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Hey news publishers. Stop acting as if your content only appears printed on dead trees and tap into the dynamics that the web offers. That’s a blunt summary of advice from Josh Cohen of Google News, from a wide-ranging interview with him on Google’s experiments with new ways of delivering news. Cohen, business product manager of Google News, says Google has no ultimate solution for the future of news online. It does have a vision of a super personalized news product that tracks someone’s “read state” and keeps them constantly informed with updates. But to turn that vision into reality, it’s conducting a variety of experiments. Some will succeed; some won’t. The experiments aren’t meant to compete with publishers. Cohen stressed that Google’s not a content play and has no “Hulu for journalism” pretensions. Google’s a technology company, he says, one with tech that it hopes news publishers can tap into. For … [Read more...] about Google’s News Experiments & The Quest To Solve The “Read State” Issue

While SEO has become an involuntary function of marketing for all sorts of businesses, ranging from professional service firms to enterprise solutions providers, a lot of companies today are still struggling to integrate SEO successfully into their digital marketing efforts. Over the past decade, SEO has become an extremely viable marketing outlet that results in more qualified leads and ultimately, more customers. It has been widely reported that SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate while traditional or outbound marketing efforts such as print advertising and direct mail, only have a close rate of 1.7%. So what does it take to put together a strong SEO campaign? It’s by no means a walk in the park, but it’s also not rocket science. Many small businesses are afraid that SEO will take up a lot of time and money without leading to quality outcomes. While you most likely will not see big results overnight, there are many resources out there to push you in the right direction. … [Read more...] about Five tools to help you build a content-focused SEO campaign

In his book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You” and thought provoking TED talk, Internet and political activist Eli Pariser makes a broad argument about how the Internet and technology in general is evolving to keep us in a self-perpetuating personal bubble of influence. Pariser cites Amazon’s and Netflix’s recommendation engines as two of several examples of systems that create a continuous feedback loop and perpetuate our selection biases. Facebook’s news feed is another example cited of an algorithm that progressively reinforces our input biases by surfacing content from feeds of those in our network we frequently click on, and suppressing those whose content we do not. Search Implications Pariser’s argument about the online filter bubble phenomenon has broad implications for the world of search. Long-time search marketers are well aware that as far back as 2005, searchers began to see different search results for identical … [Read more...] about How the Filter Bubble Impacts Google, Bing Search & What It Means for SEOs

One of the tests of how successful your business is to check how much your customers trust you. Unlike a quick sale, trust takes time, effort and diligence to earn. There are several ways in which a business can gain the trust of its customers. While providing them with the best-quality products and services works well, having transparent and realistic marketing practices in place can also go a long way in inspiring customer confidence. As a marketer your job is two-fold. You’re not just entrusted with the faith that your existing customers have reposed in your business, you also have the additional responsibility of winning over new customers. At no point is it an option to pick just one of the two groups and focus on them. It’s a constant balancing act and one that is richly rewarding if done right. Using content is a great way to establish trust between your company and customers. However, creating trust-inspiring content can be a tricky affair, and if not done … [Read more...] about How to persuade customers they can trust your content

Keywords and keyword targeting are two of the most basic and longest-running elements of SEO. You might remember that there was even a time when SEO meant just having the right phrases built into your meta keywords to rank (ah, memories). Of course, there was also a time when humans clubbed squirrels and cooked them over newly-discovered open flames. Things change. We still eat and we still use fire; we just do it differently now. Keywords remain one of the foundational elements of good SEO. Sure, maybe the days of building an architecture that sprawls to cover every possible version of a keyword phrase are past, but a site still needs to be built with keywords in mind. Whether you’re designing the site map or creating a URL structure, those search phrases still need to be at the core of your process. Naturally, there is always the possibility of going too far. Can too much attention to keywords become an obstruction to the user experience? It can be. Too many indistinct … [Read more...] about Why Keywords Can Still Drive Architecture and Content