents an immediate problem. You are trying to get your personal service listed under your office’s address, but your office is already listed… There are a couple work arounds for this problem: 1. Use your home address. Many agents work from home these days anyway… but if you don’t like the idea of your home address popping up on local searches… there is another alternative: 2. Since P.O. Boxes are not allowed, you can still get a mail box from a company like the UPS Store. They allow you to rent a physical address with a suite number, so it appears to be just another local address, when in reality, it is only a mail box. I haven’t tried this personally, but I’ll bet it would work as a physical mailing address in Google’s eyes. In my research, I found that most real estate offices are NOT listed in Google local… and in that case you can use just the office address. As of now there are no rules against this, but as the search engines get smarter, this option may go away, as a listing for an individual real estate agent isn’t as valuable as an office listing for the same address in the eyes of the Search Engine. I hope those suggestions were helpful. Your number one priority for Google is to get listed a physical address listed with them. This will give you a foot in the door for the other hints I’m going to give you now: * Once you’ve been listed, you should be able to find your local listing in a search. For example: “castle rock, CO real estate” or “real estate agent castle rock, CO” You can either search directly on local.google.com, maps.google.com, or just Google.com * Depending on the competition in your area, you may have to browse through a couple pages of competing listings to find yours… but don’t fret! You can change that… Now, here is the fun part. In order to set yourself apart from the compeition in your local market, you will probably want to pay for a sponsored listing. (note: as an individual agent, you will already stick out, since most of the listings will probably be for entire offices, not individual agents) Here is how to get a sponsored Listing: 1. You will probably notice that there are already some sponsored listings in your area. It would take too long to explain why, but those will probably all disapear when you create your listing since they are just keyword text ads and not local listings. 2. Go to Adwords.com. You may be able to use your Google login to signup, but may have to register a new account (Google is wierd about that sometimes). 3. Once you sign up and login, go to “Create New Campaign - Keyword Targeted” 4. Complete the steps, and make sure to choose “Regions and Cities” in the location area. 5. Now, choose your cities. Don’t use the pre listed cities. Type in your own. This way you can get as detailed as possible. List every possible town/city in your market area. 6. Create your text ad. (I highly recommend having a property search tool that is easily accessible on the URL destination page that you choose.) 7. Choose your keywords. I suggest basic words like: real estate, real estate agent, realtor, realtors, etc. (remember, this is for local search. It works differently than a normal adwords ad.) 8. Enter your daily budget, and CPC(cost per click). I suggest $0.10 or higher. You may need to adjust it later depending on the competion, and desired results. 9. That’s all! You should be able to see your listing appear higher than the others on local searches. 10. BONUS TIP: You also now have the option of adding extra flare to your ad. Navigate to the adgroup you just created. Then click on “ad variations”. From there click on “local business ad”. Search for your local listing, and then choose an icon, picture, and list any other information you like. Now when you search for your listing, you will see the special icon you chose on the map, your enhanced information, and top ad placement, which should truly set you apart from the competition. I really hope that this guide will produce some solid clients for you. Studies have shown that specific local searches have a very high conversion rate. The reason I was so excited about this is because I took some serious time searching about 3 large markets, and didn’t find any local sponsored results with enhanced listings. For only $0.10/click… it’s a no brainer. That’s all for now… I’m going to break this into 2 parts. The next part will be how to get listed in MSN(Live.com), and Yahoo’s local search results.
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By Justin Smith

Life of a Webmaster: Managing Multiple Websites or Domains

Hello there fellow webmasters. I know how frustrating and tiring can be to manage multiple websites or domain names or client accounts so I decided to outline the most important parts of process. Remember, you are not alone. There are thousands of webmasters like you and me struggling to stay on top of their website maintenance and management. Some of the most important task for a webmaster: 1. Website statistics:
You have to frequently check webpage statistics and take action depending on the statistics result. For example if the number of visitors decreased last month then you have to do something about it. Find out what went wrong, maybe. Also you have to often check bandwidth and space usage for every domain/website account. You may also want to check subdomains stats/usage too. 2. Login Details Maintenance:
Having a lot of websites/domains means that you have to deal with a lot of usernames and passwords. It’s not a good idea to stick with one password for all your websites or accounts. I hope you understand that. Keeping good track of all your website’s login details also helps when you want to access those websites via FTP. Setting FTP access and logging in to the servers can be frustrating. 3. Taking Backups:
If your web server does not support automatic back ups then it’s your responsibility to take copies of your website’s data. This is especially important when you have running databases (e.g. when you have a forum or portal). Taking frequent back ups can also help when you want to change servers. 4. Email Management:
Managing multiple domains and websites means a lot of email addresses. How do you deal with that? The smartest way to go through it, is by using email forwarding. I hope your server supports this feature since it is a common one. The idea is to redirect all email-messages from one e-mail address to another. That way, you can have a main email address and multiple other -redirect- email addresses. All messages will be redirected to your main email address. 5. Client Management:
A lot of webmasters, apart from owing websites, they also offer webhosting services to people. Everyone is tempted to make some extra cash this way. I only host websites for people i personally know. Anyway, if you have some clients you have to keep track of their domain and webhosting accounts. Here are some issues that may arise:
- Domain expiry issues
- Account bandwidth limit reached issue
- Name server management issues
- Client support issues (online, phone etc)
- Finances and more.. It takes a lot of time and effort to deal with all that! 6. Website/Domain Management Software:
If you use WHM/CPanel control panels you have a lot of control over your accounts. I’ve tried lots of control panels and they all offer more or less the same level of control but I stick to WHM/CPanel. Now, there’s software based on these control panels that helps you automate webmaster tasks and manage multiple websites and accounts even if they reside in different servers. If you search for -Domain Management Software- or -Website Management Software- you’ll get millions of results. This software is supposed to automate your life and streamline your business even further. Webmaster tasks like: - mass nameserver management
- mass account creation
- mass subdomain creation
- multiple FTP uploading
- mass chmod commands ..can be applied to multiple websites on the same time and maintained through one central location. Choosing the right domain/website management software can be tricky. Be careful when messing with that. It depends on your experience level and your way of thinking so choose wisely. You must know what you are doing. For example, you may not have many websites and feel that you don’t need such management software. There are a lot more issues and tasks that a webmaster is responsible for. I just thought of mentioning some of the most important and time consuming tasks for the average webmaster.

