phoenix search engine marketing firms

A personal, and oh so painfully true, story from the SearchBash party during SES NY 2008.

39 Vote(s)

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Perry Evans wonders, as he examines the new site-specific search SERPS (see here for context): Have we lost the intent? When a consumer uses search terms like walmart or walmart.com, it’s one thing to “help the user” by giving them sub-site links, it’s an entirely other thing to use…
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Want to improve yourself and your blog - learn from the best: habits of outstanding bloggers for inspiration.

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I asked each SEMpdx Searchfest 08 speaker to reflect upon last week’s event and I got some really good answers. Here they are…

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Sometimes it’s the off-topic, off-message, or off-brand content that earns you the most valuable linksâ€"links that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten

38 Vote(s)

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Tags: SEO Tools SEM Social Marketing Technoratri Technorati

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

At SES, while I was on a panel about universal search, Comscore today released some really interesting data. We spent the rest of the hour debating the meaning of if all. It was like getting muffins straight from the oven - no one has seen it, not even the…
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Because I own BlackHatSEO.com and spent literally 1 day building and marketing it, a year ago a reporter writing for The London Times decided to do a feature article about me. Hey I rank #1 and own the exact match URL so I must be the guy, right? Well maybe (just don’t ask Matt!)…but bonus good deal for me on getting the feature, other than some of the regretful out-of-context quotes that were attributed to me.

More recently, I was interviewed by a reporter from The Register named Cade Metz in When Google Does Evil, an article about the opaque world of AdWords. In the article I was referenced as a search marketing consultant, and the link points to search-marketing.info.

Had that site not ranked for hundreds of AdWords related queries I would not have been asked to do the interview. But I just as easily could have moved the best content from that site over to this one. I appreciate the citation, but screwed it up on my end 2 ways

• wrong site: anytime featured articles from the mainstream media reference you it really helps if they mention your primary brand
• weak reference point: there are about 100,000 search marketing consultants in the world. As long as thousands of people claim the same thing you do then your claim does not mean as much as it should. Anytime you talk to the media you want to promote a memorable identity. I had an easy identity when I was the author of the SEO Book, but now that I have changed business models I need a new identity statement for the media, and quick!

When you talk to the media do you make sure they reference the correct site? When you talk to the media what title do you claim that seperates you from the rest of your field?

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Are search engine marketing jobs and budgets really recession-proof? And, if they are, will going to SES New York this week help traditional marketers get through the most serious recession since World War II?
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Ian Lurie’s unfortunate experience with Alaska Airlines leads to an insightful post on 10 ways a business can best apologize if they screw up.

45 Vote(s)

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Posted by rebecca

Sorry this roundup is delayed. I had the damn thing about 60% completed earlier today, but then Mel brought in a pig full of beer, which we proceeded to drink during lunch. A couple of glasses later, I returned to my desk and inadvertently hit whichever combination of keys on my keyboard is the equivalent to the "Back" button on my browser, thus losing my post. After work, I went to the liquor store (wow, all this talk of alcohol sure makes me look like quite the drunkard…) and, after making my purchases, was prevented from entering the store’s parking garage because two car thieves were getting busted by four squad cars’ worth of police officers. Then, once I finally started to hunker down and get some work done, Jane distracted me with something horrible. Thanks, Jane.

To summarize, beer pig + crime scene + Jane’s deviousness = delayed Roundup Thursday.

Stories, news, and other notable items from the past week:

Three star links:

• Apparently money can buy you happiness…if you spend it on other people. So, if you want to be happy, just buy me a new car or something.
• Rand is interviewed by Search Feature. I’m highlighting it because he says nice things about me and other coworkers.
• Retire@21 also interviewed Rand. Sheesh, so many interviews lately!
• The Fame Experiment is a website that’s trying to determine whether someone can become famous solely through Internet exposure. I think LonelyGirl15, the Star Wars Kid, and the Chocolate Rain singer would all say "yes."
• According to Hitwise, U.S. visits to question and answer websites increased 118% from last year. Of those websites, Yahoo! Answers dominates, with 75.05% of the visits as of March of this year (though that figure is down 21% from 94.25% in 2007).
• Coolest litmus test ever!
• Apparently the recession will hit the web. Darn.

Four star links:

• The NY TImes highlights the "blissful ignorance effect," where once you’ve committed to buying or consuming something, you want to like what you’ve bought so you end up doing a lot of self-convincing.
• Hey, Matt Cutts is doing link bait! And I just…linked…to it…ah, damnit, he got me.
• SEO ROI shows us how to hide a text link ad. Sneaky, though Rand points out that the link graph should still reveal the manipulation to Google’s classifiers.

