Guest Post By: Victoria Fortnum, Intern

Depending on whom you talk to, an internship can mean a variety of things. To some individuals internships are a necessity – the best, and sometimes, the only way to get your foot in the door of an industry in which you wish to pursue a career. To others they are hit or miss, some companies can be great and others… well, not so much. And then there are the “extremists” who believe internships exist for the sole purpose of companies being able to take advantage of students to do the work they don’t want to do; i.e. making thousands of copies and sharpening pencils.

Thankfully, my vision of an internship is still a positive one. I have not had to make a single photocopy or sharpen any pencils, however I was teased that I was going to have to change the water cooler everyday, but that’s a whole different story. With that being said, I have been fortunate to experience a preview of the ever-changing world of Internet marketing.

When I first came to Vertical Measures, I had dabbled in social media, and thought I had a decent understanding of the evolving world of Internet marketing. Almost immediately, I found out that my “understanding” of Internet marketing, hardly even began to cover the basics. Having to figure out the difference between link building through commenting and keyword searches, developing social media releases and editing articles created one big SEO puzzle in my mind. However, with some hands on training from great coaches, individual research, and some successful and failed attempts the SEO puzzle is beginning to come together.

With this being my sixth week at Vertical Measures, I have had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects for different clients. After the caffeine kicks in, I typically begin my day working on commenting. The goal of commenting is to increase link building by engaging in a conversation with other readers over a blog or article posting. Sounds easy, huh? Well with comment monitoring, page ranks and Not Do Follow it is much more difficult and time consuming then you would think! When my eyes begin to burn from scrolling through search quarries, I tend to redirect my attention towards article editing or promotional social media releases. Article editing puts my ASU writing courses to the test, while giving me an insight on how keywords are used throughout a piece as a marketing tool. Promotional social media releases are my favorite. They are like mini press releases that reach out to bloggers and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Typically they are informal, and allow me to go back to my social media roots, developing catching tweets and postings. Depending on the day and how busy the rest of the staff is, random projects, training sessions, or team meetings may be thrown my way as well.

The variety keeps me on my toes, and away from the copy machine. With a few more months still left in my internship I look forward and am eager, to see how the puzzle develops. I do recognize however, that in this ever-changing world of Internet marketing the puzzle will never be complete.

Guest Blogger

There’s never a dull moment in the life of Arnie Kuenn. He’s preparing for a marathon of events over the next eight weeks. When Arnie isn’t looking over the shoulders of his team at Vertical Measures or writing a book, he’s speaking at industry conferences and events both locally and across the country. Up next, Social Media AZ, today September 9 at MadCap Theaters in Tempe, Ariz. Arnie will present Winning Tactics for Content Creation and Marketing. The event is expected to draw nearly 400 attendees.

Then, he’s on a plane and off to Search Marketing Expo East, October 4-6 in New York, where he will participate in a Link Building Clinic. This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their questions about link building by going live on the web to seek answers and examples. In addition, Arnie will be part of a very successful SMX Advanced panel called Show Me the Links.

On October 11^th, Arnie will speak at the ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Arnie will present amongst a variety of well known media professionals from near and far as a part of Cronkite’s fall Speaker Series.  The title of his presentation, The Future of Content in an Online World, in which he will discuss how content is king and the role that journalists, writers and marketers now play in the online world. Other presenters include former CNN anchor, Aaron Brown and KPNX Channel 12 anchors, Lin Sue Cooney and Mark Curtis.

Next, it’s off to Baltimore for the Power of eMarketing Conference, October 20-21, at which Arnie, along with Grant Eckert of Harte-Hanksm, will present a Search Marketing Panel and Interactive Discussion Workshop.

With little time to rest, Arnie is on a flight to Las Vegas for PubCon 2010, November 8-11. PubCon is one of the most anticipated search and social media expos of the year. Arnie, along with Tim Ash and Brian Combs, will give live site reviews for session attendees. And last, but not least, Arnie will participate on a panel, Real World Winning Tactics for Content Creation and Marketing, along with other content experts as they share their methods of how to keep the flow of keyword-rich and relevant content going.

Whew! I’m exhausted just thinking about all of this. But, Arnie’s a pro and I’m sure he’ll make this all look easy. I don’t doubt that the Vertical Measures team will create some interesting murals while Arnie is away. We never fail to impress the boss with our artistic skills. If you’re in any of these cities, be sure to check out these great conferences and events and wish our fearless leader, Arnie Kuenn, good luck!

