What valuable lessons, if any, do we teach on Sphinn regarding SEO?

A high-level analysis of one week of Sphinn postings.

The Selection

I’m coming at this from an angle where a non-SEO site owner says "hey, I have to do something… now let’s learn from the best".

I sifted through the  900+ items posted between Friday May 9 00:00 and Thursday May 15 24:00, culling the ones that seemed to convey real value for a newcomer and dropping items like "30+ Weird, Educational and Stupid Search Screenshots", "Trolls or Upset Customers? Do You Know the Difference", "Exercises For Lower Ab Workouts" or "Is Bebo better than Facebook? Creating a profile network".

The Problem:
Have you ever had a client come to you in a state of desperation, begging for help to remove a blog post that ranks for their business name, and portrays them in less than a positive light?

Or perhaps you had a very contentious break-up with an old flame, and they’ve since decided to air their beefs with you in a more public forum, and these complaints now appear every time you type your name into Google. Maybe you merely made a mistake one evening after a few too many beverages, but the proof now appears in video form online and as a result has become part of your public resume.

There are three types of people in the world: Those who think anyone can do PPC. Those who think it takes a very special kind of idiot-savant. And those who understand that the truth lies somewhere between the two.

Image: Corbis

I spend my typical PPC day pulling bunnies from hats.

The prestige — the unexpected and surprising conclusion of the illusion — lies in knowing exactly which hat I’ll be wearing that day. Oh, and in having a brilliant assistant.

Image Courtesy - ab initio ad infinitum

So it would seem that everyone is in a race to become as transparent as possible.� It has become (clearly) evident that there is more revenue potential out there by opening up everything and making it available than there is by keeping it all horded and secret and hidden in the dark.

Cell phone technology is a brilliant example of transparency becoming extremely key.� It’s helping mobile carriers and equipment providers to quickly and easily design, develop, and deploy in tandem.� It’s also giving software development platforms such as Google and Microsoft the opportunity to build out their handset web technologies.

Great news this a.m. from the land of hockey … Yahoo has finally acknowledged that yes, we Canadians live in Canada. What you ask?

In essence, this means that Yahoo is finally automatically redirecting Canadians searching via Yahoo Search (ie. Yahoo.com) to Yahoo.ca, presumably based on IP. The result is more Canadian sites will be found in the search results (and fewer U.S. based sites) since the vast majority of searchers assumed this was happening automatically.

Try it for yourself if you live in Canada … type in Yahoo.com and see if you are redirected to http://ca.yahoo.com.

When you say “Local Market Strategy”, most people think of local as at the city level. In search that means Google Local, using Geographic delimiters in keywords, Local Directories, etc.

But for large enterprise sized clients, a local strategy is one for a particular country. Multi nationals typically are faced with the decision:

Are they going to have one overriding strategy for all markets

or

Are they going to have a local strategy (including different products, pricing, etc) for each market (country) that they play in.

and how this question is answered has a HUGE impact on your Search Strategy (at least it should).

So I don’t know if you recall in the past when I mentioned that I believed Live to be the branding where Microsoft planned on competing with Google.  (See Virtual Reality - Microsoft Office Live).  Well, we should look at some of the things that they are doing from the User perspective.

Nice and clean, free of advertising, and links to other Microsoft places of possible usefulness. It’s very familiar, don’t you think?  Ever seen anything like it before from any other extremely successful search engines?

Image courtesy of rapidsharecinema.blogspot.com

According to the ComScore figures, growth in paid-search clicks happens to be slowing down.  Is it because of the economy?  Is it because of the “R” word that is being used in the United States?  Don’t know, but there was still growth in Google.  Certainly it may not have been huge growth like the numbers we are used to being reported, but still almost 3% growth year over year is substantial compared to the losses evidenced by the competitors Yahoo and MSN.  Yahoo paid clicks went down by about 3% year over year and MSN went even further in the wrong direction by a note-worthy 12%.  It all really does make that 3% growth in Google clicks stand out that much more, and lends that much more credibility to their reputation.

Andrew Goodman, of Traffick.com and Page Zero Media, and I are if not friends, well, at least peers with a mutual and healthy respect for each other both knowing exactly how long the other has been at this Search (whether paid or otherwise) stuff in this country. Over the years we’ve lunched, coffee’d and conferenced together.

And always, one theme has come up. When and why did Canada miss the boat when it comes to search and the Internet?

Coincidentally, Andrews post of today “When Registering Domains, Think Big”, he states:

Personally, I have a real problem with the .ca.

Now that you’ve forged your Foundation Friends, and are beginning to expand your authority by continuing to write excellent quality blog posts, while securing new friends and fans through the previously mentioned tactics, the concepts ‘Spheres of Influence’ and ‘Influence Ripples’ become tremendously important.

Source: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/

Spheres of Influence & Influence Ripples … the Concept:
David Armano introduced the concept of Influence Ripples in 2006. His post Influence Ripples 2.0 shows how numerous bloggers with varied spheres of influence interact. Ultimately, networks become evident.

The concept is this, each person’s authority can be viewed as a circle (see above) on a 2-dimensional grid: