Biznology

Most of you are familiar with the six sigma programs that have raised quality standards for products and processes around the world. Six sigma programs are important and they work—when used under proper circumstances. Unfortunately, when devotion to quality is taken to extreme levels under the wrong circumstances, it leads to undue caution and lack of experimentation. So, should your Internet marketing program be six sigma? I’m here to argue it should be maybe one and a half sigma.

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Are you looking for a firm to help with your search marketing? It’s complicated, for sure. (That’s why we wrote our book in the first place.) But there are steps that anyone can take to narrow down the firms available to help you.

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Over a year ago, both Google and MSN began experimenting with the titles that they showed on search results screen, often using the title of your site from the Open Directory rather than the title tag coded on your site’s home page. That upset many search marketers stuck with lame (and hard-to-change) titles that hurt their organic search results. Now, MSN and Google have offered a way to opt out of Open Directory titles.

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I’ve been a bit slow to post this, but a few weeks ago our fifth printing of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. hit the streets. And, for each printing, we try to update the book to reflect the ever-changing events in search marketing, posting the changes on our Updates page. So, no matter when you have bought the book, you can scan that page to see what has changed since your copy was printed. We hope that this is a useful way to serve our readers on this fast-changing subject.

If you haven’t heard about Eurekster, you should check out their Swicki search engine. Swicki provides a way of applying the wisdom of crowds to search engines. If you have a blog or Web site devoted to a subject, you can easily use Swicki to create a specialized, vertical search facility on that subject alone. What’s more, you can allow your searchers to improve the search results because Eurekster automatically boosts results that people click on. Beyond that, Eurekster offers a wiki-style suggestion box where searchers request changes to search results for you to accept or reject. I spoke with Grant Ryan, Eurekster’s Founder and Chief Scientist, to learn more.

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