MindFlow

Techno-Bias for Those Who Twitter

2008-04-28T18:34:37-07:00

Image via WikipediaLately, I've found myself annoyed when I look someone up on Twitter, and they don't have an account. Now that I'm addicted to real-time information and real-time crap - intertwined! Is it bad of me to form these opinions? Is anybody else having this internal dialog?

It is a challenge. The fast-paced Twitter environment demands your attention, but even more challenging, it demands your authenticity! Maybe that's what keeps some people out of the game. Or at least partially out of the game. My friend and business partner, Jim Cook (@jcookaz for those on Twitter), observed that neither Seth Godin (God of Permission Marketing) nor Hillary Clinton, follow anyone on Twitter. They have followers to whom they preach, but they don't or won't listen! They call this an influence ratio. Both Seth and Hillary influence a lot, but are influenced by none! Think about that for a second. They don't care what you have to say! I think high influence ratios are out of whack - they make a statement of their own.

Side Bar:

I was speaking at the Social Media Club in Phoenix earlier this month, and I mentioned Seth Godin. Then, knowing that I probably mispronounced his name - I decided to ask the audience. Several indicated that it wasn't Go-den or Ga-din, but GOD-in. They told me that was how he pronounces it. To which I replied, "I'm not surprised!"

So, back to my question. If someone is talking about social media on their blog, and you go to Twitter and search for them, and they're absent, what does that say about their social media skills?

Side Bar:

If your company wants to build its brand on Twitter. I think that is fantastic, but do it as a representative of your company. Go ahead, follow the sage advice of Levine + Locke + Searls + Weinberger in the 1999 book "The Cluetrain Manifesto" - get involved in the conversation! Show your humanity.

Alright - I just needed to get that off of my chest. I would be very interested in the opinions of others - please comment.

Related articles
Seth Godin Praises Twitter; Seth's Tweetiquette Critiqued [via Zemanta]

How-To: Using Twitter to Build Brand Integrity [via Zemanta]

The Business End of Twitter

2008-04-18T15:08:58-07:00

I really started Tweeting about two weeks ago, even though my account has been active for awhile. My early thoughts about it were probably not too dissimilar from yours. It felt like a very juvenile, time-wasting activity. So, I quickly dismissed it and moved on. Then, I decided to attend a Social Media Club meeting in Phoenix where everyone seemed to be on Twitter and loving it! It took some time for that to settle in on my mind, but it made me give it another try. This time I was less critical of the seemingly mindless Twittering and began to see it filling a void to express our humanity.

My company, ThoughtLava, is a virtual company. We call ourselves "Location Independent Professionals". It's another way of saying, we can work from anywhere, but we primarily work from our homes. There is a blog dedicated to this way of life in the extreme (really working from anywhere). We gave up our physical office last October. We had found that we were beginning to do more from home and less from the office anyway. The reason I am telling you this is that as we saw less of each other physically we needed to supplement the lack of "Water Cooler" opportunities. We began keeping SKYPE connected all day. Mostly, we would just hear others breathing. Occasionally, someone tells a joke or asks a business related question, but mostly breathing! As more people work independently, the need to show we're human and see the humanity in others is going to increase. Twitter provides an outlet.

So great - but is there any economic benefit to Twitter. Quick answer: Absolutely! Here's the recipe I've been using:

1. If you know your target market, you need to find representatives from it on Twitter and begin "Following" them. I've been using a combination of TweetScan.com and profile surfing to identify those I need to "Follow". With TweetScan.com, I set up keyword searches and create RSS feeds so that I can use my Google Reader to see who's talking about concepts where I can be relevant. Everyday I check my reader to see the daily catch. Then, I begin following each of these people. Here are some other ways to find your target market on Twitter:

Search for the authors of magazines/blogs, that your target market frequent, on Twitter - it won't hurt to have them follow you - you might become a source for a future article/post. If you find them, FOLLOW!

