Well guys, gals, and gobblers– it’s just about that magical time of year again. A time when dinner means an eight hour feast, commencing dinner at 1 in the afternoon is defensibly the norm, and wearing sweatpants (or anything with an elastic waistband) to the dinner table is not only socially acceptable, but pretty much a prerequisite.

Yes! Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and while the shining star of this holiday is often a glistening turkey surrounded by a cornucopia of side dishes, both savory and sweet, it’s always important to remember the reason for the season… you know… giving thanks, and stuff like that.

…Because those things special enough to give thanks for? They stick around way longer than whatever sumptuous Turkey Day food you just spooned a third helping of (shhh, I won’t tell).

At aimClear, we have a ton to be thankful for this year. We got a beautiful new home. We brought on new members to our online marketing team. We’ve also got a lot to be thankful for as individuals, and we know our friends do, too. In the spirit of the whole mushy-gushy-fun flowing full-force this week, we hit the tweet-streets to see what you’re thankful for. Some responses were truly heartwarming. Others will snarktastic. All were genuine. Read on for the lovin’-goodness.

(I made the blog post, so I get to include a photo of my cat. I don’t make the rules, I’m just the Publication Manager.)

Happy Thanksgiving to all, and to all, a good night!

Post image credit: joanna8555

I’ve recently had two transcendent experiences to further frame my now nearly 20-year career as an online marketer. First, I essentially stepped away from aimClear’s offices in Duluth and Saint Paul for 6 months to write a book about Facebook Ads. Then, literally as the book was completed, I had heart damage fixed. During cancer treatment over five years ago, my aortic valve was seriously impacted by chemo and radiation. Both the book project and open-heart surgery took me away from my decades-long daily study of SEO for weeks at a time. Both experiences turned out really well, were essential and deep, made aimClear an even better company, and provided me with magnificent perspective I would not have realized by other less extreme experiences.

Any CEO, whose company grows over five years from only him to approaching 20 souls, needs to trust the team. I knew aimClear was totally cool because now, these years later, we’ve got an office full of brilliant SEO brainy-types who practice state-of-the-art social, PR, SEO, PPC mashup strategies and tactics with vigor, wit and thought leadership. After each chunk of time away, the team briefed me so I never got personally very far out of sync with SEO changes. From daily vicissitudes in Facebook, YouTube template changes to Google’s +1, I asked for and received comprehensive studies from our team whenever anything important evolved. Still, being away from my beloved SEO study broke my heart. Well, it was broken already. The whole thing was very ironic.

Still, temporarily stepping aside made me a much better marketer. The unexpected silver lining was that constantly returning to SEO news tuned out to be a bit like perspective gained by a lonely parent who rediscovers his children after weeks away at summer vacation camp. Though I was (truly) stunned at how significantly SEO had changed each block of time away, not too much had changed at all.

In fact now that I think about it, not much has not changed at all since the days of “Fetch,” “Archie” and my hot little 14.4k Modem (V.32bis) (2400 baud) modem. Heck, not much of marketing’s essence has changed for hundreds of years. As I wrote Killer Facebook Ads, the book became much more about marketing, beyond just Facebook Ads.  After completing the book, the sabbatical from the daily SEO grind to repair my heart gave me some unpressured time to assimilate things, to think and I felt inspired to see things clearer than before. SEO is ever new and barely ever changes. Long Live SEO! This is the first installment of two, the second half of which will be published later this week.

1. SEO Is About Operating On Brand Quality, Not Just Algorithmic Discoverability
Sure: tags, shares, CMS structure and links are critical, but it takes an awesome new product to overtake an established brand. Customers don’t buy tags and shares. They purchase products that work and services that solve needs. Links and shares come from creating wonderful products, promoting the products, and finding customers who care. Just because it’s “SEO” does not mean the fundamental precepts of marketing are any different then they have ever been. SEO is a marketing channel tactic, not a strategy.

