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Ed

Don’t Let IT Run Your Website Project

August 25, 2010

I got a note from a prospect the other day saying, roughly, “We don’t think we need a site architect. Our IT department is going to work with our designer.” Yikes. That short exchange raises so many concerns. I’ll start with the last one first.

Your IT department won’t work with your designer. They will abuse [...]

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Does PPC Spend Affect Natural Search Results?

May 27, 2010

An associate in Northern Arizona pinged me about an odd effect she was seeing in one of her client’s online marketing campaigns. They turned off their PPC campaign for a while and saw a quick and dramatic drop – 50-60% – in traffic from NATURAL search. Not from PPC, which obviously plummeted to zero, but [...]

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Tweaking for Dollars

February 4, 2010

I just finished reading Steve Krug’s latest book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, and was particularly struck by his suggestion that you tweak your website rather than redesigning it. In fact, one of his usability testing maxims is "When fixing problems, always do the least you can do."
"Do the least you can do" isn’t a phrase [...]

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Get Top Search Rankings with Sneedobb

January 28, 2010

I had a lively discussion with a writer and online marketing guy from a local ad agency over beers last night. (Side note: Wednesday is wings night at Sun Up Brewery, the hot wings are tasty and just the right amount of painful, and the Trooper IPA cools the fire with delicious efficiency.) Our conversation [...]

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Using KEI for Keyword Research in Wordtracker

December 14, 2009

If you’re using Wordtracker to do keyword research for search engine optimization, you may find this useful. Wordtracker is a great tool for keyword research, but it does have one puzzling quirk: Wordtracker gives us two indexes – KEI and KEI3 – and they don’t agree.
KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, and it’s a formula [...]

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New Facebook Privacy Settings Aren’t Private At All

December 10, 2009

I’ve been playing around with the new Facebook privacy settings, and was quite surprised to see how much was NOT private any longer. I’ll admit I was a little careless when I accepted Facebook’s suggested new privacy settings yesterday, but I imagine a lot of you will have been, too. Want to see what your [...]

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Getting a Handle on Post-Conference Overload

October 14, 2009

I just got back to my office after the excellent BOLO2009 conference here in Phoenix. (My sympathy to all the great peeps I met there who are still sitting at the airport or on a 5- or 6-hour flight home.) Like so many people I spoke to at the conference, I now have a stack [...]

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Going to BOLO? Grab My Conference Planner

October 6, 2009

I’m attending the BOLO Conference in Scottsdale next week, put on by my friends at Agencyside. If you’re going, and especially if you’re from out of town, download my BOLO Conference Planner. There are so many great workshops, labs, and breakouts at BOLO that I think you’ll find it useful in picking your sessions from [...]

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Social Media DOES Help Your Search Ranking (Just Not Your SEO)

October 5, 2009

I love presenting at conferences and seminars because while I’m teaching, I always end up learning something, too. I was reminded of this at a presentation I gave recently for small business owners at the Small Business Development Center in downtown Phoenix.
The title of my workshop was “Tune Up Your Site for Search Engines,” and [...]

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Four Ideas for Marketing Travel in a Tough Economy

June 30, 2009

With the typically busy travel weekend of July 4th looming, I thought I’d take a look around the Webs and take the temperature of the industry. There’s good news and bad news, and I have a few ideas to share on how to tune your marketing during a down economy.
AAA projects a decrease of about [...]

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