ATLANTA, GA & CARY, NC – April 12, 2010 – A new marketing partnership between Pumpkin Labs and Dex One, a leading marketing services company that helps local businesses reach customers, has been forged. The arrangement will bring Dex One’s content and local advertisers to a wider local Internet audience.

As part of the agreement, Pumpkin Labs will help market Dex One’s leading local Internet site, DexKnows (http://www.dexknows.com).

Jeff Dittrich, CEO of Pumpkin Labs said, “Dex One has strong local content and a local advertiser base that is deep and wide in certain parts of of the US.  We’d like to make sure our local Internet traffic is exposed to this content.  In the end, local businesses that are Dex One customers will draw a much larger audience than could be found from the paper-based, Yellow Pages market.”

Local online advertising continues to grow as more local businesses realize that mobile search and online search is usually the first step in converting a consumer. Rather than using traditional off-line marketing (such as yellow page or referrals from friends), consumers are using local search sites to find everything from valued local service providers, to restaurants and ticketing information. Local advertising networks are the next step in connecting more local businesses with consumers who are in their respective market.

About Dex One

Dex One Corporation is a leading marketing services company that helps local businesses reach, win, and keep ready-to-buy customers.

Through access to a vast collection of highly valuable, proprietary local market intelligence, as well as the personal, hands-on service from our more than 1,400 dedicated marketing consultants, Dex One helps about 500,000 local businesses create custom-tailored marketing programs that effectively reach potential customers – wherever, whenever, and however they search.

Dex One delivers a broad range of products and services to help local businesses grow – from identifying target audiences and developing messaging, to optimizing marketing programs and leveraging appropriate products such as online and mobile search solutions, print yellow pages directories, voice based search platforms, and one of the largest pay-per-click ad networks in the U.S.  The company also drives value through its Business.com subsidiary, the nation’s leading business search engine and online directory.

Filed under: CEO's Blog by Administrator
No Comments »

ATLANTA, GA & WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA – January 7, 2010 – A new content and marketing partnership between Pumpkin Labs and CitySearch, a local content and advertising company, will expand advertiser’s reach. The partnership will expose CitySearch’s content and local advertisers to a wider local Internet user base.

As part of the agreement, CitySearch will offer Pumpkin Labs access to its local search content including editorial information, user reviews and video. Pumpkin Labs, in turn, will give CitySearch access to a growing number of websites in their network, which is currently more than 10,000 strong. These websites are geographically targeted with more than 23 million visitors each month.

Jeff Dittrich, CEO of Pumpkin Labs said, “Citysearch’s local advertiser base and expertise in local markets provide pertinent and and meaningful information about local businesses to nearby consumers. It will help bridge the gap between the worldwide reach of the Internet and local businesses.”

Local online advertising continues to grow as more local businesses realize that mobile search and online search is usually the first step in converting a consumer. Rather than using traditional off-line marketing (such as yellow page or referrals from friends), consumers are using local search sites to find everything from valued local service providers, to restaurants and ticketing information. Local advertising networks are the next step in connecting more local businesses with consumers who are in their respective market.

About Citysearch

Citysearch is a leading integrated local search, directory and media company that connects consumers and merchants through trusted content, local expertise and user-friendly tools. By delivering trusted content, including user reviews, editorial reviews and ratings on local businesses, Citysearch empowers users to make informed decisions about where to spend their time and money. Through its unique Local Pay For Performance (PFP) service, Citysearch enables businesses to capture their most relevant customers online while paying only for the leads received. Citysearch is both a leading provider of in-depth restaurant information and a local directory on the web, supplying information for every domestic zip code. Citysearch is an operating business of IAC (NASDAQ: IACI).

Filed under: Company News by Administrator
No Comments »

ATLANTA, GA & SEATTLE, WA – June 10, 2008 – A new content and advertising partnership between Pumpkin Labs and Marchex, a local online ad company, to open up new consumers to both platforms. The partnership will distribute Marchex’s content and ads to a new user base and will offer new content for its network.

As part of the agreement, Marchex will offer Pumpkin Labs access to its local search content including editorial information, user reviews and video. Pumpkin Labs, in turn, will give Marchex access to a growing number of websites in their network, which is currently more than 10,000 strong. These websites are geographically targeted with more than 23 million visitors each month.

Jeff Dittrich, CEO of Pumpkin Labs said, “Marchex’s local reach will help their advertisers reach local consumers, and in turn, allow these consumers to make smarter decisions that save them time and money.”

Local online advertising continues to grow as more local businesses realize that mobile search and online search is usually the first step in converting a consumer. Rather than using traditional off-line marketing (such as yellow page or referrals from friends), consumers are using local search sites to find everything from valued local service providers, to restaurants and ticketing information. Local advertising networks are the next step in connecting more local businesses with consumers who are in their respective market.

Filed under: Company News by Administrator
No Comments »

OK… we tend to stay away from the dark underbelly of the SEO world called “black hat,” but we’re amazed that stuff like TrackBack Spam still exists today.

Most bloggers, even techie types, don’t fully understand trackback pings and their use. So, for those of you new to this “Trackback” thing, here’s a good Trackback Tutorial that discusses the basics (particularly as they pertain to the popular blogging software WordPress).

I have to believe the reason why black-hats like trackback links is they typically don’t use the rel=”nofollow” attribute (though some are starting to now), which means the link actually passes link “juice” to the entity that issues the trackback.

We all know that search engines have learned to recognize links found in the “Comments” sections of blog posts, and are heavily discounting these types of links even if they don’t contain the nofollow attribute. So then, why are black-hatters still using trackbacks to spam blogs to this day, even though this technique of spamming has been around for years?

The trackback specification intent was to spur online discussions between blogs, but certainly it’s opened a can of worms.

Comments / Trackbacks anyone?

Filed under: CEO's Blog by Administrator
No Comments »

Though we’re primarily an ad network and direct marketer, we occasionally are challenged with building more traditional web sales tools — like a home-grown shopping cart.

In our quest to do something different with the front-end navigation of the cart, I came across a fancy-worded type of navigation called Facet-Based Navigation.

With facet-based navigation, unlike a simple traditional hierachical category scheme, shoppers have the ability to drill down to products based on mutiple dimensions (or facets).

For example, a potential web customer shopping for jewelry may be interested in browsing by particular Type of jewelry (Earrings, Necklaces, Bracelets, etc…), while others are more interested in browsing by a particular Material (Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc…). ”Type” and ”Material“ would be examples of facets, while earrings, necklaces, gold, silver and the like would be facet values. What’s more, if products are assigned multiple facets, shoppers can refine selections using these facets to help us locate just “Silver Necklaces” or “Platinum Earrings“.

How Does this Help SEO?

Well… good question! For our implementation, our client wanted us to build an online furniture store.

Since we’re lazy , and didn’t want to do all the keyword research to try and figure out which keywords were most important. We thought, “Why not build a navigation system that does all of the keyword stuff for us?”

So here we go… since most furnishings and furniture items have the following “facets:”

• Item (Beds, Dressers, Chests, Armoires, etc…)
• Room (Bedroom, Living Room, etc…)
• Type (Sleigh, Platform, Teen, etc…)
• Material (Iron, Wood, Leather, etc…)
• Manufacturer (Bassett, La-Z-Boy, etc…)
• Color (Cherry, Mahogany, etc…)
• Size (Twin, Full, Queen, King, etc…)
• Style (Tradition, Shabby Chic, etc…)

We set up a facet-based data navigation model accordingly.

Now, check out the long-tail search terms we get! For instance, looking for a wood sleigh bed? How about a contemporary chest? Or, maybe a contemporary black wood twin sleigh daybed? Each browsed page constructs itself off of the previous traits’ selection, allowing us to create optimized pages for keywords on the fly. Make sense?

