Articles by Ian Lurie

Man. 2010 turned internet marketing into a charnel house. RSS, SEO, the web were all pronounced dead by one pundit or another. Let’s review: SEO is dead Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Jason Calacanis, Jeremy Schoemaker and others all pronounced SEO dead because of Google Instant or blended search or a pressing need for more links [...]

Session ID make your URLs look like this: mysite.com?sessionid=ASDOFAnasdf;lawe0r9823049812-30481349745087 They’re bad: They’re ugly, and discourage clicks. They prevent your server from caching pages properly, because they cause thousands of duplicate pages. They kill you in organic search, because search engines find ‘em and then can’t figure out which page is real. And because people link [...]

I’m addicted to Quora. There, I’ve said it. I know some folks have doubts. I love StackOverflow too. But something about Quora has me on there, all the time, answering questions. I do have an ulterior motive: If I can get on there and help lots of people out, I can build an audience. If [...]

This post is a guest blog by Bruce Lee, marketing copywriter This is the most important message in this article, so it is placed here, at the top, where you’re most likely to see it. Put the message you most want to communicate at or near the top of your web page. Marketing expert Roger [...]

I’m not a big New Year’s Resolutions kind of guy. My whole life is making lists and crossing things off of them. Why do that one more time each year? I do love to learn stuff though. Here’s my learning ‘to do’ list for the year. I want to learn: How to give a kick-ass [...]

I’m a creature of habit. And there are 8 stupid copywriting mistakes I make with amazing consistency. Here’s how I try to deal with them: 1. The camouflaged typo Ever use ‘form’ when you meant ‘from’? When you do, your computer snickers to itself and mutters something like Remember that time you cursed at me [...]

My latest Search Engine Land column just went live. It’s about Crawl Budget and how it may work. Having re-read it, though, I want to make sure I add even more qualification to what I wrote: I talk about crawl budget a lot, but the most important part of this article, really, is ‘making the [...]

In spite of reading my blog, you want to go into internet marketing. Welcome to the asylum, my friend. Time to start learning. This is a list necessary skills for an internet marketer. Warning: I do not necessarily know all these as well as I want to. I’m still learning: Writing. I’ve beaten this one [...]

Well, 2010 was interesting. On the down side: Kidney stones and the ER; a wasp attack; head explosions. On the up side: A fantastic year for my family; a great year for my company; a terrific team that’s kicking butt. But how’d I do with my predictions for 2010? Let’s see: Bing versus Google. I [...]

Today, you get to see the ugly, stench-ridden underbelly of my writing process. I actually recorded myself typing this blog post. While I removed a few typos that would’ve gotten me rated NSFW, the rest is pretty much straight-up: And, in plain old text, in case you don’t want the video version: There are no [...]