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We recently launched the Web site for Office Furniture & Related Services (OFRS). As a merchant of new, used and refurbished office furnishings, we built the site so that it would allow visitors to drill down to exactly the product that fits their needs. For OFRS, the site serves as a 24-hour, 7-days a week salesperson. As part of our line of Management services, we will also be working with OFRS to create a powerful SEM campaign to drive highly-targeted leads to their Web site.

At the Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search track at the SMX West Conference, author Andy Beal led a session on keeping your web credibility intact.Even though we’ve been taught the childhood rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, words will never hurt me,” keep in mind this was written prior to the Internet! Andy talked about how the explosion of social media – blogs, social networking sites, and video sharing sites – has given the power to consumers to enhance or destroy a reputation. It’s important to pay attention to your online reputation as 52% of individuals put their trust in what others say about your brand. Other statistics: 83% of companies will face a reputation crisis that can impact their share value by 20-30% and 87% of consumers look at the reputation of your CEO, when judging your company’s reputation.

I’m back from Santa Clara, California, ready to put into practice all of the ideas I took away from the Search Marketing Expo.It’s always a challenge to fly anywhere via Chicago’s O’Hara Airport with multiple delays, cancelled flights and lost luggage, but at the end of the day, it was worth spending the time to gain wisdom from experts and make new friends in the business of search marketing.

During the three days of the conference, I attended sessions on blended search, using video for high impact for local businesses, understanding consumers using persona models, managing an online reputation, social media, and multiple strategies for search engine optimization.

Chris “Silver” Smith offers up a great article – “Forget Black Friday! Are You Ready For Holiday Season’s Cyber Mondays?” regarding the onslaught of consumer madness when retailers do their best to extract as much creditworthiness from one’s wallet.

“Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers. But, for each Monday after Black Friday, consumer searches spike up on the internet and online retail websites enjoy their highest traffic and associated sales of the year. Search engine use is directly impacting businesses during this period, and companies which haven’t optimized their internet presence stand to lose out on some of the sales they could be getting if consumers could find them. This is true for online businesses as well as for brick-and-mortar stores.

Last month at BarCamp Nashville, John Ellis spoke about Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Pay-Per-Click Advertisers.

One of his Seven Habits was to avoid the top spot in a Search Engine Marketing campaign.

The number-one position usually leads to a poor return on investment, and that can often be true of the second and third positions as well. The traffic coming from the top positions are not buyers; they are just researchers. Serious buyers will go to the third, fourth and fifth positions. When consumers are ready to buy, they will come back.

Learning about effective Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is a long arduous journey. At times, it’s as fun as manually reading a dictionary searching for effective keywords or looking for a phone number in a stack of papers. Where does one start?

The temptation is to apply quick fix shortcuts. Understanding the foundational basics of SEM and SEM best practices coupled with a long term strategy will prevent unmet expectations.

Who doesn’t want to be Number 1 on Google?

I have to say that my experience with Microsoft AdCenter was rather disappointing.

Although MSN AdCenter has attempted to mirror strong account features that are provided by Google and Yahoo!, they were not implemented on a reliable scale. I feel that
human factor was ignored during the development of MSN AdCenter. Even though the “full version” of MSN AdCenter was rolled out during September of 2006, it still SCREAMS beta.