This month marks the anniversary for my 10th year in business and the 1st year of my blog. Both of these events have been monumental in our success. In honor of this celebration, I’d like to share my all time

Top 5 Things I Love about Search Marketing:

5) Quantifiable nature of the business. If you are gaining awareness, increasing visits, improving conversion and growing sales, you’re succeeding. Search can be the most quantifiable of all marketing efforts if done properly.

4) You don’t step in the same river twice. Search marketing is a swiftly moving, ever changing discipline. I don’t know how you could ever get bored as a search marketer.

3) Interesting history. I watched 28 up the other day, a documentary about the interviews of a handful of people on their 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th birthdays. I would love to see some research body do this for search marketing. How can you predict where it will go? It’s driven by part legacy, part innovation, part perspective and part sheer will.

2) Relative newness of the discipline. Traditional marketing and advertising have tried and true practices and standards. Search marketing is finally becoming standardized, but as new strategies emerge we are challenged to work them into the search marketing mix.

1) The people. Search marketers are by nature, exciting, innovative, interesting creatures. They are the first to share their new findings and the last to disparage. They are some of my favorite people on the planet.

Thank you to the following:

My children, Marcus & Taylor for putting up with my travel, my crazy schedule, having to share my home office with your music room before we had a real office and for accompanying me to California many times to go to Disneyland;)
Dallas & Roxanne for helping make the family schedule work
My parents and family for helping me through the good times and the bad times, I love you
My friends for their support (and martinis)
The nay sayers for teaching me the value of perseverance
Dave Edwards for great business advice
My co-workers for their faith that we were working towards something special
Avery Dennison for the opportunity to work with such a fantastic company
Print and Mail Center for exploring the unknown together
Cathedral Ridge Winery for coming back;)
EZkem Lab Services for being a great collaborator
Vineyardview for teaching me that I love search marketing and I hate running a B & B;)
Copper West Properties for your patience and faith
Swaddlekeeper for the cutest product ever
Hitchsource for your innovation
Monster.com for making me your PR person and hooking me up
Kiplinger Magazine, Glamour Magazine and The Oregonian for the great articles
SEMPO for creating a standard for the industry
SEMPDX for creating a local membership of search marketers, for making me an Advisory Board member, for the trip to Chicago, for the speaking gig at SearchFest, to your board members (Todd, Ben, Scott, all) for their great mentoring and mostly for being such a great group of professionals

I am grateful. Here’s to another 10 years!

Content is king, but wait, links are the holy grail of search marketing, but wait, it’s hard to meet search goals if you don’t have successful site architecture. Okay, as search marketers we address all these issues and more, but let’s take a minute to review an important checklist for your site architecture.

* Have a site map-it helps the engines and your visitors
* Do your keyword research so you’re using words your visitors use
* Create a global navigation system that is always present for your user so they can easily find content
* Each page should have an objective, create content for that purpose
* Visually impactful images are an important element of designing your site, but use text to display keyword rich content and links
* Create unique keyword rich title tags and alt+image tags that describe that page
* Create internal cross-links that helps guide your visitors through your site
* Ask yourself the question-”Have I told people what I’d like them to do on my site?”
* Update your content, create a content management system so you can easily change content or implement a blog
* Test your site, pretend you’re a user and experience your site as a visitor

Before you take the next step in your search marketing campaign, make sure you’ve reviewed this checklist with your design team, developers and customers.

Recently, I presented at a Software Association of Oregon meeting for our local Columbia Gorge Chapter and Gorge Tech Allliance on the topic, “Growing Your Online Marketing Channel”. It was a great group of local businesses with a focus on tech companies, but retail, non profit and content sites were represented as well.

When broaching a topic this wide, it’s easy to get caught up in over simplifying or over whelming. Summit Projects Executive Account Manager Rob McCreedy presented great information and case studies from their Nike sites and gave some helpful guidelines for understanding Website Usability.

My focus was creating framework for good Search Engine Optimization and how Natural Search can help grow your business. The hardest part about these short meetings is providing value. We could spend a week on Keyword Research alone (1 of 15 slides in a 20 minute presentation). It’s always the hope that these educational meeting lay the groundwork for understanding that Web Marketing and Search Marketing are complex disciplines and that investing in your success as a business owner is worth your time. This takes a great deal of insight and responsibility from the business owner.

The two biggest issues I see with business owners struggling to make the decision to grow their online marketing channel (especially small to mid-size business) are:

ISSUE
1) The desire to spend precious little time or budget on online marketing, then having unrealistic expectations regarding results.

SOLUTION
As a business owner, create an expectation for your marketing agency for ROI. Research the potential for growth for your company online, determine your ability to garner more of the market place, define parameters for potential growth and make decisions about investing in search marketing, web development and other online marketing strategies.

ISSUE
2) The expectation that you can pay an agency for a project, walk away and return to great results.

Get involved with your agency and collaborate through the entire project. As a write this, I think about a project we’re working on now. The business owner (I’ll share more about the project upon completion;) has been involved, not just with creating project parameters, but with design, content development and user experience. It’s not an easy process to say the least, but the potential for success of the project increases dramatically with your involvement as a business owner. No one knows your business better than you.

Kudos to those who attended this (or any) meeting exploring Growing Your Online Marketing Channel, and dare to take the next step and create an actionable strategy for growing your business online. If you think you need more education, attend SEMPDX meetings, attend local Community Education courses, read articles on the topic (ClickZ or SearchEngineLand) or reach out to an agency who has provided results for their clients.