Last week, I was lucky to join Joe Apfelbaum of Ajax Union and Ben Kirshner of Elite SEM on a panel (ably moderated by Jules Kibbe of  TicketNetworkDirect) for the Ticket Summit on the recent changes in search marketing. The attendees are ticket brokers an dpartner sthat move most of the seats for entertainment and sporting events in the U.S., so you can imagine that they have a fierce interest in search marketing. It fell to me to explain the dreaded Google Panda update of its search ranking algorithm. I say “dreaded” because so many people have treated this latest reshuffling of the search results as something approaching apocalyptic disaster. If it has been a nightmare for you, my condolences, but there’s no going back, so we all need to understand the idea behind Panda and we might need to change the way we think to succeed in the brave new Panda world. Read more

I frequently advise clients that the secret to successful search engine optimization is to have content that people really want to find. And, beyond SEO, the secret to a successful site is that the same content makes prospective buyers want to read it, and it persuades them to buy what you are selling. It sounds simple, and for some companies, it is simple, but we often make things more complicated than they are. I find that small and large companies each struggle with this question of what story to tell, but they struggle in different ways.

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SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you might rightly expect that SEO is about optimizing pages to appeal to search engines. And you’d be right. Increasingly, however, I am finding that clients believe so fervently in SEO that they aren’t actually optimizing their pages for sales. If you are falling into the trap, you’ll likely regret looking so narrowly at SEO.

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I realize that to some, this is a dumb question. I mean, if you have a Web site, why would you NOT optimize it for search? Organic search is the cheapest way to bring people to your site and paid search is the easiest, so it’s a no-brainer for you to recommend that every blessed Web site on the Internet dive right into search marketing, right? Wrong.

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