If you search for "family link" or "familylink" on Google, the first hit is not www.familylink.com. Today, on the query "familylink", hits #5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 all refer to FamilyLink.com, but they are from blogs and press releases. Google is not yet ranking FamilyLink.com as the most relevant result for these queries.

The blogosphere is going nuts over the possibility that Google will be providing monthly query volume by keyword. This is something that Goto.com/Overture/Yahoo Search Marketing has provided for years, but inventory.overture.com has been unreliable for some time. And Yahoo only has a minority of the overall search traffic.

For many years I have wanted Ancestry.com to go international, since the world population is more than 20 times larger than the U.S. population. I felt that a Rootsweb-type model could be done in virtually every country of the world, followed at sime time, by an Ancestry-type subscription model. The one (a user generated content model) would lead to the other (a premium database model.)

Note: I left the company in February 2002 and have no inside information about the company or its plans.

In December a panel of internet entrepreneurs shared their stories and their keys to success with my BYU marketing and Provo Labs Academy students.

One young woman told how she had teamed up a few years ago with her brother to start an ecommerce site, selling a very unusual niche product. They did almost $1 million in revenue last year.

One student asked her how long it took for her sales to take off initially. Her answer surprised me: she worked for an entire week before she had her first sale.

Some people are born with great names and others have great names thrust upon them. In the 1960s when I was given the name "Paul Allen" it was an ordinary name. But thanks to the dynamic duo of Microsoft's Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the name is now famous.

But what do you do if you want to be found online, but you can't possibly stand out like the rich and famous person with the same name? Or what do you do if you have a name like "John Smith" that is so common that it can't possibly stand out?

Thanks to SoloSEO.com, a new web-based search engine marketing project management system, for pointing me to this excellent post from a Seattle SEO firm about how to get more incoming links. I have used some of these ideas before, but this post describes a more comprehensive and useful approach than any internal search strategy my teams have employed to get links. I highly recommend this.

I'm attending my first panel at SES Chicago. I chose to attend the session called Bulk Submit 2.0. The presenters include Amanda Camp, the Google engineer over Sitemaps, and Amit Kumar, the Yahoo manager over Site Explorer, along with two agency search marketers. Everyone is enthusiastic about the industry's acceptance of a bulk site submit protocoal at www.sitemaps.org. I will try to boil down all the advice from this session and others into future blog posts.

I have recently discovered that Matt Cutts, a Google employee who blogs about search engine optimization (he explains the kinds of tactics that Google considers black hat SEO tactics and encourages everyone to do only appropriate search engine optimization) is also doing video posts on Google Video. (See all 19 Matt Cutts videos on Google Video.)

Okay, I'm just keyword stuffing my blog post, to see how many visitors I get by using these keywords in my title. These are all very hot keywords according to Google Trends.

Here are the trends for MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia.

Yes, this is an advertisement.

It's an invitation for you to bring your startup company to the new Provo Labs Academy, where you will learn dozens of important internet marketing tactics that can help you find more success for your business.

In September, a new office building will open in Provo with space for dozens of small startup companies. It is adjacent to BYU on Ninth East, across from the Creamery on Ninth. If you like the BYU Dairy chocolate milk (best tasting in the world) you will love moving your small business into our new space.