There are many good reasons to start a blog. I’ll give you a few. Perhaps you want to share your specific expertise with the world. Maybe you want to give your company a voice that speaks directly to your clients/customers. Or maybe you just like writing. Here’s one good reason not to start a blog…because somebody told you it helps with SEO.

Blogs do not help you with SEO if you have nothing interesting to say! Let me explain why.

If you’re not saying anything interesting you won’t have any readers and you will quickly drop blogging like a bad bean pie. You’ll have a blog that just sits there and stinks up the rest of your site. Your visitors will come to check out your blog and think you’re a big a loser because you haven’t updated your blog in over a year. You need to have commitment and/or passion to blog consistently and doing it for SEO reasons won’t provide that.

If you think you are serious about starting a blog, here are three things to consider: Read More

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has posted some new search engine market share figures…Google gained another 6% in search market share in 2008!  What? Are you surprised?

What’s even more interesting is that Google’s profits are rising as well, even in this bad economy.  Microsoft, which has never ever had massive layoffs in it’s history is laying off 5000 employees and Google actually posted an increase in profits in the last quarter of 08. Amazing.

Here’s the story:

Search Market Share 2008: Google Grew, Yahoo & Microsoft Dropped & Stabilized

Online, a landing page is the first impression a potential customer, friend, or even an enemy, has to a website. The landing page is an opportunity to answer a question, deliver an opinion, offer a product or service, or completely alienate a visitor to your web property. Depending on your goals, your landing page may be effective – but let’s look at some practical uses of landing pages – making online “friends” and converting customers. Read More

A little late on posting this, but we’d all like to congratulate George and Kim on the birth of Elliott Dmitry. Mom and baby are happy and healthy. Elliott already has his own Google shirt too!

2008 was a great year for all of us, but 2009 will be very new and exciting for George and family. Congratulations buddy!

While managing PPC for clients one question comes up more than any other: “Why can’t I see my ads”? A few years ago this had a few answers – Keywords being bid on, time of day ads were being shown, IP address exlusions, etc. But more often than not, it has to do with budget constraints. Ads will not show up for every query possible – especially in the more competitive verticals (this would likely even prove to be unprofitable). While all of these reasons still exist, a whole new dimension has come into play and, unlike before the answer is, “well, where are you looking for your ads”?
Read More

Ahhh Goals — Don’t you love ‘em…and hate ‘em! Once the hangover from the holidays wears off you are faced with the fact that it’s a new year and just like everybody else you feel compelled to make this the year that your going to make it happen.

Make what happen?

You know, that thing that you’ve been thinking about for the last 3 months. That thing that you KNOW you should’ve been doing by now. They say you should keep your goals simple and try not to take on too many things at once so I’m going to give you one simple suggestion that will help make your SEO campaign goals successful in 09.
Read More

Just read through all of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and noticed there was no mention of avoiding paid links. Hmmm… Do you think they simply forgot to mention this in their popular guidelines for webmasters? This is the page they tell webmasters to read if they are having ranking problems or for those who have been banned. Seems like it would be logical to mention linking practices that they definitely don’t agree with.

It seems a bit strage that I can’t find much in all of Google’s official documentation against BUYING paid links. It’s more geared towards those sites SELLING and how they should make sure they don’t pass “link juice” to sites that are buying advertising. Here’s some evidence of that…
Read More