by Jim Gilbert

WELL… YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST and WE WARNED YOU!
Quote from an Official Google email dated 23May2008:

“The feature will be enabled by default, although it
won’t begin to affect your accounts until June 3, 2008.”

UPDATE! 23May2008 — Automatic Match to be the DEFAULT! see the full update at: Automatic Match to be Default

So far this “Automatic Match” option is only a beta and accessible by invitation only. BUT, If this monster goes live and removes our ability to “opt out” (like in Expanded Broad Match), something very, very ugly may happen:

•   No matter how large your budgets, they WILL be spent — every penny (and dollar)!

I was going to let you read the Beta help file, but it disappeared… IT’S BACK, but you will have to be logged into an AdWords account to get to it: Automatic Match

Summarizing:

Just build your campaigns and they will come. Heck, you no longer even have to offer any keywords — Google will look at your ad and your site and make sure your ads show for any search query that even “smells” relevant.

Did Google’s revenue drop in January scare them that badly?

By Li Evans

Madison Avenue advertising agencies may be good at TV commercials, and highly paid PR Firms may know how to write a press release, but when it comes to translating that across to an online medium (i.e. the internet), the majority of them have a lot to learn. I came across a post on AdFreak about Hanes’ new ad campaign for their new product “Wedgie Free” underwear, which features actress Sarah Chalke of Scrubs fame. The commercials really hit the mark by capturing Sarah’s comedic timing and her all around good looks. It can appeal to women by them thinking “wow, ‘She Gets Wedgies Too?’”, yes I know kind of corny, but all of us have been in that situation at least once in our lives.

While the commercials are catchy, and even premiered on American Idol (trying to capture that ‘young adult female’ demographic), I stopped and wondered how this was translating online. To any online marketer, it’s probably not a surprise that it hasn’t translated yet. If you’re a major online brand, maybe even Hanes, you are probably wondering “what is she talking about?” Well lets take a look at this a little closer.

Hanes PR people sent out a press release. It’s nice, contains images of Sarah Chalke from the commercials and also includes the ability to play the videos on PR Newswire. Great! Hanes’ PR company has at least managed to figure out how to get the videos and images into the press release, but that’s where it seems to have stopped. The PR Release isn’t optimized for search - at least the way normal people search - especially if the aim is “Wedgie Free”, “Wedgies”. I’m sorry, but not many women refer to their underwear crawling up their backsides as “no ride up”, its a “wedgie” plain and simple. It make work in a commercial, but that’s not how people search.

When they launched this campaign, they probably didn’t even stop to think about an online strategy. I’m pretty certain it was more of an after thought. Why? Well because if you look at the search results, you’ll see they (meaning Hanes’ website) doesn’t rank for the main phrase “Wedgie Free”, nor “Wedgie Free” Hanes. They could own this term but they don’t and they are missing out - especially with their PR people contacting blogs like AdFreak.

Google Search “Wedgie Free”

Google Search “Wedgie Free Hanes”

Google Blog Search “Wedgie Free Hanes”

You can see the results (in both regular search and blog search) brought back are minimal, and probably until this point, not a lot of search were conducted on “wedgie free”. However, if you launch a campaign on American Idol touting “Wedgie Free” underwear, what do you think will happen? Hello - the audience of American Idol is the demographic that uses the internet the most, they are going to go on and search for videos, images and information on “Wedgie Free”. With as little competition as there is for the key phrases around this campaign, they could have really hit the mark online with this campaign without a lot of effort. Instead their Press Release on PR Newswire gets the search results as does AdFreak, who points to the PR NewsWire and Wall Street Journal pieces, not even to the Hanes website.

Multi-Media wise Hanes is sorrily missing out too. They could really capitalize on this campaign if they only took the time to contact an online marketing agency to help them “get more bang for the buck” when it comes to their online efforts. In taking a closer look, I’ll show you some examples of where they are really missing out. First we’ll look at images and then go to video.

A search in Google Image Search shows the screen capture below for “Hanes Wedgie Free”. I also did a search on “Sarach Chalke”. Granted the search for Sarah might be a bit more competitive, but had Hanes optimized their images on their site and in their press release for theses terms, they could be capturing another segment of search, and it’s quite possible they could invoke that these images produce “blended” search results in the search engines (where the images will appear in the search results).

