Search Engine Marketing

Who owns your social media marketing content?

I had a great question posed to me at a seminar a few weeks ago. The question concerned the ultimate ownership of content, especially when using social media. I knew that FaceBook takes ownership of your content, but I was not sure how the Terms of Service actually read. So I went there to see FaceBook’s legal policy on ownership of Intellectual Property content. And Wow! Was I in for a surprise.

FaceBook’s Terms of Service:

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In…

3 of the most important elements in designing the content of a webpage are color, contrast and font size.

These three elements are amazingly useful when used properly, and mean the difference between action or ignorance. Understanding the important part that these three elements play in capturing the visitor’s attention is critical to today’s online marketing.

Google Analytics finds the Interface

Google is the most recent company to understand the critical role that something as basic as color, contrast and text size have to do with creating a successful user experience. By updating their analytics interface, they have now overcome one of the primary obstacles to gaining great data…

Release date is set for March 29, 2011

Internet Marketing: An Hour a Day

is now on the way to the printers. The release date is March 29, 2011, but you can pre-order your copy today! This exciting project was the work of over 14 months of research and development for presenting a start-to-finish guide to internet marketing. The book covers the testing of your current site or the considerations to starting a new site, and the development of marketing campaigns to extend the visibility of a business.

What Others are Saying…

Already the book has received great reviews from other peers and experts in the industry: “Matt Bailey is one of my favorite speakers…

After a few emails and client concerns about Google Instant, I’m posting my thoughts on the good and bad about Google Instant. Any problems suffered from this new interface may be problems to Google and not businesses. Death of the Long Tail? Absolutely not. Google instant provides searchers with additional tools (words) that ultimately help them refine their query. In other words, it helps the searcher qualify themselves better through suggested phrases. By providing these tools to help searchers better qualify themselves and develop more throughout search terms, it drives them deeper into results, providing greater visibility to more websites. For just a few searches, a searcher is only exposed…

Search Engines do not like ranking report software. Period. In the past, some search engines allowed an API access key to be used for ranking report software, and it can still be utilized today. Without utilizing the API key for the reports, you could be blocked from accessing the search engine. Software-automated queries drain resources, bandwidth, and inflates ad impressions, which is used to compute quality score for Pay-per-Click Ads. In response, Google is particularly aggressive about blocking repeated queries from the same IP address. Google would rather keep advertisers happy then overly aggressive SEO’s who check their rankings incessantly.

Personalized Search

With the advent of creating accounts at the…

Re-designing or redeveloping a website has become a major issue for companies, as they seek to refine their online presence and invest in their websites. However, more than ever, the search engines are the biggest obstacle to website improvement. Planning for a Re-Design I find that in our development and Information Architecture consulting, one of the largest hurdles that we encounter is dealing with the transition from the old website to a newer architecture. For larger sites, planning a transition to maintain the links and rankings held by thousands of pages that will no longer exist is quickly becoming one of the more time consuming tasks. Surprisingly, the main obstacle…

Part 1: Analytics: Is it Fun or Easy? Part 2: Ambiguity is Opportunity

Part 3: Segmentation Finds Motivation

Why Segmentation? Segmentation is the principle that people come to the website for many different reasons, they enter at many different points, the see different pages, and are looking for many different pieces of information. Basically – you can’t treat all of your visitors the same way, neither in the marketing and content nor in the measurement and analysis. As John Marshall of Market Motive (who also developed ClickTracks) famously said, “people are not cattle.” Therefore, we should not treat them as such. Aggregate = Inaccurate Funny enough, when we build reports on aggregate data (page…

Part 1: Is Analytics Fun or Easy

Part 2: Ambiguity is Opportunity

Hamster-Wheel Analytics From Part 1, setting goals is the first and only place to start when developing an analytics strategy. Otherwise, the analyst or the website marketing manager will spend the majority of their time developing reports with numbers on them. The rest of their month will then be spent justifying why those numbers are higher or lower than the previous month. Without goals, there is simply no direction. Large numbers become the goal, and people become enamored with large numbers, even though everyone knows that more visitors is not necessarily the goal. Qualified visitors are the goal . This is hamster-wheel…

Hearing the questions from so many that come to my seminars, one would think that analytics was difficult or hard to grasp. Seriously, it has caused great wonder as to why the concept of analytics would prove such a perplexing and daunting task to so many people. Unlearn Analytics At the heart of the matter, I believe, is that many people have been incorrectly “trained” based on their thinking and practice of analytics. Those that have been online for many years know that the earliest analytics packages were simply traffic counters, hardly “analytics” as we call them today, but more “stats,” as they became more widely known. The basic stats…

This has been stewing for a while. Just brimming under the surface. An brewing anger towards companies that do not understand accessibility, nor the commitment that is required to be accessible, but will give it a light treatment simply as a sales tactic. Basically, I’ve had it. I’m mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore. I’ve worked with too many projects where a vendor has sold a program, content management system or software application as a part of the overall project, and claimed that it was “technically compliant”. “Sure it is 508 compliant,” they say. Not understanding the implications of such a statement. Invariably, the…