The eldest of my two young children has discovered analytics. He still understands it only as measurement, but I see The Meticulous gleam.

Is it genetic? Perhaps if my children had been born hundreds of years ago, our family would have been the The Trackers of Evanshire, or the Adders of Lakehorn. Maybe there is misunderstanding when we interpret the historical designations…possibly being honored as “The Count of…” meant something else entirely.

This child recorded the circumference of a tree outside our back door, then sealed the paper bearing solely “18.5 inches” into an envelope with instruction to me to send it to his grandfather, another of the Meticulous clan - an actual verified rocket scientist. For both child and grandfather, the measurement alone is sufficient as overture, communication, message.

You must love analytics (or children!) as much as we do if you’ve made it this far. Making the assumption you are a marketer, possibly even a web marketer, or someone who relies on web marketing for revenue, here is my curiosity. What are the three top measurements - the visible, tangible indicators - (and these must be pre-sales!) you watch to assess that your web marketing efforts are doing what they need to do? Do you watch Google rank on search terms that have converted in the past? Do you look for a certain presence or absence of a particular kind of lead generated off your site? Is it unique visitors or aggregate page views that indicate to you a meaningful change in volume?

It is my experience that people successful at hitting their ultimate targets always are tracking something intermediate, something that kicks off data to guide the degree and direction of mid-campaign adjustments. In a political campaign these indicators are a) money and b) votes. In a web marketing campaign…what are you watching?

Each week I get ‘invitations’ to join somebody’s online network. More and more invitations…to more and more networking sites. Almost always (so far), the invitation is from somebody I actually do know. If I don’t, they are often a recruiter looking to grow the world’s largest online network for themselves and their wallets. (Hint: if the person has a gazillion contacts, join at your own risk.) I feel strongly that having a good network is THE best marketing you can do for yourself. And, there’s some evidence that the links from networking sites are good for your SEO.

I’m not new to online networking. In 1999, I built a website for ex-Compaq employees. Over margaritas and nachos, two friends and I traded stories of people we used to work with “in the old days.” We wondered where everybody had gone. Where they’d landed. What they were doing. That evening, we pulled together a list (a whopping 40 people) of names for whom we had email addresses. We sent out ONE email and wrote a couple of pages of copy for the site. The site grew to over 1500 members from that single “invitation.” I know it’d still be growing if the back-end software guys hadn’t moved on to bigger and better things. Our site for ex-Compaq employees grew very quiet — but it’s still there.

One thing that fascinated me was the quantity of executive-level folks that took the time to join the network. Executives (maybe it’s instinctive) knew better than anybody the importance of networking and staying in touch.

There are several people I spoke with after finding them again– and we got to know each other even better than we had while working together. Amazing that you can be in a meeting with somebody every single week and not know a thing about them outside of their job. As people were laid off or “retired” from Compaq, the emails would fly between those of us trying to help each other out. One thing is certain– especially in the business world: “it’s who you know.”

LinkedIn soon became my replacement networking site. They made it easy for me to start building my network by integrating with Outlook. I now respond to requests from Plaxo members (and most recently from Spock.com members). And, I have a MySpace site (my niece insisted) that I never, ever visit. And there are a couple of other networks that I just haven’t taken the time to investigate.

So, my question is (and I ask myself this with almost every invite I get from a non-LinkedIn site), how many of these networking sites can there be and how many of us have the time to grow and maintain multiple networks?

Yes, the sites themselves are doing everything they can to make it easy for us — combing through Outlook contacts, checking against your other networks, reminding you to update your profile, nagging you to answer an invitation, etc., etc., etc. I just wonder how much time we can spend actually networking when there are so many places to be?? Anybody have the same feeling??

Susan the Meticulous and I are back fresh from speaking at the monthly round table luncheon for Business + Balance, a local group of self-employed moms. I wasn’t sure what to expect since nobody has ever said, “Hey, Sara! Come address our group, you subject authority, you.”

I was along for the ride to talk about blogging, but it turned out to be a nice team effort with active questioning throughout. Those are some whip smart moms. Women are funny, so many of them being helpful and cooperative by nature. Both Susan and I have to stop ourselves from just jumping into these women’s sites and doing on-the-spot consulting.

It’s interesting to approach the whole tangle of search marketing solutions from the perspective of just sharing information, rather than pitching a prospect whose business and needs you’re already familiar with. The concerns of a very small business doing their own search marketing are, of course, very different from the companies for whom we are a line item on the budget. It’s frustrating for both us and them that to do the whole shebang—SEO, pay per click, some social media—requires people with a lot of different expertise areas, time, and work. Because of their size, these businesses aren’t likely to see a positive ROI for what they’ve put into web marketing services.

