If SEOs Mated

Prepare to laugh. This is one of the funniest SEO-related blog posts I've seen in a very long time.

If SEOs Mated

Free and Cheap Discount Deals on Keywords - Hitwise Data

Logically, when I search for things, there are certain descriptive words I use to find what I am looking for. I might be looking for "low cost health insurance" or "cheap flights", or even "free music". Different people search differently of course, but there are definitely more popular trends or ways of describing what you're looking for. Bill Tancer from HitWise recently posted some data on his blog about the words people use to look for deals, discounts, and otherwise value-oriented search terms. A few clear trends emerged, including the fact that people search for "discount" when looking for consumer goods, "cheap" when searching for travel, and "free" when looking for electronic downloads, music, or other low priced items that could conceivably be offered for free. It's important to understand the way people search, because even though a cheap and discount travel might mean exactly the same thing, your choice of words can make a huge difference in traffic to your site. Do your keyword research and then check your log files to see how people are finding your site.

Search Engine Strategies Coverage - San Jose 2007

I was planning on going to SES this time around, but I just had too much work to take time out for it. Thank goodness for all the SEO Bloggers who provide great coverage of these events. It's not quite the same thing as being there and the networking and parties can't exactly happen though a blog, but it's better than nothing.

There are several blogs that have great coverage, but the best and brightest are linked from Search Engine Land's industry conference page (thanks, Barry). You can browse by day and then they have links to the best coverage of each session. Good stuff, Maynard!

Internet Business Reality Show

I stumbled across the website for The Next Internet Millionaire. From what I can tell, it's a reality TV show in the spirit of The Apprentice, but this particular show is all about building an online business--and the show is only online. You can view the first episode on the website, or through iTunes. The show is the brainchild of web marketing guru, Joel Comm, who is also the host of the show. It's a very fun concept. I haven't watched the whole episode yet, but it looks like it's well produced, especially for a web-only show like this. It will be interesting to see how much attention this gets. Will we start seeing all kinds of niche reality competition shows like this? Anything is possible on the 'net.

Popular Searches - Cool New Tool

Since this blog is called Search Trends, and due to the industry I'm in (SEO), I am very interested in what people are searching for. Most of the time, my clients don't care about what the most popular searches are, they just care about the most popular searches for their industry. However, I find it very interesting to see what keywords people are searching for. Many search engines and social media sites offer up data showing the most popular searches.

Rand and friends over at SEOMoz have recently released another cool free tool, the Popular Searches tool that compiles popular search data from several data sources.

I like that this tool pulls from a variety of sources--blog search (technorati), web search (Yahoo, Google, AOL, Ask, Lycos), ecommerce (eBay and Amazon), social media (flickr, delicious). I'd like to see all this data somehow weighted and pooled into a single database that could be sorted and analyzed over specific time periods. It would be interesting to see search trends for specific products, or music bands, genres, etc. But it's definitely easier than going to each of these sites on your own to try to figure out what's hot.

Seth Godin Squidoo Article

Pauline Kerbici from High Rankings recently posted an interview with Seth Godin about Squidoo. She asks some interesting questions about Squidoo and SEO. Several interesting points arise. She pointed out some over-hyped content on Squidoo where they previously touted the Google PR-raising value of having a Squidoo lens. Pauline notes that the offending text was removed shortly after the interview. He says they aren't building their business to pleas Google, but he admits that the "spam overhaul" came after they got dinged by Google. He also closes by emphasizing that they've done a lot of good through the charities that they support, which I agree is a very cool part of the whole Squidoo concept. In fact, I think it would be cool to set up a similar network that gives all the money back to charities, rather than just 5% or whatever these guys do.

Forget About Best Practices

Kevin Gold says there are no best practices...he's not really saying there are no best practices for search marketing, but that "best practices" are simply a starting point from which you should test and constantly improve upon. I have to say I agree with Kevin on this, if you use the standard best practices to get started, and then constantly test different variations and strive to improve, you will develop the true "best practice" for your own situation.