Being an individual that is very social and likes to get out and have a good time, I’ve been to my fair share of clubs and bars here in Southern California. And there are A LOT of them out here. Since there are so many, a lot of club owners, promoters and “Beer Name Here” Girls find ways to bring you back. One way I see more and more often is harvesting your phone number and email.

A majority of the time, scantily clad girls either walk up and down the red rope or they’ll be inside the bar jumping from one group of people to the next, flirting for your Name, Email and Phone Number. At the end of the night, they walk away with 3-4 sheets filled with 50 names on each sheet.

Email marketing via clubs/bars has been around for a while, which in case, I still don’t see them utilizing that form of marketing to its fullest, but the most recent form of advertising or enticement is mobile marketing.

Almost every other day, I get a text from a promotions group in Newport Beach letting me know what’s happening tonight or the following day. They’ll promote an array of stuff like 50% off food, select DJs playing, grand openings or “Text Back for VIP list”. I’d say the best part of all the promotions is getting on the VIP list. If you don’t get to a club/bar before 10:30pm, then you’ll be stuck in line for 30-45 minutes (unless you flash a Benjamin to get in). Needless to say, waiting in line sucks.

At any rate, marketing to this young, select group I’m in with cell phones is excellent. Our demographic is always texting texting texting. I’m curious why more bar/club owners don’t utilize this in-house or hire a promotions company to start doing this. Could easily be trackable with an array of methods to show ROI. Regardless, I see this as a very strong marketing medium for clubs, clubs and promotion companies now and in the future.

Originally, the ’sandbox’ factor was used to describe an odd phenomenon noticed by SEO professionals in conjunction with the algorithm. What is the signs of “sandboxing” before ruling out other possibilities? - from DP

The Google Sandbox effect has been around since 2004. It was started to get rid of spammy sites that would be thrown up using automated tools, acquire thousands and thousands of links and rank for keywords within weeks. Google implements the “Sandbox” as well as a few other filters, to combat against these types of spammy ranking tactics.

I find that a majority of webmasters aren’t entirely sure what the sandbox is and how to get out of it. The sandbox is applied to new sites only. Now, when I say new sites, I mean brand new domains that have just launched a web presence. I run across clients that think just because they’ve owned the domain for 10 years, that they might not get into the sandbox, when in fact, the site was actually launched 5 months ago. Sandbox sites occur when the site is brand new to the web.

What happens? 2 things happen usually. Either a site will have 0 rankings in Google for all keywords or the site will have some rankings for a few weeks, then the rankings will disappear.

Another effect you might find yourself is that you think your site is not in the sandbox. This usually happens when you are ranking for keywords that are very long-tail or are not competitive at all. Recently, I ranked a site for “Bulletproof Fiberglass”. The site is still on the first page and has been since I launched the site. The keyword is very relative to the client’s industry, but the competitiveness for that keyword in Google is very, very small. Since competition is so small, the website ranked extremely high right out of the gate. Do I still consider this site in the sandbox? Yes. If I were to get rankings for more competitive keyword phrases, I’d have to sit a little while before rankings proceeded.

When you start to see rankings for 1st and 2nd tier keywords, you’re out of the sandbox and can enjoy great rankings and really start to nurture your search engine optimization efforts.

How do you get out of the sandbox? We’ll have to save that for another “Ask SEM Inc.” Till next time!

- Adam

I was reading a recent way to gain traffic over at SEOmoz via DIGG comments. They discussed how you can get a pretty decent amount of traffic from commenting on to-be front page DIGG articles. The tactic is to make sure you’re the first one to make a comment before it hits the front page. Seems like a decent amount of traffic can come from this type of “marketing”, by looking at the post.

I recently tried a little different twist. Any blogs or forums that were on the front page of DIGG, I’d write a comment on the topic on the actual page. This resulted in about 50 unique visitors over the course of a week. Not too bad, and nothing compared to what the SEOmozzer did, but nonetheless, it was a decent way to get a few more eyeballs checking out my site.

Give it a try, especially if the site is within your niche. You just might get a little business from it.

Google recently announced their new algorithm change. The change is going to fully incorporate all other verticals they have into existing web search results. What this means if if you do a search for APPLE, you might get a video of an apple, an image of an apple and maybe directions to an apple store all within the search single SERP, rather then going to each different Google search section.

What does this mean for SEO/M?
As with most industries on the net, they continue to grow and shift. With this new change, SEO’s are going to need to understand how to rank different components of content. If you don’t know how to rank and image in the top 10, then you’ll need to start learning. If you’ve never ranked a video in the top 10, its time you start learning.

Universal search is going to take away listings on the search pages that would normally be taken by actually pages, rather then a video or image or local search.

SEW is having a discussion on the topic. It’s an interesting topic and definitely one that will change how we optimize websites, at least for Google.

