How would you like to subscribe to Search Marketing Standard at cost? Well, now you can. For the holidays Boris and the crew are offering a 1 year subscription for only $4.95, that’s a 67% saving on the regular subscription price (for new subscribers only). What’s more, there’s a charity aspect to it, for every person that signs up using the coupon code “HOLIDAY67″ they’ll donate $1 to Toys for Tots.

So that’s a magazine with great search marketing articles at a huge discount, and a donation to charity that gives you a warm glow, where can you go wrong? (and no, I’m not getting anything out of this)

Since other sites have critiqued the candidates sites, and their social media strategies, I thought I’d come in from another direction and look at what’s ranking for certain campaign 2008 terms on Google.

First up is “President 2008“. Ignoring Wikipedia, and other informational, non-candidate sites, here are the 5 names that display in the top 10.

1. Christopher Walken
2. Mike Gravel
3. Hillary Clinton
4. General Zod
5. Mitt Romney

So out of the 5 ‘people’ listed, one is a fictional character (no, not Mike Gravel, General Zod), and one an actor who, unlike Fred Thompson, isn’t running.

How about if we amend the search to include the word ‘for’? So now the keyword is “for president 2008“, every candidate should have that on their website, shouldn’t they? Well, there are many of the same people in the top 10 as in the above (which you’d expect with the addition of one word), plus a few more:

1. Christopher Walken
2. General Zod
3. Hillary Clinton
4. Mike Gravel
5. John Kerry
6. Macguyver
7. Mitt Romney
8. Mark Warner

What about PPC? Well for both of those results - the only candidate running ads is Bill Richardson, which is a great idea given that his site doesn’t show up organically for those searches.

Lets go partisan. “Democratic Candidate for President“. Page 1 is all news & opinion sites, the first candidate site that displays is in the 11th spot… and which candidate is the one that ranks highest out of all candidates for “Democratic Candidate for President”? Yep, Republican Mitt Romney, followed by Republican Michael Charles Smith, Republican Jim Mitchell, Republican Tom Tancredo, and Republican Ron Paul. The first actual campaign site for a Democrat for that phrase is Joe Biden in 49th position.

How about “Republican Candidate for President“? Mitt Romney and Michael Charles Smith show up on page 1, and Jim Mitchell and Tom Tancredo on page 2.

So where are the Democrats? Where are the big candidates? Hillary? Obama? Edwards? Let’s try “Presidential Campaign 2008” and see if that works out better for them… Well there’s only one candidate website on the first page, and that’s Republican Ron Paul. The first mention of the big 3 democrats is Obama’s site in 26th position, 2 behind our old pal Christopher Walken, but 2 ahead of Mitt Romney, and 3 ahead of John McCain. As for Hillary and John Edwards, neither of them are in the top 100 (although a Hillary blog shows up in 55th). Other major candidates - Rudy shows up in 31st, Fred Thompson in 70th, and Chris Dodd in 71st.

So what are the others ranking for? Well, it’s their names, or the searches aboves modified with their names. As far as the generic terms, it really looks like the Republicans are doing a better job, even for Democratic terms. What does this mean as far as the election? Not much, The only ‘big’ candidate ranking well for any of these terms was Mitt Romney, not ranking for these terms doesn’t really seem to have hurt Hillary, Obama, etc…

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

Looking to find a new domain, but are having trouble because all the good ones are gone? Well, there’s a tool out there that lets you enter words and it’ll check all combinations, along with combinations including synonyms, to see what’s available. You can ask it to combine on 2 or 3 letter terms, and ask for just the .com, or to make sure that the .com, .net and .org are available for a particular combination. The name of this tool? BustaName. Thanks to Ben for the tip.

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):

1. Save Me Bloglines - June 2007
2. Poor SEO, Great Content - August 2007
3. Scraping SEMPO for Keywords - August 2007

Traffic Sources:

1. Referrers - 61%
2. Engines - 20%
3. Direct Traffic - 19%

Top Referrers:

1. StumbleUpon
2. DooleysFurniture
3. Sphinn

Top Keywords

1. Simon Heseltine
2. Search Engine Tigers
3. Nick Stamoulis

Congratulations to both Bill Slawski and Li Evans on the official announcement today that they’ve both joined Christine Churchill over at KeyRelevance. The great news for both of them is that they’ll be working remotely, so Bill will be able to stay ‘by the sea’ in Delaware, and Li will be able to stalk watch her beloved Eagles. Congratulations also go out to Chris Boggs, who is moving from the Philly area to Ohio, to work for eMergent Marketing.

As for me, well I’ll be making some changes in the near future, but they’re all going to be blog related. The current title for this blog is “Local and In-House Search Marketing Topics”. Since I write about In-House for Search Engine Land, I haven’t really been doing much on In-House here. Funnily enough, a (non-personalized) search for - in house search marketing - has this blog third, with one of my SEL articles in first place. Yes, this site currently ranks above SEMPO for in-house search marketing, and they have a committee dedicated to it…

As for the local side of things, since I changed jobs 3 months ago, I haven’t been working with geotargeted campaigns as I had in the past, so without daily, or at least frequent exposure, it does become difficult to keep on top of a topic. Then there are the other writing commitments that are eating up my not so available time: I write on a little bit more than a weekly basis for RBDRodeo, and probably soon on a ‘more frequently than I was doing’ basis for SearchEngineGuide (I was bribed with a wonderful laptop bag), so I’m not quite sure where I’m going to go with this blog. In all likelihood I’ll continue to use it as a place where I can put a little of my personality in the posts, with posts that are either slightly off topic / don’t fit with the other blogs I write for, or posts that are fairly short and concise. Thinking about it more, you probably won’t notice much of a difference beyond the title change (when I get around to it), but still I thought I should mention it to the 18 29 subscribers (nice jump since the last time I checked Feedburner).

