LizWelsh.com

Liz Merfeld | (608) 335 2363 | lizmerfeld at me.com |

We work with some of Madison’s most prestigious ad agencies and companies, yet love to help even the smallest of start-ups reach their potential. Shall we add you to our Client List?

Fresh Blood: The Second Coming of Trash the Dress

Just in time for Halloween, Dustin Blake of Atlanta-based indy Productions, a 2010 EventDV 25 honoree, has resurrected the Trash the Dress (TTD) movement with a degree of sexiness hitherto unseen—and this time, he’s added an element of the macabre.

Adventure Sports Photography: Creating Dramatic Sports Images in Wild Places, by Tom Bol. Published Nov 30, 2011 by Peachpit Press.

Renowned adventure sports photographer Tom Bol shares his expert techniques and offers inspiration for all outdoor shooter. Bol is a veteran adventure sports photographer with over 20 years of experience, named one of “50 of America’s Top Visionaries” by National Geographic Adventure.

You can pre-order it from Peachpit Press now. Once you receive it, let me know and I’ll autograph it for you.

The only Apple-certified book on OS X Lion, this revised best-seller will take you deep inside the latest big-cat operating system—covering everything from installation and configuration, customizing the operating system, supporting applications, setting up peripherals, and more. Whether you’re a support technician or simply an ardent Mac user, you’ll quickly learn and master the new features in OS X Lion. Following the learning objectives of the Apple Certified Support Professional exam, this self-paced book is a perfect guide for Apple’s training and a first-rate primer for computer support personnel who need to troubleshoot and optimize OS X Lion as part of their jobs. Chapter review sections and quizzes summarize and reinforce acquired knowledge.

Put your thinking cap on. The only Apple-certified book on OS X Lion Server, this comprehensive reference takes support technicians and ardent Mac users deep inside this server operating system, covering everything from networking technologies to service administration, customizing users and groups, and more. Aligned to the learning objectives of the Apple Certified Technical Coordinator certification exam, the lessons in this self-paced volume serves as a perfect supplement to Apple’s own training class and a first-rate primer for computer support personnel who need to support and maintain OS X Lion Server as part of their jobs. Quizzes summarize and reinforce acquired knowledge.

You can pre-order it now from Peachpit Press.

Just Google Ireland Summer Tours, Backroads Ireland, Southern Ireland Tours, Summer Ireland Tour Package, Ireland Tours 2012, Ireland Tour Operators, or similar searches, and you’re bound to find Inroads Ireland Tours on the very first page. Another handful of search phrases will bring up the company’s website on page 2 and 3.

I’ve been working on this site since last spring, and since then their presence on the web has gone from “you’ll find them if you Google their company name” to what it is today. Each month we see improvements!

Andrew Waite’s Higher Definition Media

Waite runs Higher Definition Media (HDM) out of Bakersfield, and just this June launched its wedding-focused spin-off, Lovestruck Films. In addition, he is an indie filmmaker, with 3 self-produced features under his belt, and was one of the first presenters announced for IN[FOCUS] 2012.

Thrive is the economic development partnership for the Madison region committed to providing businesses with access to capital, growing the region’s industries and sectors, and sharing best practices across communities. Only about a month after our Search Optimization, Thrive has quickly increased its search presence on Google for many different areas of their website.

The Aussies have scrunched their event video industry’s evolution into the blink of an eye, leaving videographers stateside blushing. Sure, event videos in the U.S. have advanced by leaps and bounds, going from totally cheap to totally chic, and morphing into films along the way. And there’s no better evidence of the rise of event filmmaking in Australia than the Aussies’ innovative educational event, Exposed Down Under. EDU 2011 kicks off on 4 July in Melbourne. Read the article here.

Robert Runchey of American Home Consultants LLC, recently came to us in April to help him with search optimization for his website. He came to us with a solid website including quality information but needed us to help him utilize the rights keywords for searching. We researched his competitors and others in the industry, implemented Google Analytics, and took advantage of some missed opportunities with inbound links.