The Sun Sets on Canadian Tabloid Journalism

Sometime in the coming quarter, the Sun chain of Canadian tabloid newspapers is likely to fold. Founded in the early 1970’s the Toronto Sun grew from an upstart blue-collar broadsheet to a national chain of tabloids publishing in most of Canada’s large urban centers. Today, it stands as an early warning to other traditional news publishers, an oxygen starved canary trapped in a coalmine. The sun will soon set on the “Little Paper that Could” and even for those who opposed its viewpoints and resented its trivializing coverage of major world and national events, its demise is a little sad and more than a little unsettling.
Known for its controversial and often blatantly sensational reporting of events, the Sun was designed to emulate British tabloids. Often pulling its positions from neo-conservative views expressed in American media, the Sun was an ardent supporter of the Conservative Party of Canada and its predecessors the Progressive Conservatives and Reform Parties.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Sun’s influence stretched across the country as it opened papers in Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Brampton and York. It also acquired two of Canada’s oldest independent newspapers, the Winnipeg Sun and the London Free Press.
In 1998, the Sun chain was purchased by Montreal based Quebecor with also owns Le Journal de Montreal and Le Journal de Quebec. Quebecor also publishes a very successful series of free commuter dailies under the name 24-Hours, in Canada’s six largest cities, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton.
Since its acquisition a decade ago, the quality and quantity of news coverage has declined significantly. Much of the reporting, editing, compilation and layout is done in a central location before being sent to its nine English-language papers and the chain of commuter dailies, 24-Hours. Its circulation has dropped significantly over the past decade, down almost by half in ten years. The Toronto Sun sells a mere 200,000 weekday and approximately 400,000 weekend newspapers per edition.
Several external forces have combined with the numerous internal issues to spell the death of professional tabloid journalism in Canada.
Internally, the Sun chain faces sever labour shortages as successive rounds of lay-offs and attrition have reduced its newsrooms to skeleton staffing levels. Its competitor, the Toronto Star, estimates there are only six general assignment reporters, three bureau reporters and three police reporters working from the Sun’s King St. offices. Twelve writers remain to cover a city of almost six million people. Last year, unionized workers at Sun Media have filed several complaints with labour boards relating to massive layoffs and firings and the subsequent increased workloads. Morale is said to be non-existent in what is left of the newsrooms.
Externally, there is little the organization can do to stave off the inevitable. Newspaper publishing is only profitable for a small number of very large outlets. With a weekend circulation below 500,000, the Sun is simply not big enough for major advertisers to bother with. Increasingly, smaller advertisers, such as small businesses and individuals who might use the classified-ad section are abandoning newsprint in favour of eBay, Craigslist and search results.
In 1998 when the Toronto Star was fighting Quebecor for control of the Sun chain, newspaper circulation throughout the world was rising while the expense of gathering and publishing the news was actually declining. Technology had made gathering and sharing news less costly and the nature of corporate conglomeration made economies of massive scale possible. Since then however, costs for newsprint have risen dramatically while revenues from advertising are in sharp decline.
In 1998, consolidation spelled convergence, a magic word for publishers in the days before the dot-com crash of early 2000. Quebecor, which also owns several television broadcast licenses and the aforementioned affiliated chain of 24-Hour commuter dailies, has cut costs by compiling news, sports and political coverage across the second largest nation-state on Earth into one small national news office.
The concept of convergence is deceptively simple. Assuming the Internet can publish news in video, audio and text based formats, large information organizations combined their efforts in order to compliment each other’s specialties and cut costs. One reporter could theoretically gather material for publication in three types of media all of which could be reproduced over the Internet. Apparently convergence is more complicated in real life than it is on paper.
While the public and financial markets for mass-published newsprint are in sharp decline, news gathering organizations have faced stiff competition from smaller, more focused online news gathering organizations, including this one. With much lower production and staffing costs, online journalism has grown into very real niche industries.
The death knell for traditional publishers who have based their success on convergence has been the rise in popularity of user-created video sites such as YouTube. The production and distribution of news and entertainment in video format was the last protected bastion of what was once the traditional media. Now that the cost of producing video is virtually nil and users have the ability to self-distribute their own content, the large, cumbersome corporate news outlet is on its way to extinction.
The Sun chain is about to set in Canada and its demise should stand as a warning to other large media chains. Based on their editorial content, many in Canada thought the Sun was written by dinosaurs. What we didn’t fully realize until recently was that it was also managed by dinosaurs. We all know what happened to dinosaurs that failed to evolve. Author: Search marketing expert Jim Hedger is one of the most prolific writers in the search sector with articles appearing in numerous search related websites and newsletters, including SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.

Building Link Bait

Link bait (n): Link bait is any content put on a website with the primary function of attracting links to that page or to another page on the site.