Check for event parties on Flickr - many times the pictures are annotated with the names of those in attendance. Search for them on Twitter - then FOLLOW!

When reading blogs/articles that interview members of your target market - search for them on Twitter, then FOLLOW!

2. Most people, not the Scobleizers of the world (he follows 21,129 and is followed by 19,926 people), follow several and are followed by a few. So when a new person shows interest in following them, they often reciprocate. If you're following me here (pardon the pun), your target market is now listening to what you have to say. Time for a rule:

Social Media follows the same protocol as Human Courtship or Dating. While you may have a very specific agenda, your progression toward your goal needs to be subtle and patient. Disobey this rule at your own peril!

3. One of the things you'll notice quickly is that this is an active community. These people are getting out and doing things, like attending conventions. A convention is a Twitter catalyst - they become junior reporters. So, by engaging those in attendance and asking smart questions about the content - you might build a little micro-buzz about your company (without the expense of being there). This week had the ad:tech conference in San Francisco. I asked a few of the people I follow who were attending if they had seen anything about "Semantic Marketing". They responded with "no" and indicated that they would keep an eye out for me. Later, I asked them if ad:tech would be a good fit for our Semanticator product. Now, I really wanted to know their opinion and at the same time I knew a by-product of our exchange is that they would have to educate themselves on Semanticator! The surprising thing is that other people that were attending ad:tech, outside of those who follow me, began visiting our website and requested additional information (an example Semantic Persona brief).

This is the current state of my experiment on Twitter. After a couple of weeks, it represents the number two source of referrals to http://www.semanticator.com, behind our most successful "Comment Marketing" campaign. So, if you want to grow your business, you might give Twitter a chance, or even a second chance!

Power of LinkedIn

2008-04-05T12:08:19-07:00

This past week I've been trying to identify blogs that are frequented by my primary market: Advertising Agencies. So, I tried Google Blog Search using the term "Advertising". It returned 76,922,165 entries. Among them were the following:

Pronet Advertising
AdAge
Advertising Lab
The Business Marketing Blog

Then, I tried the IceRocket Blog search engine for the same keyword. It returned 580,233 entries. I examined the first page and only found references to small marketing oriented blogs. I sat there thinking "Man, this is going to take a while." I was actually getting angry that nobody has created a decent search engine for identifying contextually relevant blogs. I mean there are so many blogs being created each day, how are we supposed to navigate the "blogosphere". My hope is that Twine, from Radar Networks, may help solve this problem some day!

Next, I tried Digg. When I plugged in the keyword "Advertising", I got back a menagerie of results mostly from YouTube. I tried all sorts of relevant keywords, and my frustration continued. Then, it occurred to me, why not leverage my LinkedIn network. Surely someone out there can recommend a list of blogs that senior level advertising and marketing executives visit to stay on top of trends and technology.

So, I asked this question four days ago:

What blogs do advertising executives follow to keep abreast of trends?

Within an hour, I had at least 75 quality blogs that attract our target market. It was amazing! No searching, just asking and people with expert opinion filled in the blanks for me. Here is the list generated by my LinkedIn community (it is still raw - I haven't visited all of the links yet - so swim at your own risk):

Ad Busters
Ad Holes
AdFreak
AdGabber
AdPulp
Adrants
Ads of the World
AdverLab
Advertising Age
AgencySpy
Amnesia
Beth Morgan
Boing Boing
Brand Autopsy
Brand Noise
Brand Play
Brandweek News
Cherryflava
CK
ClickZ News
CMM News
Comscore
Contagious News Feed
Cool Hunting
Cool News of the Day
Copy Blogger
copyranter
Crack Unit
Crave RSS
DM Confidential
Duct Tape Marketing
eCPM
Ed Delia
eMarketer
eMarketer Articles
Ernie Schenck Calls This advertising
Fallon Planning Blog
Five Day Weekend
Gen Y Voodoo
Guy Kawasaki
HHblog
How to Change the World
Iconoculture
Internet Retailer
Jaffe Juice
Logic+Emotion
Lovemarks
Lumifi
Majestic
Marketing Vox
MarketingProfs
Media Bistro
Media Buyer Planner
MediaPost | Media News
MP Daily Fix
NetVibes
Paid Content
PopWire
Practical Ecommerce
PSFK Trend: PSFK
Publishing 2
Quantcast
Russell Davies
Search Engine Watch
Search Write
Seth's Blog
Stanford
Talent Zoo Guest
TechCrunch
Tendocom
The Cool Hunter
The SchaBlog
ThreadWatch
Tom Peters
TREND HUNTER Magazine
Trend Spotting
Trend Watching
Vinnyling Ham
Webmaster World
Welcome to Optimism
Wharton
Marketing Sherpa
YPulse

