If you’re a marketer and you’re currently tied up with other initiatives (campaigns, new site launch, etc.), or a search professional bogged down with doing keyword research, a technical audit, or staying up with the latest trends, remember to come up for air every now and then (at least once a month if not more) *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above or, in Facebook, by clicking on the “View Original Post” link below. ***

This month I made my 30 day challenge be “Don’t respond to email after 10 p.m.” I’ve done very well overall on this challenge, and I like the results a lot. I’ll probably try to keep up this behavior

This month I made my 30 day challenge be “Don’t respond to email after 10 p.m.” I’ve done very well overall on this challenge, and I like the results a lot. I’ll probably try to keep up this behavior. Now I need to pick my next challenge.

Your product or service is amazing, your website is gorgeous, your sales copy is solid and for some reason nobody is buying.

Not long ago WhitePages.com quietly introduced its own local business search. The site, the original “people search” engine, has always offered “yellow pages” listings but now the company has built its own database in the background. Accordingly, WhitePages claims its data are more accurate than you’ll find on search engines and Google in particular

WhitePages.com is looking to boost its traffic through the upcoming formal launch of its Daily Pop deals offering as well as the introduction of more local business listings, Jason Milstead, director of business search, told PaidContent in an interview. Here’s the plan. Click to read the rest of this post..

If there’s one thing that’s made me borderline OCD (happy now Michael ?) would be the world of personalized search. Probably more so, behavioural data, is an area (both explicit and implicit) that seems to be part of any likely evolution of search engines (and by extension SEO). Now, I am not alone in this

If there’s one thing that’s made me borderline OCD (happy now Michael ?) would be the world of personalized search. Probably more so, behavioural data, is an area (both explicit and implicit) that seems to be part of any likely evolution of search engines (and by extension SEO). Now, I am not alone in this.

In the search marketing industry, we like to believe we’ve got hard and fast rules as to what goes into proper SEO.  From the way we choose keywords to the length of page titles, to how often and where best to place links from one page to another and across web sites.  The fact however, is that we don’t have direct access to the search engine algorithms, so we need to rely upon our experiences and those of others in the industry we trust.  An aspect that we think applies today may not tomorrow.  And how that aspect applies may be open for debate, like the Meta Description has, at times, or at least it has, until now? Last week, I posted an article in response to a claim I read where it was reported that Google is now using Meta Descriptions in page relevance .  We got a flood of input, both on Twitter and in the comments of that article.  Vanessa Fox chimed in, as did Jill Whalen, Edward Lewis, and about a half dozen others.  So a few people agreed to join in and test this out… Caveat When it comes to testing things we think might be ranking factors, it’s not possible to test as completely or thoroughly as we’d like simply because we don’t have access to the search engine algorithms, nor do we have the capacity to test under all circumstances without gaining access to the server resources that companies like Google or Microsoft have. Given that reality, we need to make assumptions and break the scientific rule by going with our “best guess”.  In my life, I prefer to call this following the intuitive.  Most of you probably call it going on instinct, or “a gut feeling”.  Then, as more data comes in, or as I can further study what happens after I’ve taken action based on that, I can sometimes gain more knowledge.

Earlier this month, we speculated that Google News is getting spammy, way spammier than it ever was. We based this assumption based on the number of complaints in the forum thread