Marketers like to get angry because search engines seem to give established brands big breaks. Yep, it sure is hard for new brands to break through. Dude, it should be that way. The reason search engines make it hard for new brands is because awesome new brands are actually pretty rare. Arguably, it should be hard to break through. It’s always been this way. I heard from my mentors that in 1965, as a ma’ and pa’ appliance shop, it was pretty darned hard to take on Sears®, selling washing machines and stoves in Minneapolis neighborhoods, too. Things really have not changed very much in the Internet age.

It’s just that now entitled SEO practitioners complain, spoiled by the long lost days when, for just a minute in history, mediocre products could win by algorithmic manipulation. You know what? Get over it!

The timeless marketing axiom is that you can’t wrap a turd up in a bow and expect customers to keep buying the product. Mastering the algorithm in any organic era or publishing environment won’t fix a terrible product, even after prominence is gained. Lies are discovered and half-truths backfire. Having access to a printing press, fax machine, email or Facebook Page could never help if the product sucks. The only real wealth to be gained is the creation of valuable brands, timing, hard work and luck. After these attributes, organic prominence comes next. “Real” SEO is about understanding the imperative need to nurture the evolution of brand equity based on marketplace feedback.

Yes, SEO is about discoverability without paying the engine, but sure-footed SEO marketing starts with having awesome products that customers want. Truly great marketers will be truly great in any era and transcend the channel of the day. A brand can buy any flavor-of-the-month channel distribution expertise. It’s much harder to develop fabulous ideas and differentiating creative concepts that highlight and flatter the true value that makes a brand, new or otherwise, a perfect match for the community’s needs.

2. SEO Without Research Is Like The Tin Man, A Body With No Heart
Content without understanding what customers want is a little like peeing in the wind with your eyes shut. It’s possible to thread the needle in a vacuum, but success without research seems to be very rare. The “caterer” who discovers the keyword “gourmet food delivery Manhattan” has found a market segment that is potentially product defining. The Facebook community manager who discovers 12,630 users who are fans of a certain complimentary website have a place to go, to hang out, network and make new friends.

In the old days we called hotel room gatherings to decide on logo colors, marketing message “focus groups,” and Neilson used survey books. Now, from search to social, we have more empirical methods to understand what customers want and what words they use to express certain things or intentions. It’s a fine new age of data-driven market research. Research is the all-knowing king and content is the all-powerful queen sitting equally at his side.

3. Great SEO Content Is The Natural Result Of Authentic Value
Now that “liking,” “sharing,” rebroadcasting and other social signals have joined links, semantics and trust as primary SEO elements, there’s a lot of talk amongst marketers that recurrent and brilliant content to traffic and promote is essential. As it happens, this reality has been the same for centuries.

Brands win when they start with the principle questions:

• “What must we give our customers to demystify the process, preemptively remove barriers, and support the process of becoming and being our customers?”
• “What can we leave behind for potential customers that will clearly incent them to return and buy?”
• “Are we willing to give until it hurts?”
• “Are we as marketers willing to create content that teaches customers to fish, without giving away the fish bucket?”
• “How can we pay it forward with new customers to keep their faith and loyalty?”

These truths have nothing to do with SEO. Soft, magnanimous and benevolent touches are immortal when it comes to content.

4. Understanding Circulation Is Key
When it comes to the distribution of content, broadcast and rebroadcast, adopt early and adapt often. Distribution paradigms change daily. Present-day distribution networks, how they piggyback and dovetail, are the dominant concept to stay current with and master. Facing the brutal reality of what you do and don’t know about how content circulates amongst people is fundamental. This applies not only search engines themselves, but components of user behavior that search engines see as signals. Who saw tweets coming as important social signals to search engines? To those early adopters who invested time in building huge networks of authentic Twitter friends… go the spoils.

