Michael Shipe Blog

Upping your position on the left side of search engine result pages is the cheapest form of internet marketing right. Aside from the cost of achieving a higher ranking of course. But having a high position does not cost a thing. So we found out that inbound links up our relevance and all of the sudden building links became the thing.

It is no wonder it became the thing. Building links is relatively easy, inexpensive and kind of fun for the swivel chair marketer. This spawned a whole slew of irrelevant opportunities to build links. Thankfully, search engines weight the importance of each link by the quality and relevance of the site providing the link.

Thus the Golden Rule of Link Building:

Establish links as if there were no search engines.

The other day, some friends of mine were researching the rumor that someone had found a cure for HIV/AIDS. After reading the Wikipedia entry on it, he went on to some news site that had written a story about it.

They are not marketing nerds, so I was a little disappointed when my exclamation and finger pointing at the advertisement fell on deaf ears.

Someone was not doing their job and let the advertising they spent good money on denigrate Johnson & Johnson’s K-Y Jelly. Who thought K-Y would be good to associate with HIV/AIDS?

This just goes to show how thorough you have to be in building your brand. Marketers who think they can just throw money out will find themselves hurting themselves unexpectedly. Maybe they thought, “Since some prince in Africa has cured AIDS, people will be buying more K-Y!”

I feel like I am becoming an expert in SEM. I have learned that the average person with 12 months of website analytics gets over $78,000. Wowza! Internet marketing is still growing because you can get the ROI on your marketing efforts – ROMI if you will.

Why do I feel like an expert? Reading blogs. Adage, Search Engine Watch, Web Analytics Association, etc. I also came across http://www.semmys.org/ which I need to check out further.

I have also started offering some advice to some small web projects on how to improve their web presents. It is largess I know, but how else was I going to get a Dictionary.com word of the day into this blog?

All the articles I read about getting descovered on search engines said Google would be the last one to rank me, but that’s turning out not to be the case. MassEffect.MichaelShipe.com is now 43rd on Google (when searching “mass effect”). I think that’s pretty good.