Here are some of the searches you can find him under:

home energy inspection madison wi
certified energy auditor wi
wisconsin energy star homes madison wi
home energy audits madison wi
home air quality testing madison wi

Greg Mulvey is the Lead Editor and Motion Graphics Designer for Second City Communications, the business solutions division of Chicago’s world-famous improv comedy theater, The Second City. (Alumni include Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, John Belushi, and Bill Murray to name a few.) Editing comedy is an art form, one that Greg admits he’s still learning.

Learn more about Greg Mulvey here.

One of Chicago’s more successful event video studios—FurlaVision has won more WEVA Creative Excellence Awards than any studio in the Midwest—Chris Chibucos attributes much of his company’s success to they way they have always combined a fairly large volume of work (as many as 150-175 events per year) with a high price point.

Read more about Chris and FurlaVision here.

We are pleased to announce the addition of Brigit Larson to our team as our new Social Media Assistant. Brigit is a recent graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in Consumer Affairs. She has interned for RotoWire.com, a fantasy sports news website, where she researched social media and learned how to use it to leverage any business. While she is a loyal Chicago fan, she loves to travel to new places and has been to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji during her semester abroad. Glad to have you on board Brigit!

In February I optimized a Wausau, WI, plumbing company website for lucrative search terms such as “plumbing central wi.” In early March, Dan’s Service Plus‘ website rankings shot through the roof (previously, you could find the website on Google only by searching for terms like “Dan’s Service Plus”).

Here are some results that appeared as soon as Google’s spiders crawled the new-and-improved website:

Page 1, first result:
plumber central wi
residential plumbing central wi
heating contractor central wi
master plumber central wi
commercial heating central wi

Page 1, result 3:
commercial plumbing wausau wi

Page 1, result 4:
plumber wausau wi
heating technician central wi

Page 1, result 5:
plumbing central wi

Page 1, halfway down the page:
heating contractor wausau wi

Now, the challenge for the Dan’s Service Plus will be to make those rankings stick (which is why it is sometimes a good idea to engage SEO companies on a longer-term basis).

Hyatt Connects with Ignite
The global hospitality chain uses video to communicate with more than 80,000 employees at 340 locations across the globe
By Liz Merfeld

For Hyatt Corp., a hospitality chain with 340 hotels worldwide, communicating with 80,000 employees is no small feat. How to bridge communication among offices thousands of miles apart, from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia, and to bring bandwidth-challenged hotels into the fold was an issue the company attempted to solve by launching a new intranet site in October 2008.

With the new portal, dubbed Hyatt Connect, came the ability to share audio and video content and, as Hyatt executives were pleased to discover, a potentially uber-efficient way to get employee face time—even with staff in remote locales such as Azerbaijan.

There’s a wave of unproduced, demolike, one-take music videos sweeping the web. It started way back in April 2006, when Vincent Moon (real name: Mathieu Saura), a young filmmaker from Paris, conspiring with Chyrde, creator of popular French music website La Blogothèque, filmed songs guerrilla-style “to go” (as opposed to shooting in a standard concert setting) and then uploaded them to the website for mass consumption.

If you want your MTV, then move along; this article isn’t for you. But stick around if you’re intrigued by the prospect of watching or producing genuine homespun, documentary-style short films of roots/Americana musicians performing their songs.

Field Recordings
by Liz Merfeld

With an infectious smile and a joie de vivre you can catch purely by proximity, Meg Simone looks as though she hiked right out of a Trek Travel catalog and into the wedding film industry’s inner circle. By expertly combining her love of the northeastern outdoors with her work, she has (perhaps inadvertently) cornered the market on destination weddings in the heart of Mount Washington Valley (N.H.), a resort community filled with restaurants, shops, ski resorts, quaint inns, and historic grand hotels. What’s more, in a “why didn’t I think of that” move, Simone has become the first videographer to build a brand around elopements, private ceremonies taking place in and around her hometown, picturesque North Conway, N.H.

