Search Engine Tigers

If you’re not going to be heading to SMX-London, then you have an alternative. Li Evans of Key Relevance is having another of her Philadelphia SEM meetups on November 15th. If you’re in the area, it’s a great chance to chat with her, Bill Slawski, and whoever else attends. Full details are below.

WHEN: Thursday November 15, 2007 starting around 6-6:15 p.m.

WHERE: Fox & Hound Pub & Grille (King of Prussia Mall)
160 N Gulph Rd,

King of Prussia, PA 19406.

(610) 962-0922

Get directions

My latest post on Search Engine Guide went live yesterday. The topic: a review of 404 error pages.

What a wonderful email I received from Expedia this morning. They’re following up on a hotel stay that I booked through them. They’ve given it a week so as not to pressure me, and have now sent me an email asking me to take a survey on my stay at Unknown…

What a shame that they don’t know where they booked me in, and by the solitary comma up at the top, it looks like they believe that my name is blank. This really is a case where they’ve obviously not fully tested their email system to ensure that it’s sending out the appropriate messages, similar to this issue that Jeff Herrity talked about recently. Testing and usability are 2 pieces of the online puzzle that, for some reason, seem to be an afterthought, if even that, which is a shame because if the functionality isn’t right and the site isn’t easy to work with, you’re going to leak customers when there’s no need to.

Not a search related post, apart from the fact that I sent myself a document on search that I was working on in Word 2007 format, without having Word 2007 at home.  If you’re unaware, the Office 2007 suite uses different technology that is not compatible with previous versions.  Luckily Microsoft came up with a solution.  All you have to do is download the docx converter, and your older Office applications can open up files created in 2007.  So now I can read and write to my search document.  Nice.

Just in case you were wondering why I was talking about working on your presenting style the other day, it’s because I’m going to be speaking in London on November 16th at the SMX-London conference on the topic of Reputation and Brand Management Strategies. So if you’re going to be in town for the conference, be sure to come over and say hello, and if you’d like to attend, you can use the discount code SPSMX07 to get 10% off the price of the show.

Just in case you haven’t seen it, my latest In-House column for Search Engine Land went live this morning.

The IT Group: Friend or Foe of In-House Search Marketers?

For those who don’t know, I’m the current VP of PR for my local Toastmasters club in Manassas. As a member of the club I get a monthly magazine called “ToastMaster” (not very imaginative, but it states it’s intended audience quite well). In the edition that I received today there was a reprint of a BusinessWeek story entitled “YouTube Your Way to Better Speaking“, which is a nice article talking about how you can improve your public speaking and presentation skills through watching ‘experts’ speaking on YouTube.

Having recently seen a video of myself speaking a few months ago (no, I’m not dropping a link to it here), I’d also advocate taping and watching yourself. You’ll notice mannerisms and ways of speaking that you can then attempt to correct. For example, I noticed a couple of things about my presentation style. Firstly, I kept looking down and to the left, which was where the presentation was located, not really my fault, as the built-in screen on the lectern wasn’t working, so we had to use a laptop to the side. Secondly, I noticed that during the presentation I was waving my hands around a little too much, but I did think that I used gestures well in most places.

So there you have it, YouTube is not just for McGruff the Crime Dog putting mentos and diet coke into an industrial blender while a Brazilian goalkeeper acts as though hit by a sniper rifle when brushed on his cheek, it’s also good for self improvement.

So there you are, checking out the SERPs for your company. All 10 on the first page look good, you feel good about life…

Unbeknown to you, at that very same moment, a disgruntled customer is blogging about the poor experience they had in your establishment that day. Mere minutes after they press ‘Publish’ on their blogging software of choice, their post is spidered, and the SERPs for your company suddenly look different.

So the answer to the question in the title is: a few minutes.  (Disclaimer: yes that last listing for Claytime Cafe is from my personal blog).

The same goes for the non-SERP visible results, such as on rating and review sites.  For example, while yellowpages.com may show in the SERPs that it has a listing for this company, there’s no notification to the company when a poor or negative review for their business is added to their site.  Again, a poor review can be added top one 0f these sites in seconds, so the company needs to have some way of finding out about these reviews, so that they can respond in the most appropriate manner.  Whether that means that they have some automated way of monitoring them, they monitor them manually, or they pay someone to do it, it needs to be done.  Nothing affects a business more than having a poor reputation.

Sometimes you, and by you I mean I, have an idea for the perfect post. Hopefully you’re near a computer, a pad and pen, or your blackberry, and you can jot it down.

Eagerly you rush to the computer, and start typing. Waiting for the moment that Neil Gaiman describes thusly

..that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it… and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

Then it happens, either the post starts to head in a different direction, and you’re not happy with the way it’s gone, your beautiful six year old daughter runs in and distracts you, you get half way through and don’t think that what you’re saying is worthwhile, or you get done and before you post it you go to your feed reader and someone else has covered the same topic in a much better way.

In this spirit, I thought I’d go through 4 posts that stare back at me from their draft status every time I open up wordpress, and say why they didn’t make it.

Why SEO is like a game of pool

Seemed like a great concept, well at least when I was in the pool hall wasting time before a hair cut. You have to play your shot, get the ball in the hole, but that’s not enough, you also have to position yourself for the next shot. Your SEO plan should always be thinking one step beyond where you are now, getting ready for the next ’shot’. After about a paragraph the analogy started to wear too thin, so it went over to the draft pile.

Ethics and Anonymity

This post was about how anonymity really doesn’t exist on the web, and people who believe that it does, will eventually get found out. This was triggered by the scandal involving the Whole Foods CEO who was posting anonymously on a finance site about a competitor. I put this post aside and other people did a much better job of covering it. A few weeks later though, I did return to this topic and completely rewrote it over on the RBDRodeo blog.

How Important is your Title Tag?

This is a post that could go live any time, all I need to do is go back to it and finish it / tidy it up. I think I have enough in there to differentiate it from other posts on the same topic.

Running with Analytics

The post was written and scheduled to go up a week ago. It talked about how preparing for running a marathon (less than 2 weeks until I attempt my first) you should listen to your body and determine when you can push yourself to go to the next stage, and when you should make corrections to your running based on feedback from your body (my poor knees). Obviously I then tied this into analytics, and how you should use them to know when to modify your site, and when to push it to the next level. Then, the day before the post was scheduled to go live… the Chicago marathon debacle happened. With one person dead and over 300 hospitalized, I figured it wouldn’t be a good idea for that post to go live, so instead I rewrote it and put a post on Continual Measurement with Analytics on RBDRodeo.

So there you have it, 4 posts that have been sitting there, begging with me to do something with them, and now that I have I can put 3 of them out of their misery, and let the 4th one sit there in the knowledge that I’ll return to it at some point.

So while I’ve been off writing blog posts about writing blog posts, and making sure that you write frequently, I’ve not been posting frequently here.  So I’m going to start rectifying that by giving you some links to some great posts that I’ve read over the last few weeks.

Matt McGee wrote about how you should Go Green to get Links

Jen Laycock followed that up with  a post on Going Niche, specifically Green

Jacob Wolfsheimer expanded the topic with his Social Media Marketing Campaign Process 

Switching topics, Debra Mastaler put out a great post on how someone with a new site should start out building links to that site

Of course, should you not want to do it yourself, Loren Baker has a list of 11 tips on hiring a link building firm

But how do you determine whether an SEO firm that you’re looking to hire is a good one or a bad one?

…and I’ll finish this roundup with a post from Nan Dawkins (my boss) who had a response to the announcement by Google that they were going to be providing support for nonprofits through YouTube