The purpose of link baiting is pretty obvious, to develop incoming links to your website. One thing that may not be clear however is how links to internal pages on your site helps you rank highly. The benefits are divided into two parts:

1. You will rank for more phrases. Building links to internal pages is a great way to get those pages ranking for related terms. For example, if you run a real estate site and you put out some great content on how to get a mortgage in yourtown, somestate and who your visitors should use and provide a few useful tools to help your visitors you can attract links to this page for mortgage-related phrases. This will then help you rank for phrases such as “mortgages yourtown somestate”, which in turn is going to drive traffic to your site.

2. You will boost the overall strength of your domain. Building links to internal pages helps build the link strength of your overall site. The internal links from the linked page to your other pages will be stronger and so, in turn, those pages become stronger. Stronger pages rank higher.

So we understand what link baiting is and what its purpose is however, how do you build it? This is a difficult question to answer as what makes good link bait can vary from site to site and industry to industry. In short though, you need to create something that others in your industry will find important, useful, or even humorous enough to link to.

Let’s use an example we all know, YouTube. If you view any given video on YouTube you’re going to find two ways to put that content on your site, link to it or embed it. The link provides the link bait benefits, embedding it provides the branding. They win either way. Now they have content to meet any persons’ needs/wants, but what do those of us with fairly fixed site topics do?

Here are the steps for building link bait:

1. Figure out what appeals to those you want linking to you. This is not necessarily the same as what might appeal to your target market. When you’re doing this try to think about the types of people they are (likely very similar to you). Are they funny? Do they just want quick solutions to their problems? What do the people who own websites related to your topic want to provide for their visitors?
2. Build it. If you want to provide a solution to an information gap, write up a great article. If you want to provide something humorous, do that. If you want to provide a useful tool on your site, write up your specs, hire a good developer and get it made.
3. Test it. If you’re unsure as to how your new link bait will be received, test it. If you’ve written a great article on a subject you know people are interested in, try visiting a few forums and posting a link to it and see what the reaction is. You can do the same for humorous content and tools as well. Find out how they’re going to be received by your site visitors and site owners you are hoping will link to it.
4. Launch it. Now it’s time to add it to your site. In the Testing stage we put it up on the site but didn’t link to it internally. Now it’s time to link to it from inside your site. If you feel your potential clients will enjoy it, why not add it to your navigation? If you feel it’s better for the people you want to link to you but not as useful for your potential clients then perhaps you’d be better of to build a resources page and link to it from there. Or, if you have a blog you can simply announce its launch on your blog.
5. Promote it. Now it’s time to get the word out. There are a wide variety of methods for doing so and the most effective will vary by site category and who you want to reach. Here are some of the methods we have found most effective across a wide array of subjects:
- promotion on your site: large buttons on the homepage, in the navigation or other prominent spots
- press releases: if it’s a service or information that a wide variety of people will be interested in a press release is a great way to get the news out quickly
- forum posts: if what you are offering will help then why not tell them about it in related forums. Chances are there are people looking for the solution you are providing – post a link to it for them, and others, to see. This will provide you with a link from the forum and potentially many more as people find the information and feel it may help their visitors too
- newsletters: take out an add in an industry newsletter
6. Monitor it. Now all that’s left is to watch your stats and backlink counts to monitor the success. If you find you’re getting solid traffic, or backlinks, or both it’s a sign you just might want to do more of the same. If the results aren’t as spectacular as you were hoping then you’d do well to consider how well you performed the five steps above, how they might be adjusted, and what else you can do.

It’s important to note that building link bait is not a “one off”. A successful site will continue to develop greater and greater numbers of incoming links through a variety of methods. Once you determine how to successfully link bait in your industry you’ll want to reproduce it periodically. Fortunately, with the results you’ll see if done properly – you’ll be happy to take the time to do so.

Author: Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. Beanstalk provides search engine optimization services that are guaranteed to get results or your money back. For more information on how they can help you develop your link popularity through link baiting and other tactics visit their link popularity services and keep updated on the latest goings-on in the link popularity and SEO world on their blog.


By Dave Davies

Todd Friesen - AKA - Oilman - Interviewed

It’s a funny world. Todd and I live less than 1 mile apart, yet we see each other more often outside Victoria than we do here in town. We do make the effort every 6 / 8 weeks to have lunch. The fact we see so little of each other in Victoria is a reflection of crazy travel schedules, and packed lives.

When we do get the chance to meet, I always appreciate Todd’s candor, and insight. Like is SEO Rockstars co-host, Greg Boser (aka webguerrilla), Todd is forthright in explaining what he likes, and what he does not like. I respect that.

Apart from his participation in SEO Rockstars, and his Oilman blog, Todd spends his time as head of organic SEO for Range Online Media.

Q. How long have you been working with SEO / SEM ?

Since 1999.


By Richard Zwicky

Q. What’s been your favorite technique that you can no longer use due to algorithmic changes at Google?

Everything still works to some degree. My shift in SEO technique was due more to my decision to move from blackhat indy status to whitehat corporate status.

Q. Has Google (or any other engine) ever made an algorithm change which made you very happy?

Back in the days of the monthly Google updates I was very happy very often. Today we honestly don’t even notice most algo shifts.

Q. If you could get Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask to each answer just one question about their algorithms, what would it be?

I honestly don’t know what I’d ask. I suppose I’d be curious about what’s next but I’m not sure they even know (see previous answer about how everything still works to some extent).

Q. Why analytics are important to you?

We use analytics to measure our success. Being able to tell a client how much money you’ve helped them make helps to ensure customer satisfaction and client retention. In a purely self serving view it helps show how SEO typically generates a much higher ROI than nearly any other online marketing technique.

a. how often do you look at them

We spot check on a regular basis and generate a comprehensive status report once a month.

b. how do you suggest your clients use them

Generally I don’t like clients to spend too much time in any analytics tool. There’s so much stuff in there that can be distracting and I’ll spend hours on the phone explaining and justifying stuff that’s not at all useful for what we’re doing. Traffic that converts to revenue is really what I’m after. If I can’t show a client that what I’ve done has made them money or accomplished a branding goal then I should just quit.

