This one is big news - Google has released a Beta of Knol, its new Wikipedia-like service.
As I understand it, this service is based on the idea of making the author responsible for the content. (Wikipedia’s model is that the community edits the content, with a group of moderators responsible for enforcing the rules. Other people can contribute, but it is the author who decides.
I think this is a great idea and has a lot of potential. We will be advising our clients to get involved. Bonus - initial analysis seems to indicate that Knol results get a Google Search Engine Results boost.
Cuil is all over the news. Started by ex-Google people to compete with Google. So far I have not been overly impressed, although it seems that they improve some every day (did they go live a little too soon?).
Very briefly, here is how they promote themselves:
1. More pages indexed than Google
My take - so what? Does anyone seriously believe that Google is deficient because it does not index enough pages or show enough results?
2. Formatting of Results
My take - no opinion yet on whether it is better or worse than Google. On the one hand, it’s more graphically oriented - on the other hand, are we suposed to go down the page or across? I like Google’s better because of the lack of ambiguity - but it might just be because that’s what I am used to.
3. Quality of results
So far, Cuil seems inferior. I don’t have an axe to grind here, and I don’t want to get into analyzing random examples right now, so I’ll just leave that as an opinion based on a very small random sample.
However, it must be said that both Google and Cuil get the basics right - a search for ‘internet marketing ny’ returns www.salemglobal.com in position 1 in both search engines.
There’s some buzz going on about the changing nature of SEO, kicked off by Mike Grehan and discussed on Search Engine Watch.
Folks, Mike is right on the money. Standard SEO techniques are still the foundation, but the use of Web 2.0 tools is critical to success. Basically, waiting for people to find you in organic SERP doesn’t quite cut it any more. That strategy is too passive. You have to be more proactive, and dominate all kinds of online communities, reaching out to your target traffic in a host of creative ways.
Make sure your SEO / Internet Marketing provider is talking about - and using - creative techniques to reach your audience.
As an SEO/SEM consulting company, we need a good way to manage our client projects - our resources, tasks, schedules (and of course progress reporting, although WebCEO does a great job of that). The threads I found via Google are a year or two old. Does anyone have any current suggestions or experience?
Had a GREAT 2-week vacation over the holidays - France, Israel, and Jordan. Check out the Treasury at Petra (Jordan) below (if it looks familiar, you probably saw it in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).
2008 will be an active year on this blog - the field is fast-paced as always and i am going to do my level best to share my online marketing experiences for those who are interested. Stay tuned!
We have been asked to prepare a pitch for a very large local retailer about hiring us to do their SEO work, vs. hiring an in-house employee, so we have been talking about the relative merits for a company of doing their SEO/SEM in-house or outsourcing (out-house SEO, as Chris Silver Smith humorously puts it in his Natural Search Blog post).One of the sharpest comments I saw on the matter was a commenter, Tyler West, at Webmama’s blog:
I distinguish between an SEM marketing manager and outsourced search engine consultants by asking the client this question. “Would you rather pay another salaried employee to sit behind a desk with no guarantee they’ll perform OR would it make more sense to compensate your expert out of the money they make your company?” The answer is always unanimous in favor of the less risky proposition.
In reviewing some of the posts I found, it seemed to me that many of the valid arguments in favor of in-house SEM really applied to large companies that could justify an entire department of people to work on SEM - in such a case there are factors like internal politics, institutional gridlock, etc. however if the choice is between hiring a single SEO employee, or outsourcing to a firm with experience, multiple resources with expertise in different aspects of SEO/SEM, tried and true techniques and tools (how’s that for alliteration - if ’strategies’ started with ‘t’ I would have included that as well)…the results are bound to be both quicker and more effective.
Even for the larger companies, i didn’t see anyone address what we consider to be an ideal solution - use in-house staff to write copy, update the website, and other business specific tasks, while using an SEO firm like SalemGlobal to manage those resources, do the research, utilize best practices and tools, and provide direction and prioritization.
More than 350 interactive marketing companies exhibitied at adTech in the NY Hilton. It’s just up the street so we at SalemGlobal Internet Website Marketing all checked it out.
My take - I suppose i am supposed to say what a great show it was, but to tell the truth, every booth seemed like they were selling the same thing. It was hot, noisy, and crowded, and I learned virtually nothing from the booths I visited. Why, then, was it so crowded? It seemed like an excellent networking opportunity - people in the biz from all over were meeting, catching up, etc. The bars did a great business! I actually tried to arrange some meetings with a few people who were here from out of town but it didn’t work out (yet).
Really looking forward to NY XPO, where we are exhibiting on Nov 28 at the Jacob Javits Center in NY - at least there is bound to be some variety!
Eytan pointed me at an even better social bookmarking tool. Socialmarker.com allows the reader to submit to multiple bookmarking sites with a single submission. So I added that one as well, below. Check it out! (And keep those comments coming…)
David Risley posted a piece about using StumbleUpon to promote a website. Seems like a pretty typical model. StumbleUpon
is another social networking site, that allows people to randomly access websites that might be of interest to them (according to their expressed preferences as well as their StumbleUpon history), and also to tag those sites for other users. I have come across several posts about StumbleUpon lately, so perhaps this is worth working with.
vs. 
