Cameron Olthuis

Goog referrals…

I love it when charts look like this. Been working with this client, who is also a good buddy, on SEO since Jan 1st.

Two great linkbait pieces that really caught my attention today. I love this kind of thing.

This one is seriously one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. Who would’ve known that Neil and I would make such cute kids.

What if SEOs mated?

The other one, from my good friend Rhea, is also very well done. I’m honored to be selected to the first ever SEO Dream Team. Watch out for us in the ‘10 Internet Olympics. To all you other teams - “You’re going down like a sweet muffin!”

SEO Dream Team.

Both are great examples of targeted linkbait. While they’ll probably only spread through our little SEO industry, I know they’ll pick up a bunch of super targeted authority links.

Did that get your attention? No, I’m not going to write another SEO is dead or all SEOs are scumbags post. Actually just the opposite.

There’s been a lot of hate towards SEOs and the industry lately. Most of which has been led by Jesus Calacanis. Just for the record I happen to think Jason is a brilliant guy and I respect him a lot. I don’t agree with half the shit that comes out of his mouth, but then again I’m not so sure he does either. I think he’s just an attention whore and attention he gets.

For the most part I’ve been watching the battle from the sidelines. Listening to both sides of the story but refraining from jumping in with another me-too rebuttal. I decided this morning that I want to add my two-cents.

As the CEO if an Internet company (or any company for that matter) — if you don’t want traffic from Google you should be fired. Simple as that. If by now, you don’t understand the value of Google rankings then you’re an idiot.

I’m not talking about spamming and ranking for obscure crap that is irrelevant to your business. But if you’re not fighting for a top 3 spot for relevant terms then you have no business running a company. It’s common sense really.

And that’s really all I have to say about that.

Not five minutes after I post about picking a brand over keyword domains comes news that Business.com is on the block for 400-500 million. Business.com was bought back in ‘99 for what then was the largest domain purchase ever at 7.5 million. Turns out that it was a huge win for them.

My question is — how much did the domain factor in toward their success? They don’t even rank number one for business. It obviously had something to do with it though as that’s a domain that would get a lot of type in traffic.

My hat’s off to Danny Sullivan and the entire Third Door Media team for putting on a fantastic conference. In my opinion, SMX was easily one of the better, if not the best, conferences in our industry. It was the little things that made the difference too. For example; warm buffet style lunches instead of box lunches, snacks and drinks at all times, and the open parties to name a few.

My only complaint for the entire conference was from the last session called “Give it Up”. This session was the one where presenters were supposed to give up their favorite SEO secrets or tips. Unfortunately only half of the presenters had anything useful to say. A couple of them had no real tips or advice or gave the most basic SEO advice I could imagine. The ones that did give good tips though were awesome, so I guess that makes up for it.

Here are some pictures from the “Better Ways” panel which was a blast.

Update: Last.fm’s chart looks good…

Last year I wrote a couple of posts on how getting on TechCrunch isn’t a viable marketing plan. While a TechCrunch write up can certainly be a great kick-start to your marketing campaign, by no means is that traffic spike alone going to make your company a success.

A good comparison would be getting on the homepage of Digg. They will both result in a huge spike in traffic, attention from key people, a few sign ups, and a bunch of links from other bloggers but the problem is that after a few days you’re back where you started. Ok, so maybe you have a little more traction but it won’t be enough so you need to keep moving forward. Unless you have a solid PR strategy and this will be an ongoing campaign you need to have a more well rounded marketing strategy, one that results in a graph that is up and to the right, not spikes.

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I love it when big companies get called out for having a crappy online marketing strategy (Blockbuster).

I’d also like to add that their natural seo sucks; if you’re a company like Blockbuster how the hell do you let someone like DVD Avenue out-rank you? I bet I could fix that problem in about 5 minutes. Blockbuster, if you’re listening here’s a freebie: put your main “money keyword” in your title tag. Replacing parts of that image with real text wouldn’t hurt either, in fact just recode the entire HTML, it’s awful. Sometimes I wonder how some of these people still have jobs.

This would also be a good time for Blockbuster to respond if they’re monitoring their buzz. We’ll watch the original post to see if there’s a response. I’ll keep you updated.