Here is a blog post, used with permission, from a Female under the age of 25. Why is the age relevant? Because she is the typical consumer in today's economy. If you don't take notice to her behaviour then in 5 years your business is going to be left out in the cold.... Enjoy (the article)! Read the rest of this entry »
Webmasters trying to vie for the top spot in the organic search results like to pay attention to all the latest news and changes from the almighty Google. The last algorithm change called 'Caffeine' came out a few months ago and I can honestly say I didn't pay much attention. Sure I caught a few important tidbits here and there, but overall I never developed interest.
Why? It may seem counter intuitive since SEO is a crucial component of a holistic web marketing strategy, but I've learned over the past 7 years watching Google that some things don't change. Read the rest of this entry »
The power of user generated reviews on web sites or general business directories is powerful. Consumer markets ranging from Future Shop to Canadian Tire all permit a level of user generated reviews for products. Why is this crucial to generating sales online?
Firstly, the web is used as a vehicle to research new purchases. It's been shown that negative reviews actually do more to turn a sale then positive ones.
Secondly, negative reviews (and positive) permit the business owners to reply and engage the issue. Read the rest of this entry »
Think social media is a bust? If your boss thinks radio and newsprint are the way to go then you either have a very tiny and late adopting niche market, or your boss is a nut job. This week we've been delivered two astounding pieces of info that solidify social media as THE marketing vehicle of tomorrow. The thing is, it's already here TODAY! What do I mean?
Check out Old Spice, where I could smell like the Old Spice dude, but man, I just don't look like him....
Great post at Endgadget with Google engineer Amit Singh that provides some delightful insight with how Google searches that accentuates the search engine's continued innovation.
Of particular interest in Engadget's summary include: Read the rest of this entry »
Venture Beat is reporting new numbers for Twitter that solidify its position as the #2 'search engine' behind Google.
Over 800 million searches a day, or 24 billion in a month, for Twitter. That puts it at a search traffic level that's 25% of Google and more than Bing and Yahoo! combined.
Implications? Read the rest of this entry »
Google is now thinking about evolving beyond sitemaps.org protocol in favour of an all encompassing format that can contain videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information.
For full details visit the Google webmasters blog.
An interesting discussion is heating up over at SEO Chat where I am one of the moderators.
The conversation is about LSI, or latent semantic indexing. That's a fancy way to describe how search engines may deliver synonymous results for a query that doesn't contain particular keywords.
The relevancy to SEO directly is almost zero. In fact, so-called SEO firms delivering LSI services are blowing smoke in your face--it's simply a scam.
So what about LSI? What can we take away, what's useful, and what should we ignore? Read the rest of this entry »
