Passion2Publish

The 10 Most Asinine Trends Online and Why You Should Ignore Them

I could add a few more to this top 10 list, but it's a good start, and I especially agree with no. 4:

4. "SEARCHLESS" ADVERTISING.

Many CMOs have no problem authorizing multimillion-dollar TV and print campaigns, but their systematic neglect of search marketing borders on the criminally myopic. Search-engine marketing doesn't drive demand; it responds to it, which means that unless your brand is present to capture post-ad queries, you've failed to close the marketing loop. Plus, it's quite likely your competitors are already exploiting that failure with strategies to poach the awareness you've spent so much to generate.

Read the full article over at AdAge.

(Via)

Search Engine Marketing Basics: A Beginner's Guide

Sharing a very basic SEO presentation -- well, ok, a part of the presentation ...

If you look at the first slide you can tell what I removed, basically our services and our pricing. For those, you could call me OR you could call the lovely Erin Slater who handles our new business.

FYI: If you're as busy as me and don't have the time to keep clicking on your bookmarks, or stumbling your way back to my blog -- I've decided to publish my full posts in my RSS feed and email updates (which are just emails of my posts, never marketing pushes).  Use the links on the right to sign-up now.

Opportunity Costs and Managing Paid Search Campaigns

Yesterday, I popped into the Online Marketing Summit event here in Chicago for the afternoon. I caught Craig McDonald of SEMDirector giving a lecture on estimating opportunity costs for paid search campaigns.

Craig goes to great lengths to estimate the costs and rewards of increasing paid search programs for his clients. He says that they have moved from asking "what are we doing?" to "what should we be doing?" -- and any marketer needs to be able to say, "Well, sure, you could bid for #1 placement on this keyword term, but it will cost you x and I estimate you'd get y number of increased visits and conversions." It's the last part that is so difficult to estimate right now. Craig expects to see software providers solve this problem soon. Then we could hand over brief excel tables to our clients with the cost of placement and the reward -- and they would hug us and reward us with one of those big bags with money shoved in it.

But my question is, how do we also account for the competition in the market on our estimates? Increasing your budget in paid search is immediately visible to your competitors -- so a static estimate of the cost of gaining prominence in your campaign is good for only one or two days in some keyword markets.

I'm honestly not sure if someone is already tackling this project -- but I would like to see a software solution that analyzes keyword markets (here I mean not only Google, Yahoo, etc, but also for keyword terms themselves) and measures volatility, efficiency and level of competition. Then we could begin to create a common metric across all markets to affect an accurate range to our estimates. So when our clients ask, "I'd like  the top sponsored link for 'cancer research,'" we not only can tell them our estimate of the value of clicks and conversions for that spot, but also the level of competition and focus that keyword will require moving forward.

And again, they will hug us and shower us with money. What? That's never happened to you?

Relaunch & Retain: A Guide to Keeping Your Search Ranking

For Google, we call it the Sandbox -- the effect moving a site over to a new domain or launching a brand new site structure has on the ranking of the site. Plenty of #1 search results plummet after a redesign, never to be heard of again ... I for one think we should call it "Davey Jones' Locker."

When Google returns to your site to have a look over, to kick the tires, to report back what's new and it sees a completely different site altogether -- it gets suspicious. Very suspicious. It moves you from your previous ranking and puts the deep freeze on your site until you prove yourself all over again -- meanwhile, you lose scores of traffic and massive amounts of conversions.

There are ways of speeding your site through the Sandbox -- and returning your site to its proper ranking more quickly. Click through to see my steps and some suggested further reading.

What would you do tomorrow?

Recently I gave a very quick presentation on SEO to a client of our firm -- and it got me thinking about 'how things used to be.'

It used to be that you could dole out a few tricks and boom, your website would jump ranks. It used to be about hiding a little text here, spamming a few keywords there, exchanging a few dozen links and your work was done. But then came Google, Matt Cutts, his spam team.. and their little dog too.

But that's when I got interested in the whole SEO thing, when it became more than 'tricks' and code, when it became about quality content, viral content and reaching your customers. Really, I'm just a lot better at marketing than I am at programming.

SEO is such a flimsy term. Search engine optimization, search engine marketing, we use those terms because we want to peer into the well that is the internet and receive instant gratification for our efforts, but gaming your search ranking can often distract you. Reaching customers, creating conversations, affecting conversions, these should be the objectives of any marketing effort online. SEO is just one weapon in your arsenal. So it's hard when someone asks me about SEO, for me to stay on topic. I think about how things used to be -- when you could beat the search engines in a couple days and then had to sit back and say, "but what about everything else?"

If you could beat Google in a day, what would you do tomorrow, where would your strategy turn next?

What would you do tomorrow if the fixation of today were solved?

Frustrated with the Google Webmaster Tool

Dear Google,

I love your tools. I'm one of those crazy googlers with a blogger account, a packed Calendar, a stuffed Reader, a couple Coop engines, I use the Docs and Spreadsheets, I send out invites to all my friends describing the wonders of Gmail, I've listed my company in the local business center, I run Analytics on all of my sites, I've got Talk installed and actually USE it -- these are all products I've tested out, liked, used repeatedly and even have become a strong advocate for. But there's one product out there that drives me absolutely crazy..........

Hot SEO Posts for Tuesday

From time to time I share a list of great posts I've read over, here's the Hot SEO Posts of the day:

• What Separates Search Marketing Novices from Experts: Rand separates the wheat from the chaff, the weak from the strong, the geeks from the nerds.
• Google Groups Becoming a Gold Mine for SEO Information: Everything you could ever ask or think to ask, or dream of thinking of asking has already been queried.
• The 301 Redirect Headache: For anyone who switches hosts, domain names, or even has down-time. Take a quick read.

How to Read Minds and Predict the Future

What's the difference between a fortune teller and a search marketer? No really, what's the difference? The funny hat? Both rely on a keen understanding of the customer and the environment -- and for search marketing, it all starts with the keyword.

This is Part 4 of the Writing for the Web series, this part of the series will help introduce writers and marketers to keywords, how to research them and how to use them. It's a rather long post, but I hope it's helpful.

Top 7 SEO Elements to Master

SEO strategies can involve more than a hundred aspects of your site, on the page and off, but there are key elements you can focus on to achieve measurable growth.

This is Part 3 of the Writing for the Web series, adapted from several online articles, including SEOmoz's Top Ranking Factors, this part of the series will help introduce writers and marketers to the process of Search Engine Optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization? (Part 1 of Writing for the Web)

This is Part 1 of a document usually only reserved for Imagination employees. As the company grows, we're focused on knowledge management and disseminating as much information throughout the company as possible. We have some brilliant print copywriters who may never touch the web, but we wanted to draft a document, a primer to writing on the web, that everyone can share.