aimClear Search Marketing Blog

aimClear gets daily cold calls from confused businesses that are losing ground. The stories are eerily similar. “We used have high Google rankings”, “Why do Internet Yellow Pages rank above us for the name of our company?”, and “What are all these maps, videos, and news stories?”`

The answer is easy. Universal search and third party verticals are wreaking havoc on those unfortunates who didn’t adapt and evolve. A surprising amount of businesses have absolutely no idea that nearly half the websites in the world have blog-like tools which connect them to each other, RSS aggregators, social communities, the media, and modern link building communities. Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-pollinating bookmarks between social communities you’re active in is rarely discussed and can be an effective technique. It’s especially powerful when using redirects to track outgoing traffic from social bookmarks to the actual posts you are promoting, a modus operandi we’ll discuss later in this post.

Bill Hartzer visited cross-pollination in his post, “Claim Your StumbleUpon Blog through Technorati”, which details how to increase links to your StumbleUpon blog and pass “link juice” to pages you add, review, or “Stumble”. There are a number of other C-P (cross-pollinating) protocols to consider between communities. These practices are white hat methods to share valuable content between groups of friends who tend congregate in different and/or multiple places. Read the rest of this entry »

Local and Mobile search comprise a massive search marketing frontier. Most marketplace pundits predict that ad-spends will rise to $8 billion by the year 2010. It’s still the Wild West, home on the range, with numerous platforms springing up every month. Frontline technologies are maturing at blazing speeds and it’s critical not to be left eating dust.

Shootout At the O.K. Corral
The major search engines and online directories all have guns drawn are they’re taking aim at heaps of glittering gold. Other niche-contenders are circling the wagons. They too are bent on staking out product and service segments. Factor in the ambitions of mobile carriers and you’ve got the makings of an epic hoedown. Read the rest of this entry »

Social communities are just that-social. StumbleUpon, Sphinn, MySpace, FaceBook, and countless other channels are essentially places where people, ranging from like-minded allies to diametrically different provocateurs, congregate and intermingle.

Online communities mirror the physical world as we share, debate, and interact to the greater good of the collective. It’s all about getting along, making friends, and building networks through respectful and appropriate interactions. We are positively judged for good behavior and kicked off the island if we deserve a press of the dumb-ass button. Read the rest of this entry »

Ask an experienced public relations guru to explain his or her profession’s fundamental aim and you’ll likely receive some variation of the following lecture: “PR is media relations, investor relations, community relations, customer relations, internal relations, human interest, and crises management.”

PR Has Been Important Since the Dawn of Time.
No doubt cave people intentionally spun messages to achieve goals and solve problems. Could anyone argue that Jesus’ disciples were not public relations stars in their authenticity and holistic intent? Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, John Adams, and the Federalists seemed keenly aware of the effect their words might have on the American population. These folks knew what they were doing.

Throughout recorded history humans have “published” with the tools of the day. Be the venue shouting from treetops, distributing parchment manuscripts by horseback, World War 2 propaganda trailers before Clark Gable movies, faxed press releases sharing professional accomplishments, political billboards, annual corporate reports, or Nixon feigning righteous indignation from the Oval Office, humans forever spin. Read the rest of this entry »

Organic landing page conversion measuring is a time tested after-deployment technique which, though highly effective, can take days, weeks, or months to fully tune.

As optimized pages gradually rise in the SERPs, conversion is measured and pages modified to achieve better conversion ratios. However we’d rather definitively test and tweak landing page concepts to focus conversion, prior to deploying them for organic indexing, using “fixed length short burst paid search.” Read the rest of this entry »

Well known writer Rose Sylvia (aka flyingrose.stumbleupon.com) has started ppcThink, a new blog which promises to be an authority online publication focused on “Cutting Edge Internet Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Profits.” You may also know her work as long time moderator of Search Engine Forums PPC forum.

Zero to Sixty in Three Seconds
Rose joined the Sphinn community with vengeance about 2 weeks ago, bringing her StumbleUpon power-user savvy and blogging experience to the young search marketing social community. In 11 days Rose had 9 submissions that “went hot” and quickly became a top Sphinner. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who has done serious business as an employee, employer, vendor, or contractor has had to deal with non-disclosure agreements (NDA) at one time or another. They’re as standard in business as darts in a pool hall. However this can be a tricky topic for incoming employees or contractors who suspect they’re somehow being unreasonably limited or ripped off. For the search marketing employer, no matter how well an employee candidate or potential contractor is vetted, each new hire holds risk that someday that person will try to cause harm or seek unreasonable personal gain with inside information.

In search marketing traditional boilerplate NDA language opens an interesting can of worms because SEM “territories” are truly global and social network relationships can be valuable assets. In this post we’ll explore some basic elements of NDA agreements, discuss how standard concepts might apply to SEM firms, and question whether typical non disclosure requirements are fair to search marketing employers and those they hire. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately we’ve experienced a humbling surge of inquires from potential clients, exceeded only by StumbleUpon traffic to our blog . It should be no surprise for any reputable web 2.0 search marketing agency to receive daily cold calls from interested SEM shoppers who have been referred by existing clients, an advertising agency, or simply found one of our websites.

Some callers are curious grazers. Many are experienced marketing professionals carrying cow flop from previous SEM relationships. Some used to be sitting pretty in the organic SERPs but now are the proverbial deer caught in headlights as competition and Universal Search gradually plow them under. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati is a real-time engine that tracks, measures, and ranks authority of blogs based on how they’re interlinked. Most blogging software like WordPress and Movable Type are easily configured to “ping” Technorati regarding new or updated posts. Bloggers (and other sites plugged into the grid) embed Technorati tags in the body of posts which provide Technorati a dedicated method by which to index and categorize blog content. Tracking over 70 million blogs, Technorati was relaunched in May to mixed reactions. A surprising number of new bloggers don’t understand and harness it’s data mining power.

Why is Technorati Important?
The answer is all about links. The value of your website and it’s power to propel keywords to top rankings is measured by multiple on and off-page factors. Search engines algorithmically evaluate how many other sites link to yours and assess the “quality” of your site’s inbound link portfolio. Technorati makes it easy to spy on another sites’ inbound-link-portfolio, making it an ultra-easy research tool for aspiring link builders. Read the rest of this entry »