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My wife lost her iPhone last Saturday night. When we realized this Sunday morning, I first tried using Apple’s MobileMe service, but the locator service was disabled. I then signed up for AT&T’s FamilyMap service, which is designed to help track your kids, but is also a last best hope should you loose your phone. FamilyMap pinpointed the location of the phone to a restaurant in Harlem where we ate dinner the night before. I called the restaurant and was told that the phone was nowhere to be found. I would have to wait for the manager to find out if it was put away the night before. When I tried to locate the phone again, FamilyMap indicated that the phone was not available.

The connection between my phone call and the phone dropping off the radar made me very suspicious, so I walked over to the restaurant, which is only a few blocks away, to see what was up. I found two people cleaning the restaurant and their supervisor, who I had talked to on the phone. He and I looked everywhere and then I just decide to give up and wait for the manager. The most likely scenario seemed to be that someone found the phone while cleaning up and then turned it off when I called the restaurant. When the manager arrived she assured me that nothing was found and they would continue to question the staff and look throughout the day. There was really nothing I could do so I left and continued to try and track the phone throughout the day.

Later in the day I called and reached the restaurant owner, who said they had been looking throughout the day but could not find anything. They had gone over the whole restaurant and questioned all the employees. They even went through the linens from the night before to see if it got caught in those. I thought this was really going above and beyond, but as it turned out this was just the start. Soon after hanging up with the owner I got another signal from an address in Queens, so my wife called back and asked if anyone on the staff lived at the address. It turned out that one of the employees who cleaned up that morning lived at the exact address. Busted!

The owner called the employee and told him to come back with the phone or she would call the police. He showed up at the restaurant an hour later, but he completely denied taking the phone. The restaurant owner asked us to come over to show him the evidence we had, so we bundled our young daughter up and headed over to the restaurant hoping to quickly resolve the issue. No such luck. I showed everyone including the thief the detailed maps with the location of the phone at 10:30AM and the location of the phone at 6:30PM. Still the thief denied taking the phone or any knowledge of how the phone managed to get from the restaurant to his apartment. We told him we would call the police if he didn’t give us the phone but he persisted in denying it.

Now this was just getting stupid, but also interesting. We caught him red handed, he might be arrested if he does not give us the phone, but he continues to deny it. The logic perplexed me, however, a smart thief would not have turned the phone back on after getting home from work, so I was thankful for his stupidity. At this point we had no choice. We called the police and I went home to put our daughter to bed while my wife waited for the police with the owner and restaurant managers. It seemed that everyone had become fascinated with the turn of events.

While waiting for the police, my wife tried to locate the phone and found that it was now a few blocks away from the restaurant and it kept moving up and down the block. After putting my daughter to bed, I logged in to see this interesting activity. We guessed that the thief had left the phone with a friend, who was getting impatient and pacing the block.

At this point the police arrived and he continued to deny any knowledge about what was going on despite the evidence and the indication that the phone was just around the corner. However, after more questioning and the arrival of additional officers he finally said that he might have "dropped" the phone we were seeing it on the map. The police, my wife, the restaurant owner, and the thief all piled into squad cars to go find the phone. But, the adventure was not over yet!

The thief still, “did not know where it fell,” so the police began combing the entire area. They looked through everything on the street corner. It was really impressive how helpful they were! While everyone else was looking for the phone, the thief just stood there smirking. It became clear that he knew exactly where the phone was. At this point the owner of the restaurant told thief that she was giving his remaining wages to my wife unless he told us where the phone was. All of a sudden he seemed to remember that the phone was tucked under a parking lot fence in a CVS bag. Mystery solved!

We are sending flowers to the restaurant today. We are not sure how to reach the police officers, but they truly showed themselves to be New York’s finest. We will be sending them something soon. We are so happy to have all our picutures, videos, and memories back. Thank you all!

The debate in journalism is about the effect of the internet when it needs to be about the value of the journalistic product. The real issue is not the medium but the message. Putting more information online is not just a matter of reaching a new and different and broader audience, but about the velocity of information and, by extension, its value.

The problem for most purveyors of information has been that the arbitrage they used to enjoy is gone. Much like…well, exactly like…stock brokers who used to connect buyers and sellers in an illiquid market, journalists connected people with information. It was the old many-to-one-to-many arbitrage whereby an expert gleaned information from multiple sources and compiled that information to produce a centralized hub in the form of a physical publication. The internet, of course, eradicated this model by allowing for a many-to-many distribution mechanism. The internet also allows for the slicing and targeting of an audience in a way never before seen in media, thereby dramatically changing the economics of advertising.

