aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Here at aimClear, we’re proud of our in-house authors. Like many publications we also open our pages as a community platform to host guest bloggers. Sometimes guest posts are written by industry professionals whose practices are perceived by some as controversial.

Wait. Let’s stop right there. “Controversial.” That word can carry a negative connotation, one of altercation, agitation, even acrimony. But on the flip-side of the coin, “controversy” can be a beautiful thing. Controversy when hosted on a public, unbiased, progressive platform, such as a third-party blog, can function as an open invitation for conversation- healthy debate, passionate exchange of perspectives and core occupational beliefs. Other times, visitors with an unrelated agenda attempt to ruin the discourse. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: idovermani

After an invigorating keynote speech from Charlene Li I hit the ground running. “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds” was moderated by Joshua Palau, of Razorfish and included a brilliant panel of  industry-blogger thought-leaders: Read the rest of this entry »

Just because you have 20,000+ followers doesn’t mean your Twitter feed is successful. Rebecca Lieb, Li Evans and Jennifer Slegg- the lovely and intelligent panel of SES San Jose’s “Extreme Makeover: Live Twitter & Blogging Clinic” session took audience volunteers’ Twitter and blogs and ever so kindly tore them to shreds. Warning: bad Twitter practices below (and some awesome advice).

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photo credit  (just fragmented link-juice by 2 links to do the right thing): Mykl Roventine

The most important news to come out of  ‘Advanced 2009 is Google’s blurt-of-a-revelation that they removed the algorithmic benefit from internal page rank sculpting, “about a year ago.” The change also affects how Google handles noFollowed outbound links.

Boiled down, noFollow still prevents the passing of link juice (energy) to the internal or external destination page. However the value is no longer divided up amongst the remaining followed links on the page. Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings.

No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs. Here’s what we’re telling our clients: Read the rest of this entry »

The social Internet is about conversations that propagate virulently and index at various speeds.  Twitter, the fastest feed community of all,  can be easily leveraged to “proof” marketing concepts for slower social channels the same way SEOs use PPC (pay per click) to prove organic landing pages.

Read on for a tactical starting point to use Twitter’s flashpoint sharing environment to test your linkbait, promotional messages, calls to action, friend-making and branding. Read the rest of this entry »

The ever increasing popularity of social media sites YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook  reveal the necessity for brands to  connect with their customers in these arenas. This SearchEngineStrategies New York session will touch on  advanced tips for increasing online brand awareness & brand equity protection in a shaky economy.

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Unlike most blog posts, I’m truly hopeful that (a) selected good Samaritan Mac evangelists will chime in to explain why I’m completely wrong. (b) Apple and software manufacturers will take this input and fix some baffling ticks. Read the rest of this entry »

They don’t talk about butterflies, candy ass theories and granola bars here. You get the impression that these alt.news used-to-be geeks are delightfully modest, after systematically bringing the known marketing-universe to its knees over the last 10 years.

Having sprung forth from IRC, NewsGroups, Pine, BBSs and nightly modem buzz–PubCon is all about science, social engineering, huge business, perpetual evolution and a driven sense of humor. Rock on geeks and phreaks…rock on! Read the rest of this entry »

A “splog” is a spam blog which might scrape or otherwise rip off content from other blogs.

There are a myriad of motivations which drive unscrupulous publishers to steal content or create garbage posts: Organic prominence and AdSense revenue are classic spoils for plagiarizing.  Gaining false credentials to dupe unsuspecting clients is another. No matter how many times it happens or what the reason, it sucks when your content is stolen. Read the rest of this entry »

Storied search marketing publication SearchEngineWatch/blog has turned on their comment-threads. Yay! I was proofing my post just now and noticed the new feature for the first time.

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