In my experiments, a Craigslist Ad takes up to 1 day to show up in the Google SERPs once it has been posted in a major market, and it lasts up to 3 days at the top of the results before it disappears.  For example, a recent post for a product on Thursday afternoon was on the SERPs by Friday Morning and stayed in the top 3 for searches on that product until Monday morning.

If this continues in our future tests, then we  only need to repost this ad every 4 days.

Our first effort to help our brick and mortar friend generate more online sales was to post on Craigslist.  We weren’t too interested in the Craigslist traffic (although that is a nice bonus).  Our thought was to post his popular products fairly regularly so that they shoot to the top of the Google SERPs for searches for that product.

So, I created 24 ads and decided to post one ad in each of the “big locations” that is linked directly off the Craigslist home page.  I chose these markets because they should have the most link juice because they are the fewest clicks from the home page and thus should show up higher in the Google SERPs and also be picked up quicker.

My client sells many variations of the same product.  The variation is significant and makes it a distinctly different product.  So, I made 24 variations of the same ad that just changed some text to note this variation.  My first ad was posted fine.  However, every ad after that one is tagged as a duplicate.

When creating my ads, I wanted the variations so that the name of the actual variant of this product would show in the title.  This helps the Google results.  To overcome the duplicate error, I am going to post one ad for this product and list each duplicate in the body.  I don’t know if we will rank as highly in Google, but it’s worth a try.

So, I am going to create 24 ads for different products and post one in each market.  Spreading them out among different markets will hopefully keep us from getting flagged as spam like 24 posts in the same market would.

I’ll update you later on the results.

A customer called me on Friday to ask for a favor.  It seems as though his business is declining faster than he can scale back, and at the current rate is about 30 days from closing his doors.  With the economy the way it is, his entire industry is suffering and his competitors are dropping like flies. In the last year, his sales have been cut by more than half while his expenditures have remained steady.

His question to me was to see if I could do something online to bring in more sales.  He has a tremendous sales team, I just need to get the phone ringing.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t have much if anything to spend on advertising as his business isn’t doing well, so methods like PPC will be limited initially.

Keep an eye on this blog over the next week as we fill you in on our methods, what is working, and how much of an impact we are able to make with his brick and mortar business in a short time span.

I was reading the Shoemoney blog today when I saw his post of Sage Lewis’ video debating if SEO is dead. It is funny to me that many people I have seen that seem to be on opposite sides of this argument are really saying the same thing and completely agree with each other but are confused on terminology.

I agree, SEO is dying. It isn’t quite dead yet, but is heading toward extinction as Google continues to grow and incorporate more human generated information into it’s algorithm. However, SEOs will continue to thrive as they move away from tricking the algorithms and more toward practicing UEO (User Experience Optimization) which good SEOs are already doing.

Typically, the phrase SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used to describe tweaking your website to take advantage of known deficiencies in search engine algorithms in order to increase your rankings for particular key terms. SEO, if done properly, works. However, many of the known search engine algorithm deficiencies are constantly being improved and modified so that many SEO tweaks only have a short term effect. I understand that the term SEO has grown to often encompass more than this, but if you poll around, you’ll see that this is most people’s understanding of the term.

It is the mission of search engine companies to provide users with the best search experience possible by feeding them the information they desire. The search engines attempt to cater completely to the user and their needs. With SEO, we have created a struggle between the search engines and website owners in which we fight to “fool” the engines in falsely ranking our sites.

What we should be focusing on is UEO (User Experience Optimization) and making sure we optimize our website to provide our users with the information they desire in a format that is easy for them to browse. With UEO, website owners work more in harmony with search engines as we both share the same goal of quality content that is easily accessible.

When performing UEO on your website, don’t worry about the search engine rankings. If you build quality sites that are user friendly, search engine love will follow. Considering UEO when developing your sites will lead to much longer, more sustainable search engine ranking results.