Thankfully, MyZone headphones are much cheaper and easier to deal with than murder.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Make your holidays bright, by tuning out your life.

Today, we’re going to delve into some great AdCenter features that you’ll probably all want to be very aware of as you transfer all your adverts to AdCenter in the next months. In case you forgot, Bing is now Yahoo, so you’ll want to get your ducks in a row to capture all that sweet AltaVista traffic.

AdCenter’s 3 Strongest Features

Geo-Targeting
Right from the bat, we’re targeting your geo in AdCenter. Let’s go through the steps. When you sign up an account from the US, we’ll walk you through creating your ad, specifying your budget, bids, etc. Just like Google.
Then, instead of setting you up with your ads targeted to North America, we’ll go ahead and target your ads to the world for ya.

True Geo-Targeting right when you setup an account. Only from AdCenter.

Keyword Insertion
We all know that keyword insertion, or dynamic titles, or whatever you call them (parameters? what?!), are vital part of every campaign’s ad copy. Well don’t worry, at AdCenter we’ve made sure that Keyword Insertion works just as it does on Google and Yahoo.
Simply put {keyword:xxx} into your ad, and we’ll insert your keyword if it fits within our character limits. Additionally, you can follow Google’s keyword capitalization standards and use {KeyWord:xxx} or {KEYWORD:xxx}, but we won’t follow their command and formatting.

At AdCenter we assume that you’ve created your keywords with the capitalization you’d like to use, so we won’t bother you with any other option. We’ll keep your keywords in lower case if that’s how you entered them.

Easy Tracking Integration with Google Analytics
Here’s the best feature yet. Say you use Google Analytics and want to see which keywords your visitors used to find your ad, click through, and buy your product.
You’re in luck!

With AdCenter we’ll let you use a standard variable for your ads that will cover all keywords used to see your ad. By using the {QueryString}…or, wait…{OrderItemID}, no no no, {keyword}, well, one of those probably works…anyway, plop that bitch in your tracking URL, and behold!!!!!

In Google Analytics you’ll see data for the keyword {querystring}, {keyword}, or {orderitemid} depending on which one of those you decided was the best. None of them will show you your keyword…we don’t know how to do that yet. We’re working on it, we’re thinking that it might take a couple years, though.

In the end, how’s that going to help you track your hits anyway?! You should just use AdCenter’s Analytics Package – seen below.

AdCenter Analytics Package

As you can see, AdCenter really has the user in mind, and we can’t wait to take all your money in the next couple of months.

Love,
Steve

I realize this is very half-assed

PR needs to expand its reach because journalists are looking to social media for news.

• Don’t just rely on a basic press release – employ photos, videos, whitepapers, podcasts.
• Optimize – Get your partners to link to the release, involve sponsors & partners.
• Improve Performance – Turn the newsroom into a more dynamic press release site. Make it more like a news oriented blog. Talk about events, have a background, images, videos, links.
• Balance the Social Life – Twitter, Facebook, SMM are your friends. Monitor what’s written about you.
• Understand it is Forever – Join in on the negative content conversations. Maybe employ PPC to push the negative sites away.
• Good Relations Take Work – update old content with new links, photos, keywords. Go back and use social bookmarking.

So, what did we learn?

I think that friend of the blog, Melanie Phung, put it best in a tweet yesterday:

Someone who’s clueless rants about SEOs, SEOs rise to take the bait, rinse, repeat, ad nauseam. *yawn*

Yes, that’s about right…most of the time.

The thing that made this little debate so much more interesting to me is that both sides are actually saying some truthful, albeit misguided things. Let’s start with the salvo from Mr. Powazek. Some truthful elements in his post:

• Make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret.
• It’s not your job to create content for Google. it’s their job to find the best of the web for their results. Your audience is your readers, not Google’s algorithm.
• Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again. Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers.

