Next year promises to be an exciting time for us at GILL Media. We’re expanding beyond strategic internet marketing via SEO and PPC. Look for full fledged social media marketing, targeted email, video and more. Visit GILL Media regularly in the new year to watch these developments unfold!

Like many people, I look up things on Wikipedia every day. Oh, I don’t always trust what I read, but then again, I’d never make it my sole source for serious research either. The fact that it’s one of my top casual destinations underlines its importance in strategic search engine optimization. Of course Google and Wikipedia are both well aware that Wikipedia is some of the most valuable SEO real estate due to both raw popularity, and Google’s tendency to up-rank Wikipedia pages . . . well, just because. Every SEO analyst has a story of a client who had trouble cracking the top because Google saw fit to chuck an obscure Wikipedia stub up to #1.

One of the things we take very seriously at GILL Media is our duty to represent a client’s business according to their wishes. This is one of the hard rules of our strategic search engine optimization method. It’s a challenge, too, because page content and blog posts are elements of a stream, not static artifacts. They need to be regularly expanded, updated and adapted to traffic fluctuations, ranking changes and other new conditions.

Special thanks to Geoland.org and Giorgos K. for the opportunity to guest write Chrome versus PPC: What is Google Thinking?

One of the roots of a successful search engine optimization strategy is new content, filled with keywords that aren’t forced, links that fit keywords and most of all, original content that people are interested in reading. It may seem weird to say this after a bit of a hiatus (sorry - I’ve been very busy!) but consistency is the key. Nothing turns people off your site like a blog that hasn’t been updated in ages. People often start blogging with gusto but lose interest before they have a chance to build traffic. Given that Google has first hand experience with dead blogs in the form of thousands of moribund Blogspot accounts, you should bank on their algorithm being smart enough to penalize blogs that look abandoned.

Look ahead if you will - to the future! We’ll all wear silver jumpsuits and drive teardrop-shaped flying cars. These will be polished to a reflective sheen by our robot butlers. That’s cool, but as an SEO guy I have to ask: “SEO is changing every day, so what will I be doing to pay for my flying car and faithful robot butler in say, ten years’ time?”

Read the title. What does it mean? “Vertical marketing” is a response to an increasing trend toward niche searches and finely divided communities. Vertical markets have always existed, of course. Not a lot of people need pelagic hydraulic fluids, for example. (In fact, even though I toured the linked site, I’m still not 100% sure what they are!) Increasingly, natural vertical markets are being joined by niches that have been “verticalized” by the evolving nature of searches and communities.

Graywolf’s article on the how Google gives bad Wikipedia pages privilege got me thinking. So did Demerzel’s “Future of Google Search Results.” When I’m analyzing the SERPs for a specific keyword I increasingly note that Wikipedia’s hogging the first position, even its doesn’t really have much to say. Youtube’s up there as well. That’s cool for casual searches, but when someone’s looking for serious information, 90% of the time Youtube’s going to be a bit too wacky for the job.

I’ve written a guest article on Five Steps to Successful Niche Marketing for the folks at Hoover Web Design. Check it out!