With more than 70 sessions covering PPC management, demographic research, SEO, social media, link building, mobile, duplicate content, SearchEngineStrategies Chicago is an annual techno-pilgrimage for fortunate attendees. We’re stoked because December 7-11th is coming up fast!

aimClear will be at SES (as always) in full blogging regalia covering sessions, speaking and hanging out with ya’ll…

Dear Facebook Ads,
Thank you for the amazing new Ad Platform. It’s groundbreaking,  heart-pounding, a lot like Google’s Content Network and with even more intriguing targeting options on the grid.  It’s been a love affair for aimClear, starting in the academic lead generation sector years ago when ‘Ads first launched. I’m sorry to say that Facebook’s inability to grow customer service at the same prodigal rate is extremely disappointing…

Whatever business you’re in, dealing with customers is where earth moving boots crunch deep gravel roads. Part of my job is training marketers committed to becoming self-contained entrepreneurs over the long haul. Relatively early in their development we start them interacting directly with name-brand clients, to our mind a necessary stop for building “complete” marketers.

At morning meetings we discuss each other’s jobs, progress, ongoing client dynamics, priorities, coordinate production and critique correspondences…

PubCon is a whirling dervish, a collage of kindred spirits, sites, sounds, intensive learning and hyper-techno-geeks. All of this is a hyperbolic stew mashed up with a healthy heaping of Las Vegas kitsch & killer eats.  Here are some a snapshots to capture a portion of the frenetic ultra-vibe.

The boys from seOverflow: Yes, tell your boss that there is ROI for the sweet shirts…

Ah PubCon, jewel of the Nevada desert.  The sun has barely risen here but I’ve been up for hours working,  thinking, tripping about the amazingly massive search marketing day ahead. 

Dude the energy here is unreal. Here’s the obligatory true-must-attend conferences of the year thing…so much more powerful when fully authentic.   In a minute I’ll be pycho-trawling the eye candy people-watching Hilton halls in a minute tunes cranking in noise canceling headset…

photo credit: craigCloutier

Most large Internet marketing agencies and in-house shops are configured as departments of specialists. It’s no wonder! In today’s complicated world PPC, ORM, social media, link building, affiliate networks, analytics, content creation, video, public relations, SEO, coding, server administration, vendor management and account management all require experienced and nuanced practitioners…

Rand Fishkin is a singular personality and, to those in the SEO industry,  needs little  introduction.  Having “started playing” with Microsoft FrontPage WYSIWYG web page software in 1993 as a high school student, he’s grown his company SEOmoz to take its place amongst the most recognized brands in search.

Rand worked his way to thought-leadership by classic pathways: speaking engagements at early Danny Sullivan/Chris Sherman Search Engine Strategies conferences, tackling ambitious data-driven research projects, ahead of its time tool-making, endless sharing, participation and blogging…

The wind whistles howling, this blustery Canal Park morning, 7:20 AM.  The water churns brown, surface licking little whitecaps, tinted iron ore agitated by waves. There’s going to be snow south of us by the Shores of Lake Superior today, hazardous travel they say.  It’s about 43 degrees Fahrenheit outside but I’m good.

Each year it takes about a week of around-freezing weather to acclimate a soul and I’m there…

Google Insights For Search

What does it take to rank in Facebook’s newly enhanced internal search engine, which now spans the entire user base? This post offers results from aimClear’s study of Facebook search and offers SEO tips & tricks for getting keyword queries ranked in FB’s organic SERPs.

We also examine opportunities for savvy marketers to best exploit Facebook’s expanded social graph search to immediate advantage and share straight-up ranking-factors-advice…

photo credit: Rebecca Miller
Gazing out this Airbus A319’s window, dreamlike cirrus clouds expand towards the far horizon. I travel tens of thousands of miles each year, but some trips are special.  Others, like this week in New York for SMX, are pilgrimages.

