Internet Marketing
November 30, 2009
New & 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.
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.
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.
November 17, 2009
Got That? 6 Compelling PubCon Takeaways
Editor’s note: After attending PubCon Las Vegas last week, Marty Weintraub kindly offered to share his major takeaways with PubCon-deprived BCI blog readers, and we are thrilled to have Marty’s unique wit and sharp analysis on the BCI blog. You can also find more of Marty’s PubCon insights, along with search and social media marketing news and recommendations, on the aimClear search marketing blog and on Twitter, @aimclear.
I’m back from from PubCon ‘09 in Las Vegas. There was cool new information mined and lots of reinforcement for what we already know and do. Usually at these conferences a few tidbits stick in my mind to keep the brain thinking. These factoids are top-of-mind reflections from PubCon.
1-Measuring Social Media is the Wild Freakin’ West
A lot of SEOs believe that URL shortening tools don’t send referral data, the global guts of web analytics. This is wrong. URL shorteners are just redirects. The truth is that analytics don’t get referrer information if customers’ interactions happen on installed software like TweetDeck. Got that? Read more.
November 16, 2009
Achieving Strong Themes through Silos and Data Mining Server Logs in the SEO Newsletter
The monthly SEO Newsletter will be blazing its way into inboxes tomorrow. It’s so stuffed with the last month’s news, it’s safe to say you could have been Rip Van Winkle the past few weeks and none would be the wiser after your reading of November’s SEO Newsletter.
For a preview of what’s to come, check out some excerpts from this month’s articles.
Siloing – How to Theme a Web Site for Clear Subject Relevance
Siloing is a way of arranging a Web site’s contents according to themes, which facilitates search engine optimization. Search engines catalog information logically by subject, which allows them to easily find and return the most relevant Web sites for any user’s search query. The more organized your site contents are, the clearer your site’s subject relevance becomes to search engines as well as to users.
Focusing SEO Efforts with Server Log Data
The ability to track a consumer’s interactions with a brand or business from initial exposure to completed conversion is one of the most exciting and useful developments to happen to commerce since the advent of the Internet itself. Finally, business owners are able to see, in records generated straight from the source as they happen, what’s working or not working with customers visiting a Web site. Read more.
November 13, 2009
Friday Recap: Freaky Friday Edition
Happy Friday the 13th! That doesn’t freak you out, does it? Okay, it freaks me out a little, too.
But I keep telling myself that’s silly, because really, look at all the cool developments over the last week!
For starters, PubCon Las Vegas has been going on all week, bringing together thousands of search, social and affiliate marketers to the U.S.’s party capital. Blogger Gil Reich has compiled an ever-growing list of Best of PubCon moments from the conference.
Coverage of PubCon can be found across the blogosphere, including TopRank Online Marketing Blog, Search Marketing Sage, Search Engine Roundtable, and Outspoken Media. Read more.
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