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.