aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

SEOs know the risk. It’s easy for determined malevolent-users to destroy reputations using social media. The ability of a provocateur to mess with a  brand’s reputation by social media profile, used to involve a fairly labor intensive research process. No longer…Now a quick scan is available for free .

CheckUserNames.com is a new tool from @streko, @graywolf and @itcn which quickly streamlines the search process for determining which social profiles are available for any keyword. Read the rest of this entry »

The bandwidth involved working with my SEM colleagues, twittering, staying in touch with Facebook peeps and processing clients is delightfully staggering. Sometimes an innocuous written exchange blasts across my desk amidst the noise,  strikes a nerve and leaves me in thought.

In this case a state-level branch of a well known national brand, pinged me by email to ask common SEO shopping questions, including classic misunderstandings: personalized search and “site submissions.”  The inquiry was a bit of a “Dear John” letter, so other firms likely received a similar inquiry. We don’t respond to RFPs but make it our practice to answer polity to reasonable questions time-allowing, with the corporate mantra being to support potential clients.

I’m memorializing my answers to that inquiry in this post, for the benefit of future clients and our Account Managers.  I’ve fictionalized names to protect anonymity. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter and cell phone text messaging (<= 140 characters) have us expressing ourselves in sound bytes, sharpening our writing chops and communicating more whilst using many less words. It’s nothing short of cultural revolution, as our increasingly plugged-in populace evolves to more succinct communication.  In  my opinion this efficiency serves to counter ever-escalating online cacophony. Read the rest of this entry »

March will be an über-busy month for aimClear. In addition to exciting work with a growing cadre’ of well known client-brands, I’ll be speaking in Portland, OR at SearchFest and SearchEngineStrategies New York 2009, where we’ll cover with a 5 blogger crew! Read the rest of this entry »

These days predictive utilities like Trellian, WordTracker and AdWords are only half the keyword research story. State of the art processes combine these standard search predict tools’ output with “what we already know,” by mashing in site-specific datasets at the keyword level.

Additional keyword data might include statistics culled from organic analytics (KW traffic, conversion, behavior criteria), PPC history (CPC, CTR, conversion, etc…) and SEOmoz’s Linkscape (SEO competitiveness-predict).

We all know it’s theoretically useful to “advise” the keyword selection process by aggregating datasets. Very few SEMs actually pull it off. This article will guide you through the process of using spreadsheets to pilot advanced techniques, for API automation later. Read the rest of this entry »