It’s early in the New Year, so appropriately it’s a time to look back on the past decade or so and talk about what’s changed in search marketing since I first started back in 1996. (Yes, I said 1996. Take that, whippersnappers.)
Actually, one might have to expand the topic a bit to include other types of internet marketing, particularly since one of the biggest trends has been the ongoing “blendiness” of all things Web. It’s almost impossible these days to cut a discrete line around what is search marketing, what is social media marketing, and what is online content publishing. At the Online Marketing Summit conference in San Diego this upcoming February, I’ll be on a panel with other old-timers during the special “Search Engine Strategies Day” on Feb 25 , talking about “SEM Then & Now: What’s the Same? What’s New?” We’ll discuss how social media and its realtime search implications are affecting search reputation, plus how content strategy is the new SEO. And we’ll look back on some of the tactics that got us where we are today, and how they’re still impactful.
What a stellar lineup of old friends and colleagues who have helped to shape this industry since long before Google existed, let alone was used as a verb: Nacho Hernandez, Greg Jarboe, Anne Kennedy, Kevin Ryan, Heather Dougherty and Mike Grehan. And no doubt the panel will have lots of laughs on it as we remember back in the days when we had to SEO through the snow uphill both ways.
While I’m waxing poetic, here are a few of the things I do NOT miss about Search Marketing from “back in the day”:
- Having to make 6 versions of every web page, one for each of the 6 major search engines (yes, there were 6).
- The Google Dance, when it didn’t mean “free beer.”
- Manually adjusting PPC bids by pennies before the advent of management software.
- Explaining what I do for a living.
- Flame wars about commas/no commas.
- Having to convince clients to make search marketing a priority.
- Having to use the Overture keyword tool for primary KW research data, with its randomly inflated search counts.
And, to counter, a few of the things I do miss:
- Cloaking.
- Paid inclusion from Inktomi (at one point, it front-loaded full pages of SERPs on MSN.com – sweet!).
- Talking about actual search technology at conferences (enterprise search, advanced algo tech, etc.), not just search marketing.
- The ease of ranking by simply stuffing a bunch of white-on-white keywords on sites.
- The original Google Adwords program, where you could buy a full year of #1 placement in advance, on a locked CPM.
- Yahoo keyword banners. I once got a 40% CTR on one of those babies. Yes, 40% – not 4%.
- The Google Dance that meant free beer.
I hope that you will be able to join us for the discussion at OMS in San Diego, and will contribute your own great memories at the conference and here on this post. I think this will be one of the most fun panels of the show. Even you whippersnappers will hopefully enjoy getting some perspective on where we are now, and how we got here.
Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!
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Oh Dana – the good ole days. It has been 15 years since I put up a catalog, static site for my employer at the time and 14 years since I started WebMama.com as a consulting company to increase qualified traffic to a site via low cost internet marketing (sounds like search to me).
What I DO miss:
1. Danny’s cocktail hours with just 20 of us
2. Thunder Lizard Productions
3. Fitting into my first Google Dance t-shirt (I believe there were 75 people at the first Dance)
4. The Targeting Hispanics panel
5. Search Marketing getting credit for everything
What I DON’T miss:
1. Arguments over whether an industry association is a good thing.
2. Florida Updates
What I can’t believe I still do:
1. Read html
2. Try and convince clients to get engineering and IT out of the loop
3. Tell clients they cannot put white keywords on white backgrounds
Cheers,
Barb/WebMama
Barb, I second your “Thunder Lizard Productions” comment (I still wear their long sleeve t-shirt when running in cool weather) and the Google Dance t-shirts (I have all but 2007).
What I miss is changing title tags and instantly seeing a site rank #1 organically. And being able to outrank competitors in PPC by outbidding them by a penny. Sigh…the good old days!
@Barb – I can’t fit into my first Google Dance Tshirt – the one with the cool dancing robot on it. But I wear it around the house anyway.
@Stacy – Amen to seeing instant ranking results just by messing around with the content. *sigh* indeed!
Wow, memory lane. I have trouble remembering last week let alone 10 years of tumultuous change, but here it goes:
Things I miss the most:
1.) River rafting down the American river with almost the entire conference panel of 15 – 20 people
2.) Shooting those same individuals with Paintballs (remember when we actually had time to enjoy each others company?)
3.) How similar the Internet was to the Wild West. Black Hats vs White Hats and being outnumbered 7 vs 1in a poolside showdown
4.) Actually being able to contact the people that mattered at Google and to get a straightforward and timely response to an issue
5.) Believing in that tiny search engine (Google)
6.) Fighting to establish that things like cloaking and invisible text were “bad”. The late night philosophical discussions about it over drinks.
Things I don’t miss so much:
1.) Finding out my publisher didn’t have insurance and what “work for hire” contractually meant to my ideas
2.) Having to convince clients that what I said was the absolute best thing for them to do
3.) Cloaking, Doorway pages, Ghost Pages, Envelope Pages, Jump Pages, Gateway Pages, Bridge Pages and Invisible text oh my
4.) Lawsuits (Thankfully I haven’t lost any to date but does anyone ever really win one?)
5.) Flying all over the dang place
[...] to be done differently for the SEM conference industry as a whole. In the meantime, you can read Dana’s musings on this as [...]