Texture design

Posted by randfish

Rather than simply┬?share my opinion, let's make it democratic. I've built a short┬?list of the Top 10 overlooked tactics I see in the professional search marketing sphere. These aren't the mistakes that websites make when trying to appeal to search engines, but rather, the omissions that we, as professional marketers and consultants, let pass by.

If you've got more to share, please enlighten us

Ugghh. I'm realizing this poll isn't quite optimal (too long, too many choices, etc.). Oh well, I suppose everyone has an off-blogging night, eh? A free thumbs up to whoever guesses what I would vote for first, BTW.

Posted by randfish

I've got to say that I'm immensely proud of Rebecca. When she first applied here at Designmoz, we failed to even call her back for a second interview. But, she convinced us to take her on as an unpaid college intern, knowing that once we had a taste of her sweet work ethic, creativity and smorgasbord of pop-culture laden sarcasm, we'd have no choice but to bring her on board full time.

Recently, however, she's put together a project of immense proportion, deserving of praise - Designmoz's new premium article, "The Professional's Keyword Research Guide." Rebecca and I built a detailed outline for the article together, but over many edits and re-edits and combinations of our writing, it turned into an enormous, 75-page behemoth on the subject. I blame myself for the girth - we'd put together something brief and valuable and I'd want more. Rebecca dug deep, I dug deep and then I made her dig deeper. She ruthlessly scraped every piece of value and function from 10 different keyword tools, dove into the world of keyword targeting and wrote an ode to brainstorming that would make Dan Thies blush.

Rebecca's work on this project was tireless, and she fit it in with all her other duties for clients (and comics) here at Designmoz. To top it off, DaveN recently commented that "she takes the piss a little." I'm pretty sure that's the highest compliment an individual in our sphere can achieve. Bravo, Boowrecka - it's not just my boos you're wreckin' anymore

Also - a note on the premium articles. A little part of me feels guilty providing content that requires payment. I recognize that it's critical to our business model and to supporting the time-consuming research and writing, but it also drifts off against the spirit of Designmoz. Thus, I've decided that to help balance out the karma, we'll be releasing one free, valuable, article for every paid one we provide. Today, for example, we released the KW Research Guide and Jane's Social Media Marketing Spectacular (Jane's getting lots of well-deserved praise for her work over here).

As for the premium membership and the tools - we're about to move servers to a new host that should be able to withstand our hefty traffic load. Once that's complete, the keyword difficulty tool will once again be accessible to everyone and in the next 2-3 months, we'll be launching a new premium tool in beta and releasing our crawl test tool for public consumption as well (it's very, very sweet). So, premium article = free article and premium tool = free tool. Hopefully the moz gods will accept this penance.

p.s. Yeah - I know there's lots of shilling in this post. Sorry about that; I'll try to keep it to a bare minimum.

Technorati Tags

keyword research guide, rebecca kelley, daven

Posted by randfish

On March 26th, I'll be speaking on the Linkbaiting, Social Search Marketing & Blogging panel in Munich, Germany. My intention is to bring examples of the ideas and strategies that have been so effective in the English-language market to German Designs & website marketers. However, I could use a bit of help - my German is rusty and my familiarity with German social media sites, popular blogs and UGC-portals is second-rate. If you're familiar with these sites in the German market, I'd greatly appreciate any information you can provide, particularly links, so I can bone up on as much of the local market as possible.

My trip to Munich isn't all business, though. Mystery Guest, my new fianc╨╣e, will be joining me on the trip, as her father lives south of Munich, in the small town of Iffeldorf. We'll be celebrating our engagement with him and partying it up a bit before the conference with my excellent friend (and the person responsible for my trip to SES Munich), Thomas Bindl. I might even ask him to do a bit of English-to-German translation for me as my abilities limit me to asking for potato salad (kartoffelsalat), inquiring about the loo (Wo ist das WC?) and determining if there's an English-speaker around (Sprechen Sie Englisch?).

