The question has been asked: should customers expect web designers to know about SEO as a matter of course, or should designers presume customers know and will ask about SEO if they're interested? Here's what I think......
MarketingSherpa today released the fourth annual edition of its Search Marketing Benchmark Guide. The search marketing industry is still expanding rapidly - as much as 31% in the United States and 39% globally for 2007....
Google Trends now updated daily. Broadmatch at Google gets booed. It's toooo broad. AdWords conversion goodies. Enquiro does eye tracking on Google Universal Search. DMOZ... gone from Google?
While vertical search is still in its infancy, the integration of vertical results through Google Universal and Ask 3D are allowing sites to draw more and more visitors from specialty indexes. One of the vertical search indexed that is becoming more and more popular is image search. Unfortunately, many small businesses are overlooking traffic opportunities by not optimizing the images on their sites. Pat B. Doyle has a great post on using images to drive traffic at her blog.
Sage Lewis gives his take on the Search Engine Guide article of the week. This week's pick is an article by Stoney deGeyter titled, "Content or Community, The Red Pill or the Blue?"
So you just started a new job in the "Insert Category Here" industry and are instantly expected to get up to speed so you can begin helping your team with billable work. You've heard that blogs are a great resource to begin your education, however you discover that there are literally a million blogs you could read, so where do you start?? This situation is one that probably many individuals face and I can understand where they are coming from especially since it's quite difficult to believe which bloggers are actually telling the truth or which bloggers' strategies actually work....
Stoney has offered up a few articles here in the past week that aim to remind folks of the importance of community when it comes to building and establishing solid content. He took a lot of heat for the first one from the industry. Mostly, from folks who felt you couldn't have community without content. I've been thinking this concept over for the last week and I've got to say, I agree with Stoney.
The Yahoo Search Marketing team has a post up this week reminding site owners that online holiday shopping increases pretty much every year. In fact, more than 80% of shoppers bought at least one thing online last holiday season. With the holiday sales cycle already gearing up, it's a good idea to start fine tuning your site and campaigns to drive more business. While most of the five tips Yahoo has to offer are a recap of the fundamentals of good online marketing, they're still worth reading and putting into action.
The search engines do indeed index and rank PDF documents these days. Basically, what they do is convert them into HTML and then index the information just like any other web page.
In my last article I declared that content was dead and community was the new king online. The title of that post was a bit of an overstatement which wasn't backed up by the rest of the article. (It was a link bait-y title, but yet another example of community ruling content. But I digress.) In the article I found some stats that some have used to re-declare (yet again) that "content is king" but I went on to show how those stats really didn't say that at all. I wanted to go a bit further in today's post while...
I've always believed the SEO value proposition to be so clear and obvious that if a person couldn't intuitively "get it" themselves, nothing I could tell them would help them understand. I asked my fellow SEMpdx members to successfully answer the question that I could never answer very well.
Despite years and years of writing and blogging about the need to offer something of value in return for a link, people still don't get it. In the past week, my inbox has been absolutely slammed with link exchange requests and link schemes. Not a single one of the has offered me anything in return, not even good content. They all just want me to link to them. On the other hand, Stoney deGeyter scored himself a link to his online marketing blog by getting creative.
There's been a lot of talk lately about what the shift toward blended and universal search means for small business owners. On the one hand, those increased opportunities to snag listings allow one company to snag even more real estate on the first page. On the other hand, those increased opportunities to snag listings allow one company to snag even more real estate on the first page. It's all good if you're the company scoring more listings, it's not so good if your competitor does it and pushes you off the front page.
by Karon Thackston - In Part 1 of this series, I introduced you to Announce It!, an online candy-bar-wrapper manufacturer that was seeking professional help with their search engine copywriting. The primary problems were that the copy did not convey a sense of excitement or answer all the questions customers might have.
Motivation is a funny thing. You can try to encourage people by telling them the benefits of this, that or the other, but sometimes it's just not enough. You've got to make them "feel" it. If you craft your message right, you can do just that using words only.
I am constantly on a quest to find safe ways for my children to enjoy the internet, but not find all of the crud that is out there. I've found resources that have let me feel more confident about their browsing, but nothing is a substitute for parental involvement.
The old cliché is wrong. All our lives we've heard, "It's not what you say, but how you say it." That may occasionally be true, but for the most part it's what you say AND how you say it.
The challenge left to me at the end of part six of this series was how to gracefully recover from a social media attack that left Bento Yum (and me) reeling. Standing up and walking back in the door when you feel like you've been tossed out on your rear can be difficult, but it's all part of community life on the Internet.
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