Accidental Link Building Through Blogging »
Posted on May 29th, 2008 by Paul Woodhouse in Business Blogging, SEO | Leave A Comment

At last week’s Next Generation Marketing Conference (which was a second cousin twice removed from exceptional - get yourself to Martinsburg June 12th) I heard something spouted from one of the attendees early on that I haven’t read or heard for a good three or four years. Somebody actually said in reference to blogging:

“I don’t have time to read blogs.”

I’d forgotten my reaction to this statement, but I soon remembered it was akin to taking a punch to the bread basket whilst simultaneously slapping yourself on the forehead ‘doh-ing’ on each slap. A sort of violent anathema to the belly rub head pat trick.

So simple even a bambino can do it.

Continue reading →

TAGS: authority sites, blogging, blogs, keywords, linkbuilding, linking, roi, tinbasher, wikis

The Essential Web Site Check List – Part 3 »
Posted on April 22nd, 2007 by Justin Seibert in PPC, Paid Search, SEO, Search Engines, Web Development | Leave A Comment

First of all, I want to apologize for using Pittsburgh Pirate Ronny Paulino in my post about content management systems (step #2). He’s probably my favorite Bucco and it’s clear that I jinxed him. So no q&a today. The Pirates, set for a resurgence, don’t need me adding bad luck to the cause.

With mea culpa out of the way, let’s explore why you should think about Google, Yahoo! and those other search engines when you’re having your Web site developed or redeveloped. Continue reading →

TAGS: cms, google, keywords, meta tegs, PPC, SEO, Web Development, yahoo

John C. McGinley and Your Business »
Posted on November 30th, 2006 by Justin Seibert in Online Marketing, SEM | Leave A Comment

Let me start off by saying I’m a big fan of John C. McGinley and think he’s a terrific comedic actor. He’s brilliant in Scrubs and was amazing in what must be considered the greatest film of all time ever made about anything, anywhere: Office Space. I also hear tell he’s a great dramatic actor.

I’ll be honest with you, I love his acting, I do. I’m a John C. McGinley fan. But did you watch Scrubs last night? Did you think letting your hair grow out to go for the red jheri curl was really a good idea, John? Really? C’mon. Seriously? I was absolutely fixated on it the entire time.

Here he is, an extremely talented actor, one whose work I already know and love, and I couldn’t get past his hair. Continue reading →

TAGS: copywriting, keywords, PPC

Search Engine Marketing for Schools »
Posted on November 12th, 2006 by Justin Seibert in DOM News, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO | Leave A Comment

When someone asks me what my company does, I usually say that we help businesses increase sales and quality leads through targeted online marketing. If a company is a sales organization and truly wants to increase its sales, we can help.

The one problem I currently have with my description is that not everyone thinks of the words “business” and “sales” the same way I do.

For example, some of the heaviest online marketing investment is for educational facilities. It began with online colleges like Phoenix and has blossomed to brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. Now private schools, boarding schools, parochial schools, and schools for at-risk youth are discovering they can increase enrollment - or just increase the quality of their enrollment - through online marketing.

Online schools can obviously market almost anywhere - they don’t care whether students come from Bar Harbor, ME or Chula Vista, CA. Last month there were over 4.5 million searches for “online college”* - even more than just “college” - so even though there’s a lot of competition, there are a lot of potential “clients” to reach.

The power of geo-targeting allows day schools with physical locations to target only students (or students’ parents) within a drivable distance, say 15-50 miles. Search engine optimization is probably more effective than search engine marketing for these schools unless they’re in major metropolitan areas just because of search volume by geographic region.

Most “colleges” (1.78 million), “boarding schools” (151,000), and “military academies” (22,000) - the numbers in parentheses represent searches per month for those particular terms - may be able to enroll students from any area, but they may also find that they have an easier time selling students from a particular state or region. A school in West Virginia or Arkansas, for example, may not think it’s worth it to try the New England prep scene region and opt instead for the South or Mid-Atlantic.

By advertising on specialities of your school, such as being a “culinary school” (107,000), helping students get “biotechnology jobs” (111,000), or helping “troubled teens” (53,000) you can both differentiate yourself and reach more people with less competition.

By the same token, maybe a boarding school has had students come to it from Japan, Switzerland, or South Korea in the past and wants to try to reach more people from that region. Why not advertise on “American boarding school” (2500) in those regions? You can even have your students help you write the ads and landing pages in the appropriate language.

If you work in admissions for a school that would like to increase its enrollment, please give us a call at 1-800-979-3177 to discuss how we can help you meet your goals.

* A note about my statistics: I base my search volume numbers on the number of overall searches last month on Yahoo for the United States and English speaking Canada, which has about a fifth of the market share of searches in these locations and then multiply these numbers by five (5) to come up with an approximate total # of searches across all search engines per month. Singular and plural versions of the keywords have been combined unless otherwise noted. And remember, these are only numbers for high level keywords. By expanding your list, you can come up with many many times greater numbers of searches.

Of course these numbers will vary by month. If you want to see how search volumes vary over the course of several months, might I suggest Google Trends. A pretty good tool, although search volumes have to be pretty high to show you a trend over the past couple years.

TAGS: google, keywords, SEM, SEO, yahoo

Ghouls, Witches, and Goblins Mean that Holiday Must be around the Corner: Election Day »
Posted on October 25th, 2006 by Justin Seibert in SEO, Search Engines | Leave A Comment

Junk flyers in your mailbox. Telephone calls at dinner time. Mudslinging tv and radio ads. We’ve all been subjected to these types of marketing campaigns for politicians for years. Like most forms of marketing, we’re receptive to some more than others.

But political marketers - although right now it seems to manifest itself at the grass roots level - have a new arrow in their quiver: Google bombing. Google bombing consists of selecting a search term or search phrase, usually negative, and getting a site that you do not own or manage to rank highly in the search engines for that phrase.

The most famous example is “miserable failure”. If you do a Google search for “miserable failure”, you will see the first link shows up is George W. Bush’s bio page on the official White House Web site. Similar tactics have been used to push up Web sites for John Kerry and Al Gore for “waffles” and “miserable loser”, respectively.

Here’s how it works. Search engine optimization, or seo, is the process of getting Web sites to rank higher across the major search terms for various terms. While Google, Yahoo!, and MSN’s Live.com all have different formulae for ranking sites, they all use a large number of variables - up to 100 or more - to determine their rankings.

Even though the formulae, or algorithms, are all different, two items weigh heavily in their rankings: relevant content, and link quantity / quality.

Google bombing focuses heavily on the second item. By getting hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites and blogs to write some text with the keyword in question and then link that keyword to the site they’re targeting, they can acheive their desired effect.

Today comes news of bloggers trying to band together to Google bomb George Allen’s campaign. The goal of the allied bloggers is to get an unflattering CBS news article to return the top ranking when a user searches for “George Allen”.

Google says it has changed its algorithm to make such bombing more difficult. Will the bloggers succeed? Track it yourself. Do a “George Allen” search on Google over the next couple weeks until election day to see what shows up.

TAGS: blogs, bomb, keywords, SEO