Search Engine Marketing, according to Didit cofounder and executive chairman Kevin Lee, is dead. The point is, consumers who are driven by desire are seeking out and browsing for information. Lee argues that consumers are not using just search engines (i.e. Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, etc.) as their main source for seeking information; consumers are searching for specific and highly-targeted consumer-oriented information in other search functions, including Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.

The best way to capture a desired target audience, Lee suggests, is through keywords, as they describe both consumer and content interest. As consumers spend less time on search engines and more time on social networking sites, marketers are beginning to grasp a better understanding of their audience and the types of words their consumers like to search for in order to have their brands situated in the appropriate online environment.

Another reason marketers may be thinking about ‘find’ and ‘influence’ marketing is that massive search engines cannot find up to 30% of the sites consumers are searching for. Lee asserts that this is one of the main causes of consumer frustration when they retrieve an irrelevant website. Lee illustrates that this is where the Long Tail enters in, where websites reveal words that people actually search for and use, rather than the industry jargon marketers think they are looking for. The most commonly used search terms will direct customers to their desired web page.

So, what is the benefit to all of this? The idea is to encourage positive information (and word of mouth!) about your website, company and brand. According to Rob Fugetta of social media marketing company, Zuberance, 30% of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions when making a major purchase decision. On the contrary, David Nowell of Nowell Enterprises argues that a mere 10% trust advertisers. Fugetta argues that consumers that are communicating through these social networks act as brand advocates that can positively influence their friends and family about your company. As consumers become informed and trust your company, consumers will positively influence others to seek out information on your website as well.

Sources

Fugetta, Rob. (2010). “Zuberance Data Sheet.”

Lee, Kevin. (May 28, 2010). “SEM is Dead – Long Live ‘Find’ and ‘Influence’ Marketing.”

Nowell, David. (2008). “Marketing on the Web.” Nowell Enterprises.

I’ve traveled a fair bit in my life and I have, in fact, lived on three continents. So I know a great travel guide when I see one. One of the best parts about travel guides is that they now have online counterparts, which means that if you left your Lonely Planet guide at home by accident, but if you have internet access, you can access the information that way. It’s definitely a far cry from gas station maps and word of mouth from my parents’ day.

So I was tickled the other day when I stumbled upon Chris Sherman’s article “The Thirteen Best Online Travel Guides” and in the spirit of summer vacations, I had to share his first 6 picks and their overviews with you.

1. Arrivalguides.com: is entirely web-based, and all of its guides are available as free PDF downloads. This website is available in either English or Swedish, but some of the individual destination cities have options to download their guides in different languages. Arrivalguides.com doesn’t have a mobile version, but does offer free downloads of its most popular guides in the iTunes app store.

2. Concierge.com: provides guides to more than 200 destinations through publisher Conde Nast, including content from the Conde Nast Traveller magazine. Exploring for destinations by interests and ideas turns up some offbeat travel suggestions that you might not find with other guides. Concierge.com doesn’t have a mobile site but does have a “postcard” app.

3. Fodor’s: offers interesting perspectives of destination because its guides are written by people who live in the location they write about. The guides on the website don’t seem as complete as the print guides, though there are about a dozen free downloadable guides available. Fodor’s has an extensive mobile website at m.fodors.com.

4. Frommers.com: from the company that published one of the first travel guides, Frommer’s now publishes over 300 guidebooks as well as the Frommers.com web site. Founder Arthur Frommer still actively blogs on the site, offering unique perspectives on the travel industry sharpened by decades of observation. Frommers doesn’t have a mobile version of its website, but has published a number of iPhone apps.

5. Let’s Go Travel Guides: publishes budget travel guides, written entirely by students for students. Let’s Go guides focus on off the beaten path locales that other guides tend to overlook. Its video gallery is a YouTube-like collection travel of videos—an interesting way to preview a destination. Let’s Go does not have a mobile site.

6. Lonely Planet: advocates “responsible travel” and is still a great “alternative voice” even though it is majority owned by the BBC. Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler pens an interesting blog with lots of perspective from many years of personal travel and editing guidebooks. Lonely Planet doesn’t have a mobile version of its website but has several iPhone, iPad and Nokia apps available.

