Last month, in a post titled, “Revealed: Which Video Platforms Get Results in Universal SERPs” we shared  the first half of our video SEO study. In it we detailed findings as regard the video sources that comprise Google and Bing Universal organic SERPs.  We promised to release the second half of the study today, in the form of a white paper.

In the white paper, available at no cost below, we detail additional findings, which study the breakout of query intent types which tend to return video in Google and Bing mainline SERPs…

We’ve all heard the expression “live like you’re dying.” I’ve experienced that first hand and it’s colored my experience founding aimClear, in profound and beautiful ways. This post is dedicated to our special friend who’s currently kicking cancer’s butt.

I started aimClear on the heels of surviving Lymphoma stage 3B, still handling the effects of chemo and radiation…

Greetings readers! Search Engine Strategies New York 2011 looms large and straight-ahead, kicking off on Tuesday in the Big Apple. This will be my 5th straight SES NY and it never grows old.  There are a hundred reasons why this annual online marketing conclave is classic. Here are 6 of them:

1-The sessions are highly informative, stuffed with crucial information and thought leadership…

With March Madness upon us, we decide to have a little fun and research which NCAA Division I basketball conferences sport the the highest percentage of underage students who are stupid enough to admit it on Facebook. Read on for the dirt!

Here’s how it works: We all know these days college kids share their drunken escapades on Facebook. Advertisers can easily target these, “Interests” via the Facebook Ads Platform…

Greetings marketers! We’re back from a fabulous week at #SMX West, San Jose 2011.  The sessions and speakers were fantastic.  It’s a brave new world of attribution modeling, SEO influencing social signals, international search and a veritable mobile explosion.

After the main conference was over, we rolled out the inaugural edition our very own aimClear® Facebook Marketing Intensive…

Greetings from #SMX West, 2011. The sun has not yet risen over the Mountains, but there is an air of excitement here at the Marriott San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Today kicks off this years edition of West and aimClear is here in force.

Today, I’ll be speaking at 3:45PM PT on the “YouTube Ads for Fun and Profit” panel, moderated by conference Co-Chair Chris Sherman, Executive Editor, Search Engine Land…

As you may have heard, LinkedIn has updated its previously anemic DIY advertising platform to include targeting specific job titles and companies. LinkedIn PPC is now useful for a range of paid b2b direct-response and branding tactics. We’ve been getting our hands dirty to seriously gratifying success.

Even aside from the flaky UI that (poof) vaporizes half-hours of work from time to time and high CPCs, I just have to say, “Here we go again…” Back in the day it was Overture PPC’s inconsistent editorial process that stunk up the late 90s, making search marketers’ lives miserable…

Righteous systems judge the ethical value of wealth by the ways in which it is obtained.  This timeless axiom has never been consistent in the world of search engine optimization. In fact, most mature SEO practitioners’ roots are planted deep in algorithmic subterfuge.  The, “Dirty little secrets” of SEO, recently glamorized by the New York Times and regurgitated by many, is not a secret at all…

The practice of SEO necessarily focuses on granular tactics to achieve success.  We all know the drill. “SEO” has always meant keyword research, tag writing, targeted creation of recurrent and valuable content, internal and external link building, eliminating duplicate content, and other technical CMS (content management system) fixes. These days SEO, for the purpose of increasing organic prominence, also means holistically mashing tagged content into social distribution networks, unselfish listening, sharing and mutually beneficial outreach by active community managers…

This post continues yesterday’s post, 44 Must-See Internet Marketing Conference Speakers, Part 1.  The Q1 conference schedule gets underway in earnest shortly. Soon many of us will converge on SMX West San Jose, SEMpdx SearchFest Portland, OR and Search Engine Strategies New York other niche’ conferences which include Social Insider Summit, Key Biscayne, OMMA San Francisco and PubCon South…

The Q1 conference season is about to launch into warp drive. SMX West San Jose, SEMpdx SearchFest Portland, OR and Search Engine Strategies New York are the biggies on my list, though there are numerous smaller (and totally worthy) offerings including Social Insider Summit, Key Biscayne, OMMA San Francisco and PubCon South.

Whatever conference is at hand, one great pleasure of being aimClear’s CEO is getting to recommend specific sessions to our staff, clients and other friends…

LinkedIn Direct Ads get the same sort of bum rap that Facebook Ads had in early 2008. To an extent, complaints from PPC marketers are valid. We’ve never been able to figure out why LinkedIn has invested so much in building incredibly robust advanced organic search tools, while under-investing in such a relatively lame PPC targeting mechanism. No doubt the rumored post-upcoming-IPO Direct Ads makeover will add more targeting might…

Whether the online marketing assignment is for a multinational company program or niche small business campaign, over the last five years RSS feed marketing by blog and associated content strategies have become essential SEO tactics.  Now more than ever it’s easy to see why. Without authority social users rebroadcasting links to a website’s content, the site risks seriously low discoverability in critical social, news and search channels…

2010 saw its share of remarkable online marketing content, amongst tumultuous industry changes that left many second rate online marketers in the dust.  It takes lot of reading and study to keep cutting-edge-current. We bookmark literally thousands of articles each year for use in daily training.

Last year we released aimClear’s entire 2009 Daily Training Link Library. To celebrate the conclusion of yet another stellar year of online marketing content, here we highlight 22 of our favorite 2010 non-aimClear posts and the bloggers who wrote them…

AdWords Keyword Tool may be viable again for SEO. The debilitating short-tail-only problems seem to have been fixed. Long live SEO!

