26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
Here’s an internet marketing conference this week in Toronto, Canada. These kinds of gatherings for idea-sharing have increased relevance in this down economy. 
Incisive Media has announced the agenda for the Search Engine Strategies London 2009 Conference & Expo. The event will be held February 17-19 at the Business Design Centre in Islington. The conference is being organized by Kevin Ryan and hosted by Mike Grehan, search engine marketing experts.
This item probably belongs on our colleagues’ FlackMe.com site for PR professionals. But we don’t mind scooping them (we think) occasionally. Anyway, BurrellesLuce has introduced BurrellesLuce iMonitor, a one-stop “self-guided media monitoring service” that allows instant searches of thousands of media outlets and both the targeted issuance of news releases and the coverage they receive.
It looks like a great way both to create and monitor media campaigns with quickly searchable results. We viewed BurrellesLuce’s very engaging promotional video, which doesn’t include the flat-fee price. But if you’re interested, they’ll be happy to call you. A most promising service, we think.
…
AOL has launched When.com, an online guide to local events. It looks like a great place to scout for weekend activities in your area, or places to go or events to enjoy at any time. PC Magazine notes of the new service: “It’s powered by Zvents, a local search engine behind hundreds of Web and mobile partners, featuring event listings to promote local businesses. When.com will derive revenue from online advertising sold through AOL’s Platform-A service.”
Search engines love blogs. That’s not big news at this point, but it’s worth repeating. A blog updated a few times a week can keep getting SEO notice. There’s a testimonial to that in the comment to this post. Keeping an online diary linked to your site is not only satisfying creatively; it makes SEO sense. 
We’ve been talking about why it’s important to think of search engine optimization /search engine marketing (SEO/M) and Web 2.0 not as the be-all and end-all of your communications universe but as key ingredients in a complete, balanced diet. Of course what we mean when we say “Web 2.0″ breaks out into three areas:
- Rich Internet applications (RIA) including AJAX and Flash
- Broadcast media such as streaming, RSS and mobile SMS
- Consumer-generated media (CGM) like consumer reviews, wiikis, blogs and participation in forums
All of us who post here on SEO Shootout want to talk about best practices, but today is show-and-tell: I’m going to show…
When was the last time you saw an online display ad you’d click on? Or, better put, when was the last time you clicked on an online display ad? I seriously never had unless I did once in 1994 or something. But I saw this ad and was intrigued enough, and entertained, that I’d click.
I had to write this post first, so I haven’t yet. It’s my next order of business. Good job Very Short List, whoever you are and whatever you’re selling!
(i.e., Why try to game the system when you can do just plain good work?!)
— Abigail
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The power of social media branding and marketing is expressed really well in this post at ClickZ:
Hours after Palin was named as [MCain's] running mate, James posted a photo of Wasilla City Hall on his Facebook profile page. The photo was originally posted by djcn0te on photo-sharing site Flickr.com in 2005. Since Palin ascended into national politics, so too has this photo. It’s now accompanied by wisecracks (or insightful observations, depending on your political persuasion). Wrote clockwerks: “so McCain’s VP pick was mayor of a laundromat?” And this from emasscouple: “She really is for reducing the size of government, eh?”
One blogger asked…
Traditional PR has involved a public relations firm dropping your press release on the wire and hoping somebody picks it up. Sure, they may have conversations with analysts prior to the drop, but in this Web 2.0 era even you can make a huge splash on a ‘Net, grab the attention of thousands, and, perhaps, even get some conversions or sales out of it, all for no added cost to you. All it requires is a little elbow grease and the right kind of thinking.
Ensure that your title, header, and first paragraph include your targeted keywords.
The title of your press…