Read the entire article.

Case study written for Ignite Technologies, Inc., appearing in E-visions Summer 2010, by yours truly: “Using Technology for Global Communication”

The Challenge
Need to move large volumes of water or oil around the world? That’s not a problem for the Flowserve Corporation, global supplier of pumps, valves, seals, and automation to industries such as oil, gas, power, and water. It’s the flow of rich company communications to its small-city-size workforce spread out across more than 56 countries that had them scratching their heads.

Headquartered near Dallas, Texas, Flowserve struggled with relaying corporate messages in an engaging and efficient way to its 15,000 employees.

Executives, especially fresh faces like Flowserve’s newest CEO Mark Blinn, wanted to establish credibility and build rapport with workers, for starters. But it wasn’t as if they could just call an all-hands meeting down at the local Bennigan’s…. Read entire article.

Studio Time | Society Hill Studios & CANON FILMMAKERS LIVE

After introducing themselves to the crowd at Re:Frame Austin, Society Hill Studios’ Cristina Valdivieso and Jon Connor, along with partner Amy Reese now seem to pop up everywhere with the industry’s inner circle. But how did these Young Turks manage to crash this party, seemingly overnight, and set themselves on the road to becoming one of the go-to studios in Philadelphia for couples wanting a high-end, artistic wedding film?

Check it! Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 3 by Dion Scoppettuolo is now on bookshelves.

I had a wonderful opportunity to write three photographer cameos for the book while discovering even more reasons I want to buy Aperture 3.

Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 3

This is one of those websites that calls for a more sober style of writing, unlike, say, some of the PETA projects I worked on years ago. The former, generally speaking, is more difficult to pull off than what’s typically known as “creative writing.”

Once again, I worked with the design and dev wizards at Planet Propaganda to bring this project to life. Congratulations to Planet and M3 on the launch!

“You did a super job making the copy read as though it was a seamless extension of our company. Your writing style stayed very true to our business, which isn’t an easy task!”

- Krissy Bystrom Emery, Marketing Advisor, M3 Insurance Solutions for Business

I’m a beer connesuir myself (that might be a slight understatement), but when I got a call from the delightful Etty Lewensztain, owner of start-up Plonk Wine Merchants, I simply couldn’t say no to working on such a cool website.

Plonk Wine Merchants is the ultimate online destination for cool, artisanal, off-the-beaten-path value wines. All of Plonk’s wines, many of them organic, biodynamic, or “diamonds in the rough” are priced strictly at $30 or below. Hat tip to Stoffa Productions for the spiffy site!

Our work involved addressing technical considerations related to the search-engine “friendliness” of the website as it was designed and developed by Stoffa Productions.

We evaluated design concepts, information architecture, and backend coding to provide feedback on W3C web standards and SEO best practices including clean, semantic markup, header tags, page size, “crawlability,” navigation, deprecated code, and use of html-visible copy. We also developed titles and metadata and an inbound linking strategy.

On Stoffa’s side, I supported the project by writing both the project description on their website and the newsletter announcing the project.

Cheers!

Here’s a sneak peek at a new project I worked on (SEO for Plonk and copywriting for Stoffa). Can’t wait to see the site launch next week!

After five years of deliberation I’ve finally signed up to ride my bike for 300 miles over 4 days to help raise over $300,000 for AIDS Network in August. The eighth annual Wisconsin AIDS Ride is my year and I’m signed up and ready to go! If you want to donate, my fundraising goal is $1600, and you can donate online or find out more about the ride at http://actride.org/.

With reports of young people abandoning e-mail to communicate via social networks, Facebook developing its own full-featured Webmail.

Social Networkers Still Love E-Mail – eMarketer.

