Archive for the ‘Blogs & Blogging’ Category

Guest Post At Bruce Clay’s Blog: 10 Image SEO Tips For Local

Friday, July 29th, 2011

I was excited to be invited to write a guest piece over at Bruce Clay Inc’s blog this week, and my article on “10 Image Optimization Tips for Local SEO” provides a few ideas to help further enhance a small business’s local search signals.

Bruce Clay is of course a well-known and well-established technical search marketing expert who helped pioneer the field, and I recall reading his work and sitting in on his presentations at industry conferences from the very early days of SEO, back when I was working in obscurity within a big mega-corporation. So, it was a particular honor for me to be invited to foist my thoughts on — I mean contribute a professional article on — his blog!

In all seriousness, I’ve used Bruce Clay’s tools over time, and I believe his LocalPack business listing distribution service is well worthwhile for any business beginning to establish its listing information in major online directories and local search engines everywhere. (And, FYI, this was not a paid endorsement a quid pro quo endorsement by me — Bruce Clay’s people have not asked me to write about their products nor link to them, and I have no financial connection with them.)

LocalPack business listing citation distribution service at Bruce Clay Inc.

I’ve also particularly enjoyed reading work by the various other authors and editors who work at Bruce Clay Inc — Susan Esparza, Jessica Lee, and Virginia Nussey.

Thank you guys for inviting me in to participate on your blog, and making me feel welcome!

Sudbury Hydro Inc Merger? Be Careful What Your Searches Reveal

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

I find this slightly amusing – looking over my Google Analytics for this blog, I ran across someone who’d typed into Google the keyword phrase, “writing a memo to employees advising them of a merge”. That’s not all that surprising since I’ve been writing about a theoretical merger between AT&T, SuperMedia, and Dex One yellow pages companies.

But, the phrase caught my attention, because it looked like the sort of query someone inside a corporation might search upon while doing research on how to announce a merger to their employees. Could this reveal imminent merger announcement from those companies I’d been writing about?

So, I clicked to see the network of the person who came to my blog on that phrase, (more…)

Squeezing PageRank from Photos & Images

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

I’ve written a number of times about how one can leverage images to get more promotional value and links. Here’s another example today, from a blog post on 1800RECYCLING.com: Ten Recycled Ship Houses.

Boat House - assembled from parts of a ship

The writer of this post contacted me a while back to get permission to use one of my photos (of a house made out of a ship) I took a few years ago on Catalina Island since the pic happened to match up with their article’s theme.

I love helping out with projects like this whenever I can, in return for links!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve provided images in return for links for news websites, blogs and more. To me, that longterm link value is equivalent, or better than a mere transitory image licensing fee. (more…)

Poor Taste: Lay Off 100s Of Employees, Then Write A Blog Post Advising How To Retain Employees

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

SuperMedia Cracking UpIn a blog that SuperMedia operates to provide advice and information for businesses, they published this surreal post on “Employee Retention During a Corporate Restructure” at the end of December.

SuperMedia has been laying-off employees in droves over the past two years, as they struggled through revenue decline, heavy debts, Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, and subsequent cost-cutting (possibly paving the way for a three-way merger between SuperMedia, AT&T and Dex One). So, “corporate restructure” is an accurate term for what SuperMedia employees have been enduring for quite some time, if not an understatement on a massive scale.

So, publishing a post on how to retain employees seems downright… odd under the circumstances.

The article advises a number of tactics for employee retention (my interpretation/paraphrasing): (more…)