Rob Sullivan Introduction and the History of Search Engine Marketing
What does over 4 years in the SEO/SEM business feel like?
I thought I’d write this, my first article more as an introduction into who I am, and some of the things I’ve seen in my time in the industry.
My name is Rob and I started in the SEO industry almost 4 and a half years ago. When I started there was no such thing as SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or PPC (Pay Per Click). The buzzwords were SEO (Search Engine Optimization), sitemaps, doorway pages and later on, link building.
When I started in the industry, the engine you just had to be in was Altavista. If you weren’t in Altavista you weren’t anywhere. Similarly, Inktomi, while not a search engine, commanded a fair chunk of search engine traffic through partnerships with the likes of Yahoo! and AOL.
Google was the new kid on the block – only geeks and techies were using it. But they had the best results and boy were they quick!
When I started, it was common to see 3 or 4 page websites. And if you properly optimized the site, you could achieve top rankings in Altavista in a few days. However it wasn’t too long after I started that it began to take longer and longer to get into Altavista. Near the end, as Google began to gain in popularity, it was taking 6 to 8 weeks to even get a visit from Altavista’s crawler. [ read full article ]
Brilliant Marketing Technique
So, I woke up this morning and turned on my laptop to begin my daily routine of checking emails, web stats, blog entries, etc., when I noticed that I hadn’t yet loaded the Alexa toolbar on this particular machine. No biggie, I made a quick visit to Alexa’s site and had it installed in seconds. After some re-arrangement I had all my toolbars exactly where I like them, Yahoo at the top, Alexa, and then Google at the bottom, closest to my cursor. I was ready to quickly move on with my morning to-do list.
This is where the story gets interesting.
Only minutes after visiting Alexa’s site to begin downloading the toolbar, I received an email. The email was from Yahoo. To be more specific it was from Yahoo ToolBar, or directmail@yahoo-inc.com. Maybe I just had too much caffeine this morning but the perfect timing of that email seemed highly coincidental. Only moments after visiting a site about toolbars, I get an email from Yahoo boasting the great features of “Their Toolbar"…hmm.
Now this could have only been a coincidence, but the internet marketer inside of me was far too intrigued to let this go unexamined. In attempts to find a pattern, I decided to do a search on my computer to find all of the times that Yahoo has emailed me. A quick search turned up a couple from their Music service, Jobs site, and their Toolbar group. Jobs? Hmm. That got my gears turning. I had recently posted a job on Careerbuilder. I looked at the posting date and sure enough, I received the Yahoo Job email the same day that I had placed the listing….. I had never recieved an email from them about Jobs until the day that I visited Careerbuilder. [ read full article ]
Search and Social Media Emerge as Key Shopping Influencers
For environmental nonprofits this is a genuine conundrum, which is actually Latin for “annoying problem involving paper.”
They need to attract donors and members, and to keep those supporters informed and happy. That means that the groups need to market. And that means using paper, ink, and energy (for printing and transportation), which typically requires cutting down trees, using petroleum-based products, and expending non-renewable resources.
You can see the issue: To raise money to save the environment, environmental groups employ marketing techniques that are often detrimental to the environment.
“[Our] members are sensitive to the issue, but the mail tends to be the lifeblood of most nonprofits, particularly nonprofits that need to generate income through donors,” says Anthony W. Conway, executive director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers. “The mail has traditionally been the go-to medium for prospecting for new members and new supporters and generating income.”
So you won’t see environmental groups forsaking their primary marketing method; after all, their goal is to minimize negative impacts on the environment, not to eliminate any impact on the environment at all. [ read full article ]