In the world of search engine marketing, there are numerous metrics that can be measured. The trick is to determine which ones are the correct ones for your online campaign. more often than not that same client is absolutely determined that the chief KPI is that ranking on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), but is it?...
From the outside, it seems like anyone with an IQ topping 60 could market this way. So agencies launch search divisions. Large companies find people that seem to have no pressing items on their to-do lists and make them the new Director of Search Marketing. Everyone throws their hat in the ever increasing search marketing ring....
Many SEO's have offered suggestions on how to best capture "Long Tail" traffic. If such explanations make your head spin, I would suggest that you just focus on integrating as many keywords as possible into your website that you discovered in your keyword research....
Last week, the Google team announced plans to integrate dayparting and ad scheduling into the AdWords advertiser panel. With Microsoft's adCenter already offering limited dayparting options, it was only a matter of time until Google was forced to do the same. Even so, most small businesses will be looking forward to this feature launch with great anticipation....
Search engine optimization is still a very new concept to most companies. Even the most respected companies can make mistakes in this arena, either by choosing the wrong SEO service, or by trying to avoid hiring an SEO service altogether by bringing it in house with well-intentioned but unqualified people....
The sudden appearance of Google's online video ad distribution service is going to have multiple repercussions for the $38 Billion US television advertising market. It is also going to present multiple opportunities for search marketers and their clients....
There's some buzz moving around the blogosphere that speculates on whether the left-leaning ideology behind one of the most popular search sites on the Internet may be tainting their ability to provide unbiased results through the Google News search engine and through the actual Google Web search....
Remember that Web site solutions don't have to come in the form of search engine optimization or technology. They can often come in the form of creativity . . . the missing element in search engine marketing....
With quality search marketing consultants now charging anywhere from $100 to $500 an hour and some companies requiring at least $10K to even start working on your site, search marketing seems to be leaping out of reach for most small business owners. It doesn't have to be that way....
You’d be surprised with the impression you can make with a quickly returned phone call. I can’t count the number of sales I’ve made because I’d called and gotten a contract signed before another SEO company even returned the prospects call or email....
In the search engine marketing/optimization community there are abundant resources and articles on how to improve rankings. So much in fact, it can be confusing as to which tactics are current and valid....
For the right price you think I'll engage in sleazy link building tactics normally only used by gambling or viagra sites? Nope. And it's not because I think I occupy some sort of high moral ground. It's because these tactics make the web experience worse and simply don't work. And the sooner everyone stops being link whores, the better, in my opinion....
Just because you have a lot of visitors on your web site doesn't necessarily mean that your web site is going to make you a lot of money. And you don't have to have a lot of visitors in order to make a lot of money from your web site you've got to have the right visitors looking for what your web site has to offer....
If you have a branding problem online, get your brainstorming team together and think about what you can do about "GJL Retail" and how to brand it and make it memorable....
When customers come to your site, they are looking for a clear reason to buy from you instead of all the other sites. Do you give them a reason? Do you give them several reasons?...
With blogs, there exist as many or more optimization opportunities to optimize as with a web site. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for blog optimization are readily available....
There are a zillion other things that you can learn when measuring your true SEO success through web analytics. If you're not already using a good program (and learning from it), I can't stress enough how important it is to start doing it....
In the last few years, local search has given us many impressive advertising ideas to promote local businesses online. As impressive as some of these features may be, many end users just don't use them on a regular basis....
In SEO and SEM, time management is critical. Almost anybody in the industry will tell you that you can spend countless hours "tweaking" a web site, looking at traffic analysis and conversion stats, and employing solid link building campaigns....
More than a year and a half after last updating their home page, Yahoo! has introduced another overhaul designed at helping them maintain their position as the most popular site on the web....
Microsoft and Yahoo had been in discussions for some time as part of a general exploration of plans to cope with Google’s dominance of the search business....
There are several things worth mentioning when it comes to linking. Don't be afraid to link out to good content. If you see something in your industry that's helpful to your web site's visitors, then link to it and tell them about it....
A new desktop search tool, Quintura, is betting that a new user interface based on the concept of semantic mapping is just the ticket they need to win the search lottery. It's a powerful concept in understanding how people search and something we identified in our previous research....
Yesterday in their annual Press Day, the team at Google brought the world up to date on their latest and greatest, including the launch of one update and three brand new products....
Suffice it to say that spam is a major issue with the search engines in terms of time, resources, and ultimately money. New filters are added by the engines to combat spam, and the Web community finds new ways to cheat their way to the top....
Mona Elesseil has recently authored the Yahoo Search Marketing Handbook, a 102-page manual that starts with the basics, outlines potential pitfalls and gradually guides the reader towards establishing and maintaining winning YSM PPC campaigns....
As technologically advanced as search engines are, there are a few areas where they still don't quite measure up. It's well known that search engines don't like duplicate content on web sites, but did you know you could unknowingly be serving them duplicate content?...
How does Company A, that is new to search engine marketing, assess Company B to hire them to manage their SEO programs? It seems just as complicated to pick a company as it is to actually optimize....
The reason top sponsored ads are effective is because they're placed in the highest traffic portion of the page. We orient ourselves in the page on the upper left. Our destination is the top organic ad. Top sponsored ads are placed in the middle of the most popular real estate on the SERP....
The next interview for Spotlight on Search is with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. Two interviews in one day? Well, the repsonse to my queries to interviewees has been fantastic. Plus, Rand has received some excellent attention in the media recently....
What is the future of social networking likely to look like? One login, many networks, with an individual's profile altered for each network. Portable friend/family/buisiness groups likely built from email lists....
From a business and consumer's point of view, the lack of professional oversight or certification in the search engine optimization field can present problems when deciding with whom to risk advertising dollars....
Coming right on the heels of Microsoft's adCenter launch, the team at Yahoo has finally decided to publicly release some details of the updates they plan to launch this fall to their own pay per click advertising platform....
Careful and strategic planning before you begin developing (or re-developing) your website can help you build the best possible website that meets both your, and your customer's needs....
Once you have great content on your web site, you first need to take care of your internal linking before dealing with getting external links from other web sites. Great internal linking also means that you link to your related topics and your most important products (if you sell products on your web site)....
Your log files and the reports generated by your software can tell you only how people are *currently* finding your site, not how they might find it in the future. So if you haven't yet optimized the site, or haven't optimized it for all the keyword phrases that you were planning on, you'll never see those phrases turn up in your log files and reports....
Explaining the finer points of website optimization and search engine marketing to a person who has never designed a website themselves is tricky, under any circumstances. It is all too easy to get carried away when discussing one’s ability to put a website on the first page of Google results....
I'm sure I'm not the only one that has read article after article and blog post after blog post announcing the death of traditional search engine optimization. I've even written a few myself that talk about the need to shift our focus from things like keyword density, PageRank and even rankings themselves....
For Microsoft, the month of May has come in like a triumphant lion. When you are used to being the king of the pride, nothing says success like taking big chunks of business from the competition and over the past few days, Microsoft has scored big gains in its fight against Google....
Losing a test website in a laboratory environment isn't a big deal to an SEO...it is part of an ongoing educational process that insures clients receive the best possible results for their investment (since ethical SEO's NEVER use client sites for such experiments)....
Search engines still face a daunting challenge when it comes to matching searchers up with local companies and small businesses. The problem, is how make advertising easy enough to entice the 23 million small businesses that could be advertising....
My perception of reality is getting a little skewed. When you do too many industry shows in a row, you get a distorted sense of your own importance. In SEM circles, I’m fairly well known. But my accomplishments hold little weight with my wife, just in case you were wondering. The line "Do you know who I am?" usually lands with a decidedly flat thud whenever I try it....
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