Our Insights

I was conducting some competitive analysis for one of our clients today and came across an SEO linkbuilding scam that was really well done. While the technique used is pretty smart--and technically "white-hat"--the end result could be scamming people out of their hard earned property.

Let Google's Advanced Systems Spend Your Budget For You

Maybe I'm too cynical, but some things are better left to human intuition and controls. Yesterday Google announced the release of "Enhanced CPC" on the AdWords blog. While this sounds like another great addition to the AdWords product suite, I'm pretty skeptical.

Mass Marketing Is Dead

At least that's what many Internet marketing agencies would have you believe today. I wouldn't say mass marketing is dead, just evolved.

How Keyword Research Shapes Your Optimization Plan

In the good ol' days of about 10 or so years ago it was generally enough to stuff the keywords meta tag, add some black text that included your keywords on a black background, publish the page and monitor results. We didn't worry so much about what people actually searched for as long as we could show the page coming up when we searched on those keywords in Altavista. Things have really changed and now it is extremely important to be in tune with selecting good keywords, or more accurately key phrases.

Don't Underestimate the Importance of Conversion

At IPG, we consider a website's conversion capability to be "Productivity." While on the surface it is easy to say a higher conversion rate is good, having a high conversion rate also gives you a lot of other options you might not have thought about.

This has probably happened to you as it has to me on more than one occasion.  You see or hear of a promotion on a product or service you would really like to own or receive.  The ad, whether in the conventional or online media gets you excited and immediately you track down the store and start driving toward it.

Your Ad Campaign Is Live, But Is The Site Ready?

Nothing irks me more than clicking on an ad only to see some kind of site error. As an Internet marketer, I know that the advertiser just paid for my click or paid for the impression and they just lost an opportunity. It's bad enough when the site is down during an ongoing campaign, but when you have an email blitz the site better be up and ready for the bump in traffic.

If there was a God of Internet Marketing he would probably command one of digital marketing’s top prophets to the mountain for a little conversation by a burning web site.  He would likely be very angry about all of the lies and distortions being cast by the charlatans and money-changers who call themselves Internet marketing professionals.  There would be lots of lightning, thunder, big hail and algorithm rumbling while those at the base of the mountain continue their salacious online behavior.

Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you...

So it's Friday and I'm trying to get better at putting blog entries in on a regular basis. It's the typical cobbler's shoes thing.

At any rate, I was checking out Matt Cutt's blog as I do a couple times a week and came across an entry clarifying Matt's stance on a few points. Now anyone who knows me knows that I may kid about the big Google monster and Matt especially, but the truth is I have a lot of respect for those guys. In a lot of ways they make my job easier (heck, they make my job possible). In his post, Matt references the Google Ad Preferences page where you can indicate your interests so ads are better targeted. I think this is both good and bad for completely different reasons.

Why you shouldn't rely on web analytics for specific numbers and how even some "professional" SEO people get caught up in the statistics.

So SEOmoz has an interesting article on "Indexation for SEO" and why you shouldn't rely on the site: tag in Google. While I agree with Rand Fishkin in his article it is interesting to read the comments that follow and see how differently people view the web analytics. There is even one comment that is clearly from someone who has not been doing this very long. I won't name names, but they point out a clear issue with any kind of web analytics tool and this inherent discrepancy is what I plan to cover in this entry.