I will be heading out to SMX Social Media and SMX Advanced this year, and would love to catch up. I will not be liveblogging, rather will be hoping to gather ideas from those of you in the business.

I will not be waring my hat. But come shake my hand - meeting folks is the best part of the event.

If you’re going, fire over a Tweet [scottclark] or comment and be sure to say hi at the show.

Photo (me, Bruce and Cristine) from last year’s shows.

This week, my call log shows four companies calling me with sad stories to tell about ill-conceived internet marketing strategies executed by way of an agency or part-time “SEO.”

It’s unacceptable. Business customers deserve honesty, integrity and more help in understanding which are selling bullshit and which have the needed expertise. If a product or service isn’t going to fly online, they deserve to be told so, and why- not bled dry.

I envision a process including the following steps in order to make this happen: 1. Define commonly used search marketing tactics; 2. Rate the tactics by risk level; and 3. Educate webmasters on the ratings… he search engines provide Webmasters with guidelines on what tactics they consider right or wrong. Enumerating the various tactics, and the risk rating associated with each tactic would allow people who are not familiar with search marketing to make informed decisions. It would also go a long way toward fostering a better understanding of the work that goes into organic search engine optimization.

So here I cast my link juice to this article about SEO/SEM Standards and why they’re needed. Chris, you did well, my man.

Go check it out.

I have six professional heroes presently - and I don’t mind sharing. In random order, they are:

• Seth Godin - For telling me to quit dead ends and focus on being the best.
• Edward Tufte - Guided me into information design, recognizing and avoiding chartjunk, and telling stories visually.
• Jakob Nielson - For telling it like it is even when it’s totally unpopular.
• Richard Florida - For drawing attention to what drives creative people.
• Steve Wozniak - For his approachable demeanor as well as the desire to spread knowledge.
• Steve Jobs - For his relentless passion to innovate.

I’ve met Florida, Tufte, Jobs and Wozniak. If only for a moment (they wouldn’t remember me.) I had no trouble making the list above. It came to me in 3 minutes. Each have contributed through a career of hard work with a real passion to improve things.

Have any heroes emerged in the SEO world? Should we expect it? As I sat in a meeting recently all eyes were on me to save the business. My answers about content creation, social media, and slow, steady growth were not superhero answers. Some are looking for the cape crusader to save old-school companies with new marketing feats of awe. People start looking for a mild-mannered SEO to burst from the phone booth and fix the problem. I don’t know why.

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A quick search of Google News shows dozens of cases where homeowners, business owners, and community code enforcement officials are embroiled in battles over improper building permits. In many cases, the builder is forced to tear down the structure - at great expense. Communities put permitting procedures in place so that an even-handed process is applied and ensure safety, prevent shoddy workmanship, and preserve home values. You must stand in line, fill out forms, and pay fees when your project is already complex enough, they reason. So lots of people try to get around it, and some succeed. Houses crack. Fires start. Communities get uglier.

In the website construction industry, we can draw a parallel between SEO advice and building permitting. Pressures placed on any web development project can cause marketing goals to be ignored or at least diluted. The builder doesn’t have to “live” with the results. They get paid and can easily vanish independent of the commercial success of the venture. The SEO gets called to come fix the mess. But the mess is already sealed in the walls. The cracking foundation has already been built upon.

Many companies invest heavily in their web design and construction, and then call on SEO experts to come in after the fact to make suggestions to help traffic flow. Unfortunately this often results in bad news. The website was not designed with search in mind, and you have to re-build it if you want organic traffic to flow. This is the equivalent to being forced to tear down that addition to your home, or that big warehouse building you just put together. You’re stuck. The expense to rebuild it is too high. The expense not to build it is too high (paid search.) I’d like to make the plea to the business community to consider thinking about SEO earlier.

I propose that people involved in web development look to the construction industry for guidance. Involving an SEO/SEM consultant before, during, and after your web development plans are in place can be a money-making proposition. I think that in some ways this is like permitting your building project. In my opinion, SEO/SEM experts should be project managers for any web development project where marketing the site is a core business directive. Decisions will be made with the social, search, and traffic goals take center stage, not the aesthetic “high” of the site being finished and wowing a committee. (more…)

I removed this post because it simply wasn’t worth it for me to argue the points, and the discussion on Sphinn and this post at piloSEO are probably sufficient.

No wait, here’s another good rant on it.

