SEO continues to be called a ‘waste of time’, ‘evil’, a ‘waste of money’ and worse all over the net, and by numerous different sites. I know I’m not the only SEO proponent banging my head against the proverbial wall.
 
Heck, if SEO is such a waste of time, perhaps the purveyors of these gems of [...]

There is so much misunderstanding of these two terms, how they relate to each other, and which to target. I’m going to try to diffuse that dichotomy. 
 
It’s not a case of the chicken-before-the-egg or vice versa. They are two completely different disciplines, though each can benefit from the other much as SEO and paid search [...]

We have notified & refunded our attendees, and chatted with the speakers. Now we can let everyone else know:
The SEM Canada Conference has been postponed until October of next year for the following reasons:
1. We are in final talks with a new corporate sponsor who will enable us to really make the SEM Canada series [...]

Toronto SES was superb!
This post is a bit of ramble but it does contain my picks on:
• Most amusing event
• Most embarrassing comment
• Best session (of course this is not in any way biased)
• COOLEST people I met!
Most Amusing Pick
I realize this is not related to the conference directly, but I was in Toronto, [...]

This year has already resulted in numerous shifts in the search marketing space as we know it:
Trends From an Investors Perspective

Microsoft bid for Yahoo!, then withdrew the offer and Yahoo!’s shares dropped nearly 20%
Google and Yahoo! are still skirting around a search advertising partnership
Ask withdrew from main stream search to focus on women searchers
Google’s search [...]

I was interviewed today by Global TV News Calgary. It was a terrifying experience. I can only be thankful that it wasn’t live, and for the discretion of the both the cameraman Danny and the reporter himself.
After over an hour of interview time the actual live segment was less than 6 minutes long, but the [...]

SMM needs input from a variety of sources. This post hopes to bring numerous diversely related thoughts together.

This is one of those posts I’m writing simply because I wish someone else had written something similar when I was looking for this type of information a few years ago. This is the most current information I can find and is peppered with my own interpretations.
 
1. HOW PEOPLE SEARCH
 
People search in a variety of different [...]

For the number of big brands that do employ PPC effectively, there is a greater number that do not employ it effectively, or who do not employ it at all. Here are 6 specific data points that might be of interest to the latter group:
 

10% 1 to 20% 2 of consumers are strongly influenced by [...]

We have a confession to make. We’re totally (un)ashamed to admit that we’re really excited about this blog. Originally we had planned to have just one blog based around the SEM Canada Conference,  but after many brain storming sessions about the content we wanted to publish, the amazing guest authors we wanted to ask to write, [...]