What’s more the search engines should not consider this spam. On the contrary, we’re classifying products for them, which should only help in their relevancy for searches. We’re also able to build title tags and meta tags pertinent to each of selected facet values. For example, the contemporary black wood twin sleigh daybed page we talked about earlier has the following HTML:

<title>Contemporary Black Wood Twin Sleigh Daybeds : Decor South</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”Find, shop and buy Contemporary Black Wood Twin Sleigh Daybeds.”>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”contemporary black wood twin sleigh daybeds daybed”>

Now we’d just need to write some great content for the page, right?

So, What’s the Problem?

Well, there’s really no problem, until I started playing the the navigation. As it turns out, we’ve accidently built a very racist website. For example, check out:

• White Girl’s Headboards
• Black Baby Furniture & Home Furnishings

It appears putting a few of the facets values together in the wrong order can result in some polarizing language.

In Conclusion

Regardless, I hope this helps some of you when brainstorming for ideas to help with SEO of your shopping cart (constructing keywords, long tail searches and the like).

I’m sure we’ll be hearing from Rev. Al Sharpton soon.

Filed under: CEO's Blog by Administrator
No Comments »

One of the great things about being an pay-for-performance Internet marketeer and consultancy is we get a “behind the scenes” look at a lot of industries and review a lot of diverse business models.

Some of these industries are hyper-competitive, and some are newcomers to the Web.  Obviously, depending on the level of competition in a niche or industry, we adjust our strategy to garner our slice of the pie.

Let take for instance, the mortgage industry.  It’s a perfect hyper-competitive market on the Internet.  Looking at the cost per click bid values in Google Adwords for any given mortgage-related term will often yield PPC bids in excess of $28.00.  Though it’s not the highest bidded keyword market – it’s one of the top.  To be a player in this industry, you’d need deep pockets, great marketing skills, and technical ability. 

OK…  let’s assume that you have all of those.  The only thing left that you would need would be a unique strategy.

Whenever, we see PPC values for a competitive niche ride up this high, we like to adopt an “arbitrage” strategy.  We know it’d be difficult to compete with the merchants and top affiliates out there on a CPA (cost per action or pay per lead) basis who have been doing this for years.  And we know we’d have to pay hefty dollar amounts to generate a significant amount of traffic using PPC search engine marketing. 

Sooo…  we often enter a hyper-competitive market like this by building a mortgage rates site for the niche and playing in the PPC-side of the market. 

OK…  so how did we approach this market?  Well…  we first got an XML feed from a upstream provider in the mortgage industry.  This feed will pay us on every click we send to one of its mortgage lenders (anywhere from $4-$16/click), and then we’ll build entire sites around this feed.

So, now all we have to do is drive consumers to our site that shows mortgage rates and get them to click, right?  Well yes…  but we like to know we’re providing value to the advertisers in the end, so we want to send GOOD traffic to them.

So we’ll try and get the long-tail SEO terms indexed by the search engines using a multi-faceted taxonomy for the site(s).  For instance, when possible, we’ll try and break down the geography to get some specific, yet high converting terms, like:

• By County: Orange County Mortgage Rates
• By City: New York, NY Mortgage Rates
• By Zip Code: Florida (FL) 32963 Mortgage Rates

and now lets take it a step further and we can get really specific like:

• Dallas Texas (TX) Refinance 30 Year Fixed Mortgage Rates
• Long Beach California (CA) New Home Purchase $200,000 Mortgage Rates

Next, we’ll bid on these long tail terms in order to see how much traffic we can get from the PPC search engines. Whoa…  wait a minute!  I thought you said this traffic would be expensive.  Well, yes it would be if we were bidding on the generic terms.  Plus, since we’re marketing for clicks and not for leads, our $$$ volume spend will typically need to be much less than if we were trying to optimize a full-blown CPA campaign and generating actual mortgage leads.

And that’s all the goodies you’ll get for now — I can’t give away everything can I?

Similar markets that can be toppled with this same strategy: insurance, education, dating and a few large ones yet to be named.

Filed under: CEO's Blog by Administrator
No Comments »