In a shortly to be released study by B2B, web marketers, web developers, videographers and supporting technologists may want to consider preparing for a busy 2008. Some hilights:

60.1% of all marketers plan to increase their 2008 budgets.
79.1% plan to increase their online budgets (last year was 75.6%)
Web Site Development will be increased says 74.0% of marketers.
Email Marketing will increase says 70.1%
Search Engine Marketing (SEO) will be increased by 64.3%
Other increases include video (39.5%), web casting (39.1%) and social media (26.2%)

source

I also think that 2008 will be a huge year for analytics, and for those who know how to utilize them. Skilled, science-based marketing seems to me like the smartest and lowest risk type of investment for people still bedazzled by Web 2.0 orgies. I’m hoping that 2008 will turn focus back to the business, in particular the small business, which was relatively neglected in terms of innovation for 2007.

One of the most difficult challenges is tracking paid search performance via telephone calls for the small business. While a few will spring for a new 800 number or IVR system to get some of that information and train phone staff in its use, many cannot due to the workaday reality. Often the busy office environment means metrics go out the window in favor of just getting the order out, so the company continues to guess.

This is especially true for companies who are struggling to find their sweet spot in the paid search world. During the day-to-day chaos, few are thinking about the cost of each call - they just want to answer it and do their best to change the caller into a customer. If the staff is so busy, do you really think they’ll drill down and get the “how you found us” information accurately recorded. It doesn’t happen. Pay-per-call and click-to-call offer “embedded” tracking, but are plagued with inventory and adoption challenges. My friend Christine (CC: Nice to see you at SMX!) created a great post on Offline Conversion Tracking, which covers some of the same ground, and this issue has often come up in conference sessions.

As Greg Sterling points out, the vast majority of purchases are made offline, yet the tracking solutions are only just maturing, and others have a very healthy skepticism about some of the new solutions.

The real result of this is the “leaking” of marketing budgets that happens with a lack of tracking. The dynamics of the purchase cycle are mysterious, making strategic and tactical solutions little better than guesses.

I see basically four flavors of off-line conversion tracking from pay-per-click ads, and would like to introduce a hybrid.

anecdotal
customer question at point of sale, catalog IDs, coupons, offers
poor man’s IVR (multiple phone numbers)
cookied IVR
…and a hybrid…
cookied part number modification

CLICK MORE to see the rest of this article.

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It seems everyone’s bending over backwards to optimize my pay-per-click campaigns for free these days. Google did it a couple of weeks ago, and now Microsoft Adcenter has chimed in. Can the PPC campaigns really offer good value to customers without conflict-of-interest becoming a problem? Or is it a “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” issue? In my opinion, clients are best served by a mix of marketing ideas, outside analytics, and design consultation that blends the pay-per-click element into a wider-angle view of a websites’ performance.

In my in-box today:

As a valuable member of Microsoft(R) adCenter, we’d love to help you reach out to more potential customers. That’s why we’re offering you up to 45 days of one-on-one assistance from an expert Media Specialist at no cost to you. It’s our way of saying “thank you” for your continued support

From keywords choice to copy style to the way you structure our search campaigns, the goal of our service offering is simple: to help you save time, potentially attract more customers, and maximize your ROI.

Our search experts will help you get the most out of your adCenter investment by helping you identify strategies to:

- Test your ad copy
- Identify your most successful keywords
- Expand your search terms
- Track your sales conversions
- And more…

PS: When is Microsoft going to roll out any kind of accredited program for professional consultants? I thought this was coming?

I think, starting today, the “Worlds Biggest Web Host” , 1&1, now offers built-in Google Site Map Tools in their Package-level domain lists, making it extremely easy to create a sitemap for any domain hosted with their services. Too Damn Easy. They’ve had such tools in their “marketing tools” before but now it’s much more “in your face” while you view your domain names in the hosting. The “standard” webmaster tool settings creates a very basic Google sitemap 0.84 schema, uploads it, and says “thank you” . Bam, it’s that easy.

You do not have to drink the Kool-Aid folks (more…)

I noticed that Google is starting to estimate your likelihood of display for site-selection ads. Trouble is, anyone who does any level of CPM tuning will have different bids on many sites, and the estimate only seems to apply to the default. If they showed the estimate for individual sites, that might be useful. ” Display likelihood is estimated only at the ad group level. Similar estimates are not available on a site-by-site basis.” says Google.