The word on the street is that a new Google Penguin update will be rolling out within the next few weeks and by all indications, the impact of this particular refresh could be huge. Matt Cutts the head of Google’s Web Spam team recently confirmed the forthcoming Penguin release on Twitter, in response to a question regarding whether or not a new update had already occurred: As to the update’s scale, a May 13th, 2013 video released by Cutts explained that update “will go deeper and have [...]
Generating ideas for content marketing can be tricky sometimes, and you may find yourself hitting a creative wall. Use the 6 ways outlined in this video to brainstorm and develop content ideas so you can make sure to keep your creative juices flowing. Transcription During the brainstorm process, it can be easy to hit a brick wall. If your brainstorm session has reached a dead end, here are some creative ways to generate fresh ideas that your audience will love. Mind-Mapping This strategy creates a visual representation of related terms [...]
SEO & PPC. Friends or foes? And which one really is more effective in an online marketing campaign? The truth is that they are not only friends but “coworkers” as well, and one is not necessarily more effective than the other. They serve different purposes but working together they create a synergy not possible as two independent parts. PPC is great because you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. SEO, on the other hand, is more of a long term investment that takes some time and [...]
It’s been 10+ years since I built a website for my first client and I’m not ashamed to say that back then I was a terrible web designer. I was terrible for many years and for many different reasons. In fact, everything you’ll see below, I was guilty of. However, I eventually learned how to perfect the web designing process the hard way, through determination, research and lots of experience. Today, I think it’s safe to say I’m a very good web designer. If you don’t believe me, ask Inc [...]
Many of my clients tend to start out an engagement by making various website changes, and often they are even already in the middle of, or about to embark on, a complete website redesign. There are numerous articles and books about how to optimize website designs, but for SEO and Paid Search, there seem to always be some issues that perenially come up (the “usual suspects”) all well worth highlighting. Here is a standard, quick checklist I’ve developed for use with new and existing websites, to ensure the website [...]
SEO tools are the much beloved First Children of the search engine optimization industry. It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have a favorite tool, a list of favorite tools, or who doesn’t have some anecdote about some SEO tool. Sooner or later everyone tries one or more tools. Many people fall in love with them. We turn to tools to save time, money, and frustration. Every tool vendor tells you they are solving a problem and giving you a critical advantage. Every tool tutorial is trying to sell you [...]
My blog turned seven years old on Thursday. It began on April 18, 2006 with a poorly-optimized and completely forgettable blog post that I titled not after a U2 song, but after a Rolling Stones song: Start Me Up. That same day, I posted a second article about the blogroll I used to maintain. Another lame blog post. In fact, if you want to see the lamest blog launch in publishing history, just look at the eight articles I posted in April 2006. You’ll see a guy who knew [...]
We see dozens of guides and tutorials on how we should make our websites better to rank, convert, and perform. On the other hand, there’s so much wrong-doing, it can be easier for you to STOP doing some things to get better results with your online presence. Below I’ve outlined the 17 most popular “sins” I’ve identified on my customers’ websites within the last 2 years. 1. Stop posting pathetic useless promotional content I do realize, some “boring niche” companies find it pretty hard to create a content strategy and [...]
With the explosion of sites like WordPress, YouTube, Pinterest and Facebook, content can go viral very quickly. By creating high quality, engaging content your brand can be shared around the world within minutes something that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing costs ten years ago. The social media revolution has changed the way we market content. Here’s some numbers that support the revolution: 2 billion videos are watched daily on YouTube 200,000,000 blog posts can be read on WordPress 50 million tweets per day on [...]
As a bit of psychology fiend I just wanted to share this video I found a few days ago on Youtube which explains the different ways in which advertisers use persuasive psychological techniques in their advertising campaigns. The video covers peripheral messaging and it got me thinking about it’s correlation with inbound/content marketing. The concept of peripheral advertising is essentially what the term implies; the marketing is conducted as a secondary effort to the main project, promoting the product or service tangentially. The other element of the video I thought [...]
