The disdain on their faces is usually palpable.  I’ve been experiencing subtle Facebook derision from mainstream SEOs now for two years. Last week’s edition was a conversation with Greg Boser, President and CEO – 3 Dog Media, a new friend and brilliant speaker on the SMX Search Marketing Conference series circuit.

Dude is a salty-dog SEO genius. However, as we each shared what we were planning to discuss with Australian conference attendees, I had barely started when Greg made it clear, with nary a word, that Facebook demographic segments are a bunch of bullshit…

At SMX Sydney last week, I was approached by a number of zealous attendees (prior to my Facebook PPC presentation) who mentioned that they reckoned not enough of Australian or New Zealand citizens participate on Facebook to make FB marketing worthwhile.  The reality could not be further from the truth.  Read on for a breakout of basic demographics and a few fun samplings from categories, brands, places of employments and other interest segments from Australian & NZ markets…

Greetings from #SMX Sydney Australia, 2010. The exuberance here could light a continent.  Sydney is a shimmering study in architecture, culture, wealth & bustling cosmopolitan life. This SMX conference, advanced edition, feels vital and spot-on  relevant to Australian Internet marketing.

Take the cloistered urban grandeur of New York, mash it up with a healthy dose of San Fransisco northern CA charm and exotic melting pot romance…well that’s Sydney…

Using blogs for SEO is a strategic linchpin of many a marketers’ content tactics. Composing optimized headlines to title posts that are catchy, research driven and relevant to readers, is a classic search engine optimization mission.   This post offers two blogging SEO case studies, for constructing posts titles.

Blog post headlines are key on many levels. Most blog CMS (content management system) installations mirror the post headline as the HTML title tag, arguably one of most important SEO ranking factors, for the post detail page…

One of the more challenging aspects of running an online marketing agency is mashing our process into legal agreements. Out of the legalese we typically cover in our documentation (fee structure, NDA, Term, Termination, Indemnification, Arbitration, etc…) none is more delightfully daunting than the obligatory “scope” exhibit.

Because our work is always data driven and research based, it can be tricky to make legal promises that set realistic expectations based on fact-sets as yet undiscovered…

Google Insights For Search

What does it take to rank in Facebook’s newly enhanced internal search engine, which now spans the entire user base? This post offers results from aimClear’s study of Facebook search and offers SEO tips & tricks for getting keyword queries ranked in FB’s organic SERPs.

We also examine opportunities for savvy marketers to best exploit Facebook’s expanded social graph search to immediate advantage and share what we learned about ranking factors…

photo credit: Rebecca Miller
Gazing out this Airbus A319’s window, dreamlike cirrus clouds expand towards the far horizon. I travel tens of thousands of miles each year, but some trips are special.  Others, like this week in New York for SMX, are pilgrimages.

I’m certain I’m not the only speaker, organizer or conference attendee who will look back on this year’s SMX East as subtle testimony to fantastic pivot points…

Good morning New York! The sun has not risen outside my Herald Square Mid-Town hotel, though the city’s morning energy radiates  outside for miles.  It’s autumn in New York and that means SMX East,  one of our favorite annual search marketing conferences.

Freshly recovered from last night’s Clix/aimClear SchmoozeFest (thanks to Dave & Buster’s),  this morning it’s time for serious business…2 speaking assignments on the Social Media Track…

photo credit: lorenzwalthert

In 1996 while employed as a CBS affiliate’s Creative Director, our team built the community’s first television station website and started publishing daily news show scripts. It was pretty amazing  stuff. The white paper to station management to procure our initiative’s budget, was that “broadcast television could become minimized or obsolete in light of changing publishing paradigms” and that the station should hedge its bet by “targeting newspaper customers now” by early adoption of the Internet which was “going to become the millennial printing press…

I had a near out of body-real-time SMS/search/tweet experience last night interacting with our attorney, Laura.  (No, the picture’s not Laura.)  She’s in Manhattan to attend the Social Media Risks and Rewards legal conference, and pinged me to quick-search for information about a ruckus she was observing outside the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Our innocent little text exchange and my ensuing searches (illustrated later in this article) make it entirely clear there’s a radical new type of query intent (what users’ are looking for): situational…

photo credit: B Rosen

We’ve reviewed plenty of paid search accounts, where the supposed PPC expert literally destroyed a business. We know it’s difficult for non PPC professionals to vet vendors, giving the ever shifting best-practices landscape.  It’s no wonder there’s an icky underbelly to the PPC vendor scene.  Things change very quickly so it’s hard for anyone but the most committed practitioners to keep up…

photo credit: sinisterbluebox

<rant> I was strolling along the lake towards our lovely Canal Park Office this  morning, when my Blackberry (sonar sound) alerted me to an email. I was consumed noodling on possible blog topics for today and weighing ideas against our team’s imposing schedule. The sound of an email spammer trying to buy doFollow aimClear Blog content links that violate Google’s terms of service, jolted me a bit…

photo credit: photoaf

By design, in-house and advertising agency clients can successfully take over day to day account basics after working with us to pilot, heal or massively improve missing, average or terribly broken PPC. Agencies & businesses just need reliable support (and intensive training) to fix existing accounts themselves. We’ve witnessed success in as little as 4 intensive weeks…

For years now our search-specialized marketing shop has worked with “traditional” advertising agencies,  who’s clients ask them for services we provide. While ad agencies have discovered their digital-metamorphosis involves an intense learning curve, trial and error and experience-most figure  out their appropriate place at the search table after training.

