vaughan-marketing.com Blog

As many of you know I’ve taken on a new gig as of late…I’m now the VP Marketing at Balihoo.  Balihoo is a vertical search engine designed specifically for the advertising industry.  You can find out the details at the about Balihoo page.  Also, there is specific information for media buyers and media owners.

So…my first (OK, not first, but pretty early) order of business was to get the website up to par both in terms of content and from an SEO perspective.  I’ve worked at lots of organizations launching websites and microsites, but this has been my first experience at owning everything, soup to nuts, for a specific company.  Certainly a challenge.  A little about the process:

First, thankfully, my lovely wife and in-house SEO expert was around to provide guidance on the infrastructure.  She helped me go through everything we have today and identify specific areas of content.  Then, she helped me go through page-by-page and idetify unique META tags and Title tags across the entire site.  Along with other guidance including ALT tags for the images and specific naming conventions for the navigation, her guidance was invaluable in creating what I believe is a site with a really good SEO infrastructure. 

Next step was development of the actual content.  I think for most businesses this is actually the easy part…speaking (writing) about your own business is actually pretty easy.  The challenge comes in:

1. Ensuring your SEO target keywords are throughout the content
2. Limiting the verbosity of the copy
3. Ensuring you approach the topics from a ground-level as opposed to jumping right in the middle

Finally, the design.  We’re lucky enough to have a very talented designer and I pointed him to some sites that I liked and we ultimately worked it out to come out with what you see today. 

I’m very happy with the final product (well…it’s never really final).  Check it out at www.balihoo.com and let me know what you think.  And, if you’re an advertising media buyer or planner, get in touch and we’ll get you into the Beta Program and see what you think of Balihoo’s solution for finding advertising opportunties!

I was contacted by someone recently inquiring whether I was a true in-house SEO – I’m guessing it was based on a comment by WebMama placed on their Top In-House SEOs blog that might have been a little confusing.  I am definitely a “true” in-house SEO – my title is Global SEO Manager and that is my focus 100%.

I believe the intention of the Top In-House SEOs blog was to gather names to list In-House SEOs and the fact that this role is continuing to grow.  I’m not sure what the criteria were in determining these in-house people as “TOP SEOs”, however, as I saw some folks I know on the list that I believe are entirely focused on paid search marketing. I’m not even sure I’d say I was a Top SEO without knowing my competition a little better but I’m definitely flattered by the mention.  Also noticed a few names missing from the list – but how could you capture them all with the way this field is growing?  This list and the commentary behind it is a clear indication that companies are figuring out that they need to hire SEO expertise in house.  That doesn’t mean we don’t value you agencies out there!  But I do I believe having at least one full time in-house SEO is imperative for most medium to large businesses.  Perhaps a small business wouldn’t need a full-time SEO but having some SEO expertise in house is ideal as those experts are more likely to keep the web strategy on track when it comes to natural search presence.  Again, not to devalue the agencies that specialize in this area; I work with an agency or two myself (including WebMama), not only for expertise and collaboration but sometimes simply for bandwidth as they are my extended team!

OK…since she’s obviously not going to do it, it looks like I’m the responsible party.  Tanya Vaughan (noted in this release by her old last name of Rietze) was just elected to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) Board of directors.  Read the full release at Search Engine Land. 

This is quite an honor to be on the board of this influential organization in the search marketing industry. 

Congratulations Tanya! 

Most of this weekend was spent putting together design, content and images for a couple of websites I’ve been working on.  I just had to drop a line and tell the folks at iStockphoto (and all of you!) how much their service has helped me out.  If you haven’t seen them, check them out.  Quality professional stock photography for $1-2 each picture.  That’s cheap enough to pick up them up when you need something just right for a presentation or for any other reason.  Plus, they have lots of web buttons, designs and other vector graphics that work in many places. 

Guy Kawasaki provides some good coverage on their acquisition by Getty a year ago. 

Enjoy! 

 - Shane