Homes to inspire

To many web designers, user experience (UX) is the crux of every homepage, while SEO is an inconvenient ploy that uses cheap tricks and focuses strictly on numbers. Many believe the two ideas can’t work together, but that is simply not true. Both SEO and UX are important elements for every site and should be embraced and combined by marketers to create a successful site. Every page needs striking headlines, copy, and pictures to interest their readers, but if you haven’t optimized the copy, page title, headline, and alt text to bring users to your site, your UX efforts are all for nothing. Likewise, if your site is well optimized but you don’t have quality content and appealing design then users won’t stick around to hear your message. It is possible to create a compelling experience without stuffing the page full of keywords so the content isn’t readable – the key is to find a balance. Make the two work together by choosing quality over quantity. … [Read more...] about Landing Page Design Inspiration: SEO & UX



Editor Note: We received a press pass from INBOUND and Hubspot. “This is not a conference. It’s a movement. It’s the INBOUND MOVEMENT.” These words were plastered across a screen the size of a swimming pool in a room larger than a football field. HubSpot’s four-day Inbound marketing conference kicked off on September 8th with a room filled with 14,000 eager marketers, and it was clear from the outset that this wasn’t going to be a typical marketing conference. I spent last week navigating through the maze of sessions, keynotes, and bold talks, trying to soak up every last bit of knowledge I can share with you. As a third-year attendee and frequent conference goer, I notice there is always one consistent theme at Inbound: inspiration. No, I do not have data to back this up, but I’m confident that the majority of marketers leave feeling inspired. And how could they not? With speakers from marketing legend Seth Godin, to the famous TED talker and … [Read more...] about 7 Inspirational Takeaways from #INBOUND15

It was way past quitting time, and though I still was on deadline for a new flight of text and display ads, my creative muse had quit hours earlier and gone home or wherever it is that muses go when they desert you. The phone rang. It was my wife calling to ask me to pick up some bread and milk on the way home and “Oh, can you also please get some dry cat food for Mozart?” No problem. Finding the right milk was easy enough. Our store carries only one brand and a half-gallon of 1% lasts us about a week. Done. Finding the right loaf of bread took a bit longer – so many more brands to choose from – but since we prefer 12-grain, that narrowed the choice to just one. Done and done. A quick swing by the cat food aisle to fetch a bag of dry cat food, and I’d be on my way. I turned the corner and froze in my tracks. The cat food aisle was as crowded as a search results page with PPC ads for digital cameras in December. I couldn’t remember which brand we … [Read more...] about Want to Write Better PPC Ads? Try Cat Food For Inspiration

Content. Content. Content. SEO’s hammer clients with pleas/prayers/entreaties to produce content. Writing, videos, images, audio, sanskrit, I don’t care; just please, for love of all that’s right and good, produce something. Clients respond: I don’t have time. I can’t write. I hate writing. Our partners won’t let us publish anything. The branding team will veto us. The CEO has to approve every word we publish. And the SEO campaign sputters and fails. The SEO can build links and optimize existing pages, but if the site’s stagnant, someone, somewhere will grow their site and beat you to number 1. So you’re stuck. Produce content or die. And it is hard work, no doubt about it. You can make life a little easier, though, by learning to recycle and reuse content. Chances are you’ve got lots of great content, begging to be published online, in your office. You’ve just been looking at it so long you no longer regard it as a potential … [Read more...] about Go Green Or Go Home: Recycling Content For SEO

Without a doubt, developing or improving mobile marketing strategies in 2012 is likely occupying a lot of real estate on the product roadmaps of many brand managers. For those marketers whose top priority in 2012 is creating and maintaining mobile apps to support their marketing activities, figuring out the functional requirements and features to make mobile apps appealing to their target audience is a daunting first step. In order for marketers to leverage mobile platforms and generate measurable ROI from apps, it’s important to first take a look at how a mobile app would best serve the business goals – whether that’s generating inbound calls, mobile commerce transactions, online reservations, walk-in traffic to a physical location or generating revenue from in-app advertising. Most marketers agree that having a deep understanding of what features would provide the most value to your core users keeps them coming back for more, leading to earning loyal followers and … [Read more...] about Marketers Reveal Their Favorite Mobile Apps To Inspire Your Strategy In 2012