Kevin Lee Search Engine Marketing Expert - News - Views

This was funny. went to live.com to check if a client site was well crawled. Got the main page, but when I his search, the earthlink DNS money machine kicked in. For thepurposes of this illustration, I swapped the search term to “car.”  When I changed DNSs Live returned, so I doubt the root DNS entry was bad.

Alexa has a webservices API. Generally they are A-OK with folks using their data in either API or Widget form.  Apparently having the word Alexa in Alexaholic’s name was enough to raise the ire of the folks at Amazon.  Even though the owner of the domain has changed the name to Statsaholic (and plans to display traffic graphs from Compete and Quantcast, two Alexa competitors), it still looks like he’s fighting an uphill battle.  He’s looking for support from the iMarketing and blogger community. Alexaholic was a creative way to display Alexa data, better then the original site. Creativity shouldn’t be punished.

One of our marketing managers came up with a great idea.  Dave Pasternack T-shirts that say SEO is not Rocket Science from Cafe Press.

OK, this is getting funny. Threadwatch. is ruining a Dave Pasternack SEO contest (details here). All because Dave said SEO isn’t rocket science in response to data from a Marketing Sherpa report and having been in the SEO business for ten years. (since 2001 we only do SEO audits for clients illustrating the low hanging fruit problems that need to be addressed and highlighting best practices). From now till March 1st, a whole bunch of SEOs who apparently have free time are going to work to try to come up high in Google for the search phrase Dave Pasternack. Dave may end up more famous than the chef, owner of Esca (a great NYC seafood restaurant).

By the way if Google’s purity is preserved (perhaps through bloggers who wish to anchor link to Dave’s bio page on our site), and we win the $1000, we’ll donate it to the American Cancer Society.

Last month, right during the holidays, my wife received 14 identical direct mail pieces from the local Manhattan Paychex office. Clearly they either flunked marketing 101, or there was a major breakdown in quality control in their marketing department or agency. Actually, it could have been both, because when you open the envelope, theings don’t get that much better.

The letter isn’t merged to personalize it to my wife. Plus clearly the list they rented is one of Psychologists. Why not take the extra 5 minutes per profession to merge in a mention of the profession in the headline. Plus, one of the main focuses of the letter is the dedicated representative service and the letter is unsigned. No personal touch at all, no personality at all.

Management at the firm deserves to know, so I’m going to send this packet of letters off to the Paychex management.
I certainly hope they do a better job administering payroll than they do in direct mail and marketing.

A quick check of  Google and Yahoo for the keyword “payroll” indicates that Paychex hasn’t yet discovered that search engine marketing belongs in the marketing mix.  ADP is notably absent too.  Intuit and a bunch of lead generation services who sell their leads non-exclusively to… Paychex.

Looks like some SEOs agree that you don’t need to personify what you do as “rocket science” to have a great professional business.   The hooplah continues however, in response to parts 1 and 2 of my column.

I wrote about ShaveEverywhere.com in my ClickZ column but in addition to ignoring PPC search,they also could have done so much more with organic search.  by embedding the flash in pages that described the contents in text, the site could come up for som mych more than its name.

David Dalka met up with me at the ACCM and used his minidisk player to do a cool podcast where I discuss MSN’s entry into the marketplace.

At the catalog and multi-channel merchant conference this week, I was struck by how many catalogers are nearly completely ignorant about SEO and SEM. Many don’t eve use PPC search at ALL! Time for one of my staff to write an article.

OK, so I have to jump on this bandwagon. There is an SEO contents to get a Google-Bomb phrase V7ndotcom Elursrebmem to the top. I like the following site for the phrase V7ndotcom Elursrebmem because at least they will give the money to charity if they win. Of course the chances are that Google will invalidate the contest or at least invalidate the resulting links back to participants.

I took the SEMPO survey. You should too.

Take the survey and you get early access to the results.