• The 1% Of News That Matters
    I first heard about the earthquake in Japan from a cab driver in Milwaukee. By the time I got to the airport, it was all over the monitors. And by the time I could find a Wi-Fi connection, the first details were just starting to emerge.
  • Searching For Some Integrity
    I have to admit, I'm in a reflective and sentimental mood these days. Last month my wife and I welcomed our third child into the world. During my short paternity leave away from the office, I found myself thinking about life's possibilities for my newborn son. My job as his father is to be a positive influence. I need to teach him to treat others with dignity, and to act with the utmost integrity in everything he does in life. So with a not-so-subtle twist of irony, you might imagine my shock over recent headlines I encountered from around the …
  • Why Rankings Still Matter In SEO Reporting
    Yesterday at South by Southwest, Danny Sullivan held a Q&A session with the search engines, with Matt Cutts representing Google and Duane Forrester representing Bing. While I followed the session on Twitter, one comment especially caught my eye: there seemed to be some general consensus that rankings are no longer a valuable metric in SEO reporting. So is it time to abandon rankings as an SEO success metric?<
  • Video Increasingly Key To SEO And Content Strategy
    Since Google and Bing introduced blended search engine results pages that often highlight videos and images near or at the top of the page, search marketers have been leveraging video content to get to the top of SERPs or to more completely dominate a SERP. In fact, start-up and emerging brands are often able to break into page-one results they might otherwise be locked out of for months (or years) by using smart video strategies.
  • Search (For The Rest Of Us)
    Last month I outlined some simple and practical search-related tips to keep clients (and bosses) happy. As I was writing this, I realized that there are a myriad of ways that search marketing acumen has -- or will - become as common as owning an email address. So, why is this relevant to search marketing professionals? In my experience as a software entrepreneur and general geek, I've seen the same pattern repeat itself over and over, since the early days of the Internet. When there's technology involved, professionals focus too much on the technology, and too little on the other …
  • A Search History Of TED
    I always find it interesting to look at a cultural phenomenon through the lens of search. Search provides a fascinating and quantitative look at the growth of interest in a particular topic. Having spent all last week immersed in the cult that is TED (I was at TEDActive in Palm Springs, Calif.) I thought that this was as good a subject as any to analyze.
  • The Me-Ification Of Search And Social
    Chris Copeland wants to be #1. Correction: Chris Copeland knows that Chris Copeland is already an expert, a search and social marketing guru, but he wants Google to know that he is all of that and for Google to give him the self-glorifying satisfaction that comes with one thing: Chris Copeland ranking #1 in the Goggle search results for the term Chris Copeland.
  • Lessons From Overstock And Forbes: Three Tips to Avoid Violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines
    After the hubbub about JCPenney.com a few weeks ago, last week Google appears to have made an example of Overstock.com and Forbes. While Overstock was offering students with .edu accounts discounts for providing .edu links to the Overstock site, Forbes was accused of selling links for PageRank. Were these violations intentionally violating Google's webmaster guidelines for SEO gain? For webmasters and SEOs everywhere, it's time to re-evaluate your own site(s) and ensure that you don't get caught possibly violating Google's guidelines. Here are my top three tips to avoid doing so, based on the most common mistakes I see.
  • From SEO To Social Media, Getting All Channels To Drive Traffic
    The old ecology mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle" is one that could be applied to marketing efforts today. But as recent history has shown, it takes an awful lot of people working in concert to achieve objectives as simple as these.
  • Content Is King -- Analytics & KPIs Are Royal Subjects
    It's been an interesting string of weeks, with a couple of groundbreaking announcements from Google. While both are aimed at improving relevance, one is more algorithmic and mathematical in terms of assessing the quality of content -- while the other is consumer feedback to essentially cross-reference the same quality content metric. Here's how I think these changes will improve the quality of search results for consumers, and the impact they will have on advertisers.
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