Renegade Search

Google is rolling out a new feature designed to compete with Facebook's "Like" feature, as well as general social bookmarking sites like Digg & StumbleUpon. Called "+1" (which is a much better name than some recent Google misfires *cough* Hotpot *cough*), the new addition to the results pages will let you know when a site has been recommended by someone in your social graph. This is a potentially very exciting update, and could quickly become a game-changer.

As always, it's important to take a critical eye towards all the hype surrounding this launch, but there are some reasons to believe that this can actually be a major change for online marketing.

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Just a few years ago there was no surer way to decimate an advertising budget than to be opted in (which happened automatically, if you weren't careful!) to Google AdWord's Content Network. Fast forward 4 or 5 years and the AdWords Display Network (rebranded perhaps to show it's increasing leanings toward image and video marketing, or maybe to shake off the image of old) has become a very good way to scale a paid search account while reaching an audience beyond the threshold of search. The shift came as Google began granting more and more control to its display network users, and this trend now continues with the introduction of Topics.

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When we work with clients to revamp their websites and make them more SEO friendly, we often suggest that clients use text hyperlinks to connect their pages when creating new content. This topic can lead to some confusion, so I put together this handy blog post to guide our client’s into creating optimized and internally linked text.

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Did you ever get a good lead on your website and wonder "How did these guys find us?"  Was it from the ad we ran on that trade website, our PPC campaign or our SEO efforts?

You can always go into Google Analytics and see how people are finding your site in general but Google Analytics doesn't report on personal user data, so it doesn't tell you how any specific leads found your site.  You would normally have to figure that out for yourself, which depending on lead volume, can be a painstaking process. It would be good to have an easy way to be able to attribute a lead to the specific way they found you...good news, there is! A great way to do this is to have that referrer data inserted (using Javascript) directly into each new lead email you get.

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I've had two clients contact me over the last couple days, so I figured this one warranted a blog post. There appears to be a new email scam telling advertisers that their Google AdWords account has stopped running.

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