aimClear Search Marketing Blog

I had a near out of body-real-time SMS/search/tweet experience last night interacting with our attorney, Laura.  (No, the picture’s not Laura.)  She’s in Manhattan to attend the Social Media Risks and Rewards legal conference, and pinged me to quick-search for information about a ruckus she was observing outside the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Our innocent little text exchange and my ensuing searches (illustrated later in this article) make it entirely clear there’s a radical new type of query intent (what users’ are looking for): situational. It turns out Google’s not adept at some situational searches which, to some minds,  leaves them vulnerable to services like Twitter in a substantial segment of emerging search inventory. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 3rd, Matt Cutts freaked the technical SEO community by casually stating that PageRank sculpting, the subtle art of flow-managing page value distribution, had changed significantly from what Google had been prescribing.

Who cares, we don’t need noFollow. What bothers many is that know we’ve learned Google flipped the switch a year ago, all the while offering misleading public information. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get this out of the way: Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team. He is perceived as a rock star in the industry and everywhere he goes he is a followed by a giddy horde of search marketers. SEO trends and techniques live and die by the words of the affable Mr. Cutts.

Yet there remains a healthy degree of skepticism and about Google’s advice. At the end of the day, the various teams at Google are doing what’s best for Google’s search users, which is not always best for an SEO’s clients.

Continuing the SMX Advanced tradition, Matt was kind enough to sit down with Danny Sullivan once more to take on audience questions in a You & A with Matt Cutts. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media has crept into nearly every aspect of SEO to where it’s now quite difficult to imagine them disentangled from eachother. Keyword research traditional to SEO is being used to advise every tag, tier, and title in brand social media efforts. Go ahead and find me an SEO who says “I don’t do social media”,  they’re either speaking figuratively, are blissfully unaware, or have an extremely rare vendor relationship.

What do we now know to be true about SMO that we didn’t know 1 year ago or even 3 months ago? What social media principles have stood the test of time? Should we reignite a serious dialogue on ethics in social media optimization?

Search Engine Strategies New York 09 brought some of the best and most outspoken search & social media marketing figures together for the session “An Update on Social Media Optimization“, moderated by Search Engine Watch’s managing editor Kevin Newcomb. Read the rest of this entry »

A hallmark of the Search Engine Strategies conferences has been the  “first look” and stage demoing of bleeding edge search marketing tools before they go live and eventually change the world.

Rather than the unveiling of a brand new tool performing functions we didn’t know we needed, the search marketing community at SESNY 09 received something long asked for (and long overdue) with the Google Workshop: Preview the New Adwords Interface session. Read the rest of this entry »

Periodic, if not constant, change in search marketing is a certainty. Proof positive is that “Google” didn’t even exist 10 years ago and is accepted in the vernacular as a verb (“She “Googled” this or that”). The growing use of online media provide new avenues for searchers. Watch for the changes, and always ask yourself, what is out there and how will your customers find you?

Today at SES New York, speakers focused on what Google has done and what they could do better in “Beyond Googling: Where Will Your Customers Be Searching in Five Years?” The session was moderated by (one of our favorites) John Marshall, SES Advisory Board, CTO, Market Motive. Read the rest of this entry »

Is there life beyond Google? According to this session’s speakers, the answer is YES, YES, YES, a resounding YES! As the early afternoon bell rang at SES Chicago 2008, a diverse panel of speakers did indeed assure participants that there is life beyond Google. But is this like trying to find life on Mars? Read the rest of this entry »

Association with domains perceived by Google to be in bad neighborhoods can get your domain blown out of Google or seriously crippled.. This reality has spawned a favorite tactic amongst malfeasant black hats, who use the wormhole to destroy competition. It’s happened to our friends and it can happen to you. Read the rest of this entry »

aimClear Blog’s homepage Toolbar PR ticked from PR5 to PR4 overnight. Also, TB PR seems to be distributed with more power & deeper within the blog. Imagine that… I happened to be reading Sphinn about Matt Cutt’s blog comment on the impending update, checked aimClear and noted the change. Upon a cursory glance several other SEM blogs, PR5 previously, have been bumped to 4. Hmmm…Smackdown baby…. Read the rest of this entry »

[Editor's note: This post is our continued dissemination of content from last week's  SearchEngineStrategies San Jose search marketing conference, where aimClear had 3 correspondents providing our readers notes and articles. The following is from our friend and blogger-associate, Jennifer Osborne:]

During Day 2 of SES San Jose, Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics Evangelist, was in fine form discussing Google Analytics changes.

For any of you who have heard Avinash speak you’ll know that he’s an incredibly humorous speaker. But underneath that humor lies wisdom. Even when you think he’s making a joke, if you dissect what he’s saying; underneath, it’s brilliant.

Here are Avinash’s best quotes from his speech and the underlying implication of what he said: Read the rest of this entry »