I’m certain I’m not the only speaker, organizer or conference attendee who will look back on this year’s SMX East as subtle testimony to fantastic pivot points…

Good morning New York! The sun has not risen outside my Herald Square Mid-Town hotel, though the city’s morning energy radiates  outside for miles.  It’s autumn in New York and that means SMX East,  one of our favorite annual search marketing conferences.

Freshly recovered from last night’s Clix/aimClear SchmoozeFest (thanks to Dave & Buster’s),  this morning it’s time for serious business…2 speaking assignments on the Social Media Track…

photo credit: lorenzwalthert

In 1996 while employed as a CBS affiliate’s Creative Director, our team built the community’s first television station website and started publishing daily news show scripts. It was pretty amazing  stuff. My white paper to station management to procure the initiative’s budget, was that “broadcast television could become minimized or obsolete in light of changing publishing paradigms” and that the station should hedge our bet by “targeting newspaper’s customers” by early adoption of the Internet which was “going to become the millennial printing press…

I had a near out of body-real-time SMS/search/tweet experience last night interacting with our attorney, Laura.  (No, the picture’s not Laura.)  She’s in Manhattan to attend the Social Media Risks and Rewards legal conference, and pinged me to quick-search for information about a ruckus she was observing outside the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Our innocent little text exchange and my ensuing searches (illustrated later in this article) make it entirely clear there’s a radical new type of query intent (what users’ are looking for): situational…

photo credit: B Rosen

We’ve reviewed plenty of paid search accounts, where the supposed PPC expert literally destroyed a business. We know it’s difficult for non PPC professionals to vet vendors, giving the ever shifting best-practices landscape.  It’s no wonder there’s an icky underbelly to the PPC vendor scene.  Things change very quickly so it’s hard for anyone but the most committed practitioners to keep up…

The old reputation management adage is “want to know how to get 2 FDA.gov, 2 WashingtonPost.com, 1 CNN.com & 2389 blog links this week?” The answer (of course) is to accidentally injure people with your product.  Trust us, getting the ensuing horrible results pushed off search engine results pages (SERPs) will be much tougher that placing them in the first place.

Clients come to us wondering why they are unable to easily expunge negative search engine results for brand names, after PR debacles or other difficult incidents…

photo credit: sinisterbluebox

<rant> I was strolling along the lake towards our lovely Canal Park Office the morning, when my Blackberry (sonar sound) alerted me to an email. I was consumed noodling on possible blog topics for a today and weighing ideas against our team’s imposing schedule. The sound of an email spammer trying to buy doFollow content links in my blog jolted me a bit…

photo credit: photoaf

By design, in-house and advertising agency clients can successfully take over day to day account basics after working with us to pilot, heal or massively improve missing, average or terribly broken PPC.  Agencies & businesses just need support to fix existing accounts themselves…in as little as 4 intensive weeks.

Though most pedigreed PPC companies are reticent to accept an Advertising Agency’s client’s PPC “trainee-shadow,” confident ones will…

For years now our search-specialized shop has interacted with “traditional” advertising agencies, who aim to provide many of the same services as we do. While  ad agencies are discovering that their digital-metamorphosis involves an intense learning curve, trial and error and experience, they figure things out soon enough with training.

That’s where we come in…

aimClear’s coverage of SearchEngineStrategies San Jose has concluded for 2009.  A classic annual industry conclave, this year’s edition of #SESSJ exceeded all expectations.  In the teeth of a difficult global recession, the McEnery Convention Center halls were packed with somewhere around 5000 visitors from all over the world.  That’s huge.

Somehow this gathering was different, deeper in a particularly stimulating way…

photo credit: Ha-Wee

San Jose shimmers in radiant pre-dawn light this SearchEngineStrategies San Jose morning, as incandescent energy pulses from the heart of  legendary Silicon Valley. Technology icons including Hewlett-Packard, Adobe and BEA Systems call this area home and the GooglePlex is just a short commuter rail ride north to Mountain View. This week, along with thousands of search marketing peers, San Jose is my home away from home…

Egregiously incompetent, reckless or outright dishonest? No matter how you slither it, the latest generation of predatory SEO creeps proffer blatantly false information camouflaged by pretty blue reports. Deceptively branded hue aside, buyer beware when the snakes come to call. Here’s some hard facts to dispel the crap-ass haze of myths and misinformation.