Q. What do none of the analytics tools do that you would want them to for you?

Rank checking, I mean true rank checking. Enquisite is as close as we have it’s a major step forward.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

Okay, so I said it all in the title. Perhaps you need not even read this article as you may start off not believing it.

Today I read an article written by an unknown name in the SEO industry (at least unknown to me). It had a number of points focused on improving search rankings and provided a bunch of tips on how to improve the overall standings for a site. Sounds like a useful article, and for many who read it, I am sure it was - or at least seemed that way.

The article, sent to me by a client, was surprisingly wrong on several accounts with what the author recommended in terms of SEO. The advice was certainly not anything which could be damaging, but more out dated, now useless information. Many of the tactics recommended may have worked several years ago, but now play little to no role in search rankings.

I found it odd that an article as out dated as this had been published by a seemingly creditable newsletter. The source was one I had heard of, but never actually read. I am not trying to discredit the source and therefore will not mention either it or the author, as this is not the point of my post.

I replied to the client and explained which points were inaccurate and why, and then carried on with my day. I got to thinking after receiving a thank you from the client where he stated: “…goes to show you cannot believe what is being written all the time…”. I thought, that is very true, and it sparked the idea for this post. I read a lot of articles from a variety of sources, and often spot what I find to be inaccuracies, but never really think anything of it. But what if I were a common businessman with a website, and I was trying to learn about SEO?

How can you tell if the advice you are reading will actually help your site? This is actually a tough question. Most of the advice you read in newsletters and even on authoritative SEO sites is fairly general, applying generic techniques. Very seldom are they focused for a specific site for a specific purpose, so even while the recommendations may be perfectly legit and helpful in most cases, they may not have the desired effect for some. This is not to say they are bad, but merely non-specific enough to do the job. This all makes sense of course, as to be specific enough and cover all possible scenarios, would require articles into the hundreds of pages - otherwise known as books!

Now that I have gone a little off topic, I’ll get back to where I was at. So how can you tell if the information in an article is even accurate? Here are three fairly simple points that can help you to determine if what you are reading is trustworthy

1. First check out the author. Is it a name you recognize? What are his or her credentials, have they been around for a while? Are you able to find their articles on any creditable SEO news websites? If not, this does not mean they don’t know their stuff, but it may raise a flag, that perhaps their article could be incorrect. The best of the best are often featured on these news sites and publish a number of articles, so there will likely be at the very least, some reference to them.
2. Check out the website in their bio. (If they don’t have a bio, there’s another flag). Are they even an SEO company? If they are an SEO company, use whatever SEO knowledge you have to see if their site reflects the industry. While not all good SEO companies will necessarily have their own rankings, the basic SEO fundamentals should be in place. Check for the basics, things such as unique title tags, on page textual content, proper navigation etc. In the vastly outdated article I read, the author’s bio pointed to a web design company. Now their design was quite nice, and they seem to know their stuff – in terms of design, but their site did not address SEO properly at all. In most cases good designers are not good SEO’s, just as good SEO’s are not necessarily good designers. There are of course exceptions to every rule, but chances are you would not pay a visit to your lawyer to ask for medical advice. For that matter, you would also be unlikely to see your doctor to have a tooth pulled, perhaps a closer analogy to SEO and design.
3. Check out the author’s advice. If you plan on implementing the advice or specific recommended technique, do some research to verify if what they say is true before putting your site at risk. If their recommendation is one that can be helpful chances are someone else has also written about it. Take a look at some of the popular forums and check for references on the technique – even add your own post asking for thoughts on the item. It is possible that the author is writing about a breakthrough discovery that nobody knows about, but in virtually all cases where a breakthrough occurs, it is kept secret, one would not want to give away a goose that lays golden eggs.

This may seem like a lot of work, but it may certainly be worth it. If you plan on undertaking your optimization efforts on your own you want to ensure that the techniques you are about to use are not only up-to-date, but also worth while and legitimate. Check out your sources and their recommendations. If they are legit, you will most likely be able to verify it fairly easily.

I want to throw in an extra note here. It is very possible that you could stumble upon an article by an unknown name, with no website, and no prior history of contributing articles to any news publications, and it is very possible that this article and author are highly knowledgeable. There are exceptions to every rule, and everyone has to start somewhere. Just because an author comes out of the woodwork it does not mean that he or she has not practiced SEO extensively as perhaps an anonymous face in a large company or even as an in-house SEO for a large corporation for example. My point is basically to do your due diligence before applying any techniques you read about, because you just never know.

And in case you were wondering, no - you don’t have to believe anything I say either.


By Scott Van Achte

The Impact of Personalization on SEO

Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people until now. With Google’s widespread integration of personalization into standard search results, search marketers’ attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue. Up until recently, Google provided two personalization options:

• You could customize your Google Personalized Homepage for quick access to information of your choice (email messages, news headlines, etc.).
• You could get automatic personalization from your search history.

Recently, Google started combining the above two options for users who sign up for services through their Google accounts. When you sign in, you get access to tailored results utilizing information from your search history and your Google home page. If you don’t wish to see results based on your past searches, you simply sign out of your Google Account or turn the option to track your history off in your Account settings.

To quote Danny Sullivan, “…anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products: Search History — Personalized Search — Personalized Homepage.” In the past, Google Accounts required you to manually enable Search History. However, with the recent change, personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home pages generated based on account information.

