Posts by InsightsDigital

White hat SEO not only may improve PageRank score but it good practice and should be espoused by internet marketers. Back Hat SEO should be avoided at all costs.

I found this very interesting blog post on this issue. I am still wondering how this will impact long term.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

Yahoo will officially release Search Pad tomorrow. It allows users to collect information from search pages to one page. With release of a public url, Yahoo will allow data integration with Del.icio.us, Facebook, and Twitter. From a SEO perspective, I wonder how SearchPad will affect the SEO landscape. What do you think?

Paypal released is new Adaptive Payment API which now competes with Amazon's Flexible Payment Services. It is supposed to be more flexible for adaptation. Which API would benefit most to e-commerce sites?

Hi
I discovered a new social bookmarking site, Pinboard.in. It is a simple site and for short term tagging. But I wonder if businesses will submit their tags here, though the site's tagline is "Social Bookmarking For Introverts".

Just like some time ago there were the Big Three with TV networks until Fox came along, I wonder if... if... there is a newcomer search engine that will make its presence and become part of the new Big Four. Who knows...

How can this situation be prevented?

I just found these videos on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO0Y8YDH8u4

Hi
What do you think of the Freemium model? Most websites providing e-services provide a freemium model to entice visitors to become members and then upgrade for additional services.

Even a few years ago, most e-services were pay or no service. Now, consumers expect a free service. What do you think?

I am planning an online business and a freemium model seems to be the most popular and viable in today's business world. Have you used a Freemium model on your business?

Any question regarding Google and SEO could be found here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf.

I wonder if Bing will ever displace Google but statistics do not reflect that. What about Yahoo?

As a user, I actually have accessed the site map of content heavy sites. By accessing the site maps, I have been able to access the information I want very quickly.

Hi Sara,
It is true that due diligence needs to be conducted by job seeker before the job interview. But employers also conduct similar process for potential employees. It is good for job seekers to have the edge during the job interview.

I wonder if Yahoo will release a new and improved search engine as well...

Would you ever contemplate switching or looking into paid solutions?

You would need aggressive tactics but my comments for you are:
1. Do you really care about visitors or conversion rate instead?
2. You can have 1,000 daily visitors but if it is not the type of visitors you want to accomplish your business goal, then do you really want these visitors?

I agree - free or freemium platforms allow you to test ideas/tactics out and when your community grows, you can migrate the community.
A word of advice on growing any online community is that your need to obtain a critical mass/membership and keep them coming/engaged.

To answer your question, I personally prefer a daily podcast with smaller tibbits of 2-5 minutes. I personally have produced a talk show on technology and culture and the research that goes behind each show can be time consuming. So my question for you is, "Do you currently have resources to create content for a daily show?"

I have spoken with creators of their own online social networking sites and all these 3 entrepreneurs told me that they had hundreds of contents and information on their community by the time of launch. One creator told me she had over 300 articles she wrote on her community before launch. Another creator is writing over 1,000 and still is working on launching on their community. I personally have created online communities with almost nothing or little content with the notion - I create and they shall come - well I did have lots of visitors but the bounce rate was very high.

Is your site still in development mode? Either way, your site may benefit from some usability tweeking on the home page. The home page needs to entice the visitor to want to learn more about the site and to stay on the site. It needs to be engaging.

I recommend checking into Joomla or Drupal. They are both open source CMS.

I actually suggest the following:
1. Constantly put ads on whatever free online bullentine boards you can - as long as you are not violating the communitie's guidelines.
ex. I have posted weekly ads on Craigslist for a Yahoo Career Related Group to recruit members.
2. Recruit potential members via blogs and sign off with info on your group. It depends if your posting gets approved.
3. Plug plug plug at offline events!

Very good point. But if the vendor/business decides to upload instructional videos on how to use the technology/product, it now has the option to upload bigger files.

A few years ago, I encountered many websites - especially their home page - done entirely in Flash. From an analytics and SEO perspective, these websites may have had high bounce rates and the spiders were unable to crawl through the site - not a good thing for SEO.

I actually research on this particular SEO topic for a client some time ago and discovered that:
1. Page and Link Age are important factors
2. But constant updates and content refresh needs to be added to the website to keep the website "fresh". It defintitely will entice the spiders to crawl the website more often.