It’s immensely frustrating that everyone from the biggest corporations to the tiny corner grocery has a website, and you have to compete whether you have the resources or not. Not that it’s hopeless, impossible, or not worth doing yourself, but it’s not a set of hurdles you glibly want to send someone running through. Especially since different businesses in different areas will have different solutions.

After the talking, while we were eating, Susan and I were talking about what to do to help these small businesses with their search marketing solutions as far as informing them in a practical, helpful way. She suggested a one-day or half-day seminar. What kinds of things would you want to see in that? What topics would you want covered? How much time can someone like a self-employed parent give per week to this? What’s a comfortable budget? Got any other questions we should be addressing?

As you would expect from a marketing company working on our direction for the future, we have been homing in on our differentiation. Surprisingly, there are a lot of search marketing companies which don’t have much real marketing experience. Because it’s web marketing, companies tend to skew young, to have a hip, wired, energetic company. However, a company full of marketing newbies may not be a good fit if you need a business partner entrusted with bottom line performance. It isn’t hard to do PPC, and any web person can add tags to a site, but real agency- and client-side marketing management experience is hard to come by. Since we happen to have a lot of that (and some of us have some gray hair to go along with it), it’s an important part of our identity. And, we’ve realized that a lot of our joy in doing our jobs comes from helping our clients understand how web marketing works, so we are focusing our future on education, strategy and reporting.

From this most recent study from eMarketer, it looks like marketing executives are really coming up to speed on two important issues: marketing basics (any economic downturn spurs both a drive toward “back to basics” in budgeting and an emphasis on measurement and then reporting on ROI) and, surprisingly, search engine optimization. From our viewpoint, SEO is the foundation of modern marketing, especially if you are marketing to businesses…it’s nice to see our client-side marketing peers mention it as both a trend and as an almost fundamental emphasis.

Dear Webmaster or Supported Personnel,

As our research suggests, you are doing the specimens e.g. Search engine Optimization, PPC, link building, Content Development & Web-Promotional activities. This really hurts us! As so many individuals have not clearly about the root to which we concern if you will outsource campaigns of any theme, we will definitely put our rhythm right giving 100% effort-making activities. How to draw the attention of the Search engines in major SERPS with targeted traffic as well as quality prospects to their sites - without paying a single penny to Google, Yahoo or MSN like search engines. I know that it’s your business and you want to achieve the key objective incorporated with the initiation of your website. But I have the solution for you to wipe out such worries that are tormenting you on your way to achieve the necessary business success. From one of my daily emails from service providers in India.

I was talking today with an agency friend about a client who always wants the cheapest solution. It’s an unsophisticated client, so it’s not likely she can educate them about how to evaluate the offer, trying to understand what QUALITY is being offered at that low price. I suggested they try the cheap solution for a few months, see what the real cost turns out to be, and then measure the cost per lead or cost per acquisition. One of the great things about web marketing is that you can measure everything…that is, everything that comes in to your site. You can’t measure the damage from people who dismiss you without visiting because your content doesn’t look professional, or if there are errors in the content on your pages. Part of your job as a marketer concerned with reputation management should be the quality of prospective SEO firms.

I don’t know how many people are using offshore SEO vendors, or how many agencies are outsourcing to them, but as a recovering English major, I don’t understand how a person can justify the risk of having their web content developed by a vendor which is not a marketing firm, does not have American writers, and who does not know the technology, the competition, the market or the customer. The sample text above is the worst written email pitching professional services I have ever received, but not ONE of these Indian companies has ever sent an email soliciting my SEO business without a syntactical or other grammatical error. That is the concern that has put my rhythm right, tormenting me on the way to achieving the necessary business success. Well, actually, it gives me some security, that there are some jobs that really can’t be outsourced. In terms of your reputation and that first impression, quality doesn’t cost, it pays.

I’ve been thinking about keywords and phrases, henceforth referred to as KPs. There’s the pile of a few terms that have the big search numbers up front and a looooooong tail of more specific phrases. The long tail phenomenon is old-hat for the SEO crowd. Most people outside of search marketing probably aren’t familiar with it. They sit down to think of what terms they want to be found for, then come up with a list of terms that are incredibly general. So general, nobody actually ready and willing to buy would be using them. And people come in saying that they want to be number one on the internet for “book” or “computer” or “plastic surgery”.

