Oliver Tani

I’ve been working with interactive agencies, online marketing companies and even served as the in-house internet marketing person for the better part of a decade now. I have recently made the move back to being an independent consultant. By recently, I mean it’s been exactly 24 hours. In order to be successful, I knew that there were a few things I would have to do. Below are some ways that I know that I’m going to need to do in order to remain successful and on my own.

Treat each day as a normal work day.
This doesn’t mean get up, fight traffic and hate the entire world before you get to the office. What I mean is that it is very important that while you’re just walking into your home office or living room, or back patio, you should still treat it as you’re walking into a working environment. I would never walk into an office setting in shorts and flip flops, so I made sure that when it was time to work, I was dressed and ready for the day. If you don’t do this, you’ll surely find yourself in the same shorts and flip flops when the end of the work day rolls around.

Keep your reputation strong.
One thing I have done over the last few years is create many positive working relationships with people. I have made sure that I have always had my best foot forward when it was important and that I always gave more of myself than I did the time before. You want to make sure that whenever you put your name on something, that it is the best thing you’ve ever done. If I’m not proud of my work, I won’t put my name on it. Your reputation, especially in the online marketing world is like a viral resume of sorts in the fact that you can be recommended for jobs and consulting work without even knowing it.

Stay Organized.
Calendars definitely help, whether it’s Outlook, Google, or even one of those hideously big desktop calendars that your teachers had in 3rd grade. Merely writing down appointments, calls, and meetings chronologically has helped me tremendously. On my first day out on my own, I had about four meetings that I had to make sure I was ready for. I make sure that every single meeting invite I have is synched to my Blackberry and I set the meeting reminders for 30 minutes ahead of time. This helps me never miss something important. The other thing that I do is keep lists. When I first sit down to work, I always create a list of things that I should do, and things that I have to do. I know it sounds so simple and elementary, but it has really helped me.

Create Goals (and see them through).
I have a few goals as far as how much new business I need to bring in to get to a good client load and how much money I need to make to live comfortably. Everything I do and work on, I make sure somehow ties into either my short-term and/or long-term goals. You have to know what you’re working for or you may not always see the value in doing something.

Stay Connected.
Probably the most important thing for me to do would be to make sure I’m staying connected in the industry. Staying connected can mean three things to me. First is the internet connection. Seriously, in this day and age, how many internet outages should we have!? Nothing’s more frustrating than having emails that you can’t get to when you’re on a tight deadline or not being able to access your online tools etc. Secondly, staying connected to me also means that I’m current in everything that’s going on in the industry. In my business, I have to know what’s happening, when algorithms shift, when best practices change and any other relevant news. The last thing, but most important is staying connected to people. If it weren’t for the people I’m currently connected with, there’s no way I would’ve been able to make such a smooth transition to working on my own. Most of my contract work and consulting gigs I’m working on right now are because these people that I’m connected to have referred them to me.

Well I know this was quite the post, but I had to make up for not posting in about a month! I guess now I’ve got nothing but time on my hand, so this blog is yet another way for me to stay connected!

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So I’ve been doing a lot of research online for shopping cart software to install on one of my client’s sites that until now has been using Paypal’s very basic solution. I’ve found a lot of the open source ones to be good, but not quite as “packed with peanuts” as we were hoping for. What we needed was supposed to be pretty simple:

• WYSIWYG Editing
• In-Depth Reporting
• SEO Friendly URLs
• Built-in Image Handling and Resizing
• Customizable Templates

There were of course a few other things, but I’ve installed and uninstalled about ten of these before I found the one my client and I both liked. The online shopping cart I ended up choosing was from ashop Commerce. I was able to get it loaded up very easily and even had some assistance along the way from a member of their very friendly staff. If I could remember their name (I apologize as I’m very forgetful!) I would’ve sent a thank you email. We went with the light plan which is less than $40/month. Great deal in my opinion as it made my job easy and made my client happy. Check them out.

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Ok, so I’ve decided. I love AJAX. No, not the cleaner but rather the new web technology that seems to be engulfing the internet and combines two older technologies to bring a web user an experience similar to a desktop application. AJAX uses JavaScript and XML in conjunction with one another and queries a remote data source, thereby being able to change the content of a page without leaving said page and without using frames. If you ask me, that’s pretty sweet stuff, as long as it’s used right.

AJAX is intended to add to the user experience, but from a Search Marketing standpoint, we must keep in mind that not all visitors will be able to experience AJAX and those visitors are just as important as other visitors. An alternate experience is recommended not only for search engine friendliness, but for usability as well.

Here is a good list of sites using AJAX.

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comScore Networks today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In March 2006, Google gained in search market share versus year ago for the eighth consecutive month and maintained its status as market leader with 42.7 percent of searches conducted on its sites. Yahoo! remained in second place with 28.0 percent, while MSN ranked third with 13.2 percent.

