Hundred Dollar SEO

photo credit: SuperFantastic
Search Marketing is more than just search engines. One of the most amusing things to me is when people boast that they get the vast majority of their traffic from Google — sometimes as high as 80%. It is difficult not to laugh at that. Having a business that is entirely contingent […]

Continuing from the understanding customers post, today I am tackling a more complicated explanation of buying decisions.
The temperament description is a common introduction to the concept of how people engage information. However, companies like Future Now internally use a more complicated system — like the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator. MBTI splits each of the temperaments […]

I know this is a major accusation but Google is spiraling further and further into a “keep them in the dark” business model.
On March 6th they announced that load time is going to be factored into Quality Score.
This means that if you are running dynamic content, third party tracking, any javascript, or off-page calls […]

One session that I wish I had attended at SMX West is Avoiding PPC Pitfalls. One of the speakers, Amy Konefal of Closed Loop Marketing, put her Powerpoint online so I read through it. I’m not sure how I feel about the things that she points out.
The basic premise is solid — broad match can […]

Recently I receive the Yahoo PPC Guide Smart Start it is 82 pages with plenty of pictures and simple instructions. I would feel comfortable showing it to a client who wanted to know more about buying online advertising, I would not recommend it for a beginner trying to learn how to use the system. A […]

Do you optimize your ads for pay-per-click manually? You should.
Both AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing offer a convenient option to “Optimize” ads.
Yahoo! :

Google:

It is tempting to use these option if you are new to the system, but they do not have your best interest in mind. Both systems will skew the ads they serve based […]

Google verifies that I was right about locations appearing in AdWords ads because of GeoTargeting.
We show the name of the region or city based on the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the user. For example, if you target both Madrid and Barcelona, a user located in Madrid sees the word ‘Madrid.’ A user in Barcelona […]

Last week Google rolled out a new placement system for AdWords. After a conversation with a Google rep I was assured that the new system should result in a greater opportunity for advertisers to appear in the the position directly over the organic results, not first in the right hand column first above the organic […]

In PPC Competition Part 1 we covered how to eyeball the level of competition for ad space. In PPC Competition Part 2 we covered how to assess how much your competitors are bidding on your pay per click phrases, and potential hidden competitors. In this installment we will look at another of the tools that […]

Ben, one of the participants in the Netflix Prize, says that studying statistical inference suggests that Google’s Signals may have a very arbitrary relation to relevance.
One implication is that Google’s algorithm is less principled and more pragmatic than the average web designer might expect. If crappy websites tend to use more red text, using […]