Adventures in Fusion, Part 1 by Elizabeth Avery Merfeld

Last fall, Canon shook our world when it released the transformative EOS 5D Mark II, a DSLR featuring full-frame HD video and dynamic depth-of-field control. Along with others of its ilk, the 5D is revving up videographers’ creativity, smearing the line between the photography and videography industries, and ushering in (some say) a new era of photo-video fusion. With several months of use under their belts, we asked a handful of early adopters for their take on how the 5D has impacted their businesses and where (if anywhere) their first forays into fusion have taken them.

I just wrapped up my latest book proofreading project, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition. For those of you who don’t know, Zeldman cofounded the Web Standards Project and is a leading voice in web design and usability. I found out that he’s also irreverent, self-deprecating, and the caliber of writer I can only ever aspire to be.

The good people at Planet Propaganda gave me the opportunity to bid on an SEO and writing job for Madison-based mystery shopping company Beyond Hello. I’m happy to say I got the project. That was at the beginning of the year, and our work is now complete.

I had so much fun writing the copy for their website, in large part because the people I got to work with were some of the friendliest and most genuine people I’ll ever have the good fortune to collaborate with. Planet did a phenomenal job on their website. Take a look!

Today I crossed the finish line of my latest project: copyediting Refocus: Cutting-Edge Strategies to Evolve Your Video Business by Ron and Tasra Dawson, partners in life and in business (they tell me it’s possible).

I like them because they’re creative, and know that to succeed you’ve got to practice creativity in all facets of business, including your offerings, your brand, and your new media and social networking. Check it out!

A letter to the editor I recently had printed in Inc. magazine:

Searching for Growth

Thank you for the prudent advice about outsourcing search-engine optimization [Ask Inc., January/February]. It’s a shame that some SEO firms aren’t above taking advantage of unknowledgeable customers with inflated fees. Fortunately, I’m beginning to see that more businesses are catching on to this and beginning to trust smaller, proven SEO firms, which often don’t have the egos of larger providers.

My advice: Find someone local to help you with SEO. And, just as this article advised, choose a company that comes up first in a Google search of SEO firms in your area. It’s what they’re paid to do, after all.

Elizabeth Avery Merfeld
President
LizWelsh.com
Madison, Wisconsin

And a cherished comment from a current client on my letter:

While reading my latest edition of Inc. magazine, I came across this smart, witty and on-point letter about small businesses and SEO growth.

Thought to myself, this person speaks for me, I have to hire this person! Guess I already did

Kudos! Well done.

Chioma Amegashie
Founder and CEO
MOSAIC distinctive global chic
www.shopmosaiconline.com

Studio Time: Starcross’d Creative | Wedding Video’s Hottest Garage Band

Some artists seek inspiration in long walks, majestic sunsets, or awe-inspiring works of art. Others, like the crew at wedding and event cinematography studio Starcross’d Creative (formerly Starcross’d Films), “get together over some beer and Rock Band.”

Deconstructing the Demo

The Experts’ Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do, compiled by Samantha Ettus, is based on the premise that often “the simplest things are the hardest to master.” The simplicity of no-brainers such as washing your hair, telling someone a story, or even breathing makes it so these primitive tasks come naturally–but at what price? We are doing them–and ourselves–an injustice, she reasons, by not taking the time to become maestros of mundane activities.

To guide readers in perfecting their handshaking or lipstick-applying skills, she has compiled 100 chapters of golden rules, techniques, and instructions from 100 experts. It was this book–no offense intended-that came to mind when we approached the subject of creating a demo.

Joe Simon Productions: Weddings, Super 8, and the BMX Factor

The mid-1960s saw the advent of revolutionary film format Super 8–nowadays a medium used to conjure up memories of the “old days” our parents keep cocooned in cobwebbed basements and cold attics. In the ’70s, boys racing their bikes on dirt tracks kick-started a phenomenon that became known as bicycle motocross, or BMX. And in the ’90s, Joe Simon apparently developed a thing for old-school hobbies involving damage, scratches, dirt, and dust.

