October 2, 2009 | 1 Comment
October is a busy month for for us at Envoca. We have been pretty excited about the official public launch of Google Wave and have been having fun with our new accounts. Aside from having plans to launch a half dozen websites and eat a lot of turkey this month, we will also be attending several regional tech events alongside other Portland web design firms. These events are always helpful for keeping us ahead of the curve on the latest trends and tools that people are using in the web marketing sphere.
Drupal Camp PDX
Drupal Camp PDX 2009 is being held October 9-11 at NedSpace Old Town, right above Backspace at NW 5th & Davis in Old Town Portland. The Conference planners state that, “DrupalCamp PDX is a unconference…developed entirely by the camp participants – you and your fellow Drupalers.”
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September 8, 2009 | 6 Comments
At Envoca one of the things that specialize in is building websites that generate leads for our clients. It is one thing to design a good-looking business website for a client but it is quite another to build a website that brings business to a client. One of the other things that we specialize in is legal internet marketing. When we work on projects that are a combination of the two you can find examples of some of our best work.
Staying Ahead of the Curve – The Hydroxycut Recall
On the morning of May 1, 2009 the FDA announced that the popular diet drug Hydroxycut was to be recalled due to severe cases of liver damage and the risk of death. Several of our clients are law firms who handle pharmaceutical injury lawsuits and wanted to be able to take the cases of people injured by this drug as soon as possible. We have found that these days, when people need a lawyer, they look on the internet to find one. Therefore, it was important to us to make sure that people searching online for a Hydroxycut lawyer found our clients on Google as soon as possible.
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August 29, 2009 | No Comments
Remember the good old days where there were only 3 places to buy traffic? Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have dominated the market. Especially in local search marketing, several IYP, Internet Yellow Pages, have moved from yearly directory listing fees to a pay-per-click structure.
In some highly competitive keywords especially, this has been a great opportunity for more keyword inventory and to really control a cost for conversion for a client. However, with so many opportunities and each site offering a slightly different package and type of customer a search engine marketer’s job is growing increasingly more difficult.
Over the next several weeks, we are going to open up our Advertising Portfolio and share real traffic patterns and conversion rates for the different IYP to show which sites drove quality traffic and leads and the sites whose advertising structure actually hurt our search engine efforts. You will want to stay tuned, as we rank each traffic source… you are not going to believe how the traffic from the different IYP behaved or how drastic different results were from the same sources to different industries.
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August 19, 2009 | No Comments
When I talk with traditional search engine optimizers the question I hear is, “What is the most important factor with Local search?” I think there are a lot of parallels with traditional and local search, but the one thing that is really important to remember, something that someone new to local search optimization often overlooks, is the importance of data standardization. Standardization tells Google, and in fact all the search engines, a consistency story from the seed provider to the end user. Consistency regarding your company name, address, phone number—from the bottom up.
Inconsistency Leads to Fragmentation
This is the most common error we see where inconsistency has lead to fragmentation for companies because sometimes they add “inc.” to their name or change their address from suite #123 to ste. 123. These differences water down your brand where Google is getting better at this, it still takes time to merge nuances. Look at the example below.
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August 12, 2009 | 2 Comments
The second official day of Search Engine Strategies (SES) is now underway and some interesting things have happened so far. Yesterday we had the privilege of hearing Clay Shirky speak on Social Media and its effects on world affairs. Clay touched on the effects of social media’s consumer impact and even sported the now infamous “3 wolf moon t-shirt.”
The trade show was open so I got a few minutes to chat with the folks working on Bing’s up-and-coming mobile search platform as well as WYS from Google who is known online as “that guy who does the Google webmaster videos with Matt Cutts.” In the afternoon I got to sit in on a panel that included 3 of the top 5 people involved in SEO in the world namely Bruce Clay, Michael Gray, and Aaron Wall. Then in the evening, WebmasterRadio.fm put on their Search Bash after party where the industry’s movers and shakers were able to well…move and shake together.
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August 12, 2009 | 5 Comments
The SES convention started off with a keynote by Clay Shirky who reminded me a lot of Fromone Pidontknow. No doubt he gets that a lot. He talked about how communication habits are changing due to the technology available. The speech was interesting because
1. He seemed to be very passionate about his subject matter
2. He was well prepared and seemed to know the message without cues
3. I was drinking a caramel macchiato
4. I am interested in the subject
You can listen to it online. The material is covered in his book, here comes everybody. The two bits of his talk that I found most interesting were
1. The web facilitates Lynch Blogs and other forms of organization without organizations
2. The way we communicate has changed – but the motivation to do so has always been there
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