Widespread Personalization

We don’t know for sure how rapidly search personalization will take hold. However, a 2006 Choice Stream Personalization Survey shows that consumer interest in the issue is strong, with 79 percent of respondents indicating a willingness to receive personalized content and more than half of the 18-24 year olds asked expressing an interest. The study also saw an increase in the number of people who would be willing to trade privacy for increasingly tailored results.

These findings can likely be generalized to search users because the information required for search personalization is less intrusive than the content participants were questioned about in the survey.

Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners

Personalization benefits users because it can help make their searches more relevant based on past search behavior. It also can help Web site owners who have excellent content and well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the “stickiest” content will be weighted more favorably. However, in both cases there is also the possibility of closing out potentially useful resources because they do not fit a user’s previous history.

In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the search results page, they represent the way human users will judge the site and decide whether or not to click through.

You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized homepage of many search users. One way to do this is to offer users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To Google buttons on your pages so users can subscribe to your content. Another tip is to put Google Bookmark buttons on your pages, such as those provided by AddThis. The more a visitor relies on your site, the better ranking it will receive when that user performs searches related to your keywords. The winners in personalized search are those who make a connection to their users because the results reward loyalty.

Implications for SEO

Increased personalization in search results has obvious implications for anyone performing search engine optimization since search results will now differ from user to user based on search history and user profile. Naturally, all queries will show a change in ranking positions between personalized and non-personalized results. Practitioners have analyzed this effect and found that results for personalized vs. non-personalized search can vary as much as 90 percent. Clearly, on page elements, particularly in the content and Meta data, will become extremely important again.

Rank Checking

The area most affected in the search optimization process is rank checking. An article by Mike Moran in Revenue January/February 2007 states, “Widespread personalization will doom traditional rank checking”. Moran also asserts, “It’s the biggest change in search marketing since paid search.”

Extensive personalization will affect the traditional rank checking process because site rankings will differ based on users’ idiosyncratic search habits. SEO analysts will be looking at average rankings rather than absolute rankings. This will force a change in search engine optimization techniques.

Currently, SEO requires decision-making based partly on researching targeted keyword phrases used by leading competitors. With personalization, it becomes difficult to identify the leading competitors because all search results will differ.

Therefore, new methodologies for making search engine optimization decisions will have to be devised. Traditional SEO and on page optimization will still be very important and SEOs will need to continue to improve pages, making them superior to other pages for specific targeted keyword phrases. This will require more thorough analyses of competitor on-page and off-page factors.

The process of SEO competitor analysis will require data collection, quantitative and qualitative analyses, as well as multivariate analysis. Multivariate analyses can help determine the relative importance and influence of multiple factors compared to each other, yielding the competitive landscape for your targeted key terms. The strengths and weaknesses of this landscape will help practitioners make the SEO decisions needed for targeting the right terms for optimization.

In-depth competitor intelligence will give SEO practitioners more accurate readings of how their client’s Web pages compare to their competitors’ pages, and the result will be more accurate information than we currently get with rank checking.

The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence

In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what’s working and what’s not for a site’s strongest competitors. It can reveal which sites are competitively strong (or weak) compared to the client’s site, regardless of what the respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking.

New age competitor intelligence will tell you what optimization factors are most important for specific competitive landscapes. Technicians will learn the true competitive nature of a keyword phrase rather that just the number of results returned for a specific query. They will know exactly what SEO factors to work in order to strengthen their client’s position rather than guesstimate based on general guidelines.

In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how to prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing semantic relationships between the client’s content, the competitors’ content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to search personalization of user results. Optimization in the era of personalization requires robust competitive intelligence, and this will pay big dividends to those who master analyzing the competitive landscape.

It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically once personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an art that is extremely flexible and will adapt with widespread use of search history to affect rankings. SEO practitioners have always been creative, and we will develop new techniques to achieve search visibility for our clients as personalized search becomes more prevalent.

Author: Claudia A. Bruemmer is a former Managing Editor of ClickZ (1998-2001), where she achieved the editorial success resulting in its first sale to Internet.com. Currently a freelance Internet writer, her clients include Bruce Clay, Inc., Search Engine Watch, TopTenWholesale and more. She can be reached at cbruemmer@bruceclay.com and has a website under construction at claudiabruemmer.com.

By Claudia Bruemmer

MISOGYNY UNACCEPTABLE IN SEM

The tone of the debate turned ugly and a well known speaker and writer was silenced. The fallout is going to be enormous and wide-reaching. It might have stemmed from jealousy, anger or even a previous insult but it hurt. It might be rationalized as an unintended consequence of free-comment, but the intention was obviously humiliation. As sides form on the issue the only element that is starkly obvious is a fear or hatred of accomplished women. Misogyny mistaken as fun.

Prominent author and public speaker Kathy Sierra cancelled an appearance at the O’Reilly sponsored ETech conference yesterday in reaction to sexually violent threats posted to the now defunct blog, meankids.org. Similar comments appeared at another recently defunct blog, unclebobism.wordpress.com.

Negative comments are not new for Sierra. As the author of several books, papers and articles on marketing and Java, Sierra has attracted the wrath of those who disagree with her views. Over the years, she has dealt with sexually explicit comment. In this case, comment has transited to transgression and the better part of the blogosphere appears united in anger and condemnation.

About a month ago, comments made to her site and to meankids.org and unclebobism.com transited beyond mean-spirited. At her Creating Passionate Users blog, Sierra outlines the history and graphic nature of the threats in long post titled, “Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)”. Her experience paints a disturbing image that details the undercurrent of anger, misogyny and violence present in blog comments and forum discussions.