Google Image Search “Hanes Wedge Free”

Google Image Search “Sarah Chalke”

Now lets go to video. Here’s another chance that Hanes could quite possibly get “blended” search results to start appearing for these phrases that undoubtedly people are looking for after the appearance of the commercials on American Idol, however, again they are missing out. Google now incorporates relevant YouTube videos into their search results, Yahoo incorporates Yahoo, YouTube, Metacafe and a few others - Hanes is really missing out here!

Hanes doesn’t have a YouTube channel (as of this writing!), and they don’t have any of their videos/commercials out there. Instead other users on YouTube do. This actually does say a lot for their commercials - they are clever and witty, and Cuba Gooding, Jr is just hilarious in those commercials with Michael Jordan. People really LIKE them. It’s too bad Hanes isn’t taking advantage of this, people would subscribe to the channel and it could be another channel to disseminate their message in a quick and easy manner. Instead, with these new commercials, only one video is out there and it’s put up by a division of a PR Company. Plus the video isn’t even optimized for what it should be, it just has that “PR Spin” in the description.

YouTube Search for “Hanes”

YouTube Search for “Hanes Wedgie Free”

YouTube Search for “Hanes Wedgie”

YouTube Video of Wedgie Free Commercial Uploaded By Another Company

The point here is that this ad campaign is clever, it hits its mark in speaking to its target audience, and it’s got a likable spokesperson, but wow, is it missing out on taking this to the next level. The video of how the commercials were made that’s included in the press release on PR Newswire is great but only included there, why they haven’t put together an online marketing strategy to take advantage of this is really befuddling!

Hanes, if you listening, at least get your own YouTube channel! (That’s a little free advice!)

By Bill Slawski

There are 3 major parts to what a search engine does.

The first is crawling the Web to revisit old pages and find new pages. The second is taking those crawled pages, and extracting data from them to index. The third part is presenting pages to searchers in response to search queries.

There’s been some interesting research published recently on the first of those parts.

Crawling Challenges

Crawling the Web to discover new pages, and identify changes in pages that a search engine already knows about can be a challenge for a search engine. The major issues that search engines face in crawling sites involve:

• How many pages they can crawl without becoming bogged down,
• How quickly they can crawl pages without overwhelming the sites that they visit, and;
• How much resources do they have to use to crawl and then revisit pages.

A search engine needs to be careful on how it spends its time crawling web pages, and choosing which pages to crawl, to keep these issues under control.

A recently published academic paper describes this important aspect of how a search engine works, the Web crawl, in more detail than most papers that have been published on the subject before.

Enter IRLBot at Texas A&M

The Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University has been running a long term research project know as IRLBot which “investigates algorithms for mapping the topology of the Internet and discovering the various parts of the web.”

In April, researchers from the school will be presenting some of their recent reseach in Beijing, China, at the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008).

The title of their presentation is IRLbot: Scaling to 6 Billion Pages and Beyond (pdf), and the focus of the paper is this primary function that a search engine performs - crawling the Web and finding new Web pages.

Their research describes some interesting approaches to finding new pages on the Web, handling web sites with millions of pages, while also avoiding spam pages and infinite loops that could pose problems to web crawlers.

In a recent experiment that they performed that lasted 41 days, their crawler “IRLbot” ran on a single server and “successfully crawled 6.3 billion web pages at an average download time of approximately 1,789 pages per second.” This is a pretty impressive feat, and it’s even more impressive because of some of the obstacles faced while finding those pages.

Problems Facing Crawling Programs

Politeness

One challenge that faces Web crawling programs is that those programs shouldn’t ask for too many pages from the same site at a time, or they could use up too many resources of the site and make the site inoperable. Keeping that from happening is known as politeness, and search crawlers that aren’t polite often find themselves blocked by site owners, or complained about to the internet service provider hosting the crawler.

URL Management

As a crawling program indexes a site, it needs to pay attention to a file on the site known as a robots.txt file, which provides directions on pages and directories that the crawling program shouldn’t visit, so that it doesn’t crawl pages that it isn’t supposed to see. The program also needs to track which pages it has seen, so that it doesn’t try to crawl the same pages over and over again.

Avoiding Spam While Crawling

The crawling process described in the paper also tried to limit the crawling program from accessing pages that might more likely be spam pages. If a crawling program spends a lot of its time on spam pages and link farms, it has less time to spend on sites that may be more valuable to people searching for good results to their queries at search engines.

One key to the method used by this research team in determining how much attention a site should get from their web crawler was in looking at the number of legitimate links into the site there are from other sites, which is what they refer to as domain reputation.

Why This Paper is Important

The authors of the paper tell us that there are:

…only a limited number of papers describing detailed web-crawler algorithms and offering their experimental performance.

The paper provides a lot of details on the crawling process and the steps that the Texas A&M researchers took that enabled them to index multi-million page web sites, avoid spam pages, and remain “polite” while doing so. It explores the experiments that they conducted to test out ideas on how to handle very large sites, and crawls of very large amounts of pages.

They conducted their experiment using only a single computer. The major commercial search engines have considerably more resources to spend on crawling the web, but the issues involving managing which pages they choose to index, being polite to sites that they visit, and avoiding spam pages are problems that commercial search engines face too.

Learning about how search engines may crawl pages can help us understand how a search engine might treat individual sites during that process. If you are interested in learning about the web crawling process in depth, this paper is a good one to spend some time reading.

By Li Evans

This past week I presented at SMX West in Santa Clara, California on the Retail and Blended Search panel. It was quite interesting to be on a panel that also included representatives from both MSN and Yahoo Shopping divisions. There was a lot of information given, from making sure your images had feeds to looking beyond feeds for promotion of online retail products.

As we progress further and further with technology and the availability of broad band to shoppers, searchers are looking for more than just a blue link on a search results. Searchers are becoming more savvy as technology progresses, and as more and more options are being provided to them, they actually WANT more than just a blue link. So where does that leave the retailers on the web who have invested so much in feeds?

Retailers need to start thinking outside of the box, because if they merely rely on a feed to get the traffic to your page, eventually as the search results become more engaging. Retailers who just rely on the feed links will loose out on all those people clicking on video links, picture links, social media profiles, and reviews. So what’s a retailer to do?

Images:

• Make sure your products have images.
• Make your put captions underneath image.
• Make sure your images folder is accessible to the search engines.
• Name your images properly.
• Make sure your images are of good quality.

Google actually shows different images in blended search than it does in regular image search. The thing to remember with images is that shoppers are very visual and if you have the opportunity to take advantage of image search why not put your best foot forward?

Videos:
Here’s a perfect opportunity to engage consumers via a social media medium. It’s visual, its interesting and it engages a customer into finding out more information. Utilize a few of the social video sites, by uploading some short videos of product demonstrations, humor takes, or even “how to” videos. If you make them fun and interesting, there’s even a chance for them to become viral and while not directly on your site, if the description is optimized with a link to your site or the page the product is on, this can be another traffic driver, beyond the search engine.

Rating & Reviews:
If you can start reviews of your products on your site, this could be a powerful resource to help raise the quality of the page. Amazon uses this very wisely and to their advantage. Rating & review sits such as Epinions and Yelp, also hold a lot of value and can help with with yet another way to “indirectly” hold another position in the results.

Social Media Profiles:
Having profiles on various - relevant - social media sites are another way to help bring awareness to your brand, as well as your products or services. People link to social media profiles, so just like with rating and review sites, it is possible to own another spot on the SERPs in an indirect manner. Make sure that your profile on all of the social media site you belong to is properly filled out with the right URL, emails, contact information, etc.

These are just a few ways retailers can broaden their reach, beyond the regular product feed. Starting to think beyond the feed and planning a full online marketing strategy will open a lot more opportunities for retailers in the new realm of blended / universal search.

By Christine Churchill

SES London 2008 is nearly upon us. Looking over the agenda and speaker list I was happy to see Analytics expert and all around good guy Jim Sterne. I’ve known Jim for a couple of years and I continue to be in awe of the man.

Jim is a prolific author of books and articles, a famed speaker, and the producer of the eMetrics Summit Conferences. Energetic and engaged in life, Jim runs Target Marketing and is the Founding President and current Chairman of the Web Analytics Association, a wonderful organization of which KeyRelevance is a proud Premiere Corporate Member.

Jim and I will both be in London next week speaking at SES London. Jim is legendary on stage and I’ve heard other speakers playfully call him the PowerPoint King. He’s one of those rare people you occassionally meet in life who exude positive energy and great ideas. I caught up with Jim the other day and asked him a few questions.

Christine: Most of us running online businesses are going in many directions and have to prioritize where we spend our time. Here’s a question for all those harried business owners who are trying to make every minute count. If I only had 15 minutes a day to spend on analytics, where should I spend my time?

Jim: That would depend on my goals. If my obsession for the day were in conversions, then I would spend my time looking over the persuasion path to see where I could improve the visitor interaction. If my goal was to sell more advertising, I would be measuring what makes people look at more pages so I can display more ads. If my goal is to bring in more qualified leads, I would watch how well my advertising money is being spent - where are people coming from and are they the sort of people I’m after?

Christine: Now here’s a related question. When evaluating a new site, what’s the first measurement you would look at?

Jim: It completely depends on the goals of the website. The first thing would be to get the basic numbers, just as a benchmark. How many visitors? How many events (what we used to call pageviews) per visit? How often do they come back? That way, we have something we can compare with tomorrow’s numbers.

Christine: Since both of us will be in London next week, let me as a question related to analytics and geography. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important measurements that companies track. Do you see any regional or national differences in KPIs?

Jim: None at all. KPI’s are particular to industries and website types. Even the ability to track those KPI’s is the same. There are very smart companies in every corner of the globe and some of the most advanced places harbor the least capable companies.

Christine: That is excellent news for businesses with global aspirations and your answer makes perfect sense. Jim, you are well known for your clear thinking and forward looking approach to life. Where do you see Analytics heading?

Jim: Given enough traffic for statistical significance, I think we can use the activity on a website to measure the impact of all our marketing. The web is so much a part of daily life now that an ad in the newspaper, an ad on the radio and a direct mail postcard will all have an effect on the behavior on the website. Capture that activity, sift through it and the impact of your marketing spend will be revealed. We’re not there yet, but it’s right around the corner.

Christine: In the good old days of the web, the “hit” was the unit of visitor interaction, at least until we figured out that it was a lousy metric. Then, the “impression”or “page view” became the standard. Now along comes Web 2.0 sites with their richer, more interactive mode of interfacing with a visitor. Google Maps, for example, may occupy a visitor for several minutes, without the URL on the Address line changing. When a visit can no longer be accurately be measured in “impressions” how do we properly quantify web site traffic?

Jim: While those better and brighter than me are working on measuring “engagement”, I am happy to break down a visit to a website into “actions”. Searching for an address is an action. Scrolling the map is an action. Zooming in on a location is an action. Commenting on a blog is an action. These actions add up and spell out the flow of individual activity and quite readily replace the pageview as a means of understanding behavior.

Christine: The search engines are offering analytics tools as a part of their offerings. I’m frequently asked this question by students and clients who invest heavily into online paid advertising. From a web advertiser’s perspective, is there any danger in letting the search engines have such a detailed view of a company’s conversions, revenue, and other business metrics?

Jim: One first has to assume that your website is interesting enough and the data about your website is valuable enough to put a $166.2 billion enterprise at risk.

Christine: Jet lag or bad food? What’s the worst part about travel?

Jim: The worst part about travel is yet to come: when they allow mobile phone on airplanes.

Christine (laughing): Thanks much Jim. I’ll see you in London!

Jim: Looking forward to it!

By Bill Slawski

If you run a business, and own a web site, it’s not a bad idea to include the address of your site on your invoices, your business cards, within the letterhead of your stationary, and other paperwork that comes out of your office. You may even want to include that URL on shipping boxes, on your business sign, and in other places where the address might be visible.

Every few months, I like to take a walk through the small town I live in, with a pen and notepad in hand, and look for web addresses in places that I haven’t seen them before. On a normal day, I don’t think that I pay too much attention to how the Web and the world interact on a stroll through town, but I see some surprises when I start looking more closely.

My town is a University town, and most of the students are away on winter break, which made this morning quieter than it is when school is in session.

I start searching for URLs as soon as I get out of my front door, and the first one that I see is in a nearby parking lot. There’s a Marine recruiting station close by, and a number of recruiters’ cars in the lot. A number of them had written across their sides and back the Web address “marines.com” and “1-800-marines.”

