November 2009 Archives : Bruce Clay Blog
November 30, 2009New & Improved: Bruce Clay, Inc.’s SEO Blog
Sound the trumpets and bring out the good china! There is exciting news to celebrate here on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog! After months of planning and programming, the hard work has come to a proud and happy ending. Welcome to the new and improved Bruce Clay, Inc. blog.
Earlier this year, BCI staffers with a role in the blog swore an oath to make it better. A blueprint had been laid out by Internet marketing maven Patrick Sexton. He had spelled out several shortfalls of the blog’s design and function in constructive detail. His suggestions would serve to increase conversation and visual appeal, and in it we saw a vision for a better blog.
With a plan in front of us, we aimed our sights on several goals and announced them to readers, who replied with supportive and encouraging comments. It appeared we weren’t the only ones eager for change. Today we’re all aflutter because the newly redesigned blog is live! Just in time for the holidays, here are some of the new features we’re glad to bring to the blog. Read more.
Brand bidding strategies in search engine marketing
It is obvious the importance of SEO and PPC advertising strategies to brand marketers, however to what extent should these strategies be implemented together for branding queries? It is quite usual to find corporations bidding on brand terms while at the same time running a PPC campaign, mainly because brand terms usually drive quite a [...]
November 26, 2009
Google on Speed
More Caffeine and more Speed Google and Speed are very much interlinked. Matt Cutts officially announced that speed would play a role in the Google ranking algorithm. This announcement makes sense when put in perspective with the imminent release of Caffeine, an improved version of Google search with a strong emphasis on speed. The SEO [...]
November 25, 2009
Friday Recap: Gravy-Flavored Edition
Happy Thanksgiving! The whole office just came together for a serious cornucopia of a potluck lunch. If by the end of this post my eyes aren’t rolling to the back of my head as I succumb to a food coma, I’ll consider this an incredibly successful day. (Though my tummy already knows it is!)
So it’s recap time! With a short week comes a recap in a smaller serving size than usual. You should be saving room for that feast tomorrow, anyway, right?
Some people can’t seem to participate in social media very long before doing something that bites them in the behind — something that raises red flags with a boss or rocks the boat of a romantic relationship. But here’s a first. A member of one quasi-celeb’s entourage was arrested after not using Twitter. Read more.
November 24, 2009
How To Approach Ads, Content Distribution and Marketing on Twitter – SEM Synergy Extras
SEM Synergy and its accompanying blog post are usually reserved for Wednesdays. But since it’s a short week and you’ve got a Thanksgiving-themed recap coming at you tomorrow, the SEM Synergy Extras blog post is yours a day early. You’ll still have to wait for tomorrow at 3 pm Eastern / noon Pacific to hear the podcast air on WebmasterRadio.fm, but in the holiday spirit please accept this blog post as an early holiday gift!
Michael Gray was my guest today and I used the time to pick the infamous online marketer’s brain about Twitter marketing. Hearing Michael speak during the Twitter Marketing Tactics session at SMX East in October, I took away a lot of incredible tips about Twitter marketing best practices for commercial organizations.
Check out the live blog coverage linked to above for the full presentation, including how Michael recommends growing the number of followers you have and how to automate tasks without being perceived as a lifeless robot. Read more.
November 23, 2009
Quick Hits for Black Friday Marketing Pushes
It’s a short holiday week for most, but if you’re a retail business owner or an SEO of a small retail business, this week holds little rest for you. Days away is Black Friday, the mega shopping day that falls the day after Thanksgiving and ushers in the winter holiday shopping season.
The flurry of sales that come on Black Friday is anticipated by businesses all year long. Because of the big bucks that historically get spent on Black Friday, for some, it’s as though the first ten months on the calendar are a practice run leading up to the big event.
Marketers have been optimizing and planning their holiday season campaigns for months now, and for good reason. But if you haven’t already been planning for the holiday season and would like to capitalize on Black Friday mania before it’s flown by, it may not be too late to capture some of the excitement surrounding the holidays and cash in on Black Friday frenzy. Read more.
November 20, 2009
Friday Recap: Little Genius Edition
Welcome back to Friday, friends. There was no major news this week. Oh, wait. There was that one minor blip on the radar — a.k.a. the release of Twitter’s new, official retweet feature.
The long and short of it is that no one likes it. Lisa Barone dissects the many shortfalls of the function in Why Twitter’s New Retweet Feature Sucks. (Tell the Wall Street Journal I said hello, Lisa!)
Google also had some news to share this week. The source code for Google Chrome Operating System has been opened up to developers. That news and other updates were shared by Google during a press conference this week. You can find coverage of the event across the Web, but readers got a special treat as Matt Cutts joined the liveblogger corps.
Microsoft announced that their anticipated cloud computing system, Windows Azure, will be fully live early next year. The company is inviting software developers to create programs for the platform, hoping to catch up to the cloud computing pack leaders Amazon and Google. Read more.
November 19, 2009
Sticks & Stones May Break Your Bones But Ignoring the Online Convo May Crush You
Conferences are a hub of learning, growth and progress in the SEO industry. They’re part of the glue that connects members of the community, offering a cherished opportunity for forging relationships and friendship.
And no matter how many conferences they’ve been to, most attendees almost always walk away from a conference with new professional knowledge in their head or with new business connections stored in the BlackBerry.
But if there’s a lesson in human nature to be learned from time spent at a conference, it’s that when interacting with an audience there are two channels to pay attention to today. Forget the fact that you’re interacting face to face, because there’s also a conversation happening right behind your back.
In a blog post for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Parry writes about tweckling, or heckling a speaker on Twitter. It was during a higher education conference last month that one episode of tweckling lit up Twitter like a Christmas tree, the episode becoming the poster child for the dangers of disgruntled audience. Scratch that. The audience didn’t even have cause to be disgruntled. They were just bored. Read more.
Are Google spreading themselves too thin?
I know that seems like an odd statement for the most valued brand on the planet. However, I was just perusing the latest news from TechCrunch this morning and read 2 articles one after the other, the first was The Google Phone Is Very Real. And It’s Coming Soon and the second was Google Holding [...]
November 18, 2009
A Competitive SEO Advantage in Studying the Times – SEM Synergy Extras
On today’s episode of SEM Synergy, I speak with my guest Bas van den Beld about search marketing in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What does the Berlin Wall have to do with search marketing, you ask?
Bas is a Holland-based Internet marketing consultant, the co-host of the internationally-focused SearchCowboys podcast (live Tuesdays at 2 pm Eastern/11 am Pacific), the editor of Europe’s most popular search marketing blog, and (perhaps most intriguing of all) he was an historian in a former life.
In an article on Search Engine Land, Bas indulges his inner historian by looking at how tearing down the Berlin Wall shaped the face of global commerce and, in turn, search marketing as we know it today. What do you think the world would be like without the European Union, a single European currency and the spread of wealth that resulted within a unified Europe? A very different place indeed. Read more.
