It can be fun to draw analogies between the real world and cyberspace. For most people, the acronym VIP means “Very Important Person”. The media, and especially the tabloids, focus a lot of time and effort on following their every move. We all seem to get in on the act; for example, when someone knows a VIP there always seems to be a tendency to name-drop them whenever possible.

In cyberspace, I think of VIP as “Very Important Page” and the analogy to a very important person can be made in an eerily similar way, but keep in mind, search engines don’t understand human traits like infatuation. Traditional advertising concepts like “celebrity sponsorship” are not familiar to search engines and don’t really work very well.

I’m glad search engines don’t seem to get “star struck” like humans and try to concentrate on web pages from topic authorities instead of the celebrity sites. It makes the search engine optimization (SEO) process a little bit more predictable. However, many web site owners and search engine marketing (SEM) firms still seek out web pages with high page rank (PR) in an attempt to get a link placed to their web site from them.

This reminded me of a time in my life when I was required to travel coast-to-coast a few times a month on business because our New York 3D graphics firm had been acquired by an engineering software company in Los Angeles. Well, I quickly became an American Airlines Advantage Gold Member and was upgraded to first class on just about every flight I took. As a result, I flew with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Richards, Whitney Houston, Andy Williams, and Frank Gifford to name a few.

My colleagues were all excited about it since they got to hear a lot of interesting stories about the celebrities, but for me it was just too much time away from family and friends. Interestingly, search engines would have probably considered my Hollywood anecdotes valuable information if my business was celebrity gossip, but they certainly would not have indexed them in relation to engineering software design.

There are many instances where a link from a specific type of web site can quickly move your rankings higher in the major search engines, Sites like Wikipedia, Academic and Professional Associations deliver much higher value than any celebrity site ever could. Search engines pay very close attention to how sites link to you and how you link to them.

So this brings me back to the VIP analogy. Of course it is important to have links from sites with high PR value, but I believe it is more important to concentrate on links that are from authority web sites from within your vertical industry or community. Soliciting a link just because it is located on a web site with a high PR value is like grabbing a camera, jumping on a motorcycle and joining the link paparazzi.

This is the first official post on Viewmark’s NEW blog. We actually started looking and using blogs back in 2004 when blogging was just getting started. Several of us participated in a session at a Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose with the creator of Blogger. I vaguely remember him announcing the Google acquisition.

We were intriqued enough to secure several blogs for Viewmark back then. Recently, we’ve added several new client blogs and are integrating the technology with our tools. Blogs are just one of the many marketing tools our customers are using to communicate with their customers.

As President of Viewmark, I am in charge of the overall vision and direction of the company. I think my first entry on our NEW blog will be to officially announce our commitment to use this channel to discuss, share, and explore relevant news, topics, technology and methods related to using the internet to enhance business.

I find blog integration with RSS feeds particularly interesting. We are now living in an “on-demand” world. Consuming content based on our personal preferences is becoming more and more the norm. News readers and the the many personalized myPages that support XML feeds through RSS and Atom are an eyeopener for sure.

In the late 90s, I was lucky enough to attend an awards ceromony in which Tim Bernes-Lee was discussing his book “Weaving the Web”. In the later chapters of the book, he describes the Semantic Web. Are we now starting to embrace and support his vision? Stay tuned!

I hope you you will sign up to our blog and join in on the discussion.