Internet Marketing Blog

Google just gave some free, basic SEO advice for non-profits that actually applies to every website. As we’ve been saying in various posts for years: Use good page titles. Write good page descriptions. Properly apply heading styles. Use ALT text for images. We’re here to help. Contact us if you have questions about these suggestions [...]

Yahoo! Clues is a new tool that offers insight into search trends. Think of it as a version of Google Trends that only provides a month’s worth of data. It does try to provide additional demographic information such as gender and income breakdown, but this data almost certainly only applies to the very small portion [...]

A friend recently pointed me toward an article that says “SEO is Dead” because of the rise of Social Media Optimization, or SMO. The article is wrong, and here’s why: First, search traffic is still growing. People still use search to find products and services, background information, reviews, and competitive pricing. People may get ideas [...]

When optimizing for local searches, it’s important to recognize the difference between two distinct user segments. Bruce Clay defines these as “recovery” and “discovery.” When someone knows your business but needs contact or location information, they will be searching on brands and company names. E.g. “Bob’s Widgets Seattle”  The discovery group will search on unbranded [...]

This week Microsoft sent emails to US advertisers stating that Bing is beginning to power Yahoo natural search results: This week, Bing will begin powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada. This only affects natural search, not paid results at this time. Microsoft is still [...]

Submitting a sitemap to Bing is trivially easy. Simply go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml, replacing “www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml” with your website’s sitemap URL. Unfortunately this method provides no feedback about the success of processing your sitemap or if errors were encountered. The more advanced method is to utilize Bing Webmaster Tools. Adding your site enables you to see information [...]

Now that Google is allowing searchers to specify the location of search results, it is more important than ever to ensure search engines know where your click-and-mortar business is located. We recently wrote about local SEO (part 1, part 2), and now would be a good time to take basic steps to improve the likelihood [...]

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 [...]

Recently we blogged about local SEO and local store marketing. There we talked about adding local listings to online service directories. In this installment, we’ll provide some specifics about improving the ranking of your Google local listing and visibility in map results for geographic searches. David Mihm has written an excellent report on local SEO. [...]