Well… I figured since I’ve been leaching off the knowledge of the search engine marketing community and not contributing, it was about time I gave back. I’ve been involved in search engine marketing in some facet or another for the past 15 years. Over that time I’ve lived through a lot of changes in the techniques that drive traffic and I’ve made my share of mistakes, so I hope there’s a little I can add to help others avoid my pitfalls. More importantly I think there’s a lot of crap out there to be found. Probably as much as 75% of what is out there is just plain bad advice or several year old practices.

For now, the focus of this blog will be geared toward the pay-per-click side of search engine marketing. I just think there is a big gap that needs to be filled in terms of solid resources of information.

A little about my background
Over the years, I’ve managed little mom and pop pay-per-click campaigns with a $100 monthly spend, multi-million dollar budgets with WaltDisney Parks & Resorts Online, and everything in between. I’ve setup large national campaigns with little regard to cost-per-click and I’ve worked through the grueling process of implementing local geo-targeted campaigns for businesses with so slim a margin that you’d wonder why they didn’t just shut their doors and deliver pizza. Finally, I’ve been through the facade of chasing the lowest cost-per-click and have discovered the secrets in determining the real value of a keyword.

In terms of search engine optimization, I’ve been involved in that jazz since I’ve built my first website back in 1992. Back then the world was easy… He with the most repetitive keywords won. Over time the engines became more and more sophisticated and we all had to switch from keyword stuffing with white text on white background to white text on a black background with a white tiled image ;-)

Today search engine optimization is more about accessibility, page/site themeing (is that a word?), and social marketing than anything else. The tactics needed to rank well are so convoluted; maybe 0.5% of the web community is truly doing it right.

These days I am totally white hat. It’s just not worth it to be anything else. Black hat tactics work for a season, but the cleanup when things go sour can set you back months. I may touch on that a little in this blog, but there are so many great resources on the topic, I will probably just stay clear.

Anyway… that’s me in a nutshell. I hope I can, in some way, add value to this community that I have grown to love. If not, just slap me and I will shut down this blog faster than you can say “SEM sucks!” Well, not really …but I am always happy to get a good reality check.

Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Pay-Per-Click ~ ~ Trackback