Search Engine Marketing News

Anvil Media, Inc. is a search engine marketing company specializing in keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) management. Anvil's Web marketing clients benefit from a broad array of search engine marketing services designed to increase revenue and decrease costs while supporting branding and marketing initiatives. With over twenty years of combined Internet marketing experience, Anvil can help you generate a meaningful return-on-investment (ROI) on Internet marketing programs.

Friday, February 29, 2008

How to Prioritize Your Optimization

Everyone wants to optimize. If you're like most companies, you have a laundry list of things you'd like to do with your site. You know instinctively that all the items on the list are of equal value. You know some might have more impact than others. You also know these items require different amounts of effort and resources. So the obvious question is, "Where do I begin?"

You're likely familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which states that human beings must first prioritize basic needs, such as food and shelter, before they're able to seek higher needs, like social interaction and self-actualization needs. What good is owning a Harley-Davidson or finding the perfect outfit for a trip to a club if you're starving to death?

Looking at your site in a similar fashion is extremely helpful. Since I first introduced our concept of the hierarchy of optimization last year, I've wanted to dig into it a little deeper...

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Sunday, February 17, 2008

7 Social Networks where you can get Relevant Links

When getting links, the most important thing is to get them on pages that are relevant to our website's content. Sometimes it can be difficult to get this kind of links, so what we can do is generate new pages that are relevant to our website's content and link from them to our site. This way we would be getting one way relevant links, but the problem is that the new pages wouldn't have any authority, so what we can use is social networks to accomplish this task. Here I will show you 7 social networks where you can get relevant links:

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Thursday, February 07, 2008

Two Practical Landing Page Tricks That Will Save You Money

Do you want to know how to reduce your cost per conversion by up to $10.67 and improve your quality score at the same time? Let me tell you a story about how I used two easy landing page optimization tricks to do just this.

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

There's no Such Thing as a Worthless Link

With certain linking strategies under fire and others frowned on by the search engines, I thought I'd focus on what links do count and share how and where I find them. The short answer to the question "what works" is: they all do. All the link building tactics we're fond of jeering at still work; reciprocal links, using article directories, adding your site to a bazillion general directories, and yes, even paid links. But they don't tend to work for long or provide the algorithmic insulation you need to weather the update storms. For that you need authority or "quality" links.

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Google Failing to Combat Link Spam

In spite of recent suggestions by Google that they are clamping down on sites using link spam to manipulate search results it seems the search engine is still struggling to introduce a solution to effectively tackle the problem.

Traffic from Google is an extremely valuable commodity and some sites will stop at nothing to secure top rankings for lucrative keywords. One of the main factors that determine how well your site ranks is the quality of links that point to it. These act as votes for your sites authority and help to improve your position within the search results.

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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The SEO Success Pyramid

John Wooden, the greatest basketball coach ever, never talked to his teams about winning. He talked to them about preparation and about the process of becoming a great team.

Wooden’s philosophy on coaching (and life) is summed up in the “Pyramid of Success,” which beats the tail off all that Self-Help Guru junk you see peddled in books, on blogs, on daytime chat shows, and on late night TV. I was lucky to hear Coach Wooden speak about the Pyramid of Success while I was a student at Pepperdine University; to this day, it’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. (Seriously, if you don’t know what his Pyramid of Success is, visit CoachJohnWooden.com.)

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Thursday, December 27, 2007

Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007

Tamar Weinberg from techipedia has compiled the Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007, complete with descriptions about why each post was so great. Definitely worth bookmarking and referencing this year!

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Monday, December 24, 2007

Comparing Traffic from the Big Three Search Engines

DazzlinDonna has done some comparison of the big three:

It’s not often that I can truly compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges when looking at search engine stats. It’s also not often that I rank #1 for a major keyword phrase for all 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live). I’ve got quite a few major phrases that aren’t #1 across the board, but are scattered about at #2, #3, etc. But even one ranking down means you are no longer comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. And sure, I've got lots of long-tail phrases that are #1 across all three - everyone has that. But the traffic is so minimal for each of those phrases, that comparing stats isn't very trustworthy at that point. But if a phrase sends a million users/month, and it is #1 across all 3 search engines, I'd say the stats associated with that phrase will be pretty darn accurate.

Since I hit #1 for that kind of phrase across all three search engines this month, I thought it would be a great time to see just what percentage of traffic the search engines sent me. The results are glaring.

Google - 83.33%
Yahoo - 11.26%
Live/MSN - 5.40%

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Google Changing the Way They Handle Subdomains

WebmasterWorld administrator tedster has informed us that Google will be treating subdomains like they treat folders on a site. In short, he said, Matt Cutts said Google will roll out in a few weeks a new filter to make sure only two results of a domain (no matter subdomain or folder) will show up for a search.

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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play

I get so many questions from people about Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and other social news sites every day that I decided to write this little "manual" as something to read before you jump in head first into any social site, and to keep by your side as you progress through the ranks. It should not only help you succeed with your social media marketing efforts, but also help you avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

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