Author Archive: Casie Gillette

I am a self-admitted fan of celebrity gossip. I don’t know how it happened or when it happened but I have been sucked in and I can’t get out. Needless to say on Monday I was skimming through the various ‘entertainment’ blogs and I came across a few stories on how John Mayer Googles himself every morning and how he responded to the accusation. A lot of the authors were making fun of him but I don’t blame the guy one bit.

Utah Web Services has a post entitled ‘A CEO’s Perspective On SEO, SEM, SMM, PPC, and ROI‘ that really hit home for me.

So often we as a company have to answer to CEOs, Presidents and executives who do not have a clear understanding of search marketing and more importantly a clear understanding of what they are paying us to do.

One of my biggest weaknesses (and thankfully Andy’s biggest strengths) is explaining search marketing in a way that everyone can understand it. With improved analytics and tracking it is certainly much easier to show ROI but it isn’t always easy to explain the SEO processes themselves.

Why Social Media Scares Me 

Andy still likes to joke about how he came across my MySpace page when I applied for this job and saw messages from my friends congratulating me on a new job and a big move.  The funny part - I hadn’t gotten the job yet! 

As we have read time and time again, what you put on the internet can be seen by just about anyone.  Google “casie gillette” and what will you find?

• I work at KoMarketing
• I played basketball at Marietta College
• My Sphinn name is Casieg

As I have noted in previous posts, the majority of my friends and family don’t really have what I like to call a “firm grasp” of what I actually do for a living. I usually end up trying to explain it and when I am done, despite the “Oh yeah’s” and “I see’s”, they still really don’t understand.

So, for my New Year’s resolution I decided I would just start lying. No more explanations resulting in blank stares, I am just going to lie. I think it’ll be a fun experiment. In fact, I am pretty sure I will get much more positive responses.

With all of the talk lately about paid-links, PageRank reductions and nofollows I have started to wonder “what is the REAL value of a link?”. I spend countless hours finding linking opportunities for clients, instilling in them the importance of backlinks and when it comes right down to it, I honestly don’t know the definitive answer to that question.

• Is a nofollowed link that drives traffic more or less valuable than a search friendly link that doesn’t?

• Is a link from a large trusted website better than a link from a smaller more relevant one?

Derek and I attended a SEMNE event last night where Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR spoke on Universal search and in particular video. He discussed not only YouTube but the increased frequency of YouTube and other videos showing up in Google search results. He also provided us with a statistic that really caught my attention:

In September, YouTube was the 3rd leading search engine with over 1 million searches (ComScore Data)

First of all, I had no idea that many people were searching in YouTube. Second, with 1 million searches on YouTube, 5 billion searches on Google, and the advent of universal search, I don’t think the question is ‘Should I use video?’ but instead ‘How do I use video?‘.

After my alarm clock went off this morning I got up, turned on my computer, checked my work email, Gmail and Hotmail accounts, opened up Bloglines to see what was new on my favorite blogs, checked out Google News, Dugg a few articles, submitted a story to Sphinn, checked my MySpace and Facebook messages, sent an IM and then decided to take a shower and eat some breakfast.

OK Casie, thanks for an update on your morning…but what is the point? Three years ago today my day started NOTHING like this. I lived in a different city, I had never even heard of Gmail, Google News, Bloglines, Digg, Myspace or Facebook, Sphinn didn’t exist and to tell you the truth, the letters “SEO” meant absolutely nothing to me.

I attended the BIMA 3rd Annual Cross Media Forum yesterday where people specializing in various channels of marketing came together to discuss media integration.

The forum was mainly geared toward large companies who use several different agencies to handle their print, television and online campaigns, and how they are able to overcome the obstacles that may be involved in working with a variety of platforms. The panelists discussed everything from brainstorming an idea to campaign execution to using metrics when measuring success.

Derek’s post from a few days ago reminded me of the first time I realized I was an SEO nerd. I had been working at a search marketing firm for about five months when one of my teammates called me over:

Steve: “Hey look what I found” (shows me website with about 700 lines of hidden keywords on the page)

Me: “Woah Cool!”……..”Crap. I can’t believe I just said that.”

I was a little saddened at first. I had never thought of myself as a nerd. I mean, I’m nothing like Screech! But then I started thinking and realized that I wasn’t really a nerd, I was just an SEO nerd and I was perfectly okay with that.