On October 7th 2010, we published a post in aimClear Blog entitled, “R.I.P. Google Keyword Tool. Long Live SEO!” Baris Gultekin, Group Product Manager, Google AdWords, Google, Inc. had just dropped a big stink bomb at #SMX East, confirming what many of us had already figured out…

Facebook American Military employees openly disclose sexuality to advertisers. So do United States Congressional employees.

Many folks, on both sides of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” debate, most likely feel strongly in light of today’s Senate decision which #repealed the long-controversial American Military policy on homosexuals.  We’ve been tracking the conversation in Facebook…

When it comes to the quaint custom of #FollowFriday, I often wish that tweeps’ recommendations came with explanations, speaking to why I should follow their friends.  In that spirit, this post offers my #FollowFriday recommendations for today, Sara Holoubek and Andrew Ecklund, with explanations of why I enjoy their tweets. 

It’s the tiny little social media moments that fill me up as a marketer…

Early this morning, as we made our way down the The St. Regis Deer Valley Hotel’s scenic funicular to begin the journey home, I was moved  by  Park City Utah’s stunning mountain terrain by dawn’s snowy light.  The romantic mood was fitting, especially given my gratitude for the experience of speaking yesterday at  MediaPost’s prestigious Search Insider Summit. I’ve been traveling a lot folks, so it takes a bit more right now to get me emotional…

Google’s semi-radical shift to instant while-you-type SERPs mostly served to codify the dumb-em-down effect caused by the herding users via the search suggest Ajax box.  In tandem with Google’s sad business decision to neuter the AdWords Keyword Tool, both users and all but the best PPC marketers are now forced to operate predominantly on the short tail. This represents big G’s jihad to consolidate inventory…

St. Paul’s historic Lowertown district matured from the city’s “Lower Landing” on the Mississippi River to a thriving national warehouse and distribution center. Serving burgeoning businesses throughout the upper Midwest from 1880-1920, many structurally stunning buildings were designed by nationally celebrated architects.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, St…

Now that the AdWords keyword tool has been dumbed down, we’ve received many inquiries seeking updated advice regarding keyword research best practices.  For those depending solely on Google’s free tool, the new reality is stark.  In truth, it’s not that radical a change for many pros, because we’ve always used an assortment of tools– mild to wild–to build out our KW baskets…

A firestorm has erupted on the Mayo Clinic Facebook Fan Page wall. Whether the allegations against Mayo doctor Avearas Slucis, accusing him of being a racist are true, the spiteful rhetoric makes for one ugly fan page.

This is the double edged sword of user generated content in all it’s ugly splendor. If the content has cycled off the fan page, click the “older posts” button at the bottom for an most unbelievable ride through user-generated Facebook disaster…

More analytics mavens are becoming aware of Woopra, a relatively inexpensive software package, available on the web and as a desktop application.  Woopra is best known for its gorgeous daily dashboard (pictured above) and extremely useful real-time analytics features (below).  For this post, we’ll use the desktop application.

What’s less known is Woopra’s killer KPI reporting capabilities, using custom segmentation features Woopra calls “Filters…

Chris Winfield is one of the most sociable and pleasant online marketing pros in the business.  Seemingly contrary to his East Coast roots, Chris has way more of a California-laid-back swagger.  Don’t mistake this vibe for lack of intensity.  Dude is extremely passionate, has an impressive quiver of clients,  experience, heart and business acumen to back the swagger up with action and results…

Attendees sat stunned at #SMX East as Baris Gultekin, Group Product Manager, Google AdWords, Google, Inc. clarified that the ubiquitous AdWords Keyword Tool now only provides keywords Google deems “commercial.” It’s been obvious anyway by degraded results over the last few weeks. This represents a shift of seismic proportions to those who utilize the tool for demographic research purposes, in and outside of AdWords…

Google.com/alerts have been the reputation monitoring rage for years now.  Most companies seem to feel safe under the Google alert notification blanket. It’s true that Google alerts keep reputation managers apprised of a lot of content, conversations, news, media, etc… However Google alerts alone are far from a complete picture of what’s going on out there. This post offers a guerrilla list of RSS feeds, perfect for reputation monitoring, for mining alerts from major sites including YouTube, Google, Facebook & Twitter…

Data is starting to roll in on the effects of Google’s elegant UI/SERPs adaptation Google Instant. The concept of SERPs that configure as users type is not new, but it appears big G’ has laid claim to mass paradigm busting.  Marketing chatter ranges from ridiculously hyperbolic to ho-hum with good reason. Instant instantly appoints already-dominant brands’ godly brand-status & likely makes growing brand awareness more expensive for everyone else…

aimClear’s demographic research product includes social media influencers from a number of channels ranking from Facebook and YouTube to forums.  We then challenge Community Managers to take these “friend leads” and convert them to organic friends over 3-5 days, at a “cost per friend lead” calculated from how much time the friend-conversion takes.  This post samples techniques to identify and qualify friend-leads, influencers and several holistic tactics proven to convert those leads to friends…

B2B, B2C…B2 anything, every marketing department would love to somehow crack the social media code. Be it by content marketing, participation in Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc… invariably, the conversation turns to the same question: “What are we going to do and who’s going to actually execute on this every day at the office?”

Then comes the obligatory: “How are we going to measure it?” and, “When will we set business goals?” or, “Are we just doing this for the hell of it ‘cause everybody else does?” All are reasonable questions…

In March 2010, usage of Facebook’s internal search engine jumped approximately 48% to peak at 2.7% of U.S. searches.  Though April and May U.S. search share dipped, these numbers are still rather substantial given Facebook search’s obvious people-focus and legendary limitations.  That said compared to Google’s monolithic 63.7 percent of American search share, Facebook’s internal search usage does not seem like a big deal…