I was trying to help a partner understand our org chart and remembered that at CES in Las Vegas the Lego people were giving out little Lego guys.

This is what I sent my partner:

First time at CES – I decided to go in order to understand better what I can do to expand our offerings on YouNeverCall.com and our other cell phone and tech websites. We get huge amounts of visitors but dont manage to turn enough of them into customers – yet. We think this is for two reasons.

1) The site needs a major upgrade – which we are doing.
2) We dont have the products that people want – many people just want to buy a cell phones.

In any case the show was interesting and I saw a lot of interesting technologies. – especially related to 3D TV in the home.

But the event also made me feel old. I could see so many young companies banking their future on what could best be summed up as a cute idea. Reminded me of my first few tech jobs.

Some examples: a ball-shaped mouse, various iphone stickers to personalize your iphone, plastics to put on your TV to make it appear to have more depth etc.

I feel like I have a much better sense of how likely a company is to succeed than I did some years ago…

So I feel like I have been around the block a few times – enough to identify other people’s naïveté about projects that will fail. Interesting that I still get into projects of my own that are bound to fail!

For about a year my company has been utilizing a new set of techniques to help us in our SEO efforts. While the techniques are not unique our results are in some cases singularly unique and valuable.

Even if you are new to SEO you probably already know that some of the main “types” or areas of SEO are:

1. On Page – things you can do on your site to make your site rank better (think rich on-topic text, titles, descriptions, keyword choice, site structure, interlinking etc.)
2. Off Page – things that can be done on other people’s sites to make your site more popular (think linking and creation of pages and content on other sites that influence the search engines and push your efforts forward)

Aside from these, there are actually many other, sometimes equally important arenas where you can act to increase your site’s popularity and rankings for specific keywords. These include:

Looking at this incomplete list, it stuck me that aside from the very visible link acquisition and site building activities there are a lot of very valuable activities that contribute to a site’s dominance of a keyword, but which are much harder to see. I call these activities SEO Dark Matter because we can sense they are there but we may have some difficulty actually detecting and monitoring them.

For example – if you see a site rise in Google’s rankings for a tough keyword like “contact lenses”, checking its backlinks and the pages of the site itself will not allow you to see that the strength came from an old on-topic website that you redirected to the new site – you wont see the 10,000 incoming links that give it strength and you will probably be fooled by the 20 incoming directory links that have been purchased for the sole purpose of fooling you.

Another example – imagine your site falls for a target keyword – even you may have trouble detecting that the reason was that someone was generating a lot of erroneous search engine traffic to your website and has suddenly stopped that activity – sending the search engines a clear signal that your website no longer deserves the rankings it has.

That’s SEO Dark Matter – it’s harder to detect and it’s the next frontier of SEO.