aimClear® Search Marketing Blog

Welcome back to aimClear’s coverage of #SMX East 2011! Breaking News: Changing SEO elements of your website, e.g.: title tags, Meta descriptions, anchor text, interlinking structures, can have a tremendous effect on organic rankings. Okay, so maybe you don’t need spades of sophisticated know-how and online marketing agility to know that little tidbit. Pretty straight-forward: Update your site and take note if a ranking change occurs. One did? Great! Was it causal or correlative?

Was it what?

The ability to successfully distinguish between website updates that cause a change in rank and updates that merely correlate with change in rank is something deep marketers must possess in order to be a master craftsman craftswoman SERP-ninja. But hang on a tick… are there specific SEO changes that directly cause a change in your SERP position? Surely those are golden tickets every sitemaster should implement straight away!

Or is it more of an indirect effect? A mere, yet telling, correlation?

Fortunately for any frazzled marketers at #SMX East 2010, moderator Danny Sullivan, Q&A moderator Max Thomas, and speakers Eric Enge, Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Mitul Gandhi, Kristine Schachinger, and Tony Wright were set to take the stage and weigh in on Great Debate of Correlation vs. Causation. aimClear live-tweeted this session via @beebow. Fruits live after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Day #2 at #SESNY picked up after lunch with a great opportunity to scream, cry, learn, prepare, & group hug. Whether your [website's] bottom was sore from a recent Google-spanking (warranted or not), you wanted to prepare for a future inevitable spanking, or just wanted to know what the hell people meant when they kept referring to farmers & panda bears, Search Engine Strategies‘ Search Engine Watch Round Table Special tackling Panda: The Aftermath was a way-worthy discussion to check out.

The SEW panel featured Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch, Danny Goodwin, Associate Editor, SearchEngineWatch and Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media. With  Mike Grehan, Chair SES Advisory Board, Global VP Content, SES/Search Engine Watch/ClickZ as moderator, the quartet discussed last month’s massive update the Google algorithm, now infamously referred to as Google Panda (or Farmer). Panda’s double-wave algo’ change, rolled out only in the U.S., was intended to eliminate content farms & crappy content in general from the Google index. But many victims of the update  claim their clean-cut white-hat sites were still spanked. With vengeance. aimClear live-tweeted this animated chat. Read on for shimmering highlights. Read the rest of this entry »