“This cupcake thing is killing my summer,” an evening with Ryan Abood of GourmetGiftBaskets.com

Kudos to the Boston-Cambridge SEO meetup organizers for not just another great presentation, but a riveting speaker.

Ryan Abood took what he knew from his parents’ floral business in Manchester NH and created a multimillion dollar David among the Goliaths of the gift-basket realm: Harry and David, Wine Country.

On Monday he revealed how and how GourmetGiftBaskets.com got burnt by Google for some unsavory tactics: paid-for links.

His strategy now — besides delivering the best quality goodies in the baskets, with lowest-cost shipping — create events and find strategies that reach beyond SEO. Local Marketing and SEO is easy to learn with LCT. And when you combine the local SEO module with some of the others, you’ll create a unique marketing mix that will give you unprecedented advantages in your industry.  Local search is just growing, and future projections indicate that it’s bound to get a lot bigger. This is becoming increasingly clear by Google’s focus on providing people with solutions and services nearest to their physical location. It’s also apparent in the increased number of ‘near me’ searches. Learning how to do this by yourself is probably the single biggest investment you’ll make over the next 10 years. But to do that, you’ll need a local SEO training program that’s run by people who actually know what they’re doing, have a proven record of consistent rankings for local keywords and frequent map pack rankings on search engines like Google. There are many SEO training programs positioned as a way to help you dominate local search. But, many of these lack merit or are unable to deliver on their promise. At Local Client Takeover, we have proven local SEO training that is guaranteed to get you the results you so badly want. Our training is from years of testing and hundreds of campaigns run on every search engine there is. Over time, we’ve learned what works, and what doesn’t. Do you want to spend years trying to figure it out or would you rather have proven formulas and checklists that you can follow to get your small business ranked on any search engine?This is a common question that most people especially those who are either new or not familiar with online marketing might be asking. SEO stands for search engine optimization. In layman’s language, it the process of capturing traffic from the search engines such as Google listings. Through this read, I am going to give you facts about the SEO business, current market status of SEO as well as the future projections in this field. The major reason as to why people get into business is to profit and expand their economic status. In the field of SEO business, the rates of returns are promising. This is because a recent research on SEO returns for a period of 12 months shows that at least all the players had something to take home. However, the returns are varying depending on a players’ hardwork and skills in the field. For example, according to this research, 34% of the interviewed SEOs said they received an amount less than $ 30,000 while another group of respondents, 17% said they received returns that were above $ 500,000. Just like the annual SEO returns, SEO income per customer also varies. This is because there are those clients who would pay less than $100 a month while others will pay more than $5000 a month. This variation in income per client can be attributed to the type of services provided as well as the depth of services. The size of business a client is seeking SEO services for also play a role in determining the amount to be charged. For example, small businesses are charged less simply because their requirements are much smaller as compared to large multi-location franchise businesses.

And, so we will soon witness the results of his (just) month long quest to obtain the Guinness Book of World Records for the world’s largest cupcake, to be baked and unveiled in Detroit in just a couple weeks.

Why? Not just to create an “international sensation, you can’t can’t buy that publicity,” but also because “I want to be the guy who holds the world records for the most world records,” Ryan said, rousing quite a response from the normally serene crowd of optimizers, link-builders, eMetrics-centric folk.

Aside from his quips, though, Ryan had some serious insights to take home:

• “Conversion has everything to do with trust”
• “Building credibility, conversion has to do with that and only that”
• “Link-building has to have consumer interest in mind”
• and “Vanilla rises better, travels better.”

Update Oct. 2010

Once again, the mastermind behind GourmetGiftBaskets.com has leveraged media coverage with recent coverage in Inc. Magazine: How Google Cost Me $4 Million.

For how you can leverage PR and/or SEO for your business, check out today’s post: How to optimize press releases for links and coverage.