All the social media metrics bloggers have disowned impressions as a useful metric, just like all the Web marketers before them. Impressions data is actually very important to understanding how effective your marketing campaign is. Of course, there are some wrenches in the monkey works when it comes to analytics data these days: all those bots out there are clicking on everything and inflating your page views, visits, bounce rates, time on site, etc. Actually, bounce rate is a terrible metric Click to continue […]
Author: Michael Martinez
Should You Put Your Blog on a Subdomain?
It IS okay to put a blog on a subdomain. Believe it or not, there are digital industry bloggers who would still have you believe in pseudoscientific anecdotes that suggest using subdomains for blogs or other content is a bad idea. We have been using subdomains for years (disclaimer: Randy prefers to work with root domains whenever possible) and not once has any subdomain-based Website failed to perform as expected, unless we simply stopped working on it (which occasionally happens). Over the Click to continue […]
How to Create Unique Content for Any Website
I love this question every time it comes up in a client conversation: “Everyone says you have to create unique content, but how do you create unique content for an [X] Website when there are dozens more just like it?” The answer always boils down to the same truism: to be unique and distinctive you have to say something different from everyone else. In practice you have to look at more than just words on the page, though. What makes your Website distinctive includes: Words on the page Navigational Click to continue […]
A New World of Digital Marketing is about to Spawn
While everyone struggles to get their sites into the mobile Web space the Internet is quietly experimenting with new technologies that could, if fully adopted, render all that mobile marketing obsolete. The trend of allocating more and more money toward building a mobile presence in corporate thinking is too slow moving to stay on top of what is happening in Web technology now. In fact, the budgeting inertia will probably delay adoption of the latest Web technologies on many sites for 1-2 years. By Click to continue […]
Link Building Strategies for 2015
Link building is not only not dead, it is making a big comeback. Of course, most of the comeback is by way of private blog networks, which are growing in popularity. There are pitfalls along the PBN pathway, to be sure. Most of the PBNs I look at are poorly designed and may not have much staying power. But the PBN community is feeling more confident these days than a year ago. However, let’s take a look at the kinds of links you can place or ask for without violating search engine guidelines. Click to continue […]
How to Devise a Blog Strategy Matrix
All too many blogs die out before they become successful. They are not failures, not in the traditional sense of “this does not work”. They simply do not become productive enough to sustain the bloggers’ interest in maintaining them. Writing is an emotional exercise. The less emotion you put into it the less you gain from it, and therein lies the problem for a majority of work-for-hire blog posts, the freelance stuff you buy for a few dollars that fails to bring in thousands of daily visitors. Click to continue […]
So You Cannot Recover from Panda 4.1?
I have come across a few Websites that were downgraded by Panda 4.1 last month. More than a few, actually. And some people have sought me out asking for free advice. Well, I don’t have much time for free one-on-one advice but here are some tips for Panda 4.1 victims. Do with them as you will. Ignore All Claimed Recoveries Dated Before December 1, 2014 Some people may have figured out how to recover from Panda 4.1 but their ingenuity won’t be revealed until 1-2 iterations down the road. So anyone Click to continue […]
And Now .@sempoglobal Turns the Discussion to Ethics
I don’t want to repeat everything I wrote at SEO Theory in “SEMPO Calls for SEO Code of Ethics – So What Is Ethical?” but I do want to talk about the problem of defining ethics for a worldwide industry. Ethics are supposed to guide the moral behavior of a group. But just who exactly decides what is moral? Search engine optimization as a label has been plastered across many different types of practices, such link building, content marketing, and article spinning. Conceptually all of these identifications Click to continue […]
Every Product Must Tell a Thousand Stories
When you want other people to talk about your company and your products on the Internet instead of making sales pitches you should turn to story-telling. That is how true content marketing works. It is also how true word-of-mouth marketing works. And if you look at the most popular advertising campaigns in history, that is how they worked. One of the longest-running gags in technology advertising was the “Mac-versus-PC” campaign that Apple used to successfully promote its products. Every commercial Click to continue […]
How to Write a Reflective Blog
There are two types of reflective writing. Traditional composition theory teaches us that reflective writing is the style used when recalling real or imaginary events and sharing insights or lessons learned from those events. You use an imaginary event when writing metaphorically or allegorically, or to protect innocent people from derision or investigation. This kind of reflective writing is very common on journalistic Websites, especially those which feature a lot of op-ed articles. In Web Click to continue […]
Why Making Articles Scannable is Less Than Optimal
Someone once left a comment on an SEO Theory article — one of my longer ones — complaining that it wasn’t scannable. He criticized my writing style, suggesting that people would miss out on most of my points because the articles were not easy to scan. I have seldom tried to make an article easy to scan for time-sensitive readers, especially a theoretical article. While it is true that I can be very wordy, I find that when I take the time to edit my copy and condense it I pack even more information Click to continue […]
Things SEO Bloggers Still Get Wrong about PageRank
It has been about 16 years since Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, the famous Backrub paper. After all these years I still find SEO bloggers writing complete nonsense about the paper. And there is really no excuse for that. Anyone can read the paper. You shouldn’t be relying on what other people have written about it over the years. So why is it so hard for people to get their facts straight? Well, here is yet another blog post about Click to continue […]