Wednesday, October 19, 2011

A Restaurant, Dive Shop, And Bakery Share Their Groupon Experience (TCTV) | TechCrunch:

Three San Francisco businesses recount their experience with Groupon.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Infographic: Why Content For SEO?:

Some good data on why content matters so much for SEO and ranking, all zipped up in a neat little infographic for your pleasure.

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Google Places Mischief
Interesting piece in the New York Times on the dangers of crowdsourcing business information. Google Places, like similar services such as Yelp, uses user-submitted information on local businesses to keep its listings up to date. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous users post incorrect information intentionally, such as indicating that the business has closed down! Read the full article here, along with some additional analysis from The Atlantic Wire here.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Over at the eBlox blog, thoughts on how Google's local deals ambitions are rubbing up against their fight against web spam. Is encouraging quantity over quality in reviews a violation of Google's own principles? Read it here.

Monday, August 01, 2011

Infographic: Are Deals Sites Here to Stay or Just the Latest Craze? - Nicholas Jackson - Technology - The Atlantic

I've got mixed feelings about daily deal sites. As we've discussed in the Web Marketing and Advertising class, if you view them purely as a marketing expense and measure their value by customer acquisition cost, then at least you've got a good basis for determining whether or not they actually make economic sense. This G+ infographic (analyzed in detail by The Atlantic) gives a pretty good idea of how deal sites work and what they actually mean to merchants in terms of cost. For merchants that can afford the customer acquisition cost, there's the secondary issue of capacity - can you handle the rush of deal-seekers? As always, be careful what you wish for. Full article here.

Monday, July 18, 2011

The Top 20 Most Expensive Keywords in Google AdWords Advertising | WordStream

Some interesting info for those of you considering advertising online. Wordstream has compiled a list of the most expensive keywords in Google's AdWords pay-per-click advertising system. "Insurance" takes the cake with a 24% share and a top CPC (cost per click) of almost $55! Check out the infographic here. It might give you a few good ideas on keyword campaigns to avoid!

Monday, June 27, 2011

The New York Times on Content Farms

The paper of record provides a good overview of the hows and whys of content farms, and what Google has launched in the last few months to combat them. If you're looking for a straightforward, layman-friendly explanation of how content farms work and why they make money, you should check it out.

Of course, you can expect the content farms, spammers and questionable SEO companies to adapt in response, but for now, the results are looking pretty good. Read it here.

Friday, June 17, 2011

In class, I often mention "content farms" as an example of the SEO-influenced clutter that makes up most of the internet's online content. It's tough to get your head around exactly how much of the content out there is created solely for gathering clicks and viewers (and thus dollars) as opposed to actually informing people. The amount of junk content is truly staggering, and it's only getting worse.

Here, then, is an interesting tell-all by a "content farm" writer from AOL. It's not pretty stuff, and once you understand how much of this junk is being created, you'll get a much better idea of just how difficult it is for search engines to find the content that matters. As I've discussed before, Google is constantly adjusting its algorithm to rank the junk lower, but it's an uphill battle.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

For Some, Blogs Also Pay the Bills - NYTimes.com

For Some, Blogs Also Pay the Bills - NYTimes.com

During classes, we often talk about making money with content – you write about something you love and magically get paid for it, often using a product like Google's Adsense, which lets you monetize your popularity by selling ads on your site.

This New York Times article highlights some bloggers and entrepreneurs who've actually turned their hobbies and passions into an online profit center. Check it out here.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

A VC: Finding And Buying A Domain Name

A VC: Finding And Buying A Domain Name

Some interesting tips from venture capitalist Fred Wilson on domain names. Wilson is targeting web startup entrepreneurs in the article, but his advice is interesting, and echoes the guidance I give in class. It's tough to come up with something unique, so having some additional options and ideas is always helpful. Of particular interest is Wilson's suggestion to consider "renting to own" domains. It's worth a read if you're working on business and/or domain names. Check it out here.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

How PPC Can Improve Organic Search Conversions

How PPC Can Improve Organic Search Conversions

One question I get asked frequently in class is whether or not advertising on Google's AdWords pay-per-click advertising system can also improve the organic performance of your site. It doesn't directly, but this interesting (and a bit technical) piece over at Search Engine Land describes how you can use your PPC campaigns to help you convert organic leads. Worth a read if you are considering pay-per-click. Check it out here.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Facebook Marketing eBook

Social Fresh has published a very brief eBook (really more of a pamphlet, if anyone remembers those) loaded with tips for making your business Facebook page more dynamic and engaging. Some good info here, especially if you are a consumer-oriented business. As always, those of you with business-to-business selling models should take all the Facebook marketing hype with a grain of salt - engagement with business-to-business brands is limited on Facebook, and it may make more sense to direct your day-to-day engagement activities to LinkedIn. Download the eBook here.

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

The Importance of Google PageRank: A Guide For Small Business Executives

An entry-level primer over at HubSpot on exactly what Google's PageRank is and how it affects your search ranking. For those of you who desire a more thorough explanation of PageRank than what I provide in class, this is a great starting point.