It’s our job to teach them how search works, that they can’t be number one for those things, and that there are better phrases…KPs that are more specific, that indicate readiness to buy, that may be very specific to their industry area. We see the list and use it as a starting place to find the KPs that will make a difference and will work. But it occurs to me that we shouldn’t just dismiss the general or overly-competitive keywords. The single word KPs need to go, but some of the ones that you won’t win on *but* are likely to be parts of other phrases should get to stick around. Why?

I read that 50% of searches are unique. They’re long, funky strings of words. They aren’t going to show up on the keyword research and tracking tools. But you know what they are going to do? Include the words for the core ideas and features around the product. The one word keywords will wind up in the copy just as you talk about whatever it is you do. Take the term “SEO company”–there are 1,130,000 pages in Google for that term, and WordTracker predicts 996 searches per month on it. That’s some tough competition, but also a whole lot of eyes. Are you going to be #1? Probably not. Especially since it’s SEO–everyone’s site is optimized. But if someone is searching for an Austin SEO company or “Austin SEO company cost of SEO”, there might be enough content on our site about both of those things to make it relevant in one of these longer, unique search queries.

Even more interesting is the difference between “search engine optimization firm” and “search engine optimization company”. The number of searches isn’t too different–about 15%–but there are over 2x the number of competing pages for “search engine optimization company”. It’s just as important to pay attention to what the competition is as to what the predicted search volume is. “SEO firm” has a few more searches than “SEO company, but there are 870,000 more competing pages for “SEO company”. Not that the general terms aren’t worth going after–we’re ranked in the top 50 on Google for “marketing agency”, and it has the highest number of competing pages in this sample with 1.75 million. But that’s because we got the visibility by populating with terms that had it in there already, like terms about our work in B2B web marketing.

So while it’s hard not to squeeze that KP you’re going after in one more time, I think it’s worthwhile to make it a point to include some of those long shots that would be great to have, but so hard to get. Don’t waste the valuable real estate in tags and titles when you could be using the phrases you’re targeting for a good reason, but don’t reject them entirely. Do I have some rule of thumb on percentages and balancing this stuff? Nope. But it is worth taking the extra time and not missing the extra searches you could be getting.

Lots of good thinking out there on how referrals are becoming the new filters that sort out the good stuff from the “90% of everything that’s crud.” (Chris Anderson, The Long Tail) It’s not so much the wisdom of crowds (remember Howard Dean?) but the “nichebusters” that break to daylight and someone casually gives you a rendezvous with greatness. That’s the power of social media, and why it is so important to the future of search marketing. Even for B2B. Thinking future perfect, we are already becoming a social media agency, courtesy of our teaming with leaders like Tom Parish, Cynthia Baker and Deltina Hay. (These would be the people you would HOPE to have in your network!)

As marketers who are in the business of helping people find what they are looking for, it’s nice to know that we are both helpful and contributors to the bottom line for our clients. It’s so much better than being in advertising and trying to figure out how to persuade someone that one brand is better than any other option, just because of the cool person who is using it in our TV ad! (for a cool $250K)

I love this quote because it can explain to your CEO why nobody ever searches on your tagline:

“Marketers now have to compete with the conversations customers are having with one another about the products they buy. None of those conversations consists of customers repeating the same three word phrases over and over. This is one of the main drivers for (the market’s) interest in “customer-generated media”: Not only are customers more credible—a 2006 study by Edelman PR showed that customers think the most trustworthy source of information about a company is “a person like me”—they’re also more interesting. Customers are now “mashing up” marketing materials—re-editing them into parodies, mixing them up with totally inappropriate soundtracks—turning commercials back against their creators and in the process making them far more interesting than they were originally. Think of it as customers’ revenge for all those years of being treated like simpletons.”

The truth is that advertising stopped being smart and tried to win by being clever, and fell away from relevance. As David Ogilvy said, the consumer isn’t stupid, she’s your wife. For this next gen of search marketers, the lesson should be clear: don’t try to use tricks to outsmart Google, because in the long term, you will never win. Talk to the people! Open up and let them in…they are smart enough to see through corporate speak, and they ARE talking about you behind your back. If you are honest, responsive and reliable, that will be your reputation. My view? You don’t really manage your reputation–you earn it every day.

There is a reason they call me Susan the Meticulous. I’m going with the notion it’s a compliment. I say yes, that’s me, and I have the shoes to match.

It is a safe (workplace!*) characterization. I do tend toward research and cross-checks. I perk up when I get an afternoon of View–>Source for a zillion websites to get a sense of how our client’s competitors are coding in support of their organic SEO. I jump with delight when I can get a whole year of client HitsLink data, and it if it includes conversion tracking, well, start thinking tranquilizer dart. And, yes, I always set the keyword research setting to return 1000 results.

I have, however, stumbled around the block enough times to respect some limits, one of those being we can optimize a website, at least on the first round, for a very finite set of terms. We’re talking somewhere between the legal driving age and the age you get dropped from your parent’s health insurance. Inevitably we’ve carefully pruned a list of a few thousand terms to a list of a couple hundred, and now the task is to choose which are the top 10% to optimize.

Usually there’s not a year’s worth of data (sigh) about terms that have worked for the client. OK, usually there is not a day’s worth of data about what terms have worked for the client. We’ve got data about search volumes and numbers of competing pages, but we all have to admit that data has imperfections.

So here’s my question. Other than using some variation of the ratio of search volume to competing pages, what comes to your mind reading this - how would you go about ranking a list of 200 great terms so you can take the top 20 for optimization? No matter your perspective - marketer, SEO expert, any other interested party…I am curious what first comes to your mind.

Because no one knows better than someone who adores manually comparing lists for overlap and gaps that sometimes the best choices have little to do with anything listed in columns and rows. Rather, they come from listening to what strategies seem interesting to folks like you, folks who might make it this far in to an entry in an SEO blog.

So let me know. And until then, I’ll be sorting and pivoting among columns and rows, earbuds tuned to the ambient wood flute and yoga bells channel, looking for clues.

*Please do not go looking for those shoes in my closet. My image would be so blown. I can only imagine the new nickname.

Search Engine Optimization is crazy. Learning about SEO can be overwhelming. Even if you’re only looking for a good SEO consultant, you need to know the basics. Optimization involves making lots and lots of small changes. It’s like being the general of your own, personal army of Oompa Loompas.

First of all, there are no mighty Oompa Loompa warriors. You won’t be able to make a few changes to the site and be done with it. You need to make lots of small changes all the time. However, if your site’s in bad shape now, you’ll need a throng of Oompa Loompas to fix the problems and create a strong foundation for you to build on.

But you can’t let your Oompa Loompas run rampant. Think of the chaos. No, your Oompa Loompa Army needs to be organized into platoons:

• keyword phrase research;
• content development using the identified keyword phrases;
• developing abundant links on other, relevant sites to your site;
• good, clean code;
• good site architecture.

Keyword Phrase Research: This is your Oompa Loompa Army Intelligence Department. Their mission is to find the keyword phrases that people actually use when searching. In the pre-internet days, your marketing would bring the people to you. Nowadays, you have to meet the people where they are. Keyword Phrase Research tells you where to go, so to speak.

Content Development: This is your Oompa Loompa Infantry. Optimization doesn’t happen until you get the keyword phrases worked into the pages. By the way, you need more pages. Each page is like an additional Oompa Loompa for your Infantry.

External Links: This is your Oompa Loompa Artillery. Search engines want to display the best results possible for each search. The number of sites that link to your site qualifies you as having some value, especially when the sites linking to you involve the same subject matter as your site.

Clean Code: Ironically, this is the Mess Hall for your Oompa Loompa Army. Soldiers need to eat good, healthy food for peak performance. Likewise, optimized pages need good, clean code for maximum benefit.

Good Architecture: This represents your Oompa Loompa Engineers. Army engineers build bridges and roads. Your site needs a stable infrastructure. URLs should be free of extended query strings (everything after the question mark in the URL). Navigating through the site should not require the use of javascript or submitting forms. Important pages need to be “top level” pages (i.e., linked off the home page).

Oompa Loompa and SEO success is achieved by an overwhelming volume of small victories.

Why Oompa Loompas? Because they are small, plentiful, and they take the moral high ground on every occasion. It’s easy to find yourself in a gray area with SEO. The last thing any of us needs is to have a bunch of Oompa Loompas singing about some faux pas we’ve made. Oompa Loompas are here to keep you on the straight and narrow. SEO is here to get you more and better qualified leads.

A special note to our current and prospective clients: although we provide many search engine optimization services, including SEO copy writing, I am not one of our writers. You may see my work in parts of your search engine optimization audit, but rest assured that your audit and all of the copy we write and optimize will be 100% Oompa Loompa free. That is my personal guarantee to you.