Biznology

Photo credit: The Shifted Librarian

Harsh question, I know, but the search results for many website search engines appear almost random. The reason I am familiar with this situation is because clients often ask me for help. They usually start by telling me that their search engine stinks. Now, sometimes it does, but not usually. More frequently, they haven’t done anything except install a search engine. That works about as well as just installing a CRM system. If you just let your search engine lay there, don’t expect to like the results. Read the remainder of this entry »

Photo credit: Sean MacEntee

Last year I took a look at Google’s new privacy policy and wasn’t that happy with the way it was presented. Too many links to click, hard to backtrack to make sure you read everything, not sure which parts were boilerplate web safety advice vs. Google’s specific policy, and more. But it got me to thinking, which those who know me rightly find dangerous, about what the future of privacy policies really are. It’s clear that no one is terribly happy with the current situation. Users have no idea what they are agreeing to, privacy advocates complain about the lack of transparency and pillory companies, governments also criticize and regulate companies for their behavior, and companies go to great lengths to obscure what they are doing because they know they will be criticized no matter what. I wonder if there is a better way. Read the remainder of this entry »

Photo credit: DavidErickson

Most of you know that Biznology is all about digital marketing, which is a nice hot topic to cover. And you’ll be forgiven if you think that all this focus on shiny new marketing techniques leave little room for the tried and true. But you’d be wrong. Digital marketing, in fact, is way more about marketing than about digital. Even though there are many things that are changing, the basic still stay the same. One of those basics is brand marketing. Far from becoming unimportant, brand marketing is becoming more important to more companies every day. Read the remainder of this entry »

Photo credit: Search Engine People Blog

I definitely had a problem. I had signed to do a corporate training session on search marketing. As I often do, I spent time on the phone with the event organizer and several of the attendees before the session, so that I would understand what the organizational problems were. That way, I know what the participants know and what they don’t know, and I can tailor the information to their actual level of knowledge. I can also customize the topics to address the real problems that they face instead of a “once over lightly on everything.” But I ran into a problem. This team knew zero about analytics and they were adamant that they wanted to stay that way. Yeah, I definitely had a problem. Read the remainder of this entry »

Photo credit: Wikipedia

I am old enough to remember the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. At the end of his life, there were endless reports of his courageous fight to remain alive. When, inevitably  he did pass away, Saturday Night Live aired a news story about Francisco Franco’s'”valiant fight to remain dead.” I am getting to the point where I think we need to do the story on SEO’s valiant fight to remain dead.  I’ve been doing SEO for a long time, and I have grown weary of the “SEO is dead” stories. We’re experiencing another round now and it is still wrong. SEO is not dead. What’s dead is dumb SEO. And you could have seen it coming. Read the remainder of this entry »