Results tagged “SEO” from Portent Interactive, Seattle, WA
And so it begins... You may have heard that soon Bing will provide all the paid and non-paid search results in Yahoo. Or you may have heard some twisted version of this because the whole thing is so complicated. Personally, I like the Frankenstein imagery. Although it’s kind of cool to think of a Bing biting a Yahoo and the Yahoo becoming a Bing beneath the full moon. The good thing is we knew this was coming. Yahoo! and Microsoft signed the deal a year ago. In February, the European Commission and US Department of Justice Approved it. Yahoo and
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Continue reading A Flavorful Blend, Yahoo! Organic Search, Now With 25% Bing
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
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
Our good friends over at Hanapin Marketing - you know, the folks who run the PPC Hero blog - are running a pretty amazing SEM Sweepstakes right now. They have some great prizes available, including: (3) Paid Subscriptions to SEOMoz (1) 3-Month Subscription to ClickEquations (a neat bid management tool that we use at Portent) (100) Various Internet Marketing Tomes (1) Full PPC or SEO Audit by the Hanapin Marketing Team (worth $4,000) What are you waiting for? Go sign up! They’ll start randomly selecting winners on October 12th, 2009.
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Continue reading Shout-Out: Hanapin Marketing's $16,000 SEM Sweepstakes
Keeping up to date in interactive marketing is painstaking and frustrating. Yes, we are knowledgeable experts, but if you think we will have the answers at our fingertips every single time...you need to rethink your drink. Let’s take SEO as an example. Things Change This year Google announced that the nofollow attribute no longer reflects or redirects PageRank like a closed irrigation gate. Instead it evaporates link juice. By the way, it took Google almost a year to let everyone in on this change. Here is another example of Google’s changing tune. In 2005 Matt Cutts wrote, If you’re straight-out
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Continue reading Interactive Marketing - Ever Changing & Often Unclear
Everyone knows those distinctive for Dummies books; the bright yellow cover, the triangle headed man with pointy fingers and the strange feeling you might have picking up something for Dummies. Why? Because you know you’re smart. Why would you need a book for Dummies? (Because I co-authored one, that’s why.) Need a little more than that? Fine, here are 36 reasons why you need the Web Marketing all in one for Dummies book.... Learn how to optimize a blog post to earn the top Google rank for “enraged bear.” Because no one reads your blog. $25 coupon for Google AdWords
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Continue reading 36 Reasons You Need This Dummies Book
I just wrote a skeptical piece about the search engines’ new rel=canonical standard. I am, after all, a skeptic. But, if you’re a large publication with a massive site, you’ve got canonicalization problems, and this could be the solution you’ve been looking for. In a nutshell: You can use rel=canonical in the HEAD element of pages you don’t want indexed, and search engines will list the URL you indicate, instead. No guarantees on whether this will actually help with search engine optimization, but given how difficult it is to clean up these kinds of problems on larger sites, it’s worth
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Continue reading Calling All Publications: Rel=canonical Is Worth A Look
Today, a colleague asked me what I know about external links. Rather than simply e-mail her back I decided to sit down and answer this like I might if I were taking a college course exam. In other words a time limited brain dump. Let’s see how much I remember. :) A Little Foundation InLink = Inbound Link - A link from another page or document on the Web to the page being examined. OutLink = Outbound Link - A link from the page being examined to another page or document on the Web. Internal Links - Links between pages
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Continue reading Everything You Wanted to Know About Inbound External Links
Google just updated their Toolbar PageRank, also known as the little green bar. Once again I am seeing a lot of web sites losing PageRank, so I want to re-share what I have counseled people in the past. If your rankings and traffic have not recently fallen, do not worry about your diminished PageRank. Visible Toolbar PageRank is only a snapshot that Google updates every four to eight months. The real PageRank, the one you never see, is continuously calculated. Google uses real PageRank in its ranking algorithm. As the Internet gets bigger it becomes more difficult to achieve
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Continue reading Google Updates Visible Toolbar PageRank
When you read that paid search and organic search require separate content strategies you might think, “Duh! That’s obvious.” Except that something happened to me last week, and this was not the first time. A Portent’s client earned a top ten ranking for an important keyword, one right near the top of the keyword chart. Time to cheer, right? Except, Google selected a different “landing page” than the one we optimized and targeted for this particular search query. Instead of celebrating a profitable new top ten ranking I found myself asked how to move the ranking result away from
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Continue reading Paid Search & Organic Search Require Different Content Strategies
