aimClear Search Marketing Blog

The University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) has banned varsity athletes’ participation in Internet social networking sites like MySpace an Facebook. If a student athlete is discovered to have such a site “we would ask them to remove it” stated university Athletic Director Bob Neilson in today’s Duluth News Tribune. He continues, “If inappropriate content is found the student would be disciplined according the athletic department’s code of conduct.” Read the rest of this entry »

It is gratifying that a number of our clients are marketing professionals and agencies who retain us on behalf of their clients. We also receive inquiries from advertising agencies or marketing, PR, and advertising solo-practitioners for input as to how they can use Internet marketing themselves. Over time we’ve noticed some common website promotion and Internet marketing questions that get asked early in the process. We’ll publish some them here from time to time along with our responses.

1)  After accepting an SEM firm proposal what can I expect in leads from searches for my business listings
weekly, monthly etc…?

The real question is how valuable and in-demand is your business in your region? Are you willing to create a site which answers potential clients’ questions with great content and information design so that potential customers request information to learn more about your business? How good are you willing to make your website at converting traffic to customers? Read the rest of this entry »

More often then not, in any SEO project, the spiny issue of homepage word-count arises in the process of optimizing a client’s site. Unless the company we’re providing SEO services to is relatively small, most likely there are multiple factions invested in the homepage content. To make our task more complex interested players on the client side can include advertising agencies, PR consultants, internal Internet marketing team members, IT personal, writers, and product managers. There are often layers of conflicting needs or even politics involved. The interesting irony is that most everyone’s position is reasonable.

Players most concerned with the brand and image of a product usually want sparse text on the homepage with lots of white space available for images, flash, video, and other cool stuff. To advertising folks optimizing the homepage may mean uncluttering it and making sure the homepage has direction, intent, and a distinct call to action. IT personnel (who had total control of websites in previous generations of website development) want security, ease, and control of the technical process. All of these objectives are admirable but often boil down to conflict over control of the word-count density on the newly optimized homepage-or even arguments as to whether the SEO firm is allowed to impact the homepage at all. Who’s position should prevail? How many words should there be on the homepage? Read the rest of this entry »