SEO Expert, Evangelist and SEO Consulting Services - Tony Adam

I was going through my recent newsletters and blogs today when I came across an article about the battle between the two.  Personally, I do not think there is a debate and it is almost irrelevant to compare the two.  It is like comparing apples and oranges.  I mean, truthfully in the end one can aid the other, and depending on the funding that your organization has for marketing and advertising purposes, you should be doing both.

Granted, there are some points that you can use to determine which option that you should spend more time on when first starting out and what not.  Generally though, I find there is no good reason to use one without the other.

An example of how to use SEO and PPC together is by using PPC in order to ramp up your SEO traffic though brand awareness.  So, what do i mean by that and what does that mean in general?  I have heard from customers and other contacts’ customers using both PPC and SEO say they used the site because they saw them in both sponsored and “regular” (obviously organic in our eyes) results.  Basically, this is just adding validity to your company.  E.G. you are ranked highly for “home loans” in both sponsored and organic listings in the SERP results, people think of your brand as “The Home Loan Guys.”  Yes, this is a very casual approach no doubt, but still very true in many ways.

Finally, i’ve also witnessed high PPC listings as a way to help you start boosting and ramping up your SEO efforts through both link building, page views, etc.  It is a trial and error process that does work for some and not for others, but there is no sense in putting no effort into it, you never know what you are missing out on until you give it a shot.

Brandchannel.com reported their Top Brands of 2006, you can take a look at the article here, http://brandchannel.com/start1.asp?fa_id=352.  Interestingly enough in the Global top 5 and in the US/Canada top 5, 4 of them are Technology companies.  While the Global list is topped by Google, in the U.S. and Canada we see that Apple takes the top spot!  I guess they are selling a few of those Macbook’s and iPod’s!

LA times has announced a new model for their web strategy in which they will combine the efforts of both their print and online reporting.  According the James O’Shea, editor, “Latimes.com will become our primary vehicle for breaking news 24 hours a day.” 

It seems that latimes.com will be trying be trying to rejuvinate it’s advertising revenue as it has been declining massively on the print side.  We will see this from more and more companies as we continue to become more accustom to an online news model.  Although, it seems that the LA Times newspaper will be taking a more “thoughtful approach” according to O’Shea.

What do I think?  I think this is a great move to LA Times to try to bring some new life to the company through a massive online push.  Although, I doubt they will get anywhere near the likes of sites like digg.com, this could be a major way to regain some strength and increase the decreasing profits within the company.  It will be interesting to see how things turn out, personally, I think it will be for the better.  I think we will start seeing more and more of this in the future from other traditional journalism sources as well.

So it looks like we have our first product from SearchMe, based in Palo Alto, called WikiSeek.  WikiSeek is a Wikipedia search engine that basically indexes wikipedia links and also sites that wikipedia has linked to as well.  It has a very simple (almost Google-like) user interface and returns pretty high-quality and spam free results, as it only indexes the sites previously mentioned.

But, that isn’t all they did, they also released a search plugin for Firefox and an extension as well for firefox.  The extension adds a search button to wikipedia which allows you to search using wikiseek.

All in all, I find it a pretty good product, with monetization through sponsored links, tag cloud for common tags related to searches and highly reliable links.  SearchMe did a pretty good job with this one, with the official announcement coming on Wednesday, I’d like to see the traction and reaction they get!