If you’re interested in checking out my recent posts on the other blogs, here’s a list.

Search Engine Land

• When to Work with Agencies - August 2007
• Managing Search Marketing Campaigns with Social Media tools - August 2007
• How To Hire A Search Marketing Team Leader - July 2007
• When To Bring Search Marketing In-House - June 2007

Search Engine Guide

• Using Google Trends to Research your Brand - August 2007
• Using Lead Generation Services - July 2007

RBDRodeo

• SEO and Object Oriented Programming - An Analogy - August 2007
• Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007 wrap up (links to the 12 sessions I blogged) - August 2007
• Search Engines and Re;evancy - August 2007
• 5 Reasons for Continual Search Optimization - August 2007
• LinkedIn - Social Media Overview - August 2007
• Social Media - An Overview - August 2007
• How Advocacy Groups can take advantage of Universal Search - July 2007
• The Basics of Online Reputation Management - July 2007
• When should your CEO Blog? - July 2007
• The Perils of non-Canonicalization - July 2007
• Grand Central - not quite the Google Phone - July 2007
• Spreading your Corporate Footprint using Google Universal Search - July 2007
• 6 PR Disasters from late 2006 to the Present - June 2007
• SEM, SMO & PPC for the PRSA - June 2007
• International Search Marketing - June 2007

I was at my local Toastmasters meeting on Wednesday night, and the issue of finding a coordinator for the area humorous speech contest came up. The district governor lamented the fact that it was hard to find people to volunteer for positions such as this, as people these days tend to ask “WIIFM” or “What’s in it for me?”, rather than leaping in and volunteering to help.

This got me thinking about the SEM industry, where I really have to say that the people, on the whole, are really nice and welcoming. From buying strangers, like me, drinks, to being willing to forge friendships with people they either haven’t met, or briefly met on a bus on the way to a party for 5 minutes. People in the industry are willing to share their insights, answer your questions, or even ask you for help. This is a kind of community that I didn’t experience in my previous life as a programmer, and I have to say that it’s very refreshing.

But it does go beyond that. This week, the company that I work for announced that they are going to be providing pro bono support for a charity that takes at-risk kids and trains them a triathletes in order to make sure that their life is on track. Not only is the company providing this marketing support, but we’re also going to be providing financial support to the organization - Exceeding Expectations - by sponsoring all clients and employees for any endurance distance events (you may notice that a certain blogger gets mentioned in the article as the next to run a distance event… thanks for the pressure Nan).

It’s not just RedBoots that does this though, there are plenty of other individuals and organizations in the SEM space that support pet projects and charities in order to enrich the world we live in. Back in May, Bruce Clay ran a contest for non-profits, to give a couple of people training and tools to increase their effectiveness for their organizations. Looking at Facebook, you can see the various charities that people in your network support, such as Matt McGee of Marchex, who appears to support similar charities to some Irish singer called Bono.

I have to say that I’m happy to be part of this community, and I’d like to think that I’m trying to give back as much as I take from it. As for the contest coordinator job at toastmasters… well, my name is on it, and it’ll be one of my tasks when I get back from SES-SJ, what’s in it for me? Outside of the experience of helping out a great organization, not much, but that’s just fine by me.

With the fun of summer, and SES - SJ coming up next week (followed by my own little side trip around CA), I’m not setting up an official VASEM meetup for August, and have instead scheduled the next one for Sunday September 9th at 4pm at Bertucci’s in Tyson’s Corner (back where we had the first meetup). I’m looking forward to seeing both past and new attendees at the next VA SEM meetup.

While doing a Google search for my company - RedBoots Consulting - I noticed a PPC ad over on the right hand side for a Nick Stamoulis.

For some reason his name sounded familiar to me, so I did a search on my old company - Innovectra - and, lo and behold, there was the same ad, once again… the only ad. This got me thinking, apart from me, what was the connection between the two companies? My first thought was that both were SEMPO members, so to test this theory I went over to the SEMPO membership list and did some more searches - Bruce Clay, Fathom SEO, Ingenio, 360i, Flying Point Media, G3 Group, Kinetic Results, JumpFly, Performics, Sitelab International, The Search Agency, TopRank Online Marketing - each one had the exact same ad from Mr. Stamoulis displayed. Now admittedly, while virtually every SEMPO member company that I tried had the ad, I did find one that didn’t - Keller Williams Realty- but that is most likely because he scrubbed the list, or those ads were taken down. Why could they have been taken down? Well for starters that display URL contravenes the Google AdWords guidelines.

Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you’re advertising… The display URL field cannot be used as another line of ad text…Avoid gimmicky repetition

So by repeating that phone number in the display URL, it becomes invalid as attempting to go to that page pushes you to his custom 404 page (the destination URL behind it is fine, it’s the display URL that is invalid).

As for non SEMPO members, I tried a few, and he didn’t show for any of them - Commerce360, Calafia, Marketing Pilgrim, Small Business SEM, Marchex, Search Marketing Gurus - which leads me to think that my original hypothesis is correct, and this guy sourced his PPC keyword list directly from the SEMPO member list. Yes, it’s an open list that anyone can access and get, and he is a paid up member of SEMPO, but it just doesn’t feel right to me.