Julian Lewis Watkins wrote in the book  The 100 Greatest Advertisements that 95% of the most effective headlines from the early years of magazine advertising were eight words or less. This is because magazine copywriters had to write tight headlines due to space concerns, much like Twitter. This also makes me think of more modern slogans like, “Just Do It”, “I’m Loving It” and “This Buds for You”. The obvious major difference is that millions of dollars of market research when into crafting those slogans.

I’ve got about 50 cents to spare on my next tweet. Sex and humor it is.

Why don't you just hold a gun to my head?

For the last couple of years I’ve monitored my name via Google alerts as part of this experiment of achieving and maintaining search engine rankings for my name. This morning, before I could get through my green tea, I found that my rankings are under attack. Now ranking number nine in Google for “Devin Downey”, is this page from a company called Juglo.com. What’s their pitch? If they were asking for money, you could describe the basis as blackmail. Essentially, register with us or we will continue to post this search engine optimized bio of you until you buy it and write or someone else does.

Here’s the setup, the heading states, “Want to Know Everything About Devin Downey?” and the text on the page provides a fictional bio of “Devin Downey”. At the bottom it asks, “Are you Devin Downey?”, and goes onto the sales pitch:

This profile was autogenerated by Juglo and optimized to rank at the very top within search engines for the phrase “Devin Downey”. If you are Devin Downey you can now sign up and claim this profile as yours.

A premium search engine position for this profile means anybody looking for your name in Google™, Yahoo™ or Live Search™ will find the information YOU want them to see. Join the Juglo community and promote your name online.

The unstated message is essentially, if you don’t register for this profile with us, someone else may very well do so and write things about you that are much more concerning than our “example” bio. After years and years of seeing this done on the corporate level, I guess it was only a matter of time before a company used a blatant strategy like this one to do the same at the private citizen level. To me, it seems not altogether different then when people have created profiles on Myspace and Facebook of famous people and built up huge lists of friends and then attempted to sell the profile to the celebrity’s management team. The major difference is that they are not asking for money (at least for now) but rather they have the opportunity to utilize your registration information. In their privacy statment they state, “I agree that Juglo uses the information that I enter in the Juglo user panel (such as gender and attended college, profession, etc.) and that I voluntarily display on my own profile, to send me personalized targeted advertising and / or special offers and services via the Juglo network.”

Something about all this just seems unsavory. Still, it’s not all that different than Naymz, Zoom Info or Classmates.com, other than in the approach. While those companies rely on information harvested from existing files on the internet or consumer supplied content, this company took an extra step and has created a fictional bio and optimized it. It just seems to go too far, as I believe people should opt into participating in social media as opposed to having their arm twisted into giving a company their private information in return for protecting their reputation to a small degree.

Everything is going green. Green cars. Green hotels. Well, those are the subjects I’m focused on at work since I work with travel and hospitality clients. If you do a search on Google for “Green Hotels”, not one major hotel chain shows up at the moment. Wanna know why? It’s because the keyword tools say there is currently no volume for the “green” keywords yet. So nobody creates the content for green keywords. Yet if you pick up Travel + Leisure, and did an analysis, you would find that the keyword volume within the magazine itself is very high for the words “green”, “eco-friendly” etc. This has an impact on the consumer and I believe it helps to shape their future search behavior.

The same thing is occurring in the car rental field in regards to keywords such as “Green Car Rental”. Not one major car rental agency is currently showing up on the first page of Google search results. Yet major newspapers are all over the topic with USA Today running an article on their front page a couple of weeks ago on the consumer demand for fuel efficient car rentals.

While many search marketers might scoff at optimizing for keywords with no current volumes, the press and media coverage of green themes in travel and hospitality will ensure that these keywords become valuable. Team those generic terms with geographical terms like “green hotel san francisco” and you’ve got yourself a potential revenue generating optimization strategy. I’m absolutely sure of it.

Every day major corporations miss out opportunities they created themselves for search demand. On July 18th, 2007 Whole Foods scored big with a Designer Bags publicity stunt in Atlanta, GA. I know because I heard about it on the radio in Dallas, TX and then later in the day in Tulsa, OK. I went online to find out more. After many searches, I didn’t find anything. Later they followed this up with an operational decision to ban plastic bags altogether. That’s all you are going to find out about on wholefoods.com if you try to find about the designer bags. At least they had a related topic to cash in on. Most companies don’t. Instead, they come up with golden ideas and then forget to optimize content in advance by forecasting the search demand.

It’s been about nine months since I’ve actually posted anything here. My goal was to get the number one ranking in Google for “Devin Downey”, so once I achieved that ranking, I quickly lost interest in writing. I certainly don’t consider myself much of a writer.

After a quick scan of the search engines,  I discovered that I have achieved at least a number two ranking in all of the majors (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask), so this blog has served its purpose. I’ve also managed to secure seven out of the top ten rankings on Google for “Devin Downey” with content on sites like Linked In, Classmates and Naymz.