I was reading MarketingVox (which by the way is one of my favorite websites) and saw that Guy Kawasaki has launched a new social/viral/”place Web 2.5 word here” website called Truemors. The site harbors your rumors. It’s kinda cool, kinda “why”. I mean really, how much validity does one post have over another? Yes, I know it has the down/up arrow to combat that, but even so - “Hey Frank/Sara/Dan/Delana/Michelle/Harrison…could you please give a little boost to my recent Truemor?”.

I do like the fact that no matter where you are, you can email, text message, submit on the site, or even call in your rumor and it will be posted. Another plus to this site is the logging in: You don’t have to.

You can leave comments on each individual Tremor, which is kinda nice, but also opens up the possibility of spamming, even if its on a small scale, which is ok and ultimately can’t be avoided if you want a social-type website.

All-in-all, I like the idea, I just would like a little more clarification on what makes a rumor, a…true…rumor. If there is such a thing.

- Adam

PS - Everytime I say “Truemors”, I can’t help but think of Tremors, which by the way, was an excellent movie.

This question is brought to you by DP forum member Aks:

Hi every oneis it cloaking good or bad, can I be banned from search engines for it?

I run across this question quite a bit. Its a trickier question then most, because there are a view variables you need to look at. If you want to go with the Google gods and follow strict procedure, then the answer would be “It’s bad”. But this type of question really need to have the “With this site - MySite.com - is cloaking bad?”.

Before we get into a semi-answer, let’s discuss what cloaking is. Cloaking is showing a normal web visitor one page and a search engine crawler another. The purpose of this is to show more qualified, optimized pages for the search engine crawlers, with the benefit of better rankings…potentially.

There are a couple ways of doing cloaking, either with javascript redirects or IP-based. IP-based is the best and least traceable by the search engines. How IP-based cloaking works is you have a list of all the crawler IPs and when a crawler hits your cloaked page, you show them the search engine friendly page. When any other IP hits the page, you show them the web visitor page.

Now to semi-answer the question. I’m going to give you a view examples of what I would qualify as “ok” cloaking. I was doing consulting for a real estate web design company. They provided templated web sites with a very robust backend for the agents to make changes their sites.

The Problem: There was a feature in the backend to having a potential buyer land on an email capture form before moving forward to the listings and other areas within the site. We wanted a way for the search engines to still crawl those pages, but not allow visitors to access them without signing up first.

The Solution: We used IP-based cloaking to show the search engine crawlers the listing pages, as well as informational pages within the site and when a web visitor landed on those pages from the search engines, they were still given the email capture form. We were able to get those pages indexed and ranked that were stuck behind the email capture form, where the crawlers couldn’t crawl threw.

In the scenario above, I believe it was OK to use cloaking. Google got more informative information from the agent’s website by indexing a ton more pages and the agent was still able to capture the visitors email to follow up with. Win-Win.

Other big companies do this, especially newspaper websites. They’ll let their content become indexed, but when you land on it from the search engines, you have to sign up to get full access. Now, I know that sucks to have to register, but if you’re in the shoes of a business owner, its a great way to build your business and have people register and pay.

The Future: I think eventually Google and others will have to let up the “White Hat” NO CLOAKING what-so-ever mantra. I do believe its a case by case basis, but not every person that uses cloaking is trying to make money from Adsense or affiliate programs.

Stone Temple consulting and marketing put together an amazing report on different analytics programs. Its a great report and really shows the variances of the top web analytics online today.

SEM Inc. is designing our own, in-house analytics program. Our program will track all the goodies like unique visitors, sessions, click-paths, browser types, screen resolution, etc., but what’s really exciting is the metrics portion of the analytics program. We’ll be tracking conversions not only from PPC ads, but from organic click-throughs too.

We plan on offering this to all clients and might even make a copy of the program to be built out like StatCounter.com, which is user-friendly and will track everything.

I’m starting a new series of posts where you can submit your questions about search engine and internet marketing (which can be a variety of things). Today’s question comes from the DP forums. No one had answered this question yet, so I thought I’d use it as a start.

Hey,

I am using wordpress and I am wondering how to choose the names of the categories and posts. There is a field for the ‘name’ and a field for a ’slug’ (the slug is shown in the URL bar in the browser and the name in the menu )..

Now I would like to know what is the best way of choosing names for these two in regard of search engines.. for example :

Should I try to put keywords which I think a viewer will search for in google in the slug ? Or in the name field ? Or in both ? And which one is more important ?

Also, what about a name and a totally different slug ? Would that be bad ?

Regards,
-FOP-

I’d suggest putting both the keywords and whatever you’re going to use as the slug be the same. Keywords in the URL definitely help with optimization, but also, your keywords in the title of the blog post is going to help too. The blog post title usually is wrapped in H tags, which does carry little weight in the search engines.

If you really wanted to target the specific you were putting in the Title/URL, I’d suggest doing both, but if you wanted to target a few more broader keywords in the URL and the go specific in the title, that is an option too. You’ve got to remember though that you’re probably putting your blog posts in categories, which should be high-level keywords anyway. Example:

BlogAboutYoga.com/yoga-mats/best-yoga-mats-in-orange-county/

So keep that in consideration.

Good luck!