Pay Per Click advertising can be a great way to drive traffic to your site but in the wrong hands, it can burn money. If you bid on the wrong keywords or focus on the wrong audience, you can end up spending a fortune without any measurable return. If you want to dip into the PPC landscape yourself, or work out if a PPC provider knows what they’re doing, consider these five essential stages of the process. 1. Audience. First up, determine your audience. Who will search for you? Who will click on your Adwords, Overture or other pay per Read More

There’s been quite a bit of discussion about Coca Cola’s evolution of its content strategy. For many years, the company dominated the advertising space – globally – but the Internet has forced a change in its strategy. Rather than ‘Creative Excellence’, they’re now after ‘Content Excellence’. One commentator, Jeff Bullas, believes there are 5 lessons to be learned from Coke’s new approach. Lesson 1: Create Liquid Content As Jeff Bullas notes, the purpose of content excellence is to create ideas that are so contagious, they can’t be controlled. Coke calls this “liquid content”. It means creating content that begs to be Read More

Matt Mullenweg, during his recent “State of the Word” presentation, fielded a number of interesting concepts that are driving development priorities for the ubiquitous open source software.   The most intriguing, to me, was that of desire paths (wikipedia definition here), which Matt referenced to show how Automattic was watching the trends in plugins and themes to see what features were most in demand or lacking from WordPress. This concept makes perfect sense for application development, but it’s also a great similitude for how we approach SEO.  While I’m not an SEO expert (that title belongs to our resident Paul Fleming), Read More

Some clients ask a lot of questions, some just go along for the ride. Sound familiar? I prefer clients who want to understand the Search Engine Marketing journey and who take the time to ask questions as they come up. These clients are often, although not always, more engaged and better partners in their campaign. Many times this is the difference between a campaign that has a hard time getting off the ground, and one that is more successful. As in any human communication, there are frequently unasked questions lurking behind the ones that are given voice, and the person doing Read More

During the process of getting to know a new client, and providing him with the early deliverables for his SEO campaign, he had a simple request.  Could we meet in person instead of by phone to discuss the project progress to date, and give him some help understanding the ‘jargon’ we used in the reports? Jargon? Upon reviewing his report, I saw that there are numerous places where we indicate that there is an action item associated with a particular section of the site, without fully explaining what or where the item in question resides or even if it can Read More