There is a lot more to SEO than often meets the eye, but sometimes the SEO eye isn't enough to make a good optimized page great. While the actual SEO work can be pretty straight forward, it's the additional effort in making the page user-friendly and has the ability to drive visitors to conversions....
One of the biggest concerns I've heard from businesses that are considering exploring social media and viral marketing is the fear of negative feedback. The bad news is, no matter how carefully you tread, no matter how genuine your involvement is, you may find yourself getting slammed by the very audience you are trying to reach. The good news is, if you go into a social media campaign with honest interest in engaging in a dialogue with your customers, you'll be able to weather the storm....
These past few weeks I've watched how things played out in the blogosphere after breaking the story of Google's new "unavailable_after" tag. I have to say that what I learned was extremely interesting and educational to me!...
Are you overcomplicating things when it comes to promoting your online business? It's not as hard as you think. In fact, I believe it's really not that different from marketing a brick-and-mortar business. The key is to focus on where your prospective customers can be found....
There's a rush to launch a corporate blog these days. There's also a rush to dive into viral marketing. Companies both large and small are working on communicating with their customers through these interesting new marketing tactics. The problem is many of them go after these things with good intentions, but fail to follow through. It's bad enough when a company's blog fails because they simply can't come up with anything interesting to write about. It's worse when a company completely ignores the blogging and viral marketing opportunities that fall right into their laps....
Google's Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, has just published his quarterly update for the top ten Web Analytics Blogs. Avinash uses Feed Subscribers and Technorati rankings in order to rank the Web Analytics blogs appropriately....
It's long been understood that people trust the advice and opinions of their friends more than they trust the word of a marketer. The interesting thing about online communities and social media is that they've allowed people to create those "friend" connections with people they've never met in real life....
So you have decided to venture out into the world of SEO. The first thing you will need to do is determine the direction of your campaign in relation to the key phrases you are choosing to target. This article will focus on how to find keywords for your organic campaign, as the process is slightly different for PPC....
Sketchcasting is basically podcasting with a whiteboard. Rather than publishing content through text or audio, authors express their ideas on a whiteboard (through video). I think this method of conveying thoughts and ideas to your audience is very effective because it will engage readers at a whole new level....
A few weeks ago one of my employees ran across co.mments.com, a free, web based comment tracking tool. It's turned out to be a very nice one-size fits all solution to keeping up with any comments on any blog post, whether I've commented there or not....
If you haven't heard of it by name yet, you've probably already used it in one form or another. Google Maps, The Wall Street Journal Online, and Flickr, just to name a few Web sites, all use it. So what is Ajax and what does it do?...
I just got into work this morning and as I suspected someone mentioned the word, "Starbucks." My eyes widened and I immediately went to the stock, Grande Soy Vanilla Latte with Add Shot for my order. Yet I hesitated and desired something different this morning. I went to my web browser and went to www.starbucks.com and low and behold, no online menu. Are you kidding me?...
Chance are high that you've never heard of Yelp, so you probably have no idea what it says about you. This is a mistake. More than 1.8 million users turn to it for information each month. It also ranks incredibly well on Google for a wide range of local search phrases. That's why I'll ask you again, what does Yelp say about you?...
For the first time in many years, I had the privilege (misfortune) to receive (be tormented by) a Multi-Level Marketing presentation (assault). There are many obvious reasons why I have a strong disdain for MLM…probably no different than anyone else´s. Fortunately as time moves on, the rising popularity of social media should greatly reduce the effectiveness of MLM 1.0 as a business process, hopefully causing its practitioners to abandon its use....
MIVA is updating their records... and in the process giving all of their contacts access to over 1200 email addresses. Early this morning I received an email from MIVA and there it was, right in front of me, over 1,217 email addresses staring at me in the TO box....
Aodhan Cullen, CEO of web analytics provider, StatCounter has taken home the prize of Europe's top Entrepreneur under the age of 25. The young StatCounter CEO edged out other leaders from companies such as JT International and Amsterdam's Wakoopa....
Take a look at your own Web sites. Who do you think are your target audiences? Have you considered that women may be the ones making the buying decisions? How can you appeal to women buyers? From a professional SEM perspective, think of the small businesses that are operated by women who work out of their homes. These are all potential customers for you....
More than two years after first testing the sale of magazine ads, Google's print ad program has left beta and now allows AdWords advertisers to place ads in more than 200 newspapers across the United States. Google began testing the newspaper ad auction for a small group of advertisers last November with just over 50 newspaper partners, including The Washington Post and The New York Times....
By now, you've all heard about Google's new Universal Search concept, which combines all the information within its vertical databases into one index to serve a single set of Web search results. As you can imagine, this will require some adjustments to standard search engine optimization techniques....
One of the things we've been trying to wrap our head around is the concept of writing content for both personas and the personality of site visitors. We battled with this for several days, trying to distinguish properly between a persona and a personality. I was finally able to boil each down into a few words that made it easy for us to see the difference....
All content is not equal. There are numerous factors that determine the value or success of how content supports your major subject theme. Evaluate different methods towards determining how your content measures up to your competitors. Learn how to determine the originality of the content on your site....
There's a lot of talk about blogs being wonderful marketing tools lately. In fact, many big businesses are quickly working on plans to launch their own corporate blogs to serve as communication channels for their customers. When it comes to corporate blogging, some companies have stumbled, some have soared and others are facing serious start-up challenges....
Considering Google uses A/B testing to optimize the performance of their pages, shouldn't all site owners do the same? If you haven't noticed, Google's Gmail home page has been running a small A/B test to help promote new Gmail sign-ups. In Google's case, they are running an A/B/C/D/E test....
On a personal level, having a damaged reputation can mean being a part of the "in-crowd" or being a loner. For businesses a damaged or negative reputation can mean millions of dollars. The importance of reputation management cannot be emphasized enough....
No...not THAT kind of sugardaddys...I'm talking about Sugardaddy's the makers of mouth-watering gourmet brownies and blondies. The company that seems to have nailed three keys to marketing success, both online and offline, and impressed me enough I'm sitting here writing an article about them just two hours after visiting their factory outlet and tasting their brownies....
Last night was our third SEMNE event (Search Engine Marketing New England), and we were humbled to have Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, spilling the beans about how to get your site into Google. He talked for a half hour or so, and then proceeded to answer audience questions for at least another hour....
Do you ever get the feeling that there are super cool websites out there that you have not discovered? Sites that everybody is talking about, except to you? Well, fret no longer, young Internet Junkie. Time Magazine, in partnership with CNN.com has issued their report on the 50 Best Websites for 2007....
I've been submitting my articles to Ezine @rticles for a few years now and I have great respect for them, but lately, well, they've been riding the short bus to school drinking crazy Uncle Joe's home made Koolaid....
In Part 1 of this series, we started our journey toward providing a real world example on how to identify the elements for building an information-rich site that serves both users and search engines with the elements that provide top keyword rankings. The focus of section 1 was Subject Theming, which emphasized the importance of building a keyword-rich "siloed" themed Web site....
The search marketing industry is currently going through a transition phase in which many companies are considering bringing SEO in-house rather than relying on the services of 3rd party search marketing firms. With training from organizations such as the SEMPO Institute as well as the need for companies to have tighter integrations with online marketing efforts, the transition to in-house becomes a much more obvious choice....
To recap, Universal Search is a term coined by Google in which results from different vertical search engines (images, video, news etc...) are integrated into Google's regular search results. The idea is that textual listings may not necessarily be the most relevant result for a user's query. But when will these different search results show up? For example, what causes a video of a scene from Star Wars to appear within the organic search results for the query: "Darth Vader."...
With Google's new universal search being rolled out the concept of "top search engine rankings" changes dramatically. On one hand a first page ranking is much more difficult to achieve, and on the other, there are now more ways in which to achieve a first page ranking....
Search Engine Marketing knowledge is a very prized possession. Many people want to learn how to do search for themselves or for their company. However, they don´t know how to begin the educational process. I asked my fellow SEMpdx members how they would advise a new entrant into this field....
We probably all had our iPhone media fill by now. We saw the TV stations covering the long lines for the launch and the endless buzz on whether it’s a revolutionary product or an over-hyped gadget. I’m one of many that bought into the iMarketing and now own one (justified by my way-outdated other cell)....
The term siloing originated as a way to identify the concept of grouping related information into distinct sections within a Web site. Much like the chapters in a book, a silo represents a group of themed or subject-specific content on your site....
Organic search engine optimization, until recently, had been a fairly straightforward endeavor. The goal was to optimize the content on a website so that it would show up in the organic results on one or more of the major search engines – results that were comprised of nothing but other websites....
So your web sales are down. What could be the problem? Or is there really a problem at all? I don't know which is worse - wasting time trying to solve the wrong problem, or wasting time trying to solve a non-existent problem. Fortunately, there's a solution at hand, and best of all, it's free!...
The key to success in blogging, whether you want to make money, gain more subscribers, or increase visitor engagement is to constantly test new strategies. With A/B or Multivariate testing and using web analytics to measure its performance anyone can move closer to their ideal formula of success. The results from the multivariate testing will allow you to test various alterations before they are 100% live as well as allow you to capitalize on the best performing combinations....
Once Abigail had decided to pair up with me to offer bento sets for sale on my bento blog, we needed to move into development mode. One of the biggest challenges facing Bento Yum in this regard was the fact that Abigail does not have a web development background. As I spent more time looking through information about WordPress I became convinced that this was actually the perfect system for our little business....
Two years ago I put together a post about what I thought was the perfect SEO firm. I revisited that post this morning as I was looking at one of our white boards that had a list of positions that we have filled and positions that we want to fill in the coming months. My list of positions required for good SEO has not changed a whole lot in the last couple of years, although some minor modifications are needed....
In a previous article I wrote that a search engine friendly website is not the same as a search engine optimized website. I'm using that as a jump off point for this article on the topic of building a search engine friendly website. The purpose is to simply highlight a few of the aspects that comprise a SE friendly (not necessarily optimized) website....
A key concept to social marketing is that it is not designed to immediately provide business but instead it provides the visibility your brand needs to ultimately convert fans into buyers....
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