Why Momentum Is Important In Business
I’ve enjoyed spending much of my career learning and pushing myself as much as I possibly can. It’s the way I do things, I like to be in a fast…
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I’ve enjoyed spending much of my career learning and pushing myself as much as I possibly can. It’s the way I do things, I like to be in a fast…
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On Thursday of last week, I had the opportunity to present at SMASH (Social Media Advanced Skills Huddle) at USC. What I was really excited most about was the fact…
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Well, it turns out that Facebook has included all of the meta data and thumbnail info for the like button around the web. This is great news for publishers as…
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Tweet There is so much buzzing in the search industry from @arrington writing about why he thinks search still sucks and JCPenney being busted for paid linking. And, just weeks…
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Tweet Sometimes SEO isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You work your ass off, you do what you have to do to get things done, and you buy people…
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Tweet Every time I write a requirements document for SEO, I make sure to address Usability and Information Architecture. I like to think that Google will reward sites that do…
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Tweet Being a good decision maker is one of the toughest things to be. It isn’t just about being smart, but, also has a huge dependency on being able to…
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One of the most interesting things I’ve been studying over the last year has been the power social design and network effects. Even though many of us have used Social…
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One of my favorite quotes I try to remember every day is by Nas. In the song “Favor for a Favor” he recites “Favor, for a favor, that’s how we do business.” This is pretty much how people should operate. Now, I am not saying we should be literally counting the favors, but, at the end of the day, if someone helps you out, you shouldn’t let it go unnoticed. Most people might see this post as tangential at best, if so, feel free to move on…

Thanks to Erik Deutsch, I had the opportunity to speak to a great class at UCLA tonight about SEO and Social Media for Communications Professionals.
SEO & Social Media for Communications
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Dealing with the limitations of AJAX and Flash can be an SEOs worst nightmare. There are so many issues that come into play and usually you can deal with many AJAX SEO issues by developing Progressively Enhanced code. While, I’ve written about how to address crawling and indexing with AJAX and SEO. I wanted to take a little bit of a deep dive into this again, along with the bigger issue, ranking…

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Last week I was working with someone and showing her the ropes of social media marketing and other general topics. I had showed her how to sign up for Digg, StumbleUpon, and various other Social Networks, but, I stumbled on this (no pun intended of course):
So, what does this mean? Does this mean that the new Digg will be launching sooner than expected? There has been much speculation about what Digg 4…

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I’ve always been a big fan of quick page load times on sites from overall User Experience standpoint. But, ever since Google announced that they were using site speed in web search ranking I have become a big time stickler about this. After watching this for the last couple months, I’ve realized that my peskiness about the whole thing warranted just cause.
Proving that Site Speed is directly correlated Pages Crawled
I tend to keep an eye on Google Webmaster tools to see any blips in crawl rate, pages crawled, etc…

If you know anything at all about me, it’s likely that it’s this- I’m ALL about the relationships that I create. I’ll never blatantly walk up to someone and tell them they should be buying a product or service. It’s just not my style. Granted I’ll shamelessly self-promote something, but that’s typically just for the sake of shits and giggles.
For me, it’s never been and never will be about trying to win a client for the sake of numbers…

I’ll start by saying this, I agree with Mark Suster’s points to never hire job hoppers, but, sometimes there is more to a story than a resume holds. And, according to Jason Calacanis, I might be a Gen Y Trophy Kid, but, in my opinion, there is more to it than meets the eye in some cases. My thoughts and opinions are those of my own and I will always stand behind them, but I do apologize in advance if this post offends anyone or is in fact unhappy with the stance…

While at SXSW, Chris Winfield and I had our presentation on “Social media marketing for your business.” My biggest focus for the presentation was to help people realize the power of creating a plan, setting goals, and executing them. Overall, creating a marketing plan or strategy should not just involve trying to get some traffic or a few links. There needs to be an end result that helps the business bottom line, like getting new users…

Having spent a lot of my career doing a lot more than just SEO, I’ve had to wear many different hats. One of my favorite hats to wear is actually the Business Development one. I’m total people person and I love the sales process. The feeling of closing a deal to me is almost as good as sex. (Sorry, I had to set the bar high).
So, rather than actually sitting here and writing another useless “SEO Tips” type post, I wanted to give to put together something a little more business focused, so I came up with the idea that I would write about how I find and close biz dev opportunities…

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been tweeting a ton about “big decisions” that are on the horizon. The truth is I came to a major cross roads career wise and geographically. I had to evaluate where I was going and what I was doing career wise, but, also had to look at personal happiness. With that, came the decision to leave BillShrink to join MySpace.
Why leave BillShrink?
First, why am I leaving BillShrink even though they are one of the hottest startups I know? I joined because I was dying for an opportunity to really help impact the growth of a business…