Share of Online Searches by Engine March 2006 vs. March 2005 Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users Source: comScore qSearch Mar-05 Mar-06 Point Change Total Internet Population 100% 100% N/A Google Sites 36.4 42.7 6.3 Yahoo! Sites 30.6 28.0 -2.6 MSN-Microsoft Sites 16.5 13.2 -3.3 Time Warner Network 8.9 7.6 -1.4 Ask Jeeves/Ask Network 5.5 5.9 0.4 — Americans conducted 6.4 billion searches online in March, up 10 percent from last month and 15 percent from last year. The increase in search queries from the previous month marked the largest gain over the past twelve months. — Google Sites led the pack with 2.7 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.8 billion), MSN-Microsoft (849 million), Time-Warner Network (486 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (376 million). — The toolbar search market continues to be dominated by Google and Yahoo!, which combined for more than 95 percent of toolbar searches in March. Google led the way with 48.9 percent, while Yahoo! captured 46.5 percent.

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What does this algorithm do to Google? It’s supposed to let the user decide for himself what they find most relevant. Dubbed “Orion”, the search technology will hunts down pages where the content covers a topic that is strongly related to the searched-for keyword or phrase. It returns a section of that page.

If it did a really good job, a searcher might find the answer to a question right in that section of text, without having to visit the site itself.

But what does that mean for websites? Well, less visitors for one. I don’t care who you are, but that’s not good for conversions.

That’s only part of what Orion does, though. It also lists other topics related to the keyword, letting the searcher choose ones that are most relevant. If any particular broad topic is like a tree, related topics are branches off that tree, and Orion can help a searcher find the twig they were looking for – or even get a better picture of the whole forest. The university’s press release about the technology describes it as “offering an expert search without having an expert’s knowledge.”

It then provides an example that many of our readers in the United States should be able to relate to from their elementary school days. “Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works. Orion would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain much more valuable information from every search.”

Story Here

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Of course. Microsoft decides that they’d like get social as well. I mean seriously, don’t they get beat up enough as it is? Officially, I’m out on this one. People don’t take stands quite often enough, so I am.

I mean think about it. How many friends do you have? No, not how many people do you know, or how many people do you say hello to everyday, but how many people do you know, trust, and actually be willing bet that they’d NEVER lead you in the wrong direction? I can only count about a handful of people, besides my family, that would fall into this category. These are the people I would want in my social network. One thing that’s very hard is to decide who to listen to and who not to listen to these days. There are so many self proclaimed “experts” that its just obnoxious. At least I know I can trust my real friends. I don’t want to trust some weird kid named Tom who slouches.

Honestly though even Yahoo! Answers is a bit too “let’s hear what advice this 13 year old kid has to say about my IRA Rollovers”. Maybe it’s just me being untrusting, but so be it. Good luck with that. I’m Out.

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So their new tool seems pretty cool. Take for example the virtual pet site at NeoPets.com. This site has been targeted by typo-squatters to serve pornographic-themed ads if it is misspelled. One such misspelling, neoppets.com, is currently serving ads promising naked photos of Britney Spears or other adult images. Kids these days are screwed up enough as it is… we don’t need to be feeding them a constant flow of smut, popups and spyware each time their chubby fingers can’t spell something on the keyboard correctly. Strider could potentially help us out here:

When a user visits a Web site, her browser may be instructed to visit other third-party domains without her knowledge. Some of these third-party domains raise security, privacy, and safety concerns. The Strider URL Tracer, available for download, is a tool that reveals these third-party domains, and it includes a Typo-Patrol feature that generates and scans sites that capitalize on inadvertent URL misspellings, a process known as typo-squatting. The tool also enables parents to block typo-squatting domains that serve adult ads on typos of children’s Web sites.

Of course, it can only be installed on Internet Explorer. Go figure.

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OMG, you’re only a PR4? That’s Ghetto. Any of my friends who have my link on their site that has less than a PR5, please remove me immediately or I’ll sue! I can’t stand these people. Seriously. Are we still talking about this issue? I mean it’s 2006 for God’s Sake. Let’s take a look at some people in the SEO community who know what they’re talking about and try to learn from them.

First off, what does Aaron Wall have to say?

“Instead of chasing PageRank I like to find the low PageRank sites that rank well in the search results,” says SEOBook author Aaron Wall. “What links do they have? Why are they ranking so well? If you get the types of links that those sites have, and if you have a compelling website that other sites actually want to link to the PageRank will naturally fall into place without you developing a wonky link profile trying to artificially boost your PageRank.”

Hmmm, but what could he possibly mean by that? Does that mean if I find out that a site with less than a PR4 is linking to me, that I should write them a letter and demand they remove my link on their sub-par page?

Or how about that one dude, Andy Hagans?

“With each new Google update, it is apparent that PageRank counts for less, while other factors (trust, age, authority links) count for more,” said Hagans.

“Really, the importance of the green pixels is now negligible, aside from a very rough indication of a site’s link popularity and assurance that it isn’t banned in Google. But as long as Google continues to show PageRank in the toolbar, it will never ‘die’ in the public consciousness.”

But what does he know? Quite a bit apparently.

Even Eric Ward, who has been building links long before pagerank even existed and while Mr. Page and Mr. Brin were still in highschool says that “…trust and link building, not chasing PageRank, are the most important parts of the search strategy.”

Man, that’s 3 people who do more than teach others, they make a living doing this, and look at what they’re all saying! Trust me. Anyone can get high Pagerank to their site. So people, it’s time to pull your head out your asses and get your shit straight.

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