Riffing on the Semantic Web

2008-03-28T21:33:45-07:00

Source: Wikipedia

What's the promise of the Semantic Web (a.k.a. Web 3.0)? It is to make it easier for people to find things that have meaning to them - information, media, websites, etc. When they arrive at a website - they'll see more of what's interesting to them and less of what isn't! The reason I use the word "promise" is if we look only to the scientific community, there are debates as to whether the Semantic Web will happen at all - classifying and making new relationships out of collective human knowledge via computers. However, if we look to our entrepreneurs, some are actually bringing the promise alive today - even if their approaches are different from those conceived by the World Wide Web Consortium - the international governing body for the development of platform independent web standards and specifications. These are people with big brains that use words like "vis-á-vis", "concordantly" and "ergo". They are responsible for the architecture of the Web - they make it work! The formal name for the study of the meaning of terms in a vocabulary, and their relationships is 'Ontology'. This is a vast landscape that could take thousands of PhD level ontologists many years to chart. Our world is abundant.

Even in geographies where we lack abundance of food, we have abundance of thought. With each year, human knowledge grows at an astonishing rate. It is immense. And each of us has a complex framework of interests - where we pick and choose from the body of collective knowledge. Some of us like cooking, others prefer eating; you may like Rap music and I might be more into classical; I prefer earth tones in contrast to a colder palette; some follow college basketball where others might be equally passionate about the NFL. If you are picking up on my not so subtle point - there are infinite paths but limited time to explore. We often need help making choices. This is where commercial opportunity thrives. Where passion looks for satisfaction. Where demand forms.

Traditionally, consumer products businesses have reserved significant portions of earnings for developing and communicating brand. They worked to understand their brand attributes and produce a unique selling proposition. Then, through advertising and point of sale merchandising, they helped people choose their brand over another. Imagine walking into a grocery store without any branding - all generics. It would take forever to read all of the labels and make choices. Brands make things very easy. For example, both my mother and my wife's mother used "Tide" when we were growing up. We don't even think about it - out of the numerous brands of laundry detergent, "Tide" is always our choice. However, when the world began migrating from a physical marketplace to a virtual one, it became easier for new brands to enter the marketplace. This has resulted in information overload, and we need help making choices.

Consider the Music industry. If we reflect on the activity surrounding music that started back in the 1990's with services like Napster. Whether you ripped music from your CDs to MP3 files or supplemented your collection with songs from friends - you might have arrived at the realization that what you had been carrying around in your head as a massive collection of music wasn't all that big! Maybe you had diverse taste: "Let The Good Times Roll" by The Cars or "Prelude in C Sharp Minor" by Sergei Rachmaninoff to "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by The Beatles and "Black Rooster" by The Kills. What ultimately happens is you realize that your huge collection is a microscopic fragment of the broader music catalog. In fact, with just the commercial music available today - if you started playing songs 200 years ago and never repeated, you couldn't catch up at the rate at which new music is appearing. OK great - so how do you find the good stuff, from your perspective. For the last several years, companies like Pandora.com, Last.fm and Musicovery.com have been trying to help people find music that they will like. Pandora requires its subscribers to create a music channel by entering either a band or a song. From there, it begins playing related music. Then, the subscriber participates by giving a thumbs down to what they hate and a thumbs up to what they like. Pandora pays attention and refines the channel based on taste. Last.fm works like Pandaora, but is also a social music network where your friends make recommendations. The assumption is that your friends will have similar tastes, but different exposure. And Musicovery is about selecting mood (from dark to positive; calm to energetic) and genres (from disco to rap; jazz to country), then it builds a dynamic playlist. Like Pandora, you interact with the selections by indicating which songs should be banned! Music is a primal passion. Because it is so universally important, much effort has made advancements here that will eventually transfer to other industries.