I'm looking forward to seeing some familiar faces (Bill Hunt, Sara Andersson and Mike Grehan) and meeting lots of new people, too. If you're interested in registering for SES Munich, the cost is €995 until March 9 (€695 for one day).

Many thanks to Thomas, who's translated this post to German:

Rand fliegt nach M╤?nchen um das Wort zum Thema Linkbait zu verbreiten

Am 26. M╨┤rz werde ich in der "Linkbaiting, Social Search Marketing & Blogging" Session auf der SES M╤?nchen sprechen. Mein Plan ist es ein paar der Ideen und Strategien, die im Englischen Markt erfolgreich waren, Deutschen Designs und Seitenbetreibern nahe zu bringen. Nichtsdestotrotz k╤?nnte ich ein bisschen Hilfe gebrauchen - Mein deutsch ist angestaubt und meine Vertrautheit mit Deutschen Social Media Seiten, popul╨┤ren Blogs und UGC-Portalen ist eher zweitklassig. Falls du mit diesen Seiten im Deutschen Markt vertraut sein solltest, w╤?rde ich jegliche Information zu sch╨┤tzen wissen. Besonders Links zu diesem Thema w╨┤ren gut, damit ich den lokalen Markt m╤?glichst gut verstehen kann.

Mein Ausflug nach M╤?nchen ist nicht nur gesch╨┤ftlich. Mystery Guest, meine neue Verlobte, wird mich dabei begleiten, da ihr Vater in Iffeldorf, einem kleinen Ort s╤?dlich von M╤?nchen wohnt. Wir werden unsere Verlobung mit ihm feiern. Ausserdem werden wir ein bisschen mit meinem guten Freund (und der Person, die f╤?r meinen Trip zur SES M╤?nchen verantwortlich ist), Thomas Bindl feiern. Ich werde ihn vielleicht sogar darum beten ein bisschen Englisch-Deutsch f╤?r mich zu ╤?bersetzen, da meine F╨┤higkeiten sehr begrenzt sind. Sie schr╨┤nken mich darauf ein nach Kartoffelsalat zu fragen (potatoe salad), den Standort der Toiletten zu erfahren (Where is the loo?) oder ob jemand, der Englisch spricht (Do you speak English?) in der N╨┤he ist.

Ich freue mich darauf ein paar bekannte Gesichter (Bill Hunt, Sara Andersson und Mike Grehan) zu sehen, sowie viele neue Leute zu treffen. Wenn du daran Interesse haben solltest dich anzumelden, es kostet bis zum 9. M╨┤rz €995 (€695 f╤?r einen Tag) .

Technorati Tags

ses munich, events, search engine strategies

Posted by JaneCopland

Last week, Rand discovered that an article we'd written quite some time ago had never been launched. "How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message" covers thirty sites that you can use for marketing. Obviously, the list is far from extensive: we went for a more general overview of what's out there than a comprehensive guide (that's called the Web 2.0 Awards).

Ranked loosely in terms of usefulness, we looked at a range of factors, such as whether the site's pitch or "About Us" section bore any resemblance to what it actually does. We also looked at whether the site is tailored to a small niche or to the general public and whether it disallows engines from spidering its pages or nofollows links.

In addition, there's some information as to what you can achieve on each of the sites in terms of uploading your content, controlling your image, gaining ground in the SERPs and attracting customers. It's meant to be informative and yet fun at the same time. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags

marketing, social media

Today Beanstalk launched the third in what will be an ever-growing set of free Design tools. The first two tools, announced last Thursday in this blog, focused on various ways to check your rankings faster and easier. Today's tool is designed to help you find relevant links faster and easier. This tool enables users to specify the relevancy by search phrase and the type via a drop-down box (article links, blogs, reciprocal, directories, etc.) We hope that you find this tool useful.

Remember to check back regularly as we'll continue to add more useful tools to our lists.

You'll find this new link suggestion tool here.<