"I've Been Known to Locate Things from Time to Time."

One of my all-time favorite movies is "Shawshank Redemption", starring Morgan Freeman and Tom Robbins. In the film, Red (played by Freeman) is known as "the guy who can get things." Red has a penchant for locating hard-to-find items for fellow inmates and exchanging them for smokes, liquor and favors.

This knack Red has for "finding things" affords him a measure of status in Shawshank prison which other inmates don't have. You might say that Red has a "competiive advantage" over others inside Shawshank. When asked by Andy (played by Robbins) whether he can smuggle a racy poster of Rita Hayworth into the prison, Red replies in a smug tone, "I'm known to locate things from time to time."

*Research and SEO
What is my point to this introduction, and what does it have to do with SEO?

I mention Red to underscore a conclusion that I've come to in my tenure as an Internet marketer: it all boils down to research.

To me, what distinguishes a good SEO from a great SEO is his research ability. I make spectacular discoveries, almost on a daily basis, which enrich my knowledge and enhance my Internet marketing skill. There is so much information out there in Cyberspace that it's staggering, and you can learn how to do just about anything you can imagine, if you know where to look. In my experience, being a great SEO is as much about being a guy "who can locate things from time to time" as it is about anything else.

*Research: The Competiive Edge
What makes Gnosis Arts a superior Internet marketing firm is not the fanciness of our presentation. Nor is it throwing tons of loot at projects and hoping for the best. What makes us a superior marketing firm is our ability to be "the guys who can locate things from time to time."

Our superlative research ability is where we derive our competitive edge over other small firms. Daily we find the needle in the stack of needles, sifting through obscene amounts of cyber-dribble to find that mising gold coin And we do find it, every day.

It's amazing what you can find, if you look hard enough. Our research has enabled us to create search engine filters that deliver a higher quality of information than even Google at times. Through our research, we've been able to build very sophistocated Web applications, without a shred of formal coding education; locate virginal markets no one's even thought about; generate laser-targeted leads for clients; locate some of the juiciest, free links around, and more.

*"The Most Valuable Commodity ..."
"The most valuable commodity I know of is information," said the investment tycoon, Gordon Gekko, in "Wall Street". And we concur. In the democracy of the Internet, the competitive edge doesn't necessarily go to the one who spends the most dough, but to the one who finds things other people just ... can't find.

In Cyberspace, the most valuable commodity is not money or a magnanimity; it's information.