aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

St. Paul’s historic Lowertown district matured from the city’s “Lower Landing” on the Mississippi River to a thriving national warehouse and distribution center. Lowertown’s goods were shipped to businesses throughout the burgeoning upper Midwest from 1880-1920. Many period-defining buildings were designed by nationally celebrated architects and still adorn the area.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, St. Paul city leaders created “The Lowertown Heritage Preservation District.” Today venerable Lowertown has become a vital urban conclave, ringed by multinational businesses, restaurants and loft apartments.  Hundreds of millions in urban redevelopment surround scenic Mears Park.

aimClear is extremely proud to call Lowertown our second home. Our footprint now spans two cities, as the new space is in addition to our Canal Park Duluth office. Recently, as the season’s first snow started to fly, I snapped a few pictures of the new ‘hood to share. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the AdWords keyword tool has been dumbed down, we’ve received many inquiries seeking updated advice regarding keyword research best practices.  For those depending solely on Google’s free tool, the new reality is stark.  In truth, it’s not that radical a change for many pros, because we’ve always used an assortment of tools– mild to wild–to build out our KW baskets.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing alternative keyword research tools and techniques. This post is the first and highlights a radical, arguably black hat, tool that blew the audience away when I demonstrated it live at #PubCon earlier this month.  So, hold onto your hat (whatever color it may be) and let’s have a look at ScrapeBox’s fabulously intuitive UI for mashing up mainstream search suggest boxes query results for keyword research. Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings #PubCon attendees. Our own Marty Weintraub is speaking today at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Salon C, in the “SEO for Multimedia and Rich Media” at 2:55PM PT. Because Marty wants to spend his time sharing cool YouTube keyword research tactics we employ at aimClear, he asked that the team back in Duluth put together this “uber-high-level one pager” cheat sheet of YouTube optimization ranking tips. We hope you find it useful. Read on for the goods as well as the YouTube extraction agent at the bottom of this post. Read the rest of this entry »

This past summer we published Facebook SEO Ranking Factors, 2010 Study Results, marking our second in-depth study on Facebook internal search since the social network behemoth announced significant search enhancements over a year ago. Shortly before those June 2010 results were released, Facebook’s search share increased approximately 48%, amounting to about 2.7% of U.S. searches. At first blush, that figure seems ridiculously insignificant compared to Google’s sweaty grip on approximately 64% of national search share. But it’s worth noting that unlike major search engines, Facebook’s limited search inventory, housed within a walled garden, primarily consists of people. Or, at least, it used to.

As the content types available on Facebook have evolved, so too has its internal search engine. Read on for findings from our most recent study on Facebook SEO Ranking Factors, along with ideas for maximizing organic visibility & a look at the recently rolled-out SERP interface. Read the rest of this entry »

From the moment the first attendees arrived at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, it was plain to see that #BlueGlassFL was a different kind of industry event. The atmosphere was more reminiscent of an ultra-hip class reunion than a button-down business conference… and the distinct sense of an open & welcoming community permeated every session, making the jam-packed two day conference as rewarding  as it was memorable.

For the aimClear crew, it was two days of learning, live-tweeting, blogging, presenting & hanging out with industry friends, new and old, under the southern sun of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Our synopsis of #BlueGlassFL, key session takeaways and links to comprehensive coverage can be found below the fold… read on the a glimpse at a variety of top-notch sessions. Read the rest of this entry »