The performance that really made it for me - Bruce singing The Rising:

Sublime.

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I don’t go off-topic on this blog too often, but this seemed worth recording somewhere. I’m sitting listening to the concert from the Lincoln Memorial, the concert to celebrate President Obama’s Inaugural.

From a few hours before the concert, Bruce and Pete warming up for their performance, accompanied by a gospel choir.

I was born in England, and now live in Israel. Although I lived in the US for many years, I never became a citizen (no reason particularly, I just didn’t) … yet I feel a profound sense of history being made. The thought that a black man could be elected President of the US was unfathomable in the Sixties, when I was born, and even in 2008 it seemed an unattainable summit.

Yet it happened. Millions of Americans put their hopes and trust in Barack Obama, and today the National Mall is swarmed with people listening to a celebration of an historic moment. The concert is coming to a close as I type this, and I just listened to Bruce Springsteen and the 89 year old Pete Seeger lead the crowd in a singalong of “This Land is Your Land. What an extraordinary day.

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Got an email from Barry Schwartz yesterday letting me know that SMX Israel won’t be taking place this month as hoped. The plan is to postpone it till the summer … given the current economic outlook, coupled with what’s going on in Gaza, I understand the decision, frustrating though it is.

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When I first started developing sites for myself — affiliate marketing sites, AdSense vehicles, etc. — I was still working full-time for a NY based company. Since my work there included PPC campaign development, search engine optimization, and other online marketing activities, I decided to use a pseudonym for my moonlighting work in order to keep these two lives separate.

Since I’m a big fan of the British author P.G. Wodehouse I chose the name of one of his minor characters, Tuppy Glossop, for my online alter ego. As a result, poor Tuppy is all over the Google result pages  for a variety of activities he would never have countenanced (or indeed, understood!)

Anyway, it’s been a few months now since I left that position and I’ve decided it’s time to move out from under Tuppy’s shadow. He’ll still be around, since I quite like writing as someone anonymous occasionally, but I’ll be using my real name much more from now on, particularly on this blog.

Just wanted to tidy up any potential confusion for new visitors here.

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Way back at the dawn of time (well, last February to be precise) I was at the inaugural SphinnCon Israel event.

At the conclusion of the afternoon, we were teased with the possibility of a full-blown SMX Israel, targeted for early 2009 … but there’s been very little news about it since then. A friend’s question reminded me about it today, so a-Googling I went, and lo and behold I found this page:

Search Marketing Expo - SMX Israel: January 25-26, 2009

Could it be true? Any one in the loop who can confirm or deny this possibility?

If it’s really happening, this would make a lovely Chanukah gift for that special search marketer in your life!

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Today I once again emerged from my shell and ventured into Jerusalem, this time for breakfast with Jeff Pulver and around 80 of his friends. I have to get accustomed to this idea of being with actual live people, but I think I could grow to like it.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with these events (I wasn’t until today) you’ll find this video interesting:

Jeff is a multi-faceted guy with an impressive resume and an engaging style. He’s been hosting these breakfasts for a year or so; this morning’s was the first in Jerusalem, although there have been a few in Tel Aviv. All in all he’s done 35 of them in 18 different cities.

I got to reconnect with some of the people I met at the Jerusalem Web Professionals meeting last week, which was nice … it’s much easier to go into these events knowing a few friendly faces. So, it was good to see Charlie Kalech, Kim Mayroze, Shimshon Young, and Debi Zylbermann again.

Some other attendees included Brian Blum of This Normal Life and his wife Jody Blum, a financial coach; Yehudit Singer, the editor of IsraTimes; Joel Katz of Religion & State in Israel; Robin Zalben from Spielberg Film Archive; and Bernie DeKoven, the Fun Maven.

The tools that Jeff describes in his video … The Personal Social Networking Toolkit, as he has dubbed it … is what makes this event stand out from others I’ve attended. For me at least the tag labels were awkward. Particularly when talking to women I was a little shy about applying labels to someone’s chest, so those were a bust. But the personal tag line is a marvelous conversational ice breaker, and there were some very creative ones to be seen. (I never did get the chance to ask Jody Blum about soup, but I found the tag line intriguing nonetheless!)

I had a great time at Jerusalem’s first Breakfast with Jeff Pulver, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the next one.