About advertising: it has been very pernicious to all types of editorial content, because it removes a direct financial link between the consumer and the product. This has seemed like a very good thing, because advertisers got eyeballs and consumers got a product without having to shell out for it directly. The moral and quality implications of such arrangements are interesting, but so are the economic implications.

By subsidizing information, advertising masks its true price. It is not dissimilar to the way that securitized mortgages had a deleterious effect on housing prices; when the lender has a stake in transactional commissions rather than the quality of the loan, he naturally has a perverse incentive. When a consumer no longer has to pay for what he consumes, this tends to skew his purchases. This, in short, is what happened to journalism. It isn’t that the internet killed journalism, but that advertising for a very long time masked the fact that journalism had been a product for which people were no longer willing to pay. It is for this reason, also, though it didn't need to be the case, that most journalism has long been declining in value.

It would be easy to argue that people stopped paying only because they got used to journalism costing them little or nothing, but that’s sophistry. If information presented in a paper format was very valuable, people would still purchase it. Instead, subscriptions have fallen. I still purchase the Wall Street Journal (both in print and online) because it has a definite value to me. The NYTimes is raising the cost of its Sunday paper. Good for them.

Subscriptions need to rise and people need to pay for information directly. Then the market will function and the most valuable information will succeed. And perhaps this could mean that all we’d have are tabloid rags, but I doubt it. I think people will seek out valuable information products the same way they seek out valuable products in all other categories. Journalists might argue as to what they think is valuable, and that's an argument worth having when it's focused on the consumer. The argument that journalism has a responsibility to do xyz has worn thin. It might be true, but what does it have to do with what consumers will purchase?

The problem is that the information in most newspapers is, by definition, not very valuable. My publication charges about $1,800 a year and a number of people pay it. I couldn’t begin to pinpoint exactly why they all do, but I have my suspicion that it’s because we cover hedge funds, already a very specific topic, in a highly granular way. Our expertise in this subject matter is also likely a function of our success, because it allows us to bypass general commentary and appeal to a specific audience in language they understand. I’m certain that our tone (arising from an understanding of jargon and subject matter) is appealing in a way that a similar story in a more mainstream publication would not be. Regardless of the specifics, our subscription revenue more than covers our cost of production. Our advertising revenue is gravy. This makes what we do a bit more like research or consulting, and perhaps that is where journalism has to move. It has to go where whatever product it tries to sell is something someone is willing to buy with hard cash, because the advertising subsidy is gone. In the long run, this promises to be a very good development.

I am dubious that the ad-driven internet can work as a model for the distribution of journalism. The kinds of articles that bring in massive numbers of eyeballs are never those that reach the Pulitzer committee, so ‘good journalism’ will have to make itself more saleable.

Perhaps, as in housing, we need a lot of the dead wood to go away before a price level can be reached. A large amount of the “news” on web sites is really the re-presentation of information that companies now blast out to everyone for free. It’s unclear what value Forbes.com provides by running a story like “U.S. Retail Sales Drop In April” when that article is everywhere and the data it is based upon are available on free public web sites. The argument that people need a filter is without teeth and, really, irrelevant. Who cares if they need it? The question is whether people will pay for it.

The question comes down to what people will pay for, and that is very hard to determine. Eyeballs don’t tell us. That’s just popularity. Ask a person who their best friends are and then ask the same person which of their acquaintances they’d be willing to lend money to and be certain that they’d get it back. Those would be very different lists, right? We don’t lend money to our fun-time pals, but to our stable, boring, married friends. It’s much the same problem with the information provided by publications, and one they seem wholly oblivious to. I love Michael Lewis’ writing and I will buy his books (Moneyball, Liars Poker, etc.). They entertain and inform me. I also liked what he wrote for Portfolio Magazine. I read his articles for free on their web site. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have bought the magazine. Bringing my eyeballs to their web site didn’t even come close to monetizing my interest in Michael Lewis’ writing. Why did Portfolio pay so much for those articles only to give them away for free? For eyeballs. Dumb move.

