I've been pretty torn over the last few months. On one hand, I'm so pleased to see that dealers (and even some vendors) are really starting to embrace building content pages on their website. On the other hand, I'm concerned that many companies are starting to promote building these pages as their complete SEO strategy. What's worse is that many dealers are starting…

I don't enjoy calling out vendors. It's something that I think is unprofessional in most situations. Sometimes, when a vendor is truly hurting the automotive industry, it must be done and I have to do that today.

We have a client being hounded. This other vendor has been telling them that our philosophy of using onsite and offsite content to…

This is one of those blog posts that my team will probably hate. I can already hear them. "Stop giving away our secrets!" As I've posted before, there really should be no such thing as secret sauce in automotive digital marketing, so I'm going to share our recipe.

There are three key ingredients to a proper automotive SEO awesomesauce. You can taste for these…

When you have two people who have combined for over two decades of working with automotive website providers, you would think that they the company they would build together would be another website provider. It wasn't. There's a reason for this.

Search and social are the marketing venues we chose to pursue for one big reason: minimal parody. Car dealers have…

I can already hear the vendors scrambling to put together their rebuttals. I'm not going to dwell on the issue, but it's an important one to note.

For most dealers, it's okay to be in the mix. As long as you're on the first page on Google for the major keywords, you're doing just fine. Aggressive dealers, those who truly want to dominate, cannot do so if…

If you've participated in automotive internet marketing for long enough, you've very likely heard the concept that "content is King." It was in play back in the days when I started researching search engine optimization all those years ago and it never really stopped. There was a dirty little secret that few of us in the SEO community ever mentioned, but it's been…

There are those who have been spreading (indefinitely, it seems) the thought that SEO is dead. It never ends, the thought (hope?) that search engine optimization has reached its conclusion. The main reason for these calls is, of course, when “experts” in search marketing start to find that their…

If there's one thing that bugs me more than anything professionally, it's when bad marketing people give good marketing people a bad name by continuing to use spam and automated techniques when they simply do not work anymore. It's a plague in many industries, but seems to find its happiest home in the realm of search marketing.

There's a reason for this, of…

There are those who were hurt by the recent Penguin 2.0 update by Google. If your rankings fell in the last month, there’s probably a black and white flightless bird reason for the drop. Thankfully, there are things that you can do to make things better.

Even if you weren’t affected by the change, you should still take note. There are nuances and…

There are two frames of mind amongst search marketing professionals when it comes to major updates such as the Google Penguin update last year and the upcoming Penguin 2.0 algorithm update. Some start to panic as they’ve seen these algorithm updates force companies to make major changes. In some cases, companies have had to close down because adjusting was just too much to bare. The other perspective is that these changes…

The statistic or something similar to it has dominated the sales pitches and marketing materials of search engine optimization companies for a very long time. I…

Some may try to call me out on the title of this post. “Don’t you mean ‘strategies’ plural?”

No. Search and social strategy. One thing. Different processes. Slightly different goals. Same strategy.

As we move forward through the second quarter of 2013, it’s important to understand how the dynamic between…

The rise of content marketing and more importantly the focus that Google and Bing have…

Pound for pound, SXSW was a little disappointing this year, at least for search professionals. It's not that there wasn't plenty to do, plenty see, and plenty to hear. That's always going to happen when you're at a conference/festival with speakers…

Back in the days when Yahoo was fighting against Alta Vista, when Bing was still called Microsoft Live, and when Google was trying to get the big Y to buy them, onsite content and meta tags were…

There are still many in the search engine optimization industry that are fighting the concept that Google (and Bing) is taking social signals into account at a high level when determining search rankings.

These people fall into three categories:

1. Those who haven’t…

The idea of the NoFollow attribute on links was to help prevent spam from appearing on user generated content sites, particularly Wikipedia. It was intended as a way to tell Google (and eventually all major search engines) that a link was not supposed to transfer any “link juice” to the recipient of the link. In essence, it was designed to…

Call it human nature to mislead in order to promote a product. Call it deceitful selling. Call it ignorance. Call it whatever you want to call it, but the concept that has been being spread around the automotive industry that you don’t need content on your homepage is absolutely incorrect. In fact, the homepage is the most important page on your website from an…

“How about a magic trick? I’m gonna make this keyword disappear.”

*SMASH*

“TA DAA! It’s…It’s gone.”

The famous scene from The Dark Knight applies very nicely to black hat search engine optimization tricks today. Those who are still trying to “beat the system”…

There was a time when the search engines rewarded content of all types. If a website syndicated content from elsewhere on the web and exposed it to their audience, it wasn’t as good as unique content but at least it didn’t hurt. Some of the content would be de-indexed as duplicate but the overall health of the domain itself was not harmed.

Today,…