The much anticipated application, Twine, will help us expand our knowledge by developing relationships with other people in specific topical areas. This is like a mindmap of all things which you have personally explored - from music to vacation spots to hobbies to sports to educational topics. What we are sure to find is that there will be common themes across categories, and people who share common interests in each of those categories. Most of us haven't spent any time creating or studying the set of interests that make up our personas. This is what Nova Spivack, Founder of Twine, calls a Semantic Graph. The result is that we may be surprised in a really good way as computers start making suggestions based on our unique combination of interests.

The fact that Web visitors are heterogeneous is what has made it difficult for marketers to be relevant. We have been trying for years... using demographics to make media buys for advertising or select lists for direct marketing. Recently, companies like Mindset Media have made it possible to buy media based on the psychographics of your target market (i.e. spontaneity, humility, carefulness, creativity, etc.). This is a huge jump in understanding the behaviors that might indicate whether a person will like your products or services. In other words, products and services are being promoted that are congruent with the behavioral profile of a Web visitor. My company completes the loop. Once the visitor responds to an online advertisement, whether now or a week from now, our clients' websites can detect the market segment to which they belong and immediately display the most meaningful content. We make it possible to greet your market segments differently the moment they arrive using our patent pending Semantic Marketing technology - Semanticator™. After eight months of field testing, we're finding increased relevance results in a 41% increase in time on site, a 30% decrease in bounce rate and a 26% increase in conversion.

Semantic Marketing's Impact on Content

2008-03-18T11:06:39-07:00

One of the first questions we get asked when talking to clients about Semantic Marketing - in particular our technology, Semanticator™ - is how much work is required to maintain content for each market segment?

There are a couple of ways to look at this question. If we step back and observe the way the Web has mostly been viewed - as another piece of marketing collateral - it makes sense to ask this question. In our experience, most companies aren't getting what they could out of their websites - increased sales leads and/or brand affinity. It has become a self-fulfilling prophesy! 'We haven't seen the ROI we were expecting from the Web, so we haven't invested.' Another way to look at this is if delivering a more relevant message to each visitor results in a significant increase in conversion, would the work be worth it?

What we are finding is that you can have a lift in conversion or an increase in brand affinity using Semantic Marketing without a huge increase in workload. In fact, with our oldest implementation, launched in August 2007, two market segments account for 62% of the interactions. Now, there is work involved in extending market segments into what we call "Semantic Personas". In fact, it is probably 80 to 120 hours worth for each Semantic Persona. That work, however, has resulted in a 41% increase in time on site, a 30% decrease in bounce rate (people entering and exiting from the same page) and a 26% increase in conversion! Being more relevant improves website performance.

So, is there an impact on content? ABSOLUTELY! Is it worth the effort? ABSOLUTELY!

For the first time we have an intelligent sales medium that is capable of adjusting its message to each prospect. Up until recently, the initial experiences on most websites have been one-size-fits-all. Some websites, like Amazon.com, monitor visitor behavior and make suggestions on subsequent visits, but have little impact on the first visit. The power of Semantic Marketing is making incredible first impressions!

Social Media Power Bubbles

2008-02-27T00:20:02-07:00

I have been struggling to determine where to focus my energy across all of the social media applications available. I have categorized them as follows: Content Aggregators, Social Media Aggregators, Micro Blog, Bookmarks, Community: Visual Media, Community, Community: Business and Discovery. There are a few others like Community: Software - Wakoopa, Community: Books - Shelfari and Marketplace - Kiva.

