Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

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My good buddies Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis must be working overtime these days. They’ve just recently become “evangelists” for Text Link Ads, and are also doing a new show called “Rush Hour” on webmasterradio.fm - tune in for the first show which will be held weekly Wednesdays at 4:00 pm. I’m honored to say that I’ll also be their first guest on the show, if there’s anything social media related that you’d like to hear covered, feel free to post it here, and we’ll see about putting it on. My only worry for them is that they cover too much of the REALLY good stuff that is working well these days. These guys are sharp, and it should be a great show to listen to for all you webheads out there. Be sure to tune in!

How many AAA companies do you know of? AAA insurance did it most notably with insurance. Insurance is competitive. You need any angle you can get. I think the roots of search optimization can be traced to this. This is the mindset. This is the school of thought in action. Gaining an advantage in the alpha-sort (thanks to Michael for the the techie-marketing terminology) is one of a handful of ways that you can increase your advantage in the world of optimization. This is beyond SEO - this is a marquee example of the school of thought that sets good SEO’s above those who still work on meta tags and creating reciprocal links. This is the school of thought that gives creative thinkers an advantage in any marketplace that they dive into. If you can’t figure out what I’m talking about - keep writing those title tags and meta descriptions. If you can, keep it at the forefront of your thought process when implementing creative campaigns - just be sure to spread a little link love if you engage in a little "yellow page optimization". Despite the simplistic nature - it so often gets overlooked. Keep your eyes peeled. Opportunities abound (and that doesn’t mean you need to post ‘em to the world the second you find them either:) **Despite the fact that I like this simple technique - it might also be a good label for the really BASIC optimization that most folks think of when they hear SEO (metas, titles, kw copy, etc.) - It could also be the type of people you’d FIND if you looked in the yellow pages under “search engine optimization” (yellow page optimizers). Hopefully it’ll take on a bit of a double meaning for people that “get it” - kinda like “Forget about it!”

Despite being incredibly sick of always hearing about “the new google”, and not believing it can happen due to the extremely high barrier to entry, I think there *IS* still opportunity for someone to gain significant share of the stagnating search marketplace. The ONE major reason it could happen - is geek mindshare. That’s where search was won by G. I read Rand and Matt’s excellent piece of the digg algorithm, and it got me thinking about why I like the site so well. If the same processes, and level of expertise can migrate to other genres - they have a winner.

I’ve been playing with Digg quite a lot lately - it’s an interesting site with a very well defined user base (of alpha geeks). I decided to start taking notes on some of my favorite articles and information on Digg for your reading pleasure (and so you don’t have to search as much as I did). I think there are some great opportunities for reaching an impressive audience with digg. They’ve got some sharp folks behind the scenes - and are improving their algorithm at a rate much faster than we’ve seen search engines do in the past.

I’ve been playing with digg quite a bit lately, and one of the big problems is duplicate story submissions - or power users walking over smaller users by resubmitting the same stories from different sources. In my opinion, it’s only right to give a digg to the person who originally submitted the story - assuming it is the same topic and a reasonable story (I didn’t digg the article that had “AMAZING STORY!!!” in the title today despite it having been submitted an hour earlier than the one I DID digg). So do digg a favor - if you submit a story and SEE those duplicates, don’t say “screw those guys” and submit anyhow. Give a good karmic digg, and keep hunting for another good story. Consider the time as well as the better title - if there’s 5 minutes difference, and the late guy has the better title - I vote that the better title wins. A good title (as all SEO’s know) goes a long ways, but time should generally be the main consideration.