aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Our clients ask us about Flash all the time. For years Flash has been the stuff of web design joy and pain, causing frustration for search marketing folks. Those who design and brand absolutely love Flash’s web 2.0 animation, video, and rich media feel. 

SEM types traditionally have avoided Flash for critical organic optimization applications. The technology’s quirky propensity to be indexed (or not by) search engines has led to creative back door methods, sparking dialog and discourse as to whether certain techniques are evil cloaking tactics.Read the rest of this entry »

First, for a sobering look at how your site parses in mobile browsers, check out these mobile preview applications: Skweezer, Google, and the live demo of Opera Mini. Chances are your site is not immediately navigable in the mobile environment or you’ll hate what it looks like.

When polled during a recent Chris Sherman mobile search web event, most pro SEM attendees indicated that they had not yet geared shop production to consider and exploit the rapidly expanding field of mobile search. This will certainly change.

“… it’s really not a matter IF the mobile phone will become the dominant internet platform any more but WHEN…” - Yahoo! analyst Russell Beattie

Adopt Mobile Early
Compared to traditional web search, mobile search remains a relatively small piece of the pie. That said, the looming mobile marketplace is vast and can’t be ignored. We advise our clients to consider mobile versions of their sites for any web production with an expected shelf life of over 18 months.

Last September comScore Networks estimated that in the United States only about 19% of mobile owners were use phones like Treos, Blackberries, and Q’s to access the Internet. However there were approximately 2 billion mobile phone users globally compared to a measly 750 million Internet users. In some European countries like Spain nearly 25% of mobile phone owners use mobile search to access the Internet, mostly via big-engine portals like Google and Yahoo. I recommend mMetrics as a source for statistics on mobile usage.

There are a number of issues. This post discusses tips, tricks, and techniques for successful development of alternate mobile versions while demystifying the action-steps required to design, build, deploy, and market mobile websites.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 »

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 »