The greater fear is not that publications will give away its ware for free, as Portfolio did, but that they don’t even know what to put on the shelf! Look at how little many publications, judging from their online site, seem to value their readers: BusinessWeek values breaking news so much that they get theirs from the AP. Forbes is so big on breaking news that their website takes it from the AP, PRNewswire (!), BusinessWire (!!), Reuters and Thomson. The proprietary “breaking news” on their web site is all market stuff, such as quarterly earnings reports and stenography or data released by companies and governments. What’s really interesting is to see what Forbes.com thinks is great and what their readers think is great. The article lists below are a snapshot from today. There is no overlap!

Top News
• U.S. Retail Sales Drop In April
• MGM Mirage To Raise $2.5B In Capital
• Intel To Appeal $1.5B E.U. Fine
• Allianz Q1 Profit Falls 98%
• Verizon, Frontier Strike $8.6B Deal

Top Rated
• Migrating To Linux--Safely
• Stress-Test America
• Chanos: Prosecute Bank Execs
• U.S. Seeks To Join A Despots' Club
• Baseball's Best Boss
• Rating Your Doctor
• ABB: Power Guys
• The Stress Test Head Fake

Forbes.com readers seem to value opinions and advice far more than earnings releases and corporate “news.” Since these articles make money by attracting eyeballs, the opinion and advice are more valuable than the “news.” Now, more importantly, how much money would these popular articles be worth if they were monetized properly via direct sale? I think we’d have a third list or what people were willing to pay for, followed by what people liked to read, and finally what Forbes.com thinks is important.

Publications are all running online because it offers them a chance to market their wares, get some ad dollars and connect with an audience in, they think, a more direct way. It may take a few years, but ultimately publications will realize that these initiatives make no sense. These web sites, as structured, do not let anyone know what information is most valuable, only what is most popular. Again, popular = valuable only in the narrow sense that it can glean more ad dollars. Whoopie, but that won’t pay for a real staff, let alone the kind of profitability worth writing home about. Secondly, there is the high probability that whatever information might really be valuable (e.g. Michael Lewis’ pieces in Portfolio) is going to be given away with almost no compensation in return. Last is the absurd notion that a website functions are free advertising which will lead people to buy the product. This is possible, of course, but where’s the example of that being the case? Where’s the case study of a publication giving away only 5% of its content and watching its subscription revenue go up? I defy anyone to find it. I’d be extremely excited to see it. I bet what would work is posting really old issues as examples, the way that b-to-b publications do, the way my publication does, and saying: if you like what we’ve got here, please pay to get the product. But, of course, doing that requires having real faith in the value of the product. Giving away fresh information for a miniscule amount of ad revenue sends a strong signal to readers about how much you think the information is worth.

The message is this: journalism will fall much farther before a few publications come up from the dust with working revenue models. These revenue models will not be some amazing innovation the way journalist and web guru prognosticators keep stating. These models will be simple. We’ve seen them in other industries, such as b-to-b publishing. It’s called subscription revenue and it’s a real signifier of value. Now, not to be confused, distributing a product via the internet is a very good idea. Giving away a valuable product is never a good idea: you’ll never know what it’s worth and you’ll have trouble convincing anyone that it has value.

Everyone is trying to find uses for Twitter in their marketing. All I can say is “Whoa Nelli!” Slow down there. It’s just another tool! It’s not the coming of the messiah.

I think using a Twitter stream like you’d use press releases, ads or targeted marketing makes for a good use of the medium, but the information you push has to be extremely product-specific. If you’re a celebrity, your every motion is interesting to your consumers, but if you’ve got a more varied audience, you need to segment what you release and consider having multiple Twitter streams.

Every piece of info from Pepsi, for instance, could be interesting, but I doubt there are many people who love the company that much; what they love are various products. “Pepsi Water,” “Pepsi cola,” and “Pepsi Green” (for environmental initiatives) would probably be a better way to target consumers than just having a “Pepsi” channel.

I use Twitter as a human-powered (and hence much smarter) RSS feed. That’s what I try to do with my own Twitter posts: stick mostly to info on finance and not put any personal info on there. With an RSS feed, some static always intrudes on the clarity of the “signal,” but with Twitter it’s the job of the poster to keep the clarity high. Deviate from what interested someone enough to sign on in the first place, and you will probably lose them.

I still follow @cheeky-geeky, because I think he’s wicked smart, but he also clogs up my stream with a lot of stuff I have no interest in, and I kind of wish he split his interests into different streams and had more defined brands. However, Twitter is not yet modeled in this way.

You can’t have a top-level stream and substreams or designate substreams using tags that a reader can then opt into or out of. These would be good additions to the platform. For now, while each stream has its own users and a multi-account approach would segment one’s following (3,000 users on 3 streams versus 9,000 on one stream, for instance), I think it’s an option worth considering. Few people want to read about my personal life, but there are more who will take my recommendations for articles on finance, and I’m trying to respect their screen space by not posting minutiae.

From the point of view of a PR firm, there is typically no natural buyer for a firm’s “product line.” Some firms are very targeted (e.g., nothing but tech) so they could in theory post every press release or update about any one of their clients, but most PR firms have a varied client base.

Some reporters will want news on Firm A or B, but not on all a firm’s clients. So it would make more sense to look at the information “product line” that various clients represent and split that information into separate Twitter accounts.

From an information-gathering perspective, it makes TONS of sense for PR firms to cross reference all their journalist contacts with Twitter and follow those streams (just as they should be getting RSS feeds of articles). It could lead to a lot of annoying updates on personal issues from those reporters, but could also (now and then) alert them to what they’re working on so you can see where a client might fit in.

But despite the obvious practicality of taking these measures, I can’t see where Twitter would move the needle hugely one way or another. It’s just another tool. People get so wound up about these things, but technology is just a way to reach out. Don’t get caught up basing a marketing strategy on any one piece of tech, especially a platform that hasn’t yet figured out what its revenue model is.

IBM recently came out with a research report titled “Beyond Advertising: Choosing a Strategic Path to the Digital Customer ,” By Saul Berman, Bill Battino and Karen Feldman. The report covers familiar ground for marketers, but should still be an interesting read, because it is chock full of survey data and puts numbers to many trends currently taking shape.

These reports are also interesting in that they provide insight into what IBM is thinking in terms of its role in the industry. Naturally, IBM is quite excited about the explosion of analytics in advertising. IBM seems to have great plans to help advertisers move to that brave new world “beyond advertising” with new data management, analytics, and targeting tools. While impartial and objective in tone, these research reports represent a key component of IBMs marketing strategy. Most marketers don't think much of academic papers, but they are well worth the investment when you are selling complex and expensive services to a select and highly educated group.

The report seeks to show that “the senario of the future is consumer centricity,” i.e. highly targeted and relevant advertising delivered in the format most appealing to the consumer. The key factors preventing the industry from achieving consumer centricity according to the report are the following:

• New format uncertainty - Particularly in the new economic environment, there are questions about the growth of new formats like advanced TV and mobile
• Fragmentation - Large number of suppliers in new advertising formats, and there is no agreement on format specifications.
• Siloed operating models - There is limited cross-platform integration of campaign support tools, processes or organizations to enable the selling, tracking or delivery of integrated, “know-me messaging.”
• Data glut - Enormous amounts of information exist, but are difficult to access given the lack of consistency in data structures, metrics or analytics.

These are certainly major problems. No matter how much we wish it were otherwise, the big ad agencies are just not that tech savvy. Traditional industry titans are being blindsided by technology and innovative business models. However, just when we were starting to feel really bad for Madison Avenue, the report suggests “Four capabilities to enable consumer-centric marketing”:

Last night I attended "Innovation in Media: Global Meets Digital" at the Levin Institute. Marc Frons from the NYtimes; Betsy Morgan of HuffPo, Geoffrey Sands with Mckinsey, and Tom Phillips of Google sat on the hot seats and answered questions posed by MC Garrick Utley and the audience. The general discussion centered on a short list of key issues that the media industry is currently facing, namely: What does the future of the media industry look like? How does/will anyone make money? Will New York City survive as the media center of the universe?

Mr. Utley started the discussion off by asking the panel what works in the modern media business? Or, does “nobody know nothing?"

Mr. Sands explained that the deterministic 5-year plans that Mckinsey used to create for clients no longer work, because everything now changes too fast. He suggests that companies create a portfolio of initiatives and quickly shut down the initiatives that do not succeed. He also pointed to the explosion of independent artists creating music, films, etc., and innovations in advertising from mobile to behavioral targeting as evidence that things are not all doom and gloom.

Picking up on the innovation, expansion, and optimism note Ms. Morgan pointed out that HuffPo has doubled its staff in the past year to nearly 60 people. Their newsroom in NYC manages about 10,000 bloggers generating 300 posts per day. Nearly all of the editorial staff is under 30 and many are under 25 years old.

