Ah springtime.  The greatest time of the year. Warmer weather, cherry blossoms, baseball, and, this year, neon colors.  Everywhere. Color took a bit of a break from our lives the past few years as the entire world seemed to teeter on inevitable collapse, but it’s back now, and I, for one, am happy about it. From the skinny jeans (for women and, unfortunately, men too) that come in colors matching every shade of Avery Hi-Liter, to the incredibly popular Cole Haan Oxford shoes that sport neon yellow soles, to the numerous handbags bright enough to make any dark alley light up like it’s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Internet Marketing Industry | Retargeting & Remarketing | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column

Your business website is beautiful, full of interesting content, images, and cool functionality. You’re feeling good -- until you try to view it on your smartphone or tablet. If your website has not been optimized for an audience on-the-go with a smaller screen, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to drive physical traffic to your business. But effectively maximizing your mobile visibility includes far more than just the aesthetics of your website. Now that we have your attention, it’s time to tackle the essentials of optimizing your business website for mobile consumption. Ca [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Mobile Marketing Column | Search Marketing

Like most fellow zealots, my original love affair with search was all about the glories of being served up "consumer demand" -- and being able to market and optimize to that demand. Expressed demand right at your fingertips was a beautiful thing. Following the ghostly spending period of 2001-2002, it made it much more palatable to jump back into digital -- and, of course, to guide other marketers to do the same. As the past decade has roared on and our media marketplace has been practically propelled by consumer demand, influence, path and usage -- we have built our house around this con [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column

The wolves are attacking Google again over its search quality. Last year, they were fed the Panda Update to fend them off. This year, Google may throw an Over Optimization Penalty to the pack. No, that doesn't mean SEO is dead once again. But it may sadly confuse SEO with spam. It also doesn't mean the penalty will improve Google's results. Google already has problems enforcing all the other penalties it has rolled out over the years. Jumping The Shark "Jump the shark" is a reference to a Happy Days episode where The Fonz did a water ski jump over a shark. It was later seen as a mil [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Google: SEO | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column

Vendor/Self-Appointed Industry Expert:  So, what’s your Pinterest strategy? Me: I don’t have one yet. Vendor/Self-Appointed Industry Expert:  Really?!? Are you crazy?  You are missing out!  All your customers are there!  Our agency/technology/approach will make you tons and you can really capitalize on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Me: Sigh.  Please go away. Be honest. Most of you are reading this story only because you saw the Pinterest logo and got excited aren’t you?  I spent the last week at eTail West and the above conversation happened no less than a zi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column

Fire your marketing department! Social media is free! Have you heard the news? It’s been trumpeted recently in no end of misleading, link-baity headlines such as these: P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To Advertise On Facebook P&G slashes marketers in lieu of free social media P&G CEO Discovers Social Media Marketing Is Free! P&G to cut 1600 staff after CEO discovers digital media is free‎ In Internet marketing, "free" is a dirty enough word to be a serious deterrent to email delivery when used in a subject line. Apparently, this doesn't hold [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Facebook | Facebook: Marketing | Google | Google: Marketing | Search Marketing | Social Media Marketing Column

To understand how Google became the world's most popular search engine, think of it as a giant vote counting machine. That's why there's so much attention these days on Google's competition with Twitter and Facebook. They're the new, popular ways that people are voting for things they like, casting ballots that Google can't easily count. Search 1.0: Counting Words On The Page Let's go back to the beginning of web-based search engines. When names like AltaVista and Lycos were ruled, search engines figured out what pages from across the web should rank well largely by looking at the words on t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Facebook | Google: Google +1 | Google: Google+ | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column | Twitter

Remember how Google ended up penalizing its Chrome browser in its own search results because of a sponsored video campaign that violated Google's own paid link guidelines? The company behind that campaign, Unruly, has now emailed instructions to those in its network to help prevent that type of thing from happening again. How Google Penalized Itself With Unruly's Help Unruly was hired by Essence, which in turn was hired by Google to help promote the Google Chrome browser through video ads. The campaign that emerged had a video about Google Chrome appearing in posts that had little to do wit [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: SEO | Link Building | Search Marketing | Top News | Video

All hail the vision of truly socialized search -- where results and experience are personalized, drawing on social graphs, browsing history and reams of  input data to deliver on the concept. Our expectations for absolute interconnectivity of environments and extensive personalization have us drooling over this concept of search at a glance. But, taking the official and absolutely imperfect debut of Google’s Search Plus Your World as an illustration, we can safely say the market reality is out of whack with this vision.  We are nowhere near the promise of the real deal on this. Yet, our [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Facebook | Google: Google+ | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column | Social Media Marketing | Twitter

One of the long-standing myths about Google's search results is that they're completely computer-generated with no human input or involvement whatsover. But, since at least 2005, Google has had a program that involves regular searchers reviewing the quality of their search results. There are several different job titles involved, but the people who get paid to review Google's search results are commonly called Quality Raters. Their work has largely been a mystery over the years, but over on Search Engine Land, we've just published what might be the first of its kind -- an interview with [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Google: SEO | Search Marketing

