Mondays follow weekends and a lot can happen over 48-hours. That makes a Monday morning a bit of a mash-up. As I scan article ideas from first to last, my mind keeps wandering to the middle. There must be a common thread uniting ideas found in the four pieces outlined below. The most obvious connection is that each relates to search marketing but perhaps if read collectively there is something a bit deeper, a signal of where the SEM industry is going. Read more…
The StepForth SEO Blog been nominated for an award from Search Engine Journal. That’s a nice way to start a Friday morning after a long and busy week. Huge thanks from StepForth to those who nominated us. That was the easy part. Now, anyone interested in voting for their favourite blogs has a much harder task ahead of them.
A quick scan of the nominees shows a number of well written and highly informative blogs readers can cast their ballot in support of, separated into five categories. Participants are asked to rank each nominee on a scale of 1 – 5 with 5 being the highest score.
Best Search Engine News Blog
Pandia | MarketingPilgrim | SearchEngineBlog.com | Search Engine Lowdown | Search Views | John Battelle Search Blog | Search Engine Watch Blog | Threadwatch | Google Blogoscoped | Search Engine Roundtable | Research Buzz | Top Rank Blog
Best SEO Blogs
StuntDubl | FishSEO | SEOMoz | SEO SpeedWagon | TextLinkBlog | SEO Black Hat | SEO by the SEA | Jim Boykin’s Blog | Link Building Blog | Stepforth SEO Blog | Matt Cutts Blog | Greg Boser’s WebGuerrilla | SEO Book
Best Search Engine Owned Blogs
Yahoo Search Blog | Ask Jeeves Blog | MSN Search Weblog | Google Blogs (All of them)
Best Search Engine Marketing and Contextual Advertising Blogs:
AdRants | Did-It Frog Blog | Got Ads? | JenSense | Google AdWords and Adsense Blogs (in general) | Marketing Vox | ProBlogger | Traffick.Com
Best Blog Search Engine Blogs
Topix.net Blog | IceRocket Blog | Daypop Weblog | Feedster Blog | BlogDigger Development Blog | blogpulse Newswire | Blog Search Engine | Technorati Weblog
As you can see, there is some stiff competition in the SEO Blog category. If you are interested in voting, please visit the Search Engine Journal’s 2005 Best of Search Blogs Awards at SurveyMonkey.com. To anyone who participates, thanks for voting. And to other nominees, thanks for writing and sharing your information with others in the industry. Hopefully we can all teach each other another thing or two in 2006.
The greased pig of the search world is about to get caught. Apparently the pig is a prized ham after all.
Have you ever been to a greased pig catching contest? Almost twenty years ago, while hitchhiking my way across the vast Canadian prairies one youthful summer, I saw one and let me tell ya, it was better than watching donkey baseball. (another bizarre Canadian pastime. It’s best not to ask too many questions at this point eh?). Ok, here’s what happens. Read more…
It is twenty days shy of Christmas and Bill Stroll, our sales and marketing manager just spent ten minutes on the phone talking about Valentines Day. It’s not really a strange subject to come up in conversation at this time of the year. Valentines Day is the next major commercial marketing event. The nature of search marketing leads us to plan months into the future as seasonal and event specific content needs to be developed, posted, spidered in order to achieve eventual top10 placements.
As recently as three years ago, we would caution clients to expect a three to sixteen week turn-around time between posting optimized content and positive results. For some, that would mean the development of commercial content for Valentines Day might begin in late October and early November in order to have it ready for a post-Christmas shift in target audience. Now, content posted to established (long-term) websites on a Monday could appear in the Top10 before the following Friday, sometimes hours after it was posted.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that content creators and webmasters targeting a mid-February audience should wait until the end of January or early February to begin to develop Valentine’s related content though. As the years have gone on, a lot more information gets added to the web and much of that information is more professional, better written and far better optimized for search placement. For smaller businesses, this can mean long hours of writing, researching and designing in order to have a series of seasonal pages ready for posting in order to compete with larger websites.
Successful marketing is a process of long-term planning and execution of those plans in an ordered campaign. When designing a sales-orientated website, planning for annual special events is a good way to capture interest and increase sales. Search engine users are fairly predictable. Being the general public, they are interested in whatever is interesting at any given time. As search marketers, we know when search traffic will spike for specific holidays and events with a far greater degree of accuracy than the television and print media can offer.
Search marketers also know that seasonally topical information can be posted at any time of the year. Think of the search engines as a reference guide to a massive filing cabinet. There might be files about any number of subjects amongst the vast amount of information stored in that cabinet but its specific items are only accessed when needed. A Top10 placement can be achieved for products or services relating to Valentine’s Day in September and remain in place months after February 14th, provided the page is actively updated and not left static and stagnant.
Long term content is often much easier to get placements for than new content is. Documents that exist for longer periods of time tend to have more incoming links and are viewed as more “trusted” by search engines. As mentioned above, that content should change from time to time as a static page is not seen as favorably as an active one.
In previous years, search engines tended to put more emphasis on the Home, or index page of a website. That would necessitate seasonally topical content being inserted on the first page of the site six to twelve weeks before placements were expected, or the development of seasonal sub-domains. Now that search engines tend to treat all documents within a domain as equals, event or seasonal information can be an ongoing part of a much larger website. This again allows search marketers to view the web as a filing cabinet. It is a good thing to have information easily accessible at any time of the year and it is always a good time to promote seasonally topical information, even if the season or event is six months away.
There is a natural rush towards the date of the seasonal holiday or event that should be accounted for in search marketing planning. During the 2004 US elections, real estate in Maryland and Virginia was reaching a peak that tends to follow US election cycles. In the weeks leading up to the election, a massive rush from Maryland and Virginia based realtors flooded many SEO shops, even those of us a continent away on the west coast. Realtors who first approached SEO or SEM shops naturally tended to fare better than those who waited until mid-rush. (Many SEO and SEM shops offer exclusivity on keyword targets to clients and tend to not represent more than one client per keyword or keyword phrase).
A point Bill made in our discussion stood out. We should be telling our clients to try to envision their websites months or even a year in advance and asking questions about long-term marketing planning. What are our clients doing at various points in the year? Is there information on their websites that would be searched for with greater frequency one month over another? Are there products or services that have a seasonal tie-in?
In previous years, spiders drove the search marketing sales cycle. To get a strong Valentines Day placement, we would be working on optimizing content starting this week. Today, the search marketing sales cycle is much more similar to that of the brick-and-mortar world. For smaller clients and those with new websites, today is the time to starting to plan for next year’s Halloween to Christmas season, along with the dozen or so other consumer events of the calendar year.
