Posts Tagged ‘seo’

Optimize Your Life (Using SEO Principles as a Guide)

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

SEO professionals (such as The Emperor) practice their craft to help organizations establish a findable online presence. The ‘optimization’ does a bit (ok, significant amount) of dumbing down the grade level of what’s written. One could easily argue that is a good thing, since such a small percentage of the adult (or overall) population can’t read very well anyway. The typical newspaper (not talking WSJ or NY Times here) is written in fairly easy-to-digest prose, so it’s fair to say that SEO activities are a reflection of society.

To see your level of lexical elitism, play this fun SEO game: run a search and see what separates the top-ranked listing from those further down the page (or next page). We did so with plumber and fed the first page of copy through a ‘smarty-pants-readability’ tool.

Our findings below. Proof positive that good SEO=lower grade level. So ends Umibot’s argument against the SEOism of life as we know it.

Here begins Umibot’s argument for SEO-friendly standards in business cards. It’s a fairly visual argument, represented by Exhibit A and Exhibit B. Let’s just say they are not card scanner friendly.

Exhibit A

SEO Friendly Business Card? Not!


Exhibit B

Business Card Exhibit B

Urban Mapping to Present at Search Insider Summit

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Urban Mapping’s own (guess who) Ian White will participate at MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit May 18-21 on Captiva Island, FL. Ian will participate on several panel discussions and breakout sessions. Umibot is thrilled that UMI will be at the event as it will provide a good opportunity to take the pulse of search engine marketing and local search.

Seeking a Geo-aware Search Marketing Wiz

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

Thanks to our talented people and forward-thinking customers, we’re growing in all directions. Our newest offering has to do with geotargeting. As we’ve noted in the past, the current state of affairs in geotargeting ain’t so good. IP lookup can’t provide the granularity that is required to serve up local content/relevant advertising. If a user has registered/provided a profile, that’s great news, but is only a small piece. It also presupposes you are located in your default/home area.

Leveraging our expertise in informal space (ie, neighborhoods), user research/cognitive psych and local search, UMI has developed a geotargeting service that reflects user intention. This is significant because technical methods fail to deliver expected results. This synthetic geo-targeting service taps into user intent, allowing for ‘hyperlocal’ to be more than hyperbole.

We’re looking for somebody who can help us penetrate agencies and advertisers. With marquis clients already in place, we seek an entrepreneurial and driven search marketing pro who thrives in vague and inherently ambiguous environments. You have a demonstrated track record of developing new business and are resourceful, tenacious and creative.

Urban Mapping hires for what you can do, not for what you have done. This means the background we seek is desirable, but not critical. A few notes about specifics:

  • Agency/publisher experience - 3-15 years campaign management, ad operations, account management

  • Sales/Biz Dev background - The primary role is to bring sales, but this can only happen once a plan is in place. You must be comfortable on the road, drawing from your contacts, inbound lead gen, cold calling and geunuinely enjoy your work.

  • Industry knowledge - You are an interactive advertising fountain of knowledge–you consider SES to be a great networking opportunity, not a great venue to learn about online advertising. You have a solid understanding of SEM, SEO, PPC and emerging ad products.

  • Technical competence: You need not be a programmer, but technical comfort is a requirement. This means awareness of stacks/languages/environments and advertising APIs. Exposure to geospatial technologies is useful, but not required.

Compensation is modest base, generous commission and equity participation.

We work in a creative, entrepreneurially-vague environment. Our methods are novel, but our approach has yielded valuable insights and results. To be considered for this position, please forward a resume and brief note speaking to your training and experience. Email to talent [at] urbanmapping [dot] com. Indicate “SEM Pro” in the subject line. No phone calls please!

If You Must Protest Something, Make it Something You Believe in

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

Like, um, landing pages?

http://blog.nomorelandingpages.com/

It’s true. These guys are planing a sit (or page?) in at the ad tech confab in San Francisco.

Details from ad tech blog.