June 13, 2008

Should you forward that email?

Happy Friday everyone!

What a crazy week this has been, and interestingly enough it has rushed by like the ones before! Wow time flies… Here’s a little something funny for you to share with your friends, or should you?

email forward chart

May 2, 2008

Geek gossip

Buenas tardes everyone,

Weekly UpdateIt’s another perfect day in this perfect world we live in, and what better than some good updates from the Search Engine Marketing world to make everything fit right in? I can’t think of anything better… Below is a short list of some articles that captured my attention this week, nothing from the main news stream that you already heard about from reading major news sources. This is the good stuff you don’t find out from such sources, these are things that come from “a friend of a friend”. Today I am your friend’s friend, and here are the news I bring to you:

  1. imnotadoctor exposed Big Local today. As he was doing the geek’s version of the daily muscle flexing in front of the mirror, which is googling keywords your site ranks well for, he found some major spamming going on. Not only that, but they have a fishy 302 redirect in place taking visitors from the target url (www.clovers.com) to their main site (www.BigLocal.com). You should read up on that story on Search Engine Land.
  2. Summize LogoA Twitter Search engine is out. I found http://summize.com/ this week, but I’m not sure how new it is. Pretty interesting tool, and simple concept. It basically searches through people’s tweats and serves results. Here is the search result’s page for tweats related to the seosurvivor.
  3. Google’s Porn problem seems to be far from over. In the last month there have been at least two instances where Google was spotted displaying explicit porno pictures in the universal search results box. When searching for “knuckles” and “Hot Celebrities” on regular search, with the “adult filter” on, you’d get a big old explicit image right there on the top of the results. Not cool Google, not cool at all. Granted, it’s freaking hard to keep those spamming porn sites out of the way.
  4. Google's porn problem

  5. Linda Phan, from eVisibility, wrote an awesome post about helping searchers find their way with local business ads. Amongst other things, Linda talks about how advertisers don’t get charged for people clicking to expand the plusbox, clicking on the actual map, or clicking to get directions to the business location, which is nice for all adwords users out there. A good read if your business is local and you use PPC.
  6. The SEM industry still rocks! Danny DeMichele wrote a post on his blog talking about some recent studies showing that the Internet Marketing Industry is far from declining, it’s actually gaining more momentum! That’s a good thing to know for all those of us who are immersed in it 24/7.

I’m stirring the brain juice and crafting some fun posts for next week. Have a great weekend and pick up your trash :)

March 4, 2008

Ricardo Figueiredo is on the radar

As mentioned on my last entry, I wrote a post for the eVisibility Insider about the use of nofollow tags. That post has received awesome feedback, and I’m very happy to see that the SEO community embraced it the way they did.

We even made it to the homepage of Sphinn, check out the screenshot:

Sphinn

For a lot of the big players out there, that’s nothing to be bragging about. But being fairly new in the SEO industry, and holding a full time job that keeps me busy, I certainly see this as an accomplishment.

Thank you ImNotADoctor (I have links to this guy on my sidebar, so make sure you check his site out), for getting the word out and submitting that post!

SEO Roundtable’s Tamar also mentioned our post and that definitely put a smile in my face. My buddies who went to the SMX West last week were telling me that she’s great in person, and I’m grateful to receive good feedback from her :)

Have a great day everyone, and thank you for your support and readership!

February 29, 2008

SEO related stuff

Another week has gone by and I haven’t posted anything in my blog. I have had plenty of great ideas throughout the week, but having time to post them is a total different matter.

As an SEO/SEM Project Manager for a positively busy Internet Marketing Agency, I don’t have much time during the work day to develop personal projects. Then, at the end of the day, when I get home the last thing I want to do is work. My attention turns to some type of entertainment and relaxation. Although I do love this business, at a personal level, I also love other things… And believe it or not, I try to move my body every now and then :)

With all of this blah blah blah said, let’s talk about something interesting…. How about the last SMX West? Three of my boys just came back, and they had a blast!! SEO by Mike, OrganicSEOConsultant and ImNotADoctor. That’s right, I didn’t go and I AM going to talk about it!

By the way, look how awesome the shirts we made and passed around the conference are:

FRONT

Robots.txt Shirt by eVisibility Photo

BACK

Robots.txt Shirt by eVisibility Photo

I scored some schwag thanks to my peeps thinking of me while there, and my boy Fumi took care of the photoshoot with his blackberry. The photo below is showing off my new schwag as I’m writing this blog post! Right now you’re thinking “How awesome is that?”.

