Review of Apogee Search

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

This is a paid review of Apogee Search. Since I am not a client of theirs and have not had the opportunity to use their services, I am only reviewing their web site here. The web site can be found at http://www.apogee-search.com/.

Upon visiting their web site, the first thing I noticed is that it is extremely cluttered. Due to this clutteredness, it is hard to determine the overall message they are trying to deliver. I’m sure that it will reveal itself upon closer examination. However, I feel that they need to simplify the home page so that whatever message they are trying to deliver jumps out you without having to read through several paragraphs of copy to determine it.

It appears that Apogee Search is a search engine optimization firm offering “search engine marketing.” The company page for Apogee states that they are one of the largest online marketing services firms in the country today and have been in business since 2001. The services they offer include paid search advertising, natural search engine optimization, pay per call management, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing training and search engine marketing analysis. According to the services page, they are offering a free analysis of your website’s performance in the search engines.

They also seem to be legit as they have several badges on their web site. They have a badge listing them as a Google Adwords Qualified Company. They have a badge showing them to be a SEMPO Circle Member. They also have a membership badge for SEOPros.org. I have heard of SEMPO, though I have not heard of SEOPros.org. I have never been a member of SEMPO, so I can’t really comment on them. I do have some idea of what is involved in the Google Adwords Qualified program. I would say completing that program would definitely make them qualified to handle your Google Adwords campaign.

The sales copy on their site emphasizes that they are about making their clients money. They claim to do this by tracking actual actions from the site that increase the bottom line, not just rankings or clicks. If I was looking for a search engine marketing company, I think I would be looking for someone who at least said they were doing that. It also seems that the goal of the site is to get you to contact a sales representative. That is pretty common for most business web sites, and it seems they are doing a good jab by having that call to action on every page. If I was giving out advice to them, that is probably what I would tell them to do.

Apogee also has an online marketing blog, found at http://www.apogee-search.com/Blog/index.php. One thing I noticed about the blog is that it lacks the same navigational toolbar found at the top of the company site. That may be fine for someone entering the site via the blog, which is probably the purpose of the blog. But since they are linking to it from their site, they should really insure the navigation is consistent across all pages. As far as the content of the blog goes, it seems they are only linking to or quoting other SEO and Google related news items rather than providing any commentary or opinion.

Finally, on their site, they have a downloads and resources page. This page mainly links to their white papers in addition to SEO tools on other sites.

Overall, I think their site does a good job of selling their services, notwithstanding the cluttered home page. One other thing I think they could do to increase the effectiveness of their site is to show some examples of success stories they have had for their actual clients.

ReviewMe, the Choice of a New Generation

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

One of the things that is creating a lot of buzz this week is the launch of ReviewMe, a site that pays bloggers for reviews. In fact, I signed up for ReviewMe and am being paid to write this review!

How it works is bloggers sign up and submit their blogs, providing the url and a description. When you submit your blog, it is automatically reviewed and assigned a rating plus 2 dollar amounts based on the rating. One is the amount that an advertiser must pay for a review on your blog, and the other is how much you get paid to write a review and post it on your blog. Advertisers then sign up with ReviewMe and pay for the bloggers to write about them.

The key to the success of ReviewMe is that the blogger is not required to write a positive review. This is what makes them standout from Pay Per Post which is a similar service that requires the blogger being paid to write a positive review. While paid blogging is attracting a lot of attention lately, ReviewMe is slightly less controversial in that they require the blogger to disclose that they are being paid to write the review. Pay Per Post does not require the blogger to disclose that the review is paid for. Another cool feature of ReviewMe is that the blogger can choose which reviews they accept. If you don’t want to write about something, you don’t have to. The only other requirement for ReviewMe is that the post has to be 200 hundred words or more.

I really like ReviewMe, and think that it provides a great service that serves both audiences. Advertisers get talked about, and bloggers get paid to do what they already like doing anyway. I’m sure many people are wondering why they didn’t think of this first.

To launch the site, ReviewMe is offering $25,000 to get bloggers to sign up and write about them. This is very smart on their part because it is getting them great publicity, and it proves that the product works! ReviewMe is already successful in launching their product thanks to their own service!