In each bubble, the participating applications are in order of type size. The clear winner is at the bottom of each bubble in the largest type. I used a combination of PageRank and People Count to determine the order (see attached spreadsheet - Download social_media_matrix.xls)

Until now, I have been registering and participating in all of these applications. After doing this exercise, I am going to reduce my participation to one or two from each category.

Top 5 Things to Make Social Media Successful

2008-02-19T19:45:12-07:00

Over the last couple of months, I have immersed myself in Social Media. I blog a few times a week, I Twitter , today I tried Twitxr (Twitter with photos), I belong to groups, content aggregators, community bookmarking, etc. Here are the top 5 things I have learned from the experience thus far:

Having a blog is key, but not mandatory. While I have a blog on our company website, having one hosted differently (a separate IP range) than your company website is important for Search Engine love! Basically, if you create links to your website from your blog and they are on different servers - Google will be happy and allow energy to flow from you blog to your website. Some people even choose where they blog based on overall PageRank (fundamental building block of the Google search algorithm). The point is to start a blog and contribute on a regular basis (2-3 times per week). I use Typepad (as you can probably tell)!
Another building block is a group. I began by participating in a few Google Groups where I was interested in the topic (Semantic Web or Web 3.0). Then, I created my own Google Group- Semantic Marketing. These are places where I can participate as a community member. Beyond your contributions to the content, if you participate - you get noticed by others. This can help you bring energy to your blog or to your collaborative tagging/bookmarking sites.
Create accounts, submit your own content and participate within collaborative Bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us or collaborative tagging sites like Digg , Reddit , BlinkList , Iminta , etc.
Participate on sites like OthersOnline and MyBlogLog to connect other like-minded individuals to your blog and group activity.
Twitter or Twitxr to increase your personal network. It is important that you be able to steer a reasonable sized group's energy to a recent Digg, new post in a Group or Blog. I have also found that including my blog in my Linked-In profile can increase traffic. And, don't forget your email signatue. Think of this as a "Pied Piper" play!

So, those are the 5 things that I think it takes to be successful with social media. Stay tuned, I'm surely going to have to evolve my thinking as a gain more experience out there. If you think I've got it all wrong, please comment! :)

Announcement: Semantic Marketing Google Group

2008-02-19T10:54:29-07:00

As I grow in my understanding of the Semantic Web, it occurs to me that there are two camps aiming at the same goal - an improved, highly-relevant Web experience for us all. One camp, Developers, consists of those who are really going to make it happen - architects. They are participating in the development of standards for Web 3.0. They are determining how Web components (pages, content within pages, images, etc.) will be classified so that content can be quickly assimilated with meaning. There is much work to be done...

Another camp, Entrepreneurs, has companies like Radar Networks with Twine (private beta) , Enth (semantic search engine), and our favorite - Semanticator™ (semantic marketing technology made by us - ThoughtLava). A friend of mine, Eric Hoffer with Second Integral (semantic Web expert - blog), said something to me the other day, "...some of the smartest people become their own bottleneck..." What I think he was saying is that Camp Developer may have difficulty bringing the promise of the Semantic Web to the masses. If that was his point, I think it is the job of Camp Entrepreneur to take hold of what we can and begin delivering it to the people. It may be imperfect from a standards perspective (as they aren't fully evolved yet), but it will get everything flowing in the right direction. Camp Entrepreneur may catalyze adoption as Camp Developer makes the reality more universally available.

As a result of this epiphany, I have started a new Google Group to facilitate discussion on the topic of Semantic Marketing. Please join me in bringing it to life.

Subscribe to Semantic Marketing

Email:

Visit this group

Semantic Web Tomorrow, Semantic Marketing TODAY!