So how does HuffPo make the money and stay financially viable in these tough times? It’s the classic model, ad sales pay for operations. There are no plans to change this. It also helps that none of the bloggers are paid. According to Ms. Morgan, bloggers are mainly writing opinion pieces and accrue other benefits from blogging, which make up for the non-existent paychecks.

This makes sense, trying to make money from blogging is not easy, kind of a stupid idea, but getting those published articles on a known site like HuffPo will often bring the notoriety that leads to big money, at least enough to buy a coffee! Also helping the bottom line are the young editors, who are paid “competitive”, read small, salaries.

Ever meet a job hunter who looks like he’s been living in a box? Day old scruff, rumpled clothes, a generally look of disarray? Clearly, it’s a bad idea to look homeless if you’re looking for work. While it may elicit sympathy, it demonstrates to people that you have lost control, and that’s never attractive.

Individual job hunters should know this, though many don’t, but corporations seem entirely clueless about it.

I’ve been to meetings lately where the bathrooms don’t have enough toilet paper and the sinks don’t all work. Where boxes are piled up in the entrance and there’s either a part-time receptionist or no receptionist at all. Where lights have gone unfixed and mail has gone unsorted and never seems to get to executives on time. Some businesses are always run this poorly, but lately a lot more have joined the ranks of the scruffy, as a result of killing so-called support personnel or “non essential staff.”

But what is essential? We’re in a depression (a recession if you’re a blind optimist) and what people consider essential is a topic of great debate. Do we need to eat out? Do we need to go on that vacation? A lot of these questions are easy to answer, but in a corporate environment they become more complicated. In war, supply lines are essential. Keeping your office up to snuff – paper in the printers, working lights, working faucets – isn’t arbitrary: these are your supply lines.

Sure, having a receptionist can be a luxury, but if you’ve designed your office so that the receptionist is the first person to greet clients, what kind of a message are you sending by having a big hole where that receptionist once sat? Isn’t that like showing up for an interview with no shirt on? “Oops! I ran out of laundry.”

Or would you wear a shirt with a missing button? What does it say if the faucets don’t work and the toilet paper isn’t replaced more than twice a week? It says that you don’t care about your own people, your employees. If you don’t care about them how much do you care about clients? For visiting clients, that’s the equivalent of going out to eat and finding a dirty bathroom at the restaurant. Bathrooms are easy to clean. Kitchens aren’t. What does it mean if the bathroom is foul? It means cancel your order and get out quick!

Even in good times it’s a dumb idea to skimp on simple issues of quality. If you let little things go – a broken light, a printer that never seems to function – your employees get a very clear message: details don’t matter to you. Typically, if a company doesn’t care about its own appearance, it usually cares little about the quality of its products. Employees are surprisingly protective of clients and a poor aesthetic is just as pernicious in an office as it is on the streets: when people see graffiti and broken glass they assume a certain level of chaos and a neighborhood gets a bad reputation. It’s the same with a company.

Times are tough, but managers can always take pride in running a quality, detail-oriented business. Your office is part of your marketing. Don’t dress it like a homeless person.

Skittles just launched a new un-website that is simply a navigation block in the upper left corner overlaying various social media websites related to Skittles. The landing page is the Wikipedia entry for Skittles. Other links include Products (Wiki pages on specific products); Video (YouTube); Pictures (Flickr); Chatter (Twitter); Friends (Facebook).

The site borrows it's concept from Modernista!, but the Skittles has been lauded for being the first major brand to launch a website that fully embraces the concept that companies don't control their brand image, but rather must be active participants in the conversation that are continually shaping and reshaping their brand in the public consciousness.

The origins of this idea can be found in the Cluetrain Manifesto, which has been promoted for many years on the social web. At first it was a novel, even revolutionary, concept that markets are conversations, which corporate marketing departments have little control over.

However, the introductions of an un-website from a major CPG company like M&M Mars clearly demonstrates that at least one large corporation has understood and accepted its role as a participant and sometimes guide in the online conversation about one of it's products.

Putting marketing theory aside, the Skittles site itself is slightly awkward to view, because the navigation box is large and blocks out the upper left portion of each website visited. The navigation can be minimized, but just expands again as soon as the user go to another page.

The current initial landing page is the Wikipedia entry for Skittles, which was chosen after the Skittles Twitter page got raunchy on launch day. There are still a continuing stream of questionable posts running across the Twitter page. I quickly glanced at the Chatter page and noted a number of posts from a user named FuckCity. This uncontrolled nature of the content streaming across Skittles.com necessitated the addition of an annoying pop-up that requires users to enter their age before entering the site.

