December 2010 Archives : Bruce Clay Blog
December 31, 2010Friday Recap: The Best of ‘Best of 2010’s
We had a lot of “best of” this and “best of” that this week. So, I thought it would be appropriate to give a nod to our own SEM best of 2010, then roundup the best of the “best of”s floating around on the Web.
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December 30, 2010
7 Ways for Bloggers to Overcome Writer’s Block
I have an annoying affliction that rears its ugly head from time to time. It’s called blogger burnout. In fact, it literally took me five minutes to write that first sentence. I blame it on three things:
1. Information overload. I literally have 100 things I could write about right now, but nope. Nothing. Cannot form sentences.
2. Blogging every day. Trying to keep blog posts new, exciting, relevant to everyone and engaging is a big job. And sometimes it leads to analysis paralysis.
3. Forgetting that life inspires writing. Not making the connection between experiences and challenges I face every day and topics for the blog. Big mistake.
But stick around, because in an effort to fix this nasty problem, I’m gonna hit it head on by talking about it. I’m making lemonade.
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December 29, 2010
Social Goes Local: Tips for Local Rankings
In the past couple weeks, I’ve talked about factors that affect local rankings. I first spoke about keyword selection and PPC campaigns for local search. Then, I talked about some of the factors that Google says affects local search rankings. Next, I covered how business listings in important online directories play a role. Now, I’m going to talk about other factors we’ve seen that affect local rankings, and no surprise, social is becoming a key player.
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December 28, 2010
Why Landing Page Optimization is Crucial and How to Start
Here’s a scenario: you’ve spent countless hours on the design of your website, with the input of several experts. You’ve based your design on the knowledge of your Web designer and the marketing and business savvy of either yourself, your team or the execs. You’ve even invested heavily in search engine optimization, Pay per Click and social media to ensure people are coming to your site.
Six months in, you find your rankings are high in the search engine results page (SERP) and you have a fair amount of traffic, but the time users are on your site and high bounce rate is painting a very different picture of the success of your website.
People are coming to your site, but they are leaving it quickly without taking any action. This means, you’re ready for the next step in Internet marketing: conversions. It’s time for landing page optimization. Without it, your money and your efforts for your site are going down the drain.
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December 23, 2010
Key items to ensure a successful SEO project in a large complex business
1. Training for the SEO team and SEO practitioners Most large businesses have an internal SEO team, sometimes even bigger that the agency itself actually. For the agency, the challenge is to show added value to the existing considerable knowledge base of the in-house SEO team. For these guys, it’s about putting their trust into [...]
Jingle Bells, X-mas Farewells, Long Weekend — Hooray!
It’s almost that time, and before you ship yourself off to family functions to stuff your bellies full of food that instigates gym memberships, we wanted to fill you up with some holiday merriment — the kind that doesn’t have any calories.
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SEO Hot Tub
Here is a summary of the most interesting and valuable articles of the last four weeks. 3 Important Ecommerce Trends To Watch Consumer Focus Is On Price: consumer trends prove that shopping demand is not driven by brand as much as it used to be. Today, consumers online are looking for deals, discounts, incentives, free [...]
December 21, 2010
Local Rankings: Business Listings and Directories
Last week, I showed a video from Google that explained how the search engine serves local search rankings. Those factors are relevance, prominence and distance to a query. But that’s not the half of it. There are many other factors that we believe are affecting the local rankings in a SERP, some of which are prior knowledge and some we’ve formed hypotheses on through recent research.
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December 17, 2010
Friday Recap: Insomniac Edition
Insomnia is a fun game. It’s especially fun when your alarm is set to catch your 6 a.m. group fitness class. I know this because it was a game I played last night. Insomnia won, of course. But it taught me a lesson:
1) You can go mentally insane overnight by repeating the following phrase in your head for eight hours: “Please just go to sleep.”
2) The fetal position is actually quite soothing, even at my age.
3) Friday Recaps on no sleep are completely discombobulated and contain little to no news value.
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December 16, 2010
Google’s Local Search Algorithm and Rankings
Google recently released a video explaining how its local search rankings work. I mean, Google would never really tell you everything, but the video gives some highlights and maybe even clues. But beyond the ranking factors Google talks about, local search has its own algorithm. In this post, we’ll go over some of the factors Google highlights, then next week, I’ll reveal research and dive further into other factors that might affect the rankings and give insight into the local search algorithm.
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