Archive for September, 2008

Sep26

Chris Davies

0

Static URLs beat Dynamic URLs

Google decided to be helpful on Monday and share a post called Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs. We’ve since received a number of questions from clients about this issue asking “should I change my site?” or “did I just waste thousands of dollars making my engineers implement a rewrite?” The answer is no. We’ll continue to use properly implemented redirect strategies, where appropriate, as a part of a total search marketing campaign. In competitive verticals a website that correctly rewrites dynamic URLs to short, keyword rich static URLs will outperform those who don’t (ceteris paribus). The Webmaster Central Blog isn’t [...]

Sep25

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Travelling at the Speed of Buzz

What makes up buzz? And what determines how fast it travels? Last week, I talked about how important the opinions of others are in shaping our brand beliefs. Today, I want to look at one category of word of mouth, the juicy tidbit, recently christened “buzz”, and see what makes it leap from person to person. Buzz is Nothing New   For some reason, we think buzz is a new thing that lives online. In fact, it’s as old as human behavior and has its roots in our very social fabric. We need to pass on information. We’re driven to [...]

Sep24

Jody Nimetz

0

How SEO and PPC Can Work Together as Part of an Effective Keyword Strategy

Ah SEO and PPC living together in perfect harmony.  Yeah right.  How many of you out there put as much effort into your SEO efforts as you do with your sponsored efforts?  We hear of all of this money being poured into sponsored spend yet when asked how much you spend monthly on SEO many will respond by scratching their heads and look back at you with a shrug of the shoulders implying "I don’t know exactly…".  Or even worse, others will state that they do not track what they are spending on SEO. As you track the return of  [...]

Sep19

Gord Hotchkiss

0

Branding by Word of Mouth

In the past few weeks, I’ve looked at where our feelings towards brands come from and how they get stored in our brains for future recall. I’ve looked at how powerful brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering our physical sensations (the Coke blind taste test), how advertising can mix with our own personal experiences to create false memories, how emotions can build a powerful subconscious reaction to a brand and how we label complex concepts, including brands, with a summary label that reduces all we know about a brand to an easily accessible impression. Today, I’ll [...]

Sep11

Gord Hotchkiss

3

False Memories: Was that Bugs Bunny, or just my Imagination?

I’ve talked about how powerful our mental brand beliefs can be, even to the point of altering the physical taste of Coke. But where do these brand beliefs come from? How do they get embedded in the first place? A Place for every Memory, and every Memory in its Place Some of the most interesting studies that have been done recently have been done in the area of false memories. It appears that we have different memory “modules”, optimized for certain kinds of memory.  We have declarative memory, where we store facts. We can call these memories back under conscious [...]

Sep10

Kyle Grant

0

SAR-R: Search and Rescuing ROI

Over the past several months, in part due to increased economic pressures, we have seen an increase of importance placed on improving return on investment (ROI) from search-based activity, particularly from PPC campaigns. ROI attribution and measurement becomes especially important when justifying the cost of the online sponsored advertising and improving the return on advertising spend (ROAS). Here are some tips on improving your search performance and getting the best ROI possible. 1.      Know Your Analytics This statement may seem fairly redundant, but all too often search marketers find themselves flying blind without proper analytics. Much of this article will [...]

Sep05

Jody Nimetz

12

10 Overlooked Optimization Tips by Business-to-Business (B2B) Marketers

In many conversations that I have had with various B2B marketers, I often find myself wondering why they don’t take a step back to breathe and carefully plan out their online marketing strategies more effectively.  Quite often they’ve heard of a new technology or SEO trend that they want to experiement with.  Yet when you review their site, you notice that there are some serious issues that have been overlooked. The whole B2B process tends to be more complex than its B2C cousin.  Whether you are talking about the buying cycle for the intended consumer or the longer selling cycle [...]

Sep04

Gord Hotchkiss

0

There’s More to Coke’s Brand than Taste

Last week, I looked at the unprecedented backlash against the introduction of New Coke. The fervor of the protest took everyone by surprise, especially flabbergasted Coke executives (and truth be told, Pepsi brass as well). After all, New Coke was subjected to exhaustive consumer testing in the lab and the results were clear: most people preferred the taste. So why did something that did so well in the lab fail so miserably in the real world? Why were people so passionate about brown sugared water.  Baylor University neuroscientist Read Montague set out to find out why in 2003. More than [...]

Sep04

Gord Hotchkiss

1

For Coke, Brand Love is Blind

In 2003, Read Montague had a “why” question that was nagging at him. If Pepsi was chosen by the  majority of people in a blind taste test, why did Coke have the lion’s share of the cola market? It didn’t make sense. If Pepsi tasted better, why wasn’t it the market leader?   Fortunately, Read wasn’t just any cola consumer idly pondering the mysteries of brown sugared water. He had at his disposal a rather innovative methodology to explore his “why” question. Dr. Read Montague was the director of Baylor University’s Neuroimaging Lab and he just happened to have a [...]