In sum, the Skittles site is an interesting and brilliant marketing experiment that has already generated huge acclaim and hundreds of thousands of fans and followers of the Skittles brand across the social web. The online world will probably reward the next few copycats of the un-website concept, but eventually this approach is going to get rather tired. Can you imagine if every website was just a link to the same five social media websites?

While the Skittles experiment does not represent the future of the homepage, there is no doubt that we are going to be seeing a lot more integration of social media elements in the websites of major companies. Skittles.com is surely just the beginning.

As I endlessly reword my Bernie Madoff story (surely the 8,756th of its kind written in the past month), I looked over at a folder on my desk labeled “Branding.” It refers to hedge fund branding, a feature story I planned to write six months ago in a different world.

How quaint it now seems. How ridiculous. Store brands versus house brands (e.g., old fashioned hedge funds vs. synthetic replication strategies), cultured vs. popular (e.g. high risk vs. slow burn strategies for wealthy vs. institutions), naming and imagery and publicity (hiring practices and charity and speeches and writing). All of it so very relevant and now, plainly irrelevant, because the best brands offered rock-ness (Citadel, Fortress) and failed to deliver anything of the sort.

(Oh, those firms are still standing, of course. They've so far proven great fortresses for their owners if not for their investors, who have taken deep baths in the moat.)

Even worse, and which never entered into anyone’s mind until recently: that a major point of differentiation would be liquidity, the ability for an investor to actually withdraw his money; this, the notion that it even IS his money and not – as is now so widely stated with, at best, paternalistic condescension or, at worst, outright disdain – somehow better that this money be locked in the fund for the “betterment of all the fund’s investors.” So that, going forward, either in legal agreements or in marketing or in both it will be up to he who would raise cash to actually promise to return it. No more 'Welcome to the Hotel California.'

And this is only the beginning of it. Like a restaurant advertising that it has bathrooms available or that its staff uses soap to wash the dishes, the specter of financial boogieman Bernie Madoff will force money managers to gamely insist on presenting a checklist of the obvious: Yes, we use a prime broker. Yes, we have an auditing firm that employs more than 2 people (and none of them retired!). Yes, we’ll let your number crunchers actually look at the bank account where we store your money.

In the new economy (and this will be a new economy, unlike the glorious ‘new economy’ promised in the late 1990s), despite the politicians’ need to pretend we can remedy a problem of too much debt by spending more borrowed money, deleveraging will have to happen, and, with similarity, Wall Street will have to split and segment and unbundle and de-derivativize their activities until real people are doing real jobs looking at real risks and not relying on computer games that elevate nonsense ratios expressed as numbers and labeled with acronyms as a means of comforting the ignorant and those who lack common sense (chief among these, of course, was the value at risk calculation, or VaR, which banks employed to pretend that it was a great idea to lever balance sheets 30:1 and then buy bad debt with it despite VaR relying on limited historical data and having no predictive value).

What is search engine optimization a.k.a. SEO? I've found that people, even search professionals, are often confused about what exactly search optimization is. Everyone is pretty clear on the goal of search optimization, to make a website or webpage rank highly for a keyword or set of keywords in the organic search results of major search engines. How exactly this is accomplished is another story entirely and this is where much of the confusion comes from.

The basics of SEO are really quite simple to understand, so let's break SEO down into it's component parts and cut through the confusion, which sadly is often created by inexperienced or even evil SEO practitioners who make things complex and mysterious in order to charge clients lots of money for questionably effective services.

There are three overarching strategies which are used to improved search engine ranking. For this article, let's call these strategies link love, semantic code, and search friendly copy.

Link Love

Link love is pretty clearly the mother of all SEO techniques. Google conquered the search world by recognizing that calculating the quantity and quality of links to a webpage was the best way to determine the relevance of a webpage rank it in search results.

Today Google determines search ranking through an incredibly complex algorithm that calculates search ranking based on thousands of variables, so the story goes. No one really knows since the Google algorithm is a super crazy big secret. The one thing that we do know for sure is that the number and quality of the links to your website are still the most important variables in that equation.

