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
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.
See how well you do on the IBM Press “Do It Wrong Quickly Challenge“. You’re asked a variety of questions on marketing 2.0 topics, and you have a total of 90 seconds to answer as many as possible. It’s a fun diversion, with my only quibble being that they should dock points for a wrong answer, as you could just simply click every answer to get as many points as possible, but where’s the fun in that? But then again, the concept is that if you’re quick, should you make a mistake, you can correct it and be on your way before the slow adopters, so maybe not docking point for a wrong answer is right. 
Thanks to Nate for the tip
Li Evans put out the latest installment of her Women of Internet Marketing Series today, one of her questions to Carrie Hill was
Simon Heseltine, Bill Slawski or Scott Orth?
which generated a response of
Hmm - Bill Slawski I think - I love his patent application stuff. I’m way to short-attention-spanned to do that myself so I love that he breaks it down for us. I have enjoyed Simon Heseltine’s recent foray into geo-targeting. It’s great for travel.
So in case anyone has popped over to this blog, looking for that ‘foray’, it’s actually over on RBDRodeo - ‘Local Targeting for your PPC Campaigns’, although I do have some older posts here on geotargeting (yeah, it needs updating), and I am going to be speaking at SES-Local in November on ‘Best Practices for Using PPC for Local Targeting‘.
One year ago today, the first article on this site went live - location based geotargeting - since then there’s been another 164 posts that have gone up on this site. So, since this is the one year anniversary of this site, I thought I’d throw some stats up.
Top 3 posts (traffic):
Traffic Sources:
Top Referrers:
Top Keywords
So, literally 5 days after joining the local gym, I got a phone call from Kaylee over at LookSmart to let me know that I’d won a BowFlex in a drawing at SES. This follows on from the Palm T|X that I won at SES-NY last year. Not bad. It kind of makes the phone calls and emails that I’ve received from the places I didn’t win at, worth it.
Now, when at the iPod and iPhone contest people going to be calling me to ask about shipping my winnings?
It’s offline advertising, but since it was on the way to SES San Jose (just outside Stanford University), and it was amusing, I thought I’d share…
Yep, I’ve been tagged for another blog tag game, this time actually by name. The idea behind Rhea’s game is to identify the 7 members of your SEO dream team… so here goes.
Oh wait, that’s an old Simpsons joke. Let’s do the real thing.
Danny Sullivan - This one is a given
Matt Cutts - Ditto
Avinash Kaushik - You need analytics, so go for the best (there wasn’t one person that objected when his presentation went over time in San Jose).
Now it’s time to change it up from Rhea’s answers…
Bill Slawski - one of the brightest minds I know, let alone in search.
Todd Malicoat - despite the new tattoo.
Jeremy Schoemaker- if there’s a way to make money, he can find it.
As for number 7… I’m going to leave that open for a specialist in whatever direction my team decides would be the best way to go in. Now all I have to do is have my numbers come up tonight in the Mega Millions drawing and we’ll see how this works in reality. 
Ok, now Matt, Pat and Rob, it’s your turn, should you decide to upset people in the industry by not selecting them.
Since Pat kind of tagged me on this, here goes…
All of the above are actual titles of blog posts from the same blog over the last 3 weeks. Do you have any idea what this blog is about? Actually, can you guess what any of the posts are about? Ok, maybe the “may be comin’ to your town” post, but the rest? No. Would it shock you to know that this blog ranks in the top 10 for all of these phrases, even a fairly common phrase such as “Speak of the Devil”? How does it manage that? Looking at the site, it doesn’t even bother with metatags, but it is ranked 312th in Technorati, and has lots of links. This is all due to the content. Well, it’s all due to the author of the content, this is the blog for the author Neil Gaiman.
The posts vary from discussions on his books and films, to Q&A with readers, to finding a stray dog, to wondering what’s going on with the bees in the back of his garden. But the important thing is that the content is what people expect it to be, and as such they bookmark and visit the site. I can’t imagine that he gets much search engine traffic on the topics of feeling like a cork, or getting better all the time, and with his movie not doing as well at the US box office as hoped, he may be feeling that it might have been a good idea to try to get more traffic to his site, in order to get the word out more, as optimizing his site would most likely pull in more fans or even potential fans that were unaware of its existence.