However, make no mistake. The distributed mashup of search and social is not new, nor is the notion of word of mouth circulation effecting brand “prominence.” SEO has always been social. From banks to beauty parlors, humans have always been recommendation “engines” propagating clues. It’s just that these days, it’s much easier for search engines to measure social and the sampling is finally enormous enough for databases of clues to be reliable.

Whether it was five women lawyers chattering between 1997 board meetings about how “cool” the new paper magazine is or 2,024,805 folks who like American Express on Facebook today, SEO has always been about word of mouth propagating brands. It should come as no surprise that as humans have flocked to social, search engines use the data to signal importance of content in SERPs. The new ecosystem of social media channels represents the human-sampled distribution channels of the day. Then or now, be it by little black book or PRWeb, keeping up to speed on distribution matters.

Looking To Part Two
The more SEO changes, the more it stays the same. Later this week, we’ll publish The Heart Of SEO: 8 Everlasting Truths Part-Two. Until then, happy optimization, and it’s great to be back!

iceteaimages – Fotolia.com

I started aimClear on the heels of surviving Lymphoma stage 3B, still handling the effects of chemo and radiation. As a result, aimClear was born to a person ready to embrace the joy of life and work.  That was four years ago. Every day I go to work with a invaluable combination of excitement, awe, and fear.

Upon aimClear’s recent and humbling nomination for a respected regional award, I was invited to share tips with other entrepreneurs growing their businesses. I’ve been feeling a bit introspective about how we’ve done things here,  because it’s been quite a ride as our company scaled from just me to 14 people in a little over four years. Here’s what comes to mind, in 20/20 hindsight, as keys to growing aimClear. I learned so much from cancer.

1- Achieve consensus for new hires amongst all employees, even if it means not hiring candidates the CEO believes to be qualified. Choose employees you love to be around. Never hire at the rate you can get work. Take work at the speed you can hire amazing people.  There is no reason to ever go to work with people you don’t like. Matt, Manny, Merry, Lauren, Alyssa, Kathy, Joe W., Lindsay, Molly, Erica, Joe D., Laura and Mia… you’re amazing. You blow my mind every day and we are so lucky to have you.

2- Place the highest emphasis on culture and creating an atmosphere of respect, love, dignity, human rights, accountability, and natural consequences. Why accept less?

Plans for aimClear’s New Space, 6000 Sq Feet

3- The executive team should work for the employees, not the other way around. Nurture others as you expect the universe to nurture you.

4- Achieve buy-in for the financial and product development missions. Everyone needs to be on the same page, determined, and committed to the process.

5- Be totally willing to change your mind in light of feedback from employees and customers. Face the actual odds. Kick butt.

6- Apologize when you are wrong, and don’t give ground when you are right. I say I’m sorry often. I’m not co-dependent when I think I’m right. Keep the slate clean with everyone as if there is not another chance tomorrow. Remember that there will be another chance tomorrow.

7- Invest in each employee’s personal brand to the greatest extent possible.  This is huge. Back promises up with action, training and money. In 2011, five aimClear team members will have spoken at 15+ advanced international online marketing conferences including SES, SMX, PubCon, International Search Summit, Media Post Insider Search Summit, OMMA Global, MediaBistro and DMA. Cities include three New York appearances, four in San Francisco, Sydney, Australia, London, Las Vegas, Seattle, Chicago, Park City, Utah, and numerous others. It’s important to embrace opportunities as if they are unique and priceless. 

8- Pay it forward. In the technology space, daily training is crucial. A person can’t live unless their mind is somehow active.

9- Be conservative financially and hire employees who compliment your weaknesses. Be brutal in your assessment of your weaknesses. It’s completely essential to understand your own vulnerabilities.

10- Invest in thought-leadership and share until it hurts. In Q1 2011, we’ve devoted over 250 hours to scientific studies of YouTube, Bing and Google, which resulted in marketing insights, literally, no other company in the world knew. We gave it away. Five aimClear employees contribute to major trade publications including SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, SearchEngineRoundTable and BruceClay Blog.

