Working with CMS Systems

CMS is the future If your here, you are likely already familiar with the concept of Content Management Systems (CMS) and what they do. The attraction is simple, the ability to give your marketing folks (yourself in some cases) the ability to directly edit content of your website without any HTML expertise or a concern that they might break the site. I bought into this idea working with the folks at one of the local design firms. A BIG attraction for me is the ability to tweak key SEO elements...
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Starting your SEO Efforts

When optimizing your site for traffic, you will need some means to see where you are, track your progress (or your lack there of), and help identify mistakes. Here are the core elements I recommend: Sign-up for a Google Analytics (GA) account, it's free and it some if the best information you can get about visitor activity and how they got to your pages. If you do PPC marketing on AdWords and don't have Google Analytics installed you can add it under the Analytics tab in AdWords. If you a...
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Bot Herding (aka Page Sculpting)

Bot herding, sometime referred to as "sculpting," is the act of shaping what search engines sees, and therefore what content you are ranked on. The idea behind bot herding is to keep the search engines off the content you didn't want to be known for. One of my clients has a consumer reports aspect to their business and actively blacklists companies who don't provide good customer service. As a service to their customers they listed other services (more…)
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PPC Management Options

I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires fewer hours, with much of the time spent, testing new ad copy and adjusting bids to improve acquisition cost. However diligence and attention are important as search phrases should be constantly evaluated and the results fed ba...
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Don’t Count Yahoo out

I had a meeting at Yahoo this week. The meeting was targeted at companies heavy into affiliate programs. We heard from a number of program managers, but because I am under NDA, can't disclose all the great stuff they are working on. However, I will say these guys are not sitting around worrying about Microsoft. They are firmly focused on the future and presented an impressive list of products and upgrades. Most  interesting was some of the stuff going on with PPC management and while I can't be ...
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