Good Afternoon! The exhibit halls are open, and the sessions are in full swing again. We’ve got more great coverage for you from this morning, with a second post on the way for this afternoon. Like we said yesterday, if you’re attending and didn’t have a chance to make a certain session, or didn’t attend at all, but want a visual summary of the good parts, check out our coverage below. (more…)

The cobbler’s children have new shoes!

Today, we finally have a new brand and site to match, and soon we will have a new office. Each milestone was critical in demonstrating publicly and internally the hard work we’ve put into this business. We hope you like it, let us know in the comments below! Even better, if you love the new brand, give us a like, follow or plus, so we can keep in touch. We still have a lot of content work to do and a big part of that will be free resources and future phases of development.

Getting Here

Sometimes the hardest part of being a business owner is never prioritizing the business over your clients. I think this is ten times more difficult when the business owner has a background in servicing those clients, because you want to do the work more than you want to talk about, or market it.
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Hi there! We’re wrapping up the first day of PubCon Las Vegas 2012 and it was packed with so much SEO goodness that our brains hurt! If you’re attending and didn’t have a chance to make a certain session or didn’t attend at all, but want a visual summary of the good parts, check out our coverage below.

We’ll be dropping PubCon coverage at the end of each day into a post with the help of Michael Dorausch, @chiropractic who is snapping gorgeous shots along with our team to bring you the real inside scoop.
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For those of you who attended SMX East 2012, it was great to see you there! We noticed a lot of fresh faces and companies, which is encouraging–the industry is growing and there’s still a lot to do.

We certainly learned a lot, but mostly about WordPress sliders and how few good ones exist. Those technical difficulties caused a delay in our coverage, but we wanted to bring you something good and useful. Hopefully, the delay was worth it and you find at least one kernel of knowledge that can improve your Internet marketing strategies or SEO campaigns. We’re happy to have our process worked out just in time for PubCon and we’ll see you then (or on the blog).

In the meantime, check out all of the great shots, quotes, and takeaways we picked up from SMX East 2012 (as well as a fashion trend!):
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What’s the next big thing in search? It kind of depends on who you ask and how much booze is swirling around in her coffee cup. It’s local… no, it’s social… no, it’s mobile… no, it’s A + B + C = EMC² x 3.

ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus argues that the next big Internet thing is… wait for it, wait for it… topic pages. While he draws a clear distinction between this phenomenon and traditional content curation, MacManus notes that the modern Web is way too noisy and we need more sites that organize third-party content in a meaningful way.

I couldn’t agree more. Well, I could, but then I’d owe Mr. MacManus a totem pole, a Tootsie Pop and a tattoo of a dancing taco. So, let’s just stick with the facts, shall we?
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In just a few days many of you will be heading to our neck of the woods for SMX East. If you’re attending, we’ll see you there! Pearl, Amanda, and me are all attending, so don’t be shy and say hello. We’d love to meet you.

I’ll be moderating and speaking on What SEO Performance Metrics Are Truly Important? with Vanessa Fox, Ryan Jones, and Rob Bucci. I’ll also be Q&A moderating for Looking Ahead: Local Search In 2013 and Pagination & Canonicalization For The Pros, bring your questions. On Wednesday, October 3rd from noon to 1:30pm, stop by Table 7 to talk with me about Personalization & Search. Amanda will be volunteering on Wednesday in the Issues & Tactics track and Pearl will be doing the same in the Social Media track.

At SMX East, we’ll be rolling out a new style of conference coverage. Stay tuned for that and here’s the schedule, but we’ll be covering everything from the sessions and speakers to attendees and after parties. Get your smile on–you may end up on the site!

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There’s been a lot of kerfuffle in the industry in the last year or two over whether or not we should still call what we do “SEO” A lot of people (myself included) have settled on the term inbound marketing as a useful catch-all way to talk about the increasingly diverse set of tactics web marketers are using to bring customers to their sites.  Rand Fishkin made a handy, only slightly overwhelming little graphic about it:

From Inbound Marketing is Taking Off by Rand Fishkin

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Do you value and retain your customers? Purna Virji, Online Marketing Manager at Stroll, shares five quick steps to customer retention marketing success. Purna wears many marketing hats, speaks a half a dozen languages, and when she isn’t driving sales, she’s a mom. Basically, she’s our hero and we’re happy to have her on the blog!

As SEOs, we spend vast amounts of time and effort towards building relationships, earning links, and encouraging visitors to convert. But then, like a long-term relationship after the honeymoon period ends, we stop attending to these customer relationships once the sale happens.

We all know the old adage that it is less expensive to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one, so why don’t more of us work harder at retaining existing customers? The benefits are obvious. Past customers have a significantly higher likelihood of converting again, plus longer-term customers mean greater customer lifetime values, boiling down to the one thing we all pursue–increased profits.

But, the main reason you should even think about customer retention is that it also helps you – the SEO.
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Ryan Jones is a wicked smart SEO who works with SapientNitro and rants on his personal blog (dotCult) about all things SEO, Penguin, and analytics. He’s one of the most “outspoken” marketers we know and Rhea will be moderating a panel with Ryan at the upcoming SMX East conference, October 2nd-4th in Manhattan. We hope to see you there! In the meantime, Ryan shares what you should be measuring and why.

When somebody comes to me asking for data I always ask the same questions: Why? What are you going to do with it? I don’t enjoy giving people a hard time [too much] and I’m not [that] lazy. I just want to make sure that they’re asking the right questions and answering them with the right data.

If you take one lesson away from this rant, let it be this: If you’re not asking questions, you’re not providing as much value as you could be. Chances are you were hired for your expertise, experience, knowledge, and insights – not simply your ability to sort numbers in excel. The person asking you for data has expertise, experience, knowledge, and insights too – but if it’s not in your field then it’s your job to ask these questions and ensure you provide them with the right data to make the right decisions.

A good analyst needs to understand not only what they’re measuring but why they’re measuring it too. Proper analysis demands it.

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Take a page from journalism 101– increase link building and outreach response rates by using the inverted pyramid.

When I was a Communications major with a concentration in Advertising, I had to share a lot of classes with the Journalism students. I’ve since forgotten the majority of the AP Stylebook and can barely speak much less write, but there’s one lesson that stuck with me—the inverted pyramid.

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