June 2010 Archives
I just got back from SMX Advanced and boy are my arms tired. Actually, it’s my brain that’s feeling overwhelmed with lots of fresh insight and illuminating data. The cast and crew over at Third Door Media and Search Engine Land produced an exceptional event; they outdid themselves. Except, I left Seattle’s Bell Harbor conference center with a ravenous bugblatter beast gnawing at my brain. Let me explain. Speaker after speaker kept saying that Search Engine Optimization should be guided by User Experience Optimization. For example: Instead of chasing after the search engines, chase after the user experience because the
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Continue reading SEO Is Not User Experience Optimization
Demystifying Online Attribution Speakers, In Order of Appearance: Richard Zwicky Cameron Cowan Jonathan Colman Dennis Goedegebuure First up is Richard (Applause) Looking into server logs can reveal everything about your customers. It shows where they came from, where they went, what browser they used and many other things. Now Richard talks about the ever elusive attribution over time marketing strategy. Customers see tons of advertisements on various platforms and mediums everyday and it’s a tricky procedure to watch the user from start to finish. Proper attribution is understanding the overlaps. Understanding which mediums influenced and lead a customer to the
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Continue reading SMX Advanced Live Blogging Post 3
Lunch was good. There was meat, pasta, bread, butter. All that good stuff. Now onto the 3rd session of the day. No Live Blogging of the second session, sorry. Dead laptop syndrome. Show Me The Links: Real Life Link Building Speakers, In Order of Appearance: Roger Montti Arnie Kuenn Chris Bennet Gil Reich Debra Mastaler Roger takes the stage (Applause) Roger digs right in and starts belting out some strategies for your link building. Strategies Target searching Look around for other sites using your keyword and sift through the giant pile. It’s time consuming, but can reveal many great opportunities.
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Continue reading SMX Advanced Live Blogging Post 2
I’d like to start by saying that this is my first time doing this. I take notes at conferences. Incomprehensible and very short-handed notes that even I fail to decode from time to time. None the less, I will not fail you. Here we go. SEO For Google vs. Bing Starring - In Order of Appearance: Janet Driscoll Miller - Search Mojo Rand Fishkin - SEOmoz Matt Cutts - Google Inc. Sasi Parthasarathy - Microsoft And Matt came with his hair. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but it’s nice to know he has a
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Continue reading SMX Advanced Live Blogging Post 1
ABC News posted a story over the weekend about one of BP’s latest efforts to control the complete and total beating that their reputation has taken and that is: buying PPC ads on keywords like “oil spill” “oil spill clean up” and “oil disaster gulf of mexico” at a rate predicted around $10,000 per day. A little light research shows an avg CPC around $1.22, which isn’t bad at all, but this is the ad they’re running: Here’s the keyword they’re not buying but should be (if you’re going to spend $10k anyway): So why bring this up? Nevermind the
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Continue reading BP's Buying the Oil Spill
If you’re one of the lucky few going to this sold out conference, be sure to come by and check out the paid search track session- Test that Ad! on Tuesday at 3:30pm. I’ll be speaking on some themes to test, tricks to test and things to try! Paid Search Track Test That Ad! - Let’s face it. The creative, when it comes to paid search ad copy, doesn’t give you a lot of room to be creative. You’ve got so little space, so little time your ad will be viewed, that it’s essential that every word counts. You’re testing
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Continue reading Speaking at SMX Advanced 2010
I work with some of the funniest people around. And when it came time for them to show off their incredible sense of humor, they stepped up. I give to you, the best birthday card I’ve ever gotten. I think. I have a pretty bad memory of birthday cards, but this one I will never forget. First up is the cover: In which I replace Stuart Tosh, Pilot’s drummer extraordinaire. This great little joke is due to the fact that I will from time to time start singing the infamous lyrics: It’s Magic, you know! Never believe it’s not so!
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Continue reading Happy Birthday Evan!
When it comes to SEO, placing links on a web page is not simple. There are competing guidelines to consider. The best links are keyword rich text links. Google uses the link text or anchor text as a signal of relevance. For example, if 100 pages link to http://examplesite.com/baseball with the anchor text baseball, then Google will expect that the target page is relevant for the word baseball. Sometimes we cannot use a text link. As an example of this, often the first link to a site’s homepage is an image at the top of the page, in the header
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Continue reading SEO Link Placement On an HTML Page
Dear Google, It’s time. You’ve given us the ability to segment out search from search partner traffic and yes, we see it now- search partners aren’t so great. We’d like control now so we can make it great. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of the new features- the extensions tab, product extensions, ad sitelinks and so on. But I won’t be distracted! I am very well aware that parked domains are in included in the “search partner” network and that I am unable to exclude specific sites, nor see which search partners are doing what. I’d like
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Continue reading Google AdWords Search Partner Network