I had the honor of copyediting Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Adobe Premiere Elements 7 Classroom in a Book Collection by Jan Ozer, author of 14 books on digital video and regular contributor to EventDV and PC Magazine.

Aside from his expert knowledge in all things technical, I like him because he’s a good example of someone who blends their love for their profession with their love for family. His little girls seem to be a part of everything he shoots and writes.

Hooray for Bollywood: Kevin Shahinian’s Pacific Pictures

Game On—Bringing the NHL to IPTV

Neulion, Inc. and BandCon came together to bring the NHL to IPTV. Now fans can access live games, on-demand highlights, behind-the-scenes footage, clips from morning skate, and pregame and postgame interviews and commentary.

by Elizabeth Avery Merfeld (née Welsh)
December, 2008

Lee Bakogiannakis, 2dg: Sound and Vision
When the time comes to put his legacy in order, Lee Bakogiannakis wants to be remembered for his contributions to the Greek wedding video industry. But for now he’ll settle for being known as the guy who “made Bon Jovi cool again.”
by Elizabeth Welsh
November, 2008

Meeting the Enterprise Distribution Video Challenge
With a 15,000-strong employee base and offices scattered around the world, commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield needed a reliable way for senior management to communicate with staff. They chose a content delivery solution from Ignite Technologies, Inc.
by Elizabeth Welsh
October 15, 2008

“There it was! We were on the cover of the upcoming issue of EventDV!!! And the article by Liz Welsh was even cooler! I was going out of my mind… like a rock band member hearing their song on the radio for the first time.”

“Liz, Just finished reading the article. It’s awesome! You did such a wonderful job. We’re so grateful. In the words of Russell Hammond to Rolling Stone reporter William Miller in Almost Famous, thanks for making us ‘look cool.’ ” – Loyd & Hazel Calomay, Red 5 Studios

The other day one of my editors (who goes by a hyphenated last name) asked me what name I’m going by these days. “Do you use Welsh or Avery-Welsh on your byline? We should put out an entire issue of a magazine written only by people with hyphenated last names,” he joked, referring to another editor of ours who hyphenated his name last year.

“I don’t know anymore what my name is, or care for that matter. I guess Welsh is fine for now,” I said.

But should I care, I wondered? His question and my question got me thinking about a chat I had a few weeks ago on a walk through the woods with a friend. He asked me–hypothetically–if one day I re-married, would I change my name?

I didn’t need a moment to think. “No, why would I?”

He countered, “But why would you want to keep the name Welsh, your ex-husband’s name?” which is a name I chose to adopt initially in my early twenties because I thought it would be “fun” and then kept after our split for practical reasons.

I hadn’t thought about the fact that it might be rude to refuse a new guy’s name in favor of my ex’s. All I knew was that I didn’t want to lose my business name or the name I’ve been published under for eight years, or have a last name different from my child. Plus, how would anyone know to “Follow Me” on Twitter, for chrissakes! The truth is, even though I don’t buy into—have never bought into—patriarchal naming customs (both patronymic and matronymic systems have inherent complications), I really don’t care all that much what my name is, aside from my aforementioned concerns. As William Shakespeare’s Juliet put it, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

But would it, really? I thought about why names are so meaningful to some. Why are they so heavy with pith, remembrance, and identity? My dog’s middle name is Lead-Guitar and he doesn’t even play, after all. Not to mention, I answer to the name John when my grandmother calls for me (her brain, hobbled by a stroke years ago, often defers to her late husband’s name).

I dug out and dusted off some genealogy books compiled by them. Grandpa had taught history, and throughout my childhood, family tree entries peeled off the pages like ghosts, their names swirling in my head—John D. Rockefeller, Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, and Shirley Temple, to name a few—and I wondered if at some basic level I had let these names and their connotations imbue my identity.

