The headline “SEO is Dead” has a history of generating links since long before the term “linkbait” was invented. Mike Grehan’s recent proclamation “SEO Is Dead, Long Live, er, the Other SEO” takes this controversial statement and begins the process of placing it in the broader space of marketing. Mike provides sample result pages from [...]

From Sunday’s NY Times article by Randall Stross, and the resulting spin, a couple of notable takeaways: Profit margins in the search business are mind-boggling, and cannot be obtained in other segments of the technology world. Google’s net profit margin last year was 29 percent. Amazon’s was 1.8 percent — yes, that is a “1” [...]

Bloggers and ecommerce sites alike are working hard to deal with the unintended consequences of their content management systems. For all their wondrous flexibility, blogging software can create duplicate content at just about every turn — archives, categories, tags, stubs — each can potentially create, as Google puts it, “substantive blocks of content within or [...]

Looking forward to spending a couple of days at SES_NY next week. For immediate reference, a couple of quick links to the agendas for: Tuesday, April 10 Wednesday, April 11 Lots of good options here, including seminars on SEO, SEM, Conversion and Analytics.

Rand Fishkin has posted an informative and thought-provoking project, where 34 SEO experts weigh in on over fifty issues that can impact your search result standings. Their opinions have been quantified and ranked, both in terms of overall importance and consensus among the contributors. The full list of topics is worth studying; here’s a quick [...]

A recent thread in Webmaster World’s Google Search News forum has a discussion of how a keyphrase can lose its prime position on a serp. It’s a wild thread, with a lot of ideas and war stories bantered about. What struck me as notable is a theory put out by a couple of astute observers [...]

After investing ten minutes understanding the requirements of Google’s Sitemap Generator, the prospects seemed grim. Lots of steps involving python, config files, running scripts — pretty intimidating. Shifting to a 2.0 mindset, a quick del.icio.us search produced a terrific Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Simple plugin approach, had the entire shebang up and running in less [...]

I recently stopped by Barnes & Noble on the way to the airport to pick up a copy of Peter Morville’s book on information architecture and user experience, Ambient Findability.

On the way out of Vegas after an industry conference. A few regulars to this airport have commented on the slow luggage service, suggesting that a single carry-on is the only way to get into this town quickly. Maybe not. My checked bags might be in better hands here, due to the pilot RFID program [...]