2008-02-13T00:25:57-07:00

There's a lot of discussion brewing on the Semantic Web. For example, you might check out the Google Group or a Digg search when you get a chance. When you get there, you will find much techno-speak. Here's an example:

SELECT DISTINCT ?emp WHERE {
   {?emp ?p1 ?o} UNION { ?s ?p2 ?emp}
   OPTIONAL {
      ?booking employee ?emp .
      ?booking startDate ?sd .
      ?booking endDate ?ed .
      FILTER ((?sd >= someStartDate && ?sd <= someEndDate) || (?ed

>= someStartDate && ?ed <= someEndDate) || (?sd <= someStartDate && ?

ed >= someEndDate)). }

FILTER( unbound(?booking) ) . }

I have no idea what this code does, but it's super exciting to the heavy-duty architects for the next evolution of our Web experience (they use words like "ergo", "concordantly" and "vis-á-vis")! One thing that is abundantly clear is that this is still a few years out. The concept is Web pages auto-tagging to make it easier for each of us to find what we want - making sense out of the pile of data we call the Internet! In a recent post on Read Write Web - Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App? - the author, Alex Iskold, analyzes "...several existing and potential applications of semantic technologies and look[s] for the killer app." What Alex missed was "Semantic Marketing" - identifying visitors that fit a specified profile and delivering more meaningful interactions. That's actually the tag line for our patent pending Semanticator™: More Meaningful Interactions.

As the first semantic marketers, we have been developing specific profiles that represent the majority of expected visitors for each client's website. To deliver a more meaningful experience, we must detect these profiles upon arrival. There are only 21 attribute types that can be detected before a session begins (as of this writing). They range from location to language preference to operating system to recent websites visited. Those 21 detectable attribute types each have a range of values from a dozen to thousands. With unlimited combinations available, we can create unique profiles specific to each client's branding, marketing and sales objectives. Then, when a profile is detected, we dynamically alter navigation, informational zones, content within zones, sponsored advertising, etc. to create the most relevant experience for each visitor. The best way to explain what we do is through a demonstration of one of our websites enabled with this technology, but here is an example I gave to a 20 year old bank teller the other day. He asked "uhh, what does ThoughtLava do?"

I said, "imagine a visitor to your bank's website had just visited another bank's website. And, imagine that she completed their small business loan application. I also want you to imagine that she prefers to speak Spanish, is located in Scottsdale and is arriving after typing 'small business loans + best loan incentives' into Google. Now, imagine if rather than the one-size-fits-all approach that your website currently delivers, she was presented with an alternate home page that is specifically focused on Small Business, with a link to a loan application and an area comparing your favorable loan incentives to that of other banks. It is also in Spanish and indicates the nearest branch office in Scottsdale. Do you think she'd be impressed? Do you think you'd have a better chance of winning her business?"

He said "Cool!"

What's cooler are the results over the last six months:

the majority of the sessions are profile-driven vs. default (no profile detected - one-size-fits-all experience)
profile-driven sessions have nearly double the conversion of default sessions
profile-driven sessions have a significantly longer duration than default sessions

In conclusion, we think Semanticator™ is a top-down approach to the Semantic Web as described by Alex Iskold in another post - Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web. Alex says, "Here is what we are really looking forward to with the semantic web:

Spend less time searching
Spend less time looking at things that do not matter
Spend less time explaining what we want to computers

A consumer focus and clear benefit for businesses needs to be there in order for the semantic web vision to be embraced by the marketplace." Semantic Marketing delivers on that promise today.

Narrative of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2008-02-03T11:45:30-07:00

We're often asked to describe what we do to increase traffic for a website - specifically SEO or Search Engine Optimization. And, I'm not sure we've always done a good job of breaking it down. Not because we're trying to protect the process, it's just there are so many nuances. I'm not going to get into nuance here - this will be a high-level description of our process for Search Engine Optimization.

