Online Marketing Blog

I am curious if anyone else has noticed a trend over the past year or so where people (I have nobody specific in mind) in the search marketing business seem to increasingly gravitate towards becoming a “SEO celebrity”. It’s a bit like like moths to a flame, really.

A while back, I had a search marketing job candidate answer the, “Where would you like to be in 2-3 years?” question with, “I want to be a famous SEO”. “Why?” I would ask. “Because that’s my goal”. Fair enough, but it’ll be tough to pay the bills with a wallet full of famous.

While doing some research for a presentation, I was checking out the WordPress.com site on “types of blogs” looking for creative ways to categorize them. And what did I come upon, but this page which separates blogs types into two overall categories of “popular” and “banned”. Guess where SEO blogs fall? Sigh.

Even our dear WordPress which so many search engine optimization professionals sincerely love and prefer as a blogging platform, is misinformed or at least, subject to making sweeping generalizations. This is the “banned” category:

[Start Rant]

Anyone in the search biz who knows me, knows I’m a pretty easy going person and sometimes even rational. My experience with usbank Visa both in the past and today trying to buy a product online and later a domain name transfer gave me a good taste of the unreasonable way seemingly reasonable companies are serving customers. And making it difficult to stay on as customers.

This morning, and I mean really early morning, I went about my weekly perusal of about 50 or so SEO and SEM blogs. For the most part this is a very informative and satisfying experience. However, there are a few barriers to blog reader experience that I feel especially obligated to point out. These observations are relevant for any business blog:

• Don’t make readers register or login to make a comment. What, you’re too lazy to manage all the comment spam? Or install a better spam filter? You’re lucky to get people to your blog in the first place. Why make it inconvenient to interact?

In the past I’ve written about the benefits of attending Search Engine Strategies conferences with tips on gaining knowledge, finding new clients and employees, networking with others and even as a resource for generating content.

However, there are even more benefits you can gain from going to conferences like Search Engine Strategies, Pucon and SMX that you may want to consider, albeit with your humor hat on:

It’s pretty much an understatement to say search marketing is an interesting business. In fact, some of the most creative yet technical, entrepreneurial and lateral thinking individuals you’ll ever meet work in this field. At the same time, there are cases where showmanship and hype can overwhelm real substance and certain behaviors get annoying.

Understand, this very much a rant post and most rants do little for the reader and a lot for the writer. It’s all about me you know. However, if this one sheds light or more likely, entertains, then it’s a win win.

I think it’s safe to say that everyone in the web site optimization business has experienced that unfortunate situation with a client where those responsible for creating the web site have done those nasty things that seem to make the site as un-search engine friendly as possible. While it’s not intentional, it can seem awfully ignorant to search engine optimization consultants brought in after the fact to “fix” things.

Common issues include:

• URLs that are difficult or impossible for search engine spiders to crawl
• Hard coding the same title tag on all pages, not allowing tags to be edited or no title tag at all

You know those kinds of people that have nothing better to do with their time, so they have to pick on others to justify their existence? Laywers come to mind. Especially corporate lawyers.

I am a little late to the story about our friend, Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide, her blog The Lactivist and the bully National Pork Board, but hey I’ve got a business too ya know? Regardless, I just had to write something up before the Super Proposal, I mean Super Bowl weekend was in full effect as this is the epitome of lameness.

I really had to think twice about posting this, since the best thing would be to ignore it as noise. But then I realized, it’s so off-base, so “out there” it must be an attempt at humor!

DM News, in an apparent attempt to milk the antagonizing insights from Dave Pasternack, published a Q/A with him today on the reactions to his SEO rocket science articles. Here’s one golden nugget of humor from the interview:

“…. if the web team consistently follows the rules when putting up new content, then no “fixing” or “tweaking” is necessary. Plus if the content is great, with some marketing, it will get inbound links just as Larry [Paige] and Sergey [Brin] at Google calculated.”

An attorney from a prominent, 200 lawyer firm calls me up (message) saying he’s been referred by two very credible sources. And they are exceptionally credible. Most of the time when this happens, it’s a law firm looking for internet marketing services. In fact, earlier in the day another local law firm called about exactly that.

Anyway, this attorney and I play phone tag and we finally connect. He wants to have me come to his office and speak with their ecommerce/technology group and talk about Google advertising. He asks if I can sit in on an informal lunch and ask me questions about search marketing. Just for an hour or so.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t include an image with this post? OK, so SEO isn’t rocket science, but it’s not a colonoscopy either. Well, maybe GooogIe thinks SEO is rocket science, but what do they know.

What’s with the cliche’s? Cliche’s are simply a way to hide innuendo which was the case when this Dave Pasternack -  SEO/rocket science guff all started. Some of the arguments in this debate are not entirely without merit so I’ll take a humorous and a somewhat practical approach to explaining a few.

I couldn’t help myself. The Best Buy employee walking around the games area with a Playstation 3 under his arm was just too tempting. I was there to buy a Nintendo Gameboy Advance game for my oldest and I had to ask, “How many of those PS3’s do you have?”. The BB guy said “6″. I said, “I’ll take it”. And walked out of the store with 1 game, 3 Blu-Ray movies, an HDMI cable and a 60 gig PS3.