At eVisibility, we not only like to face challenges via the Web, but when we see a physical challenge you can bet we’ll find a way to make it fun and interesting. In fact, we are making headlines with our Bike to Work challenge. Erin Cartaya, social media specialist and runner extraordinaire, rode her bike from Pacific Beach into the office. Just over 30 miles , she really takes this biking to work thing seriously!

Fumi Matsubara rode the coattails and joined in the last leg of Erin’s ride, but riding a mountain bike, he managed to ride through every dirt path he could. In viewing the larger picture of this day, George contributed his green efforts by carpooling (unfortunately not by choice, but it counts).

And finally, to top it all off- our very own CEO, Danny DeMichele rode his bike to work. Yes, he pedaled the whole 2.5 miles to work today. Great job! Oh wait, is that an electric bike!? Oh well, we’ll give him an A for effort. Great job everyone for taking part in Bike to Work day!

Here is the official press release: Search Engine Marketing Company eVisibility Takes Part in National Bike to Work Day

There are new tools and platforms springing up everyday featuring “REVOLUTIONARY” ways to optimize ad placements both for the publisher and advertiser, specifically giving the ability to track engagement time with an ad.

Great, we can now waste time optimizing nothing from nothing. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t sound like tools analyzing ad engagement time can be truly revolutionary; maybe a helpful reporting plugin at best. Rather than continuing to sort out the few remaining suckers and shove non-engaging ads down the throats of social networkers as if we are the patron saints of all that is right in the world, we need to re-think the marketing roles that we’ve carried since the birth of Christ and start involving savvy users in the game.

Imagine a world where the end user has their own ad controls.

What do you think?

This is what we found this week in the world of search engine marketing:

• 10 Things You Can Do To Optimize for Image Search
• The Next Development In Search
• Wolfram|Alpha
• Taking A Simple Idea And Executing - PR Hedgecock Style
• Twitter Search to Start Indexing Pages and Launch Reputation Algorithm
• More on Google Web Search’s New Referral Strings
• Is Social Media Marketing Illegal?
• Google Analytics Adding Two Advanced Features
• In SEO, Keywords and Branding Don’t Mix
• Link Building from A to Z
• Expired Content

I was hired in the middle of Q4 2008 for a sales position at eVisibility, and I wanted to write a little about the experience of coming from a place where I thought I had a good grasp of online / search engine marketing to joining this group who actually lives and breathes it. My previous job was with a company that put design first, where I had to learn fancy acronyms like LAMP and try to decipher the limitations and functionality of programs like Drupal and Joomla, and development tools like CSS, PHP, HTML and Ruby on Rails.

When it came to online marketing, it was a highly nebulous concept for me; and the training that I really needed was not forthcoming. I read some things about SEO and Paid Search, but I did not have enough foundational knowledge for it to really gel. Nevertheless, I was able to sell it somewhat successfully as part of a project because clients were completely lost on the subject. Flash forward to now, and a quick discussion about SEO and what I see in my job.

Now, at least, I know what I don’t know. SEO in and of itself is fantastically complex, although now I have a strong conceptual understanding of it, and a much tighter grasp of the value of the moving parts which all coalesce to create results within a well managed campaign. I can talk on and off page and give you articulate explanations of each facet of organic optimization as they relate to the way we have our deliverables and pricing set up. This is a huge departure from “yeah, we can do SEO and PPC, and we will just roll it into the price for development.”

Unfortunately, my world is complicated from a sales perspective. Potential clients coming to us have very often been burned by some company (and there are many out there) which has taken significant money and given the client results ranging from nothing to almost nothing for their investment. This happens for two reasons, the first being that there tends to be an attitude from the customer perspective that SEO is SEO, that it is a commodity like groceries or gasoline. This leads to a lot of price comparison but inexplicably almost a total lack of focused effort to really compare the deliverables from one company to the next. The devil is really in the details when it comes to organic optimization, and Internet marketing in general.

Vigilance on the part of the customer within this aspect of the sales process would almost certainly eliminate the second reason that this happens. A large number of companies in this space are either unscrupulous or they just do not have the human capital assets or top level expertise to do everything necessary to create results that justify the customer expenditure, and more of them would be eliminated if potential customers were more informed, knew what to look for, and were prepared to pay a fair price for the actual value of the expertise and deliverables that achieve results.

At the end of the day it really pays to deal with a company that trains its front line sales reps to understand this stuff at almost the level of a sales engineer. From this one can extrapolate that the people involved in the actual day to day campaign administration are extremely qualified, and well worth the $2,000-$10,000+ per month they are asking for. With the right exposure and placement, your ROI will eclipse those numbers anyway. Never has the phrase “you get what you pay for” been more appropriate.

In the world of search engine marketing this is what we found this week:

• Does Google LOVE.COM Spam?
• Digg Selling Links Off Digg.com?
• Can Microsites Harm Your Primary Site’s Rankings?
• Google Logo Not Broken, It’s Morse Code
• Whiteboard Friday - Off-Site “Over-Optimization”
• Google Maps Pulling In Geotagged Flickr Photos
• Google Study On Sitemaps
• Get Longer Google AdWords Titles Through Dynamic Keyword Insertion
• Google Launches Public Data Search & Charts During Wolfram Alpha Demo
• Lessons Learned Building an Index of the WWW
• Search on the Seas: Google Water-Based Data Center Patent Granted
• Multi categories website structure. Who needs the canonical tag?
• Search Engine Optimisation Basics
• Why SEOs Should Care About Social Media
• Google Analytics Adds AdSense Integration
• $30,000 Google Surprise: New Advertiser Runs Up Huge Bill
• Fantomaster Interviewed!
• Using Twitter Trends to Pick Up Easy Search Traffic
• Google Giving Away 250,000 Google Profile Business Cards
• Dangers of Nofollow

In the world of search engine marketing this is what we found this week:

• How to rank well in google products search & a big list of places to get reviews
• Jeeves Makes a Comeback To Ask UK
• Google Set To Change Ranking Algorithm
• Do Links From Expired Domains Count With Google?
• Hard at play in Google Labs with Similar Images and Google News Timeline
• What Does The Gray Google PageRank Bar Mean?
• Search for “me” on Google
• Advanced White Hat SEO Exists Damn It! - Dynamic SEO
• Twitter Gets Oprahed
• Hoping To Improve People Search, Google Launches “Profile Results”
• A Guide To Qualifying Link Prospects For Relevance, Value & Potentiality
• Google Keyword Tool Showing Local vs. Global Search Volumes
• Buying Expired Domains: What’s the Best Strategy?
• Buying Links vs Buying Rankings vs Stealing Content vs Selling Scams
• How Google Might Top Search Results with Additional Information
• Google Local Search, Categories, and the What and Where of Local Map Listings
• Public Comments for Business Owners
• Yahoo Now Showing Two Indented Results