SEM Insights

A long time ago I was a MENSA member. I liked feeling ‘clever’. But, it has an annual renewal fee, and with the advent of 3 very demanding children plus moving countries (and credit cards), the membership lapsed. My post is 2 fold:

A personal explanation of why I think having that type of membership is [...]

Most of you folks who read this regularly know I am a professor and subject matter expert for the Online Advanced SEM Course and Masters Certification courses for USF. Some of my experiences as such form the basis of this post:
While many students who take the course/s are relatively new to the industry, some are [...]

SES Toronto was a superlative conference this year – as usual. Great sessions, great people and awesome networking.
Apart from my session on Global Search Marketing, I was intereviewed by Greg Jarboe, President and Co-founder of  SEO-PR. It was the smoothest, most convivial interview I have had to date and I wanted to share it with you (2 minutes).
 

I was recently interviewed by Linda Bustos of ElasticPath.com’s blog Get Elastic. The topic of the interview was SEO for Global eCommerce websites and I wanted to share the questions and answer snippets here for SEMInsights awesome readers
 
Linda: What are the top SEO concerns for global ecommerce websites?

Laura: There are a number of challenges [...]

Questions have been swirling around duplicate content and international SEO for years (and way before that post too). Even with Google’s official stance (which we’ll look at later) and the personal experience of numerous SEOs, the fear of duplicate content penalties persists.
The purpose of this post is to try to address the main concerns while simultaneously [...]

Recently a colleague and I attended an Email webinar. Apart from being a solid sell as opposed to a really directionally instructive session, and while it was a bit of an overview without too many specifics to take away, there was one thing that my colleague Jo Wiebe (of page99test.com) raised that I (we) would [...]

Getting Googe Sitelinks
You can’t ‘get’ them. Not the organic ones anyway. The algorithm is entirely automated. You can’t buy them like you can buy PPC Ad Sitelinks. And even then with PPC Ad Sitelinks (an ad extension at the campaign level), unless you are in the top 3 results above the organics – in many [...]

Bit of a mixed title, but I wanted to try to catch-up with a few nuggets!
PPC ADLINKS
I’ve recently been inducted to the Online Faculty at the University of San Francisco as an Instructor and Subject Matter Expert, and one of the topics I lecture on is one that most PPC marketers may find of interest – Adlinks. I was [...]

 
While this is in no way meant as an hysterical babble, I know some may find it such. I urge you only to continue reading having been warned that it may impact your thoughts on social media – in how much you choose to share… or not. It’s an enigma in many ways.
In the second [...]

 
Depending on what you sell, there are numerous affecting variables. But there are a few tips that work for any ecommerce business.
 
1. Retention is easier and cheaper than acquisition, so spend equitably on the two where possible if your retention market warrants the spend. Don’t ignore either regardless of how established or un-established you are [...]