Call this a press release. Heck, call it a chatty letter. You can even call it bragging, because we’re proud of the things our company is doing. We’ve come a long way, baby. The founder of Level343, Gabriella Sannino, is an Italian transplant. She’s lived in the U.S. for more years than she’d care to say (and we have an NDA clause that says we won’t spill the whole “age” thing), been in more countries than you can shake a stick at and speaks five languages fluently.
It was down to the wire. We needed a big boost in traffic and we needed it yesterday. Everyone waited impatiently as the boss read over the copy; the copywriter rubbed her raw fingers, staring down at the still smoking keyboard she had ruthlessly pounded in a race against the clock. The optimizer, bouncing on her toes, stared at the boss and chewed a fingernail down to the nub. The boss gave a quick nod. “Send it to the client.”
There’s been a lot about SEO in the mainstream news lately, from the Wall Street Journal to The Globe and Mail, and even the New York Times. Last week, we posted a rant, (If You’re Going to Write About SEO, Get It Right) showing off a little bit of spirited irritation for the inaccurate and often sensational portrayal of an industry we love.
It’s March 31st, which means National Women’s History Month is coming to a close. What a perfect time to talk about our 2012 Top SEO Women awards 
After an intense week of social networking that ended with a conference, (Distilled in New Orleans) I think I finally have a better understanding of what I should be doing. It’s taken a long path to get me here; I thought I’d share it with you, our readers, in the hopes that you’ll gain some usefulness. Sometimes, I think about hiring someone else to do my social networking – some social media guru who can turn each tweet into gold. According to the analytics, according to the numbers, I’m doing it wrong.
If you’re kick-butt professional with tons of referrals and your website is just a business card, you may be thinking a positive online reputation is something you don’t have to worry about it. In fact, Darren Slatten, world’s greatest SEO, master of reputation mis-management (titles he gave himself) and wanna-be comedian (title we gave him), wrote a very pointed article about reputation management in 2009.
SEO as a part of a digital marketing strategy cannot be ignored by any marketing organization. SEO, though a subset of online marketing, has a completely different character of its own. People are more likely to click on an organic search result compared to a listing under Ads. The website owners are allocating increased budgets to digital marketing, and ranking for organic search is one of their primary goals.
It used to be you only had one search to target – the main search page. If you wanted to rank for a specific term, you could only rank on the regular SERPs. Now, you have plenty of places on the search engines you can target. Images, blogs, discussions, real time search, Places and videos are just a few places outside of the normal SERPs. You don’t just grab the traditional SERPs anymore; now you grab hold of any search you possibly can. However, having said that, keep these things in mind:
The line between reaching the search engines and reaching visitors is incredibly thin. Trying to reach search engines with SEO can alienate both, while trying to reach just the visitors can leave your site unseen in the SERPs. What’s a webmaster to do? How does it all come together for a strong return on investment?
Comment Spam vs. Comment Links: What’s the Difference?
March 21, 2011