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INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Posts Aboutseo
Writing Content? Think Brief.
Content is king, right?It takes great content to both 1) optimize your website for high organic rankings on search engines, and 2) communicate the concept and benefit of your business to your web traffic.
Great content is keyword-focused, frequent, and direct. It’s also brief – probably even more brief than you’d want to assume.
This study on web usability highlights some startling facts for those long-winded writers among us (myself included):
- Users tend to spend a baseline of about 25 seconds on your page if they’re actually reading content. In that 25 seconds, they’re reading about 104 words.
Open your wallet: Black Friday, Cyber Monday arrives
Chris “Silver” Smith offers up a great article - “Forget Black Friday! Are You Ready For Holiday Season’s Cyber Mondays?” regarding the onslaught of consumer madness when retailers do their best to extract as much creditworthiness from one’s wallet.
“Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers. But, for each Monday after Black Friday, consumer searches spike up on the internet and online retail websites enjoy their highest traffic and associated sales of the year. Search engine use is directly impacting businesses during this period, and companies which haven’t optimized their internet presence stand to lose out on some of the sales they could be getting if consumers could find them. This is true for online businesses as well as for brick-and-mortar stores.
A Search Engine Marketing habit to break
Last month at BarCamp Nashville, John Ellis spoke about Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Pay-Per-Click Advertisers.
One of his Seven Habits was to avoid the top spot in a Search Engine Marketing campaign.
The number-one position usually leads to a poor return on investment, and that can often be true of the second and third positions as well. The traffic coming from the top positions are not buyers; they are just researchers. Serious buyers will go to the third, fourth and fifth positions. When consumers are ready to buy, they will come back.
Search Engine Metaphors
I’m a big fan of analogies and metaphors to help clarify a concept or bring understanding to technical subjects such as search engine optimization.
Dave Zuis uses “Physical Fitness” as a metaphor in his article at SearchEngineJournal - SEO & Physical Fitness Metaphors
I found Everett’s comment to be absolutely spot on:
I am a firm believer that companies who are SERIOUS (I’m talking over 100 k per year serious) about their search engine optimization efforts need to either get an in-house SEO, an embedded consultant or both. Having some guy on the other side of the country with dozens of other clients send you a report that says “Do this, this and this…” without actually DOING any of the “doing” is like joining one of those online personal trainer websites where you pay someone to send you an exercise routine via email.
Drinking from the SEO SEM Water Hose
Learning about effective Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is a long arduous journey. At times, it’s as fun as manually reading a dictionary searching for effective keywords or looking for a phone number in a stack of papers. Where does one start?
The temptation is to apply quick fix shortcuts. Understanding the foundational basics of SEM and SEM best practices coupled with a long term strategy will prevent unmet expectations.
Who doesn’t want to be Number 1 on Google?
iPhone Development
I got a shiny new iPhone, and it is amazing. But you’ve already read that somewhere else.
Being a web developer, I immediately started looking for some best practices on how to write apps for this new tool of mine.
Google “iPhone development” and you get nothing but blog entries about people who don’t actually have much real concrete documentation, and a couple of development IDEs that give you preview for the frame and such. But no actual development guidelines. Shame on whoever does SEO for apple…
MSN AdCenter - a Long Way to Go…
I have to say that my experience with Microsoft AdCenter was rather disappointing.
Although MSN AdCenter has attempted to mirror strong account features that are provided by Google and Yahoo!, they were not implemented on a reliable scale. I feel that
human factor was ignored during the development of MSN AdCenter. Even though the “full version” of MSN AdCenter was rolled out during September of 2006, it still SCREAMS beta.