The funny thing is that most SEO firms are terrible at generating link love, because choosing to link to a site on some level involve passion and lust. Someone has to see something on your website that is so important or relevant to them that they just have to link to it and tell all their friends about it. Most SEO firms are composed of technicians who are not particularly good at eliciting this kind of passion. Generating lust is something that artists and writers are really good at, but you'll be hardpressed to find an SEO firm with artists and writers on staff, unless you come to Market Anomaly that is;)

Be very wary when an SEO firm tells you that they are going to generate thousands of inbound links to your website. How exactly do they plan to do this? Most likely their "plan" will involve some kind of paid inclusion technique, which if discovered by Google will get you totally black listed from the search results, meaning your site will not appear at all in their results for a very long time. In SEO land, don't trust the practitioner who seems to be offering something too good to be true. He most certainly is. Building link love takes time, patience, and a lot of hard work. Unless your SEO firm is a true hybrid with experienced writers and technicians, this responsibility should most probably be handled by your PR department with guidance from a competent SEO firm.

Semantic Code

Okay, enough knocking SEO firms. Many SEO firms are great at creating properly coded websites that can be easily indexed i.e. read and ranked by search engines. They are experts at taking terribly coded web pages i.e. the majority of the internet, and improving these pages so that search engines love them.

There are many techniques that go into creating search engine friendly webpages. The following are some important techniques for optimizing a webpage:

1. Add metatags to all pages and content on a website
2. Add important keywords to the path of all pages on a website
3. Change the structure of the XML code, so the most relevant content appears first when the search engine reads the webpage.
4. Create and XML sitemap of the webpage and submit it to the major search engines.
5. Fix .htaccess, robots.txt, and other files that may be misconfigured on your site.

There are many additional steps that may need to be taken to fix your website and it does pay to have a professional look at your site structure if you are serious about SEO. If you are working with an SEO firm, I would suggest focusing your project on this aspect of SEO, as this is what these companies truly excel at.

Search Friendly Copy

Many SEO firm will want to rewrite your website copy with a mind towards search optimization. Here is another area where the line between art and science gets blurry, so you will want to balance the input from your SEO firm with your own gut instinct. Remember, humans read your website too!

For this reason, you definitely don't want an SEO firm writing your website copy unless they actually have top notch writers on staff. The best relationship for the creation of search friendly web copy is one where the SEO firm is training those who write your marketing materials on how to write in a slightly more search engine friendly way. Good writers will know when to push back ignore certain SEO rules when they conflict with the meaning and relevance of the text to human readers.

Conclusion

It's important to create semantically perfect web pages that search engines can read, but this goal needs to be achieved while still creating incredibly engaging and interesting content that excites, entertains, and/or educates your audience. Only then will you achieve true SEO Zen and incredibly high search ranking.

The first thing that clients often ask when we start setting up a search marketing campaign is, "What do all these terms and acronyms mean?". Here is an overview of the basic search marketing terms you need to know when running campaigns with Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), Microsoft AdCenter, and other search marketing networks.

Ad position: The the location of an ad on the search results page. Position 1 is the top of the first page. On Google, if your ad is in position 1-8, it will almost certainly appear on the first page of search results, though positions 1-11 may appear on the first page of search results depending on the configuration of advertisements.

Bid price: The maximum amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click from a given keyword. Advertisers generally pay less than the maximum bid price set in the Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft ad management systems.

Call to action: Direction within an ad or a web page for the reader to take an action.

Conversion: A desirable action taken by a web site visitor. Conversions can include joining a mailing list, buying a product, calling a phone number, visiting a web page, or downloading a file.

CPC (Cost per click): The amount an advertiser is charged for a single click. Different keywords cost different amounts, depending on competition.

CTR ( Click-through rate): The number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of impressions. The higher the CTR, the more effective ad management systems (AdWords, YSM, AdCenter) generally consider the ad. A high click-through rate doesn't necessarily mean your ad is effectively meeting your conversion goals, but it certainly means that Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft are making more money from your ad. For this reason, ad management systems generally rank ads with a high CTR above other ads.

Impression: The display of an ad on a web page.

Landing page: The first web page shown after an ad is clicked. The page is constructed to appeal to the same desire as the ad.

PPC (pay per clck): The advertising model that charges advertisers only when their specific ads are clicked.

Split test: Test that divides online traffic randomly between two or more creative approaches and measures which one generates more conversions.

Traffic: The number of visitors to your website.

Visitor value: How much money, on average, a single visitor to your web site is worth. Determining the visitor value will help you set your bid price, so that you can be sure that you are not losing money on your PPC campaign.