February 26th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I had been feeling guilty about an unfulfilled New Year’s resolution. No, it wasn’t to lose weight or start exercising (did those), it was to read all the Internet marketing newsletters I was subscribed to.
There were ten or so weeklies and some daylies on every news item, and posts on SEO, SEM, Website Analytics, A/B and Multi-Variant Testing and Sales Conversion strategies. Great stuff from some of the real Gurus in our trade, everyone of them… At least I believe there is great stuff in them, if I just had time to read them I could tell you what great stuff I found.
The dilemma is there is so much and a lot is just a different coat of paint on the same wall, even the digests, which are supposed to help you discern the best to read, are by the same people talking about the same thing. I mean don’t get me wrong, these people can write circles around me, but what I need is fresh insightful information about our industry that isn’t a rehash of an article written three months ago by someone else.
So I went and unsubscribed to all but 3 sources. Sources that I now pay an annual fee for and if I don’t read these on a daily basis, I’ll not only have the guilt about keeping up on industry news, but I also have the guilt about throwing my hard earned money away.
December 7th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Like duh! It takes a study to find out people use the Search Engines for researching businesses in their local area. This article by Greg Sterling at Search Engine Watch covers a recent survey by Nielsen//NetRatings and local search engine marketing firm WebVisible.
One of the points Greg made was “One of the issues with local search is defining what constitutes a “local search” in the first place. It’s not as obvious as one might think. In its definition of “local search” comScore has historically tracked traffic volumes on Internet yellow pages sites, mapping sites, selected “local search engines” and general search engines where queries have geographic modifiers. As inclusive as that definitions may sound, it’s a fairly “conservative” approach that, in my view, fails to capture a broad range local search behavior where the query is ambiguous but there’s a local intent behind it.” This left out the searches done for telephone numbers, store hours, addresses. etc. One of the most surprising findings was the 51% of the searches used a non-specific term (”dentist”). So this means there might still be some money to be made for “Search Engine Training Classes” which could be taught next door to the rooms used for Traffic School and who knows taking a course might finally eliminate the problem of people typing in the full domain name in the search box.
November 29th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
One of the things that has been bothering me lately is the number of people and firms who claim to have been on the Web since right after the turn of the century and I don’t mean the year 2000 or 2001.
I was doing some research on website conversion strategies and came across an article about a man who had been writing copy for websites since 1986. Hmmm?
Let’s see…Tim Berners-Lee’s team at CERN brought us the first rudimentary web in 1989 and it was another 4 years until Marc Anderson came up with the web-browser Mosaic.
In 1994, the real commercial capabilities came to the forefront, but even then, Internet Magazine (which launched that year) touted a review of 100 websites as the largest list ever compiled. So I guess our industry is now old enough that we can start telling 20 year old industry war stories and no one will question the timeline.
We have 2 documents on the wall in our offices from 1995; the first one is a form I used for submitting a client’s site to the existing Search Engines. I called this service “Search Engine Submission” (catchy huh?) as SEO was not yet a part of the culture. The other document was the domain registration form for this same client, which I am proud to say, is still a client. He knows how long I have been doing this, so I guess I won’t be able to tell any stories that are older then 11 years.
November 9th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
The goal of this Blog (besides the evident SEO element) is to provide an incubator for digital marketing strategies as well as a discussion forum for industry trends and statistics. While most of the content posed here will be generated by MorePro’s staff some may come from other industry experts (including the competition) or clients who may add their own thoughts on this medium. SEM strategies, PPC campaign management, Visitor Segmentation and profiling, and conversion rate improvement will be the topic of the day, everyday in our corner of the world and we invite all who have a vested interest to partake.
