SEO

There’s a meteor headed our way. Plug your ears, sing LALALALALALA all you want. It won’t change a thing. Google’s about to make search engine optimization (SEO) into marketing, for good. How? They’ve been slowly adding user behavior to their ranking algorithm. Bet on far bigger changes after January 1st. I won’t go into the… Read More

You’ve got your site all set up at a nice, shiny new domain name. Chances are, though, you’re losing visitors. And link authority. Why? Because typos abound, and you’re not catching them. Here’s how you can grab a lot of traffic that you may be missing right now, and build better link authority, too: Step… Read More

After having a bit of success with my 11 Internet Marketing Trends to Ignore in 2008, I thought I’d give it another shot. My only totally incorrect predictions from 2008: E-books are catching on, and podcasts now capture a .002% audience, not .00001%. My bad. Analytics. Yeah, you heard me. I love analytics. But they’re… Read More

Internet Marketing

So, you’re working hard on SEO. You want that higher ranking. Rankings rankings! Nothing else matters! Then, suddenly, your organic traffic is going up, but your sales aren’t. You could fire your SEO firm. Clearly your search engine optimization efforts are a flop. I mean, all they did was generate more traffic, right? Or, you… Read More

Search engines are cool, but they aren’t that bright. They don’t know that you meant ‘car’ when you typed ‘vehicle’. If you’ve just spent 3 hours digging through a thesaurus, finding every alternative for ‘shoes’, start over. Burn the thesaurus. Think about the words that people use to find you. Then, as a revolutionary new… Read More

Search engines have dominated the internet scene for at least 10 years now. And there’s still only one totally reliable way to gain quality rankings that will truly last: Content. You can build links, send out press releases, spam blog comments and attempt to game the search algorithms to your heart’s content. None of it… Read More

Analytics

I’ll be presenting a webinar today: Transforming Google Analytics Into Business Analytics When: Tuesday, December 9, 12 PM PST (that’s today) Where: Here, on the web, silly The focus: Making actual, real-life use of Google Analytics to grow your business. No fancy shtuff like advanced segments. I’ll talk about: Data overload and how to avoid… Read More

I’m a developer. There, I’ve said it. I’m out of the closet. It’s a little known fact, but I’ve been coding web applications since 1995. I used the very first version of ColdFusion (on 1,000 floppy disks), learned PHP while building Prius Mileage and have even (gasp) muddled through Ruby. While object-oriented programming still makes… Read More

Internet marketing isn’t mysterious. It’s the writing, stupid. This is a collection of random thoughts about writing, prompted by someone telling me today that “all you know how to do is write”. They were attempting to reduce my price for an SEO project. You inspired me! Cheers! Writing is what makes marketing tick. And the… Read More

SEO widows, you know who you are: Your spouse/significant other comes home with a twinkle in their eye because they just “fixed a major spider trap” or “discovered a new component of the Google TrustRank algorithm”. Then they leave for a week to go to some conference, and you get to hear about their drunken… Read More

Internet Marketing

Just wrapped up my Conversational Marketing Summit presentation titled ‘why does most marketing suck?’. In it, I review: A brief history of marketing, as told by beer. Why and how you should select, rather than accumulate, customers. How you can better listen to your audience. The meaning of life. At least as a marketer. I… Read More

Copywriting

SEO still lives and dies based on good copywriting. If you’re going to move up in the rankings and stay there, you have to know how to write customer- and search engine-friendly content. But you’re a writer. You shouldn’t have to learn about SEO, keyword mining, pagerank and the robots meta tag. You just want… Read More

At least, take everything they say with a grain of salt. Today, they came out with their ‘SEO Starter Guide‘. I downloaded it and took a quick look. And I’ve finally lost patience. So here I go on a Graywolf-style rant: Inconsistencies in the SEO Guide: Dynamic URLs On page 6 they say “Improve the… Read More

Analytics

Why do internet marketers need to understand segmentation? So they don’t act like airlines, of course. That was my topic last night at the SEMPDX Hotseat. I just uploaded my slides, with backup text, to SlideShare. I provide a walkthrough of Google Analytics’ new Advanced Segments feature, as well as my thoughts on checked baggage… Read More

Blogs are the new web sites. Marketers launch ’em because they think they need ’em. They don’t consider the time commitment required, goals or why their audience would want to hear from them. Then the blog dangles off the corporate site like an appendix until it irritates someone in the organization, at which point it’s… Read More