Sierra has obviously been shaken. She wrote in her post,

“I have cancelled all speaking engagements.

I am afraid to leave my yard.

I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”

On March 24 someone took their hatred way over the line with images and comment that pushed Sierra over hers. She might not continue to contribute to the industry as she has in the past. In her own words,

“I do not want to be part of a culture–the Blogosphere–where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish. (And of course all coming on the heels of more explicit threats)
I do not want to be part of a culture where this is done not by some random person, but by some of the most respected people in the tech blogging world.”

Sierra named names in her post. She holds the community that founded meankids and unclebobism, which includes Chris Locke (aka-rageboy) co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, Frank Paynter (listics.com), Jeneane Sessum , and Allen Herrel, responsible for the posts.

For his part, Paynter has apologized. He had hosted both blog sites but removed them from the Web as soon as Sierra complained to him. Locke, Sessum and Herral, on the other hand, have not.

Locke did respond to an email interview request from Liz Tay of Computerworld Australia. He also notes that Sessum was barely involved saying, “Jeneane Sessum is being hounded over this whole affair, which is not right. I think she posted only once, but it was something trivial, if I recall correctly. From our later conversations, it seemed she hadn’t even read the later posts that have caused all this furor. She was in the hospital with medical problems, which she’s still dealing with. I cannot and do not presume to speak for her, but I hate to see her take heat for something she is not in any way responsible for.”

At the end of it all however, Locke misses the point of the outrage expressed by the community. This story is not about Kathy Sierra though she is an unfortunate character in its narrative. This story is about anger, violence and threats of a physical and sexual nature. It is a story that gets repeated time and time again in forums, blog comments and discussion groups. What is most shocking about this incident is that those involved are well known, generally respected names.

Regardless of who said what, the content and context are absolutely unacceptable in an industry built on the exchange of ideas. It is fine to disagree and fine to make fair comment. Both are good for the growth and evolution of technique or philosophy. If, however, your disagreement can not be articulated in civil words, it is best kept to yourself.

Perhaps there will be a positive outcome to this version of the saddening story of misogyny in the Internet development industry. Perhaps other bloggers and commentators will stop putting up with it. Even better, perhaps others in the community will join SiteProNews in taking a solid and unwavering stand opposing the use of violent, threatening, or misogynist commentary. The line has been crossed and it is time to push back.

Author: Search marketing expert Jim Hedger is one of the most prolific writers in the search sector with articles appearing in numerous search related websites and newsletters, including SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.


By Jim Hedger

Can the Web Save the World?

Can the web save the world?

In a word, yes.
And here’s the qualifier: “One piece at a time.”
Web activism has been part of my personal agenda for as long as I’ve been involved with the web.
In 1994, when I organized and sponsored the first conference on web marketing ever (Marc Andreessen gave the keynote), I invited all the usual suspects: ad agencies, PR firms, tech magazine writers - and NAMAC, the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture
Why did I want to bring a non-profit group of independent filmmakers to the table for a discussion about the future of the web?
Because I felt then, and feel even more strongly today, that the work of independent media producers is essential for the pursuit of social justice and positive change in our society.
My then-extravagant hope was that some day we’d sort out compression issues and bandwidth limitations and be able to stream independently produced video across the net as an antidote to television.
Now that day has arrived. What are we going to do with it?
Save the world, of course, one piece at a time.
Saving a city
A city is a pretty good-sized piece and seven years ago some friends and I sat around my kitchen table and tried to figure out how we were going to save a little city that we loved. Just two miles square and sitting on the banks of the Hudson River, the City of Hudson appeared destined for obliteration.
Here’s what we were facing:
The second largest cement company in the world was planning to build the largest coal-fired cement plant in North America right next to town.
Cement plants are third only to oil refineries and chemical plants in the amount of health-damaging pollutants they produce. The plant which would run 24/7 was just a mile from schools, the city’s hospital and New York State’s retirement/long term care facility for retired firemen.
And here’s the really bad part: Not only was every local politician and every local media outlet in favor of the plant, an atmosphere of intimidation hung over the city that frightened many local people into keeping quiet about their concerns. The company was prepared to spend - and indeed did end up spending - $50,000,000 on advertising, PR, lobbyists, attorneys, and donations to local groups.
On our side: Fifty people and fifty bucks.
Six and a half years later, in a conflict that lasted longer than World War II, the fifty people with fifty bucks won.
How?
It’s a long story (see the “Additional Reading” below), but it all boiled down to this: we used the media we had - hand painted signs, meetings, flyers, the mail, the web - to build a membership organization that grew large enough to counterbalance and ultimately overcome what I think most reasonable people would have thought was an unbeatable force.
Today, I find myself thinking a lot about another city.
Saving our soul
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have been initiated into the glories of New Orleans and those who have not yet had the pleasure.
Until June of 2006, I fell in the latter category. Then my old friend Steve O’Keefe, one of the Internet’s earliest commercialization pioneers, invited me to come visit. He’d been living in the city for the last ten years pursuing a passion we both share, music.
To say that I was stunned by the depth, breadth and sheer vitality of the music culture of New Orleans would be an understatement. How could I have missed this all my life? Understand, I’m a huge jazz fan. I’ve produced jazz concerts, hosted a jazz radio show, managed a jazz record label - and I never “got” New Orleans. (It might have something to do with growing up in New York City. I *assumed* my home town was the only place that mattered.)
Anyway, the city’s music scene is only the outer manifestation of something that is rapidly disappearing from North American society: communities…neighborhoods, where people know each other, celebrate and mourn together, and support each others’ creative endeavors. For too many people, New Orleans equals Bourbon Street, a Disney-like tourist trap where frat boys misbehave and puke on each others shoes.
That’s not New Orleans.
The real New Orleans is indescribably profound, creative, human and it holds a big piece of America’s soul - and the real New Orleans is dying.
Un-spinning the spin
Like so many stories the mass media sells us, the story of New Orleans has been spun to such an extreme that the reality and the reporting might as well be from different planets. For example:
* Myth #1: Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, right? Wrong.
The storm did little damage. It was the catastrophic failure of over one dozen federally built and maintained levees that caused the vast majority of the damage.
* Myth #2: The citizens of the city were disorganized, reckless and lawless. Wrong.
The pre-hurricane evacuation was one of the largest and most successful rapid movements of a civilian population in history. Those who were trapped by the flood waters caused by the collapsed levees were overwhelmingly peaceful and participated in countless acts of heroism, often risking their own lives to save others and feed and care for the most vulnerable.
* Myth #3: The hurricane was over eighteen months ago, they should be over it by now.
Wrong. Tell me what city could recover from the loss of 200,000 houses, 81,000 businesses, 175 schools and 6 major hospitals in a year? In two years? In ten? Per capita damage to Louisiana was a mind boggling $6,700 per state citizen. Compare this to New York after 9/11 ($390) or Hurricane Andrew which devastated South Florida ($139.)
What happened in New Orleans was the equivalent level of destruction of total war. After World War II, otherwise self-reliant and capable cities like Berlin and Tokyo and many, many others needed massive, prolonged infusions of outside assistance to get back on their feet.
So what’s going on?
Bottom line: The federal government - whose negligence caused the disaster in the first place - has made the decision that it’s cheaper, politically and financially, to let New Orleans die, rather rebuild it.
Thus the constant drumbeat of media propaganda that the city was destroyed by “an act of nature,” that its people are inherently corrupt and unworthy, that no one should live there. This last point is especially preposterous. If no one should live in New Orleans, no one should live in Holland either. The difference is Dutch levees don’t collapse.
You can probably see where this is leading.
Internet pros volunteers needed for New Orleans
New Orleans needs independent media to tell its story. Not just for the sake of telling a story, but to organize and rally all the people in the US and around the world who love the city and what it stands for - and there are millions of them currently unconnected.
Who’s going to do that?
More precisely, who’s going to create the media infrastructure that will make it easy for New Orleanians to tell their story and easy for outsiders who care to target their help where it will do the most good - both on the neighborhood level and in Washington.
City’s are savable. Even in the darkest times. I know. Hudson was savable. I believe New Orleans is savable too.
Are you a person with Internet skills who cares about the people of New Orleans? Would you like to play in a big stakes game, one that can change the destiny of a city and create a model for cities that may face similar systemic catastrophes in the future?
If so, please enter your name and skill set in our Internet Pros for New Orleans Database and we’ll try to match you up with a project where your skills will have the biggest impact.
Can the web save the world? Yes. One small piece at a time. Let’s start with New Orleans.
Join the Internet Pros for New Orleans volunteer database:
http://www.foodmusicjustice.com/signup.php

Author: Ken McCarthy is an activist webmaster who hope to use his skills and knowledge to better humanity, one city at a time.


By Ken McCarthy in

Can Anyone Compete with Google ?

You don't have to be an industry insider to know that Google is the dominant player in the world of search. Over the years the search engine has gone from a new player with a lot of promise, to one of the major engines, to being almost synonymous with search itself.

In fact it wasn't long ago that the word "google" was added to both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary as a verb. Fearing the dilution of its brand and the potential loss of its trademark, Google resisted the use of the name as a verb, but to no avail.

While Google may have lost the name game, it's definitely winning the search war. With its market share fast approaching 80% and paid search revenues that are truly mind boggling, I don't believe there are too many people out there feeling sorry for Google. To the contrary, some would say that Google is in need of some real competition.

So where is this competition going to come from? What is it going to take for a competitor to make a stand against the search giant that is Google?

Cuil Hand Luke?

If you follow the search industry at all you've undoubtedly heard a lot about Cuil (pronounced "cool") this past week. Entering the space with more fanfare than any new search engine deserves, Cuil is being billed by many as an engine that might eventually have the ability to compete with Google for market share.

While I do like Cuil's interface, and I always try to cut new engines plenty of slack when they first roll out, I've not seen or read anything that convinces me of its ability to compete with Google in any meaningful way. Stay tuned to find out if I'm wrong but I think that we've gotten to a point where it's going to take a lot more than a massive index and some big names to un-seed Google as the engine of choice for the masses.

The Merging of Microsoft & Yahoo

While I really don't feel like rehashing this topic today, I'd be remiss not to at least mention Microsoft's attempt to purchase Yahoo while posting about this topic. After all, isn't it just as likely that Google's competition will come from some well established players rather than a brand new engine? And isn't the desire to compete with Google the main motivator for Microsoft to originally pursue this deal?

But even if you combine MSN, Live and Yahoo's market share you only end up with around 17%. That's quite a bit better than anyone else has been doing in quite some time but I doubt it's the height of Microsoft's aspirations.

Microsoft's BrowseRank

Thinking beyond merger possibilities, Microsoft has developed a new method of evaluating web pages called BrowseRank. Separating itself from Google's PageRank, the idea behind BrowseRank is that analyzing a page according to traffic and time spent on a page is a much better indicator of quality than a mathematical evaluation of links to a page.

I'm not going to hash out the process of computing page importance here as that would be an entire post in itself, but I do have to admit that the idea is intriguing to me. You can learn more about BrowseRank here (PDF).

