Are you interested in learning more about how online marketing will help either your company or members of your business organization? Drop us a line and we’ll be happy to speak to you about it.

Bill Rowland

I am a relative neophyte when it comes to SEO. Everyday, I am learning just a little bit more, as I work with people who have been in this business for a while and know the ropes. With every new thing that I learn, I also learn how much more there is that I don’t know yet.

However, I have a great job, with great co-workers. One of the best parts of my job is talking to clients. With our great clients, there are lots of reasons to enjoy talking with them, but two reasons jump to the fore.

First, I get to explain things to people who are truly interested in the answer. Some days I get easy questions like, “Why do we want to distribute an optimized press release,” and “Why is it a good idea to write and distribute an article relating to my business?” When this happens, I can answer with confidence and move the client closer to understanding more about the partnership that is their SEO campaign.

There are also the hard questions, and that is the second reason for me to love what I do. I get to say, “Let me get back to you on that” and go find the answer for them. The hard questions come in many forms, such as “Why am I only number 2 this month for search” or “What is the difference between incoming links and site reach?” Now I can research a little, pick the brains of my co-workers, and come back with the answer my client needs, creating a safe space where they know I won’t make something up if I don’t know the answer.

I believe that my clients appreciate this transparency, letting them know that I am not yet an expert, but willing and able to partner with them to meet their SEO goals. In the course of my day, I get to learn and share, and for me, that makes it worth jumping out of bed every morning! How about you?

Yours in learning,

Regina

Regina Sillitti is Project Coordinator for Dinkum Interactive. She has worked in programming, design, business analysis and quality assurance. Her background in design and data processing give her a unique perspective on client - tech translation. You can reach her at regina@dinkuminteractive.com, or find her on Twitter, @ReginaSillitti.

It did get me thinking about my other second life….the one online. I keep forgetting that I have this whole different set of friends and colleagues, all online. Many I have never seen (except on video), many I have never met. I talk about these people to my “first life” friends and they have no idea, even supposedly famous ones.  Am I hanging around the wrong crowd?

Actually I think I’m hanging around the right crowd. These are folks I can tap into when framing out a potential online marketing plan. Many of these are our target audience, the regular Joe’s and Jane’s who I want to get my client’s product in front of. These are the occassional user. Those who do emails, spend some time on YouTube, don’t really have favorite blogs, most importantly they do a lot of searching (mostly Google BTW). I use them and abuse them (they don’t mind, it’s not that cruel) especially when planning a website design  but also part of planning for keyword strategy. You can get keyword data from a variety of sources, I think including a small group of everyday users should be part of your strategy.

PaulFleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.

During the program I took many questions that ranged from several neophytes to quite a few that had some knowledge and had thought about their online strategy. One question that provoked quite a bit of discussion from someone who had done some basic research themselves but had hit a wall – the question “If I want only sell locally what should I use for my keyword, philadelphia or Phila.”

Unfortunately I had to tell them the answer was not that easy or necessarily consistent. It depends on what you are selling and how the buyers of your product or service refer to possible suppliers in your industry.

In other words do buyers – for example – of online marketing services search under Philadelphia online marketing or do they use Phila online marketing? Only research will tell and the research will only tell which one is searched more often not necessarily which one will send more buyers to your site.

It is amazing how many times folks try to view their online strategy with the same eyes and perspective as their more traditional marketing efforts. Frustration can occur quickly as you learn just how little you are in charge of the outcome.

While doing a project for Eastern University for their nonprofit program – how do you spell nonprofit or non-profit or non profit. Once again it does not matter how you spell it it only matters how the people who are going to sign up for your program are going to spell it. Will you know from the start NO

Test, monitor, test, monitor – not really all that different from traditional in that sense most folks do not understand this yet and expect changes and results too quickly.

Be patient monitor and run with it – by the way if you would like to join me for another program I am speaking the end of February here for the Center City Proprietors Association – a good organization if you want to do business in Philadelphia.

Rick Simmons is a principal at Dinkum Interactive, a firm specializing in online marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses around the globe. With more than 25 years of experience in advertising and marketing, Simmons has spent the last four years focused on search engine optimization, and other Internet marketing strategies. Reach him at 267-626-9094 or rick@dinkuminteractive.com.

