Acknowledgments from Bill

I would like to thank Mike Moran, my co-author on this book, for his encouragement, vast knowledge, and willingness to partner with me to write this book while managing an already heavy workload. Without Mike's encouragement, gentle nudges, constant pacing, occasional kick in the backside, and, of course, his sense of humor, I could never have started this book, let alone finish it. I am indebted to Mike for his writing style that gave my rants a consistent voice that made them more than informative and actually interesting to the reader. Furthermore, Mike has been my mentor, teaching me how to effectively navigate the complex maze of a large corporate structure to actually demonstrate that search engine marketing is the ultimate marketing tool. It was under this tutelage that the methodologies included in this book were allowed to incubate and be tested on one of the greatest Web sites in the world.

A very special thank you and debt of gratitude goes out to Linda Moran for her unbelievable support for Mike and me on this book. Linda's assistance in reading and critical reviews of the book was helpful beyond belief. Mike and I wanted to write a book that was informative and helpful to the beginner and advanced optimizer alike. Linda's reviews and recommendations for changes were absolutely correct and, I believe, integral to us achieving that goal. In addition, thank you Linda for sacrificing your time with Mike to allow him to work with me on this demanding project.

I would like to thank the brilliant team of search marketing strategists from Global StrategiesJeremy Sanchez, Andy Weatherwax, and David Turnerfor their tremendous knowledge, support, ideas, research, content reviews, and undying encouragement of this effort. I need to thank them for picking up the slack with our clients while I was writing, which allowed us to keep them happy and pay the bills.

A thank-you goes out to the members of the IBM Search Effectiveness team, who have helped me to refine many of these techniques and be my sounding board. Thanks go to Marshall Sponder for his honest reviews and assistance in refining the metrics for the enterprise, to Daniele Hayes for her insights into managing paid placement, and to Jessica Casamento for challenging me to develop intuitive audit tools to be used by the business units.

I also want to thank the IBM Corporate Webmaster team, especially Klaus Johannes Rusch for his technical insight and help to understand how to really motivate and work with Webmasters.

I want to thank my IBM management team, specifically John Rosato and Lee Dierdorff, for their support for Mike and me in working on the book and their support of search engine optimization efforts. I need to further thank John for his relentless desire to rank well and deliver almost impossible traffic increases to the site, both of which forced me to work harder to crack the code of delivering effective enterprise search engine marketing. Thank you to the IBM marketing team, including Lisa Baird, Eric Siebert, Richard Toranzo, David Manzo, and Claudio Zibenberg, for their support of search engine marketing and making it part of the marketing mix.

I want to give special thanks to my wife, Motoko, and my children, Mariko and William, for their tremendous support and encouragement during this project and for the many sacrifices they made so that I could take the time to writeeven on vacation!

I need to offer a heartfelt thank you to Motoko for not only her support on this book but her dedication to my career, often at the sacrifice of her own, for the past 20 years. It is so true that behind every successful man is a strong woman, and Motoko is just that woman! Without her tremendous support, love, and understanding, this book and my overall success would not have been possible. I further need to thank her for allowing me to become the expert in Japanese SEO by keeping me current and providing many deep insights that I could have never realized alone. Thank you!

Additional thanks go to Andy Weatherwax who cleaned up my mess with the graphics and created many of the custom images. Thank you to Kevin Lee of Did-it for reviewing the paid search segments of the book and giving honest feedback and guidance that helped ensure accuracy and relevancy.

The team at IBM Press, especially our editor Bernard Goodwin, was very helpful and kept us from floundering during our first writing experience. Tara Woodman for helping us through the IBM Press process. Kristy Hart for the production support that turned our binder of paper into an actual book. Daria Goetsch for reviewing several chapters and providing insight to make some complex thoughts easier to understand.

Many others provided assistance, examples, and encouragement along the way, including Andrei Broder, Rob Key, Adam Glazer, Roger Balmer, Marshall Simmonds, Derrick Wheeler, Detlev Johnson, Joe Morin, Sherwood Stranieri, Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Tor Crockatt, Neeraj Agrawal, Mike Grehan, and many others to whom I apologize for not listing here.

Bill Hunt