Internet Marketing 101, or Hey - Watch Where You're Pointing That Thing

One of the services my former employer grudgingly provided to its clients was that of researching what terms a target audience of web users are searching for, in order to seed the client website copy with those keywords and and boost the site's placement in search engine results. This is organic marketing, as opposed to pay-per-click or "sponsored" listings.

What's much more fun, though, is just to write about whatever the hell you feel like writing about and see who Google dumps off at your site.

The first search result I ever yielded was for somebody googling on the phone number for a company in Corpus Christi. My blog post about the slim pickings available on the Corpus job market was the only result. That same entry has brought me a lot of traffic from people searching on Futuremarket Telecenter, Inc. with such keywords as "futuremarket telecenter constant phone calls" - sounds like they pissed somebody off! I half expected to get a cease-and-desist from them for a while, but hey - it's not my fault they placed such a moronic ad in the Caller-Times.

Quite a few people, more than you might think, search for "bat poop and mascara." They often end up reading about my wanderings under the Congress Avenue bridge and my ambition to become a sixties sex-romp character. I bet that doesn't answer their question at all.

I had one hit me up while searching for "how to deal with difficult coworkers." I probably wasn't much help. (Beth's Solution: Quit and move to a different city!)

I came up number four or five on a search for "steamy redhead" and was absolutely shocked to see what kind of company I was keeping. Look it up yourself if you don't believe me! (Parents: do not look it up.)

But my favorite so far is someone searching for "make corpus weird," because they almost certainly must have been looking for me - a first!

Were you looking for me? And are you glad you found me?