It’s pretty sad watching SEOs battle the pros (Search Engine Journal) and cons (Learning SEO Basics) of using SEO to combat complaint sites that can rank highly and spread negative information/experiences about a product, company, or brand.
Why is it sad? Because it’s so much more effective to add well written, well-thought out responses to complaints and offer solutions and follow up THAT YOU ACTUALLY DO PERFORM AND DOCUMENT.
Dell had that nightmare trying to bully people into removing pictures of flaming laptops…other companies’ fun and contrite response letters have gone viral and done wonders to repair damage to the brand. Your choice in 2008?…
My work life straddles design and marketing, and corporate vs. small-business approaches to each. And I’m seeing a lot of variation in how people understand and advocate for SEO strategies.
I see larger businesses with a team of marketing specialists are leaning past plain-old keyword optimization. I personally suspect that they were led in this direction by their lust for Flash and dynamic page technologies that cloak content and disorient spiders. And now that bots can better read Flash, along comes Silverlight; the jury is out on the future of rich-media page readability.
So, to compensate for having hard-to-search pages, and relying…
[Prologue: This post is going to be about brand connection, bear with me.]
Remember Biden being asked if he’d take the VP spot on Obama’s ticket? He told the journalist that he’s specifically asked Obama NOT to ask him and let him know in no uncertain terms that he did not want to be VP. But he added that of course if the candidate asks you to be on the ticket you don’t say no, so that’s WHY he specifically asked NOT…etc.
Biden may or may not be sincere in his demands — he’s on the short list of just a few possibilities this…
Sometimes I wish my life had a site map. Imagine how easy it would be to explain your history and experiences to other people. Unlike a resume, people could learn everything and anything without restriction and it would all be organized and categorized neatly in one place. Since life is not an Orbits commercial where we have floating icons to choose from, it seems we are out of luck… but more importantly, what about your site?
When it comes to development, Meta data, content, titles and links are very important, but a lot of designers seem to forget about the site…
In 2000, Congress passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) pertaining to the collection of personal information from children under 13 years of age. In plain legalese, the law spells out a web site operator’s responsibility for protecting children’s privacy and safety online. Regardless of the speed at which Congress legislates operator responsibility, technology inevitably races forward at a much faster pace. Yet, the rules for operating retail, informational, gamer and other types of sites are made clear by COPPA and enforced by the FTC. This post will attempt to spell out those rules as succinctly as possible.
Who Must…
The top 50 online advertisers (measured by media value, via ClickZ) in April of this year included 21 financial institutions (A full 42% of the biggest spenders). The top spender 
among those was Countrywide Home Loans, which has been at the center of the mortgage crunch. I wonder what share financial institutions — especially mortgage related ones — had in previous years?
Compare: 7 out of the 50 online advertising giants are tech companies, 6 are media and entertainment, and 4 are retail. The rest have smaller shares.
Oddities: University of Phoenix makes it onto the list twice at 4 and 24 (online…
Haven’t posted in a while as there have been some really great festivals going on in the Chicago area, with the biggest being The Taste of Chicago.
Anyways, came across this article by Lee Odden at Top Rank, where he delves into the notion of SEO being used for reasons other than sales.
Probably often overlooked or even ignored is using SEO for customer service purposes. Customers have been forced to use Google and other search engines to search company web sites because of how awful the integrated search is. Extending from that thought is using analytics to determine the information customers are…
