I often find myself accidently lumping in everything internet marketing with SEO. To me, SEO is just what you call someone with an insatiable hunger to learn about marketing online. The day you truly become an SEO could be the first time you read something that makes you say, “damn, this is pretty easy and I can do this, but it’s hard enough where I’m going to learn more and more about it everyday”. So maybe there should be better names for “meta-webmasters”, or “online project managers”, but for now, SEO still just sounds cool. With all the intro babble aside, to most online marketing folks, it’s all about the bottom line. In simplest form, there are three questions that I try to answer with every site: How will it get traffic? How will it convert? How will it profit? If you constantly improve on these questions you’re golden. One way to increase on the conversion question is to increase credibility. To me it makes sense that if it adds credibility for the user, it’s eventually gonna be rolled into an algorithm somewhere as well.
I really haven’t made up my mind about SEMPO yet, and certainly don’t have the big bucks to pony up personally for a membership (I’d get much more personal satisfaction from a new ipod or digital camera I’m sure). I don’t see many advantages for We Build Pages at this point in our company lifecycle either, but for many people it may be a good option. For some reason I woke up this morning with some thoughts of SEMPO on my mind, so I thought I’d explore those a bit further. There are some great minds behind SEMPO, and some excellent people that have helped got it to where it is. There are also some very smart people who have jumped ship and had very valid criticisms (albeit not always contructive) of the organization.
I did some competitive tools a while back with competitive analysis and keyword tools, but I think the idea of competitive analysis is key to the natural search engine optimization space and is worth revisiting. Understanding your industry from an online perspective is critical to the success of an SEO campaign. There are a lot of tools to better understand your competitors available, and it is definitely worthwhile to use them to your advantage.
Book: The Ultimate Sales Letter by: Dan Kennedy
Subtitle: Boost your sales with powerful sales letters
At some point, ad agencies will be forced to come to terms with the fact that they will have to accept and work with search engine marketers even if they have to bring them in house. I must admit to having a bit of a chip on my shoulder when it comes to traditional ad agencies, because I’ve been totally shot down every time I tried to have an abundance mentality with them. Since I fall somewhere in between affiliate marketing mercenary and corporate stooge, I love comparing the two worlds - the personalities involved, and the lifestyle associated with each. It is truly an intriguing comparison of people that share a lot in common, but can also be polar opposites.
Linkbait
n. Something that attracts a multitude of inbound links to a website
Linkbaiting
v. The process of creating linkbait
*Note to new readers…this post may contain heavy doses of sarcasm.
“Whole areas of knowledge and information have been defined into nonexistence because the system cannot know, understand, control, or measure them.”
- Anne Wilson Schaef