For example, if the entries in our family tree and in Wikipedia are correct, my great-great-great grandfather, Miles Avery Rockefeller, was the uncle of the “richest man in history,” oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. As a child I had hated Miles Avery for later disavowing his Rockefeller lineage, “an unusual family of entrepreneurs, capitalists, philanthropists, and statesmen,” thereby (as I surmised), robbing me of my fortune. Yet even in my painfully middle-class state, I still relished in that name that was hidden away in me like a recessive gene. It was a delicious thought.

Then I grew up and they invented Google. And in one search a more sordid secret was uncovered—that Miles was a bigamist who ran off with his housekeeper Ella Brussee, deserting his wife Eliza. Scandalous. As my father tells it, my great uncle “Chuck,” Charles Brussee Avery, their grandchild, hated the name Brussee because some teased him by pronouncing it brassier.

It’s funny, the nature of names. How, like the people they label, one can’t be all good or all bad. Names can burn like scarlet letters or sail us through admissions committees. Love affairs, deceit, and nobility of character. A name is but a handful of snapshots. If you’re lucky like Martha Stewart, the outtakes are forgotten.

The “other Boleyn girl” Mary, aunt of Queen Elizabeth I and sister of Queen Anne (whose head was of course lopped off after accusations of adultery, incest, and treason), is another of my great-great somethings who make ancestor-hunting so terrifyingly colorful. Mary Boleyn, ancestor of Miles Avery’s daughter Lucy, was allegedly not only sleeping with King Henry VIII but also took France’s King Francis I as a lover. Naughty.

I stopped my search when I found a name that I would have no qualms adopting. Darwin. There it was. My great-great Mary Boleyn’s relative. This is a name I thought I could get aligned with. A humble genius who made beautiful breakthroughs in my favorite science. A person with a conscience. “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin,” he said. Yes, I had found a name that meant something to me.

Or so I thought, until I stumbled upon another of his sentiments that I just can’t get behind: “I have tried lately to read Shakespeare,” Charles Darwin said, “and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” Blasphemous.

Juliet’s musings move me and make sense to me. Like Montague or Capulet, our names are simultaneously empty and pregnant with consequence. If I am someday asked to take someone’s name, perhaps I will emulate Juliet and stand on my back balcony gesturing dramatically down into the driveway at my true love: “What’s Welsh?” I’ll say. “It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a woman.”

But I’m not a poet. I’m not a scientist, a queen, a mistress, or millionaire. I’m a writer, and unlike some of my ancestors, my worldly desires are simple and few: a hot bath, a cold beer, a good man, and a crossword puzzle (all at once, if you don’t mind).

So I’ve decided, What’s in a name? Letters. What’s scribbled on my mailbox can wash away in the rain, but the contents of my mind and heart will never. They don’t need names, nor does the “he” in this post. He knows who he is. Like some of his other qualities, his embracing of a tradition that I call passé is at once head-shakingly silly and can’t-live-without-it endearing. It’s a quality I count on, because I need his embracing too. He knows by now I’ll never stop being that dork who’s careening down the highway in the night accidentally listening to Five for Fighting on Delilah. If he’s willing to live with those names, then I’ll happily live with his.

I’ll be there in five minutes with the Isthmus. Want to draw the bath?

“More people are finding me now through my web site than the ads on the Isthmus. That was not happening last year. You Are a Genius*, Thank you.” – Tim Quigley

*Disclaimer: Liz Welsh is not actually a genius. She just plays one on the internet. Serious side effects may occur when she is paid such inflated compliments. The most common are swelling of the head, bloating of the ego, narcissism, and inflation of hourly rate. Consult with your doctor before emailing Liz. Women who are pregnant or nursing should not go have a drink with Liz (all others should feel free). If you feel Liz is right for you, set up a meeting by emailing elizmerfeld at gmail.com.