Sarah Moraes

Sarah Moraes, Marketing Manager, heads the tactical planning and implementation of cross-platform marketing activities for Vertical Measures including; blogging, social media marketing, webinars, content marketing, email marketing and promotions. In addition, she published the Local Search Marketing for Business How-To-Guide, a part of the Vertical Measures How-To-Guide Series.

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As my co-workers James Constable, and Jason Hendricks prepare for this month’s Vertical Measures webinar scheduled “Onsite SEO: Building a Solid Foundation for Your Website,” scheduled to take place on Thursday, August 12 at 11:30 a.m. EST (8:30 a.m. PST, 10:30 a.m. CST) there has been a good amount of discussion on performing site audits. Luckily, I knew just the guy to ask! If you aren’t familiar with Alan Bleiwess,of Search Marketing Wisdom you should check him out. He is well known in the industry for his search engine optimization audits, consulting, blogging and speaks regularly on the topic.

Elise Redlin-Cook: What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

Alan Bleiweiss: Okay – I’ll play that game.  Because I always appreciate the opportunity to slap down all those “it’s all links” people out there… Here’s the low-down dirty little secret that apparently only some of us in the industry know.

Create a healthy organizational structure to contain your site.  Pick the best keyword phrases.  Properly seed the site accordingly.  Strategically embed links throughout the site to pages you want to drive more authority to, and from those pages, out to high quality related content.  Obtain high quality links into those pages.  But here’s where it gets complicated.

When you do all that, always, ALWAYS be sure that every single step you take, every single action, is based on your first having put yourself into the minds of site visitors AND site owners AND site marketers AND site developers AND site designers, AND site database/content managers…   You absolutely, without fail, must remember and factor in every single one of these if you truly want a site that will not only be highly optimized today, but that will stand the test of time.  Regardless of whether Google remains dominant or not.  Regardless of what other signals you’ll have to get from social media or tomorrow’s next great medium.

Why? Because that’s the web.  It’s the heart and soul of the web.  No matter how it changes and evolves, the core premise will always be the foundation from which all else operates and connects.  At least that’s the way it will be for the next 10 years.  Because that’s how long it would take for something new to come along that has the chops to replace the web as it’s existed for 15 years.

Elise: So, what are the main tools that you use in your SEO Site Audits?

Alan: Until this year, I only ever used Excel and performed all my work manually.  The theory was, I’m getting $125 an hour or $150 an hour to do this work, (or half to 3/4 that rate for agencies) so why not take the time?  As I’ve shifted my business so that I’m spending less time on client work and more time blogging, ranting and attending conferences, and as I’ve shifted to more and more enterprise scale clients, I’ve both raised my rates and begun testing a number of tools for all aspects of my work.  So far, I’ve found that the SEOBook Rank Checker plug-in for Firefox and the SEOMoz Open Site Explorer are both excellent tools and now use them religiously.  And of course, I still use Excel.  #Duh

Elise: What are the biggest obstacles that you face in getting clients and/or developers to execute your action plan?

Alan: Now that 80% of my audit work is for sites involving thousands of pages or tens of thousands of pages, the single biggest obstacle I face is where clients have limited budgets or staff, and when they get one of my audits and find out that there’s going to be 50, 100, or 250 hours of work required, they feel overwhelmed, because they had been hoping for quick fix solutions.

Another common obstacle I see comes from the fact that most of my clients are large corporations, such as financial institutions and my contact has to get internal buy-in from other departments or divisions.  So for example, if my contact is in marketing, they have to deal with political issues inside the company because perhaps the IT staff have a “protect our jobs” or a “we can’t do that” strangle-hold on anything to do with code-level site changes.

Elise: What advice would you give to those that are new to SEO and lack the 15 years of knowledge, experience, and hindsight that you possess?

Alan: Hire me as your go-to resource.   no – seriously – the first couple projects I tried to optimize ended up completely lost organically because I took on extremely competitive markets and I had no clue what was involved.

So I’d say start with a scale you can truly master and move up from there.  Someone that doesn’t have the depth and breadth of knowledge I happen to have might very well need to focus initially on low hanging fruit- the mom & pop sites, sites that have a purely local  geo-targeted focus.  And for goodness sake, please spend every free waking moment of your existence teaching yourself more and more.  Build on what you know.  Don’t stop learning. Test, test, test!