As I walk past them, I decide to stop for a cup of coffee at one of the local coffee shops. Next to the credit card logos on the door of the shop is a small sign advertising a University meal plan. Students can pay for a card which they can use to buy food at different eating establishments in town, and these signs let them know which ones accept that meal card. It also acts as an advertisment for students, so that they can find out more about the program, and the URL is shown so that they can find out more about the service.

I grab the local paper while I’m getting my coffee, and start looking through it for Web addresses. A front page banner ad, below the fold, looks more like it was designed for a web portal than news print. Appropriately, it advertises a web site.

Turning through the pages of the newspaper, I’m starting to see ads that don’t carry a street address or a phone number - just a URL. I wonder how many of them are actually local businesses, and how many are located somewhere else. The advertisements are for items that could be anywhere in the world.

I finish looking through the paper, and and leave the coffee house onto Main Street, when a bus passes by. I expect a URL on the bus, and don’t see one. I’ve seen their schedules online, so I’m surprised that they don’t include their web address next to their name.

A sticker from a local band, pasted on a utility pole catches my attention, and it provides a URL for their MySpace page. Another sticker, sloppily attached to a mail pickup box a little further down the street is for the state National Guard, and shows their toll free phone number, but not a web address.

A sign at the post office provides a list of dates that the the office will be closed, but tells us that “We’re always open at usps.com.” I’ve been wondering why they didn’t choose the name “mail.gov.”

A paper company truck is stopped on Main Street, to make a delivery, and the side of their truck is a billboard for their goods. Under the sentence where they tell us that they’ve been around since 1919 is the URL for their business.

As I return home, I notice that I’ve received my mail, and on the back of one of the envelopes, I see a message that I can pay my bills online, along with a URL. I’m not sure if I’ve seen a envelope with both web address, and a call to action like that before.

I think I’ve seen more URLs on this walk than I’ve seen in previous trips through town. There are a few on business signs, and on posters in store windows, and in notices posted on the community bulletin board. Next time I try this, I’m going to have to take my phone with me, and see how well those show up on a screen for handhelds.

By Li Evans

As a online marketer with a public relations background I get pretty fired up about Public Relations companies who think that Social Media and Blogging are just something they can incorporate into their “publicity” offerings without any experience in the online world. I’ve done public relations before, and I know what goes into it, I know how to make the contacts, I know how to approach media outlets, and I know how to maintain the clients message. I’ve run successful public relations campaigns for clients that included press releases, media spots, events for the press and events for the community, so it isn’t like I come at this from an online marketer’s perspective that only online marketers should do this type of work.

There are some very experienced public relations companies out there that fully understand and grasp the effect that online media has on a company’s name, brand, products and reputation. They’ve been able to make the transition from working offline, to truly understanding and working with online media outlets, which has a very loose definition. However, these public relations firms are very few and far between, and usually swamped because there are so few of them.

Then you have Public Relations firms who “think” they get it. Who claim they understand bloggers. Who think because they just hired this college graduate who has a Facebook page, that they can spin that into being able to map out a social media strategy for a client. Who think that bloggers are just another place to mass email their client’s press release too.

The key here is “don’t believe the hype“. Public relations firms are great at “SPIN“! It’s their job, it’s what they do best. But, trusting in that spin, when it’s not really true can cost your dearly when it comes to your online reputation. This is the reason you really need to investigate a public relations company’s strategies’ when it comes to online marketing. Here are some things to look out for:

• Look At Their Own Website: Is it all about them? Does it even work right? Is it all in Flash? How did you find them in the first place? All of this comes into play in a big way. If they cannot translate what they do offline into online success for themselves, why would you even want to deal with them? If all they can promote was that they won this PR award or that PR honor, and it has nothing to do with online marketing, what does that tell you? Here are some key things to look at.
  • Does the site work properly?
  • Are they optimized for the search engines?
  • Is their site done in all Flash?
  • Is there site image heavy?
  • Is it all about the awards they’ve won?
  • Do they even have a blog?
• Look At Their Company Blog: This is one key indicator that a public relations company understands bloggers, the community and social media. If they don’t even have a blog, you might want to find another company to work with to handle your online marketing efforts in the blogging and social media space. If they do have a blog, look at it closely. A serious down deep look at their own blog.
  • How long as it been in existence?
  • What kind of content does it have?
  • Is the content just press releases?
  • How often do they blog?
  • How many subscribers does it have?
  • Do they allow comments?
  • Is there much discussion going on?
  • Do they use social media promotion (Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)?
• Ask To See How the Contact Bloggers: This could get a little tricky, however, a good public relations company just like in the above example, should have no problem with this. They should be showing you that they establish a relationship with a blogger first. If they start pulling out numbers of bloggers they can contact - run, run very far away. If they start spouting “we can contact XXX bloggers with your information”, or they even mutter, “we can distribute your press release…” when you mention blogging or bloggers to them, its time to close up that briefcase and end the meeting.
• Ask To See Success Stories: Don’t just take their word for it. Ask to see SEVERAL successful results. Ask for general information about their strategy. A public relations company who knows they are successful and has a great strategy in place for working in this space will have no problem showing you exactly what they did for other clients. The key is to understanding that if their approach for each client is unique in social media and blogging. If the public relations company shows you the same strategy over and over again, it’s time to move on.
• Ask About Their Strategy For You: If they start saying “We’ll take the standard approach” or “We’ve done this a thousand times before for other clients”, stop and hang up the phone. Every client is different when it comes to social media. If you are a textile company and they start talking about Digg, honestly, it’s time to start looking at a company who recognizes each client has to be dealt with individually, there’s no “mass marketing plan” for social media and blogging.
• Ask for References & Do Research!: Ask for references from clients they’ve worked with in the past on online media promotions when using social media or blogging. Now, just don’t take that references word for it either! You can do the research, just go to any search engine, or look at that client’s website and you can likely see the results. The online results will speak for themselves as to how successful the public relations company is.

Don’t get caught up in the hype that because they are a public relations company they can handle your online marketing. This is serious business, it’s your name or your brand. It’s something you cherish with pride. The last thing you need is a blogger being mass emailed about your event, when that blogger has asked several times to be taken off your public relations company’s mass spam list they send out every press release they write to. It really doesn’t bode well for your chances the blogger will ever pay attention - other than to write you and email letting you know your public relations company really doesn’t know what they are doing when it comes to online media. I know, I just did that this morning!

By Christine Churchill

Last Spring, my friend Jim Boykin of WeBuildPages contacted me about participating in a new training program he was developing. Jim’s goal was to create a training package with help from some of the best minds in the industry. It sounded like an intriguing endeavor. Shortly after, Jim interviewed and videotaped top experts in the industry – three of whom are now with KeyRelevance – myself (Christine Churchill), Jim Gilbert, and our in-house search engine patent guru Bill Slawski.

In our videos, Jim Gilbert and I present a combination of formal Pay Per Click training and Q&A, where we provide practical advice to people or companies who want to do paid search more successfully. My goal in the putting the training material together was to have actionable information that you can go out and use today. It’s the kind of information that I wish someone had told me when I was starting out in PPC. The advice presented in the videos should help both beginners and experienced marketers get better returns on their paid search dollars.

If your interest in on organic search, you’ll love Bill Slawski’s videos. If you’re a regular at Bill’s blog, SEOByTheSea, then you know that Bill is probably one of the smartest guys in search and I can tell you from working with him on a daily basis, he is also one of the nicest. Bill has a knack for taking complicated subjects like search engine patents and explaining them in layman’s English so the rest of the world can understand. It’s a true gift. I guarantee you’ll learn a lot about the inner workings of search engines by listening to Bill speak. His advice and clear explanations will expand your understanding about search engine optimization. There are actually four videos with Bill, making up nearly two hours of solid SEO advice from one of the most knowledgeable guys in the industry. If you want to expand your education about search engines and organic rankings, Bill’s videos are perfect. Check out the SEO Traiining Videos today.

Jim Boykin sweetened the Ninja training deal by throwing in his incredible array of SEO tools. These tools provide you an amazing amount of SEO and link information on your site and your competitors. The tools save you a lot of time from pulling the data manually and free you up to make better marketing decisions.

