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Back To School: Do Advertisers Have What It Takes?

by Sarah Tillitt ~ August 31st, 2009

Back to School - Tillitt - v8.31.09 Going back to school marks a fresh start for kids of all ages, kindergarten to college. New notebooks, clothes, backpacks and various other school essentials need to be bought and tons of tiny decisions, such as Garfield vs. Hannah Montana folders, need to be made. (This year I’m betting it’s Twilight-themed supplies that fly off the shelves.)

While back-to-school shopping is generally thought of as a traditional shopping activity, i.e. at your local Wal-Mart rather than online, there is opportunity for online advertisers as well to take advantage of the increased consumer demand that the return of classes creates.

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Word Association And Clarity of Focus In The Search Space

by Chris Copeland ~ August 28th, 2009

This post was written by Chris Copeland and published in MediaPost’s Search Insider, Friday, August 28, 2009

The elevator speech.

It’s one of the prerequisites of business development. In the time you can spend with someone on a 30-second ride, how do you describe your business? For established brands, the elevator speech is not so much a speech but a word. For brands like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, you can quickly get from brand name to association in a word.

Let’s play the game together, in your head or on paper.

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The Perilous Pitfalls of Imperfect Keyword Research

by Bhak Tanta-Nanta ~ August 27th, 2009

Keyword research, much like national opinion surveys, can illuminate the perils and opportunities for a client or completely lead them astray, plummeting what once was a promising opportunity to the land where poorly researched search campaigns go to die. Let there be no mistake, everyone manipulates data to tell a story (usually a story that is favorable to your POV). As search is so heavily data driven, it does not take a far stretch of the imagination to see how illogically concocted paid search strategies coupled with incomplete search data can result in misleading information.

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Search Marketing: It's About the People

by Erika Moersch ~ August 20th, 2009

A couple weeks ago, two giant sized posters on easel-like stands showed up in our St. Louis office. I was really busy at the time and didn’t have the brain capacity to decipher what was on them, what they meant to me, and if I really needed to even care in the first place. Hell, they could have said the building was on fire and I wouldn’t have noticed. I wouldn’t say I’m any less busy today, however since there is one literally beside the desk next to me, I figured maybe I should slow my roll a bit and take a look.

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Search Marketing: It’s About the People

by Erika Moersch ~ August 20th, 2009

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Retail Search Gone Awry

by Emily Johnson ~ August 18th, 2009

By now, you probably know the importance of appropriate landing pages for a paid search ad. If you don’t, here it is in one word; Outrider’s motto…RELEVANCE. Searchers do not want to spend time crawling through your site to find what they’re looking for.

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Back to School: Sharpening Your Search Skills

by Aaron Strecker ~ August 17th, 2009

I remember the days of elementary school. Back then, it seemed like the hardest thing you had to deal with was a little homework, what the cafeteria was serving for lunch and whether it was going to be kickball or dodgeball in gym class. Ah, those were the days. They literally gave you time during school to go out and play at recess and, get this, you had the entire summer off! No classes, no homework – only fun. However, all good things had to come to an end, right? That was the dreaded – Back To School. It was the mixture of not wanting to deal with schoolwork and tests combined with getting to see all your friends again. For most, the cycle continued until college graduation, and then it was onto the working world.

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SES San Jose: Well Worth The Trip

by Tarina Carr ~ August 14th, 2009

It’s the last day of SES for me, and while my head is still a little left brain heavy, I am excited about all the new information that I’ve absorbed. This was my first SES conference, and while I came here almost completely unbiased on what to expect, I was prepared for the salesy, hit or miss session content, blah, blah, blah…that I had heard prior to leaving St. Louis.

I’m happy to report that aside from the awful daily helping of carnival food, I found this to be the best conference I’ve attended in the last three years. Not a diss to SMX or anything like that, I’m just saying that I was impressed. The SEO sessions that were my favorite all had this continued focus on understanding what the search engines are looking for and what techniques and tools are out there to help you meet those expectations. It wasn’t just about how to rank well, but also, how to convert well. I think this idea of “conversion” has become somewhat of a paradigm shift for SEO. I know when I first got into the business it was all about being in the top 10; rarely did you hear emphasis being placed on conversions.

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Search Syndication – A Classic Case of Bait & Switch

by Derek Ferguson ~ August 12th, 2009

Imagine you are the marketing director of a large, respectable corporation. You’ve approved advertising on a few prominent billboards around the city. Then, while taking a restroom break at a shoddy gas station along the highway, you notice the ad you approved for billboards is now gracing the top of a urinal cake. Seems ridiculous, right? Unfortunately (and unbeknownst to many), a similar situation is playing out millions of times each day in search marketing.