Five star links:

• Though this page ain’t got no alibi (it ugly! hey hey, it ugly!), it provides 101 quick fixes to improve your website. It’s without a doubt a handy checklist to have and run through.

YOUmoz entries:

• Why Am I Doing This? Goodroi points out that you should ask yourself that very simple question before taking on tasks like blogging, social media, video content, and making various business decisions.
• The Rise and Fall of PageRank: A Parable. David LaFerney talks about, well, the rise and fall of PageRank. And there’s a picture of a gorilla!
• Page Title Optimization and Google’s New Inline Search Box. Miketighe discusses organizing page titles with regards to readability and usability.
• What Comes First, the Meta Description or Content? Sarita asks us what we think of first and foremost when working on a website, the SEO or the content.
•  Do Other Meta Tags Really Work? Petrosianii shares an interesting a post touting the various types of meta tags, and tried them out on his own website to see if they’d improve his rankings at all. (Spoiler alert: they didn’t.)
• Taking [true knowledge] Out for a Test Drive. Carfeu tests [true knowledge], a new question-answering search engine.
• Link Building Through Cloaking? Click Magnet talks about a shady link building scheme he came across.
• A Funny Thing Happened On My Way to the Store Blog. Linda Bustos shares a "searchonsearch" result with us. The site delivered content to her based on the referring keywords. Pretty clever!
• I’m Leaving and I’m Never Coming Back… OldSchoolSEO shares some reasons why visitors may be leaving your site.
• 8 SEO Facts You Should Know Before Taking Up an SEO Service. Mukesh Mani provides some great guidelines for clients who want to hire an SEO.
• Use ‘What Googlebot Sees’ to Find Scrapers. Brent D. Payne suggests sneaking a peek at the "What Google Sees" section in your Webmaster Central console. It highlights sections of your site that you may want to consider nofollowing.
• SES NY and SMX West, Compared. Wrttnwrd compares the two most recent SEO conferences.
• Bees Attract Bees - Social Networking Over the Net. Anna Eliot provides an overview of various social networking websites.
• Slow Web Server Response is Eating My Homework. Maruschka complains how her web host is messing up her chances to win an SEO contest at work.
• What’s Good for the WMC HTML Verification File Isn’t Good For You. Brent D. Payne isn’t happy about having to log into Google’s Webmaster Tools every time he needs to supply the correct meta tag for a specific domain.
• Introducing…The Funniest Moz Comments of All Time. Tom Critchlow scrounges up some funny comments that were posted on SEOmoz.

Best of YOUmoz:

• It’s My Mozday and I’ll Cry If I Want To. Vingold announces his one year anniversary on SEOmoz, shares his awesome cake decorating, and discusses some things he’s learned about our community in the past year. Happy anniversary, Vin!
• Don’t Be Too Clever When Marketing (especially in Miami International Airport). Hamlet Batista shares an amusing anecdote with us involving his SMX promotional t-shirts, a Googlebomb joke, and some very unamused airport security guards.

New events added to the Events Calendar:

• There was a new event added but the Events Calendar appears to be down right now, so I’ll update this post with the new event once Mel fixes it.

New additions to the SEOmoz Marketplace:

Featured job postings:

• SEO specialist for ESRI in Redlands, CA
• Lead developer for BootsnAll Travel Network in Portland, OR
• Full-time SEO manager for Point It! in Seattle, WA

Featured companies:

United States/North America:

• WrightIMC in Dallas, TX
• ESRI in Redlands, CA
• Spritz Web Solutions in Chicago, IL
• Point It! in Seattle, WA
• Overit Media in Albany, NY
• McRea Site Development in Lemon Grove, CA

Central America:

• CR Solutions Group S.A. in Jaco, Costa Rica

UK/Europe:

• Voodoo in Guildford/London, UK
• Further in the UK

Asia:

• Shrushti Web Solutions in Vadodara, Gujar, India
• A1seo-services.com in New Delhi, India

Featured resumes:

• Navaneeth Kishor R is an experienced SEO/SEM with over four years of experience. He is currently looking for employment.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Recently, one of the most requested Google Webmaster Tools features I have been hearing through the forums either directly or indirectly is the ability to mark links as links you do not vouch for.

Even though we have said time and time again that links can’t hurt you, no one believes it. Not only do people feel they can hurt you, they feel they can kick you while you are down already, which makes it even worse. Once Google penalizes your site for having bad links pointing to it, Google expects you to contact the people linking to you and make them remove the links. Good luck with that!

That is why Webmasters want a feature to opt out links from counting in Webmaster Tools. Yahoo Site Explorer has it, so maybe Google should follow the lead. Here is how Yahoo Site Explorer works.

