A national chain of hotels came to us asking for advice on how to improve their PPC program. When we took a look, we almost immediately discovered a serious flaw: they had poured a significant amount of money into their PPC campaign without ever stopping to seriously consider where most of their visitors were coming from. Had they been utilizing Advanced Segments, a tool that was added to Google Analytics within the last several years, they would have found this information extremely easy to obtain and could have targeted their advertising to the areas with the highest chance of success. Read the rest of this entry »

Digital marketing managers often suffer from an onslaught of emails from owners/managers of Web sites that want to “trade links”. Simply, another site is willing to put your Web site URL and a short description of your services in exchange for you doing the same on your site. Reciprocal linking, as it’s more formally labeled, was a fairly successful method of building link juice to elevate a Web site’s rankings in natural search results (many years ago). Reciprocal links now have little to no value to Search Engine Optimization efforts and managers have to be more strategic in developing backlinks to their Web site. Read the rest of this entry »

One year ago, Yahoo and Microsoft announced an alliance where Microsoft/Bing’s search results would be used across both engines. We wanted to take a moment to discuss the impact in the world of search as well as how the changes will affect your SEO and PPC programs.

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Google recently announced they are rolling out changes to their keyword match program. For those that might not recall the types of keyword matches, please see our earlier blog, “Keyword Relevancy and the Broad Match Type”. Those advertising in Google AdWords (most of us) now have a new tool to use to optimize paid search campaigns – broad match modifiers. Broad Match Modifiers provide an advertiser with more control over when ads can be seen and this type of control is definitely a good thing. Read the rest of this entry »

Stolen or copied content can be a problem when it comes to your Web site’s search engine optimization. Recently we learned that our Omniture vs. Google Analytics blog post was copied and translated into Japanese. This made us ask what the ramifications of our stolen content could have to our site.

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We have analyzed some of the top E-Commerce Platforms, and created this matrix to easily see which platforms can be optimized for Search. Their ability to integrate with Google Analytics and Omniture is addressed as well. Take a look before you choose one for your online storefront to ensure you are giving yourself the best opportunity for SEO.

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Google has been living off Caffeine since the middle of last month. On June 8 they launched their new system for indexing content on the Internet. The old system used to index every couple of weeks, but now it is almost indexing in real time. That’s why the name Caffeine was such an appropriate fit.  ”Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before,” Google said in a recent blog posting.

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97% of internet users are utilizing online media to search for local products. Internet users are turning to Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local to find products/services closest to them. 1/5 of Google Web searches and more than 1/3 of their mobile search have a local component.

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Well, not exactly. #oilspill is one of the top 10 trending terms on Twitter right now, and thanks to  people behind the Twitter account @BPGlobalPR (among others) it will probably remain there until there is a real solution for the oil currently spewing in the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day. That account was created just 2 weeks ago, and has already garnered over 121,000 followers (including myself).

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Google spent $750 million for its 3^rd largest acquisition to date behind DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.65 billion). DoubleClick strengthened Google’s arm in display advertising and YouTube gave them the most popular video collection on the Web as well as another outlet for advertisements. Now the AdMob deal gives Google the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »