Update: After writing this article it has come to my attention from Nick James a fellow SEO, that E&P has removed the reference to the ‘500 times’. You can see the original article below. I’m glad to see they have cleaned this up for individuals who may have thought that the comment below was the right approach to SEO.

When I got in the office this morning I started going through emails and my RSS feeds. I saw an article on Editor & Publisher entitled Building Web Traffic Through ‘Search Engine Optimization’. I’m glad to see that Newspaper publishers are starting to see the value in SEO but I was horrified to see a particular quote in the article showing how there is still a lot of bad information floating around out there. Here’s the quote (with the wrong information being in the 2nd paragraph).

Manipulating meta tags also can affect search results. These tags of data (which readers don’t see) are computer code, a digital map of sorts, for what can be found on a particular Web page. “Meta tags will tell the search engines all kinds of information about what’s on the site,” says Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates in Williamsburg, Va.

He illustrates how meta tags work with this example: “Let’s say someone wants to index high with the term ‘pizza delivery.’ A programmer can type ‘pizza delivery’ 500 times in the meta tag. It’s basically a technical task where people who know the algorithms that Google and Yahoo use will work real hard to fool around with the tags to get you listed higher and higher.”

Are you serious?!?! You obviously don’t know the “algorithms” if you think that spamming up a meta tag with the same keywords over and over are going to have any positive results. I always thought of Editor & Publisher as very respectable so I’m surprised that nobody caught that quote before publishing this article. It’s a shame that there will be ones who read the above article and then ask their online teams to start taking this approach. I guess its articles like this, that keep real SEO’s in business.

Today I received a beta invite from Barry Schwartz for the site NotchUp.com. NotchUp is a job site which makes companies pay to interview you. The goal of this site looks to lure talented professionals to companies while they might not actively be seeking new employment. It’s a way for HR folks and Hiring Managers to locate those passive job seekers that typically they are unable to reach. Right now it shows Google, Facebook and some other corporate beta testers using their services.

So how does it work?

The site first lets you set an interview price and includes a little calculator which allows you to put in some criteria and then spits out a suggested interview price. This is a slick feature and seems to be pretty on par with real value even though it came in a little below what I thought I was worth ;).

Setting up your profile is a piece of cake. Most people on this site are probably using LinkedIn already so they have a feature which will let you import all your information from that service which worked like a charm for me. It also allows you to block certain email addresses from seeing your information if you are seeking a job and you don’t want your employer to know about it.

Another really cool feature is a 10% referral fee. When you refer a friend to the site and they get interviewed you earn a 10 percent referral fee (which if know of people actively seeking a job then you better invite them before I do! ) The cool thing is that even if you don’t get the job your left with more than a generic letter from an HR department, you get $$$$.

If your interested and would like an invite just contact me.

A colleague of mine recently has had some problems with a new Google Adwords account that he setup for an Auto Dealership. First I’ll give you a brief overview. This company sells used autos and has their full inventory online. Basically the goal of this account was to bring in traffic not necessarily some sort of conversion.

This is how the account setup looked:

• National Targeting & Geo-Targeting
• Use of Broad, Phrase and Exact Match Keywords
• Keywords that were bid on also matched on page copy
• Tested variety of landing pages including homepage and results pages

After launch it was noticed that the quality score for landing page relevancy was awful for all campaigns. One phrase that was bid on was 5 words total and also had the matching phrase on the homepage itself assuming that the quality score would be good; this didn’t help at all.

What was concluded to be the problem?

It wasn’t our landing page quality which was “good” so that could be scratched. Instead after working with Google on this, there were 2 problems:

• Poor Overall Quality History
• Visible URL Performed Poorly

How could this have been avoided?

Many times as search marketers we like to copy similar campaigns that might be running well to another account and make small tweaks. When this is done, keyword and creative history is retained so you will still have the same quality score.

When this account was setup there could have been more optimization such as watching the campaign closely and weeding out low performing keywords or ad copy so that the quality history could have been reversed before things got to this point. It’s still possible to do this once the campaign is has run but it certainly would be easier if caught early on. A second approach is to start this campaign over with a new account even though the “visible url” history will still be influenced.

The main takeaway from this experience is to take the extra time in prepping your account as opposed to tweaking a campaign after its run for an extended period of time and facing high CPC rates as well as poor quality overall and a negative visible url history.

Yahoo is planning on cutting hundreds of jobs in an attempt to turn things around for its struggling business. It looks like the cuts will number around 500 right now. I wonder if these mass layoffs are really going to help Yahoo turn its business around or if this is just a lame attempt to cut back costs with little positive effect or even a negative effect. What do I mean by that? If you work for a company that is laying hundreds of people off around you, and you happen to not be one of those, how confident are you feeling about your company? It might be time to start tightening up your resume. Also what about those employees who are being let go? With the thousands of online communities and tons of blogs, I wouldn’t want 100’s of ex-employees possibly sharing all the negatives about a company that I was attempting to turn around.

Also how does this affect the partnerships with the newspaper groups. Will there be any adverse effects and will this end up making the Yahoo/Newspaper Consortium partnership less valuable to the newspaper industry which is already having a tough time? You can only speculate now, but Yahoo has been a survivor in the past so there’s certainly room for them to rebound.

UPDATE: Yahoo is now considering drastic layoffs, in the range of 1,500-2,500 heads

I have truly enjoyed my job on the newspaper side which started out three years ago as a Site Manager for Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers (tcpalm.com) and then brought me to the corporate newspaper team here in Knoxville, May of 2007. I’m moving on now…

I’ve accepted a position with Scripps Networks our sister division who owns HGTV, Food Network, and other Lifestyle Networks. I will be working with the Search Marketing team that is being developed and I can say that they are a great group. I’m excited to bring my knowledge and skills to the network side and to learn from the talent that is already in place.

I’ll still be in Knoxville, actually working in the building we were in previous to our move a few months ago. It’s going to be tough leaving the Newspaper division and a great boss and friend, but tough decisions typically aren’t easy ones. I wish everyone on the newspaper side the best and I eagerly look forward to their innovations from an extremely talented group of professionals.