aimClear Search Marketing Blog

This SES New York 2009 session, “Search Advertising 101,”  was especially geared toward the SEO novice, with details on programs from major providers and advice on how to succeed.

The assembled audience was comprised of small business owners, agency representatives and in-house advertising representatives. The panelists provided a well rounded program chock full of sound basic approaches to what can be a very daunting road to travel. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to fabulous New York City. This post is the continuation of aimClearBlog’s coverage of SES NY 2009.

Session: Pardon My Reach: A Snapshot of the Display Ad Marketplace. Synopsis: This session broadened the discussion to include a focused dialog surrounding the topic of display advertising in the media marketplace. The panel addressed new opportunities and realities of heightened competition in a changing media landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit: Gandalfar
In distributing content, it’s possible to increase posts’ propensity to go hot in social channels, simply by publishing correctly to social distribution networks built amongst individuals in your organization.

Publishing “correctly” means, when pressing the CMS “publish” button, your message instantly touches hundreds, thousands and potentially millions of similar-minded folks all over the world. 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 »

If content is king, then the content management system (CMS) is surely the throne upon which King Content sits. CMS simply refers to technical method and tools chosen for adding, editing and deleting pages, links, pictures, uploading video or anything that goes on your site. Every SEO job, from small business to enterprise, is somehow dependent on CMS functionality.

[Skip straight down to the 14 tips if you already understand CMS basics, history, FTP, WYSIWYG programs, browser based web maintenance & open source CMS solutions.] Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Microsoft Word and WordPress make strange bedfellows at first gape. However our clients have increased productivity significantly by speeding up the blogging process with clever use of MS Word (Office 2003 and 2007). Anyone who has ever tried to paste formatted text from Word to WordPress and observed the awful results is probably wondering exactly what the heck this post is about.

Linking and Text Scraping is Much Easier with Word.
It’s true that you can’t select fonts, bold, italic, images, or other fancy typography tricks in Word and successfully paste content into the WP visual editor. However there is a method to compose text and create links in Word, clean the formatting, and successfully paste the copy into WP while maintaining the link-formatting integrity. Read the rest of this entry »

Many skilled and experienced marketing professionals do not yet understand that the blog structure is the killer SEM enabled content management system. I know first hand what it means to misperceive blogging software. Though aimClear mashes up chunks of blog functionality behind many websites we work with, it took a few years to become personally committed to blogging.

The truth is that bloggers pioneered software and linking methods which socialized the interconnected grid of links and content. Blogging communication tools, laid over the Internet, have helped maximize the social promise of http protocol. Blog-style tools are ubiquitous in nearly all online social communities.

We build blog software hybrids to facilitate feed marketing, content management, hosting community dialog, interactions with social websites, and for blog powered online media rooms. It makes tons of sense. These pockets of functionality are easily available to mash up from open source software like WordPress and integrate easily with traditional website structures. Read the rest of this entry »

DVD Hack on Mainstream Site
It’s just 32 tiny little numbers but for the average teenage valley tech kid it’s the key to unlock copy protected DVDs at the expense of big American intellectual property corporations. In the wrong hands this code (in tandem with black hat software) beats protective mechanisms on commercial High definition Blu-ray DVD releases.

As often happens, the code has been posted by hacks on sites like digg.com. To see the latest clever version search on Digg for “AACS.” It’s been widely reported that the monolithic trade group (Access Content System) including Warner Brothers, IBM, and Sony delivered cease and desist notices to a number of websites. Most sites complied. Digg complied at first.

The Diggers were Mad.
As you might expect, digg.com users were pissed so users took to reposting the code each time digg removed it. Apparently, after a few days digg.com changed its mind and no longer is working to filter out the content. Then it got really weird.

It is with increasing ingenuity that new hacks are circulating the DVD unlock code. Here’s a link to a SONG posted on YouTube called…wait I can’t publish it here. Suffice to say that it is a tender little ditty with 32 character lyrics.

With one click on Digg you can purchase a t-shirt that has the DVD copy protection crack code screened on the front. You can even read the code on the e-commerce site that sells it. Read the rest of this entry »

With so many of our clients blogging now (and asking lots of good questions) the subject of blogs comes up often in our “how-to” conversations. Obviously I’m a big fan of blogs. I love to write and I love search marketing.

Blogging is a wonderful pastime and satisfying personal endeavor that can pay returns on a number of levels.

Three critical components any blogger should consider when working to build readership include content, frequency and distribution. Content must be interesting and useful to your readers. Develop your unique voice and don’t be afraid to post things others will not agree with if it is your truth. Be responsible and change your mind in public if you are wrong.

First, by way of background, here is a post from earlier this where we covered the historic progression of blogging (from the early BBS days) to the SEO enabled heat seeking content management projectile that applications like WordPress and Movable Type have become today.

15 Time-Tested Blogging Tips (Believe me we’ve made mistakes in learning some of these) come from various sources, including our own experience. I hope they prove useful. Read the rest of this entry »