Background
The subject of our indignation today is an SEO “audit” one of our brand-clients received from an out-state Minnesota Internet marketing firm’s SEO company offshoot…

We’re pleased to announce our impending coverage of SearchEngineStrategies San Jose 2009, August 11-13 at the McEnery Convention Ct.

4 aimClear bloggers will post articles, videos, and pictures to highlight critical takeaways from sessions they attend. We’ll also add the dimension of pre-scheduled Twitter coverage for select panels each day, allowing our readers to “tune-in” real-time and even contribute questions during sessions’ Q&A…

@LeeOdden is a consensus thought leader-SEO Agency owner focused on the stunning convergence of PR, social media and SEO. Business, agency, fellow speaker, conference organizer or client–these answers are recommended reading.

Read back through TopRanks’s respected blog. It’s clear Lee Odden saw this future on the horizon…about 3 years ago. Gracious and brainy, he’s an approachable SEM industry personality, a fixture on the national search marketing conference scene and (for the most part) unaffected…

photo credit: futureatlas.com

Ok, so the proverbial cow-flap has hit the fan. Page 1 of Google now sports damning rhetoric about you for searches related to brand and product categories. Holy crap batman, it could cost tens of millions to have the whole world not think you suck. Take a deep breath, gather wits, drink some decaf’ and let’s get started defending your brand.

First here’s a word about fancy reputation monitoring tools…

photo credit  (just fragmented link-juice by 3 links to do the right thing): Mykl Roventine

By far the most important news to come out of “Advanced 2009 is Google’s blurt-of-a-revelation that they removed the algorithmic benefit from internal page rank sculpting, “about a year ago.” The change also affects how Google handles noFollowed outbound links.

Boiled down, noFollow still prevents the passing of link juice (energy) to the internal or external destination page…

On June 3rd, Matt Cutts freaked the technical SEO community by casually stating that PageRank sculpting, the subtle art of flow-managing an important component of page value by links, had changed significantly from what Google had been prescribing. Who cares, we don’t need it. Now we know that Google flipped the switch a year ago, all the while giving us misleading information in public…

Speaking to a pair of packed sessions at sold-out SMX Advanced in Seattle, I took time to look out into the audience and measure attendees’ eyes. After all, you savvy wordsmiths, demographic research artists, technicians, agencies, account reps’, geeks, evangelists, administrators, parent-workers, presidents, marketing directors, CMOs, brothers and sisters are totally my people …right in the wheelhouse baby…

photo credit: ArtBrom

Greetings from the Bay Auditorium, Bell Harbor International Conference Center Seattle Washington. There’s an amazing array of search geniuses and enough charismatic personalities for Vegas. The harbor air smells industrial and natural beauty overwhelming, it’s 7:30 AM and the sold out SMX Advanced 2009 is firing up!

These sessions have memorable moments…

If your site is under performing in the organic (free) search engine results pages, you probably already know it. Traffic, sales and engagement have dropped giving way to rising concern. What’s wrong? The site used to work just fine!

Sadly, now searches (with personalized search disabled) reveal keyword rankings on Google’s “average front page” have plummeted or disappeared…

photo credit: EraPhernalia Vintage

Rebroadcast is the new black. Retweets and Facebook-shares are the ultimate friend-sends, essential like her black pumps, Coach clutch, velvet gloves and grandmother’s vintage pearls…same as it ever was.

The future of the filter is insight by crowdsourcing conversations, literally anywhere humans congregate and chatter. Plug into new the new demographic research riddle to choose colorful buzz pockets, to mine relevant conversations on 3-keyword grids…