7 Reasons Why Customer Service is Necessary for Success

Original Post Courtesy of: SEO-Space
I recently published a list of the top 100 marketing buzzwords for 2008. Noticeably absent from the list was "customer service". Maybe it’s because customer service is not a buzzword, it’s more of a necessity. The whole premise behind customer service is to enhance the level of customer satisfaction that your customer receives. For it is this very customer that allows you to market your product. If you have not been able to figure it out yet, the customer is in control. They are the reason you are in business. Whether it’s B2C or in the B2B [...]

Search, Transactive Memory and the Elastic Mind, Part II

Thomas Young was the last person who knew everything. Or, at least, that’s Andrew Robinson’s claim in his book of the same title. Whether you agree or not, the accomplishments of this 19th century Quaker were certainly impressive. In contradiction to Newton, he proposed the wave theory of light, furthered our understanding of the mechanics of the eye, helped invent Egyptology and decipher the Rosetta stone, created a measure of elasticity in engineering, was an accomplished physician, created a technique for tuning keyboard instruments, compared 400 languages and coined the term Indo-European and still had time to pioneer developments in [...]

20 Types of Blended Search Results: How Businesses Can Leverage Blended Search

A few weeks back I posted about blended search and the various types of blended search results that I have personally seen in the various search engine results pages.   As a refresh, I will list them here again:
Types of Blended Search Results

Image Results
Online Video
New Results
Blog Listings/Results
Book Listings
PDFs
Local / GEO Search Listings
Traditional Text Link Results aka Web Search
Product Search
Catalog Search
Movie Search
Music Search
Map Search
Health Search
Celebrity Search
Job Search
Recipe Search
Financial / Stock Search
People Search
Comparison Search

So how can businesses leverage these types of search results?  Well if you look at the list above, you may notice that there is one item that is consistent and [...]

Am I Missing Anything in my Video/Image Strategy?

Image optimization and video optimization are not secondary organic strategies anymore, they are essential in creating a well-rounded online presence. There are numerous resources you can turn to help perfect your strategy but I wanted to take a look at some techniques you may never thought of as well as some additional questions to ask yourself before applying any tactics. 

Leveraging high image rankings: You may have top rankings for your images in both the image results and universal/blended results but what are visitors doing when they arrive at your site? Search Engines such as Google show the exact page where [...]

Search, Transactive Memory and the Plastic Mind – Part I

Honey, Where Did I Put the Car Keys?
In 1986, University of Virginia Psychologist Daniel Wegner came up with an interesting theory. He realized that we depend on others to remember some of the things we need to know. This is especially true in couples and families. Some of us are better at remembering phone numbers and birth dates. Some of us are better at remembering how 401Ks and computers work. In couples, the longer we spend together, the more we divvy up the memory workload, depending on our spouse to prop up our spotty memories. Wegner called this transactive memory. [...]

Where the Why’s End: Two Books worth Reading

Last week, I talked about the importance of asking why in marketing. I also talked about human hardware and operating systems. For me, it’s there where I eventually find the end of my “why” trails. This week, I want to give you two books that look at why we’re wired the way we are. One is a deeper dive than the other, but they’re both well worth the effort.
Descartes' Error – Antonio Damasio 
If Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink tantalized you, Damasio spreads out a 7 course feast to consider. Damasio provides the psychological and neurological underpinnings for the Blink phenomenon. [...]

How Do I Optimize for Blended Search?

Original Post:  Tips for Optimizing for Blended Search 
Tips for Optimizing for Blended Search
Previously we examined what you should know about optimizing for blended search.  In part two we look at a few tips for optimizing for blended search (or Universal Search as it is known in Google.)
Optimizing for blended search is critical for your online marketing strategy. Consider this scenario: A web site might have enjoyed high rankings on key terms within a search engine for years and years now finds that their ranked web pages have been pushed down the rankings by video, image, local search results or [...]

What Should I Know About Optimizing for Blended Search?

Original Post on Blended Search via SEO-Space: 
 2007 saw some interesting developments with the search engine results pages. Google in fact introduced their Universal Search incorporating things such as video, image results, book results, news results, blog results and the like. ASK had presented a more radical change with the launch of their 3-D interface. The ASK SERP contains three panes featuring search results, video, images, dictionary listings, related search options and more. In recent months, Yahoo and Live Search have also incorporated blended search into their results pages as well.
With more universal search results showing up in Google and the [...]

Human Hardware and Our Operating System: Why to Ask Why?

Probability is a consistent master. In many, many things, given a big enough population, you’ll find a bell curve rising from the center, showing how closely we adhere to the norm. As much as we think we’re unique and distinctive, when you start to look at why we do things, more often than not we find ourselves bound by what I call human hardware and operating system issues. These are products of how we’ve evolved as a species, our physical shells, the mechanisms of our brain (all hardware constraints) or how our society has conditioned us to act in a [...]

Persuasion on the Search Results Page

Chris Copeland took out 2007 with one last jab at the whole “agencies getting it” thing. Much as I’m tempted to ring in the New Year by continuing to flog this particular horse, I’m going to bow to my more rational side. As Chris and Mike Margolin both rightly pointed out in their responses to my columns, we all have vested interests and biases that will inevitably cause us to see things from our own perspectives. Frankly, the perspective I’m most interested at this point in this debate is the client’s, as this will ultimately be a question the marketplace [...]