It always begins with a brainstorm! Obviously, we think about words and phrases that are directly related to the products, services or ideas offered by the website. But, we spend even more time thinking about words that are "off center". As an example, we've just begun working with an Arizona company, MistAmerica, that provides misting products and services for residential misting systems, in addition to other commercial and industrial applications. Well, for residential misting systems, some obvious keywords are:

mist system
mist systems
misting system
misting systems
misting

You get the idea! These words are directly on point with what MistAmerica does. However, misting is a method of making the outdoors more tolerable in a dry, hot climate. For those new to the desert, especially if they're from a moist, cooler climate, the awareness of misting may be low. So, when they start looking for ways to reduce heat, their thoughts may go to what they know - shade. MistAmerica doesn't provide shading! But this certainly represents an opportunity to educate potential clients of a more effective approach to cooling their patios. So, through brainstorming we generate a seed list. We use that list to identify other words (synonyms) and to create combinations. This often results in 400 to 700 keywords and phrases.

Next, we work to pare down that list into something manageable - somewhere around 50 to 75 keywords. This is where the research happens! We look for two things: Popularity and Competition. Popularity is simply the number of times a particular keyword or phrase was searched for over the last 90 days. Competition is the number of websites that have something to do with a keyword or phrase. Frequently, the most popular words are also the most competitive. However, upon examination of the competition, we sometimes find that those websites that rank high on search engines got there by accident. They weren't sophisticated, they just did a few things right! In cases like that, it may be worth the challenge to attack a highly competitive keyword. But, in general, we are looking for keywords and phrases that are popular with a reasonable amount of competition. In terms of numbers, the rule of thumb is a ratio of fewer than 500 websites for every search in a 90 day period.

Once we have our keyword list, we begin focusing on the content and structure of the website to be optimized. From a content perspective, we look for quality, brevity and gaps. The keywords that we've decided upon are categorized into themes (2-3 keywords each). Each major theme should have at least one page dedicated to it. Those thematic pages should have reasonable (natural) repetition of its two or three keywords. The word count for these pages should be somewhere between 150 and 250 words. Content makes up about 20% of the formula for search optimization success. Structure is 80% of the game. And, it's a game, not a science. The rules are protected by the search engines and are subject to change from day to day. There are many elements that make up a Web page: navigation, images, tags, text, titles, links, etc. Our job is to make sure that we are doing everything we can with each element that will have the greatest impact to overall visibility without being viewed as abusive by Google, MSN or Yahoo. There are a whole host of techniques that can radically increase the visibility of a website for a particular keyword, but many of them can result in penalties which can prevent a website from showing up at all! That is a bad scene and can spell disaster for any entity that is relying on good search engine placement for success. These techniques are referred to as "Black Hat". There are also some borderline techniques called "Gray Hat". We recommend only "White Hat" techniques - those that fit well within the loose guidelines established by the search engines, explicitly and implicitly. The progress will be slower, but the long-term effect far greater. SEO is not an instant gratification play!

Once we have completed the initial optimization for a website, we turn our attention to the search engines and directories. Google is a search engine - categorized by an automated computer program. Directories are categorized by people. Yahoo is a directory. We submit instructions to the search engines and directories to help them understand how the website is organized, what they should pay attention to (e.g. thematic pages) and what to ignore (e.g. privacy policy).

Remember, we are talking about "Optimization". Here are some quick definitions (source):

Activity that aims at doing something as well as possible.
The formal process by which decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty.
The refinement process used to find the best solution to a problem.
The process of seeking the most favorable condition or solution to a goal by balancing the trading-off results on more than one criterion.

What these definitions have in common is a recognition that this is a trial and error process that occurs over time. To that end, we assess the visibility of the selected keywords for a website on a monthly basis. We like to think of it as a "Balanced Portfolio". Some words will make bigger gains than others, and some will fall back. In each case, it's important to try an understand why we experienced success or failure for each keyword. We also find that the world is not static. There are always changes which can be additions, modifications and deletions of keywords within our target list to accommodate changes in an industry/marketplace. Every month we re-optimize the content and structure, then we resubmit our instructions to the search engines and directories.

That's it! It's not all that difficult, it's just work! Here's a flowchart for further clarification: