aimClear Search Marketing Blog

YouTube has become a beast, taking seat as the second largest search engine in the world. Hulu and other niche’ engines are nipping at YouTube’s heals. Yet video search optimization remains relatively uncharted territory for most.

Today at SES Toronto, respected industry experts answered the question “Are you overlooking the opportunities of video search?” The  answers were a veritable “how to” clinic on tactics and optimization techniques, which will undoubtedly prove insightful for any business looking to fire up a video content campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media marketing is on the minds of many this year, while proposing ’09 budgets for in-house or SEM agency clients. We’re repeatedly being asked to help with proposals and business plans. If you think selling starter social to your boss could be hard because fledgling participation doesn’t always yield immediate benifit, look again.

Critical reputation management and SEO basics intersect with social, to make first step-social media budget requests no-brainers. Prudent social “campaigns” are not just about generating short term cash. Read the rest of this entry »

Organic landing page conversion measuring is a time tested after-deployment technique which, though highly effective, can take days, weeks, or months to fully tune.

As optimized pages gradually rise in the SERPs, conversion is measured and pages modified to achieve better conversion ratios. However we’d rather definitively test and tweak landing page concepts to focus conversion, prior to deploying them for organic indexing, using “fixed length short burst paid search.” Read the rest of this entry »

There is no shortage of SEM bloggers who recurrently shout from treetops “SEO is dead!” Indeed a Google search returns 2,200,000 documents. Searching allintitle: seo is dead returns 1,080 web pages which include those 3 inflammatory words in the html title tag. Clearly the topic of SEO’s supposed mortality is top-of-mind for search marketing practitioners and hyperbolic critics alike. Here’s a post where Jordan McCollum made fun of the trendy topic in Marketing Pilgrim.

Indeed, generational-game-changing shifts in search occur every morning over breakfast. Universal and personalized search killed traditional organic prominence tools like WebPosition and SEO ToolKit, programs which now gather dust and are relegated to web 1.0 new-client presentations for IT department fiefdom chieftains who just don’t get it. If new clients need us to focus on organic prominence and “hits” to get the gig, so be it. They learn fast once we start working on the project. Read the rest of this entry »

Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman is fond of pointing out that [Social Media means] “Internet way-finding tools informed by human judgment.’ Informed’ can mean many things including egregiously uninformed.”

From manufacturing to intellectual property, industry brand stewards have been forced to accept the reality of Collaborative directories like Prefound, Zimbio, and Wikipedia. There has been a lot of debate regarding the powerful weight Wikipedia pulls in Google organic SERPS for direct brand searches.

For example here is a sampling of SERPs that might keep brand managers up at night: Google #4 Dell, #3 McDonald’s, #3 Burger King , #6 J.C. Penney, #2 Old Navy, #5 Apple, #3 Cheerios, #3 Gucci, #5 Salvation Army, #5 Coca-Cola, #4 Doritos, #3 Famous Dave’s, #4 Chevrolet, #3 Target Corporation, #6 Wal-Mart. There are many others.

Reaction from the Search Marketing Industry
A few days ago in his blog post, Search Engine Optimization Article at Wikipedia Doesn’t Deserve Attention, search marketing thought-leader Rand Fishkin took aim at Wikipedia. Using the example of the Wiki-community’s ongoing misrepresentation of OUR industry (SEO), Rand called out Wiki over the quality and importance of Wikipedia listings. Rand’s post echoed around the SEM trade publications. Read the rest of this entry »