11- Reach as high as possible. aimClear Blog is decorated including stints as Technorati Top 100 Business Blogs & Top 50 SEO Blogs. The blog has status as an AdAge Power 150 publication, a consensus measure of the best online marketing blogs in the world. PRWeb cited aimClear Blog as a top 25 PR blog and Cision ACB as a top10 social media blog. We’ve published over 600 articles, the publication is over 3,000 pages, and we attract web visitors from all over the world.

12- Understand that luck and the actions of others have as great an impact on the outcome as any personal action. Know that personal action can manufacture luck.

13- Never allow customers or vendors to treat your employees badly. If they do, fire them. Always have your employee’s backs. In the technology business, you can’t have customers unable to understand and implement your team’s recommendations. Don’t accept anything that drains your life’s energy.

14- Take jobs you can succeed at and don’t kid yourself by taking jobs you can’t win just for the cash. Life is too short.

15- Don’t try to be something your not. A company has to be aimClear’s size before it’s reasonable to take on areas of expertise not core to the founders. Teach your employees what you personally know, slowly expanding the knowledge base with the addition of specialized employees.  Pass your knowledge on to the next generation, unselfishly.

16- Manage like you are dying. Be determined to leave this earth with all emotional and personal ledgers even.

Earlier today, we published the second half of 44 Must-See Internet Marketing Conference Speakers– a two-part blog post that paid tribute to industry luminaries who color the conference landscape pretty with smarts, sass, and everything in between. We believe search marketers are among the most beautiful people in the world, and that mini-series was one way to give back to those who give it their all. We also believe that there’s two sides to the conference-speaker-coin, and not everything can be all sunshine and pussy cats…

Fueled by what may have been but a playful suggestion from our friend @ToddMintz, @aimClear typed a tweet, lit a match and ignited a lightning-speed cyber-chat that moved so fast it was hardto keep up. Frankly, I’m surprised didn’t take down the server. Or become a trending topic. But… what was the topic?

What you, yes you, positively hate in conference speakers.

Mumbling, plugging, dishing out old news like it’s hot sh*t– the responses spanned the spectrum. The convo swayed back to admirable speaker qualities, then back to pet peeves– each response more colorful than the last. We wanted to capture the moment and share it here.

So… without further adieu, the unanticipated alien-third-arm of this Internet Marketing Conference Speaker series, 483 Things The World Loves & Hates About Internet Marketing Conference Speakers. (Well, it seemed like 483. Okay, shameless clickbait…)

The totally impromptu thirty-seven minute thread garnered more than five dozen responses. It spawned this blog post. It even made us some new friends. Best. Lunch break. Ever.

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All this talk of speaking has us excited for our Q1 conference calendar. First stop is SMX West….will we see you there?

When it comes to the quaint custom of #FollowFriday, I often wish that tweeps’ recommendations came with explanations, speaking to why I should follow their friends.  In that spirit, this post offers my #FollowFriday recommendations for today, Sara Holoubek and Andrew Ecklund, with explanations of why I enjoy their tweets. 

It’s the tiny little social media moments that fill me up as a marketer. I feel them like music, with emotions, and among our friends. Earlier this week a chance exchange, while working on client things, made me crack a wry smile. Thanks to friends @sarita and @aeklund. They’re my #FollowFriday, My #FF Tricked Out Tweet Exchange of the Week, Thanks @sarita & @aeklund , Please Retweet .

Below we’ve posted the exchange in text. For the uninitiated, let me decode:

First, I retweeted @SocialNetDaily’s tweet of @beebow’s popular post:
Classic Post RT @SocialNetDaily: Why Your 4,243,564 #Twitter Followers Don’t Mean Jack http://ow.ly/3ni3K (via @aimclear)

Then my friend Andrew Ecklund jumped in, with insightful perspective on Dave Mathews:
“@aimclear Marty, arguably Dave Matthews doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who’d tweet. His 822,000 are actual fans. Wow though.”