I’ve had a few colleagues and friends lately ask me about Google’s real time search results since they launched real time search about two months ago. To some of you, this might be an obvious post, as Rae from Outspoken Media pointed out with her post about Google enabling real time spam.
I was then alerted by a friend that apparently Google is filtering people based on relevance and followers and all that jazz…

I’ve been on this huge kick of creating visibility for products online lately. All I can think about is how to gain visibility for an online brand. Along with that, I’ve been really interested in two other things: Local and Location Aware applications. I’ve had my eye on Yelp for a bit, but even more so lately as the mobile market is growing. But, even more than Yelp, I’m a huge fan of foursquare since I jumped on the bandwagon back at SXSW…

I’ve spent the last week at my parents house in a little town in Los Angeles called LaCrescenta. It’s been the first time I haven’t been in an office for over 1 week in 10 years (side note: this is the first time I’ve been at my parents for this long for almost 5 years). It has been good to take some time and reflect on things and do a little bit of looking at things from that 10 thousand foot view…

About two months ago, I reached out to Chris Winfield, Brent Csutoras, and Todd Malicoat about putting together a Social Media Marketing for your Business Panel at SXSW Interactive. We all thought it would be a great idea and I put it together.
All of us particpates in some sort of Social Media Marketing, Optimization, and Promotion on a daily basis with clients and/or the companies we work for…

About two weeks ago I tweeted about having to say no to something and being bummed. I was invited by the SEOktoberfest crew to be an expert speaking and attending the conference. Unfortunately, because of prior commitments, I had to regretfully decline this once in a lifetime experience. From the expert panelists, to the parties, and of course, who could turn down the playmates?
So, why am I telling you this?
The SEOktoberfest Last Ticket is available and the charity auction has started! If you can participate in the auction, it is a MUST! You have a chance to participate in an auction that will not only change your life, but, also, change the life of many others…

As an individual that works very hard at maintaining relationships and attempts to help anyone at anytime he possibly can, I see some pretty interesting mistakes that people make, DAILY! Sometimes, I have to admit, I’ve made the mistake of burning a bridge or two at past companies, just by the simple fact of not understanding how important it was not to hurt a relationship. But, I now know that there are some things that you should NEVER do…and I mean NEVER…

Over the last few months I’ve seen an interesting cross section of startups to large brands and marketers to developers that are all running businesses. There has been one thing that ties all of these people together, and that is gaining traction and visibility to your website or business online.
If you are a large brand, you already have that visibility, but it is hard to continue to be nimble and build quickly, therefore, you are typically left behind…

I don’t normally sit here and try to pitch a reason to go to a conference or an event. The most I’ll do is usually tweet about something going on. But, with Twiistup, I felt it was absolutely necessary just based on all the reasons to go. I went to Twiistup 5 and it was my first one, but, Francisco Dao has taken Twiistup 6 to the next level and is blowing it out of the park. So, here are the reasons I am going, and the reasons you should too…

Another SMX is in the books and I had a fantastic time! From checking out awesome Panels to speaking on the “Proving the Value of Social Media” Panel to the amazing people, SMX Advanced still is one of my favorite conferences to attend during the year.
Of course, this year, a bit topic of discussion was Microsoft launching Bing…which of course was the search engine formerly known as Live Search and MSN…wonder if Microsoft can pick a brand and stick to it with Bing now…
That said, there was some other major topics of discussion this year from the entire track dedicated to Social Media, which I truly enjoyed hearing about StumbleUpon from Brent Csutoras, to Twitter from Michael Gray, and well, my talk about proving the value of social media and the metrics and data behind it…

So today I was going on about my business when I got like 10 sms messages in a row from Twitter. For no absolutely reason at all either. Then I was like…what the heck is going on? So I looked at who I was getting the text messages from and realized, these seem like people that I would have notifications on for.
But, wait a second, I haven’t turned on mobile notifications in a LONG time…

The most trending topic on twitter right now as I am writing this post is #fixreplies. It is shocking to me that after weeks of proclaiming that twitter is all about social discovery, we see the biggest Bonehead Decision that twitter could have made. There are posts from around the industry talking about Twitter putting a Muzzle on your friends.
Originally, by default, twitter would not show you the @replies sent to other users until you went in and made the change under Settings -> Notices…

Sean Percival and I decided that we would give the crowd 12 seconds of SEO and show everyone why we are really geeks at the GeekOut ‘09. We are 2 of VERY few there that could truly say #iamageek.
GeekOut09: Why #iamageek on 12seconds.tv
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You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at SEMNewsDaily.com