Elise: Could you recommend some relevant reading materials to newcomers in the field?

Alan: Sure – my SEJ column and my blog!  (Warning, my blog is NSFW!).  Gosh – there’s so much good content out there.  But it’s typically mixed in with a lot of nonsense.  So I highly recommend going to Sphinn.com and scouring the articles in your particular area of focus – and read any article that’s gotten 35, 40 or more Sphinns.  Join sites like SEOMoz or WebmasterWorld, the SEO Dojo, read SearchEngineJournal.com… Join Twitter and follow people like Kim Krause Berg, Rae Hoffman, Tony Verre, Judith Lewis, Gerald Weber, Ann Smarty, Steve Plunkett, Ann Handley, Angie Nikoleychuk , Lisa Barone (these are just a few of the 80 or so people I pay a lot of attention to – because when they say something industry related, or write about it, or recommend the writing of others, it’s a gold mine of value).   But remember- sometimes even then, it’s not valid for your unique situation, or it’s outdated. Or it’s just not true.  So test, test, test!

Elise: What inspired you to go into Search Engine Optimization? Did you follow a specific path into this field?

Alan: It was a natural progression for me.  Long before the Internet, back in the day, as I was walking to and from work both ways up hill in the snow, (yea, on Long Island we really used to get 4′ deep snow) I considered myself a facilitator of the flow of information in business.  Whether it was as a customer service rep, sales manager, office manager, a business operations manager…

I’ve been in the web consulting business since January of 95 because the 1st day I was introduced to the web, that month, in that moment, I knew the web was my future – it was like a lightning bolt of awareness that the web is the ultimate form of free flowing information.

Since then, it’s just been a matter of following my intuitive path, and always adapting to whichever newest aspect of web offerings I felt the most passionate about.  At one point, I got fried – totally burnt out on the whole consulting thing.  Went into deep depression, walked away from it all.  Tried to switch careers, ended up on food stamps rather than working at Home Depot or in some 20th century office job.  That month, it hit me – WTH was I doing?  How could I walk away from the one path that in all my adult life, had always blessed me and came effortlessly to me?  That was when I really dove back in with everything like never before.  And it’s been a magical ride ever since.

Elise: Wow, good stuff! So, do you have any exciting projects that your involved in right now that you’d like to tell us about?

Alan: You mean besides avoiding lawsuits for my rants?  Yes, I do!  I’ve become pretty well known (in my mind) for my high end audits.  Yet as much as they consistently blow customers minds, I recently recognized that if I want to take this offering even further (beyond the $250 an hour I get for my audit work now), that I’d need to change things around.  – A sea-change, if you will.  I’ve been bouncing ideas off a few very trusted friends – in the industry and in my personal life, and what keeps coming back is what I intuitively recognized on my own.   So I’ve set out on a several-month plan to evolve how i conduct audits, how I rate the sites, client’s social footprint, and their competitive landscape, and ultimately, how I present my findings to them.

I don’t have any desire at this point to go into details, however I can say this much.  I’ve devised a brand new, from scratch, 500 point scoring system for a clients web presence split out into five groups or sub-areas.  The raw score from this is converted to a uniform weighted number for each sub-area, then gets cross-balanced against the difficulty factor of their particular market.  (Did I mention how important Excel is?)

It’s still got a long way to go, however it’s already helping me to be that much more thorough in my work, and it’s already helping sort out what were previously perceived as “of equal value” recommendations.  And that’s vital, because as I said earlier, client budgets are a bitch, and I always prioritize recommendations.  The better I can be at doing that, the more success they’ll see, sooner.

Elise: I know that you do a great deal of business traveling in general. In all of the places you’ve been, where would you most like to live?

Alan: Well I’ve been to 39 States, Canada, and Europe. I’ve also lived in five States and Germany.  So I’ve gotten to experience a lot of places in terms of what feels like home.  At the moment, I’ve got the most beyond-phenomenal massage therapist / energy worker here in Marin County.  So unless she and her family relocate to Santa Monica, I’m not going to be moving any time soon.  At least not until I can afford to live within a couple blocks of the beach in Santa Monica and fly back to Marin 3 or 4 times a month, because the value I get from those sessions is that important to my well being. 