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Wow, it’s been a long while since I posted here, and also a long time since I actually left my house and met people face-to-face. Well, face-to-face in terms of a professional meeting, some networking, and talking with other SEO & SEM geeks. Outside of my work I do leave my house. Sometimes. No, really, I do. If I have to.

Enough of my solitary endeavors. Last night I went with two friends to a presentation about SEO organized by Jerusalem Web Professionals, a group founded by Kim Mayroze. Kimm is head of Kimmdesign, a Jerusalem web studio specializing in creative concept development. I haven’t been to any previous JWP events, but I’ll be making a point to go in the future.

After her brief introduction, Kimm turned over the presentation to the three speakers. The first of them, Shimshon Young, owns a web site design company, Excellence Internet Service. His presentations were probably the shortest, but he offered practical tips that would be valuable to many sites; have awesome content, have lots of pages, buy multi-year registrations for your domains, and create a favicon (something I rarely do, and probably should).

Debi Zylbermann spoke next; with long-experience in high tech and QA, she moved into SEO comparatively recently. She’s very dynamic, and a confident speaker … her presentation was interesting but could perhaps have benefited from a dry-run rehearsal for a non “tech-head” friend first. Her explanation of page rank sculpting was fine for me, but my non-geek friend had zoned out within a minute or two.

I’m also slightly dubious about her method of using AdWords for keyword research. The concept is clever — aim your bids for position 9 or 10, and use the impression count for stats — but in practice I have a feeling that the data would not be terribly accurate. It’s hard to derive search numbers from impressions, since it depends on ad inventory for that term, quality score for that advertiser, etc. And of course, it doesn’t give a sense of which words are buying terms in the way that clicks would. I’d be more likely to use paid tools like Keyword Elite and SEO Elite, or even a free service like the SEO Book keyword suggestion tool.

The third speaker was Charlie Kalech, director of Jerusalem web design company J-Town Productions. He opened with the fishing clip from The Frisco Kid explaining the difference between broad search and narrow search … very cute, and put his point across very succinctly: “How hungry are you?”

Two strong themes that I got from his presentation:

• Plan your site structure early in the process in order to use keywords effectively. This will help both Google, and your users, find their way around.
• Know what sort of traffic you’re looking for. Understand the costs and benefits of attracting floods of traffic, versus getting only a trickle of traffic that’s intensely targeted to your content.

I had a good time at the event, and I’m pleased to have discovered Jerusalem Web Professionals. Looking forward to the next meeting so I can leave the BatCave once more before 2009.

Only one fly in the ointment … there were one or two attendees who had clearly come with an agenda of showing their own brilliance and superiority at the expense of the presenters. I mean, I like to hear myself talk as much as the next guy, but this was ridiculous.

One in particular managed to alienate pretty much the whole room within a sentence or two. But it was clear that he was familiar to the presenters, and they addressed him with the same kind of gentle, calming, and dismissive tone that I use on my crazy Uncle Louie … you know, the one who spends every Seder explaining that the CIA is bugging his potato kugel.

But the wing nuts were in a minority, and it was nice to renew a couple of acquaintances. Same time next month?

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Today’s New York Times has a short article about Google’s ad quality team. Much of what’s discussed is old news to those of us who buy PPC ads, but it’s an excellent summary to share with colleagues and management who don’t really understand what we do.

For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

One figure jumps out from the article. We all know that Google makes an extraordinary amount of money, but it’s still eyeopening to hear that their revenue “… in this year’s first quarter, came in at the rate of more than $2 million an hour.”

Wow.

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As I’ve mentioned previously, I use the name Tuppy Glossop as a pseudonym in order to keep my day job somewhat separate from my extra-curricular business activities.

In an effort to increase the reach of my thoughts, I’m going to begin blogging elsewhere as well as here at Job Is A Four Letter Word. Not much to see there yet, but do stop by and say hi when you have a chance.

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It’s a cliche to say it, of course, but Aaron Wall really did write the book on search engine optimization. There are very few people around who know - or share - as much as he does on the subject.

Today he published an extraordinary article called How Much is a #1 Google Ranking Worth? and it’s one of the most thorough, well-researched and well-documented summaries of SEM and SEO I’ve ever seen. It’s going to take much more time than I have to spare currently to really go through it thoroughly, but I wanted to share it with you straight away. Some light reading for the weekend, perhaps?

Thanks Aaron … this really is a valuable article.

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