Here’s an example of why you should be less cynical about those ads on the right hand side.

I used to live in Alexanrdria, VA. There was a small children’s clothes retail store that had been there since the early 60′s. Mom and pop. Run by a nice elderly Jewish couple and they provide school uniforms for the local Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist, and Lutheran schools. They also were the place to go to for Cub Scout, Boy Scout, and Girl Scout uniforms. Their daughters, now adults, would come buy from time to time to help out. Some thing very nice about that. Gave it a small town or neighborhood feel.

But the problem is that the area is pretty transient. People will live in the area for 3-5 years and they’re gone. Maybe 15 away, but they’re gone. And there are a lot of malls in Northern Virigina, filled with kids clothes retail stores. And also, a nice and warm as it was, they couldn’t get by just on selling school and scouting uniforms. So they did some of those ads that you don’t like to click on. And it worked. It got people in the door and they’d be solid customers for those 3- 5 years. Or beyond.

They couldn’t compete with Gap Kids or any other place directly, but they could make their mark using search ads.

Just a thought.

Can’t happen. The education system in this country sucks badly enough that there are just too few of these outliers to ever become profitable.

Sure, you can target them, but real money is never made from snarky, over-education, people who question authority and turn off the TV during dinner.

You are too much of a pluralist. It is indeed charming and what a wonderful world it will be.

This has nothing to do with “getting it” or “the young kids get it more then we do” — it has to do with discernment, with thoughtfulness, with logic, with caring, with curiosity, with vigilance.

These are not developmental, they are cultural, and they have a whole lot to do with your parents, with a value in education, and with a curious passion to learn — to discern.

With no child left behind, I daresay that the progress can be officially shelved as devolved.

Geek may be in, goth may be in, and emo may be in, but smart, intellectual, nerdy, educated, trained, and rigorous… well, that’s sort of like leprosy in most places in the USA.

If you spoke to some of the guys over at Global Business Network like Peter Schwartz or read people like Pierre Wack (and I am pretty sure you have) the interesting stuff is in the areas that aren’t in most people’s targets – the unexpected, the future that most people discount is where the action usually is.

Isn’t this the big problem that traditional advertising is facing or the music industry. They never thought about the possibility of the outliers becoming the “in thing”.

You see, for me there are two levels to the internet one is the selling of products and the other one is the provision of information.
I think it would be a sad day if all the internet became about was the selling of products – like a big online mall.

It would be a mistake to think that people like me – them west coast Berkeley educated elite (as some would like to call us) hold no relevancy in the future design and the future demands placed on the web.

Information is after all the most valuable commodity and having a way of discerning the good from the bad from the false is extremely important.

It is after all partly why the blogosphere has grown into relevancy – large media has stopped placing a true value on relevant and quality information.

A few points.

1) Search engines aren’t at the point where they know what each individual would really, deeply value in terms of content quality. Getting better. but often words have different meanings or connotations.

2) Often top ranking doesn’t necessarily mean quality of content. It can, of couse, but it is keyword matching and link relatioships that have the biggest effect. Chirs would know more about this than I would. Relevency is more important here. That’s because it more reflects a direct relaitonship with intent. But the overall quality may be off.

3) A lot of companies (and this is where Abraham Harrison brings enormous value to the table) don’t have clue about SEO. Neither did the design shop that did the company’s website two and a half years ago. In flash. So the site is practically invisible to search engines. Telling them that they need a new site makes them cringe and look for quick fixes. This happened to me with a client a year ago. Through paid search, we increased their traffic by 40%. But they had their design firm redo the site…again flash, so the only way it showed up in search engines was via ads. Ridiculous. But their products (in this case, tractors) were top quality.

4) Smaller companies, one up from mom & pop, should use paid search if they’re running up against major competitors. Seasonal stuff and things like that.

Any company that’s looking to have a sold presence on the web needs to have an SEO strategy for their site. Because that’s often how we find them.

Online, people generally have no discernment: they click on anything. They behave much like barracudas do when they see glittery and shiny things. People don’t care if it is “paid content” or “real content.”

And, according to our experience, nobody (meaning very few) clicks through to page two results on Google, and only people “in the business” check to see what’s going on on page three-10…

Also, nobody ever uses advanced operators such as “” (quotes) or [] (brackets] to limit search.

I use a lot of these truths in my awesome, amazing, rockstar defensive SEO campaigns — and my promotional SEO campaigns as well.

Saul, you’re a Berkeley-educated high-brow academic researcher — what in hell’s name makes you think you are even remotely anything more than an outlier in this data?

I hate to say it, but behaviorally, you are irrelevant, mate.

;)

Not only that, they’d put on the hat of the end user, who is staring at his or her computer screen after putting in “wooden rocking chairs” and “Tennessee” an either doesn’t decipher or barely decifers the diference between organic and paid. They’re looking for wooden rocking chairs. Period. They use Google, the search engine, to get there.

Or, does SEM assume ads and so forth?

SEO is a practice, a discipline, a skill.

“Other sources, including the New York Times define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings, different from SEO which seeks to obtain better free search listings”

I guess we’re both right and I have have to be aware of that because I am probably one of the world’s most amazing SEO ninja but SEM, ad buys, paid placement, paid inclusion mean nothing to me…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing
“Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet Marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine results pages (SERPs) and has a proven ROI (Return on Investment). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, SEM methods include: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion.[1] Other sources, including the New York Times define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings, different from SEO which seeks to obtain better free search listings”

Good to know.

Now, SEM is the big daddy. SEO is a subset of it. There are, from what I can tell, two major aspects of non-paid search. One is optimization, SEO, and the other is the amount of links that go into a site. That second part helps solve the cruddy content but high ranking apsect.

Optimization is another ball of wax. Lots and lots of technical skill. And often I’ve seen if a site isn’t half way optimized properly, the content probably sucks. The usability is all off. More comments will give you greater insight.