aimClear Search Marketing Blog

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 »

“Content sourcing” means creating channeled mechanisms to facilitate the output of predictable and valuable recurrent content.  Out of all the challenges companies face as they embark on advertising, PR, and marketing online jihads, the need to source content creation is ubiquitous. This post examines the content sourcing riddle and offers tips to begin the flow.

It’s Not Really New.
Realistically speaking, every channel ever used to disseminate marketing and branding rhetoric has always been dependent on content creation. However, consistent output of worthy content has become more crucial now that search engines rank pages based on relevance of written words, quality and count of inbound links, bookmarked pages, buzz in social communities, and bookmarked RSS feeds.

Set-it-and-forget-it static brochure sites will always have their place in the website constellation, but ultimately the ability to generate site traffic and quality inbound links is dictated by the supply and demand of useful information. Actually it makes sense that search engines assign “value” and “relevance” to websites that publish a steady stream of useful content.  If there is nothing new on your website than there are fewer benefits for visitors who return or for others to discover and link to your site after repeated visits.

Whether one refers to the evolution of organic optimization stratagies and link building tactics as “New SEO,” “Web 2.0, ” social media, or any other catch phrase-at the end of the day successful website marketing comes down to creating valuable, predictable, and intentionally optimized content that people like and utilize. Read the rest of this entry »

I doubt I am in the minority today when I say I use and rely on the internet regularly throughout the day.   Going online to find my news, weather, and entertainment has become the primary method in which I stay current in my work and personal life.  There’s never enough time keep current with the web content I’m interested in.

Enter RSS
RSS is a technology that has quickly become mainstream, which facilitates content finding me.  I heard of RSS years ago but I am only just now realizing its awesome power.

What is RSS? 
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or, more commonly, Really Simple Syndication.  What RSS does is an important development in Internet history – RSS frees you from time-wasting surfing ways by enabling web content publishers to “push” you any content you designate as desired. Read the rest of this entry »

If you pay attention to seminar speakers (and anecdotal chatter) it’s quite obvious that many advertising agencies are grappling with (and feeling threatened by) the ubiquitous evolution of search marketing.  The new Internet marketing is about a constant stream of recurrent content published on SEO savvy platforms. The days of set it and forget it static pages are over…gone the way of meta keywords, and other antiquated SEO attributes.

Making the situation more confusing for agencies is the reality that advertising agency clients have heard about search marketing, they know they need it, and they ask agencies directly about it. This puts (formally full service) agencies in an awkward position including but not limited to the possibility of missed revenue opportunities. Agencies in our area seem to give their clients the stock answer: “we don’t offer those services and recommend working with a firm that specializes in SEM.”

This post begins a series of articles aimed squarely at advertising and PR agencies with the intent of demystifying the SEM process.

Old Information is Cheaper
This is especially true in second and third tier markets where engaging an “SEM firm” often means paying too much for second or third tier misinformation or web 1.0 advice (in a web 2.0 world). Unfortunately the current environment of great demand and fast profit for SEM wanna-be-companies breeds “SEM firms” that are actually last-generation website building shops. Hiring a design/build firm to market a website costs less in the short tem and you get what you pay for-less traffic and sales over time.

Read the rest of this entry »

The panelists in the SES Video Optimization seminar, Eric Papczun, Sherwood Stranieri,  Gregory Markel, Founder/President, Infuse Creative stressed the growing strength of properly tagged video content on the regular search engines.

To drive this home they shared some brand-related keywords turning up in “normal” Google SERPs within view of consumers. Given the investment most large companies make in branding, it’s a no longer optional  as the whether a company monitors and defends the SERPs video results. I have some large clients who would would fall over dead to discover such an uncontrollable subversion of the brand.

Below I show the keyword, search frequency annually (Trellian Global Database), how many documents were returned, and how many documents contained all of the keywords in their title tag.  Take a careful look. Some of the keyword spaces are relativly uncontested (with  different scales of search volume). Other keyword spaces could be a more serious undertaking to increase your rank for.

I would like to note that in nearly every search I undertook in orginizing this post, I found wikipedia.com results ranking higher than video. If any of you bloggers would be interested in sharing faciniating links, feel free to comment with SERPs for video in normal search engines. youTube is not the only game in town so it would be fun to hear about long tail results from smaller video sites.

Beyoncé
Annual searches: 1,168,180 (Trellian Global DB annual searches)
23,800,000 documents for beyonce
636,000 for allintitle
Google page 2

CSI Miami
Annual searches: searches 79,787
1,870,000 dcuments for csi miami.
allintitle:”csi miami”
Google page 1 Read the rest of this entry »

To keep current I travel quite a bit and attend a number of industry specific trade shows and conferences each year. If there is any business on earth where staying current on evolving trends and technologies is critical, it is search marketing.  We know from having been around diverse businesses for a long time  that staying current is important in every occupation.

Not much is static these days in any profession given technological advances in every field. In this post I’m going to share tips on maximizing the benefit of conferences and tradeshows you attend.  If these techniques can work for an Internet marketing company (an industry moving at the speed of light) the techniques will in all likelihood work help your business harvest value when you attend business conferences. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »