I’ve written previously about the need to re-evaluate search marketing by attending to how users encounter your BRAND through search as opposed to the dated approach of focusing on where your URL appears. This week a study emerged from a the search marketing agency Slingshot, showing that the click-through-rates (CTRs) on search result pages (SERPs) are diversifying dramatically such that only 52% of Google users and 26% of Bing users are clicking on anything on page 1. People use search in multi-faceted ways so we have to stop believing in the old alchemy of the number 1 slot and where our URL ranks. It’s the total experience of the brand that matters and those who make this transition quickest stand to gain the most from their search marketing efforts.

The time has long since come for us to consider more than the one url that our magic land resides at but rather all the ways that users can encounter our brands through distributed content and conversions in what I daresay I have a new acronym for. How about Search Experience Marketing (that way you don’t have to learn a new three letter abbreviation, SEM)?

As social media content continues to find its way into search engine result pages (SERPs), interesting new data reveals just how much traffic is referred to our s facebook pages from search. The folks at the very useful Facebook analytics engine PageLever published their analysis of over 1000 fan pages with 10,000 fans or more and found that 33.98% of the referring traffic to these pages came from one of the three major search engines.

Google recently introduced their new tool, Google SideWiki to create an annotated web browsing experience for any user willing to install the Google toolbar in their browser. Operators of brand websites are no doubt going to be frustrated by the idea of user-generated content outside their control surrounding the user experience of their website. However, there could be interesting opportunities here for marketers and tremendous advances for the consumer if the SideWiki adoption rate takes off.

Every year SEOMoz puts out a great study of what factors top SEO experts believe to be most important in impacting your rankings. Here is a link to this year’s study which puts a great deal of emphasis on the quality and variety of inbound links to your site. As much as I value the information in a study like this, I’m struck by the fact that SEO experts still remain obsessed with the concept of how to drive people to a single site. With all of the developments in social media content and services permeating the web we need to move away from our obsessions with our own site rankings and develop SEO models that are based on optimizing how we are found within the total search experience of the user.

The term “inbound marketing” tends to bring together the tactics of search and social media under one umbrella.  To me the theme that binds them all together is that they reach people during the natural course of whatever they may be doing online rather than interrupting that process with “Hey pay attention to me now” [...]

Google is now spidering Tweets and pulling them into search engine result pages (SERPs). This means that if you Tweet for a specifc business reason and are concerned about your online visibility you will want to take some steps to make sure that your Tweets are optimized for organic search. Here some tips to help you get Twoogled:

Here is an interesting tool that analyzes the content of your website and reports back to you about what percentage of the content is self-focused or customer focused. It is not entirely accurate but is an intersting way of looking at your site that goes beyond typical SEO tools. I typed in two sites I [...]

Inspired by the notion that many advertisers and marketers feel that they are held hostage by the constantly evolving paid and organic search landscape, an unnamed author has put forth the controversial idea the searh engines require government regulation. Before you whack me on the snout for suggesting such a thing, just give this a read.

Because of the many ways that social media content impacts the experiences of online searchers, we tend to put more emphasis on that area in today’s search optimization strategies. However, in this article by Michael Estrin, he documents several traditional SEO strategies that make solid sense. By paying attention to these principles in concert with an effective social media strategy you will see gains in your visibility via organic search.