aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Rand Fishkin is a singular personality and, to those in the SEO industry,  needs little  introduction.  Having “started playing” with Microsoft FrontPage WYSIWYG web page software in 1993 as a high school student, he’s grown SEOmoz to take its place amongst the most recognized brands in search.

Rand worked his way to thought-leadership by classic pathways: hard work,  experimentation, speaking engagements at early Danny Sullivan/Chris Sherman SearchEngineStrategies conferences, tackling ambitious data-driven research projects, ahead of the times tool-making, endless sharing, participation and blogging. Read the rest of this entry »

@LeeOdden is a consensus thought leader-SEO Agency owner focused on the stunning convergence of PR, social media and SEO. Business, agency, fellow speaker, conference organizer or client–these answers regarding search, social, evolution and agency training are are recommended reading.

Read back through TopRanks’s respected blog. It’s clear Lee Odden saw this future on the horizon…about 3 years ago. Gracious and brainy, he’s an approachable SEM industry personality, a fixture on the national search marketing conference scene and (for the most part) unaffected.

So far as we’re concerned, Lee’s one of the early SEOs who wrote the book on corporate use of feeds, inventoried digital assets, blog powered online media rooms, truly valuable content, empowering communities and other SMO cornerstones. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit  (just fragmented link-juice by 2 links to do the right thing): Mykl Roventine

The most important news to come out of  ‘Advanced 2009 is Google’s blurt-of-a-revelation that they removed the algorithmic benefit from internal page rank sculpting, “about a year ago.” The change also affects how Google handles noFollowed outbound links.

Boiled down, noFollow still prevents the passing of link juice (energy) to the internal or external destination page. However the value is no longer divided up amongst the remaining followed links on the page. Though this 180 degree about-face in what Google had been preaching (literally) to webmasters was poorly handled from a public relations perspective, presumably it was made because the tag was overused, abused and had the potential to skew Google’s rankings.

No worries. We actually think the change will bring some positive changes to the SEO process, though as always there are tradeoffs. Here’s what we’re telling our clients: 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 »

Don’t cut corners on your site’s foundation! Information architecture is an important part of a site’s performance and should be addressed from the very get-go of development. Many existing websites could benefit greatly if their content was only properly organized, labeled and prioritized.

This SES Toronto session Information Architecture, Site Performance, Tuning and SEO offered attendees classic methods to greatly increase site performance, while making navigation easier for users and search engines alike. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Quipp is the quintessential multifaceted search marketing agency owner. Located in Ajax Ontario, his company SearchEnginePeople is known for staffing true next-gen Internet marketing thought-leaders.

Jeff is well regarded internationally as a conference speaker and sought after consultant for paid, natural search and social channels.  I had an opportunity to Interview him regarding his upcoming appearances at SearchEngineStrategies Toronto. Read the rest of this entry »

The undeniable significance of linking within the black box algorithm of the major Search Engines has been the subject of at least half the chatter and controversy in the search marketing world. Remarkable research efforts, branching theories, and “under the hood” tools have sprung from the pure need to demystify the role of links in the SERPs.

Discover the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics at SearchEngineStrategies New York 2009 represented the first major instance of both search marketers and search engine representatives (Live Search, Yahoo!, and Ask.com) converging in one session to give polar perspective on links. Because of this, it was essentially two sessions in one, and aimClear will be breaking coverage up into two parts. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m all buckled in and ready for the ride, latte in hand. We’re talking about the road ahead for Black hat/White hat SEO, dynamic delivery, Flash, Google index updates, universal search and the whole gamut. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a sad fact of modern SEO life. You can’t slay a dragon with a sling shot and ya’ can’t rank for for Las Vegas Hotels with a brand spankin’ new domain. Life just doesn’t work that way.  It only makes sense that measuring which keywords a page can reasonably expect to rank for, in this competitive Internet age, is now an essential aspect of keyword research.

With improving accuracy, it is now possible to evaluate SERPs  (search engine results pages) competitiveness for a given keyword, evaluate the strength (and future predicted strength) of the page one wishes to get ranked, and base keyword selection on what is reasonably attainable for that page’s strength. Read the rest of this entry »

The bandwidth involved working with my SEM colleagues, twittering, staying in touch with Facebook peeps and processing clients is delightfully staggering. Sometimes an innocuous written exchange blasts across my desk amidst the noise,  strikes a nerve and leaves me in thought.

In this case a state-level branch of a well known national brand, pinged me by email to ask common SEO shopping questions, including classic misunderstandings: personalized search and “site submissions.”  The inquiry was a bit of a “Dear John” letter, so other firms likely received a similar inquiry. We don’t respond to RFPs but make it our practice to answer polity to reasonable questions time-allowing, with the corporate mantra being to support potential clients.

I’m memorializing my answers to that inquiry in this post, for the benefit of future clients and our Account Managers.  I’ve fictionalized names to protect anonymity. Read the rest of this entry »