NYC SEO Meetup

Hi everyone, please stop by Aspen Lounge if you're in the New York City area this Monday, February 11th. There will be a short talk from our own Mike Levin, Kevin Heisler (executive editor of Search Engine Watch), and Marshall Sponder (analytics specialist at Monster.com). Doors open at 5:30 and the formalities begin at 6:00. It should prove to be a great chance to network with other search marketing professionals and bloggers as we already have over 40 people who have RSVP'd for the event.

Details are available on Meetup.com!

NYC Public Relations Firms

When HitTail tells you to write about something that’s particularly in your sweet spot, it is wise to listen (for a full-update, read to the bottom). Otherwise, you are leaving traffic on the table—traffic that is likely to go to your competitors. But you can pick up this traffic with minimal effort, like picking up money off the ground.

In this case, it is “NYC Public Relations Firms”. The suggestion came in on August 3rd. In reproducing the search hit, I see us on page 6 of results, but a page I hadn’t even created until August 17th was in that spot. I think this is a matter of Google “swapping out” an even newer, more relevant page for one that USED TO be listed. I'll probably post on that as a separate topic later.

This PR firm example is a perfect case of spiraling out to ever-expansive, all equally valid ways of talking about a particular industry or market. In this case, it’s the branch of marketing, known as public relations. And in particular, it’s for the type of PR firms that have top-notch reputations—ones based in New York City.

Now, I hate to play into the stereotype in which Hollywood casts our industry, and Connors Communications is certainly not like Samantha Jones’ PR firm from Sex and The City, which was mostly about celebrity parties, and “the scene” (though we do make the scene from time to time). But rather, we’re a high tech PR agency, specializing in getting out the word on new technology, on companies usually going through their second or third round of fund-raising, and at the point where they have to get the word out.

We’ve got a pretty impressive track record from both ages past (Amazon.com, Priceline), and recently. We’re experienced in a wide range of specialties, and we’re able to adapt to radically different, or “contrary-to-common-wisdom” messages, such as when we helped GoTo.com break the “church and state” issue in the pay-per-click (PPC) marketing arena, or helped Vonage make VOIP a consumer product play.

In the past, this meant a lot of phone-calls to trusted opinion-makers and influencers. Now, while it certainly still means that, and we have our Golden Rolodex (a.k.a. iPhone), we increasingly attack publicity on the populist front, known as Google (and eventually, the other search engines as well). This is a big part of what makes a tiny boutique PR agency such as Connors a large player, especially while other agencies of similar size get gobbled up by the large marketing conglomerates, sporting “traditional” PR-thinking.

This ability to have the critical insights and ACT ON THEM successfully sets us apart.

So when we had the critical insight that your EXISTING search engine traffic was one of your best sources of competitive intelligence, we jumped right on it, and become our own Web 2.0 company.

Don’t you want your next PR firm to have that sort of technological capability, outside the box thinking, and ability to plan and execute strategies?

Imagine the sort of creativity we’ve put into creating this new fundamental online marketing tool brought to bear on your company’s brand, products, services, or objectives. Contact Connors Communications today.

[Update: August 27, 2007]
This morning, I came in and searched on this term, on the long shot that it was picked up from Saturday (at 4:00PM) to today (Monday at 10:30AM). And guess what? We're on page 1. Sure, this is the Google Honeymoon, but if you KEEP Google stimulated with HitTailing, something ELSE you do this week (or soon) will fortify this listing, and reduce the chances of the Honeymoon being over too soon. Notice, we went from page 6 in Google to page 1 in Google in less than 2 days. Someday, some blogger will get the connection I keep drawing to the quarter pusher / quarter slider machines around skeeball amusement parks and arcades.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

NY SEO

As many of you have noticed, HitTail is entering a new phase. In addition to pushing hard to continue delivering a high-quality free service, we're also beginning to ask our users to support us by upgrading at least one account to Plus. Alternatively, you might like to support us by contacting us or referring SEO business in New York our way.

Connors Communications, the public relations firm that gave birth to HitTail, performs a very high-end brand of SEO, most appropriate for larger companies who are invested heavily in AdWords, and are looking to bring their natural search traffic up to par. To that end, we've created some exciting technology, which is such a challenge to convey that we made this video.

Now that the video exists, I'm tapping into the HitTail community to see whether I can't get that URL forwarded around a few offices, preferably in the New York area, where I can schedule coming out to meet with you in the next couple of weeks. The Connors office is on 22nd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, making it extremely convenient to set up meetings.

Typically, we do a situation analysis, looking for the opportunity to leverage large storehouses of pent-up corporate data, which has never properly been unleashed onto the Web. This often takes the form of product catalogs, published articles, or even user contributed content such as forums. The possibilities of corporate data to drive qualified natural search traffic visitors to your site are limitless, and it's by far the fastest way to pick up permanent new traffic quickly.

Anyway, I believe by making HitTail, we've pretty firmly established our credibility--not to mention Connors' pedigree as the PR firm that helped launch Amazon.com, Priceline, and got many others off the ground (we still do that too). We're now further differentiated we're engaged with the online community as genuine technologists and Web 2.0'ers, rather than the low-road approaches that some of our PR agency counterparts have taken to online outreach.