Elise: Are you driven by any great passions outside of the business arena?

Alan: Absolutely.  To always evolve.  I have such a long way to go – so many flaws and short-comings.  Yet having come from the inner sanctum of hell on earth, twice, I can’t express how much happiness and how much freedom I have achieved over the past several years with each growth step I’ve taken.  And since I have had that success, why wouldn’t I want to continue that pattern?  Life really is a blessing, if you know how to learn how to get out of your own way.  So my goal is to eventually just be the co-pilot of my life spiritually, physically, emotionally…  It’s a part-time thing now, and every precious moment that it is, well, let’s just say #WIN!

But then again – there’s always the NFL – and the fact that Arnie K., Matt S., Matt M., and Tony V. are the best guys on earth to know when it comes to smack-talk…

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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This past week, I once again had the pleasure of presenting at the Online Marketing Summit, this time in Texas! It was hot, but what I really wasn’t prepared for was the intense humidity. Despite the sweltering heat, I had a great time presenting and travelling across Texas. Along the way, I met a lot of new and interesting people and am eager to share my experiences from the three OMS events. And of course, my artistic staff at Vertical Measures created yet another mural in my office while I was away, depicting what they imagined my adventures were like in Texas. I must admit, it’s pretty accurate.

I travelled from Dallas to Austin and then to Houston to speak about Social Media for SEO and Link Building.  In this presentation, I called attention to the significance of optimizing social media profiles for search, as real-time search includes social media results.  Also, as social media links and social news links can influence your rankings, you need to be conscious of your social media presence.  But the most essential point I tried to make was for website owners to understand that once you manage a website, you are considered a publisher.  As a result, you must publish quality content that will attract and maintain visitors.  With valuable content and happy visitors, links and search ranking will follow.

During my three stops, I met a variety of people from a broad range of professions. I met some great folks in the marketing industry including: Patrick Prestriedge from Imaginuity, a Dallas website and search engine optimization company, Troy Scheer from Trance Marketing Group, an integrated inbound marketing company, and Teresa Russel from Door 24 Marketing , a realtor marketing company.  Also, I met some individuals in the small business industry including: Erin Verbeck from The Joy of Marketing, a small business marketing company, and A.J. Mistretta of Biztools.com, a company that provides small businesses with advice and resources.

Additionally, I met Sarah Eshelman of LifeSize Communications , Jeff Austin of Jeff Austin Creative, a freelance graphic design and print design artist, and Reiner Musier from Allegro Development, an energy trading and risk management software company.  Also, I had the pleasure of meeting Angelica Young of Direct Energy, an electricity and gas company, as well as Jason H. Smith from Spiceworks, a free help desk software company, and David Lineman of Click True, a pay-per-click company specializing in click fraud auditing and block.

Overall, my trip to Texas proved worthwhile. I always enjoy presenting and sharing my expertise and experiences with others interested in Internet marketing and to top it all off, I even had time to stop in San Antonio for some leisure time with my wife Andi before I flew back to Phoenix.  All in all, a very successful and enjoyable trip!

Arnie Kuenn

Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures and author of Accelerate! Content Development & Marketing to Grow Your Business Online. Vertical Measures provides search, social and content marketing services, designed to help businesses improve their online presence and obtain more traffic and conversions.
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This month’s Vertical Measures webinar, “Go Local or Go Home”, on July 15th at 11:30 a.m. EST (8:30 a.m. PST, 10:30 a.m. CST) will feature Sarah Moraes, Internet Marketing Specialist, and Jason Hendricks, SEO and Link Acquisition Specialist on our staff as they explore the busy streets of local search.

Did you know that approximately 20-40% of search queries on Google are location-based? Therefore, Local search is obviously a thriving area within the internet marketing industry and is becoming increasingly important for local businesses.

Key topics include:
• The stats on local search and why you should take it seriously
• How local search listings appear in the search engine results
• The top local search sites you should sign up for today
• How to optimize your local search listings
• How to optimize your website for local search
• What local search means for SEO
• The implications of reviews and ratings on your local search listings
• How your customers are using mobile search

At the end of the webinar, you will also have the opportunity to get your questions answered from Sarah and Jason personally.

Join us to learn everything from the basics of setting up a local search listing to what “local” means for SEO.

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

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