It’s fun to see what we can find on the internet, but as people interested in web development, it is even more fun to see what can be developed. As Sherman points out, “Surprisingly, for sites that offer information about travel and moving around the world, many don’t have mobile versions of their websites, though some do have apps or iBook versions.” It will be interesting to see how that changes over the next few years.

I was just remembering my 9th grade work placement. We were each sent to “work” for a week in a career that interested us, and I went to an architectural firm (yeah, I know it’s pretty far from where I ended up). Our teacher visited each of us over the week and we talked about what we had seen and done. I discovered an electric eraser during my week and was giggling about it. My teacher told me that those were for people who made mistakes, which I didn’t do. I still laugh, thinking about it. Well, even in SEO there are mistakes made.

I can stand up and say that, because even SEOmoz admits that they’ve made mistakes along the way. Here is a list of their top five mistakes, according to a whiteboard Friday video by Rand:

1. Blocking outbound links: At one point Rand had a “tactic involving offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via robots.txt/meta robots so that he could get all of the link value.” Eventually other webmasters figured out that he wasn’t linking back to them, which didn’t make him any friends in the SEO world. He did remove this tactic from his site, but did end up doing a lot of work to ingratiate himself into the community again.
2. Buying links for clients: It seemed like a good idea to increase rankings by getting more links, but it turned out that there was never a good way to figure out if those links were helping the clients. Worse, as it turned out, Google wasn’t even counting these links and in some cases it hurt the client’s ability to rank.
3. Ensuring keywords were in the H1 tags: I know Rand was not the only one to recommend this tactic; it was pretty common in the middle part of this decade. It turns out that having your keywords in your H1 tags makes no real difference between having them “in normal text in bigger fonts”.
4. Not using XML sitemaps: The theory was that XML sitemaps can make it hard to find information architecture problems, but they also have a great impact on traffic to your site and site rankings in general.
5. Redirecting Linkscape to Open Site Explorer (OSE): OSE is a better reporting system for SEOmoz’s clients, but the original conversion wasn’t done well and it resulted in a huge loss of site traffic. It’s fixed now though.

Although it is fun to look at the mistakes of others and compare notes, it is also provides a few lessons for all of us. First, no one is perfect and the SEO process may take a few detours. We may need that electric eraser from time to time! But the most important thing is to learn from your mistakes, correct them as you go, and be smarter about it with the next project. If you learn something, it’s never a waste of time.

Tough economic times call for innovative solutions. I’ve heard it said that some of the strongest companies are started and flourish in economic recessions or depressions. Our current economic climate is no different: the companies that thrive right now are the ones that are approaching their problems with original solutions that allow them to develop greater ways to bring their products to their consumers.

In his article “Local Merchants Utilizing Social Media More as Confidence Remains Flat”, Chris Crum talks about how companies are using today’s internet marketing tools to increase their business profiles, while still keeping an eye on their finances. He points to MerchantCircle’s “Merchant Confidence Index”, which shows that the levels of confidence a group of 10,000 merchants have in the current economy is pretty flat, but that these same merchants are “more prominently using social media as a free online marketing tool to increase their customer base and revenue.”

And why not use social networking? Social networking will cost your company manpower hours to set up and monitor it on a regular basis, but not much more. Large audiences are available to your company through a variety of social media offerings. And with cost to benefit ratio on the side of the merchant, it makes sense to direct your limited marketing budget towards modern solutions. As the vice president of marketing for MerchantCircle, notes “we were pleased to see that most aren’t planning for layoffs or pay cuts for employees. Small business owners are continuing to become web savvy in their marketing by increasingly augmenting traditional advertising with free methods like social networking to generate additional business.”

With growing options in social media tools, it is interesting to watch which ones are growing and which ones have matured over the last few years. It seems like most people know about Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter these days, but merchants are reaching out for even newer solutions. Location-based services are reaching higher levels of familiarity with merchants. “For example, MerchantCircle says today, 16% of merchants are familiar with Foursquare, whereas in Q1 of 2010, the number was only 8%. Likewise, 32% of merchants that are aware of Foursquare are using it to promote their business, compared to 25% in Q1.

It seems that the key in uncertain economic times is to be creative and take a few risks. Merchants are doing just that, as proven by Crum’s observation that “It is worth noting that this is the first time social networking has eclipsed all other marketing channels to become the most popular among survey participants since MerchantCircle has been doing the survey.” So, as a merchant, your can be part of the past or create new solutions with the growing tools of the present.