SEO efforts should be held to the same ROI standards as other marketing endeavors. Measuring incremental lift will prove benefits or lack thereof.
We’re hosting the marketing carnival this week and next. Jeff Larche of DigitalSolid and Ilya Vedrashko of MIT’s AdvertisingLab discuss smart billboards.
Here’s a five minute tip which can boost your organic rankings: remove duplicate pages in the search engines by handling your own URL cannonicalization.
A chracter encoding software bug produced this “handwritten” message.
Diane Rinaldo, Yahoo Search Marketing’s Senior Director for Retail, describes the Panama launch and describes upcoming improvements including targeting, new ad formats, and new distribution options. Diane also offers advice for multichannel marketers.
Juice Analytics has put up some good material on Excel training, including an Excel tips wiki, a list of sites, and worksheet with exercises.
Recommended for your web developers: Joel Spolsky’s little book on usability, “User Interface Design for Programmers.”
Online retailers not yet using RSS for marketing purposes should consider testing doing so. Use a validator regularly to ensure your feeds are well-formed.
In attempt to foil “black hat” SEO approaches, the Google spider is starting to read external CSS and javascript files. This is good news for reputable site owners. Tip: make sure Google can reach you.
A mysql upgrade scrambled quote characters across this blog. This technical post explains the fix. Off topic — not a marketing post.
Based on our experience with our client base, on average Holiday 2006 provided both high click volume, high click conversion, and high click profitability. We provide one graph (and many words) to support this assertion.
John Chow points out that Google pays FireFox for clicks generated from the FFox search box, and projects FFox may eventually become Google’s largest traffic source.
We believe pay-per-click advertising channel performed well in terms of conversion for most advertisers during Holiday 2006. On average, our clients enjoyed a 41% bump in sales-per-click in the month after Thanksgiving.
Some pundits are intrepreting a very small number of very small Google stumbles as indication that public goodwill will rapidly swing away from the search giant. Danny Sullivan offers historical perspective: we’ve heard these predictions every few months, and they’ve not come true yet.