I hope this helps.

I also wonder about the privacy end of it which may present an issue for private users but definitely not for businesses.

I recommend creating whitepaper in slides format and share it on slideshare with the right keywords. Then, join a few Linkedin groups that you think the members may benefit from your technologies and then share a link to your slides and some information about how the technology helps these potential clients. You may also want to attach these slides to your website so you can track these visitors with your web analytics.

My advice: 1. Attend local meetups that you may encounter potential clients; 2. Create and post Craigslist ads every week and include a creative sample and link to an online portfolio - Make sure you refresh your ad every week when it expires; 3. Do call calling to local advertising agencies - project managers and client services - yes, it is tedious but it works.

Once you are logged into your Craigslist account, make sure you post an ad in the right category and area. If you dont place the ad in the right category, you risk your ad to be flagged and deleted. You dont want this. I have personally put a few ads on Craigslist Small Business in the Past. I wonder if this section does get much visitors though.

Hi
I had a G4 for years and I had no problems opening PDFs. Now I have a new MacPro Book and in my Firefox browser, I can't open documents. It just lead to an empty page. I have downloaded some plug ins but it does not help. :-(

I do believe with certain websites, it is good to have a multi-disciplinary approach to SEO - at least at the planning stage.

Your post was great. Thanks so much for the crash course.

The worst case scenario is when one team finds out what was done and says, "I should have been involved in this process from the beginning."

Thanks for the insights. I have seen people use the term SEM to describe different aspects of online marketing.

Using Flash on websites is not as popular as it was years ago. Marketers have learned their lessons.

Thanks Kirsten for your insights. It is true. In the past 10 years or so, I have seen the growth in the use of technology and digital age in our daily lives.

Other than online tactics, which % of effort would you say you put for traditional/offline tactics?

It sure seems that major businesses and celebrities are all tweeting. Perhaps tweeting will become a mainstream activity and mandatory business presence within a few years.

I hope so for the sake of their clients and their credibility.

I do wonder how many marketers who implement SEO, whether for their business or for their clients, actually have read this document.

I totally agree. During my time in the interactive agency world, I found that bringing a room mix of techies, creatives, digital analytics, and strategists brought a wealth of insights to improve the interactive deliverable.

Dont forget the traditional ways of just going out there at events and networking events and just plug your website away. I have seen many others do this and I know I definitely visited the website as a result.

I also recommend actually creating business cards centering on the new website rather than on the person. At many meetups I have attended, I have received a business card just on the website itself. Usually the business card is bigger than normal cards and its multi color and the color matches the website. Also, the url is on both sides of the card. So of course, I visited the site when I review my cards. So this approach also works.

I have a few domains that I bought for a startup (still in the planning stage) and I wonder if I can monetize on them. I neer did anything with these domains and some domains I bought through godaddy.com while others I bought through Google. Thanks!

Thanks for the info.

As I am trying to determine what is the best percentage to spend time and funding, I would like to know from your experiences, how do your appropriate effort and resources to SEO and SEM. Which one do you consider more important?

Thanks for the explanation.

I found this interesting blog post from Max Kalehoff from Clickable on his blog:

Overall Response

* Bing is interesting and may develop a stronger position, but it’s got a long way to go to catch up to Google. However, it doesn't necessarily need to overcome Google to be successful.
* As evidenced by the bullet above, most observation and judgment of Bing is inherently relative to the experience of Google. Therefore, there is little evaluation of Bing; there’s only an evaluation of Bing AND how well it stacks up to Google (and nobody else).
* Google took a stance by being a search engine that keeps users coming back by efficiently and effectively sending them elsewhere. However, while Bing often sends you away, it often tries to keep people on the site. (Remind you of AOL?).

The Internet Advertising Bureau just published their social media metrics definition. IAB is helping lead the standardization of social media metrics.
http:// www.iab.net/socialmetrics
In previous posts, I have stirred conversations about this topic. With social media being such an integrated part of today's digital age, it is important to ascertain the success of social media campaigns using standard metrics.

I never heard of those communities. I have to check them out.