Cameron Olthuis

Why is it that so many companies wait until the bad results already show up in Google before they start managing their reputation? They should be hitting this stuff the minute it’s published. It’s much easier to manage “Your Google Top Ten” if you do. Although it’s just as important to respond immediately, regardless of Google.

I just got home from being up in Northern California for the week. We started off last weekend in San Francisco where we attended WordCamp and some of the parties that took place around that. Neil and I were asked to give a Q&A on SEO for blogging. I think it went pretty good and we got some great feedback from it. Bill Slawski from SEO by the Sea was in the audience and helped us by providing additional answers for the audience when needed.

Complete trip summary and pictures after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Burger King loves their viral marketing, they just can’t get enough. Today I came across a new site that BK put up where a puppet king dances to different musical beats. You can then email the videos to your friends. These videos are pretty fun and I can see them really being a hit.

I first wrote about BK a few weeks ago when they launched the Huckin’ Chicken web site, it features videos of the chicken mascot performing stunts on a dirt bike, better videos unlock after a certain number of page views. This isn’t the first experience BK’s had with viral marketing either, there’s also the infamous Subservient Chicken site.

Burger King is doing a great job with viral marketing. These sites are also great examples of what we call “linkbait” in the SEO industry. That basically means these type of sites bait people into linking to them. I guess the question is how many more customers is this bringing in?

This post marks number 100. This blog was born the same day as my youngest daughter, Celia, on November 15th, 2005. I had actually planned on starting the blog a few weeks earlier but thought it would be fun to start it the day she was born. Plus it gave me a great topic for my first post.

Since I started this blog a lot of fun things have happened, here’s a few that stick out in my mind…

• It was accepted into 9rules
• I became a partner in ACS
• It’s gone through a couple of redesigns

I never imagined this blog would be as successful as it’s become. I honestly can attribute the success of the great things that have been happening in my professional life lately with this blog. It has opened so many doors it’s unreal. I would encourage any of you that aren’t blogging to start, if nothing else it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

Thank you to everyone who reads this blog. If it wasn’t for the many comments and the great feedback I’ve received I never would’ve kept this up. I can hardly wait until my 1000th post!

Interesting side note: Today also marks the 100th post on our company blog, Pronet Advertising, although we didn’t celebrate with a special post.

Del.icio.us is one of my favorite search engines. It’s basically the only one that I use other than Google and Technorati. Delicious is a social bookmarking site and I’m not even sure it can be classified as a search engine, but I use it as one anyways.

For at least half the searches I perform now Delicious serves up far better results than Google. They’re better because they’re community driven. Other people just like myself have bookmarked and tagged these sites as their favorites. I know that if 2500 other people have bookmarked a site chances are it’s pretty good. Of course there will always be the need for long tail searches and I’m not sure Delicious can ever replace Google in that area, but we’ll see.

I’m convinced this is the future of search. The only problem is that as Delicious gets more popular, spam will start creeping into the results. I can only hope they come up with some way to prevent spam from happening. I can’t imagine it would be hard for someone to figure out a way to game Delicious if the rewards were good enough.