Biznology

Photo credit: Lawrence OP

As a trained journalist and former newspaper reporter, I’m conditioned to look and listen for details. It’s a skill that obviously comes in handy when you are doing marketing work. But you may have noticed that a lot of marketing and public relations content is oddly free of details. Companies would rather claim to be a “leader,” to offer “comprehensive solutions,” and tout their “fast-growing” status than provide information that would prove (or possibly disprove) these claims. This is not an accident, nor is it an unconscious action by corporate marketers. A tension exists between peoples’ natural curiosity and the desire on the part of businesses to keep details and specifics to themselves.

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Photo credit: Wikipedia

People love to talk about whether you Web page is in the search index. The search index. Like there’s one. If only it were that easy. First off, there is at least one search index for every search engine, so Bing has one, Google has one, and so does every search engine in every country around the world. But it’s even more complex than that. Google and Bing have a separate search index for every country. And, in fact, they sometimes have multiple search indexes for a single country, when a country has more than one popular language. (I am looking at you, Switzerland.) So what does a search marketer do about making sure a Web page is in the right country index. Read the remainder of this entry »

In last month’s post on this

Photo credit: lars hammar

blog, Are Keywords Market Shares? I made the case for exploiting more valid and qualified keywords to capture more Web customers. In itself, this seems as basic as having a large store serviced by many doors –i.e., one or more doors per street surrounding the store. Everyone passing by interested in what you have to sell might like to step in and have a look at what you have to offer no matter from what street they’d come in from. Even on the Web, letting potential customers walking by on the sidewalk without noticing your store because it’s lacking a door or a showcase (or a valid keyword) still isn’t a good idea. Read the remainder of this entry »

Panda (Photo credit: PeroMHC)

Last month I talked about optimizing your site architecture for Panda. This is of course important, but it is only one component in optimizing for Panda. As everyone who read Mike Moran’s recent post on this blog knows, Panda rewards quality content. And Penguin punishes low-quality sites. So content quality is obviously very important for search effectiveness, perhaps more important than site architecture. Read the remainder of this entry »

Image via CrunchBase

One of the oddest things about all the updates that Google has made over the last few years concerns the lack of impact that some of the changes have had on some businesses I know. Google Panda and other ranking algorithm changes have caused significant drops in traffic for many of these companies.  But that’s not the odd thing. What’s strange, at least at first glance, is that a number of these companies have suffered only small drops in sales. This goes against everything we’ve ever thought about in search marketing–I mean, the reason that you work so hard in search is to get traffic to your site, because the more traffic you get, the more you sell–right? Google says wrong–at least partially wrong–and they have a good reason why. Read the remainder of this entry »