By Daniel Goldstein

Most of our previous blog-posts on search-engine marketing (SEM) have focused on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search-engine optimization (SEO). Here, we wanted to address another important aspect: linkbuilding.

As you may know, Google ranks search results based primarily on two factors: relevance and authoritativeness. The first is obvious: If you search for “Christmas gifts,” you do not want the latest Philadelphia Phillies scores to appear. In simplistic SEO terms, on-page optimization is an effort to tell search engines the topic of each page of your website.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

The end of the year is a time when many companies review their performances, analyze their numbers, and strategize for the future. Since we often write about the latest trends in marketing, public relations, and communications, we wanted to see which of our articles have been the most popular over the past year – and discuss how they may hint at possible strategies in the future as well.

So, without further ado, here were our most-popular marketing blog-posts of 2011 (in descending order based on the number of external page-views):  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

A lot of business and marketing is impossible to measure quantitatively but still widely regarded as valuable. Take branding, for example. Companies spend millions on logos, product appearance, communications, and guerilla marketing – among countless other tactics – to ensure that consumers think of a desired connotation when they think of a brand. It’s not a cheap endeavor – it can take years to build a solid brand.  Read more...

By Daniel Goldstein

In February 2011, Google unveiled the first in a major series of updates collectively termed “Panda” to its search algorithm. The latest Panda update occurred on November 18, and many websites lost search-engine rankings (and thereby traffic) on and after that day. See the comments in this post for just a few examples of the many that we have seen.

What the Panda updates aim to do overall is devalue the rankings of poor-quality websites including content farms, spammers, built-for-advertising sites, and those with little original content or text that was copied (or “scraped”) from elsewhere. The most-egregious offenders sometimes have their sites removed from Google’s index completely. In a nutshell, Panda wants to judge the quality of a website from a human point-of-view rather than that of a machine.  Read more...

The following is the fourth part of a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.

Moore opens with a quote from Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably aren’t going to get there.”

The fundamental principle to cross the chasm is to pick a specific niche market and focus all your resources on achieving the dominant position in that segment.

It sounds simple but most organizations fail.

Why?

According to Moore, it’s a high risk, low data decision.  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

When I was a kid, I loved “Alf” – an NBC comedy that ran from 1986 to 1990 and was about a lovable, sarcastic space-alien living with a suburban California family. I even had an “Alf” stuffed animal that my mother had bought for me when I was six or so.

So, when I was bored one day, I scanned Facebook pages for TV shows, saw one for “Alf,” and “liked” the page. I had forgotten about the “like” until much later, when I saw this item in my Facebook news-feed earlier today while catching up with the latest news from my friends and family:  Read more...