I've long opined to friends and co-workers that two of my personal passions, cooking & SEO, are deeply related in some mystical, cosmic way. Cooking is familiar to everyone. There's a process for each recipe, a uniqueness to each dish and both an art and a science to coaxing perfection out of raw ingredients to make them better than the sum of their parts. So too it is with SEO. SEO...
First off, apologies for my absence from the blog these past few days. It's been an incredibly busy time, trying to wrap things up before I leave for San Diego over the holidays. So much for a December lull... In this post, I'm going to try tackling a lot of the recent trends we've been observing from the engines and talk about my personal perception of what's to come over t...
Selling is hard work. It sucks time and energy from both seller and buyer. Both engage begrudgingly in the act to fulfill a need. If you've been reading SEOmoz for a while, you can probably feel my personal allergy to "sales" as a process and to "selling," even when that's what I'm supposed to do. It causes discomfort to be on the pushing or receiving side of sales and over ...
The word 'incentive' is defined as a ‘positive motivational influence’. The purpose of this post is to explore the different kinds of user behaviour that can be encouraged with incentives. Although this will hopefully include links as a helpful byproduct, the advice focuses more on increasing user interaction and engagement.
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I've been doodling a lot lately (see, for example, the whiteboard illustrations I turned into a slide deck for a presentation this Wednesday) and thought it would be fun to share a set of infographics - some humorous, some serious - about the field of search engine optimization. If you're uninspired by these...
In 1970 the total retail value of pornography was no more than 10 million dollars. Today, porn is close to a billion dollar industry. According to Alexa, four of the hundred most trafficked sites one the web are porn sites. Every month there are over million searches made every month for porn related terms and that number is ...
Since I'm a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it's redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append "movie" to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).
If you haven't noticed URL rewriting, you haven't been thinking like a search engine optimizer. More and more sites are using this technology to create human-readable (and SEO-friendly) URLs. If your site is one of them, good for you. Read on and you might find some reassuring data to back up your excellent decision. If you are not familiar with how URL rewriting will improve organic search ranking and traffic to your site, I don't blame you. It's not a hard concept to grasp, but it's rarely covered well in SEO publications. Few sites are using it, and this creates an opportunity for you to get ahead in ranking. If you have any search competition, you should already be thinking about how to improve the way you present data to engines.
Approximately a year ago, I decided to start my own website - a semiconductor supplier directory company called Semi-Directory. I admit it’s a bit of a dry topic, but please bear with me as this post isn’t about the site per se. Instead, I thought it might be a good idea to share my progress over the last 12 months, and provide evidence that SEO actually works! (duh - as though you didn’t know that already). Still, it’s nice to see tangible evidence that this is the case now and again. Right?
One of the areas we rarely touch on here at SEOmoz is how to use your offline, general business assets for SEO. Today I want to tackle that along with the seemingly unrelated subject of watching historical progress. At the end of this excercise, I think you'll see why these two tie together so nicely.
Virtually everyone who's engaged seriously in the practice of search engine optimization has found it to have surprisingly versatile results. Site owners will often start out optimizing in order to rank for a particular term/phrase that's relevant to getting customers, only to find that secondary and tertiary benefits from branding to reputation management to raw traffic all have an impact. Today I'd like to cover the different applications of SEO and talk about how to choose the right SEO objectives for your business.
I don't know a whole lot about email marketing, but I enjoy studying the marketing emails I receive and identifying the ones that are more effective than others. I talked to Scott, who handles our email marketing campaigns, and he praises email marketing for being "dirt cheap and very effective." I can agree on the cheap part: we use Exact Target, whose suite of email marketing solutions start at $1,000 per year for one user and go up to an Enterprise account ($15,000 a year for five users). While there are expensive email marketing packages available, you can definitely find an affordable option to start out with and get your feet wet.
So I recently read a post by e-consultancy which looked at 10 things Asda (a huge UK supermarket, part of the Wal-Mart group) could do better online. The post is part of a series where they look at a number of large brands in the UK and how they can perform better online. The series focuses solely on usability though and doesn't actually mention any online marketing. So I thought I'd step up to th...
A while ago, i was looking into video search engine optimisation (VSEO) and what benefits it could or would bring to my customers, and after contacting a number of so called VSEO specialists, found this to be a very expensive way of marketing online. On two occasions, I was quoted in excess of $6,000 for this service, not only was this a high cost, but this was a "per month" cost with...