Search Engine Placement

Many of our customers ask if they should implement a pay per click marketing campaign along with search engine optimization. The short answer is…… there is no short answer. I’ve found pay per click marketing to be an excellent resource for clients that meet any of the following factors:

• Your web-site is new (since SEO takes longer for new sites ppc helps fill the void).
• You have a regional service and more products then you do web pages.
• You have an e commerce related site.
• Your releasing a new product or service and need fast results.

Pay per click marketing may not be needed for customers that only have a few products and services and or already have a established site with a good link popularity. In these cases search engine optimization will more then suffice (and save you money).

If you still have any questions whether PPC is right for you don’t hesistate to contact me.

Article submission marketing is so 2006, but unique article submission is very 2007. See most SEO’s and “internet marketing” companies are going about it all wrong. The typical company will write an article (or worse take one from your site) and submit it to a few hundred article directories.

The problem with article submissions is the potential for duplicate content. You either gain very few back links (removed for duplicate content) or worse you get penalized if the article is hosted on your site.

To really benefit from article submissions; each article you submit must be original or at least original enough to not look like duplicate content.

Shameless Self Plug: Use our article submission service. We re create each article to so every directory has a unique listing. The end result: you gain maximum link juice and many many more back links.

For once, Yahoo is leading the pack with it’s new release of Yahoo Pipes. The new service essentially allows users to ‘remix’ their own custom RSS feeds based on existing data on the web. Yahoo provides this explanation of their latest toy:

“Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.”

For more detailed explanations on the tool, check out posts by fellow bloggers Tim O’Reilly, Anil Dash, and Nik Cubrilovic.

Google has added the ability to check your sites back links in Google Webmaster Tools . And SEO’s everywhere rejoiced. It has been ages since Google has allowed access to site back links, mostly because of pesky SEO’s using it to our advantage. With this tool, you can only see links to your own site. You actually have to authenticate that the site is yours. Fore more info, check out the Google Blog.

Right now the nation is a buzz with pre-game parties for the Super Bowl XLI. As the Super Bowl becomes more of a national holiday each year for families and sports fans, the ad campaigns during the Super Bowl are getting more and more of an attraction as well. Companies are dishing out a cool $2.6 million for a 30-second ad spot this year.

One company whose ad will be aired tonight may end up getting even more exposure for the ads they didn’t air. GoDaddy.com is pushing the envelope again with their risque Super Bowl commercials, which only one out of three will air because the other two were rejected by CBS. Banking on the ideas that “sex sells” and “any publicity is good publicity”, Bob Parsons is quite happy with any attention these commercials may bring. In a response to one blatently negative review, Mr. Parsons had this to say about the ads:

“After reading Mr. McCracken’s review, I sat back and smiled. I loved the review. In a nutshell, Mr. McCracken told me that our commercials are indeed working. You see, after most people read his review, if they look up any commercial at all, they will look up Go Daddy and watch our commercials.”

Hell, they’ve even done themselves the favor of posting their commercials on YouTube to possibly spark a little viral campaigning!

GoDaddy.com Super Bowl XLI Commercials

We often get emails from clients asking where they can do their own preliminary keyword research for free. There are a number of options out there, but they are often bogged down with limited bandwidth or return limited results because of the databases they pull from. WordTracker.com, one of the more popular keyword research websites has just released a free keyword research tool giving users an estimate of daily search volume for each keyword.

The free keyword research tool only returns the first 100 search phrases and doesn’t include additional information, such as competition and KEI analysis, but is still a great resource for quick, preliminary keyword research. Thanks, WordTracker!