Ironvine Search Marketing

First of all, Happy Birthday to one of my team members Carrielyn!

May has been a very busy month. That's a good thing, but I'm glad its starting to settle down to a managable workflow. I have been busy finishing up the dentist directory and orthodontist directory which is coming along great! Have already gotten a few comments on them and waiting for the final launch approval to start submitting it/advertising it.

The RSS news feed I manage which lists all the new site launches and general news and press releases for Sesame has finally been indexed as well! Was exciting to see that and the directories all showing up on the same day, or just about. I checked out our web logs for our Sesame corporate site and found that the news feed out performs any of our pages on hits by over double! Kudos to me, lots of good news on my front.

Working on several retro SEO site updates for our members. Http://www.km-ortho.com is one. This site had relitively no optimization and very little relivent text... no wonder they werent ranking as high as they should! Times change, good to keep things updated.

Several new orthodontic graduate sites in the works as well. That's about the only time I get to design lately, nice change of pace.

Posted by Steve Terjeson at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments

Sesame Communications' Orthodontists Achieve Top Search Engine Visibility with WebPosition 4

It is so nice to be recognized for all our hard work. I know I have personally put a lot into helping our orthodontists and dentists rank very high. Lately, it's becoming more and more apparent to me that our doctors are becoming aware that their patients really do rely on the information they get from the doctor's website.

So, it only goes to show that not only does a beautiful web site design show your best light, but having the support structure on the search engines really help as well.

Our new program Sesame Elite Search is also taking off. I am getting calls daily about our doctors wanting to advertise their offices on Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

More good news!

I got an email yesterday from Amanda, one of the Google Sitemap engineers, offering to add my sitemaps manually to our account! This is a result of my initial post about 2 weeks ago to the Google Sitemaps message board letting them know how useful sitemaps really are, but having the 200 sitemap limit really hurts us.

So, was I suprised to hear at the Search Engine Watch Seattle meeting that these engineers actually read my post and decided because of the quality of our sitemaps we add for each of our memebers that they would be raising the Google Sitemap limit to 500 on the next program update!!!! BECAUSE OF ME! That felt really good to know I have helped to positively influence a Google program :)

Posted by Steve Terjeson at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments

Being busy is a good thing right?!

We have launched several new web sites this week and I have set up many temporary sites for our software installations this week. Sesame is booming! I didn't know there were so many orthodontists and dentists out there. We hosted several of the SureSmile reps in our office today, big things on the horizon!

Still waiting for some time to write up the Google and Yahoo! SEW notes, they are worth waiting for!

Posted by Steve Terjeson at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments

Welcome to Monday!

Very busy this week and still need to post my notes from the rest of the SEW meeting! Will get to it sometime this week. Keep a look out!

Posted by Steve Terjeson at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

I had an enjoyable day yesterday getting out of the office and going to the Search Engine Watch Seattle Meeting at the Hotel Monaco. Its a nice hotel, if not a bit crowded and confined. It looked like it used to be a bank or something. Met a few people, got to meet Danny Sullivan briefly. Talked with Larry Sivitz (SearchWrite - who we have worked with for some of our seo projects) for a bit as well.

Just as a side note, parking in Seattle is nuts. It cost more for 5 hours than for my whole daily house rent value...

Here is a little run down of my meeting notes.

May 19, 2006 - Search Engine Watch Seattle Meeting ----------------------------------------

First session covered some of the new features in Microsoft AdCenter, Google AdWords, and a little bit about Yahoo!.

Jed Nahum and Brian Burdick popped over from Microsoft to tell us more about MSN AdCenter - rebranded Microsoft AdCenter.

The response to their question of how many people were using AdCenter was a resounding response of maybe 2 people in a packed conference room! GO MSN! (The Google reps response was about 80% of the audience). Being very new, and only having gone live with AdCenter in April, they do have a lot to catch up on. There were several comments about the system being hard to use and having a hard time getting keywords approved through the system.

Jed's response: MSN is working on enhancing the editorial process of adding keywords. We are perhaps being overly cautions trying to maintain the rich family experience.

Dont know what that means? One of the examples from the slides was the keyword "diapers" with something like 58% of the searches coming from men, but the caution was that a good portion of those men were most likely not new fathers, but looking for something more like "adult diapers" I will let you derive the rest from there... ;)

In my own experience I found it (at least in beta) to be fairly difficult to use and set up keword campaigns compared to Google, who has by far the best user interface of the big 3.

They do have some nice demographic tools and have the customer base (from MSN.com and Hotmail) to be able to derive the data from similar to Yahoo! (Whos West Coast Search Marketing Sales Director Kelly West, was kind enough to tell us has a 400 million registered and 200 million active user base they pull demographic data from). Those were about the only numbers any of the groups would discuss.

There was/are a lot of questions about how the demographic data was formulated and what percentage of users was it based on? No one really knows. Jed Nahum (MSN) would only say it was "a significant amount". Of what we do not know! Google wouldn't really comment on it at all and sort of brushed it off similar to MSN's comment. Oh, the ponderings and mysteries of the SEO world......

We are all SEO magicians anyway right?! ... Google Potter and Harry MSN, then there is Yahoo Weezly...

Things of note from Microsoft:
Working on updating Keyword editorial process for adding new keywords
Rebranded from MSN AdCenter to Microsoft AdCenter
All microsoft advertizing, through MSN and shopping networks will fall under Microsoft AdCenter
They will be working on an API interface to be able to manage large campaigns sometime in the future.

Follow up links:
advertizing.msn.com/adcenter/
webmasterworld.com

Anyway wrapping up with MSN and heading to Google in the next chapter...

Posted by Steve Terjeson at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments

Starting my own blog. Yay!

Been a long week at work.. no end in sight... going to have to work this weekend to try and have next week be a little more managable and meet the necessary deadlines.

Excited to be going to the Search Engine Watch strategies Seattle meeting tomorrow (May 19th, 2006). Will be nice to get out of the office to do something different for a change.

Posted by Steve Terjeson at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments