Communicating SEO Through Your Organization
I had the the pleasure to present at SES Toronto 2012 as well as participate in a post session interview with Matt Bailey. Here's the video and I'll be uploading the slide deck as well to slideshare in a bit And here's the slide deck that was presented. Search analytics for Executives from rgecko … [Read More...]
The Web in the Next 10 Years – Beyond SoLoMo
What follows is from the brain to the page ramble that hopefully can spark some imagination and thoughts. I’m going to go out on a limb and throw out some ideas of where I think things will go in the next 10 years, mostly because the story of SoLoMo (Social, Local and Mobile) can’t continue to be the hot thing every year. At the root of it all I think there will be Hyper Connectivity, an evolution of not just the connection of sites via links, but via content, and APIs. The cross … [Read More...]
From Good to Great Content
If you’ve been around the search space for any period of time you’ll have heard one of these sayings at some point or another: “Content is King”, “Write for people not search engines”, “Create good content”. AJ Kohn points to a recent Matt Cutts video where Matt talks about content and whether Google will penalize a site for having good content but poorly implemented SEO practices. There are two main points I take away from this, the first is much of what Matt says can … [Read More...]
Google vs. Data
Google announced today that they are going to make some modifications to the way they pass data along to other websites based on if a users is logged into google or not. The full details on this are at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html. This has gotten a number of folks in the SEO industry in an uproar. While I do not think it's the end of the world the way in which Google went about doing this was very.... Google. They just did it. They also opted … [Read More...]
Writting for SEO
I read two interesting articles today, one on using jargon and the other on some new features in the Wordpress SEO plugin. What jumped out at me on both of these is a focus on language and complexity. One of the new features of the Wordpress SEO plugin is to rate your text on the Flesch Reading Ease scale. Basically it tells you if your word choices and sentence are overly complex. I was once told when writing for the general public to write at a grade 3 or perhaps it was a grade 4 level … [Read More...]
The Future of Digital Marketing
OpenGraph, Google’s +1, these are all hooks into deeper personalized understanding of your interaction with the web and all the data on it. In April several big brands shared how they have split their marketing spend from traditional (Print, Broadcast and Radio) and Digital (online) . The ranges are anywhere from 50% to 90% of that spend going to digital. I don’t think that this is very surprising. More people are spending time online, be it on a PC or mobile Device. Interestingly … [Read More...]
Something Kind of Neat
Not really being one to pay attention to Google’s doodles, I happened to look today, and saw a little cake doodle and to my surprise when I moved my mouse over it, it said “happy birthday Brent” Kind of a neat little thing for Google to do. I’m not usually all that impressed by personalization these days, but for some reason it seemed a bit more personal for Google to recognize my birthday in their search results. Not much else to say here but… THANKS GOOGLE!!! Now where’s … [Read More...]
Myth Busting the ROI on SEM
I’ve seen several different citations on why SEM has a better ROI then SEO. Here are a few of them: SEM is faster, brings traffic to your website quickly, and increases visibility immediate SEM: there is more control over SEM then SEO. With SEM you can optimize the landing page tailored to the SEM experience People who come from SEM are more likely to buy, People coming through PPC are more like to spend more on that site and the NY times article referenced The Average value of a … [Read More...]
Google Instant Some Random Thoughts
With the launch of Google Instant I’ve got a few non-connected thoughts on what this means to SEO/SEM as well as to Google, and some questions with how they will adapt to this. First let’s look at the comments I have specifically to Google. A Great Engineering Feat In one way I think this is a great engineering feat from Google, not because they are showing user’s results but because of how quickly they return the result sets. I suspect they are doing several things to take a load off the … [Read More...]
Brent Chaters is the author of the upcomming O'Reilly book 
. has been working with internet based technology since 1998, first learning HTML, and FLASH at McMaster University where he earned his BA in English. He later graduated from Sheridan College from the Interactive Multimedia Program, where his projects won two TV Ontario awards. Brent has since worked for large world wide corporations and small business helping lead them into the world of the internet.
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