After two frantic days of continued voting the winners have been decided in Vertical Measures’ "Ode to SEO" poetry scholarship contest: 

1st Place: Abby Gilmore "Social Media Overload" 51.9%

2nd Place: Greg Fitzgerald "44 Tweets About 22 Women" 32.4%

Thanks to all who entered, voted, and spread the word about our contest. The first place winner will receive a $1,000 scholarship or an iPad, her choice. And the second place winner will receive a $250 scholarship for his entry. The winning poems are showcased below for those who didn’t have a chance to see them on Monday.

"Social Media Overload"

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

More Posts – Website – Twitter

Vertical Measures’ president, Arnie Kuenn, had the pleasure of interviewing with Elisa Gabbert of WordStream this month. While we love link building, we love talking about it even more! The interview is posted on their WordStream Internet Marketing Blog. In this interview, Arnie discusses everything from what factors go into a quality link to his favorite link building tools.

We are always so excited to participate in interviews and events like this, in which you bring together industry experts to talk about current trends and best practices. It helps to build a stronger community for the SEO industry. If the community as a whole grows, individual companies will grow, too. Earlier this year, we had an awesome time conducting our 2010 Predictions from Internet Experts series and we look forward to doing something like that again in the future.

Arnie is always available for guest blog posts and interviews. Feel free to contact Vertical Measures if you’d like to chat about SEO!

Wordstream develops and markets cutting-edge SEO software and PPC software. They aim to make search marketing more accessible to more companies and make individual marketers more efficient and effective by constantly innovating and automating on their behalf.

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.

+Sarah Moraes

More Posts – Website – Twitter – Facebook

Every month here at Vertical Measures our team competes for a few things: employee of the month, atta-person awards (an employee to employee card given for exemplary work), and the best client link. Employee of the month is determined by votes, atta-person cards are accumulated and drawn out of a hat, but the best client link is the hardest to award. What makes a link ‘the best’? Is it the client link placed on a high page rank site without anchor text, or a link placed on a lower page rank site with anchor text? Of course relevance is a large factor, but when it comes down to it the determination of a final winner isn’t clear.

At this week’s Monday meeting (when the awards were given out) two of our employees, Michael and James, were up for the award. A debate ensued, and it was determined there is only one real way to determine a winner: a race off! In the red shirt we have Michael Schwartz: 5’7 1/2″, and in the blue shirt we have: James Constable: 6’5″. Wanna know who won the title of “Top Link Builder”? Check out the video below!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

More Posts – Website – Twitter

The SEMMYs, an annual online award event in the SEO industry, nominates posts for recognition on a variety of topics. We’re proud to announce that this year one of our posts has been nominated as a SEMMY finalist in the category of reputation management. Our readers may remember reading the extensive and thorough post "Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management" (posted September 18th) now nominated for the award. We discuss the importance of being proactive with your online reputation management, and give you 16 opportunities to dominate the search engine rankings for your business name.

As a SEMMY finalist our readers, friends, family, and connections are able to vote for our post to win the prestigious award. Voting closes this Friday, and we’d be thrilled if you took a few moments to vote: here. Feel free to pass on the word and help us win by telling your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail. We’ve made it easy, just copy and paste: VM made the 2010 SEMMY Awards Finalist list in category: Reputation Management!!! http://bit.ly/SEMMYFinalist Vote 2day!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

More Posts – Website – Twitter