LizWelsh.com wins first-page results for LogicTraX

In mid-March we optimized the LogicTraX half of LogicHaul.com, a railcar fleet management company. We took 10 important words that they wished to be found under on Google and other search engines, and tweaked their site so that when searchers looking for their service typed those words into Google, they would be able to find them. Prior to our work, you couldn’t find them at all on search engines when typing in those terms.
Just two weeks later, analytics data from Google, Yahoo, and MSN show that 9 out of 10 of those keywords now bring up the company on the first page of search engine results! (The 10th keyword brings up the company in the middle of the second page.) Here are the results:

Google:

• Railcar Tracing: page 1, listing 8
• Railcar Tracking: page 2, listing 5
• CLM Movements: page 1, listing 8

Yahoo:

• Railcar Tracing: page 1, listing 1
• Railcar Tracking: page 1, listing 5
• Steelraods Tracing: page 1, listing 5
• Steelroads Tracking: page 1, listing 5
• Car Tracing: page 1, listing 2
• Car Tracking: page 1, listing 2
• Car Location Report: page 1, listing 1
• Railcar Location Report: page 1, listing 1
• Rail Shipment Tracing: page 1, listing 1
• Rail Shipment Tracking: page 1, listing 1

MSN:

• Railcar Tracking: page 1, listing 4
• Railcar Tracing: page 1, listing 4

It’s not every day my name or anything I’m associated with is used in the same sentence as the word hot, which is why I’m using this rare event to link to an article I wrote for the March issue of EventDV titled, “Meet the New Doc,” which one Video University blog poster described as “HOT” (in all caps no less) and another poster said “should be read and reread several times.” I wouldn’t recommend that if you’re not in the industry or if you’re not shopping for a wedding videographer, but if digital videography appeals to you at all as an art, you might give it a once-over. The artists interviewed are clearly what make the article hot–check out the links to their work at the bottom of the article and you’ll see what I mean.

LizWelsh.com takes Quigley Decks & Fence from no presence in Google to the very first page, very first result (in under one month).

In late December I was contacted by an Irish home improvement contractor based in Madison, Wisconsin, and serving greater southern Wisconsin. He had a website, but it was MIA in the search engines. His website was virtually invisible to potential customers searching for home improvement contractors in southern Wisconsin, a fence builder, or a deck builder, etc., on Google. In my research, I scrolled through to page 11 on Google searching for his site, to no avail.

The day after Christmas we met downtown at Espresso Royale. Over coffee I explained how I would research pertinent keywords for his industry and optimize every page of his website so that it would have a much better chance of showing up prominently in search engines.

One handshake later, I got to work on his site. I completed my work — which included an overhaul of his website copy as well as writing new title tags, meta description, and meta keywords (as well as some minor graphics work and analytics implementation) — on January 14.

Just shy of one month later, you couldn’t ask for better results. What’s more, the vast majority of competing sites that Quigley Decks & Fence shares the first page of Google with are directories of businesses. This is a huge edge over his competition.

A few example searches:

decks and fences southern wisconsin
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 1

home improvement contractor southern wisconsin
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 2

home improvement contractor cottage grove wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 3

home improvement contractor lake mills wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 5

home improvement contractor madison wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 8

home improvement contractor fitchburg wi:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 9

home improvement contractor middleton:
December 2007: not found
February 2008: page 1, listing 9

Other kids had lemonade stands. My “twin cousin” and I — at 8 years old both budding ambitious (not to mention shady) businesspeople — opened a laundry stand on the sidewalk in his upscale Los Alimitos neighborhood one summer. We thought we were very shrewd because we collected trusting neighbors’ laundry, and rather than wash it, we simply spritzed it with Febreze (or whatever the the ’80′s version of Febreze was). In no time at all, laundry was finished, folded, and returned to glowing customers who raved about how fresh their laundry smelled. We laughed all the way to our piggy banks.