SMX schwag photo

One good thing that we realized by having them go to SMX is that we definitely are on the cutting edge of the SEO industry. Almost nothing was news for our guys, and I’m not trying to be cocky at all by saying this, but the main thing for them was networking, which must have been awesome! Maybe I’ll go to the SES next, we’ll see. :)

We have posted some great stuff about the SMX on the eVisibility Insider blog, so if you’re interested in checking out our notes, you should definitely do so.

Besides that, I have a pretty cool blog post for next week that’s in the works, along with an overview on what “nofollow” tags can do for your site, which will be posted in the eVisibility Insider sometime next week.

Peace out my friends, have a wonderful weekend and I’m looking forward to sharing more with you next week.

November 15, 2007

Do you really need an SEO consultant in-house?

Alright, so I have some juice to write this post since I have recently lost one of my great clients because of this.

My client’s company is located in the East Coast. I work out of Southern California, and ran both SEO and PPC campaigns for his company. My point of contact within the company decided to move on to bigger and better things, something that I highly respect and admire. Upon his departure, the company’s executives found out that they don’t know much about internet marketing. In fact, they looked at some of the reports I used to send to my old contact and realized they didn’t know anything about SEO and PPC. They couldn’t read the reports and couldn’t make decisions.

Without communicating with me first, they decided to hire an SEO company located a couple metro stops away from their main office. This company would be able to send one of their SEO consultants to their office due to the close proximity. According to them, this was the only thing this other company had that we didn’t. They were located close to my client’s main office.

After they made this decision, within a day or two after my contact left the cpmpany, my old contact got in touch with me and told me that “the decisions made there were purely to get someone that can walk across the street there and explain SEM/O to their staff and executives.” At the end of the day, with my contact leaving, they had “no one that could manage or even understand the hows and whys of what I was doing.” In the process, he was extremely nice in letting me know that they credit us with having helped their company achieve record breaking numbers during the course of their campaign with us. I was very grateful for that, and we’re actually building a case study about them now.

The question remains: Do you really need an SEO consultant in-house??

I can definitely agree that this has its advantages, but only if it’s the right person. I run across so many websites that have been “optimized” by their in-house webmaster/web designer/SEO expert person, and these sites have crappy SEO. As if these “SEO experts” went to a crappy SEO 101 course, didn’t pay attention to the class, and walked out to apply some basic concepts (like meta tags) and now they think the page is optimized. There’s so much more to SEO.

So, while an in-house person is a good way of having a face-to-face interaction with your consultant, a team that’s working hard from a distance can be 1,000 times better if they actually know what they’re doing and know how to communicate what they’re doing.

My advice, don’t think that just because you can get you local little SEO dude in-house, you’re doing better off than hiring a robust internet marketing company to back your SEO efforts. Phone and email allow for excellent communication, and if needed, internet video conferencing is super easy to be done today as well. Your local SEO person might be the right person, but do talk to different companies and make sure you don’t hire the local person just because they’re local and it may seem easier. It could cost your business thousands upon thousands of dollars in the end, not to mention the potential untapped business.

October 29, 2007

The New Press Release - Keyword Seasonal Planning

This is the part 2 of The New Press Release article, posted on October 16, 2007.

Keyword seasonal planning is about anticipating news triggers. One might ask: “How the heck do I do that?”

I’ll tell you how. The first requirement is to know your industry seasonality. Every industry has different targets in different seasons, and different stories that revolve around similar topics. I’ll give you an example, one of my clients is a four seasons resort. When we were entering fall, I started to plan winter marketing material with my client. Winter related press releases(ski, snowboard, snow sports, etc.), winter target audience(different demographics than the summer crowd), and so on. We were prepared and produced awesome results by tackling that in a timely manner, and stayed a step ahead of the competition.

Follow the trendsMap your keyword strategy in connection with your seasonal planning. In January you should be targeting keywords and material about events you’ll be putting in place in February/March.

Use tools such as the Yahoo Buzz to find hot, fresh and demanded keywords. The Google Zeitgeist pulls together search trends and patters, and is a great way to help you mold you press release around something that is interesting to people. The Hitwise blog is also another source for ideas and buzz monitoring.

To be continued: Part 3(final) - Press Release 2.0 Templates and examples.

Look up this story at Sphinn.com and give it a sphinn!

October 16, 2007

The New Press Release

What is the New Press Release?

Conceptually, the New Press Release is all about identifying the opportunities available online. It’s also about using Search Engine Optimization strategies to give your Press Release more exposure in the News Search Engines, such as Google News, Yahoo News, etc.

Know how to pitch your Press ReleaseKnowing how to approach and pitch social media sites and blogs is key. You shouldn’t turn your back on more traditional media portals, but in today’s world many bloggers are as influential as the traditional media pipeline (journalists and editors), if not more!

