Search engine marketing & Guests

We had two guest speakers in the past week and a half. One was Gimmepleez.com, relating to our project to produce a YouTube video. The other speaker was restaurant.com CEO and President Cary Chessick. Students enjoy hearing Cary's story of how restaurant.com started and how it had changed its business model over time and has evolved to the brokerage model it uses today. I refer students in the class to links to the video on these speakers. Students wishing to work on the Professional Sales Program who did not hear Dr. Weilbaker speak in class can feel free to set up a meeting with him or talk to either of us about the project.

We started SEM, Search Engine Marketing this week and will continue with the topic on the 20th and 22nd. On the 20th Cary Pearlman will teach our class in PPC (Pay Per Click) and we will have a lab on the 23rd. I introduced the area of SEM and we looked at a sample google search and pointed out the paid ads versus the natural search results. We talked about Gooogle having 70% of the search engine market and that almost fifty percent of internet advertising is in search engine advertising spending. For this reason even though online advertising spending has dropped this year Q1 09 versus Q2 09 by about ten percent, search engine spending continues to rise. We talked about SEO being the process of optimizing organic or natural search. There is a lot companies can do to optimize their organic search efforts and get high page rankings without spending money. these tactics include a descriptive title bar, text that matches the title bar and is descriptive of the subject matter, links to and from related, relevant sites and appropriate keywords (although the latter is less important now). Search engine spiders or crawlers use complicated algorithms as they search through pages to determine if a page is a good fit with a particular search term. Images need to be tagged and spiders have a hard time with flash intro pages as well. I always enjoy teaching this topic and look forward to the rest of the time we will spend on SEO and Paid Search.