If any of you are trying to optimize a site that sells products that are pretty much identical to your competitors', you might want to check out my latest article for Identity Marketing magazine. I discuss the ups and downs of trying to optimize a site that sells commodity products when hundreds or thousands of other online sellers are offering exactly the same stuff. In this case, I'm talking about promotional products, but the same advice can apply to anyone who sells commodity goods against a lot of other competitors. Check it out here on the eBlox blog.

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Why Did It Take So Long for Newspapers to Copy Groupon?: Tech News and Analysis «

Why Did It Take So Long for Newspapers to Copy Groupon?

Good article over at GigaOm discussing the inability of newspapers – whose bread and butter, after all, is local advertising – to figure out how to get into the fairly simple game of local deals. Poor newspapers - first, Craigslist decimates classified revenue, then the deal sites come along and peel away local advertisers!

Friday, February 25, 2011

Google updates algorithm, targeting content farms

We saw this one coming a while back, and now it's live: Google has made changes to their algorithm that will reduce the ranking of so-called "content farms" like Demand Media or eHow, who create all those wonderful articles like "How to Get Pregnant" (seriously). These articles, though marginally informative, don't really exist to provide unique, useful information; they exist to sell ads on those very pages, and that advertising is big business - Demand Media's IPO was valued at more than one billion dollars.

It remains to be seen exactly how content farm pages will suffer in ranking. Demand Media and other large-scale content providers have been anticipating this change for quite a while, so I expect they're already attempting to work around it. But, there's no denying that web users have staged something of a revolt against low-quality, high-volume content creators, and Google had no choice if it wanted to be perceived as delivering good search results.

The twist? Google, as the largest online ad network in the world, makes millions off the ads that are shown on these sites. Reducing the ranking of high-volume content farm pages will undoubtedly impact Google's ad revenue. No one has any idea how much impact this will have on ranking or revenue, but if you're interested in an in-depth overview of the change, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has put together a thorough, detailed analysis.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Maybe that Groupon deal isn't so awesome

Check out this article over at the eBlox e-commerce blog about MerchantCircle's latest small business survey – some great info on social media and the effectiveness of deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, including this money quote: "55 percent of people who have run a daily deal campaign said they would not do so again."

This Thursday, we'll discuss local deal sites as part of our Web Marketing seminar, and this is good reading ahead for that. The eBlox blog piece is here. The full press release from MerchantCircle can be found here.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Is Google Ignoring The HTML Title Tag More Often?

With all our talk about the importance of title tags, this one comes as a bit of shocker - many webmasters are complaining that Google is ignoring title tags in certain situations and generating its own titles for search engine results. That means that the carefully keyworded, clickthru-optimized titles that you wrote for your pages might not show up when someone searches for your site on Google.

Don't worry, though: they'll always show up on your own site! This may mean that Google is giving less (or no) weight to the keywords and order of title tags, which probably makes sense given that Google focuses pretty much exclusively on page content. Also, Google's own Chrome browser happens to do a terrible job of displaying titles in its tabs if you've got more than a few tabs open, so it's possible that Google feels the tag itself isn't as important as it used to be.

More than likely, though, Google is treating the title tag the way that it began treating the meta description tag a few years ago: it decides what to do with it based on an algorithm. If it's good, brief and non-spammy, Google uses it, but if it looks loaded with keywords, or perhaps over-optimized for click thru, Google will ignore it and create its own. I'll keep you posted on this one....

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets - NYTimes.com

Comprehensive overview of how JC Penney gamed Google's search engine over the holiday season. If you're looking for a reasonably succinct explanation of how "black hat", or under-the-table search engine optimization works, this is a good place to start.

In JC Penney's case, they weren't caught until the New York TImes pointed it out, and they weren't penalized as harshly as others who game Google; they were just demoted in ranking to where they should actually be based on their quality. It's an interesting story, and it shows that even big companies who try to game Google can only be successful at it for so long. Full article here.

Sunday, February 13, 2011


Some interesting detail on what, exactly, AOL was paying for when they purchased The Huffington Post last week. Similar in some ways to the strategy used by so-called "content farms" such as Demand Media, The Huffington Post employs techniques that mine the internet for popular trends and searches. Once a popular set of keywords are determined (e.g. "what time is the Superbowl?"), Huffington Post writers often create articles geared specifically to capturing clicks from search engines for that content.

To be fair, The Huffington Post also creates a good deal of original editorial content that is less engineered toward search engine eyeballs. But their search engine-tuned content chops are what bring in the money and triggered the acquisition. I'll leave the determination of whether they are contributing to the rise of junk content up to you. Full article here.

Friday, February 11, 2011

PayPal's Micropayment Solution Opens to the Public

PayPal's Micropayment Solution Opens to the Public

For those of you selling any kind of digital downloads, I've always recommended E-Junkie's digital delivery service as a simple, fast way to plug in paid digital downloads to your site. Now, PayPal has released a similar product for anyone selling electronic content like ebooks, music or videos. Get the full story here.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Specialization and Cross-Selling

An article from Identity Marketing on how specialization and cross-selling can be a primary strategy for online sellers in very competitive spaces. Worth checking out if you are planning on selling something where the main keywords are very competitive - like "shoes" or "promotional products". Check it out here.