Which Search Engine to Focus On?

From an Information Management Strategy perspective, it serves Internet Marketing professionals well to understand what kind of Search Tools are available and typically leveraged to find their clients' digital assets.

Check out this post on Search Engine Information Management.

Welcome From the Neighborhood

Even the big dogs can't ignore SEO/SEM (i.e. "Publishing 2.0") for hyperlocal marketing...Washington Post's LoudounExtra suffers...

Loudoun and Fairfax Omni-Media Marketing Alliance

KME Internet Marketing (KME) of South Riding, Virginia announces a strategic Washington DC region Internet Marketing and Communications alliance with Trivision Studios of Chantilly, Virginia. This partnership enables end-to-end delivery of coordinated, integrated and highly-effective omnimedia marketing and communications for our clients, including powerful and creative marketing, entertainment and multi-media campaigns on the Internet, in print, with distributed electronic media, and broadcast via TV and radio. This Northern Virginia partnership also creates the most targeted, flexible, relevant and comprehensive opportunities for local businesses and organizations to promote their own brand, products, services or events to audiences in the Metropolitan Washington, DC region or anywhere in the world.

This alliance is an especially powerful and relevant business event in the DC area, originating in Northern Virginia's Dulles South area of western Fairfax, western Prince William and eastern Loudoun Counties. With the rapid growth and expansion of local businesses, national and international commercial interests in this area, this partnership provides very critical, focused and coordinated business services in an otherwise segmented and difficult-to-negotiate regional advertising market. This alliance also showcases the availability and advanced capabilities of two leading representatives of Northern Virginia's world-class Internet technology, new media and professional services community, and in particular highlights the effectiveness of regional collaboration between Fairfax and Loudoun County technology leaders.

Read more about this Washington DC Marketing and Communications Announcement...

It's not "Search in English Optimization" (SEO)

We recently had an interesting case with a client who produces a print product that reflects a very culturally-diverse reader base. The target audience and demographics come from all over - India, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Indonesia, China - you name it. Not surprisingly, the advertisements and reviews of local service providers also reflect some cultural influence and bias, both in the actual business names and descriptions of products. It turns out that a very helpful skill for SEO practitioners (at least in the US) is rudimentary knowledge, or perhaps simple acknowledgement, that keywords and phrases in foreign languages are obviously as important to get correct as those in English.

In this case, the business name of some copy we saw (in French) was misspelled. Now we don't claim to be the Loudoun County Spelling Bee Champs, but it only took some high-school level mastery of the language to recognize a possible problem. Some quick research revealed that, yes, the business name wasn't taking some sort of artistic liberties with the language of Napolean. What was concerning, however, was that this was noticed only by the person with the French language background, and not for others without.

Copywriting, editing and proofing methods do dictate that all proper names be checked and double-checked, especially if these names end up as keywords to be bid upon (with Google pay-per-click, for example). But this obviously doesn't always happen, and may we be so heretic as to suggest that most English-centric proofers (especially on the web) tend to gloss over foreign-phrases and names with some sort of assumption that, if they're in another language, they're either irrelevant or simply not to be taken seriously?

It becomes very apparent to us, especially in local and regional SEO/SEM practices (where cultural diversity is prominent), that talent must be retained for a minimum level of copy-proofing in different languages. This is obviously pretty difficult in areas like Washington, DC, with so many countries and cultures represented, but at least some effort should be made. I suppose we're lucky that our existing staff has background in Spanish, German, French, Latin (!), English and various dialects of the areas near Exit 14 off the New Jersey Turnpike - but it simply might not be enough. We certainly plan to be extra careful with any word or phrase that looks like it wasn't used on the Mayflower...