Now I am wondering if I can work in the opposite direction. How long would it take to pull a search engine “houdini”? I recently read an article on “How to be unGoogleable“. It’s not really a new concept, as people have wanted to hide from visibility for quite some time. I once worked on a corporate account that acquired a negative site dedicated to hating their corporation. It was called (insert their Corporation’s name) ____ sucks.com.  My team’s task was to de-optimize it. It took about three months before you couldn’t find any trace of it. Ask.com held on the longest with a thumbnail in their search results page that continued to display the image of the page that had not existed for three months.

De-optimization can be done with time, provided you own the content. You can even keep the content live and indexed on your site, but apply no follow tags for the search engines to de-optmize the content. But what do you do when you don’t own the content? Since you “rent” some of your content space typically, in my case on Linked In, Classmates and Naymz, you can log onto those sites and wipe your profiles clean by deleting your account. I’m guessing that would take a month or two to disappear from Google. Heck, it might only take a few days, it’s hard to tell.

But, what do you do when your name shows up in PR or on other content where you don’t own or rent the space? PR on third party sites doesn’t go away and there isn’t much you can do about it. That’s the rub, as I can still find an article from 1994 that I wrote about my college fraternity. Luckily, I don’t have a concern with what I wrote at that time, but many folks do end up writing things that they wouldn’t be proud of fifteen years later.

Everyday I see examples of published content that is going to be duplicated on other sites and regretted by the author later. I still see candidates who are interviewing for jobs at my employer who write about the process and have no idea that hundreds of folks at our company have Google Alerts set up that notify us when something is published. If you write it, publish it on your blog and include a keyword that people monitor, you better be quite the “houdini” if you think you are going to make it disappear.

If you notice the title tag on this page (if you are unaware of a title tag, it’s at the very top of your browser, the title tag on my homepage says “The ‘Real’ Devin Downey”) it is a strong example of the challenges of balancing SEO and art. If I wanted to have a shot at ranking for any search engine industry terms, I’d need to change the headline on this page to something like, “Devin Downey, Search Engine Marketer”, because on this blog content management system, my title on my page is automatically placed in the title tag of the code. Now if I was much smarter, like my co-worker Rob Garner (he is brilliant), I could probably change the code, but that’s just not me. I don’t find Content Management Systems intuitive, they drive me crazy. I just think of ideas and work with the people who can make them happen. Since no one is being employed to do the code on this site, we are stuck with a headline title tag that is designed to be the best balance between SEO and art that I can figure out – ranking for my own name yet a bit sarcastic per my personality.

Lately, all of our clients have been stressing balance. The firm I work for employs a report called an Obstacles Analysis Report (OAR short). We should rename it the Balance of Search Engine Optimization and Art Report (BS for short). Our clients instruct us that we dare not tell one of their artists that the design technique they are utilizing is killing their search engine presence and literally trashing million of dollars of search visibility. “How do we build a business case for SEO?”, the artists ask, hoping that we don’t have an answer. The answer is often stated by taking their paid search efforts and mutiplying by a factor of four or five. That number can be staggering. Unfortunately, they often still don’t grasp the concept. That’s ok. Their bosses soon will.

Is Stephen Colbert the Greatest Living American? Regardless whether it’s intentional or not, he has already added that search term to his personal identity. I remember a lot of talk in the Fast Company period of the late 90′s and early 2000′s regarding cultivating a personal brand for oneself. Greatest Living American is one heck of a personal brand! I’d certainly opt for that over Miserable Failure.

This morning I received my first Google Alert that included an entry that I had created myself. It’s interesting that it contained both of my last two entries. I feel like a proud papa.

Ironically, I also received a Google Alert set for the name of my employer today that included a blog entry for someone we had just hired. I’m assuming that this new guy does not understand that Google Alerts pick up much of what is out on the web and that by mentioning our company name he has brought numerous fellow employees to his blog. Folks that for the most part otherwise would not know he existed. More than likely our CEO has read it by now. Considering all of the emotions he has on that page, I don’t think I’d like that kind of introduction to my new company. He’ll learn soon enough!

Success. Was it the title of earlier post or the title tag on the home page? Probably the combination. The #1 spot in Google for “Devin Downey” is mine for the time being. I gotta admit, it feels good.

Ok, to be fair, I only monitor Google, but so far I haven’t made a dent. Zero visibility other than the scraper site finding me the other day. I had thought that simply adding a little bit of content and keyword density for “devin downey” would work since Word Press itself is such a link monster, but that doesn’t appear to be the case after a week.

What to try next? As part of any Search 101 thought process, I think to myself that I should monkey around with the CSS and add my name to the title tag. A half hour later, I have no idea how to do how to change the title tag. So I change the title of my blog…. and hello, that is where the title tag exists – one reflects the other on this system. I’ll give this tweak a little bit of time to be picked up and see what kind of impact I can get out of the new title. Come on Google!