Recently by Thomas M. Schmitz
Did you watch The Oscars last night? It occurred to me that motion pictures are a lot like websites primed for organic search and social media. Movies as Websites Think about the meticulous attention to detail that goes into an Academy Awards caliber movie. It requires a compelling story - well written, skillfully performed, lovingly filmed and expertly directed. Likewise, a good website showcases its own products or services or solutions with wonderful copy, images and design. Movies are designed to sell tickets, rentals and DVDs. That's where the revenue comes from. Naturally, most of the marketing, promotion and publicity
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Continue reading Oscar Movies are Like Optimized Websites
Recently, I’ve heard about startups that want to automate enterprise SEO for large websites. I suppose they theorize that if Google, Bing and the other search engines can gather Internet content, categorize it and rank it, then it’s possible to write software that will recast your content as a perfect website. I do not believe enterprise SEO software can optimize a complex website without large amounts of critical thinking or decision making from real people who are familiar with your business and have a deep knowledge of SEO. The research, evaluation, recommendations necessary for good SEO are fraught with endless
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Continue reading Enterprise SEO Automation
Full disclosure: I am not a designer. I cannot select color palettes. My favorite textures involve brushed steel. Whenever I walk by, our design team seems either out for coffee or in a meeting. That said, even I can recognize colossal web design blunders. It's amazing how the perfectly wrong photo will rip the eyes out of your sockets and whimper them off from a web page's correct eye-tracking path. Design is subjective. You see the world like no one else. What seems like a perfectly comforting image to you and me might creep-out an animal rights activist or a
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Continue reading Have You Been A/B Tested Recently?
It appears that Google’s new infrastructure, code named Google Caffeine, is rolling-out live to data centers. Why is this important? Expect to see ranking changes. Don’t freak-out. We’re not talking 2012 or Alderaan upheaval here. That said, expect disturbances in the force. While most well and legitimately optimized websites should remain unscathed, it’s likely that others could experience some organic ranking unpleasantness. What is Caffeine? Caffeine is an infrastructure change. Think of it like upgrading from XP to Vista or from Vista to Windows 7 or from Snow Leopard to Windows 7. Google seems to make infrastructure changes every three
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Continue reading Google Caffeine - Don't Let It Keep You Awake at Night
I’m going to tell you a secret that people in social media marketing and social media optimization don’t like to talk about. Fame begets fame. If you’re a celebrity or popular brand then social media will be particularly easy for you. For those of us who are celebrities only in our own minds, you and I will have to work a bit harder to succeed with all this social media stuff. That’s okay. Social media marketing is eminently doable. You just have to smash a few popular preconceptions then roll-up your sleeves. Social media is not new. Facebook and
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Continue reading Spin Your Social Media Marketing Flywheel
Keep your titles short, simple and obvious. Look at the image below. It’s a partial screenshot of my RSS reader. This is your space to hook me. If you don’t, I’m not opening your story. I have 241 unread items. I don’t have time to read them all so I’ll pick and choose based on my interest. If you think I am an outlier, you’re right. Most people don’t use feed readers. Outside of search engines, people learn about stories on sites like Twitter. Twitter has a 140 character limit, including the link. Consider who the people posting stories onto
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Continue reading Write Short Simple Obvious Story Titles
Generating great link bait ideas is hard work. When link bait works it’s magical. Watching the page views, unique visitors and server load all go up at the same time is like watching the wheels spin on a slot machine right before it lands on 777. The difference is that a slot machine depends wholly on chance. With link bait, you have to earn your luck. To help me create compelling ideas I created this poster - 230 Link Bait Ideas. I stuck it on my wall, printed in tabloid format, 11 inches by 17 inches, but it looks good
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Continue reading 230 Link Bait Ideas
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
Early this year Google made a change to their organic rankings algorithm. Named Vince’s Change, after the engineer who worked on it, the search marketing industry describes it as favoring brands. Here is what Google’s Matt Cutts had to say about Vince’s Change in March. A few things that Matt says about Vince’s change caught my ears. It affects a small number of queries People made 9.1 billion searches on Google during June of 2009. That’s 9,100,000,000 searches. Let’s say Vince’s Change impacts 5% of searches. Five percent is 455,000,000 or 455 million searches. That does not seem like
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Continue reading Is This How Vince's Change Works?
This post is about the nature of social media. The premise is simple. Your social media marketing needs a centralized location, a headquarters. Notice I did not write that you should centralize your efforts. That would be too much like those classic cartoon scenes in which the characters disappear behind skinny trees. When you hang-out in one place and one place only, online no one will hear you. Rather, I’m writing about one easy to find place on the web where anyone can catch-up on all your important information and find your company’s other online hangouts. Let’s explore this
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Continue reading Where is Your Social Media Marketing Headquarters?