Improving on Relevancy

So will Microsoft be able to provide meaningful competition to Google? Will Cuil be able to live up to the promise that it holds? Perhaps a better question is whether anyone can compete with Google at this point?

After all, Google didn't get to where it is today by acquiring smart start ups or by raking in paid search revenue like nobody's business. Google got to where it is today by providing a level of relevancy to search that had not been seen before.

As we instinctively align ourselves against the established power, we often times forget what brought Google to power in the first place. We did. And we did it in the name of relevancy.

Is there room today to improve upon the level of relevancy that Google has established?

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by chip

Google News Separates Blogs from News

Google News has started to separate blogs and news links, according to the Google Operating System...

"When you view a cluster in Google News, there's a new option to filter sources: you can restrict news articles to blogs and to local news sites that are relevant to your query. The filters are a good way to find opinionated articles and more up-to-date information from local sites."

I never understood why they have a separate search engine for blogs. Further, this just blurs the line. Take a look at this cluster of blog links on Obama, which includes a lot of traditional media blogs. All of this is becoming a giant cake mix as the Google Web index gets faster. It's not so easy anymore to keep the pigs and cows contained.

Read

Huge Growth + Talent Shortage = Increased M & A Activity

Last week I wrote about how the SEO industry is growing up. Tremendous growth and low barriers to entry are / will attract many new entrants to the market.

But with formal SEO training not yet available on mass (i.e. taught in colleges), this growth is going to leave us with a talent shortage.

Essentially, large companies who want to get into this business are going to be forced to buy their way in.

In order to prepare your shop to possibly benefit from this increased M&A activity, it is helpful to have a sense of what factors will make you attractive to a perspective purchaser.

But one size does not fit all.

The evaluation of a one man shop is entirely different from that of a large Agency .

THE ONE MAN SHOP
There are many one man shops that are hugely successful. In fact many of our most authoritative industry experts are sole proprietors.

Like it or not, YOU ARE the business. Your business has little value unless you come with it.

Potential buyers - Your potential buyers are likely those looking to “buy talent” and/or credibility. A new entrant to the SEO Industry can say that they’ve been “doing SEO” for as long as you have.

What makes a one man shop desirable?

1) Reputation / Brand - To be attractive to a potential buyer in this scenario, you MUST have a well known name in the industry. Ideally, you will have case studies from recognizable brands. Further, active participation in the industry increases your credibility as an authority.

2) Re-occurring Revenue Stream - A re-occurring revenue stream will also be important to your valuation as it is likely that your price will be a multiple of your revenue. Moreover, your established business (re-occurrent revenue) should be sufficient to pay for your future salary.

3) Top Line Revenues - An EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) calculation doesn’t make a lot of sense to a one man firm as sole proprietors typically realize their profits as they are earned vs reinvesting.

In this case, a calculation should be made based on a multiple of top line revenues.

SMALL TO MID SIZED SEO FIRM (2 - 30 people*)
If a new entrant is looking to fast track it’s success by”buying the talent” that it requires then considerations around the size and strength of your team will be important.

1) Team Attributes - How many years of experience does your team have? Do you have high turnover? Do you have senior people filling key roles in your business?

2 Process - Process is also an important consideration. A new entrant doesn’t want to just buy talent, they want to buy the secret recipe……

• How do you sell SEO?
• How do you manage the work flow process?
• Who is accountable for what aspects of the process?
• Do you have checks and balances in place?
• What does your reporting look like?
• And to what degree is it automated?

3) Cash Flow - Cash flow will be an important consideration (nobody wants to buy a sinking ship) however if you’re having trouble collecting on your receivables, many companies will assume that once they take over, they can do a better job than you are (rightly or wrongfully so).

LARGE SEO AGENCY (30+ *)
For a large SEO Agency, factors that make you attractive to acquisition focus much more on hard calculations than the softer considerations of small to mid sized firms.

*Note: There are lots of web design firms who claim to be in this category when in fact only a handful of their 30 person shop actually do SEO. This article differentiates between firms with an SEO component versus a dedicated shop of 30+ people who only do SEO.

1) Scalability - The strong team you were proud of as a small to mid sized SEO firm is expected of in a large firm. For a large SEO agency to be attractive for acquisition, organizational structure is critical.

Can the structure be replicated easily for growth? Are there established training programs in place?

2) Cross Sell Opportunity - New entrants will be looking for “fit” with their existing markets.

• Is there an opportunity to cross sell between the acquiring company’s existing clients and your products?
• Is there an opportunity to sell between your clients and the acquiring company’s products?
• What about clients? Do you predominately service mom and pop shops while your perspective buyer mainly targets enterprise sized clients? Your firm will be less attractive if the purchaser is discounting too large a proportion of your business due to “lack of fit”.

3) Technology - Have you invested in proprietary technology that would benefit the buyer either by providing them with a competitive advantage or reducing costs?

Not only does an investment in technology give you an edge against the competition but it also shows long term strategic thinking.

The actual calculation
Keep in mind that there is a difference between book value and market value. A traditional “by the book” valuation will typically end up being a multiple of your EBITDA. Six times EBITDA on the low end and twelve times EBITDA at the higher end.

But EBITDA isn’t always the most fair way to measure value. When companies are growing really quickly, profits tend to be lower or non-existent. This does not mean that your company’s value is non-existent.

This is why in a pressurized environment like SEO, a calculation based on a multiple of your top line revenue may be the more appropriate measure even for large SEO Shops.

At the end of the day, what you’re worth really boils down to how much you’re willing to sell for. And with the industry booming, algorithms changing, new markets emerging - it’s still very much the wild west out there.

so, how do you put a price on fun?

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By Jennifer Osborne