The next morning none of our customers returned. Looking back, I believe that they probably realized the impossibility of laundry being washed and dried in 20 minutes and were simply indulging us for a day. But nevertheless we realized that our business model (cheating) had short-lived success. What would we do next? It wasn’t likely we’d be able to be as beguiling with a lemonade stand. Perhaps we could secretly make Crystal Light and sell it as bona fide lemonade, but of course that would be just as much work, so what was the point?

That was the beginning and the end of my unethical business practices. Unfortunately, in the SEO world, like anywhere else, there are still some 8-year-old laundry stand kids masquerading as professionals, practicing “Febreze” techniques and guaranteeing first-page results. Their tactics sometimes work–until Google catches on and blacklists the websites that have implemented their changes. These SEO’ers take shortcuts like placing unrelated keywords (like Paris Hilton) in their meta tags, alt text, or CSS layers. They stack keywords (like cheese cheese cheese cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese wisconsin cheese) to fake out search engines. They sardine-stuff sentences (sentences at their loosest definition) in alt text, or hide keywords in the content of the page–keywords so tiny and faint that you’d need your 5.75 power reading glasses to make them out. The list goes on and on: bait-and-switch spam, redirects, doorway pages, cloaking, cybersquatting, and more.

Fixing the devastating effects the above practices can have is time-consuming and expensive. Once a customer’s website disappears from the search engines for having been caught cheating, it’s unlikely these charlatan SEO’ers are going to get a lot of customer loyalty. So it’s on to the next block, to prey on some other unassuming website owner. But once word gets around, the game is up.

Of course, there’s always selling lemonade.

It began as most friendships do: all seafood, clogs, and ice parties. A few days later, naturally, we were drinking bubble tea under ice cube lights. Before long we were talking of cowboy boots and learning how to make gelato. Naturally, as friendships go, we spent endless hours talking of mini & toy labradoodles, liposuction photos, and guitar lesson scams.

It was like we had known each other all our lives, and could talk about anything, from lighthouses to ski resorts to Superman Tees (2 for $30).

Was it a bad sign when the subject of annoying ringtones came up? Wedding planning? Thinning brows? Ted Koppel? I’ll be awaiting my gmail inbox destiny.

It’s a fun exercise to notice what Google AdSense advertisers make of your conversations by way of their keyword-targeted advertising in gmail. From what I’ve seen, advertisers have a great deal to learn about more focused targeting when advertising via AdWords. The only ads that have applied throughout the course of my many email exchanges with this friend are ski resort ads and the tactful dearth of ads when our conversations turned to subjects dealing with, ahem, “making out” and “stalking.” For these conversations, the right-hand column of gmail was conspicuously, and thankfully, blank.

What I’m getting at is proof that while pay-per-click advertising is accessible, it can be deceptively straightforward. Companies would do well not to take matters into their own hands and waste their money with keywords or ad groups that display their ads to an audience that has no interest in their product. There is a huge difference in ad campaigns targeting searchers and targeting content areas, such as gmail or other websites containing content related to the terms in your ad. It’s not a one-ad-fits-all model. But the majority of companies still haven’t learned this. Professionals who have experience researching keywords and market trends, developing highly targeted keyword lists, and discerning between various display methods (content, search, email) and knowing how to go after each audience, are going to save companies time and money in the long run.

Clients with websites dominated by Flash (whose only text is embedded in graphics and video) sometimes ask me how to rank higher in search engines for their industry. My answer is simple. Content is Queen.

Do what they do with their lyrics, but in html-visible text on your site, not audio or graphics.

Take, for example, this song: http://youtube.com/watch?v=NOHXPNvVEwo

Notice the the focus and repetition of the keywords. Emulate Queen’s lyric length and poetic placement of keywords.

Write a magnum opus on industrial equipment sales, stationery, or the decks you build. If it helps, rent a smoke machine and wear a shiny white body suit in the process.