Let’s say you were stranded on a desert island, as in our previous scenario, but luckily managed to land a number of marketing consulting gigs with your remote internet connection, so you could earn some money helping companies straighten out their marketing (and receive Dr. Pepper etc. via parachute drop by transferring money to some shipping company via PayPal). And let’s say you could start out with only ONE book on marketing.
My choice would be Read on »
Let’s say you were stranded on a desert island with no landing strip and surrounded by terrible rocks and breakers such that no boat would be willing to rescue you – without even coconuts to sustain you. But in the midst of this you somehow had an internet connection, so you could throw together a quick lead-gen business, and then through PayPal you could transfer money to some shipping company who would then drop food, Dr. Pepper, and other essentials down onto you via parachute in exchange for your earnings. Read on »
There are a ton of great free tools out there, but there comes a point where you need to actually shell out a little money for tools if you’d like to accomplish some substantial results from an SEO standpoint. If you’re an in-house SEO doing it all, you’ll need tools for the six major pieces of SEO – Keyword Research, Architecture Analysis, Performance Tracking, Content Optimization, Linking Analysis, and (optionally) Monetization. For Monetization, Google AdSense is pretty hard to beat, at least if you have under 500,000 page views, and the AdWords Keyword tool does a great job on the Keyword Research front, so in this posting we’ll focus on the other four areas.
The following tools are great values and add up to well under $100.00 a month Read on »
"Thank you very much" for the SEO Badge, Mr. President!*
Today, in the spirit of Wired Magazine’s “wired/tired/expired” series, we’re going to run through some online marketing terms that have become downright “square”, and either are being, or should be replaced by, a more “hip” counterpart. This one goes to eleven!
You see it every week. A search engine makes an announcement, and everyone blogs something along the lines of:
“hey, there was an announcement – I have no idea what it means but here’s a bunch of SEO ramblings so I can sound like I’m writing a blog posting – I hope I got this out quick enough – what does everyone else think about this”?
The following is a make-your-own SEO blog post formula. The approach is outlined in my earlier posting on formula-based content; just spin the following into thousands of versions, and then you can skip reading about 50% of the blog postings that go up every week on SEO – a massive timesaver. It starts out a little dry, but quickly devolves into inside SEO jokes – enjoy! Read on »
Google Gnomes Measuring Click-Through-Rate in Teslas?
In the Paid Search end of its business, Google uses Click-Through-Rate (CTR) as a major determining factor in its “Quality Score” calculation, which is a key factor in its Adwords ad auctions. This is because CTR is a proxy for relevance; if enough users click on an ad after performing a keyword search, then it’s reasonable to assume that the ad must be pretty relevant to the keyword. When it finds so, Google’s auction system rewards relevant creative-keyword combinations and penalizes less relevant ones. This ensures a satisfying user experience and Read on »
While keyword density is important (regardless of what you’ve heard to the contrary), it’s not enough to simply say the keyword you want to rank for many times, or even better, the the proper number of times.
Keyword Density tools like Bruce Clay’s can help you figure out how to do that, but it’s important to be engaging to your end-users, and to look natural to search engine algorithms. Peppering related keywords into your writing can help with both of these goals Read on »
They forgot "Be"
There is a company that has been doing content scraping on a level that’s really unimaginable, to the point that it can be regarded as a completely different business model than most others that do this. Like many of the sites you’ve seen out there, its approach is to spider the web and copy other people’s content, then subsections of content are “mashed” together and presented to end-users – essentially auto-generated web pages.
The difference between this company and the myriad of other scrapers our there is in the “mashing up” process Read on »
Buried away in a Google patent application from 2006 entitled “DOCUMENT SCORING BASED ON DOCUMENT INCEPTION DATE“, there is a somewhat obscure reference to using the “entropy” of a document. 
“Entropy” used in this sense is not simply as it’s defined in the field of physics, where your daughter’s room tends towards a maximum state of disorganization; instead, it refers to its definition in the field of Information Theory, which applies it to information rather than atoms.
Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on this, but you can think of Shannon entropy as essentially measuring how much information is in a document.
If you have a 20,000 word document that simply consists of “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” repeated 2,000 times Read on »
I fight for the users!
I’ve seen a number of postings about Google sitelinks, how you can influence them, how Google likely decides whether to assign sitelinks to a website’s entry in the SERPs, etc. Ultimately these Sitelinks are, I think, a terrible thing for Internet Marketers, and the LAST thing you should do is try and influence Google to add them for your site; here’s why.
If your website has come up in a search, then the name of your website is either a brand term, or Read on »
