If you’ve exhibited, presented or moderated a Search Engine Strategies conference, it’s more than likely that you’ve had the opportunity to meet Stewart Quealy, VP, Content Development at Incisive Media, parent company to Search Engine Strategies, Search Engine Watch and ClickZ. Stewart (L), along with Mike Grehan (R) were recently named co-chairs of the SES Advisory Board, which is charged with shaping the future direction and ongoing growth of the SES conference.

The SEM legend, Mike Grehan, is global KDM officer with New York based Acronym Media. He’s been involved with online marketing since 1995 and is recognized in the industry as an expert in the search marketing field. He’s programmed many SES London events and has written multiple books and white papers on search marketing.

One of the top questions asked by our clients is “Why Can’t I find my site in DMOZ?” Also known as the “Open Directory”, DMOZ is one of the web’s oldest directories and a link from it conveys a good value in the eyes of search engines like Google. Unfortunately, the DMOZ directory is infrequently updated and some people have not seen a submission approved after years of waiting.

With the recent deal made between Bing and Yahoo one must ask them selves, what impact will this have on my search rankings. In this case, it may have a significant impact – at least eventually.

Let’s assume that all legalities are settled, and everything goes ahead as planned. What we will eventually see is a full transition of Bing results displayed when one does a search over at Yahoo. This will have the effect of there only being two major search engines out there, Google and Bing. Yahoo algorithm based results as we know them will cease to exist (at least on the organic level).

Create an Online Presence and A Linkable Brand is the advice from Loren Baker in order to help with natural link building.

Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.


That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

One of the reasons that an SEO expert should know more about real estate optimization and marketing is that almost every real estate agent has a website. In the same way that realtors have business cards with their picture on them, they have an online presence for people who may want to look at several home choices and schedule a walkthrough. Like many SEO customers, Real Estate agents need a quick education on what to expect in the optimization process. Some of the top realtors in any town will also pick up on the fact that one or two commissions can pay for a fair amount of website optimization, and a well optimized site can generate plenty of leads from buyers and sellers.

There is perhaps no more level playing field in business than the Internet. It is this fact that has created millionaires from paupers. The amount of money that can be made depends of course on your industry and your products and/or services but to be sure, if it can be sold at all, it can be sold online.

While there are many methods out there for building a profitable website, from banner ads to email campaigns, by far the most cost effective over time has proven repeatedly to be search engine positioning. That major advantage search engine positioning has over other methods of producing revenue online is that once high rankings are attained and provided that the tactics used were ethical and that continued efforts are made to keep them, they can essentially hold and provide targeted traffic indefinitely. Your site will rise and your site may sometimes fall in the rankings but a solid and complete optimization of your site will insure that through algorithm changes you may fluctuate but you will not disappear.

I have been ranking websites highly on the Internet for quite a few years now and there are some essential rules that, if followed, will insure that over time your website does well and holds solid and profitable positions on the major search engines.