Kevin Lee Search Engine Marketing Expert - News - Views

This was funny. went to live.com to check if a client site was well crawled. Got the main page, but when I his search, the earthlink DNS money machine kicked in. For thepurposes of this illustration, I swapped the search term to “car.”  When I changed DNSs Live returned, so I doubt the root DNS entry was bad.

Alexa has a webservices API. Generally they are A-OK with folks using their data in either API or Widget form.  Apparently having the word Alexa in Alexaholic’s name was enough to raise the ire of the folks at Amazon.  Even though the owner of the domain has changed the name to Statsaholic (and plans to display traffic graphs from Compete and Quantcast, two Alexa competitors), it still looks like he’s fighting an uphill battle.  He’s looking for support from the iMarketing and blogger community. Alexaholic was a creative way to display Alexa data, better then the original site. Creativity shouldn’t be punished.

One of our marketing managers came up with a great idea.  Dave Pasternack T-shirts that say SEO is not Rocket Science from Cafe Press.

OK, this is getting funny. Threadwatch. is ruining a Dave Pasternack SEO contest (details here). All because Dave said SEO isn’t rocket science in response to data from a Marketing Sherpa report and having been in the SEO business for ten years. (since 2001 we only do SEO audits for clients illustrating the low hanging fruit problems that need to be addressed and highlighting best practices). From now till March 1st, a whole bunch of SEOs who apparently have free time are going to work to try to come up high in Google for the search phrase Dave Pasternack. Dave may end up more famous than the chef, owner of Esca (a great NYC seafood restaurant).

By the way if Google’s purity is preserved (perhaps through bloggers who wish to anchor link to Dave’s bio page on our site), and we win the $1000, we’ll donate it to the American Cancer Society.

Last month, right during the holidays, my wife received 14 identical direct mail pieces from the local Manhattan Paychex office. Clearly they either flunked marketing 101, or there was a major breakdown in quality control in their marketing department or agency. Actually, it could have been both, because when you open the envelope, theings don’t get that much better.

The letter isn’t merged to personalize it to my wife. Plus clearly the list they rented is one of Psychologists. Why not take the extra 5 minutes per profession to merge in a mention of the profession in the headline. Plus, one of the main focuses of the letter is the dedicated representative service and the letter is unsigned. No personal touch at all, no personality at all.

Management at the firm deserves to know, so I’m going to send this packet of letters off to the Paychex management.
I certainly hope they do a better job administering payroll than they do in direct mail and marketing.

A quick check of  Google and Yahoo for the keyword “payroll” indicates that Paychex hasn’t yet discovered that search engine marketing belongs in the marketing mix.  ADP is notably absent too.  Intuit and a bunch of lead generation services who sell their leads non-exclusively to… Paychex.

Looks like some SEOs agree that you don’t need to personify what you do as “rocket science” to have a great professional business.   The hooplah continues however, in response to parts 1 and 2 of my column.

I wrote about ShaveEverywhere.com in my ClickZ column but in addition to ignoring PPC search,they also could have done so much more with organic search.  by embedding the flash in pages that described the contents in text, the site could come up for som mych more than its name.

David Dalka met up with me at the ACCM and used his minidisk player to do a cool podcast where I discuss MSN’s entry into the marketplace.

At the catalog and multi-channel merchant conference this week, I was struck by how many catalogers are nearly completely ignorant about SEO and SEM. Many don’t eve use PPC search at ALL! Time for one of my staff to write an article.

As I blog this, I’m on hold with Ikea. I love their stores and they have an enviable reputation in the world of retail. However, their eCommerce presence leaves a lot to be improved upon. It’s not so much their site as their process.

I placed an order online over the weekend and apparently something didn’t process. I got the following e-mail:
************************************************
Thank you for placing your recent IKEA order on our website.
Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties with our ordering system, we were unable to process it.

We would like to finish processing your order by phone. Please call us at (800)434-4532 to complete your order.
Order Date: 2/11/2006
Reference Number: (removed)

Our hours are:
Monday - Saturday, 8am - 12 Midnight EST
Sunday, 9am - 12 Midnight EST

We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for shopping with
IKEA, we do appreciate your business.
************************************************
It took over 15 calls to get something other than a busy signal on the toll free number. Then once I got through, it took 25 minutes of time on hold before talking to a rep who took my order number and placed me on hold never to return. It has now been 42 minutes. At this point it’s become more of a research project for me. After 3 minutes (4 minutes into the second hold cue), I got a prompt to leave a message. Instead I hit zero and was placed back into a hold cue. I gave up when I had to go to a meeting.

Call # 2 was placed in the evening at nearly 7PM. After 29 minutes I reached a human who looked up my order. It ends up that the shipment can’t be done by UPS and so the freight costs are about as much as the item, doubling the cost. Needless to say, I canceled the order. Don’t you think the website software could be written to know that certain items can’t be shipped via UPS ground?

There’s a lot of buzz around engagement as a new metric of advertising and media success. Often the disucssion includes a concept called co-creation, where the consumer participates in the creation of what the brand means to them. Does the Internet require that we create a new word to define how consumers interact with brands? Perhaps, but then isn’t the discussion I have in a Best Buy store a dialog just like a message board or blog?

OK, so I have to jump on this bandwagon. There is an SEO contents to get a Google-Bomb phrase V7ndotcom Elursrebmem to the top. I like the following site for the phrase V7ndotcom Elursrebmem because at least they will give the money to charity if they win. Of course the chances are that Google will invalidate the contest or at least invalidate the resulting links back to participants.

Internet marketing veteran Rick Bruner must have gotten one too many spam messages in his mailbox before the Holidays. Plagued with SPAM (because few organizations use SPF or any other authentication method to allow for fool-proof SPAM filtering), Rick came up with an anti-SPAM T-shirt. Spam made my penis bigger. OK, so this may sound like a pro SPAM T-shirt, but I don’t think that those wearing it will in fact be endorsing the wonderful penis enlargement products Spamvertised. If the T-shirt is a success, I’m sure we can expect:
I got a great mortgage rate with SPAM
I made millions from Nigerian royalty in distress
SPAM Penny Stocks Made Me Million
Met My Spouse through Get-Laid Dating SPAM
I Love My SPAM Rolex

Everything you already had and knoew about bundled together. It’s the Google Pack. Google Earth, Picasa, Google Pack Screensaver, Google Desktop, Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE Personal,Adobe Reader 7, and to top it off Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition. I tlooks like that one you have to pay for eventually to keep your virus definitions up to date. So, I don’t get it. This is news? Single download for multiple programs? No big deal.

Google is testing the viral nature of the web. Publishers in Google’s AdSense program are encouraged to get referrals. Check out these Google AdSense Banners.