ASR Marketplace
August 13-15, 2010
San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA

Buyers looking for the latest products for the upcoming season know exactly where to find them — at ASR. Twice a year the Surf/Skate Lifestyle and Fashion industries invade San Diego to conduct business and preview lines for the upcoming seasons. ASR tradeshow provides an authentic and efficient forum for buyers, sellers, media, and the investment community to conduct business and move the action sports industry forward. It’s the platform that unites brands of all sizes with an unmatched national and international buying audience.

Mike Duncan, Sage Island’s CEO, will be presenting three different seminars during the show.

The Board Retailers Association (BRA) hosts Survival of the Fittest – BRA Retail Certification Programs August 12th, 2010. Retailers are encouraged to take advantage of the trip to the trade shows by attending a full-day of certified retail education focused on current market issues facing specialty retailers.

Strengthening Your Website’s Presence through an Integrated Marketing Plan
Presented by: Mike Duncan, Sage Island Marketing Agency
10:00 am on August 12th

Your website is a critical component of your business. At a time when online competition has never been so fierce, it’s crucial to have a marketing plan for your website that drives results. This seminar, presented my Mike Duncan, CEO of Sage Island addresses the necessity of a well designed, innovative site, and how to properly market it through a hands on  approach of planning, analysis, and optimization. Mike speaks to the art of  SEO and PPC tactics and how to  expand your brand on the web to drive results.

Ten Ways for Retailers to Improve Website Presence
Presented by: Mike Duncan, Sage Island Marketing Agency
Saturday, August 14th at 11:00 am

In the ever changing world of retail, competition has never been more fierce. Your website is a critical component of your business. This seminar teaches a fully integrated marketing approach leading you through the basics of a well designed, innovative site, and how to properly utilize e-commerce solutions. Learn how to build and expand your presence on the web to drive sales and maximize your bottom line.

Leveraging the Power of Social Media
Presented by: Mike Duncan, Sage Island Marketing Agency and Danny Keith, Santa Cruz Skate and Surf Shop
Saturday, August 14th at 2:00 pm

Over the last few years, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have gone from college networking sites to marketing powerhouses. Businesses today tap into Facebook to reach their audience in more targeted, local, and efficient ways than ever before.  This seminar, presented by Danny Keith, owner of the Santa Cruz Skate and Surf Shop, and Mike Duncan CEO of Sage Island, teaches the latest tactics and applications that elevate social media from self promotion sites to professional lead generating tools.

We’re looking for a motivated, creative and analytic thinker with excellent communication and leadership skills to join the Traffic and Search Strategy team in our Wilmington, North Carolina office.​

As a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Specialist, your responsibilities will be to design, development and implement PPC campaigns on major search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.​ as well as work to develop and implement strategies to increase natural / organic search engine traffic from key search engines to the network of Sage Island web sites.​

The SEM Specialist will also work with Account Executives, Graphic Designers, Programmers, and other team members to drive SEM and SEO success and will be charged with establishing best practices on optimization of a variety of different PPC campaigns for a variety of unique customers.​ Additionally, you will be responsible for developing and implementing keyword strategies, including working with business owners to understand their specific PPC and SEO needs and developing strategies, plans, and campaigns accordingly.​

The SEM Specialist will also work with developers to evolve in-house SEM tracking and reporting tools and keep current on SEM developments within the industry.​

Responsibilities

• Create, manage and optimize PPC campaigns in support of business goals for Sage Island customers.
• Continuously review and optimize PPC campaigns, including thorough analysis of profitability of campaigns, keyword lists, landing page quality, downstream feedback of lead and traffic quality, etc.
• Serve as internal search expert to ensure best practices are shared and leveraged by all groups.
• Continuously improve tracking, reporting and profitability of the SEM and SEO efforts.
• Analyze and translate quantitative and qualitative data from web analytics tool intoactionable SEM and SEO plans
• Research and develop SEM and SEO best practices to identify new market opportunities and maximize program profits with improved paid campaign performance and organic rankings
• SEMrecommendations should be very detailed and include analysis of current keywords, ad groups, and landing pages and other PPC issues
• SEO recommendations should be very detailed and include specifications for improving indexing, link popularity, on page optimization and other SEO issues
• Select and refine SEO/​SEM keyword lists
• Through research and analysis of key metrics help identify new projects to expand visibility in search engines

Skills

• Knowledge and experience with the creation, management, and optimization of large-scale PPC campaigns
• Knowledge of optimizing websites for major search engines
• Experience with Web content management tools
• Experience with PPC campaign management and optimization tools
• Understanding of search engine rankings algorithms and how search engine spiders work
• A quantitative approach to traffic measurement and experience with collecting and interpreting site visitor statistics
• Knowledge/​skills in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are a plus
• Experience using Microsoft Office programs (Excel, Word, etc.​)
• Must be detail-oriented with excellent analytical and problem-solving skills
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to evangelize Traffic/​Search Strategy projects and work with cross functional staffs to ensure implementation
• Ability to work individually on a project or in a team environment
• Self-starter approach to work, with an eagerness to consistently meet and exceed objectives and take on more responsibility.

Qualifications/​Requirements

• 1 – 3 years experience as a Search Engine Marketer
• Bachelors degree or equivalent training and experience

Full-time with benefits package. Send us a cover letter and resume. Specify Marketing Specialist in subject line to jobs@sageisland.com.

If you’re like me, you’re constantly learning something new when it comes to SEO.  Keeping up with the ever changing trends is hard enough, understanding exactly how search engines work can get overwhelming. Recently I stumbled upon what is now my go-to SEO Reference:  The Beginners Guide to SEO. If you haven’t read through this tutorial (which chances are pretty good you have, since it’s the world’s most read SEO guide)  I recommend you visit the site! You can read online or download a copy of this really helpful information.

Recently there has been a backlash in the SEO industry against what is deemed to be a non-scientific approach when it comes to SEO testing or collecting statistical data. Some people argue that you have to treat SEO as part of computer science and be very strict about it. Following this logic you are basically forbidden to do any SEO testing yourself unless you have some actual scientists doing the research.

While I am not sure why some people attempt to push in this direction I can only say it won’t work. SEO is a craft not a science. First off there are far too many variables to determine in SEO to be able to treat it scientifically. Also, if anything, SEO would have to be a social science as most things in SEO depend on human behavior. People writing algorithms, people linking, people creating content.

Read more at http://seo2.0.onreact.com/seo-is-a-craft-not-a-science

“If you are planning to refresh some of your site content, make sure to consider the SEO impacts. Many organizations make the mistake of updating their site content for a new product launch or some other business goal, only to realize that they also lost all of their existing SEO equity in the process. If you’ve already got some good shelf space, don’t do anything to screw it up!

It’s hard enough to get a top ranking position. Don’t overlook SEO in these important content planning stages. I’ve received panicked phone calls from Marketing Execs that just completed a site refresh and now don’t see their site’s rank. How awkward would it be to explain that to all of your stakeholders? Here’s 3 tips to avoid this and to make sure you’re taking all of this into consideration when refreshing your site content.

Run a rank report for all URLs that will be updated

I can’t overstate how important this is. This is the foundation that will drive a lot of your content decisions. You’ll want to see where you are currently ranking for your keyword landscape and which URLs are driving search traffic. This will help you establish your top priority URLs that need to be carefully assessed with any content changes. Remember, you may have a top ranking position due to the way your content is currently structured.

Changing the content on those top priority URLs may impact your ranking position and you could see a drop in rank and, thus, traffic. Once you’ve established these top priority URLs, make sure the people in your organization can clearly understand what the current SEO equity is, which will help with the content planning and overall strategy.

For example, your marketing department may want to overhaul the home page, removing the existing content and replacing it with a video introduction by your CEO. Now, if you do it the right way, you can structure your video content in a way where it’s SEO friendly. But – why would you go this route if your home page has a top 5 ranking for 10 different keywords and is already driving a lot of traffic? A better idea would be to assess what content is helping keep those top ranking positions and leave it alone. You can always create other calls to action on the home page, such as “see our CEO introduce our new product” – which would link over to a new page.”

Get more at Search Engine Land.

“Remember the day you first discovered Google search. Now, think back to what search was like before, using Altavista and Lycos. It was pretty painful stuff. Google, with its plain-vanilla HTML interface, simple black text, blue links and one sole graphic did nothing but revolutionize my search experience, and judging by the brand it has built since, I don’t suspect I’m the only one.

In fact, many of us can’t imagine life without Google, despite the valiant contender efforts of Bing and the old faves of Yahoo and AOL. That is until you head East. When we first adopted Google we were all on dial-up and time waiting for graphic-rich content was secondary to getting data results — fast! Yet, in a culture where consumers have always had high-speed broadband from day one, such as South Korea, who has the world’s deepest penetration of internet users, those rules just never applied. In fact, for them, search has always been an entirely different affair.” read more at adage.com

“The term “Yellow Pages” has been a literal description of a business directory product and the name for the industry which has produced it for over a hundred years. Rapid evolution of internet media seems to be revoking the conceptual connection between printed pages which are yellow and sources for finding local businesses. So, is the “Yellow Pages” name itself becoming obsolete?

As a product transfers from one medium or evolutionary stage to another, it’s normal to try to adapt its legacy nomenclature to fit the new version—all that promotional good will built upon the old product name in the past can be leveraged to promote the new version of the product.

In some cases the product name will continue to be used into the future. However in other cases, the marketplace’s devotion to the legacy name begins to disconnect, and eventually the legacy name becomes obsolete.

I think there’s reason to believe this has been happening with the Yellow Pages.”

Read more at Search Engine Land