A couple of questions that have been raised so far are whether or not the reviewer is required to provide a link to the advertiser and whether or not that link can hurt the blog’s credibility with the search engines. So far, no one knows whether or not you are required to link. It is known that search engines do not like paid links and can devalue a link if they determine it is paid for. I think it is up to the reviewer whether or not they provide a link.

In addition, many analysts think that paying bloggers to write reviews may hurt the credibility of blogs in the long run. Overall though, of the reviews I have read of ReviewMe, almost all have been overwhelmingly positive. Only time will tell whether or not this service will take off. I believe ReviewMe has a bright future ahead of them, and that getting paid to blog is here to stay.

eDay not Cyber Monday

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

Ever heard of “Cyber Monday?” It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving, and it’s been said that it is the busiest shopping day of the year for online stores. Analytics firm, Coremetrics, is saying that may not be true.

In their latest e-newsletter, Coremetrics advises e-tailers to expect the busiest online shopping day this year to actually be the next Monday, December 4th. This is based on actual data from 2005′s shopping season. Coremetrics has also coined a name for this day, calling it “eDay.” Clever huh?

My advice? If you are running an online business, you should always be prepared to handle your customers. As far as the holidays goes, expect high traffic and/or sales on both days and plan accordingly. You should be fine.

Commenting on Google Trends

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

It turns out I was quoted for an article that ran in the Knoxville News-Sentinel on August 31, 2006. One of the main functions of my job as an SEO deals with getting web sites listed in Google. A writer with the Sentinel called our offices a few weeks back and asked if someone could talk to him for a story he was writing on Google.

Google released a tool in May 2006 called Google Trends. The writer, Andrew Eder, was writing a story on Google Trends and how to determine what Knoxvillians were searching for using the tool. He called because he wanted to know what I thought about the service.

My quote ended up as a “call out” on the back page of the section C, the business section, which I thought was pretty cool. The only thing is that he paraphrased what I said, and I felt I didn’t quite come off looking like the expert I was portrayed as. Here is the quote.

“As a marketer, I would look at that and build out my marketing calendar based on that information,” Kemp said.

Impressive, huh? My point was that Google Trends could be useful to marketers because it can show seasonal patterns in searches. Marketers could use this data to determine when to begin marketing for seasonal events.

It can also show what cities outside Knoxville are searching for Knoxville related terms. If I were in tourism, I would try to make use of that information to see what areas outside Tennessee to market to.

All in all, I felt lucky to be quoted in the paper, and to get exposure for myself and Mediapulse. Hopefully, I was impressive enough that they will call back when they need a quote on the next story.

Click here to read the story, “Seek and Knox shall find.”

Researching Links on Yahoo!

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org posted on their blog the best way to find out how many external links a web page has. It is widely known among SEO’s that of all the search engines Yahoo! returns the most complete and accurate numbers when it comes to links. Yahoo even has a tool called Site Explorer that show you have many pages of a site are indexed in Yahoo and how many links that site has. But, Rand reveals something here that you may not know. Check it out.

We’ve seen lots and lots of link search data from Yahoo!’s many sources – site explorer, web search, APIs for both of these, results from the engines they serve (see below), etc. To date, the most accurate link counts we’ve ever found are done via the search.yahoo.com URL. Once you get to the results page, surf to the last page of results available – you can also append &b=999 to the end of the URL manually. Yahoo!’s count will update to be more accurate and if the page only shows “results X through Y of Z,” you can use those numbers to get a good idea of how many truly unique links you’ve got.

There you have it. According to Rand, you can get the best results by going to http://search.yahoo.com and using the link: or linkdomain: commands to get the most accurate link counts for any url you want to research links for.

Pearl Jam on Google Video

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

I just read this post on the Google blog, Attention all Pearl Jam fans, and man was I surprised. It essentially says that Pearl Jam has a new video for “Life Wasted” up on Google Video. To me, this is very exciting, and it says a lot about Pearl Jam and their philosophy when it comes to putting their fans first.

I love Pearl Jam. I have been a fan since their first CD, “Ten,” came out back in 1991. It seems wierd to think that was 15 years ago. I even got to see them in concert back in 1998. Anyway, I got their new CD the week it came out, and it rules. It is so great, and it puts what is accepted as music today to shame. It looks to be a good year for this, as the Chili Peppers also released a new CD that totally rocks.

Well, this may not be very related to SEO, but I had to mention it and throw some links in as well. You can find the “Life Wasted” video here and the Official Pearl Jam site here.

Google Approves of IP Delivery

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

Google’s Matt Cutts: The Big Interview by Mike Grehan over at ClickZ has 2 interviews with Matt Cutts. Mike Grehan asks some great questions here for Google’s resident chief spam warrior. Mike published some of what Matt had to say in the article, but I recommend downloading and listening to the full audio of both. There is some great information in there.

One of the things that Matt said in the interview that I have not heard anyone talk about is Google’s policy on IP delivery. In the interview, Matt essentially says that cloaking is against Google’s webmaster guidelines but IP delivery is not. This is something that I personally have not heard before from Google. What does all this mean exactly? Well, let’s look at what Matt is talking about.

Cloaking is defined as having a script on your web site that can differentiate between a user and a search engine bot. When the script detects a search engine bot visiting the site, it will serve content that is different than the content it would normally deliver to a user. Search engine spammers have used this technique in the past to serve pages stuffed with keywords and links created specifically for search engines, but that users would not approve of, in order to gain undeserved rankings in the search engines. This practice has long been known to seo’s as something that can get you banned from most search engines.

IP delivery is different, however. IP delivery is serving different content to the user based on the IP address of the user. Many web sites engage in this practice including Google, according to Matt. Google is saying that this practice is acceptable under their webmaster guidelines. I think this is a good thing for webmasters who may have been afraid to do this for fear of being banned in the search engines.

Update: I just found a post about this on SEO Roundtable talking about this issue last month. It turns out Matt posted a comment on his blog saying the same thing he says in his interview. Here is a quote.

IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address.
Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.

IP delivery includes things like “users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr”. This is fine–even Google does this.

It’s when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebot that you start to get in trouble, because that’s cloaking. In the example above, cloaking would be “if a user is from Googlelandia, they get sent to our Google-only optimized text pages.”

So IP delivery is fine, but don’t do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

What does this mean for webmasters? Well, I’m not sure how you could use this to benefit your users. But, I may post about this in the future on how you can use IP delivery to help you improve your overall user experience for your web site.

RSS Feeds Out of Control

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

I now have 52 feeds and counting which I am reading daily in Bloglines. And I am adding more everyday. There is so much great content out there. I have to admit I love reading all these feeds, but it is becoming very time consuming! How about you? How many feeds are you reading everyday?

Yahoo! Redesign

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

As you may have heard, Yahoo! announced that they are redesigning their site. While they have not replaced the current site yet, they have allowed everyone to see it. See the Yahoo! redesign at this link.

Sadly, my main complaint is that it supports IE 6 and Firefox 1.5 but not Safari. I suspect they are using a lot of Javascript and/or AJAX. Safari doesn’t support some Javascript dependent features, such as AJAX.

I actually really like the redesign. It is about time for an update. The current design is optimized for 800 x 600 screen dimensions. What more do I need to say? Actually, now that MSN Search is being replaced by Live.com and Ask recently underwent a huge makeover/rebranding, I think Google should follow suit. Who’s with me?

Well, I hope you like Yahoo’s new look. Check it out, and let me know what you think. I’m sure now that they have announced it, it should be live before too long.

Strange Google Error?

Posted on by Jonathan Kemp

I received this message while trying to access Google from work all day.

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.
To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:

Did anyone else experience this or was it just me? It happend on Mac and PC across every browser I tried. As you can see from the message, it required me to type in random characters from an image to access the page. Every time I did it would let me in, then after a while I would try again and get the same message. Weird.

One thing though, I usually accessed the Google personalized homepage when I received the error, but when I went to Google.com the error persisted.