Yearly Archives: 2011

Random

I love when someone tells me I should ‘manage growth’ at Portent. How, exactly, would I do that? Hire a psychic? Sometimes, the economy tanks, and you get 10 great new clients. Sometimes, the economy grows, and 3 clients leave to sell their toothpaste caps in Superbowl ads. I guess I could tell 5 great… Read More

SEO

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me. Going black hat. It’s so tempting. You put in all this time researching SEO. You know as much about the algorithms as anyone. You watch competitors zip past you and you just know they’re cheating. How else could they zip past you*? *I dunno… Maybe because… Read More

SEO

I am not a fan of using keyword density for SEO. It’s been long and many a winter since search engines cared about how often a word or phrase appears on a page in relation to the quantity of other words. Today, Google and Bing care far more about natural language patterns. This means the… Read More

Internet Marketing

Can I pay you based on performance? I hear that a lot. On its face, performance-based pay for internet marketing seems really fair: Clients pay their marketer a percentage of sales, or some dollars per lead, or something similar. If I help you sell more stuff, you pay me more. If I help you sell… Read More

SEO

So far so good. Agencies have learned the power of social media to earn brand mentions and links. But here’s where it gets gritty. When you use social media for SEO you have to focus those energies to get SEO results. There are two types of social media: Social media for people This is the… Read More

Copywriting

If you write for SEO, you write for online users, and vice-versa. I just put together this SEO copywriting cheat sheet to cover it all. It’s free – have a look. The SEO Copywriting Cheat Sheet – PDF The cost? Zero. Zip. Nada. If you want to make me smile, you can: Buy one of… Read More

Internet Marketing

‘Engagement’. Shudder. It’s the latest beaten-to-death marketing term. Truth is, though, there’s a genuine need to ‘engage’ with your customer. I get it: You want to stand out. You want your customers to like you. You want them to remember you. But do you really have to over-complicate your web sites, and your marketing campaigns,… Read More

Social Media

You know what’s startling? The endless supply of companies that EPIC FAIL in the Facebook realm.  Soooo many companies grasp that they should be on Facebook. They get that this whole “Social Media” thing can positively impact their business. The problem is that many businesses opt to have the CTO’s 12-year-old create an account and… Read More

Random

I’ll be posting the rest of this tomorrow night, after I present it to SEMPDX. If you’re in Portland, stop by and say hi. [tooltip content=”This is just a preview. When I put a presentation together, I find myself constantly dismantling/rebuilding it, right up to the last minute. So what I end up with tomorrow… Read More

Random

Just coined it myself. Creative Lockjaw: A syndrome where an individual has a great idea but can’t quite spit it out. It happens, most often, when you over-edit yourself. You’ve got that fantastic idea, but you refuse to write it down right away because you want to describe it just so. Creative lockjaw often leads… Read More

Random

Oh god, you groan, I have to write on the blog again?! I just wrote a post last month!!! It’s a pain, I know. You’ve got a business to run, or a game to watch, or kids to feed. Spending 2 hours grinding out 300 words just isn’t a high priority. It can be worth… Read More

Random

Anyone who publishes anything on the web is part of Google. Well, anyone who lets Google crawl their content, anyway. Which is just about everyone. I told ya so Lots of bloggers are saying that Google’s a publisher. To which I can only say, “Well, DUH!” I’ve been writing about Google-as-aggregator for a few years… Read More

Random

Jessica Lee from Bruce Clay, Inc. interviewed me as part of this week’s SEMSynergy show. I talk about the Facebook data I presented at Search & Social Hawaii, what’s going to happen to Yahoo!, and why I believe that somewhere else on earth I have an exact duplicate. Kidding on that last part. You can… Read More

Analytics

Multi-Channel Funnels (MCF) can provide a lot of valuable data about the entire multi-touch conversion process. But the most common question I’ve heard from people in this industry is – okay, but what do I do with this? Today I’m going to step through using MCF for opportunity analysis both in Paid Search and Organic… Read More

Internet Marketing

My clients don’t really have my best interests at heart. They all have names like ‘Joe’ or ‘Jane’ or whatever. So it’s really, really easy to have one of those butt-clenching moments when you realize you just sent a line-by-line chronicling of every onsite SEO issue your pharmaceuticals client has to your unitarian church client.… Read More