As Tom said last week, you must include search engine optimization in your internet marketing process from day 1. “Day 1” means “the first day you think about building a new web site”. And that’s not some kind of weird Seattle thing, either. Your web site is part of your campaign. So the planning that goes into it is critical to your marketing goals. Here’s how and when you should involve the search engine optimization team: Planning the Project Ideally, get your SEO vendor involved during project planning. Have them sit down with your design and development folks to figure
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Continue reading Successful Search Engine Optimization
Question: When should a company bring a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant into designing a new web site? Answer: Immediately! I just read an article where the author states that the time to hire a search engine optimization consultant is right after the design is finished, before the content is written. Wow! There’s a disaster ready to happen. I cannot tell you how often I have had to rip the heart out of gorgeous, visually appealing and clean web site design with carefully chosen color schemes and lots of white space. Is there space for anchor text or are the
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Continue reading Search Engine Optimization Before Development & Design
This week Portent Interactive is excited to welcome our newest member of the team, copywriter Amanda Halm. Hi Amanda! Jade asked me to write some SEO copywriting pointers that I just finished. Since these sound so proprietary-like, I just had to sneak them past Ian to share with you. So enjoy and *shhhh* Don't tell the boss. Select one to four keywords. Writing friendly copy for organic search is all about targeting specific search engine queries. Select one to four search queries that will fit within a 65 characters. Selecting more than four queries will dilute your page content and
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Continue reading Basic SEO Copywriting in a Nut Shell
Know Your Search Engine Optimization Competition When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, your competitors may not be whom you think. One of the first things I ask for from new SEO clients is a list of competitors. This usually arrives from their marketing office and includes other companies that provide the same product or service as our client. This in-sector competitor list contains useful information, especially for researching keywords and phrases. But, while there will be overlap, this is not their List of Internet Competitors. Internet Competitors are companies that occupy the same marketing space that your company occupies
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Continue reading Competitive Rubber Chicken Research for Search Engine Optimization
Lists and grouping are terrific ways to simplify or remember complex stuff. So today I am sharing how I categorize audience development for Internet websites. Before I start, however, I want to emphasize a point. Management guru Peter Drucker declared, "The purpose of business is to create a customer." Success in business depends on creating positive ROI; it requires profit. Everything below, no matter how counterintuitive, are pieces of a puzzle...a Rube Goldberg machine that delivers customers to your doorstop. Ever website should cultivate three audiences: The Sales/Conversion Audience Search Engines as an Audience The Social Media/Conversation Audience ONE: The
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Continue reading Three Audiences Every Website Should Cultivate
SEO can be confusing, especially for managers and others who must keep track of optimization efforts but do not do the actual work themselves. The SEO Matrix is a simple way to think about search engine optimization. In order to view the content on this page, you will need the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Click here to download it. //
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Continue reading The SEO Matrix is Calling You
I spoke about search marketing and analytics yesterday, at SEMPDX Searchfest 2008. It was a great conference and a great group! If you need my slides, here they are: In order to view the content on this page, you will need the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Click here to download it. // | View | Upload your own
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Continue reading Speaking at SEMPDX Searchfest 2008
Last week I attended SMX West. It was a great event, but one session in particular stood out for me: ‘Search Engine Q & A’. Lead engineers from Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo! and Ask all answered audience questions about search engine policies, what’s OK and what’s not, and the future of search. One attendee asked, "Do you consider search engine optimization a good thing?" I braced myself for an answer like, "No, we think you’re the scum of the earth". But, first Google’s Matt Cutts, then every other engineer on stage, all answered that they considered ethical search engine optimization
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Continue reading Search Engine Optimization: There IS A Right Way
Or maybe I should say, the best linkbait never gets stale. Basically, my goal is to assault your blogging worldview and contradict everything you’ve ever heard on the subject-all for a good cause, of course. In this post, I am going to tell you how to have a decent little blogging career, and even earn some industry panache, all without caving to the industry pressure to eat, sleep and dream in Movable Type. It is possible, and here’s how I know. When I first started my career as Senior Blogger at Portent’s site Bridezilla.com in May of 2007, I wrote
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