Christian wrote another article for AboutUs’s Learn section called Create A Cost-Effective AdWords Campaign. The article is written for professionals with a very small budget who may be interested in learning how to properly configure a Google AdWords campaign to get the best bang for their buck.

The movie Inception is this summer’s blockbuster movie. I’ve seen it twice and it has definitely stuck with me due to its clever plot, great visuals and fantastic music score. The basis of the movie Inception is that it’s possible to invade someone’s dream state and plant an idea in their mind in order to change that person’s thinking in the real world.

After watching Inception for the second time, it occurred to me that the objective of a search engine marketer is the same as an inception.

Search Engine Marketing is Like Inception

“Extraction” & Keyword Research

If you’re familiar with the movie, you know that Cobb performs what’s called extraction to try to gain secrets from an individual’s mind when that individual is in a dream state. The team at Amplify performs this same sort of extraction for each one of our client’s target audiences. Through keyword research we are able to tell which keywords the target audience is using to search for our clients’ product or service. Read the rest of this entry »

“The best proof of love is trust.” ~ Joyce Brothers

Dr. Joyce Brothers doesn’t know it, but she may as well as add “Wise Search Engine Marketer” along with her already well-known expertise in Psychology to her portfolio. This quote can pertain to how search engines view your content; if they “trust” your content, you’ll see their love reflect in the form of search engine rankings.

“I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.”

Taking calculated risks is something that should be done in life and with your website. Like what Dr. Brothers says: if you can handle what could result to be “the worst”, then you ought to take the risk. Perhaps this risk is creating a piece of content that might be a little different than the “corporate norm” that you have been producing which might help you attract some visits and links to your website. Or maybe it’s setting up a social media marketing campaign for your company and becoming as transparent as possible. If you can take the worst, take the risk.

“The world at large does not judge us by who we are and what we know; it judges us by what we have.”

You might as well replace “world at large” with “Google” in this quote: the Google does not judge your website by who authors it and what that author knows; the Google judges your website by the content that you have on it. That’s why having unique and compelling content on your website is so important. You may know the Seattle Mariners’ history from club creation to today, from the first-ever starting line-up to the category leaders in club history, but Google doesn’t care if you don’t have it on your website.

“When we lived within six blocks, Aunt Sarah or Aunt Mary knew all about the boy who you were having this blind date or this first date with. So we knew all about the boy.”

Well… can’t certainly tie this in to anything regarding SEM… so…

“When you come right down to it, the secret of having it all is loving it all.”

Love your content and you’ll begin to see it pay off in spades. Love what you’re writing about and love what you’re doing. As search engine marketers, we can’t help you love your content… we can only help you get it in a position where search engines can trust it (love it as well) and Internet users can judge it.

I checked the Major League Soccer (MLS) website on Saturday to see the fixtures for the weekend (because I’m a soccer nut) and noticed that they were announcing a new website redesign. I found it kind of funny that they were announcing this with the website I was on being the exact same. I soon discovered that they had their site redesign on another URL entirely… which isn’t the best way of doing things.

In any case, I thought I’d run down some of the best practices for a website redesign and see where the new MLSSoccer.com website stood in my opinion. After going through some of the bigger issues and evaluating the new website, I would like to give a yellow card for the MLS’s effort for their website redesign:

Here’s why the new MLS website deserves a yellow card for their site redesign:

1. Announcing a website redesign on their old URL that tells users to go to a new URL. I wouldn’t approach a website redesign this way. I’m also hoping that in due time, the MLS web team makes the switch to the new MLSSoccer.com domain permanent by assigning 301 redirects from old URLs to their corresponding new URLs.
2. Their old website has some “official” branding (such as, on the top, the “official site of Major League Soccer”). I don’t see anything like that on the redesign.
3. I’m seeing some weird 301 redirect issues. If I type in “mlsnet.com” in my browser bar, I go to the old site. If I type in “www.mlsnet.com” in my browser bar, I go to the new site. Very odd and can be confusing to site visitors.
4. The new site’s custom 404 error page is a bit lacking (please click this link so we can get this URL in their top content report for Google Analytics). Ideally, especially with a site redesign situation, you would want to have a mini-sitemap here for users to be able to quickly get to their wanted destination.

If I were in the MLS web team’s shoes (err, cleats), I would have made the switch from the old MLSnet.com website to the MLSSoccer.com one with 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new before the first Matchday in the regular season. That being said, the MLS web team did a good job with the new website with how SEO-friendly it is: there are lots of text headlines, a MUCH cleaner URL structure and more. In fact, I like it a lot better than the old website. But they could be doing a much better job on the website redesign launch than what they’ve done now.

And lastly, my one sentence of actual footy analysis:

Great action in the first weekend, some fun games (and goals) to watch, tough for the expansion Philly team to go into Seattle for their first game and even more so with the red card and MLS players need to work a bit on their first touch.

If you have an RSS feed, you should (if you haven’t already) go set up a Feedburner account and burn that feed. What does Feedburner do, exactly? Well, simply put, it dresses up your RSS feed, gives you greater control over the look and feel and gives you the ability to set-up email subscriptions. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Here are some quick tips on how to optimize your Feedburner feed:

1. Make it compatible to any feed reader. If it’s not activated, you should browse to the Optimize tab and activate the SmartFeed option.
2. Give your readers the tools to share your content easily. You can include options to allow the reader of your feed content to email it to others, email the author, share it on Facebook and more. To look at all of the built-in options, navigate to the Optimize tab and then to FeedFlare.
3. Allow readers to subscribe to your content via an email subscription. Not everyone “gets” what an RSS feed is (or what the heck to do with it!). In this case, giving those users the option to subscribe to your content via an email that automatically gets sent out whenever you publish new content is preferable. You can even enable options to customize the email address that sends out the emails, the font and color of the email text and more. To see all of the options available for email, click on over to the Publicize tab then Email Subscriptions.
4. Make sure your feed is branded! When someone is searching for feeds to subscribe to, make sure yours stands out with your company or blog logo. To add a logo to your feed, you can go to the Optimize tab then select the drop down menu option “Specify custom image URL” in the Feed Image Burner section.

With some quick changes here and there, you can truly make your Feedburner feed stand out above all others!