I’m here at the ACCM conference. It’s been a fun show so far. Amy Africa’s session was hilarious and information-packed — awesome stuff! I presented on a SEM Lab (a site clinic) this morning. I was giving a tip to one of the site owners in the audience. Their most relevant keywords are very niche and hardly searched on at all. The more popular keywords weren’t really things that they offered, although those words were likely searches for their target audience. So I suggested they target these tangentially related keywords by offering a glossary of terms on their site. Each term, such as “market segmentation”, would have a page dedicated to it with not only a definition but also additional resources and links. Even better, they could make this glossary a wiki so that site visitors could add to and edit the definitions, thus encouraging visitor participation (i.e. “consumer generated content”!) and making the definitions more credible and more link-worthy because there was consensus from all the visitors. This really does work.

I showed the audience an example of this concept in action… specifically: SEO Glossary.com, a site that we at Netconcepts developed for marketing purposes.

We simply took a 12 page glossary of SEO terms that I used to hand out at conferences and turned it into a wiki. This site is ranked #1 and #2 in Google for “seo glossary”, among stiff competition, including Aaron Wall’s SEOBook. As I was explaining this in the session, I pulled up the SEO Glossary site and my co-panelists Matt Bailey and Detlev Johnson started laughing. I couldn’t figure out why they were laughing, so I had to ask. They told me: check out the Google ads on the page. On one hand, you have “Avoid SEO Malpractice: Know the Questions to Ask Your Prospective SEO Management Firm” and on the other you have the very dodgy sounding “Guaranteed Page 1 Ranking: Guaranteed Page 1 Rankings $49.95 No Charge Until You are on Page 1”. Oh the irony! It’s almost as if the first ad is referring specifically to its neighboring ad! I took a screenshot for posterity (the one shown directly above; the red arrow I added myself for effect 😉 )