Google to Crack Down on Spammy User Generated Content?

Original article featured at Marketing Jive: User Generated Content: Google to Crack Down on Spammy UGC
User Generated Content (UGC) can provide great value for your web properties.  In fact, Bazaarvoice reported that 80% of consumers are now seeking user generated content and reviews to guide purchase decisions.  (For the record, Bazaarvoice recently served up its 100 billionth piece of UGC).  However with the good comes the bad and user generated content can be easily exploited if not monitored.
If you are a large e-commerce site, or any site for that matter, that features substantial pieces of user generated content, you will [...]

Models of Information Seeking: The Standard Model vs. The Tetris Model

The standard model of information seeking, developed through observation, is one that outlines the basic actions involved in finding information. Variations of the standard information seeking model has been developed through work by Salton and Ennis, Shneiderman, and Broder, among others. The most developed model from Marchionini and White describes the information seeking process as:

Recognizing a need for information
Accepting the challenge to take action to fulfill the need
Formulating the problem
Expressing the information need in a search system
Examination of the results
Reformulation of the problem and its expression, and
Use of the results

(Marchionini and White in [...]

Interlinking Tips: Establishing an Interlinking Process for your Web Properties

Original post on establishing an interlinking process found on Marketing Jive.
Developing an interlinking strategy is a key piece of optimizing your web properties. Quite often many site owners do not take the time to properly plan their interlinking strategy. The process outlined below is designed to provide some insight as to how you should proceed when establishing your interlinking strategy.  While this process can be modified according to how advanced your current interlinking strategy is, if anything else, establishing a process will at least ensure that interlinking is a line item as part of [...]

Search User Interfaces

If you’re interested in the academic side of search, chances are you’ve come across the work of Marti Heart, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Her work covers everything from search engines, search interfaces, social technology, information visualization and web usability. Her book, Search User Interfaces, came out late last year and is a great resource for anyone interested in the information seeking process and how users interact with search and search results. Better yet, the text of the entire book is available free online.
If you are interested in usability, the chapters on the design, presentation, and evaluation of search [...]

5 Keys to Interlinking Success

Lately, we have been asked a number of questions about interlinking and what is the best approach to take when interlinking your website pages. This is a great discussion and so I thought that I would share some interlinking tips that you might find useful.  In the past, I’ve discussed interlinking benefits for B2B websites, but really interlinking is something that all site owners should take seriously.
Before we dive right into the tips though, let’s make sure that we are on the same page when we refer to interlinking. Interlinking as it is being referred to here is [...]

Google News Sitemaps

You’ve all seen Google news results when searching online. But did you know those results come from, in part, user submitted XML sitemaps? Google allows you to submit XML sitemaps to its news feed in the same way you can submit an XML sitemap of your website to Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap works in the same way for both: it allows Google to discover your pages and index them faster and more accurately. The sitemaps also allow you to use metadata to better describe the pages for indexing.
Google is currently in a six month transition making changes to the way [...]

Taking the Confusion Out of Attribution

So we get a number of questions about attribution. What is attribution? Which attribution model should we be using? Is there an ideal attribution model? What is a typical attribution model look like? How accurate is one attribution model vs. another?
Before I go on, I would like to say that I am by no means an expert on attribution. The purpose of this article is to really open up a dialogue and help take some of the confusion out of attribution as it pertains to marketing specifically online marketing.  People have been trying to figure out attribution for years and [...]

SEO Roadmaps: Building an SEO Roadmap to Guide Your Online Marketing Focus

As we started working with a number of our B2B clients, one thing that we noticed is that many (if not all) required some direction when it came to SEO.  Some clients were, and still are, at various levels of the organic search maturity model which means that the level of engagement and level of SEO knowledge varied.  No matter at what stage the client is in, there was a consistent need for direction.
It seems as though there is always the question of where can we focus our SEO efforts?  This is a great question as there are many areas that may require [...]

Enquiro: A Decade of Search Marketing Posts: Part II

Yesterday we shared part one of Enquiro’s Decade of Search Marketing Posts, counting down #’s 200 through #101.  Today we present the second half of the list and revist the top 100 memorable posts from Enquiro that we have written over the past ten years.�
The Search Industry has changed drastically during the past decade.  We have seen our fair share of SEO agencies and Search companies come and go.  In fact, we have seen our fair share of Search Engines come and go as well.   We have used a large number of search marketing buzzwords and we will probably continue to do so.  To [...]

Enquiro: A Decade of Search Marketing Posts: Part I

Wow, can you believe that ten years have passed since the turn of the millenium?  For those of us in the Western world, and perhaps the entire world, the past ten years have produced a world that is more frightening and complicated than it has ever been before.  We have experienced:

Heinous acts of terrorism including September, 11, 2001
Increased natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005
Genetic advances never experienced before
Soaring oil prices
The Boston Red Sox winning their first Word Series title since 1918 (in 2004)
The phenomenon of blogging and micro-blogging (Twitter anyone)
Monster bailouts [...]