In addition to the video interviews with Jim Gilbert, Bill Slawski, and myself, Jim Boykin gathered an A-list of search marketers including such notables as Aaron Wall (SEOBook), Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim), Cameron Olthuis, Neil Patel (ACS), Jeremy Schoemaker (ShoeMoney), Jill Whalen (HighRankings), Jim Boykin (We Build Pages), Lee Odden (TopRank), Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl), and others!

The price for the training package is $2995. That is a chunk of change, but when you consider what you get, the price is reasonable, especially since many of the experts on the tape charge $300-$600 an hour for consulting. When you join Internet Marketing Ninjas, you get access to the private SEO tools, plus over 15 hours of “tell-all” videos by some of the sharpest people in the industry. Get the details on Internet Ninja SEO Training here.

By Li Evans

As a social media “junkie”, I get a lot of questions thrown my way. From “Why can’t I succeed on Digg”, to “Why can’t I get my page stumbled?”, to “What the heck is the value of this social stuff?”. There are a lot of people that look to social media as a way to boost SEO rankings, and gain links into their sites. However, if that’s all that you are looking at social media for, you’re missing a whole boat load of added benefit.

Social media is about interaction and conversation about something. That something could be a video, a photo, an article, a web page, a podcast, a game or even a song. The possibilities are endless for what that interaction and conversation could be about. So you are now probably wondering, “So why should I care if they talk about me?” You should care because its YOUR brand, YOUR product, YOUR service, or YOUR company. It’s amazing how things on the internet can get so turned around so quickly, and social media tends to increase that rate of speed tremendously, and if you aren’t paying attention to that conversation before you know it you could have a surprise situation on your hands.

Here’s a few reasons why you should care about these conversations going on:

• Are They Getting it Right?
  A lot of misinformation is out there, has your company or brand fallen victim to it? Did someone misinterpret what one of your company spokespeople said at a conference or in a presentation? Is what is being linked to, to describe your product or service correct?

  If you aren’t keeping an eye out for these type of situations, before you know it, you could have a mess on your hands that even your Public Relations team will have a hard time digging you out of.

• Stalkers & Trolls
  Lets face it, companies will piss off someone at one point or another. In some way shape or form, someone will be angry with the service they received, quality of a product or receiving an answer that isn’t to their liking. With today’s day & age of technology, it’s even more easy to tell the world about your grievances than ever. That’s when you need to approach with caution, and figure out if they really do have a legitimate gripe, or they are just being a “Troll” for the attention.
• Jackpot! Evangelists!
  On the opposite of the Troll Spectrum lies the Evangelists. These folks LOVE you! They talk about how great your product / service / brand / company is. They lavish links and traffic to your website. They unload heaps of praise on your efforts and guess what, they tell their audiences that you are Awesome! So, now you say “Great!” and just walk away? Wrong! Capture these Evangelists’ enthusiasm and use it. Thank them publicly, heap your own praise back. Remember it doesn’t take much to turn your most loyal evangelist into someone who can turn the world against you.
• Who’s Talking About Me?
  Not only should you care about what’s being said, but you should be mindful of WHO’S saying it. Is it a newspaper columnist, is it your industry publication, is it your fan base, is it a troll, is it your grandmother? All of these people (and more) have varying degrees of influence over their own audiences. Knowing who’s saying something, whether it’s an article, a forum post, or a comment on a social site, is just as important as knowing what’s been said.

There’s a lot more to social media than links and page rankings. Understanding that and knowing how to capture and utilize it, is a whole different strategy all together. Is your social media strategy reaching its full potential? If not, maybe you need to rethink who’s handling it!

By Christine Churchill

I am honored to announce that SEO By The Sea was named Best Search Engine Research Blog of 2007 by Search Engine Journal. KeyRelevance’s own Director of Internet Marketing, Bill Slawski, is the man behind the blog.

Search Engine Journal announced the results of the contest today and described the blog in this way:

“Bill Slawski’s endless research on search engine patent filings has unearthed some intriguing plans by all of the search companies and brought reason to projects like Google Universal, Personalized Search or Yahoo Paid Inclusion.

Instead of being reactive to the changes in search, Bill’s patent filing coverage helps us become more proactive, analyzing the trends which may happen, and preparing for them. Thank you Bill for all of your hard work, and to all of the nominees in this category.”

Congratulations Bill. We know you’ve earned it.