I was tinkering with my LinkedIn profile the other day and realized that I’ve been doing SEO in some fashion now for close to 20 years. My first website went up in 1994 and back then, SEO was all keyword stuffing, all the time (veterans, remember white text on a white background in 1996?), and…
As we sit on the morning of a lot of snow, I was thinking about why The Weather Channel (TWC) even bothers to name winter storms. It’s not a convention anyone else uses, and it doesn’t measurably improve the forecasting. What does it improve, then? TWC’s SEO – by quite a lot. Go Google for…
If your business has any physical presence at all (meaning not just a PO Box somewhere), even if you don’t take walk-ins, you need to do this: This is a Google Local Business registration. You put your business name and address in, and claim your local business on the map. Tag it with the industries…
Once upon a time, search engine optimization and branding lived apart. They dined at separate tables. The SEO guys (and they were almost always guys) tooled away in a server room or a windowless closet, coming up with awkward twists of language like BEST COLLEGE STUDENT LOANS. The brand marketers and PR folks, meanwhile, were…
What’s the most powerful change to search marketing in the past 14 years? If you guessed social media, you’d be partly correct. The biggest change is that search is becoming all about who as much as what. What in the world am I talking about? Take a look at some of the great work done…
Here’s a simple but not easy question: how subject to cyclicality is your marketing? Human beings are naturally cyclical in nature, because that’s how the planet around us operates. We do things differently when it’s summer weather than when there’s a foot of snow on the ground. That’s so obviously logical that it shouldn’t need…
On Marketing Over Coffee yesterday, one of our callers, Steve Dale, was lamenting that despite his best efforts at getting nearly every aspect of inbound marketing operating, he was still seeing no results from his digital marketing efforts for his window covering business. I took a quick look at his website today just to see…
What’s the hottest trend in search engine optimization that you’ve never heard of (yet)? The folks over at SEOmoz have been doing a great series on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is a context-based algorithm for determining search relevance. Their research has shown strong correlation between LDA and search rankings. However, it’s little things like…
Optimize, optimize, optimize. The creed of the day. Search engine optimization. Email marketing optimization. Social media optimization. With all this optimization, you’d think that organizations would be sales and marketing machines, banging out the profits faster than ever. Strangely, most of the folks promoting their optimization services barely have two nickels to rub together. The…
