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. (more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Real-time search has been available on Google since the end of last year, but it wasn’t until today when my colleague in Costa Rica instant messaged me “(5:18:40 PM) just had an earthquake, went running out of the house” that I really used it. Immediately I jumped on Twitter and searched “costa rica earthquake” and here is what I saw: (more…)

YouTube is the 3^rd most popular Web site on the Internet behind Google and Facebook (from Alexa Top 500 Global Sites). What does that mean? People are regularly uploading, searching for and watching videos on the Web. Here are some essential tips to help you maximize your efforts towards your video content so you too can tap into the millions of people who are turning to videos to gain information.

(more…)

In our opinion, understanding why someone would link to you is the first step in a link building strategy.  The main thing that you need to understand is that another company will link to you because it adds value to them.

Some of the ways you can add value to them are: (more…)

For those agencies and marketers with a total focus on ROI, sometimes branding campaigns can be confounding.  How can I measure the effectiveness of my branding campaign to optimize performance?  The answer is something we call a “Brand Metrics Calculator”.  A Brand Metrics Calculator will convert all brand touch points into a common unit, and thus a common financial value.  This way the marketer can determine the effectiveness of multiple brand touch points and shift budget accordingly, as they would say in determining that a paid search campaign generates leads at a lower cost than say a banner campaign.   While this is not by any means an exact science, it allows the marketer to make data-driven decisions on how to invest marketing funds. (more…)

When we audit a Web site for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) there are some basic things that we always look for. The following components must be taken into consideration: URL Structure, Site Map, Title Tags, Site Code, Content, and Back Links. All of these are interrelated and should be optimized together. (more…)