Next my friend Sara Holoubek caught my eye with an uber-intellectual retweet:
RT @susanmcp1: “Old structures don’t work, but the new structures aren’t quite set up yet. What replaces them?” Andrew Keen #pdfleaks

Which I retweeted:
“So Sweet RT @sarita: “Old structures don’t work, but the new structures aren’t quite set up yet. What replaces them?” Andrew Keen #pdfleaks”

So That’s why I’m recommending my friends today. I hope you enjoy following @sarita and @aeklund. See ya’ next week .

Early this morning, as we made our way down the The St. Regis Deer Valley Hotel’s scenic funicular to begin the journey home, I was moved  by  Park City Utah’s stunning mountain terrain by dawn’s snowy light.  The romantic mood was fitting, especially given my gratitude for the experience of speaking yesterday at  MediaPost’s prestigious Search Insider Summit. I’ve been traveling a lot folks, so it takes a bit more right now to get me emotional.  #MPSIS turned out to be a perfectly fitting wrap to this year’s intensive conference travel schedule and an inspiration.

The session content, venue amenities and authentic networking opportunities were all-the-way first class, a surprise treat for a road weary and knowledge-thirsty guy like me.  Thanks to Programming Chair, Laurie Sullivan, Senior Writer and Columnist for MediaPost Communications for the invitation to speak and for sequencing such stimulating sessions.  Rock on Laurie!

This CRJ700 is 34,00 feet now, a United flight home by way of Chicago. As our readers know, I am privileged to travel all over the world each year to speak at SMX, SES, PubCon, International Search Summit,  DMA, BlueGlass and other events.  The opportunity to interact with thought-leading speakers and enthusiastic attendees is surely a favorite aspect of being aimClear’s president.  I love our community’s people, the exotic locales, sharing and learning with and from the best.

From Sydney to Seattle, New York to London, Minneapolis, Chicago, ‘Vegas and San Francisco, this year I’ve  gotten to know so many amazing individuals and companies.  Yet, surprisingly there were few familiar faces in the conference hall amongst speakers and audience at Search Insider Summit.  This realization in itself was exciting and humbling all at once, real tonic for the soul. I felt so at home, somehow yet again. No matter what we do or accomplish in life, it is only a small fraction of life yet to be lived and new experiences ahead.

#MPSIS s an upper management focused conclave, a  terrific crucible in which to meet intriguing new friends and connect with potential clients, agency-partners and vendors. The setting couldn’t be finer.  The St. Regis is a spectacular hotel, steeped in regal European influenced ambiance and 5-star service. Believe me, I’m adding #MPSIS to the annual must-attend list

MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit invites, “the best minds in the search industry” together to share cutting edge tips, tactics, anecdotes and networking, “in a think-tank environment.” There’s a focus on, “exploring new technology, strategies and tactics for effective search marketing campaigns.”

My free-wheeling panel addressed the evolution of social signals that affect search engine placement and other visibility. The Moderator was friend and industry veteran Elisabeth Osmeloski, Managing Editor of Search Engine Land. We were joined by Jeff MacGurn, Senior Manager of Covario, Kristine Segrist, Search Managing Director of MEC Interaction and Dave Tan, Vice President of Innovation, Product Development & Content Solutions for Resolution Media.

One is Sliver & The Other Is Gold
aimClear has always believed that the best marketing happens among friends, who care about the outcome for each other.  There have been many times that a conference-friend-made, turned into a client weeks, months or even years later.

I’ve never been to any event where the exchange of business cards felt so immediately personal and deep, like we both knew that next week we’d certainly continue the conversation towards the real possibility of friendship and working together… sooner rather than later.

MediaPost caps attendance at the Summits to safeguard that the aggregate experience is, “intimate, productive and highly useful.” Now I understand why.Though I’m obviously an outgoing person, I actually shy away from most canned networking events and parties…not so at Insider Search Summit. Last night I was sad to see the evening end.

We’re landing now, so I’ll conclude. Thanks to new friends and colleagues made at Search Insider Summit. I’ll be calling on Monday to continue the conversation. You know who you are .  Safe travels…

Last October during a mundane office cleaning, the aimClear team happened upon an epically rad relic of the 80′s… a black & white  36×48 inch relic, to be more precise. Publication of  The Lost Marty Weintraub Rockstar Pictures gave new meaning to the tongue and cheek “PPC rockstar” and “Social Media rockstar” verbiage that had been lobbed at Marty in the past.

Sure, that luscious head of tousled black waves, deep, searching eyes and mysterious, pouting lips left tech lovers and respected industry experts gaping… but they also left us wondering… just what did Marty and The Shout! sound like?

We’re titillated to announce we’ve made another boss finding, so to speak… behold, the funkalicious glam rock that is the Lost Marty Weintraub Rockstar Video Footage.

Click on a time below to jump directly to footage of Marty:

• 0:21
• 1:11
• 1:56
• 3:49
• 3:57

The disdain on their faces is usually palpable.  I’ve been experiencing subtle Facebook derision from mainstream SEOs now for two years. Last week’s edition was a conversation with Greg Boser, President and CEO – 3 Dog Media, a new friend and brilliant speaker on the SMX Search Marketing Conference series circuit.

Dude is a salty-dog SEO genius. However, as we each shared what we were planning to discuss with Australian conference attendees, I had barely started when Greg made it clear, with nary a word, that Facebook demographic segments are a bunch of bullshit.  He actually squinted when I referred to Facebook “organic” as “SEO.” Go figure…

I didn’t take it personally. I never do.  Lots of SEOs have shot me similar vibes. Greg is representative of a generation of classic SEOs pioneers ranging from Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray, Aaron Wall to Todd Friesen, Andy Beard, Mike Grehan & Bruce Clay. Even PPC gurus like Andrew Goodman have dutifully curled their lips at me whilst I blissfully evangelized Facebook.

Don’t hate ‘em for that,  FB marketing fans. Not many in our industry were taking Facebook seriously compared to Google in 2007.  At that point I was busy blogging to (mostly) nobody with such semi-classics as Hail Mary Facebook Ads Saved Christmas and Does Facebook Social PPC Belong at Search Marketing Conferences. In 2008 when the late FB product Lexicon made me publicly giddy for all its demographic research prowess, it seemed like barely anybody cared.

Hey All You Dudes, now Facebook is up yer’ snoots. Like it our not, Facebook organic is SEO.

The SEO Pie Is Bigger Now
Look, Google is a channel not a strategy-a place where we market to users asking specific questions by their typing in a box and pressing “submit.”  For the last decade organic and paid “search” have ruled the roost.  Google is the last search-super power standing, at least for now. The art and science of so-called “SEO” has always been about prominence in search engines. Thus our industry’s true moniker was born. SEM means search engine marketing.

Marketers were first drawn to social media centering on participation’s propensity to index in engines’ organic SERPs (search engine results pages).  SEOs and reputation managers have been playing a social profile’s tendency to index in organic SERPs for years now. That’s because using social media profiles for SEO is low hanging fruit. In  those early days conversational marketers didn’t quite have enough volume of users. The “inventory,” as represented by hundreds of millions of fanatical users, was  somewhere else… asking questions of search engines.  Now there are 400 million people in Facebook just hanging out.

SEO Just Grew Another Head
Enter Facebook. The statistics are mind-boggling.  Google is no longer the undisputed king of American traffic, engagement and loyalty.  Over coming weeks and months, we’ll all hear about “best practices this” or “research that” for optimizing fan pages, events, people (yep, optimized people), groups, status updates, etc… Facebook is, like, half the Internet.  Ironically, we have reasonable cause to believe that, on a number of levels, FB shows tremendous promise in the local space… a nut no search engine has ever effectively cracked.