I’ve been delving a little deeper into the local search arena over the past couple of weeks for several clients and have so far found very little to be impressed with. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Google with their ease-of-use, their slick interface, their effectiveness. Personally, I continue to use Google for my local searches. I still find that I get much better results typing in the city name and then my keywords, my options include local, paid and organic listings (I like organic, the company is proving that they can walk the walk).

Let’s do a quick test. I go to Google, type in “Philadelphia Search Marketing”. I get a page that includes:

Local results

 Paid results

Organic Results

It’s easy. I can tell that it has a high level of relevance (I see some familiar names in there including ours) and away I go checking them all out.

Let’s have a look at SuperPages, now an Idearc Media division. With some powerful partnerships and affiliations, one would expect a decent system. I do like a good design but I’m more interested in performance…and especially usability. So I’m willing to overlook a bland appearance and even a simple typo like “Regiser a Domain Name” (as long as they don’t get the domain name wrong.)

Typing in “Search Marketing” then “Philadelphia” brings you to another screen with related categories which I must say is pretty annoying (below)

So then I click on “Internet Marketing Services” and get 2 sponsored results and some advertisers and that is it! So I wasted my time. (admittedly, there are more results for traditional businesses).

I go to YellowPages.com. A big brand also with some big backing. I like the design but again, not overly concerned with that aspect. I type in “search marketing” then “Philadelphia” and am taken straight to the results (there’s only 1 there) but I liked the ease of process (I used a pretty poor example I’m afraid, maybe dentists would’ve been better) but it at least offers some insight.

So I’m a little dirty at SuperPages.com, not only from a user perspective but as an advertiser. Managing the system is clunky, often painful, I keep getting errors (I couldn’t log in this morning which was the main cause of this rant) and admit to be pretty disappointed.

I think the graph below may also be an indicator of the comparisons. Either YellowPages.com is doing something right, or SuperPages.com is doing something wrong. I’ll continue to use Google and wait till the others get their act together or maybe a smaller player like Yelp.com will come to the fore.

PaulFleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.

They can offer all the features they want but I contend they are still missing the boat – by a mile. Most of the databases are so incomplete that they render the results lacking and thus not giving me what I want – sooooooooooo I don’t go back.

Another issue is that they might have what I need but they ask me so many questions before giving me what I want. I wanted the phone number of a lawyer in town so instead of trying to guess their URL I decided to go to the yellowpages on Yahoo. Here is the sequence:

1. I put in the zipcode – if I know it.
2. I put in lawyers
3. I need to narrow it down between:
   1. Law Firms
   2. Taxes
4. I believe law firms so I click on that
5. I get a list
   1. I am not really sure but I guess corporate

   Finally I get the list I am looking for and after scrolling past the ones who have paid I find the one I am looking for – they have been in town for over 25 years. Will I go through that exercise again or will I just put his name into Google?

There has got to be a better way and it is not just the features.

Rick Simmons is a principal at Dinkum Interactive, a firm specializing in online marketing solutions for small and medium sized businesses around the globe. With more than 25 years of experience in advertising and marketing, Simmons has spent the last four years focused on search engine optimization, and other Internet marketing strategies. Reach him at 267-626-9094 or rick@dinkuminteractive.com.

Those who can’t make it can check out the PowerPoint presentation.

PaulFleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.

Click To Play

In addition to preparing and launching the video, this gave us another opportunity to distribute it online via the many video sharing websites out there. Included in this list is:

www.break.com
www.metacafe.com
www.dailymotion.com
www.brightcove.com
www.youtube.com
www.blip.tv
www.revver.com

In all, the distribution (manually) took approximately 1 and a half hours. For the sake of the experiment, we targeted the keyword phrase “seo with dinkum”. After only 1 week, we are looking at 146 references so those 21 websites that we submitted to has expanded to include blogs and even article websites (still not sure how we managed those) and many of them are now included in our list of incoming links according to our webmasters sitemap. Add to that the handful of referrals we’ve already received from these video sites and we have an interesting start. It was a fairly low-level experiment but given the time spent (and time available) thought it was worth sharing.

We’re looking to roll out something a little more viral in the coming months and of course we’ll revisit this little experiment again to see how things are going.

PaulFleming is co-founder and VP of Interactive Services for Dinkum Interactive. A trained teacher, Paul has worked in a variety of forms of Internet Marketing but with a focus on SEO. Originally from Australia, he now resides in Philadelphia with his wife and 2 ankle-biters.