Search Strategies That Eventually Fail

One of the New York Times' most e-mailed articles today is The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. JC Penney (JCP) had been showing up for several search results, due to thousands of back links to its site.

Of course, JCP denies knowledge of any black-hat search engine optimization techniques. What's amazing to me is how long they got away with this before Google was aware of it. The good news is Google adjusted the organic results for them rather quickly.

This begs the question - is black hat SEO worth it? It seems like it worked for JCP for the last holiday season. Yet, we don't know the bounce rates from their site. They may have generated traffic, but they may not have converted to leads.

I've seen many campaigns that drive traffic to a site, but fail to convert to sales and/or leads.

Google's goal is relevance. Relevance is what consumers are looking for.

At the end of the day, an increase in unique visitors to a site is nice, but more sales and/or leads is always better.

Applying Skills to A New Industry

A friend of mine is getting into dog breeding and asked me to set up her website this week. As you know, my background is automotive advertising. Not German Shepherd advertising. But, hey, the same skills apply. Don't they?

Actually, they do. And I'm having fun learning about a new industry. The first obstacle was spelling Shepherd correctly. After checking the Google keyword tool, "german shepard" is searched a lot. And so is "german sheperd." Too bad neither of those is accurate.

As usually, the third time was the charm and I was able to secure Michigan German Shepherd dot com for her.

I just set up the site and am working on adding more pages. I should have an SEM campaign in place shortly.

My friend has promised to blog weekly updates and I'm excited about adding testimonials once her (the dog's) first litter is sold. Then we'll work on a Facebook page.

Of course, I'll continue to work on SEO with directory listings and backlinks. This is going to be a fun project in a new industry.

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Actually, I'm not old, but I couldn't resist the pun.