Ephricon Web Marketing

You may have noticed a lot of chatter lately about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and a related bill, PIPA.  The SOPA act is designed to protect the intellectual property and copyright of major media organizations from illegal piracy online.  The movie studios and record labels want to crack down on piracy, but instead of taking the fight to the website owners (who are violating their copyright), they’ve turned to Washington to legislate in the ability for them to shut down those websites and their monetization methods via government order.  More specifically, the bill would give the US government the ability to

1. order ISPs to re-route traffic going to a given website that is potentially in violation to resolve to another location
2. order search engines like Google to remove potential violating websites from the search results
3. order PayPal and other payment processors to shut down the violator’s accounts, thus cutting off their revenue stream
4. order ad services like Google AdSense to shut down advertisements for, or payments to such websites

At Ephricon, we’ll all for the protection of copyright material… however, we’re very concerned about SOPA as we feel it gives the government and major communications firms (like Comcast, for instance) too much control over the internet and the content you may or may not see.

But we’re not alone… opposition to SOPA, especially over the last few days, has been particularly strong.  High-profile websites like Wikipedia and Reddit are “going dark”, tomorrow (January 18th) and taking their sites down in protest.  The Twitter universe is also on fire with anti-SOPA sentiments, with many Twitter users adding a “STOP SOPA” icon to their avatars.

As best we can tell, there was supposed to be a congressional vote on SOPA in early January, but the recent growth of the anti-SOPA movement has caused congress to delay the vote.  President Obama has also indicated that he may veto the bill, should it pass.

So what does this mean for you?  For our clients, we don’t expect either tomorrow’s blackout or SOPA in general (should it pass) to have a major impact on SEO results and generating new business online – at least not in the short term.  Instead, we’re more concerned about SOPA from a free speech, government censorship and personal freedom standpoint.  Obviously it’s not the bad guys that SOPA might stop that we object to, but rather the free range and over-reaching power this would give to the government, and what precedents that might set on a societal level.  We’re keeping up on the latest developments and will be in touch as things progress, and should we identify any advisable action items with regard to SOPA.

Do you or someone you know have a passion for Internet Marketing? This position is for the Internet Marketing Assistant position on our Careers page, a great opportunity for a newbie who wants to learn more about SEO. We’re looking for someone who loves online creativity, research, blogs, and wants to get paid to learn more about organic search, Google applications, and hang out with the rest of the cool Ephricon team. We’ve posted the job on Oodle, please apply soon, we’re hoping to add to our team right after the start of 2012.

As we grow, Jon is getting swamped on the admin side of the business, so it’s time to hire on some help.  Our team is currently 10 people strong but 9 of those 10 are fully-engaged in client work.  We’re quite proud of that, but at there are some great initiatives we want to put into place to make our agency more efficient, and these initiatives don’t directly relate to any one client in particular.  It’s time to get organized and systematized!

If you know someone who would be a great fit for this position, or if you would like to learn more about the position then check out the job description on our careers page.

The Search Exchange Internet Marketing Conference is taking place this week in Charlotte, and the Ephricon team is gearing up for the event. It’s going to be three days of sharing information and learning even more about paid advertising, social media marketing and SEO.

We’re pretty pumped about having this conference in our own city, but we’re even more excited to announce that our very own Jon Payne will be one of the speakers at the event.

The third and final day of the conference will focus on SEO strategies and tactics, including Jon’s presentation on Stepping Up Your Keyword Research.

Needless to say, the boss-man is going to have a pretty good cheering section with the whole team making its way to the conference. Don’t worry though; there are also plenty of fan-boys (and gal) on our team for Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds and a number of the other speakers.

If you’re in the Charlotte area this week, stop by Search Exchange on Wednesday, October 5 to get some tips and insight from Jon. The conference is taking place at the Charlotte Chamber on October 3-5.

As a note to all clients – we’ll have our laptops with us and will be monitoring emails, but we may be a bit slower on the response to emails and phone calls early in the week while we’re at the conference.

Check out our latest press release for more details on the conference:
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/President-Charlotte-SEO-Agency-Speak-Search-Exchange-Internet-Marketing-Conference-1568139.htm

We’re hiring!  Again!

This time we’re looking to add another SEO Account Manager in our Charlotte, NC office.  Check out the job description on our careers page for more info.  The job description is flexible and there is a lot that cannot be communicated in a few sentences on our website, so inquire if you are interested and/or want to know more.  Superstars only.

About two weeks ago I was saddened to read a post on Search Engine Land stating that as a result of being acquired by Dex One, the Business.com directory was being phased out.

As a bit of background, if you are reading this blog you likely know that links to your site are good for SEO. Particularly, links from reputable, popular sites. Most of Ephricon’s clients operate in the B2B space, and as such we’ve easily made the case for ROI on a Business.com listing based on traffic alone. One conversion a year – shoot one conversion every several years – would easily make that case for some of our clients. But alas, if Dex One (the new owner of Business.com) were to shut down the directory, then we wouldn’t only be missing out on SEO value but also the valuable, targeted B2B traffic. You can’t get referrals from a site that doesn’t exist.

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Last night I taught a 2 hour seminar about the basics of SEO for CPCC’s Corporate and Continuing Education program.  The audience was pretty diverse, but did include a number of small business owners.  Most managed their own website or worked with a designer, but did not seem to have a dedicated internet marketing staff. In general there were a number of mom and pops who need help with SEO but often don’t have the budget to hire an SEO agency like Ephricon to handle the work for them.  Seminars like this are a chance for us to help them out and give them advice, and to do so at no cost to them (other than their time).

Anyhow, I took them through a bit about how search engines work, what they are looking for, and tips they can apply to their own websites.  We used a real-world example of Luigi’s Pizza.  Luigi’s is (in my opinion) the best pizza in Charlotte.  Yet (at the time of this post and last night’s seminar) they don’t rank on the first 3 pages in Google for even regional keyword phrases like pizza Charlotte, NC.  Outranking them are 30-plus sites, some of which are local pizza places, some national chains, and some directory and/or review sites (i.e. yellowpages.com, superpages.com, yelp.com, etc.).  In fact, their visibility in search engines is so bad that they don’t even rank on the first page for “luigi’s pizza”.

Here’s how this hurts Luigi’s…

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Yesterday Google unveiled Instant Search.  Today my inbox is full of emails from clients wondering how this will change things, wondering if Steve Rubel is right and this means the death of SEO, if the sky is falling, etc.

Yes.  Its the death of SEO.  Effective immediately we’re closing our doors.  We’re going to go become sheep herders in Switzerland.  Goodbye cruel internet marketing world

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We just pushed out a press release today announcing the hiring of David Zimmerman and Korey Kashmer as SEO Account Managers here in our Charlotte office.  Both David and Korey have actually been with us for about a month now and are already doing great work.  The release would have come sooner, but we’ve been busy focusing on client work and thus the delay.  Its that old cobbler’s children have no shoes scenario.

Anyhow, I couldn’t be more excited about adding these two SEO pros to our team.  It means big things for us as an agency, and even better things for the fantastic clients we are privileged to work with.