(1) Login to Yahoo Site Explorer

(2) Click on your inlinks link

(3) Mouse over a link and notice the “report spam” button:

(4) Click the report spam button and you are taken to this page to confirm the request:

After that, then supposedly, Yahoo won’t count that link against you.

If SEOs and webmasters are expected to be responsible for the links pointing to them, even if they can’t control all of them, then Google must give them a way to fully control which links are counting for good or bad.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Months ago, MSN changed bots to detect cloaking. Result?
"Every single domain I had is still in Yahoo or MSN. That is not a good sign for them. Some of these are way older than a cloaked domain should be." - XMCP

43 Vote(s)

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

In honor of my 200th Sphinn Submission - I give you the second part of the series looking into the business implications of Social Media Marketing — This time we’re talking to the experts who will guide us through the murky waters straight to the t

40 Vote(s)

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Tags: Social Marketing StumbleUpon MySpace Reddit Stumble

Please be sure to visit our new Social Blog Network, as well as our Social Bookmark Site. Both offer services for free!
Get you latest SEO news fix at AutoPrimeMedia.com!

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Select Distribution

I recently mentioned the Sigur Rós Hiema video, which was featured on the YouTube homepage for a day and probably got about a million pageviews. An SEO Book reader named Satish discovered that after the video built up a lot of viral media and link exposure the video was set to private mode.

Google video, as a DRM service, failed miserably. But providing custom hosting for member videos that can only be viewed from certain sites or for a certain number of views is an easy win for YouTube if/when they decide to do so. Google already owns Checkout, so it should be easy to do after they have the right relationships in place.

I predict that if that limited syndication model is available to the masses, a future media pricing system will allow publishers to offer free video for the first X views and then the videos are turned to private / members only / payment required after they get a certain number of views. All the free views build the perceived social value, while being easy to market since the content is originally free.

Sliding Price Scales Starting at Free

Seth talked about taxing latecomers by making events expensive at the end and cheaper for the first few people. And music is priced this way on Amie Street. It is basically the concept of Piracy is Progressive Taxation flipped on its head - make it free to build awareness until people really value it, then let the irrational herd follow along for the ride.

Word of Mouth is the Best Long-term Marketing Strategy

The free then paid model encourages the creation of remarkable content and ensures artists and authors are paid a fair market value for their best work. And it offers a profound business model strategy because as markets saturate marketing gets more expensive and attention gets more scarce - the easiest way to do marketing is just make it easy to use, consume, and share - and rely on word of mouth to do the marketing. And it is far better than monetizing via advertising because it is more organic, and stems from the web’s strengths. As Jakob Nielsen said:

“The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.”

When there is an unlimited amount of competition consumers are far more likely to buy what is already well trusted amongst the community.

This Type of Technology is Easy to do

The cool thing about my current content management system set-up is I can control permissions for any article on this site. It could even be automated for certain classes of information (ie: only pages, only blog posts, only book pages, only on newsletters, only on a subdomain, sitewide, etc.) … it is entirely flexible.

Limitations

You wouldn’t want to bait and switch everything you did or you would build up some serious negative karma and some people may not be willing to link at you, but most people will not care or notice. The attention comes and goes, but the links stick. If you turned 10% to 30% of your well loved featured content into premium content I doubt it would hurt your link building much, although your rear end might get sore from your wallet filling up with cash.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

On March 5th, Google came down hard on many many advertisers serving them the March 2008 Google Slap, where AdWords advertisers saw their minimum CPC prices sky rocket overnight. Hundreds of advertisers were impacted by the “slap,” and we still have forum threads discussing ways to reverse it.

Yesterday, I noticed two different threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at DigitalPoint Forums reporting that Google has shown their kind side by reversing the Google Slap. In short, many advertisers saw their March 5th minimum CPC prices spikes drop down to previous March 5th prices. Here are some posts of joy from the threads:

Same here, most of my $10.00 “inactives” went way down in price!
Enjoy it while it lasts…

I got three words unslapped today, and I followed every guidelines the annoying specialists told me. I didn’t touch the campaign except for the landing page changes. Hopefully they will fully unslap my campaign by tomorrow.

Let’s not do too much noise about this hehe…. hopefully Google won’t notice it

Unfortunately, it did not last too long. About 9 hours after the first report of Google dropping the prices, people started reporting that Google has once again increased the prices on those keywords. I guess Google noticed?

AdWordsAdvisor said “notice what?” and added:

At this point, I chalk it up to the quality-based bidding system at work. I am not aware of anything else behind it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.