However, since their clients need help right away, it often makes sense to seek out interim and long term search partners to augment immediate creative and production…

aimClear’s coverage of SearchEngineStrategies San Jose has concluded for 2009.  A classic annual industry conclave, this year’s edition of #SESSJ exceeded all expectations.  In the teeth of a difficult global recession, the McEnery Convention Center halls were packed with somewhere around 5000 attendees from all over the world.  That’s huge.

Somehow this gathering was different, deeper in a particularly stimulating way…

photo credit  (just fragmented link-juice by 2 links to do the right thing): Mykl Roventine

The most important news to come out of  ‘Advanced 2009 is Google’s blurt-of-a-revelation that they removed the algorithmic benefit from internal page rank sculpting, “about a year ago.” The change also affects how Google handles noFollowed outbound links.

Boiled down, noFollow still prevents the passing of link juice (energy) to the internal or external destination page…

On June 3rd, Matt Cutts freaked the technical SEO community by casually stating that PageRank sculpting, the subtle art of flow-managing page value distribution, had changed significantly from what Google had been prescribing.

Who cares, we don’t need noFollow. What bothers many is that know we’ve learned Google flipped the switch a year ago, all the while offering misleading public information…

Speaking to a pair of packed sessions at sold-out SMX Advanced in Seattle, I took time to look out into the audience and measure attendees’ eyes. After all…you savvy wordsmiths, demographic research artists, technicians, agencies, account reps’, geeks, evangelists, administrators, parent-workers, presidents, marketing directors, CMOs, brothers and sisters are totally my people …right in the wheelhouse baby…

photo credit: ArtBrom

Greetings from the Bay Auditorium, Bell Harbor International Conference Center Seattle Washington. There’s an amazing array of search geniuses and enough charismatic personalities for Vegas. The harbor air smells industrial and natural beauty overwhelming, it’s 7:30 AM and sold-out SMX Advanced 2009 is firing up!

These sessions have memorable moments…

If your site is under performing in the organic (free) search engine results pages, you probably already know it. Traffic, sales and engagement have dropped giving way to rising concern. What’s wrong? The site used to work just fine!

Sadly, now searches (with personalized search disabled) reveal keyword rankings on Google’s “average front page” have plummeted or disappeared…

photo credit: EraPhernalia Vintage

Rebroadcast is the new black. Retweets and Facebook-shares are the ultimate friend-sends, essential like her black pumps, Coach clutch, velvet gloves and grandmother’s vintage pearls…same as it ever was.

The future of the filter is insight by crowdsourcing conversations, literally anywhere humans congregate and chatter. Plug into new the new demographic research riddle to choose colorful buzz pockets, to mine relevant conversations on 3-keyword grids…

Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman (on right) has been active professionally in educating us since the industry was nascent. A generation of serious social media practitioners and demographic research artists cut teeth, tweak skills and stay current by attending Chris Sherman-designed conference sessions.

Count on tracks he sequences to be measured,  informed by bleeding edge data,  stocked with cool speakers, accompanied  by healthy sides of value-added perspective and measured cynicism…

Over the past 2 years, the relatively close knit blog universe has exploded in a massive confluence of social expression and corporate reaction. A cottage industry of owner-operators, trawling social media on behalf of themselves and others, has cropped up in lofts, dorms, agencies and iPhones.

These are the new social media Community Managers and corporate is clearly looking. This post offers a granular look at crucial skills, essential duties and a job description for the CM role…

A couple of times a  year, when our friend PPC Expert David Szetela (Clix Marketing) and I are speaking at the same conference, we have a little gathering with our industry friends.

Those lucky enough to be sporting the cliche’ orange wristbands are going enjoy lovely camaraderie, frightening anecdotes, “forgettable finger food” and an enjoy (yet another) awesome upstairs Times SQ Schmooze Fest NYC experience…

Greetings from the Big Apple! This SES New York 2009 session is all about keeping tabs on ever changing  advancements in universal & blended search- and what it means for marketing. The moderator is Kevin M. Ryan, SES Advisory Board Chair, CMO, WebVisible, Inc.

Olivier Lemaignen, Group Manager, Global Search Marketing, Intuit
Polls the audience to see who “knows what search is” and looked at how the interface evolved from a simple little box to lots of ways to search…

Well it’s off the the big Apple, New York New York, where aimClear will be covering about 50 sessions with a 4 blogger team.

Say “howdy” to Matt, Manny, Nam and Peter. They just might have some SearchWiki Lamesauce T-shirts to share.

SearchEngineStrategies New York is the Grand Lady of search marketing conferences.  Really folks LAST there were people twittering in the bathroom…

Some SEOs like @jillwhalen, are reserving judgment. Others like @graywolf are vocal in their skepticism, even going so far as to say that Google’s SearchWiki forces us “eat the heart of a live cobra” by allowing to users to edit search engine results.

aimClear | SES New York T-Shirt Slogan Winner!
Either way, @streko won last week’s  aimClear SES Twitter T-shirt-naming competition with his killer suggestion, “SearchWiki, Served Best With Lamesauce…

An essential aspect of any reputation management job, is monitoring the never-ending flow of  content germane to our client. Most often the keyword monitoring “Big List” includes brand, products, C-level executive names, intent phrases and competitors’ keyword permutations.

This post is a guerrilla tutorial for building a totally free reputation monitoring dashboard, suitable for personal/corporate use or reselling to an agency client…

It’s a sad fact of modern SEO life. You can’t slay a dragon with a sling shot and ya’ can’t rank for for Las Vegas Hotels with brand spankin’ new domain. Life just doesn’t work that way.

However these days it is possible to measure competitiveness of the SERPs for a given keyword, evaluate the strength (and future predicted strength) of the page one wishes to get ranked, and base keyword selection on what is reasonably attainable for that page’s strength…