One of our oldest sayings is “If you’re worth talking about, you’re worth linking to.” We believe this and have made a lot of money ourselves by following this principle. If people are willing to talk about you, if there is a buzz about you, it will generate links, which will improve your SEO. The more people who talk about you, the higher you will rank.

So when DC Comics, publisher of Batman, Superman and my favorite the Green Lantern, decided to relaunch their entire line of funny pages, it got people talking.

Read the rest of this entry »

In February of 2010 I wrote a blog titled “Apple vs. Google vs. Privacy” wherein I talked about the shift in Google’s behavior towards gathering more and more of our behavior into an algorithm to best serve us advertising online that we’re likely to click on.  In recent years online advertising has gone beyond just banners and text links to a new type of online ads powered by a process called Retargeting.

Retargeting is where your behavior is tracked by browser cookies, little snippets of code that record where you stop online, and then use that data to target the most relevant ads to you wherever you browse.  Google has done this for years, using even the body of your e-mails in Gmail to serve you text ads and so forth.  More advanced examples of retargeting are like the ads I get for SEOmoz because I attend their workshops and am a subscriber.  I see their ads everywhere, well, theirs and OkCupid’s.  Don’t ask.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today Ryan Kelly from Pear Analytics tweeted a blog titled “Is It Fair For SEO To Be Tied Directly To Website Sales“.  He discusses disappointed SEO clients who canceled their SEO service because they felt they did not see a favorable ROI.

Ryan wrote, “Every now and then we have customers who want to cancel their service because the SEO effort has not generated an ROI in terms of sales through the website.  While this is certainly reasonable to assume, it’s almost an unfair proposition given the amount of external factors unrelated to SEO that can drive a “sale” on a website.”

I went on to write a blog comment on Ryan’s blog, but apparently six paragraphs is more than the Livefyre comment engine he’s using could handle, so I was left with few options outside of writing this here blog to tackle some of what Ryan addressed.

In a nutshell:  NO ONE EVER SAID SEO WAS EASY.

Read the rest of this entry »