Meanwhile, third parties ranging from Yelp, Yahoo! Mail and YouTube all clamor like rats to grab a piece of the 400 million fanatical user-mashup pie.  Dial in a heaping doseof incestuous-fan page-status-update-real-time-searches indexing in engines, and there’s really a case to be made that Facebook-organic is SEO too, boys and girls.

Adding stew to the soup, Facebook has blown the hell out of SEO by way of these insidious and lovely social plugins.  Marketers now must concern themselves with research-driven usage of the social participation channels, without being full of shit. That sounds a like classic SEO to me .

Privacy Matters
Most Facebook users probably don’t know that clicking on an ad in the right hand sidebar easily results in our knowing exactly who they are, their progression within our website’s content and other stunning, albeit intrusive, behavioral insights. Your mom  doesn’t know that participating on websites mashed up with Facebook Social Plugs results in reveals her booty of interests for the entire world to see.

Personally I hate Facebook for these reasons. I only use the service to mirror restaurant-food-picture-from-around-the-world-tweets to my family and a few friends. I think privacy features are way too complicated for the average user.  It’s possible to clamp down the privacy settings as deeply restricted as possible, and still expose some profile attributes to complete strangers.

Reciprocally, ethical marketers like us can mine that data and leverage it for friending, leads, sales and other KPIs (key performance indicators). Dude, we’re all for privacy but if users are going to give us this data, we’re going to respectfully market to them. The problem is with affiliate dickheads who make hay on the backs of unsuspecting users.   It’s funny to think of Matt Cutts and other Google engineers quitting Facebook publicly. Really, who gives a shit? Where the rubber meets the road is that YouTube uses Facebook Share Buttons. YouTube is owned by Google. Go figure….

SEO Means Any Attainable Organic Search Result, Independent of a Specific Channel.

Facebook is an ecosystem sporting both organic contextual (fan pages, events, groups, profiles, apps’ & other participatory nodes) and paid contextual (Facebook PPC, MS brokered ads & Google Content Network). Organic nodes are fueled by participation and whole-hearted adoption of Facebook tools to organize a sharing community of real people.  Paid channels are all about mining extremely personal user attributes and serving highly-focused walk-by traffic.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t just for search engines. The moniker has grown to mean much more. SEO means optimizing content that appears any place people hang out.  However, if you must have that “search-in-a-box” mentality, simply start with  Facebook’s internal search engine focused on people, fan pages, apps, etc… greet that query with prominence advised by research. That’s SEO.

Then, get used to the idea of optimization of organic contextual.  There are so many people walking by so much content in Facebook that valuable collateral interrupt-marketing can be highly targeted and made more compelling by “SEO.” Trust me dude, the whole world is going to be making sure their events and fan pages are “optimized” soon enough.

Say it’s not really SEO. Say it’s called mango chutney IT botany. Whatever… just don’t call me late for dinner.  There’s little time for semantic disagreements amongst pundits. SEO only focused on Google will be relegated to being SEO for half the Internet. Even so, Facebook organic contextual will index more in traditional search engines as the social graph advises those precious Google & Bing algorithms. The question begs to be asked: What the hell is SEO now anyway?

Additional Resources:

• Facebook Internal Search: SEO & Ranking Hacks
• 10 SEO Tips For Maximizing Facebook Visibility
• Why Facebook PPC Is Crucial For Branding & How To Sell Your Boss
• Degrees of Separation, FaceBook, Twitter & Social Distribution Networks
• How to Use Facebook Ads Reporting Without Going Insane
• Branding, Direct Response, Intent & How Search Made Us Soft

Picture “Where the Hell Did YOU Come From?” courtesy of Lauren Litwinka (@beebow)

Power girl on the prowl…