SearchInfluence

Welcome to the Internet — but look up, you’re about to crash! If you are surfing the web today, it’s likely that your surfboard of choice is your phone. Hopefully you’re not multi-tasking behind the wheel of a car, but smartphones can provide most people with extremely useful tools for everyday life. As for marketers, surf’s up!  Phone marketing is the new big wave.

The Difference between Good SEO and Great SEO — Search Engine Guide

Are you one of the many business owners who’s decided to start a business during this challenging economic time? Competing online right out of the gate can be a deciding factor in your establishment’s survival. You’re probably already investing in your online presence to some degree, but check out this handy guide by Stoney deGeyter on the areas to maximize the potential of your efforts!

Getting More Clicks On Twitter (Infographic) — Marketing Pilgrim

Deep thoughts by bigtime lawyers...

Nearly everyone in the technology sector, especially those focused on the Internet, have een talking about the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act. We’re not here to debate the finer points of combatting intellectual property theft on the internet — the “SOPA Blackout” has done a fine one-sided job of that. (If you’re interested in a very in-depth look at the whole saga, try Forbes’s information dump.) This “Blackout” has all the right components of a perfect case study of SEO, technical site architecture, viral marketing, and the nature of the internet.

John Cheese talks SEO

Cracked columnist and longtime internet comedy writer John Cheese put out a call for interviews recently, and I jumped at the chance to talk to him. Out of all the writers on Cracked, a site I have been fairly addicted to since about 2007, John Cheese has probably spent the most time eloquently weaving his own life experiences into his always funny and often moving columns.

John ended up really driving home a rather simple yet all-encompassing idea that we have adopted as a mantra at Search Influence: fresh content is king. It really doesn’t matter whether you are advertising a novel, a list-based comedy site, or a small business anywhere in the world – if you can produce quality content that people find interesting on a regular basis, everything else will fall into place. It doesn’t hurt if you are as insightful, funny, and talented as John is either.

Take a look at the results of my email interview with John Cheese:

If you’re anything like me, when you visit a website that’s overloaded with Flash, an abundance of images, excessive menus, and just a general maze of content, your brain shrivels up to the size of a raisin and your eyes glaze over with no focus of what to look at or where to find it. (As far as I’m concerned, the same problem exists for social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Creating endless posts and tweets just for the sake of having more content and saying whatever pops into your fingers is the quickest way to get me to block or un-follow your posts. Then I’ll never hear anything you have to say!) The idea that the more there is to look at, the more visitors, friends, likes, and followers you’ll get is simply untrue in many cases.  You can still catch plenty of flies with sweet, sweet simplicity.