As they say on Twitter, awhellllnaw! Because your business, candidate, admissions office or juice bar has visitors with varying interests, you need to think seriously about landing pages. (Note the plural.) Why? Because your home page is (and must be) a compromise:, an artful catchall of tactics to engage every kind of searcher, browser or wandering minstrel. You get 4.5 …
SEO: The Three Cs
Is SEO really magical science?
No. That email promising to get you to #1 on Google overnight is a scam. Don’t fall for it.
Getting ahead of your competitors, finishing higher on Google searches depends on how you handle the Three C’s of Search Engine Optimization. The video explains that.
The Neon Trees, original content, SEO and Brand Linkage
We wrote a while back about the problems some advertisers have with brand linkage, and how often it gets (expensively) un-linked. Our favorite example is a cleverly concepted ad that shows a parade of tour buses following a car. The buses represent the music genres the driver’s listening to while she runs her errands around town. Vivid visual metaphor. Among …
Get out of the Gutenberg trap.
For more than 500 years now, we’ve been producing documents in ways that stifle thinking. We labor to perfect a document before it reaches a printing press, because it’s too expensive to correct later. We have to predict precisely how many to print, because waste is expensive, and reprinting is expensive. Today of course we can make a company brochure …
Survival of the F – what?
It’s a common phrase, but few people know what “survival of the fittest” implies, for life or business. First of all, it’s not about individuals. Darwin is talking about species, not single members of a species. More important, “fittest” does not mean strongest, smartest, most skillful, lowest body fat or highest batting average. The term equates to “most able to …
A tweak to make your search engine results more effective
How to improve the clickthrough rate of your search engine results.
Problopportunities
As we slip into December, will you set 2011 budgets by “adjusting” numbers from 2010? Take a little from this bucket, add a little to that bucket? That’s never the optimal strategy for marketing/branding/advertising, but this year especially it’s unwise. First of all, 2010 was not a “normal” year any way you measure it. A steep recession and a sputtering-but-real …
Are you optimized for your category?
How your website is found (or, he added darkly, not found) depends on what category the searcher is searching for. That statement is not as stupidly obvious as it first appears. Yes, it’s a Duh, but a Duh with interesting implications, because of what we call “category mismatch.” Every search defines the category wanted, whether the search terms are vague …
Stupid spam tricks…
Got a spam email today vainly trying to alarm us into buying some SEO service. When we considered the first two sentences, though, we were almost tempted to write back to the robot, addressed to Dear Dumbass. The email began: “Greetings, I found your website www.killianbranding.com ranked 4 for Advertising agency Chicago. If you are not on the first page …
Are you content with your SEO?
The single best thing you can do to be more visible on search engines? Have plenty of engaging, readable, relevant, original content. Why? Because over time, people will read it and link to it. It’s as simple as that. Inbound links are that big. (Not reciprocal links. Don’t be conned by offers of link exchanges – they’re essentially worthless.) We’re …