Kansas City SEO and SEM

International Search Engine List

by: Anne Haynes

I watched i-CAUGHT tonight for the first time. While it’s the second episode, it-is-what-it-is: a force to bridge the gap between traditional commercial video producers and “Joe” the online video producer.

One of the i-CAUGHT segments was around the Canadian car thieves. Canada has the secret to finding car thieves by placing cameras within cars. Think of the cars like decoys or dummies; the keys are in the ignition. These camera devices easily help identify criminals stealing cars that area frequently visited on YouTube.

After the episode tonight I decided to conduct a search on Google. It took several queries to find what I was looking for, but the following search term police cameras in canadian cars rendered the first result in Google SERPS.

How much more long-tail can you get?

While the search engines are getting smarter these days (Google) the dynamic query strings within the URL do not help a search engine understanding the meaning of a page. The URL is one of the first variables the spiders visits. And when it sees “?id=3451526&page=1” it’s clueless. Google has updated the algorithm to index dynamic URLs for years now, but it’s obvious that understanding the meaning of a page based on the title tag meta and a friendly URL helps the search engines serve up more relative results.

Come November when Universal Search rolls out prime time, SEO strategies must be udpated to support an organic marketing approach.

Updated 04-09-08
by: Anne Haynes

In the Office Google Blog last week, Google states, “Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing. It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business.”

I’m confused aren’t they in the search marketing industry? And aren’t business units just a fancy way of separating departments. Do the heads of the business units get together and share information or do they keep their business units under a secret code of silence. All of this reminds me of a few old friends of mine that work at Google. I would run into one of these friends at a bar in Los Gatos and ask how things are going at Google. He would say, “I can’t talk to you about work.” Honestly, you’d think the guy worked for the CIA. Oh, how I could rant….

Here’s another question; don’t affiliates use search marketing to generate leads and commission? I know from my experiences that many affiliates make a killing using organic marketing and paid search marketing. Moreover, I know of firms that buy out these affiliates because they pay them too much! Why does all of this not make sense when Google publicly states, “It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business”? Because it doesn’t!

While I’ve worked in agencies and closely with Google, I’m not an expert in regards to the DoubleClick Performics Google purchase, but I pose some good questions. Does anyone know why I’ve seen a 200% click through rate with 2 impressions, 1 click, at position 1 with a poor quality score? Someone clue me in. Bottom-line, if you think you’re getting incorrect data from Google, you’re right. Will Google be able to update an affiliate management and reporting network to be more accurate than their current ad network, let’s hope so! I love Google, its how I find all my information, but the cost-per-clicks just keep going up and viable alternatives keep showing up. To see the larger image from below, click the image here.

by: Anne Haynes

Social Media and Social Networking are used interchangeably and in my opinion have two totally different meanings:

Social Media is users’ rating videos, blog posts/content and consumer products. Since, I am in the market for a new road bike this summer. I used the search engines to find out what people post about bikes; buying bikes, selling bikes, discount bikes in Kansas City, etc. This helps with my ability to make a valid decision on my purchase and in my opinion is user edited content (social media).

Social Networking is connecting people-to-people through the Internet. Being the social butterfly that I am, I want to keep up with people within business and the search industry. I seek specific sites around “business” social networking Linkedin and RYZE.com

The lines blur between social media and social networking because people have names and unique identifiers and this will forever keep social media and social networking in the grey area of understanding.

When I was at SES San Jose 2006, my opinion of ghostwriting: being the unknown on the internet, was quickly changed. The big players in the search industry were present during the Social Media Session and I just stood up and spoke, “I want to be me and be someone” else!” Very quickly I was shot down by the panel of guests. It’s clear after building different social media accounts for myself and for clients, you can’t hide on the Internet.

My name is Anne Haynes – I have a voice – I have an opinion and in a perfect world the team I work with has massive data!

Thank you Rand, Jim, Matt and others for giving me the 411!

by: Anne Haynes

With my recent arrival to an agency in Kansas, I’ve found a colleague that has a blog and he’s smoking me with PageRank. This colleague with his collective technical team has architected his site in a way to include 3 different blogs into one homepage. And because of this factor only, I feel his site has been given more PageRank.

I’ve not analyzed his offsite optimization, but I’ve been working on my blog for 6 months and only have a PR 1 and he has been working on his for 4 months and has a PR 3.

Webster, the agencies funny, innovative entrepreneur also referred to as the guy that is “smoking SEO” has proven his skills.

Cheers to Webster’s success, but what terms does he rank on….try “Feather Plucking Solutions for Exotic Birds” – You can read up on Webster’s Blog

What area of search marketing is the most challenging when training clients?

by: Anne Haynes

I was listening to SEO Rockstars when Todd and Greg start talking about how people are not using their rankings to make money.They give an example of how Rand and SEOMOZ took over drivl.com and are ranking on the term “Celebrity Nudity”. Todd continues to add that this term has only 2 million indexed pages in Google. I enjoyed listening to Todd continue to showcase how true SEOers are not looking into the revenue opportunities. Todd proposes the best usage of this ranking is to 301 this page to a celebrity nudity affiliate and start making money!

A friend of mine sent me a link to a blog post about ODP being dead and wow, the reading was awesome: Check out all the details at: Skrentablog

DMOZ is kicking out editors like Shoemoney because he discussed being able to pay editors to help get listed in the directory.