We Burned a British Ship *Before* the Boston Tea Party, and Refused to Sign the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was Added

For an SEO consultant in Rhode Island (just as for any business), it’s important to leverage all possible marketing channels to reach potential clients.  Word of mouth and references from website design firms and various website and internet solution providers can be key.  With this in mind, I recently met with a local RI marketer who may be able to help me with some SEO consulting references, and in the process, I might be able to help him with his clients in RI search optimize their websites.  He mentioned he has been doing a lot of on-page optimization for his firm’s marketing services, and even with little to no link building, they are ranking well and getting some good leads.

This prompted me to take a look at whether I rank for any terms people local to me care about, and I don’t.  In fact, I have to confess that, while one might think I must be doing all kinds of crazy things to optimize this blog Full article»

Back in late August of last year, some Googlers presented a paper at a conference entitled “HyperLocal, Directions Based Ranking of Places”, where they investigated the possibility of using driving directions logs from Google Maps as a ranking factor in Local Search.  In my experience, Google does not publish papers on major ideas unless they have one or more patent applications already filed Full article»

Paid Search Pollen for SEO Flowers

The very natures of Paid Search and Organic Search may seem different,  but they are actually substantially similar.  Most folks specialize in one or the other, but comparatively few excel in both.  This has resulted in a severe lack of cross-pollination between the two fields, other than in the area of keyword research.

Where overlap exists, we can leverage learnings in one field to understand the other, provided we’re mindful of their differences.  One of the landmark papers on Paid Search was a Google paper called Predicting Bounce Rates in Sponsored Search Advertisements; here we’ll ruminate on the similarities and differences between the two fields and see how we can apply the key finding of that paper to the field of Organic Search. Full article»

OHHH, FRACK!

Over the last few years in the oil industry, a popular theory has arisen that all of the world’s easily obtainable oil is running out.  The problem of increasingly difficult-to-extract oil is also compounded by the fact that oil producing countries are in many cases third-world nations that are industrializing and are now consuming more oil themselves, making them a less likely source of exports in the future.  The theory (called “Peak Oil“), although controversial, makes sense, as the supply of oil underground is relatively fixed.  Although natural processes doubtless create more oil, it’s apparently happening slowly over geologic time, while we’re extracting it relatively quickly;  it’s not really a renewable resource from the perspective of beings that live for only 70-100 years.

This theory is now being applied by others to the Gold mining market (i.e. the theory of “Peak Gold”), and when you look at graphs of production over time, the consistent rise in how much capital it takes to extract an ounce of gold from the ground and so on, it’s a very compelling theory as well.

I have been thinking about similar problems in the search world for some time now and would like to introduce the concept of “Peak SEO” – in other words, the concept that the supply of available keywords and SERP positions is essentially fixed, and increasingly the low-hanging fruit is being eliminated and reducing the ROI of SEO more and more every year Full article»

iPhone SEO and iPad SEO? Let's try the reference section.

Search Engine Optimization for Apple’s mobile platforms is a little confusing in that, by “SEO” some people mean, variously: “writing your app to work well on the platform”, “ranking high on the iTunes app store”, and “ranking high on Google and other search engines”.
Here we’ll attempt to address all of these, and we’ll also touch on all the aspects of app marketing, since SEO affects and is affected by all of them.

*** Step 1 - Developing for the Platform ***

There are a number of resources and best practices available for making sure you aren’t doing anything stupid, like having an application that doesn’t look correct on the iPhone.  Don’t forget to also make sure Full article»