I’m tempted to call Sitelab, SiteLab International; it’s such an unusual name for an SEO company.  Sitelab started as a Web Development company about 9  years ago, and one of the founders, Dana Todd, is the person I’m interviewing.    SiteLab was the term for "website lab".   We spoke for about 40 minutes.   Dana’s brightly colored Red Hair stands out – I think it’s a statement, wanting to stand apart – to be visible.

I get intuitive feelings as I’m speaking.  The feeling I got from Dana is someone who had alot of experience in internet marketing, all aspects of it.  There is a certain "hardness" that comes with being very experienced, very busy and much in demand -  She also struck me as a thinker, someone who’d like there to be ever more meaningful converstations at future Search Engine Strategies; she’d want Noam Chomsky to keynote next time if he’d come.  I told her we should also invite Desmond Morris, in that case.

Language and the use of it, the use of language in behavior, the thinking part….making Search something greater than another method to drive traffic.  It’s not about Search, or Searching….."we are search" and we are the searchers defining ourselves via search. 

Search is all about Language, according to Dana.

I conducted the interview in such a way as to jump back and forth from talking about SiteLab to talking about her and her ideas.  Sitelab has an office in New York and Dana just moved to New York, from California, a couple of weeks ago.  Welcome.

Sitelab was interested in Metrics before the rest of the SEO field.  I asked what she had in mind when she talked about Metrics as that’s an interest of mine also.   Dana was one of the speakers in the packed Targeting Search Ads by Demographics & Behavior session yesterday. 

The Demographics targeting using MSN is interesting to her, and it sounded as if SiteLab is where everyone else is with MSN AdCenter- interested but also a little puzzled by aspects of the current MSN offerings.   In fact, many of the people manning the MSN booth at SES today did not know anything about the Geo-Demographic clustering based on the Mosaic system – it was never explained to them.  If MSN’s own workers don’t understand it – I’m not surprised that most people using MSN Beta don’t understand it either.

We talked about the promise of Geo-Demographic targeting, and the reality of what it is today.  I told her that I had a client whose most popular house plan style was "craftsman house plan" and I wanted to market that using GeoTargeted PPC in parts of California, where MSN AdCenter showed most of the market was for that style. 

Here the practical side of Dana shines, she knows all about the house plans, the styles, and the locals of different places where one with advertise.  She has knowledge that is also tested by personal experience (illuminated by personal experience might be a better way of putting it).

In this case Dana told me to just target all of California – don’t bother Geo-Targeting anything because it would be harder to target.  Sometimes, targeting is not worth the effort, and Dana knows when it is and when it’s not.     In other words she’s a thinker who also knows the practical side of  the business.

Getting back to SiteLab, I asked Dana what’s next for her company.  Since she just moved here it’s still a little new being in NY, but SiteLab has many clients here, including some very well known ones.   On my way home tonight I passed one of her clients, Lecoste.

At lunch today I sat at a table of Bloggers, most of them fairly well known.   In fact, Chris Pirillo was sitting across the table from me and I’m looking at one of his blogs right now.   Chris is in day 6 of his GoogleFasting.    I think he’s trying to avoid Google for a week to get over what he termed "his addiction" to the search engine.

I suggested that maybe he just needs to give up his addiction to all search engines…."Just don’t use them".   He was not quite ready to go that far….Yet.

I told Chris that I wish he’d change the background of his personal blog from the wood coloring to something a little easier to look at.   

It sounded to me like Chris Pirillo is a very, very successful Blogger with a ton load of traffic every day.  It appeared that alot of the bloggers I sat with knew each other for quite some time and many had worked together before.

Another Blogger I sat next to was B.L. Ochman of Whatsnextblog.com

From B.L. Ochman I got the first real explanaition of what I needed to do for Juan Enriquez in terms of Blog Buzz for his book the United States of America.  I wish I had spoken to her two months ago.

It’s not that my ideas about Blog Buzz were wrong – they were right on.  Still the real way to generate Blog Buzz for an author was this:

1. Juan Enriquez, in this case, should have his own blog where he releases information about this book and material not in the book.

- invite bloggers to post to it (perhaps in some cases, contribute to it) and get the Buzz started.   Keep releasing information on his blog and build up many backlinks.

2. The Podcast thing would have helped too… as he speaks well.

In other words, Blog Buzz comes from generating BUZZ from your Blog….no Blog, no BUZZ.    I’m sure I probably missed a step or two and if I did, B.L. Ochman, please fill in the blanks.

She was also doing a lot of corporate consulting work and her blog also has a large following.

So that was my lunch.   Oh yes…one more thing.  

There was a famous Spammer that came by and was talking….was not paying much attension to the conversation on that side of the table.  Turns out the famous Spammer is loved by Google because he generates so much money for the big G.   In fact, the Spammer scrapes content from all over the web and then creates fake blog sites and runs AdSence on them.  People then go to these sites and try to escape them, often clicking on one of the AdSence Ads. As a result, the Spammer makes several thousand dollars a day in earnings – mostly off of the poor advertisers.    Poor Advertisers – your AdWords high CPC ads are going to support Spammers that are delivering worthless traffic to you (by the time such traffic reaches your sites….the visitors probably hate where they landed).   

Yes,….interesting lunch.

Stitting down at lunch today I ended up in a convestation with Jake Ludington, a very successful blogger.  Because the information was So….ooo….oo good, I decided I had to share it with you.

Jake Ludington is a successful blogger that makes over six figures on his MediaBlab blog.  His blog income is derived from the following sources:

40% AdSence, 30% Affilate revenue and the rest from the sales of his two ebooks on Podcasting and creating a child safe home office (he sells them for $17 and $20 each) of which he sells several hundred a week, and Paid Search Ads

Jake does full text RSS Feeds and his blog is focused on technology enthuisists; in fact, he was very proud of the fact he traveled with a bag that about the size of  video camara case with his compact laptop/tablet, and audio recorder and camara.  I asked him if the bag also contained his clothes….. I don’t have to answer that one.

Jake sends out a newsletter that I just signed up for; maybe I’ll buy one his ebooks also as Podcasting is an interest of mine too (I don’t need to make my home office child safe anymore since my son is 13 years old).  I also subscribed to his RSS feed and many of the Blog Authors I spoke with over lunch were of the strong opinion that all RSS Feeds should be Full Text only.

Jake had some really interesting ideas on how to generate traffic and he told an interesting story.  Over the Christmas – New Years Holiday he was visiting his family in Iowa, where he grew up.  XBox 360 just came out and Jake wanted one badly.  He heard that WalMart would carry just 8 XBox 360′s per store and assumed they’d all be sold out for sure.   But he wrote in his Blog that he was going to try to find a couple of XBox 360′s anyway and drove all over parts of Iowa to each Walmart to see if he could find any.

It turns out he found 3 Xbox 360′s in one Walmat and 4 in another; but they were the base unit without any additional memory.  It turns out that people in Iowa wanted the unit all souped up and so they passed on the base model.  

Jake could have kept the 2 XBox 360′s but decided to give them away instead, and generated ALOT more traffic (and profit) by doing so.

"I ran a contest for the affiliate or site that sent me the  most qualified traffic".

He was careful the traffic was the type he wanted, and based on links to his site that were from good neighboorhoods (SEO term).   As a result he got a tremdous lift in traffic right after New Years.

Jake Ludington was very easy to speak with and very open and enthusiatic about the technology he writes about and promotes on his blog.  I’d give it a visit and susbscribe – and buying one of his ebooks.