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The world of SEO can be intimidating for anyone who is just jumping into the game at this point. Terms like PageRank sculpting, temporal analysis of links, canonicalization, and a multitude of other esoteric terms are constantly being bantered around the industry. For a new practitioner, it's easy to see why many people view SEO as some kind of voodoo. And truth be told, there are a lot of small details that can have profound effects on SEO, so the reputation isn't completely undeserved. However, as much as these arcane bits of knowledge might be, the difference for some websites in ranking in the top three for a particular competitive search phrase (the art of SEO) really isn't about black magic, but more so, it's about the study of the user that you're trying to target. The reason I say that is because ultimately the user decides what the profile of a top ranking site should be. Google, Bing, and other search engines have historically spent millions (if not ...

For the past couple of months, Google has been telling the world that page speed is an increasingly important aspect of Web sites. The Google Speed site – which has the laudable goal of making Web browsing as fast as turning the pages of a magazine – has been featured in several posts on their Webmaster blog, and features links to various free tools that they, and others, have made available for the masses. So, as someone responsible for a site, if you suspect that you may have page load issues, what's your first stop? Where should you go to get an overall idea of your site performance, short of opening every page of your site while holding a stopwatch? The first place that many of us will start is in our Google Webmaster Tools account. Log in, click on Labs, then Site Performance. There, you'll see site performance data based on feedback from their crawlers.  On the page you'll also see a sample of 10 pages with the load times for each. Unfortunately, it doesn't ...

Just about ten days ago, we reported on the launch of the new Google search results pages (SERPs). Some positive feedback has emerged, both from the general public and from search professionals, although users seemed mostly infuriated at the outset. So hit or miss ? On May 5th, Google unveiled its new search results page, deploying a whole range of tools including Universal search as a core feature, more search options, find and compare, a cleaner logo and finally, the much-criticized dynamic left-hand navigation bar. The look and feel - "Hate it !" At the time, and judging from the comments to our post, the majority of users were forming a solid "I hate the new Google search page" camp. The left hand navigation bar was disqualified as "counter-intuitive", "redundant" with the top menu, and the icons for the various "Everything" options were said to be "clutter", "as ugly as sin" (in case you wonder, these are...

As marketers, we should all pursue how to better communicate a message -- yet many of us naturally limit our opportunities by focusing only on what we know. For example, when you hear the phrase "content is king" in the context of sales and marketing, does your thought process default to content that should be written? We're all familiar with the old adage of "a picture is worth a thousand words." In this attention (deficit) economy, what's old has become new again. Many consider visual assets (e.g., images, diagrams, illustrations, animation, video) as secondary marketing elements. However, these are the assets people are most interested in sharing. You may think this is obvious, but consider what Facebook had to learn, as stated by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his recent "60 Minutes" interview: "Photos originally weren't that big of a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people really liked them, so we built out this f...