Search engine advertising is beneficial for local advertisers as well as national advertisers. Google's advertising system, AdWords, offers the option to target ads to searchers in a specific geographic region. Due to the method Google uses to identify the location of these searchers, though, it's imperative for local advertisers to run national ads as well....
Providing a little (or a lot) of information can go a long, long way to building a good relationship with your visitors. That, in turn, can lead to more sales and significant business growth. Unfortunately, many online businesses go with the less is more philosophy. As such, this leads to less user satisfaction and in turn, fewer sales....
Does advertising ruin credibility? It certainly can. But what many people don't realize is that advertising can be a draw and a benefit to a site, if done correctly. Selling text ads for link popularity may earn some cash, but it certainly won't impress your site visitors....
Yesterday MSN posted on their blog that they have turned of certain advanced search queries because, (gasp!) people are using it for research!...
What does valid code have to do with SEO? Honestly, not a whole lot. But it can help you quickly and easily spot potential coding problems that can effect your SEO efforts....
In case you're unfamiliar with dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), it's a feature of Google's AdWords program. It is often used for large campaigns in order to automatically insert the keyword into the headline of an ad. Truly, it's a lifesaver for many pay-per-click (PPC) ad managers who have to stay on top of thousands of ads every day....
Within the last week or so Google updated their Google Alerts service to incorporate it with some of Google's other services. Somewhere in the process of the change they screwed up as over half of my Alerts are missing!...
B2B marketing can be, and most often is, a complex process. However, a complex process doesn't always require a complex solution. To me, complex means ambiguity and ambiguity means lack of clarity and direction. I find it frustrating when people take a complex process and make it more complex. Why not attempt to simplify the process?...
Ever wonder what it would be like if we had all the conveniences of the Internet in the "real" world? I do. A lot, actually. Whether I'm sitting at a stop light, looking where I left my keys or just waiting in line at the grocery store, if we had the power of the Internet available to us I think our lives would be so much simpler....
One of the questions that often pops up when I teach small businesses about link building is where to go to find sites to request links from. While most businesses understand the idea of going to directories and search engines and finding sites that way, many don't yet understand the power of using blog search engines to seek out blogs to target with your link building campaign....
What Impact Might Apollo Have on Online Marketing? This is my loaded question of the day because Apollo will conceivably extend interactive marketing Internet to both the online and offline desktop which opens a variety of doors....
You may have noticed earlier this week that K-Fed is actually launching his own search engine. Well, to be more accurate, he's slapping his face on an existing back end, so to speak. Personally, the more Federline-free my world is, the better....
Today, in the final installment of this series, I'll explain how search engines use links to determine the popularity and authority of a web site. We're used to listening to friends, family and authorities to help us shape our opinion about people, places, products and services...why wouldn't search engines try to do the same?...
On March 16th, the International Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) publicly de-accredited the domain registrar RegisterFly.com for fundamental contractual breaches. Perhaps this post will help you protect your domain(s) and ultimately your livelihoods from future train wrecks....
I recently had an inquiry from someone who was looking for some possible SEO consulting with me. He was in the process of a redesign and wanted to be sure not to make any mistakes along the way, which is super-smart! The time to be looking at SEO is definitely in the beginning stage of any design or redesign project....
In reading an article about the plummeting of music CD sales believed to be caused by the increase in music downloads (purchased and pirated), I got to thinking about the music business in general. While most news stories and editorials talk about the effects of the music distribution industry, I can't help but wonder if this will effect the music industry as a whole--artists and fans included....
Lionsgate films may have an unintentional hit on their hands. It appears that someone put up the wrong billboard campaign which many are finding objectionable....
I am trying to develop a way in which to use an include to allow me to place the Meta data in a separate file and then use the include to place in the head tag. I have tried this using an HTML file with the Meta tags in the file but Google does not seem to be able to pick this up on the site map verify stage....
The SEO industry has changed significantly in the last few years. Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings. Today's SEOs, or at least any worth paying more than one dollar to, are focusing on many other aspects that were once traditionally left to more marketing minded people....
As an average Web user, you don't have to be a fan of social media optimization. However, as a site owner, you do need to know that it exists and be aware of the effects and potential benefits it could have on your site....
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is placing a fairly large bet that people can trump technology in the search engine game. He's putting $4 million (of other people s money) plus an undisclosed "large amount" from Amazon on the line, betting that he can steal 5% of the total search market away from Google with his new project, Wikia....
With the release of Webmaster Central from beta, Google has made a strong statement that serious Web site owners need to be concerned with, and aware of, a range of data regarding their sites. Crawl errors, backlinks and page load times are all available for a webmaster to study and parse through in order to refine and integrate with their search engine optimization strategy....
Transferring traffic and popularity to a new domain is a painstaking process that no one on the web appears to be immune to, or so Topix.net has realized. Topix.net is a leading news aggregation resource that has been in the news lately because they are planning to move their site from Topix.net to Topix.com after purchasing the .com for a cool million from a Canadian animation company....
In part one of the series, I explored the idea of links as the threads of the web, helping both search engines and humans find their way from one site to another. In part two I'll explain why search engines look to links as part of their attempt to replicate human judgement so that they can determine the content of the web site or web page....
One of the biggest problems faced by businesses today is the inefficient collaboration between marketing and sales teams. So when it comes to Search Engine Marketing – who owns it?...
Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people until now. With Google's widespread integration of personalization into standard search results, search marketers' attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue....
Right now Google is the 900 pound basket delivering a sizeable chunk of traffic (eggs?) to businesses on the web. That's fine and all but what happens when you lose your Google rankings for a day, month, year?...
Should you change your page content frequently? The answer is yes and no....
As SEO enters the mainstream of business marketing strategies you would think that less time would have to be spent educating people on why SEO is so very important. But the fact of the matter is, many people still just don't understand SEO or the benefits it can bring. Worse, many companies haven't yet grasped the fact that SEO is crucial to long-term online success, especially for small companies without big brand names or budget....
Why is search engine marketing defined by diametric opposition? It seems like for every question there are two extreme answers. And these polar opposite viewpoints are held with a tremendous amount of passion. The least questioning of our position can unleash a firestorm of retribution....
There are literally thousands of signals that can be changed to improve one's conversion, last week I pointed out ten. Today I give 10 more, but they are not quite as easy to implement as those on the first list....
Since it's hard to build a good link strategy if you don't actually understand why links are so important, I thought that I'd put together a new series of articles that examines why it is that links matter so much to both search engines and to Internet users....
My business partner is developing our site and wants to put a list of keywords at the bottom of some of our shop pages (i.e. below the text) in the hopes that this will get the search engines to notice us slightly more....
While both paid search advertising and organic optimization have their merits in terms of increasing a company’s online exposure, it is important to understand the differences in the respective investments and to determine why cost per click is not a fair indicator of the performance of a search engine optimization company....
Here's the conundrum. Search engine marketing requires links. Links can be hard to come by. Blog reviews are a great way to get links. Blog reviews have the added bonus of carrying the power of word-of-mouth recommendations. That said, it can be hard to catch the eye of a blogger and to get them to write about your products. The solution? Buy your blog reviews. At least that's how some people see it....
I've been writing search engine articles regularly for a couple years now and I´ve always been able to see the nexus between writing and inbound link generation. This isn't a story about how to create good linkbait, but how I attempted to apply what I learned from linkbait masters like Todd Malicoat & Nick Wilson....
It happens more frequently than you might think. People spend a lot of time and money getting their sites ranked highly in the search engines, but give little or no attention to converting their visitors into paying customers. What's their logic? From what copywriting prospects tell me, "I wanted to get my rankings in place before working on my conversions....
According to Google, actual click fraud only accounts for 0.02% of all click activity found when Google's team is asked to audit an advertiser's account. If correct, Google's 0.02% assertion places the perceived dollar value of actual click fraud in their system somewhere in the range of $2,100,000....
The question from an SEO standpoint is, would they be better off with a new domain name and website for the business side, or a home page that says business clients click here, individual clients click here, etc....
My SEO firm has been spending a good deal of time analyzing conversion and usability aspects for our clients over the past year. While there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of things that can be changed to help improve conversion rates, we've created a short list of things that are both quick and easy to change or add to your site....
While it's easy enough to envision a potential customer heading off to Yahoo or Google, conducting a search, clicking through and making a purchase, the reality is that the online sales process is more complicated than that. This is because online shoppers tend to take some time doing research and following the "search buying cycle" before settling on a product and a web site to purchase it from....
Marketing 101 tells us that it costs less to engage an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Lawrence Friedman’s The Channel Advantage puts it this way: "The cost of acquiring new customers is typically three to six times that of retaining existing ones." The conundrum is that while new buyers contribute to sales growth, the process of acquisition is costly....
But when you do an honest appraisal on the issue, the search engines would rather we get over our preoccupation with click fraud and start thinking of it as part of a much bigger whole, the return we get on our search marketing investment. This in no way negates the importance of click fraud as an issue....
Are we so accustomed to the vastness of modern media that we've forgotten consumers are always a click or two away from a zillion and one alternatives to our humble offerings? Today's consumer is on high alert for answers, answers, answers. There is little reason to gamble away time trying to get those answers out of you the seller when better answers—easier to find answers—are so tantalizingly available....
The big news of the past couple of days is that Yahoo now allows you to opt out of having Yahoo use the directory title and description in their general search results. As I was installing the new robots meta tag onto my home page I started thinking, "why am I opting out when I never opted in?"...
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