As part of the audit we do to kick off SEO strategy development, we ask folks to let us know who their competitors are.  Then we look at the competitors for search visibility on  the search terms we’ve been provided, and sometimes find, (through OK, way more meticulous research than might be needed, but you never want to leave any stone untermed), many times the competitors the client provides simply aren’t players.

We’ll find those URLs in the 20’s and 30’s ranks, or not present at all in the top 50. Checking out the top 20 URLs, competition that may be lurking just outside the client’s radar often emerges.  Sometimes an entirely new category of competitors emerges.  For instance, in an industry where dealers, affiliates or aggregators develop a lot of content about the industry (franchising, for example), those aggregators actually are your stiffest competition for getting your corporate URL seen in ranks 1-20.

This is a great example of why it pays to hire SEO out.  If you are coming up to speed on SEO, you might start your research by looking at which URLs are present on the terms you think are the best.  Then, if you don’t see your competitor’s URLs…you might think SEO isn’t all that important - since none of your competitors seem to be doing it.  What you don’t know by guessing is that there are probably dozens of search terms that people are using. Between not quantifying the Total Available Search Market(TM) and not understanding the competitive landscape, you may be overlooking the potential gains from SEO entirely.

The truth is, your prospects are searching.  That’s all you need to know, to know investing in SEO campaign management and analysis makes sense.  Besides, you really don’t want to look through data on who’s out there in the top 50 ranks for hundreds of terms on a zillion search engine pages, do you? And I do…

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??