The Raven Archive

Archive for the ‘ Commentary ’ Category

SEO Hats Are Dead – It’s All About Risk

Monday, November 24th, 2008

In the past few years, archetypes for search engine optimizers have emerged. They include a three point spectrum that includes “White Hat,” “Gray Hat” and “Black Hat.” SEO hats, like most labels, were designed to pigeonhole and simplify what a person does. However, as the practice of SEO had matured ...

Google introduces SearchWiki; SEO heads explode

Friday, November 21st, 2008

If you’re signed in to Google this morning and have performed a search, you’ve no doubt noticed that they’ve introduced interaction elements that allow you to move results up or down or suppress them from your display. Google is calling this feature SearchWiki. According to the Google Help Center article ...

Attack of the Quechup Fem Bots!

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Skip to full story below the image Most social networks grow through people finding friends or people they relate to. In some cases, people will friend others solely for the purpose of expanding their reach and exposure (usually for marketing purposes). But what happens when the friending is a result ...

Apple’s Marketing Spanks Microsoft’s Marketing

Monday, October 20th, 2008

It’s hard to sell something you don’t really believe in. That’s the assumption I’ve been making with Microsoft’s new ad campaign, created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky. Microsoft has thrown some $300 million dollars at CP&B to make them pretty again, but the only thing they’ve been able to do ...

What’s in Your Word Cloud?

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

The Online Marketing Blog is a regular internet haunt of mine because of the consistent quality posting of search related content. Often one of the issues directed at search related content, and in particular search related blogs or sites, is that the content is regurgitated. So, to put that to ...

The Trouble With SERP Tracking

Monday, April 7th, 2008

There’s an ongoing obsession with tracking search engine result pages (SERPs). Both seasoned search marketing specialists and know-enough-to-be-dangerous webmasters can’t get enough of them. So what’s so special about these stats and why do people track them? Why Track SERPs? There are generally three reasons why people track SERPs: Research, ...

7 Social Media Websites and Their Impact on SEO

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

“The problem with social media is… there are more people writing it than reading it.” Mixx After being granted a credibility boost from the New York Times recently, it seems like Mixx is here to stay. The underdog of social networking, Mixx has a smaller following than other user generated ...

Hammock T-shirt+Photo=Laptop Equals Very Cool

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

Nashville’s Hammock Publishing has a 16-year-old annual tradition: giving T-shirts to the people they work with throughout the year. This year they added a new twist to that tradition: T-shirt+Photo=Laptop. If you received a T-shirt, Hammock asked you to add a photo to a world map on their website. For ...

Regardless of Outage, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Still Rocks

Friday, February 15th, 2008

Although we were directly affected by the two hour outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), it still wasn’t the end of the world. I read several blog entries and comments about “not putting all of your eggs in one basket” and “how cloud computing was unreliable.” However, what other baskets ...

Five Reasons Why You Should Run a “Do Follow” Blog

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Why is the Raven blog a “Do Follow” blog? The short and simple answer has to do with rewarding our blog community. There’s too many high quality comments that don’t deserve to have their links “no followed” in the comments. Running a “Do Follow” blog does take more effort. You ...