In order to expand your news coverage and quickly increase the amount of inbound linking, it’s important to leverage feeds and other interactive technology. You also need to expand the measurement of success to more than just the number of times the Press Release was picked up or “clipped”.

There are now over 70 million blogs, that’s 140 times more than 4 years ago! Bloggers are the new “editorial targets”… And the blogosphere growth is far from slowing down, with over 120,000 blogs being created every day.

Today’s blogs rival the mainstream media in popularity and influence. It’s really amazing to see that blogs such as engadget.com sometimes rank higher than money.cnn.com and pbs.org according to recorded stats from Technorati.

PREPARING YOUR PRESS RELEASE…

According to the Bennett & Company 16th annual media survey, it’s very important to display visual content in your Press Release. It’s also another important step during the “pitch” process, since most journalists and editorials say that a Press Release with a jpg, or a tif file, has a much better chance of making it into their publication. Video is another visual tool that has proven to have increased the exposure of Press Releases.

Go to the top Bloggers specialized in the niche that your Press Release fits in, and also to the appropriate Mainstream Press outlet. Start generating stories, see them being picked up by the News Search Engines, and follow the Blog Posts with your story.

Make sure you are recording the traffic data to your Press Release. You might be surprised to see that one blog might produce as much as 3 times, or more, traffic than a site such as ABCNews.com.

GETTING STARTED

Optimize your Press Release with your top relevant keywords. Your target keyword phrase(s) should be in your headline and first few sentences. Make sure you have relevant hyperlinks inside the Press Release. Have a keyword strategy on a calendar, similar to an editorial calendar.. Use keywords that will start generating buzz in a couple of months, and stay ahead of the competition.

Add photos and multimedia where ever you can. These enrich your Press Release dramatically, as mentioned above. Use wire services and feeds to distribute your content, and don’t forget the social/viral media resources(Digg, RSS, De.licio.us. etc.).

To be continued: Part 2 - Keyword Seasonal Planning and Press Release 2.0 Templates and examples.

Look up this story at Sphinn.com and give it a sphinn!

October 12, 2007

Keeping your clients aware is key

The Search Engine Optimization process can be a long, arduous, and sometimes expensive road that doesn’t always produce results right away. It’s definitely an investment rather than a quick fix.

For those of you who have clients you do SEO for, it’s important to realize that the age of computer guys(and gals) not being good with customer service and client relationships is over. Now we not only have to be awesome with the technical skills, but to be successful we have to be super customer service and communicative beings :)

It’s important to keep up on your communication skills and not only know your stuff, but also know how to explain it. In the beginning of an SEO campaign, communication might be the only result your client sees for the first few months, so make sure it’s good communication.

Here’s a great article from a buddy of mine on effective communication.

Have an awesome week!!!

Search Engine Optimization awareness

I was browsing through some forums today, (I do my best to be active on some of them)and was surprised to see how there’s such a huge misunderstanding of the ultimate purpose of SEO. I understand that a lot of businesses and clients are motivated by results, and all they care about is seeing their site on the first page of Google. The important thing for the Search Engine Optimization Specialist to keep in mind is that SEO is about making a site better, easier to use and find, and relevant. That is the ultimate goal of Google, Yahoo, MSN and all of the big ones out there.

With that said, remember to keep your optimization relevant! Don’t blind link or accept blind links just for the sake of linking. A good inbound link comes from a page that is relevant to the page it’s going to in your site. It’s even better if the link is coming from a relevant keyword, surrounded by relevant content. That’s one of the factors that makes for a delicious bite for the Search Engine Crawlers.

This “relevancy” rule should be adapted to everything you do in your site, not only with the ultimate goal of ranking higher, but also trying to generate a better site.

This may be an already known fact for a lot of SEO guys and gals out there, but if you are running around with an SEO checklist and going about your optimization as if you were a robot, than I hope this post helps you open your eyes to todays SEM.

What is the SEO Survivor?

  • The SEO Survivor is a blog created by Ricardo Figueiredo, a Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Specialist who works for one of the top Internet Marketing Companies in the country.
  • The name SEO Survivor started as a thought that in order to be successful with Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing in general, one can't just wave a certificate, or a college degree and say: "I know how to do this". Not to say that certificates and degrees aren't important, they are. The point here is that in order to be successful in this field one needs to be always learning, and excited about the biz. One needs to have "survival" instincts to stay ahead of the curve in this industry... I developed this blog so I can share my ideas and views with you, and so you can share yours back with me. Hopefully we can learn from each other and thrive in today's Wild West, a.k.a.: the internet.

    ...and remember... don't panic, it's organic! SEO Survivor

Ricardo Figueiredo


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