Pandia welcomes ACS as a new sponsor and presents social media marketing guru Neil Patel and his colleagues.

Those who have followed the search engine marketing scene for a while are bound to have heard of Neil Patel, one of the foremost experts on using the social web for search engine marketing.

He speaks at most of the major search engine conferences and has a popular blog over at ACS Pronet.

ACS Search engine and social media marketing

He is co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of ACS, one of the most respected search engine marketing companies out there.

ACS has clients like HP, Samsung and TechCrunch and is used by popular bloggers like Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore from Mashable and Richard McManus from Read/Write Web.

If you take a look at the sponsor banners in the right hand column of this page, you will find the green tree of the ACS logo. ACS has become a sponsor of Pandia, and this gives us an opportunity to present Neil and his colleagues.

CrazyEgg

ACS provides internet marketing, business consulting and content creation.

However, the company is also developing tools helping webmasters analyze their marketing campaigns, like the popular CrazyEgg application.

CrazyEgg lets people track actual clicks on a website. CrazyEgg will, for instance, generate heat maps of your web pages, showing you were readers are most likely to click.

A focus on Web 2.0

SEOmoz recently had an interview with Neil Patel and the ACS Director of Marketing Cameron Olthuis.

In the interview Neil points out that one of the main factors behind the success of ACS has been helping people who cannot afford to pay for Internet marketing services:

“We might not make any money because of it,” he says, “but it does help create some good PR for the company.”

Neil’s strong interest in social media and Web 2.0 is also found in the main focus of the company.

Olthuis says that the new mediums make it easy to create viral marketing campaigns that spread easier than they ever have in the past:

“If you create the right type of content and target your submissions, everything else should take care of itself. Of course managing the buzz you create is a whole other story and can certainly take a lot of work.”

How Pandia’s Neil Patel quote reached the front page of Digg

We heard Neil talk about using the social web as a search engine marketing tool at the 2007 Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

He argued that if you can get clients on the front page of Digg numerous times there is a very high chance that you can increase their link popularity which in turn will increase their search engine rankings.

However, he also explained that the people who rule Digg are kids or they like to behave like kids. They will joke around and they will slam you. So you should definitely know what you are doing.

Interestingly enough, our report from that session made it to the front page of Digg because of Neil’s diggers are kids comment, and that post has so far generated more than 190 comments over at Digg.

Social media optimization

In an interview with Social Media Optimization Neil says that their clients are asking for social media optimization strategies:

“Most of them are using MySpace profiles or creating Facebook Apps which seem to work as long as they are targeting correctly. Think of social media as banner ads, although many people don’t think they are effective it actually is if they are targeted correctly.”

This is why ACS also helps companies with widgets, quizzes, Facebook applications, flash games etc. that can be used for social media marketing.

Here’s an interview TopRank blog did with Neil Patel at the recent Pub Conference in Las Vegas: