Blogs

Interactive marketing is hot in the job market right now and a recent report by ClickZ illustrates the increase in salary since 2010. What is fishy about this study is how they don’t account for experience. For instance, the salary for an interactive copywriter this year gained 2.5% but is that for one who has 6 months or 5 years of experience? Additionally, the results may be skewed as it doesn’t take the location of the respondents into account. A major city like New York will obviously offer a higher pay grade rather than a small backwater town like Willow Creek, Alaska. ...

I was conducting some basic research for a prospective client yesterday using Google Insights and went off on a small tangent which lead me to write this blog post. By the way, Insights is a great SEO tool to help visualize search volume throughout the year by category, geographic location and specific years. In any case, I was curious to know what the search volume is for “porn” in the good ol’ United States of America. Here’s a graph that shows the gradual increase in search volume since 2004. ...

You’ve finally taken a big step in admitting that your website needs to be optimized for search and compiled a list of SEO agencies in your area. Now all you need to do is call and ask them countless boring questions about how they’re different. Well guess what? They already know what you’re going to ask and have the answers ready. Don’t believe me? Perform a search on Google for how to hire an SEO company and you’ll find more than ten million results. All those articles out there telling people how to choose an SEO consultant coupled with the negative attention the industry already receives, you better believe these companies will have trained employees who at least know how to read from a script. ...

I had a conversation with a friend the other day regarding my freelance SEO work. What he doesn’t understand is why I’m doing everything on a volunteer basis and not charging these business owners market rate for my consulting work - or at least at a discounted rate. I guess he doesn’t want to see me do all that work and get nothing in return. Truth of the matter is I AM getting something in return - experience, testimonials and referrals. My hands on experience puts SEO theory to practice; written testimonials instill a sense of trust in prospective clients; and referrals show other business owners that I know what I’m doing. ...

Happy new years eve!!! Just a few more hours before the start of 2011 and I thought it’d be a great idea to showcase some of the top funny and interesting search phrases of 2010 for CafePress. I had to sift through copious amounts of data to find them and even then I had a difficult time narrowing them down. I love looking for these weird tidbits because they are always a nugget for a good laugh. Moreover, it still boggles my mind on how people are able to find CafePress using search phrases that are totally unrelated to the business. ...

What is Christmas about? I’m not religious but check out the following video. Regardless of religion, it’s very clever and proves how powerful social media can be. YouTube: Christmas 2.0 Merry Christmas!!!

Link building is one of the most important aspect of any search engine optimization campaign. Since my SEO journey began half a year ago, I have read countless articles titled “Link Building 101” or “Top XYZ Link Building Tactics.” What most of these authors overlook, or don’t stress enough, is the power of internal link building. IMAGE REMOVED In early November my dentist asked me to SEO his website for him. Being new to the field I offered him a free trial for one month so I could put my new SEO skill set to the test. Let’s be honest though, every marketer knows there is always a catch to trial periods. ...

I gotta give props to them. The folks over at the Transportation Security Administration probably have one of the toughest social media jobs right now in light of the recent public backlash over enhanced security measures. Not only do they have to deal with the endless stream of “comments” being posted on the TSA blog but the official TSA twitter account, TSABlogTeam, needs to fend off an attack from all sides via parody accounts. ...