One of the most high-profile and highly respected search engine consultant firms in the US is SEOmoz in Seattle.  They have built a business out of consulting with and advising other search engine experts such as myself.  I am a Pro member at their site, which gives me access to some wonderful tools and insider knowledge.

Last week, SEOmoz hosted an Expert Training Seminar on search–advanced tactics and cutting edge thinking.  So for three days, yours truly was in Seattle, soaking up as much knowledge as possible.

I met a ton of people to network with, but more importantly, I learned a TON.  The world of search engines changes every day and is constantly in flux.  To be in a room with 150 of the top search engine consultants, all of us learning from the cream of the crop of search experts, was an experience worth every penny (and then some).  It was even worth the five hour flight on Southwest, with minimal leg room.

In terms of specifics, a lot was made about viral marketing and developing outstanding content, and how drastically your search rankings can climb with the right piece of catchy content.  We also talked at length about search engine work for small businesses, how social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace can impact your visibility, the importance of online reputation management, and so much more.

The point of all this is to remind you that we here at Keystone are never satisfied with our level of knowledge and understanding.  As the technology world continues to stretch and grow and reshape itself, we’ll be doing all we can to stay up to date on what’s new, so that your business can stay ahead of the trend.  Give me a shout if you’d like to learn more about the latest trends and tactics in the world of search engine optimization, and how I can use what I’ve learned to help your website rank better on Google.

Oh, and Seattle is definitely one of the coolest cities I’ve ever seen.  I highly recommend visiting.  There’s beautiful scenery, temperate weather, and plenty to do.   Here’s a photo I snapped on one of my morning walks from the hotel to the conference location, with a temperature of 64 degrees in the middle of August:

Here’s a little bit of fun called Fun Facts About Tennessee.

It’s a neat little list of things most of us TN residents don’t know about our fine state.  Things like:

Did you know the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Eastern Tennessee is the most visited park in the U.S.?

But it is soooooo much more than just a fun little fact list.  It is, in fact, viral marketing. What is viral marketing?

I am so glad you asked.  Viral marketing is creating web content–it may be a website, an article, a video, a podcast, etc.–that is so great… so fun/funny, that people can’t help but spread it for you.  They post about it on their blog (as we are here) and they email it to friends.  In that way, it becomes like a virus, spreading on its own.

The real benefit from doing this, from a small business perspective, is two-fold.

1. The brand recognition and buzz-worthy aspects of a much-talked-about piece of marketing.  A good example of this is our guerrilla golf balls.
2. The links this generates to one’s website are so valuable in terms of search engine rankings that they almost cannot be measured.

So in our Fun Facts example, here is a local realtor who gets it.  He has crafted a catchy, useful piece of content and placed it on his site.  Now blogs like ours are linking to it, sharing this neat list with friends and customers.  He’ll probably get 50-100 links to his site out of this, just as we linked to him at the top of this post.  And that boost he gets in the search engines is going to help him sell more houses… I guarantee it.  This kind of quality “linkbait” (site content that is “fishing” for links from other sites) can singlehandedly lift a site in the rankings, even when no on-site optimization is being done.

Those links will cause the search engines to see his site as a valuable one–one that other sites see as an authority.  A link to a site is a sign of trust.  Get enough signs of trust, and your site starts ranking better.  A lot better.

Keystone has dabbled for a while in this kind of content creation and viral marketing consulting.  And we’re being asked about it more and more.  We’d love to talk to you about it, should you have an interest.  It can boost your company’s profile in the search engines–and trust me, search engines are only going to become more important to the success of your website.

Let us know if you have an interest in some of our viral marketing ideas.  We like being creative, especially when it can dramatically help your business.

This fellow is a proud graduate of our Keystone University class on search engines.  So enthusiastic was he about taking our course, so doggedly did he pursue us to give him a t-shirt, that we went all the way to Honduras to teach him about Google.

Just kidding.  Of course, that’s a total lie.

One of our previous Keystone University graduates–from a local, Tennessee class–is currently on a mission trip in Honduras.  He had joked before leaving that he was taking his shirt… he really seemed to like his KU shirt.  He promised to send us a photo of him wearing the shirt in Honduras… and it turns out he went one better than that.

We’d like to hold a contest, and challenge each of you to send in photos of your KU t-shirts in strange and foreign locales.  But the only decent item we have to give out as prizes is, well, more t-shirts.

Anyway, we’re proud to see that our Keystone University logo is reaching even into Central America.  Global branding at its finest!

A new report ranks the countries of the world by how fast their internet service is, on average.  Guess where the U.S. ranks?

First?

Nope.

Second?

Nope.

Top 5?

Nope.

We’re 15th.  14 other countries have faster Internet connections than the country that “invented the Internet.”

The average US download speed was 2.3 MB per second.

Japan–the number one overall country–had average download speeds 30 times that, at 63 MB per second.

Oh well, at least we’re still the best in the world at some things… like swimming.