Emotion and the Forming of Brand Memories

In my last column, I looked at how beliefs can affix labels to brands, which forever after form our first brand impression. Beliefs are a heuristic shortcut we use to reduce the amount of sheer thinking we have to do to come to quick and efficient decisions. Today, I’d like to focus on emotions and their part in the forming of memories.
Why “Selfish Genes” Remember
 
First, from an evolutionary perspective, it might be helpful to cover off why humans are able to form memories in the first place. To borrow Richard Dawkins’ wording, memories are here to ensure that our “selfish [...]

Key PPC Best Practices (Part 4 of 4)

This is the final installment of the 4-part series on key PPC best practices (PPC Best Practices Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3).
Speak Their Language
There has been constant debate as to what to use for keyword analysis with regards to long-tail versus head phrases and which yields the better results. Head phrases are the very generic and broad search queries where there is enormous search volume, but costs associated with the keywords are quite high. Torso keywords are the more-specific keywords; the 2- to 4-word search queries that still have lower search volume compared to the head phrases, but [...]

Brand “Labeling”: Building our Beliefs

Up to now in this series on Search and Branding, I’ve been looking exclusively at how and why we use search engines. But the idea of the series is to show how branding and search can work together. So in this column, I’d like to start from the opposite end of the spectrum: our brand relationships, from a memory retrieval perspective.
Storing Complex Concepts
 
In the computational theory of mind, the prevailing theory that seems to best explain how our minds work (although it’s not without its detractors), the elegance with which the brain processes complex patterns of information is remarkable. These [...]

Enquiro Retro Post: Keeping Control of Your Website Redesign

After you plan your website redesign, you’ll want to ensure that the act of redesigning your website and going through the transition phase of the site redesign run as smoothly as possible.  We cannot emphasize the importance of planning your website redesign enough.  This is critical if you are thinking of maintaining your presence in the search engines.  Without planning, you can very quickly lose all of your visibility in the search engines.  Believe me, we have seen this happen over and over.  Not planning out your redesign can have an adverse impact on your online future.
So as you move [...]

Needs, Beliefs and Search

IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS, I’ve looked at how we gather information, depending on how complete the information is we already have. But it’s not just information that colors the search interaction. Like all human interactions, we are governed by our desires, our objectives and our beliefs, and this is certainly true in search.
Computing Concepts
Steven Pinker is one of the foremost proponents of a computational theory of mind. Following in the footsteps of Alan Newell, Alan Turing, Herbert Simon   and  Marvin Minsky,  Pinker argues that our "minds" lie within the patterns of information processing and functionality founds in the [...]

How to Create a Custom 404 Error Page in Microsoft IIS

We had a question from a client in California who wanted to know how to create a custom 404 error page in Microsoft IIS. Great question.  Why would you want to create a custom 404 error page you may ask?  Well the obvious reason is to improve the user experience for your site visitors who come across a broken link or an old page that no longer exists and has not yet beem redirected properly.

Create Your Custom 404 Error Page – Use a text editor or an HTML editor to create your custom page on your server.  When you create your custom [...]