Internet Marketing Blog

You know your products and services inside and out. This knowledge can be a critical challenge when communicating with customers. They may not be experts, or they have a perspective and terminology that’s different from yours. The good folks over at SPOS recently wrote about this and gave an excellent example: Customer language is often [...]

Google just blogged about synonyms as they related to searcher intent. They provide several examples of how a concept as simple as a synonym complicate natural language processing. This also brings up some important recommendations for site owners with respect to SEO. Prospective customers type in all kinds of variations on your most obvious keywords [...]

AdWords has added the ability to see what keywords are triggering ad impressions without running a Search Query Report. Simply open up an ad group to view the keywords, and a button will appear above the keyword list that says “See search terms….” Clicking on it will present you with two options where you can [...]

This post was prompted by many discussions with clients in which we attempt to summarize SEO and PPC performance in practical, easily digestible forms. There is frequently a tendency for clients to oversimplify evaluations to “it works” or “it doesn’t” based upon summary data. For SEO, we try to summarize performance in terms of increases [...]

Here’s a tip for finding negative keywords for PPC campaigns as well as websites to link to for linking campaigns. Set up Google Alerts for those keywords your advertising on. Depending on the popularity of your keyword(s) you should start receiving emails from Google pretty quickly with links to various articles, blogs and websites. It’s [...]

Given enough time, personnel, and money it is theoretically possible to improve rankings on just about any keyword. However, few us have the luxury of unlimited resources. Under ordinary circumstances, we have to choose what keywords are likely to provide the most benefit for the least effort. This is where assessing competitiveness is so critical: [...]

Google recently released their 2007 edition of Zeitgeist, an assessment of popular search terms and trends for the year. While this has little actual utility for most organizations, it is entertaining. Among our observations of their observations: Searches spiked for several notable events, including Anne Nicole Smith’s death, the Virginia Tech shooting, nude photos of [...]

Google’s Webmaster Tools shed light on how your website is seen by Google and do various indexing-related tasks. Like the Yahoo Site Explorer we described earlier,  the best functionality is limited to those who can upload a file and thus “verify” themselves as site owners. Once you have done so, you’ll be able to do [...]

Today I was conducting some keyword research on specific health topics, and I was collecting data from the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. As noted in previous posts, the tool’s stemming can result in significant ambiguity. Another big problem is that the data comes from Yahoo’s search network which Search Engine Marketers like us often request [...]

I’ve been doing keyword research for a client and found this little gem of a bug (feature?) in the Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Try searching on “space background” and compare the results to what you find with “space backgrounds”. Note the first result in each case (as of May 31, 2006) shows 70,799 searches. Well, [...]