Monday, May 18, 2009

Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota - Search Engine Marketing


Local authors Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota were at Kepler's on May 14th, 2009 to discuss their new book, Search Engine Marketing. Host Bobbi Emel comments on the event:


Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota are local search engine marketing whizzes who have put together a book about their field that even I, a person with a degree in psychology, can understand. And it has amazing information about the ins and outs of getting Google to pay attention to your website. At one point, Stephanie said that the Google employees sometimes called them to find out what was happening at Google. Finally, I had to ask them how they were able to obtain information that not even Google employees had - did they have an underground tunnel into Google's brain center? Andreas smiled wryly and said, "Google feeds the winners and starves the losers. If you're clever enough to figure out their system, they reward you by inviting people like us in to understand even more about what they're doing."

Why is this important? Anyone who has ever created a website will understand: It seems like you need to know some code or secret handshake to get Google to notice you. But, it's all about keywords and metatags and algorithms, right? Well, sort of. Here was the most surprising thing I learned: Google is now using thousands of college students in addition to the algorithm to rank websites. This means that human eyes are actually looking at your website besides the spiders crawling around looking for keywords and how many other sites have linked to yours.

Ramos and Cota explain all of this and much more in their information-packed, straightforward book. It's not all about Google, but since Google still commands about 90% of the search engine market, much of the book's information is geared toward Google. In addition to their section on Search Engine Optimization (how to get your website noticed,) they also go into web analytics for business, key performance indicators, and pay-per-click advertising. Ramos and Cota are very well-spoken and the audience enjoyed their talk and had some very pertinent, interesting questions to make for a great evening.

2 comments:

Susan Levitt said...

This SEM lecture was superb. I'd like to see Kepler's sponsor more events with them.

Kepler's Books said...

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