Novel Excerpt: “It was 2007 and we were proudly sailing our ‘built from scratch’ royal blue rig in an open water race. We were still on a high having won several awards of merit in the last race. Our two largest competitors were ahead on either side of us and we were gaining on them, as in a light wind we had an ever so slight advantage inherent with light weather sailors. I was proud of the crew and each one was well matched to their duties.

Suddenly, as the sun shone down on us, and as I busied myself reading the telltale signs of the wind and adjusting our course accordingly, a missile blasted across the sky hitting us and leaving a severe hole in both the main sail and the bottom of our boat. As water poured in we bailed out, swimming to shore. We dragged what pieces of our sailboat we could.

Shocked and dismayed we huddled together on the shore surveying the wreckage. The brutal attack made no logical sense because the missile was shot by a large Yellow boat behind us who was not only not in our race, but whom we knew well and considered friendly…”

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Over two years has since past since I received the note from a businessman I respected which included a long passage from “The Art of War”. You see I had been the deliberate target of a billion dollar monopoly who wanted me and our successful business out of business. The tactics used were dishonest, unethical and malicious and I was ready to expose them and take them on.

But the businessman disagreed with my approach and so persisted in getting his point across by sending more passages. I could not win he said because the monopoly was too big and powerful and because they had unlimited resources. It was best for me to heed the advice in the “Art of War” passage and “surrender”. “Fleeing to the hills” in my mind was cowardly, but losing my life would be stupid. So I surrendered but not without coming first to a profound realization. I discovered that I have something more valuable than the billion dollar predator’s billions and that is….The Truth.

They say crisis breeds opportunity and historically there is considerable evidence that such adversity fosters innovation in companies. The Kaufman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity showed that the rate of new business creation was higher during the deepest part of the 2009 economic recession than it had been in fourteen years. We were a part of this rejuvenation as like these companies we were forced through no fault of our own to reinvent our business-models. We did this by expanding our footprint and our service offerings, and finding solutions in unlikely places. Inspiration came from our loyal staff, from our social network, from our wonderful new suppliers, from our customers and through participating in new growth opportunities.

The final chapter of my book will be about how we learned to harness our drive and ingenuity in new and compelling ways to create a more dynamic and prosperous future for our customers, ourselves and our organization.

Creativity is like human life, it begins in the dark. Some people may think that if you are sitting there staring at a blank canvass or page that you are wasting your time. I don’t know where or when it comes because creativity is sort of like a divine magic. One day you sit down with your cup of coffee to stare at your blank page and you see the finished painting. At that point magic turns to process, skill and discipline.

Understanding the history and evolution of SEO, or search engine optimization, is important to all marketers and companies looking to enhance their web marketing efforts to gain greater access to the huge online buying population. In the age of the on-the-go consumer the use of the old medias when read to buy, particularly the Yellow Pages, have seen a huge decline in consumer usage as the information we need is so quickly accessible online or via our PDAs. The rise of Google local and the growing opportunity to source recommendations from our trusted social networks has changed the way we source and buy products forever.

So as we race to try and get on the first page of Google the real question to answer is what value does SEO and search marketing have in the online marketing mix? To look into the future in this regard we need to explore, briefly, the past and what led us to this point.

SEO Beginnings

SEO as Wikipedia defines it, is “the process of improving the visibility of a web site in search engines” through organic means. SEO was not developed overnight. Instead, it took a number of trial and error attempts as well as some changes on the end of the search engine to end up where it is today.

According to the HistoryofSEO.com, SEO had its genesis during the early 90s when website marketers realized the value of search engine result rankings to their website traffic. During the early days of the search engines. optimization was alphabetical. You could obtain the choice position just like you did in the old Yellow Pages by registering alpha URLs such “AAA” or “A#1”. Because of this “AAA” and “A#1” type optimization, trends began. This methodology was simple for the optimizer, but it wasn’t effective since it allowed sites that aren’t relevant to the search keyword to get a top rank.

In 1994 Yahoo! started using Webcrawler, but it was in 1997 when on-page optimization started. Greenlightsearch.com looks at the history further by gauging the importance of on page SEO, page rank, anchor text, domain authority, link context, and user signals over time (by 2009, domain authority is the most important factor out of all the ones mentioned).

SEO today

In order to understand how search engine optimization has changed it’s important to know how page rankings work. Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines use certain algorithms to determine the relevance of a website to the keyword used by a person on a search engine. For instance, if you search the word “notebook” on Google, http://www.google.com/notebook appears on the top slot. There are four main ranking criteria, as often cited in SEOMOZ.org: domain authority, anchor text, on-page SEO, and raw pagerank. As mentioned above, domain authority is the main factor that determines the rank. This is why sites like Wikipedia and many Google pages top the ranks—they have domain trust.

There have been many changes to how search engines determine rankings. In 2002, links were the most important factor in SEO. Some factors, like on-page SEO, hardly change. In this field, it’s important to know the trends in order to stay on top.

When selecting a search engine marketing partner it is important to know how an SEO team keeps abreast of algorithmic changes and on top of trends to ensure that clients’ search marketing program encompasses the best in class approach and results. The team at PCM Interactive has found a way to monitor this and they have seen many changes since 2000 when the decision was made to enter this foray.

Companies who have realized the importance of search engine marketing and SEO as a mainstay in their regular online marketing diet have realized the strategic value of increased quality traffic to their company web sites. SEO, which was once a technical exercise, is evolving rapidly into a marketer’s game and this provides online marketing agencies like PCM Interactive some exciting opportunities to provide some innovative cross-platform solutions geared to enhanced results.

SEO is contantly evolving but there are four things that don’t change (even in the advent of personalized search) these are: make pages accessible, target the right keywords, build content that is useful and earn links from good sources.

I had previously written about what a game changer the iPad is but this video really proves the point. Enjoy!