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Lately there have been a few weddings crashed by the search engines or at least that’s who is catching the blame.

Last week there was a post on Tech Dirt about lost wedding gifts being blamed on search engines. Apparently random consumers were lead to online wedding registries by the search engines and they purchased products from them without realizing that they were in someone’s wedding registry. This, of course, interferes with the registry by removing the purchased items from the lists. I thought this was funny and didn’t give it much thought until I visited the Grey wolf blog.

There is a recent post on Grey Wolf’s blog about wedding gift registries that were getting used by criminals to figure out when newlyweds were going on their honeymoons and then burglarize the homes while the owners weren’t there. This is a much more serious issue.

First off, the search engines are not at fault. There is no way that SE engineers would have considered wedding registries when they built their search engines. It does, however, present an opportunity to the SEO community.

I am sure that with a little bit of thought an SEO could think of several types of websites that do not want to be found by the search engines, and use their knowledge of SEO to un-optimize these websites (provide private websites).

From an SEO standpoint, website developers may want to consider creating easy, almost cookie cutter, websites that are not indexed by search engines just for events like wedding registries. There seems to be a market for them.

Here are a couple of ways to avoid having your wedding registry invaded by strangers:
1. Use robots.txt when designing your site to prevent search engines from indexing your site.
2. Make it evident on each page that the site is for purchasing gifts for an individual wedding.
3. Put all registry information on password protected pages to ensure the SE spiders and hackers don’t get to them.

Studies have shown that only 1 out 7 search engine marketers actually measured the ROI for their customer’s campaigns. These results are not surprising. I believe that this is evidence that many SEO’s are computer people and not business people, and to be truly effective, you must be a little bit of both.

Every legitimate SEO has at one time or another encountered clients who have had bad experiences with SEO firms and one of their primary concerns was their ROI. In a recent meeting I encountered a prospective client who was very leery about SEO in general. Apparently, his last SEO firm never delivered results, and their reporting was nonexistent.

Getting that top rankings is great, but what does it mean to a client in terms of ROI? Are they making a profit from their new rankings after the SEO campaign costs are considered?

There are several ways to determine ROI, but I will just mention a few that we use frequently at Comit Technologies.

The first statistic that I usually give a client (besides current SE rankings) is their general traffic information such as their number of unique visitors (not hits), their favorite keywords, inbound links, etc. This is all very important info that is easy to illustrate with graphs and such. Line graphs that show your unique visitor trends work well.

Conversion rates are next and they are probably one of the most important. They are easy to determine and they really help with fine tuning your online campaign. Often times traffic can increase while conversion rates suffer. When this happens, it is time to consider altering the focus of your SEO campaign or making changes to the website design or products and services. Maybe your visitors are misled by your keywords and your product isn’t what they are looking for. Or, your webpage may not be user friendly or aesthetically pleasing (they look distrustful). Even your advertised prices could be a deterrent.

Leads are another way to measure and determine SEO campaign success, but this is a statistic that clients are likely to notice on their own. Even so it is good to bring it to their attention to remind them of yet another SEO benefit.

I also recommend setting up a system that allows your clients to login and monitor their site. Some like to check their stats frequently and others just like to see for themselves if what you’re telling them is true.

Measures like the ones I’ve mentioned will give your services a monetary value and they can help your clients with their overall marketing campaigns. Providing regular/accurate ROI reports should be a no-brainer for every SEO firm. After all, it is easier to manage what you measure.

I have always been a fan of AMD processors. Maybe it’s because I am a gamer (not because they are cheaper) and for awhile, gaming was the only task that my pc performed, or it could be that I have always had good luck with them. To each his own, I guess.

Like any product, AMD processors have had their share of bad press, and I am pleased to see that Google is giving AMD some great press.I ran across a post on the SE Roundtable blog that said Google has decided to use 200,000 AMD Opteron processors in their server farm. Wow, guess the Intel Xeons just aren’t up to par (they are very expensive too).

There are probably a number of reasons for the switch (like separating from MS as much as possible, better heat dispersion, etc), but this move by Google just may give AMD the boost that they need.

I am a fan of the underdog.

Apparently everyone who is anyone in the world of SEO is attending SES NYC this week. Fortunately for those, like myself, who could not attend many of the attendees are doing a good job of sharing the knowledge that they are getting at SES. It’s nice to know that so many SEO’s enjoy spreading the wealth.

SE’s continuously evolve and it is important for SEO’s to evolve with them. Conventions, like SES NYC, are one of the best ways to network with other professionals and get on the cutting edge. This convention will surely yield some valuable info (Cost Per Call Evaluation Techniques, Vertical Search Engines, etc.).

I would really like to be in NYC but I’ve got more important matters to deal with. We are celebrating MARDI GRAS (Fat Tuesday) and work will have to wait until next week. The party officially ended on Tuesday but I plan to keep goin through the weekend.

This morning, while I was learning about Google’s webpage creator (look out MySpace), I came across an interesting note by Chris Sherman. In his article he points out that Google encourages its engineers to spend one day a week working on non-job related projects. These “20% projects” are, apparently, the origin for many of the Google gadgets. What a great system!

Creativity is the blood of a successful organization, and Google’s “20% project” policy is a prime example of how a company can motivate its employees to keep the blood flowing. By allowing their employees to break away from their routines, they are giving them a chance to create cool gadgets and gain experience that they can apply to job related projects.

SEO is our main focus at Comit Technologies, but we are always coming up with new ideas for business opportunities. These ideas can be challenging and profitable, and they usually generate good SEO material (links, articles, etc.) as a byproduct. Our schedules are normally full, but we try our best each day to get together and devote a little time to our non-SEO related projects.

It is always good to look at the policies of successful companies and compare them with your own. Setting aside a few hours every week for pet projects doesn’t sound unreasonable. It obviously works for Google.