All of these strategies are essential to being successful online, and should be heeded by anyone trying to increase traffic to their site. While this may seem obvious to Mr. Powazek, sometimes it’s hard to remember that this isn’t obvious to everyone. There are plenty of businesses out there that have no knowledge of how to be successful online. In Danny’s response, he highlights a few of these situations:

• A real estate agent selling real estate in one of the most competitive areas of the country, Newport Beach, California. Her friends aren’t all going to buy homes she’s listing. Her “community” congregates on Google and does things like type in “newport beach homes for sale.”
• She probably needs to kick [her individual listings] out into Google Base, in order to fully be listed in Google.
• Where’s her web site now? Is she running it off Blogger? Using her own domain? These have impacts on how both the search engines may see her as well as how she’s perceived.
• Does she have a local office? If so, has she claimed her listing in Google Local?
• Has she considered some unusual, creative ways to create content around real estate in her area, perhaps some catchy link bait, which may pull in the links she needs to rank better.

Danny offers a couple other examples, and then hints at some web developers being slightly shady too. However, these sets of arguments from both men are all we need to look at today. (I’m completely ignoring the mudslinging as it was frankly woefully out of date and misguided, the heart of the argument lies within these points – not in the bullshit).

*****

I think the problem with both of these gentlemens’ posts is that they aren’t seeing the whole picture. Danny does stress that this “It’s not your father’s (or mother’s) SEO that you rant about, … But make no mistake, it’s SEO.”

OK

Is it?

Aside from the first, third, and fifth suggestions that Danny offers, would we really consider the rest to be SEO? While it’s true that leveraging Google Base and Google Local (Bing Local, Yahoo Local, etc) for a small business is great advice and could be seen as “optimizing” said company’s presence on Google, does it qualify as SEO. Technically, sure – as it’s helping to improve the site’s presence on Google. However, this is really more online advertising than SEO. There’s no code adjustments or link building or content massaging here. Nothing on site. Nothing that a web developer should be doing.

Frankly, Mr. Powazek’s SEOs shouldn’t be doing this either. In his eyes, they should be manipulating the site, creating drastically outdated spamming systems, and causing all sorts of irreversible grief for him. However, in his model, I don’t believe the web developer shouldn’t be held responsible for this either.

The truth of the matter is, both Danny and Mr. Powazek are wrong. Powazek is wrong because he believes that SEOs haven’t evolved past the shady tactics used in 2000, whereas Danny is wrong by using the ever expanding blanket term of SEO.

We are not SEOs. We are Search Engine Marketers, Online Marketers, Online Advertisers, Online Strategists, et cetera.

We do not spam sites.

We do not hide links.

We help create good content. We build a brand strategy. We understand how to achieve higher ranking on search engines without manipulating them.

This isn’t the first time I’ve stressed that the term SEO is out of date, and until that term is changed or updated, it surely won’t be the last.

I know that posting once a month is not ideal, but as I’ve said before, I’m busy. My SEM duties were diminished 3 months ago as I transitioned into a User Experience and Info Architecture role. I kept an eye on the industry, but in the end, it has been hard to pay too close attention to something I was rarely doing.

Search Master Steve was on leave for a family related issue, or else we would’ve had a big MSFT/Yahoo post.

I write today to let you know that tomorrow I’m having surgery for a rare heart disease called arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia, or ARVD. You can read about it here – www.arvd.com

Basically, I have inherited a nasty disease that has given me a heart infused with fat, making my right ventricle friggin’ huge (medical term) and beat irregularly. As the only known symptom is death and there is no real cure, I have to have an ICD put into my body to keep me from dropping dead tomorrow or 40 years from now.

I’m told the episodes are relatively minor ordeals, but one did bring my dad to his knees, so I’m not really sure how minor I would consider that. In all likelihood, the ICD will not kick in until I’m 50 or older and with any luck it will never need to be used. That being said, you can bet your ass it’s going to freak me out. In the end, a robot is in charge of me now, and I’m sure it will do its job just fine.

I am advised to avoid magnets as they will turn off my ICD until I’m far enough away from said magnets for the ICD to determine that it’s safe to turn back on. I also have been discouraged from taking up welding and I’m pretty sure I have to give up my black tar heroin habit.

In the end, both my brother and my dad have the same disease and the same type of little robot ensuring their hearts do not stop. I’m not worried about the procedure.

Thanks for listening, I’ll try to write more often.