So contact me if you're in the marketing department of a New York City company, and would like to set up a meeting. Also contact me if you're a consultant, and you think some of your clients may be candidates for the Connors ABCs, because we do finders fees. And if you're part of an online marketing company looking to add a very high-end natural search product to your line-up, contact us because we're getting ready to pilot our Value Added Reseller program, and may be able to train and authorize you to deliver this solution yourselves!

[Update: I added this screen snapshot to show how this blog post got a search hit on the term NY SEO merely 2 days after being posted. Where this in itself doesn't mean that a valid opportunity was created (it was probably another SEO searching), but it does show that there is a big opening for regionally targeted phrases--even in the most competitive markets!]

HitTail Hosts SEO SuperPower Meetup Tonight

Just a reminder to everyone in the NYC area that HitTail is hosting a SEO SuperPowers Meetup tonight. The topic is the effect of Ajax and other Web development technologies, such as Silverlight, Apollo, Java, Mobile and others on SEO today and in the future.

Anyone in the neigborhood is welcome to stop by. It starts at 6:30PM tonight at the Connors Communications office in New York City on 7 West 22nd Streeet, between 5th and 6th Avenues. It's the "Spinning Wheel" building--a small entrance. We're on the 7th floor.

Free drinks.

HitTail's 30 Second Elevator Pitch at SES NYC 2007

This was perhaps the best Search Engine Strategies (SES) I ever attended, in great part, instead of being one undifferentiated SEO in the crowd, I was Mike Levin the HitTail guy. Unlike previous years, where I attended all four days and came away with only enough to make it worth it, this time I only attended yesterday (Thursday), and came away with a lot. I mean, an awful lot.

I'd love to share all the funny anecdotes that were packed into just one day. But the first thing I want to get out of my mind and into the blogosphere is the highly effective 30-second elevator pitch.

HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website owners of all sorts -- to help you grow your natural search traffic... free.

It works much like analytics software with a simple line of JavaScript code. For users of major platforms (Blogger, TypePad and WordPad), there are plug-ins to facilitate installation of the code, making it easy for even total newbies.

Every website has some search-life in it. Every website is trying to tell you something.

Most analytics packages overlook the most important event: when some determined visitor finds you buried several pages into search. This tells you two things:

1. There is actual traffic occurring on this term, and you CAN/ARE being found on it.
2. There are several pages of crap ahead of you which didn’t satisfy the visitor. The hit was probably coincidental, often a result of unlikely word combos from archive pages.

So the reasoning goes, if you intentionally target it, you can bring yourself from several pages in on that term to the first page.

Keep this up over time, and you will grow your search engine traffic, naturally.
It may even free you (being marketers) from reliance on Google AdWords to drive traffic.

Oh yeah. It’s free.

Works every time.

NYC Search Engine Super Powers

Search Engine Super Powers of NYC... UNITE!!!

Join the city's most authorative meetup group on optimizing, e-commerce, blogging, and search engine marketing.

Graphics Contest

Let's call this a Web 2.0 graphics contest. That means I'm throwing caution to the wind, and asking for submissions from all you graphic designers, Photoshop users, GIMP chimps and miscellaneous artists. Can you do the HitTail user interface better? Michele thinks so. If you prove him correct, we promise you nothing, but whatever fame and glory exposure on the HitTail site can deliver.

This may or may not amount to anything.

In order to facilitate this mission, I'm thinking of getting more involved in the graphics communities, especially here in NYC, where there are so many of you. Maybe a NYC graphic designer meetup? Who knows. In-person meetings are not required to participate. Just email entries to us at hittail at connors dot com. Be sure to only email GIFs or JPEGs. No attachments other than GIFs or JPEGs will be opened.

Anyway, we'll throw in a free premium HitTail account to the winner. But we promise no exposure whatsoever if you're not chosen (though we may send a complimentary shout-out). And we don't even promise that we're going to choose a winner. Sound fair? But seriously, anyone who reads our stuff knows we're good folks and are generous sharing the spotlight.

If your entry knocks us out, and we choose to use it, we will make you sign releases proving that we're allowed to use it, and then we're going to promote you on the site. If you're an ambitious graphic designer trying to make your mark, this is a chance to design graphics for a Web 2.0 startup whose success, judging by the buzz on the Internet, is likely assured. Nice feather in your cap.

A critical rule of the contest is to know what HitTail is and what it does. You need to understand the list-pairing concept. You have to experiment with paging forward and back through the datagrid and notice how there's no "position popping". That's an unusual thing in a datagrid, tied to the use of non-proportional fonts. All applications should have one homepage graphic, and one interior page graphic containing the datagrid. It's a user interface design project. Notice the mouse-overs used in HitTail. The application needs to be designed as self-documenting, compelling the user to do right without resorting to help screens.

I encourage working a concept such as "writing suggestion tool" or "build traffic" into the navigational design, so that no matter what page you're visiting, the HitTail "story" is being told in an encapsulated visual format. We're talking an attempt to instantly communicate what HitTail's about on each and every page. Two jpegs. Send to hittail at connors dot com.