If you publish web pages that might be considered too heavy with ads "above the fold," be warned: Google has announced an algorithm update that aims at ad-heavy content. Google calls it the "page layout algorithm," and says the change is based on complaints from users that are unhappy with having to scroll to find the actual content on the page and mainly seeing ads, instead. But as is often the case, Google isn't providing any specific guidance on how many ads above-the-fold are too many. On the other hand, they do say that the algorithm change will impact less than one percent of gl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Google: SEO | Search Marketing

With Jerry Yang stepping down from Yahoo's board of directors today, I couldn't help but think back to one of my first encounters with him, a fond memory shared by the shrinking pool of veteran internet marketers. It was the day Jerry started the Yahoo Priority Queue. Yahoo The Gatekeeper Think of how big and powerful Google seems today, in the world of search. Back in 1995, Yahoo was that way. It was the "gatekeeper," the company that some people wondered if it needed to be regulated, as Yahoo seemed to have so much control over where people went on the internet. Getting listed in Yahoo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Search Marketing | Top News | Yahoo

Here we are, just about two weeks into 2012, and I'm willing to bet a lot of us have already broken a New Year's resolution or had one of our 2012 predictions proven wrong. (Did you predict that Google would get through the year without any controversy? Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again. Better luck next year.) If you didn't make any resolutions or predictions of your own, you're almost alone. You work in an industry that seems to love them: resolutions, predictions, trends and tips -- from practically every corner of the online marketing industry. And not just the industry, but mainstream sou [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Email Marketing | Features & Analysis | Internet Marketing Industry | Mobile Marketing | Search Marketing | Social Media Marketing

US Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum's near win in the Iowa caucus results drew renewed attention to his "Google problem" not only from the media but also in bits last night on both Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. They're the latest in a year-long laughfest over how he appears in Google and Bing. Santorum's Google Problem As we covered in depth on our sister-site Search Engine Land yesterday, a search for "santorum" on Google -- as well as Bing -- brings up a definition of "santorum" as being a by-product of anal sex, a listing itself that's a by-product [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Features & Analysis | Search Marketing | Top News

Google has created quite a stir with what appears to be a sponsored blog posts campaign over the holidays -- a campaign that may have led Google to gain inbound links as part of the paid blog posts. And, if that's what happened, it raises the possibility that Google might have to ban itself for violating its own guidelines against paid links. Danny Sullivan's article on Search Engine Land, Google's Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome, has the details about a campaign that seems to have led to hundreds of blog posts in late December (many from "mommy blog" sites) that are suppose [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Google: SEO | Search Marketing

How important was it to Google to remain the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser? Important enough that Google agreed to pay three times more in this deal than it did in 2010. AllThingsD is reporting that Google's new deal with Mozilla is costing a cool $300 million per year. That's about triple what Google paid in the previous deal: According to Mozilla's 2010 annual report, Google accounted for about 84% of Mozilla's $123 million in revenue, which comes out to about $103 million. Why did Google agree to triple its costs on Firefox when it has Chrome, its own growing web [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Firefox | Google: Chrome | Google: Partnerships | Search Marketing | Statistics: Web Browsers | Top News

A vitally important first step to the attribution management process within a search marketing campaign is to gather all the data associated with the “touches” that have been experienced by your target audience both as a result of being exposed to all your marketing efforts and direct traffic. Each “touchpoint” associated with each individual has numerous attributes or characteristics associated with it. For example, each search impression or click has attributes such as keyword, engine, placement/ranking, ad creative, offer, landing page, day-part, and more. Each display ad impres [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column

Quora took a big step beyond being a a question-and-answer site with today's announcement of a new product called Boards. It opens the door for Quora users to post and share information outside of the standard Q&A format. As Quora's Adam D'Angelo explains in today's announcement, Boards was driven by the way people consume information on Quora. As Quora has grown, we've learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in question and answer format or not. And behind every question people ask is something larger they want to know more ab [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Quora | Search Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Top News

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act H.R. 3261) is proposed legislation before the U.S. House of Representatives that would require search engines, advertisers, ISPs and other key internet players to police content and take active moves to take down allegedly infringing content. It's a very broad bill, with many problematic aspects for online marketers. If SOPA (and/or its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act - PIPA) are signed into law, the implications for marketers are significant. Here's a Q&A covering the most important aspects of the bill that all marketers both need to know [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search Marketing | Features & Analysis | Legal | Legal: Copyright & Trademark | Search Marketing | Top News

I've been doing affiliate marketing for over a decade now. Back then, creating an SEO strategy for your affiliate-based website was pretty cut and dried. Pick a market and buy a keyword-laden domain name. Next you'd do a search on the Overture keyword tool (I'm completely dating myself here) and pick the top 50 keywords in your niche. Then you'd create pages for each with about 400 words of content on each one and then start working on your link development with some reciprocal linking. And if you were really advanced in your link development strategies, you'd also work on some one-way link [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Affiliate Marketing Column | Channel: Search Marketing | Search Marketing