I just attended a seminar on Email Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.  Ha!  I can see how you can fit email marketing into a 3 hour presentation (and Zak Barron did a good job on this) but it’s rather difficult to fit SEO into a 3 hour presentation.  Nick Stamoulis of Brick Marketing did the presenting for this part.  I really liked Nick – you can see that he is really passionate about his work and enjoys it (a rarety in these days).

Here is an interesting tit bit on email marketing that I didn’t know.  What do you think is the ROI on an email marketing campaing?  $10?  $25?  Guess again.  It’s $48, which means that for every $1 you spend, on the average, you can get about $48.   That is of course on the average, and would only work with a well executed email campaign and would vary by industry.

So, what did Nick teach us about search engine optimization? It turns out that a good website is just like a good piece of cheese – properly aged and well care for.  The longer your site has been posted and active – the better.   The more friends you have on the web (i.e. relevant links from trusted sources that lead from and to your site), the better.  The cleaner your site is to the eye of the Google behemoth, the better you’ll rank.

It also turns out that Google (and search engines and machines in general) like logic, clarity and order.  It’s not just good programming practice to clearly name your files and folders, but it’s necessary for google.  It makes sense, right?  Even humans can’t always figure out that famonbch.jpg is really family-on-the-beach.jpg.