Online Advertising

Internet Marketing in the Movies: Are People Starting to "Get" It?

Since I'm a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it's redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append "movie" to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).

URL Rewriting: Increase Organic Traffic By Using Dynamic URLs That Look Static

If you haven't noticed URL rewriting, you haven't been thinking like a search engine optimizer. More and more sites are using this technology to create human-readable (and SEO-friendly) URLs. If your site is one of them, good for you. Read on and you might find some reassuring data to back up your excellent decision. If you are not familiar with how URL rewriting will improve organic search ranking and traffic to your site, I don't blame you. It's not a hard concept to grasp, but it's rarely covered well in SEO publications. Few sites are using it, and this creates an opportunity for you to get ahead in ranking. If you have any search competition, you should already be thinking about how to improve the way you present data to engines.

Visitor Statistics After 1 Year of Business

Approximately a year ago, I decided to start my own website - a semiconductor supplier directory company called Semi-Directory. I admit it’s a bit of a dry topic, but please bear with me as this post isn’t about the site per se. Instead, I thought it might be a good idea to share my progress over the last 12 months, and provide evidence that SEO actually works! (duh - as though you didn’t know that already). Still, it’s nice to see tangible evidence that this is the case now and again. Right?

Business Assets + Historical Tracking = Serious Value

One of the areas we rarely touch on here at SEOmoz is how to use your offline, general business assets for SEO. Today I want to tackle that along with the seemingly unrelated subject of watching historical progress. At the end of this excercise, I think you'll see why these two tie together so nicely.

The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business

Virtually everyone who's engaged seriously in the practice of search engine optimization has found it to have surprisingly versatile results. Site owners will often start out optimizing in order to rank for a particular term/phrase that's relevant to getting customers, only to find that secondary and tertiary benefits from branding to reputation management to raw traffic all have an impact. Today I'd like to cover the different applications of SEO and talk about how to choose the right SEO objectives for your business.

Learning a Little About Email Marketing

I don't know a whole lot about email marketing, but I enjoy studying the marketing emails I receive and identifying the ones that are more effective than others. I talked to Scott, who handles our email marketing campaigns, and he praises email marketing for being "dirt cheap and very effective." I can agree on the cheap part: we use Exact Target, whose suite of email marketing solutions start at $1,000 per year for one user and go up to an Enterprise account ($15,000 a year for five users). While there are expensive email marketing packages available, you can definitely find an affordable option to start out with and get your feet wet.

The SEO Failings of Major UK Highstreet Retailers

So I recently read a post by e-consultancy which looked at 10 things Asda (a huge UK supermarket, part of the Wal-Mart group) could do better online. The post is part of a series where they look at a number of large brands in the UK and how they can perform better online. The series focuses solely on usability though and doesn't actually mention any online marketing. So I thought I'd step up to th...

An Intro to VSEO (Video Search Optimization)

A while ago, i was looking into video search engine optimisation (VSEO) and what benefits it could or would bring to my customers, and after contacting a number of so called VSEO specialists, found this to be a very expensive way of marketing online. On two occasions, I was quoted in excess of $6,000 for this service, not only was this a high cost, but this was a "per month" cost with...

Headsmacking Tip #5 - Link Building Through Conservation

This tip is probably one of the simplest ways to gain links through conservation. A lot of SEO advice talks about double-checking links that point to 404 pages, as these are lost potential. If a link points to a page that doesn't resolve, it's generally accepted wisdom that the engines won't give any benefit to the domain or any particular page. Certainly, with something around ...

Content and Marketing Lessons Learned from The Dark Knight

For the four of you who aren't aware, The Dark Knight is a pretty big deal for a multitude of reasons: It was the first movie to film large chunks of the film with IMAX cameras. It debuted on the largest number of screens in cinematic history (4,366). It also debuted on the...

SEO Defense: 8 Habits To Protect Your Rankings

Below is a list of things I've begun to do on a daily basis to help keep my SEO strategy clean, solid and less vulnerable to questionable competitor activities. I can't control what my keyword competitors are doing, but I can sure as hell make it harder for them to F' up all my hard work.Those bastards never sleep. So I won't sleep either.1. Check SERP ...

Movie Websites: A Missed Opportunity Or a Case of the "I Don't Care"s?

I was chatting with SEO Hack and Syzlak (the Statler and Waldorf of SEO) when the topic of movie websites came up. When movie studios have a new film coming out, they typically launch a separate, unique website for that film. I played devil's advocate and asked Syzlak why don't studios launch movies on their own domain via a subdirectory (e.g., paramount.com/movietitle). He responded by saying, "if the studio links out to a movie then that domain will rank well, but the studio itself might not pull as high a rank if it had each movie as a microsite or subdomain, etc." Makes sense. Think about it: a movie theater is trying to promote each individual film, not necessarily the studio behind that film. Thus, it's logical to brand the new movie by putting it on a separate website.