Credit: Big Golf

Change…

New adventures are always hard to begin when you’re having so much fun to begin with. My soujourn at Search Engine People has been exactly that - a fun, exciting and enriching experience that I will always cherish. That said, I’m moving on to the next big adventure in my life, where I’m sure there will loads more to learn and share alike.

I’ll be working at a mid-sized foreign exchange trading firm as their lead internet marketing strategist, with a great deal of seo and social media thrown in for good measure. Despite being fairly young, I’m ready for the challenge and new experiences that await.

So how many of you are familiar with Enterprise tools such as Google Search Appliance? Google Mini Search Appliance for example, starts at $2,990 for searching up to 50,000 documents with a 300,000 max document capacity. Google Search Appliance starts at $30,000 for searching up to 500,000 documents with a 30 million max document capacity. (By the way, these are tools used for internal development of infrastructure and intranet and to enable maximum efficiencies between the internal world of information and the internet, among other things, for those of you wondering.)

So, I’m supposed to write about things that are PPC related and today, I get to do that, and more.

How do you measure success?

To me, the ultimate measure of success for ANY company is productivity, not products as some might have you suggest.

But what exactly is productivity? Some people are functionally more productive that others in their work environment. Some people express their productivity in the breadth and depth of their networks… think account executives or bizdev people.

OK, so we all agree that social media traffic converts extremely poorly. However, can it be used help to build authority?

This is the 6th post in the series about Authority Building. The previous 5 are:

1. I Jeff Quipp Am Not an SEO … I’m an Authority Builder
2. What Is Authority, and How Do You Build It?
3. What Type of SEO Client Are You?
4. Authority vs Celebrity … Is There a Difference?
5. Authority Building: Tools of the Trade
6. The Role of Social Media in Building Authority

In this post, I’ll delve into the use of Social Media as a tool in our authority building toolkit.

Think about the path that people take when they hit your site. Perhaps the visitor enters from:

Keyword Search -> Blog Post -> Another Blog Post

or

Direct Search -> Home Page -> Products Page

Regardless of the scenario, they all have one thing in common. It’s a linear relationship that ultimately leads to a dead end.

Enter the Loop Strategy

The premise of the loop strategy is that we never want to leave the visitor without telling them what the next step is. There are no dead ends because each page leads to another page.

Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist, kicked off what he calls "an occasional series that discusses how we harness the data we collect"

After a short introduction to the history of search featuring PageRank he notes how over the years Google has "added more than 200 additional signals"

He raises and of course doesn’t completely answer the question where those signals come from. He suggests that at least some of them come from looking at user behavior:

• What results do people click on?
• How does their behavior change when we change aspects of our algorithm?

Credit: William Cho

Getting Small Biz to engage with Search Engine Optimization is difficult to say the least. That said, the opportunity for elevating SMB’s from traditional print and radio advertising to an online platform is massive, given the sheer number of businesses that contribute to the economy through a vast number of product and services.

As search marketers, bringing about a shift towards an online presence is a win-win situation for both the client and the service provider. So the challenge is definitely there, but I’m about to provide you with 5 tips that are geared towards engaging SMB’s to consider SEO and online marketing in general.

This post is the second in the series on Search Economics. The first post discussed a concept called the Law of Diminishing Returns. This series on Search Economics is intended to help search marketing firms understand the economics of their own businesses, and also to help explain some difficult concepts to clients. Primarily though, this post in particular helps to explain the industry’s fascination with automation.

Definition:
Economies of scale are defined as; when more units of a good or a service can be produced on a larger scale, yet with (on average) less input costs, economies of scale (ES) are said to be achieved. In lamen’s terms, the more you produce, the lower the average cost of production.

For all the old school SEO’s

Source: The Geek and Poke cartoon series.