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Every once in a while I gauge the effectiveness of online retail sites by looking for something I need.

Today I tried just this with my sites set specifically on home improvement sites.  The results were far from stellar and, in fact, quite discouraging. 

If you are a brick and mortar retailer that has a website, consider the following situation.  Chances are your customers are just as frustrated with your site as I was with the ones I visited.  This could be costing you sales and, more importantly, customers.

While it may seem obvious to many of us in the industry (The so-called veterans) it may not be that obvious to all.

That is, no matter what rankings you achieve or how much you are spending on your PPC in a month, you really should only consider one thing:  Your customers.

100% of your efforts must revolve around who your customer is. 

In this article I give some tips to ensure that your marketing campaign revolves around your customer.

Google has had a feature out for some time which allows webmasters to create a sitemap file to help Google’s crawlers find and index content.

It sounds like a great idea.  After all, it is much easier to feed the crawler the content then hope it finds it on it’s own.

But is a Google sitemap worthwhile?  Is it even necessary?  Well, once you realize the incredibly powerful statistics available to you, you might change your opinion.  After all, would knowing what terms might be driving searches to your competitors be helpful?

I stumbled across this quite by accident.  I knew it was there because I’d seen it before but I forgot about it until today.

So I did some checking to see if it still does work and based on my limited test it appears that it does.

What I’m about to explain to you may not only help get sandboxed sites indexed and ranking quicker, it can even make the site owner a little money.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss SEO/SEM with The American Cancer Society.  What you are about to read is part two of my interview with David Neff, the Director of Online Communications for the American Cancer Society High Plains Division. Click here to read part one.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss SEO/SEM with a non-profit organization.  The conversation didn’t start with SEO/SEM but I got to thinking:  How does a non-profit do SEO/SEM?

Having been in the industry a while I have a pretty good idea what the going rate is for professional SEM and I find it hard to believe that a non-profit firm would invest in it, knowing that in some cases it’s hard to measure.

What you are about to read is part one of a two part interview with the Director of Online Communications for the American Cancer Society High Plains Division.

Technorati has been reporting quarterly on the state of the blogosphere.  The blogosphere is a term they have coined to mean the blog world.

In the most recent “State of the Blogosphere” they have reported that the blogging world continues to expand at an incredible rate.

So this leads to the question:  Are you blogging?  And if not, why?  In this article I look at blogs in general and why they are good for your business.

Many times, a site gets very large and its ability to rank well in competitive markets decreases in part because of the size of the site.  While we in the business know that content is king more often than not it is a combination of content and effective site structure which will ultimately help your pages rank.

In this article I look at how to most effectively structure your site to take advantage of this.

This is part three of a three part series on rank checking tools. 

In it I look at Advance Web Ranking, documenting the different parts of the program along with my opinion on it.

This is part two of a three part series on rank checking tools. 

In it I look at Agent Web Ranking, documenting the different parts of the program along with my opinion on it.

In the next few articles I will look at 3 of the top rank checking software packages available.

But rank checking is a no-no on search engines isn’t it?  This is technically true.

And rank isn’t as important in the end right?  Not so true.

In this article I answer these questions and also look at the first of the three software packages.

As an SEM it occurred to me recently that I tell a lot of people what to do with their sites, however like most SEM’s I don’t usually tell them how.

Our industry has grown to the point where many of us are merely consultants.  We recommend adding feeds or tags or blogs to their site yet we rarely tell them how to do this.

Therefore I decided to start providing some how to articles.  And as my first how to I will explain a couple ways to use includes to make site management a little easier.

Local search has been growing at a rapid pace the past year or so.  So it’s no surprise that more and more firms want to understand how local search can be used to benefit themselves.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with someone from the Google Local Search team and he gave me some valuable insight into how Google Local works. 

He shared with me some tips to help improve your local listing as well as provide some ideas how to gain more exposure in Local.

There has been explosive growth in the SEM business these days.  We went from a handful of businesses to thousands in the span of 3 or 4 years.

The thing is, most of these guys throw up a shingle and call themselves SEM professionals without any real experience.

In this article I explore some of the things you need to realize if you want to start your own SEM business.

I saw this a couple days ago but didn’t give it much thought until an idea occurred to me.

What if Google decides, after tweaking this landing page measurement algorithm, to begin applying it to regular SERPs?  Well in this article I look at the pros and cons of such a move.