I am engaged to be married! Let me show you a little of how I went about shopping for a diamond engagement ring, and the importance of local and geotargeted search. I initially was looking at all styles, and wanted to see a large selection, so I did the most basic of searches for “engagement [...]

An analysis of entry or landing pages can be particularly insightful if analyzed appropriately. Simply looking at your top entry pages can help show you the pages you can focus on that will have the greatest immediate impact on the overall site performance. Unless you look deeper into the data, however, and combine [...]

It is my day to blog on the Digital Rodeo and unfortunately, I don’t have anything earth shattering to blog about (hey, it happens). Fortunately, some of my favorite Bloggers have a lot to say. Here is a list of recent must-reads:
1.) Pete Blackshaw wrote a terrific post on what text mining tells us about [...]

THINK.
A Multi-part Email Strategy series to help you get the most out of your email program. Each Tuesday, I will focus on one aspect of email communications. Please submit a comment if there is an area you would like for me to focus on or a problem you are encountering with your own email program.
Over [...]

Silverpop has recently conducted a study to see what is really stopping your members or constiuents from opening their emails from you. Is it that catchy subject line that your marketing associate spent days thinking up? NOPE. Is is all the pretty pictures in the email? NOPE. Is it the time of day the email [...]

Time for another edition of ‘Analogy Corner’.
If you’re driving your car back and forth from work, to the shops, etc, every day, you’ll probably believe that everything is going great. Your car gets you from point A to point B, it serves it’s purpose, and you’re happy that it does. Until that day [...]

In my first post, I discussed social media entry pages. I’d like to revisit this.
Your homepage is not necessarily the first interaction your visitors have with your organization, or the interaction they want to have with you in a subsequent communication from your organization.
People can and should become aware of your site and latest initiatives [...]

Humans are unique in that we have free will to think and act in distinct ways, so why is it that we often try to force site visitors to act like a machine? Too often sites are designed like an assembly line that tries to force all visitors down the same conversion path. [...]

The other day I was giving Simon Heseltine, our Search Director/Guru a ride to Union Station in DC. Simon had parked his car at my house which is near Union Station, and coincidentally only three blocks from the home of Barack Obama. While we were driving, we saw the tell-tale signs of the politically important: [...]

One of the first rules of communication or establishing communications with your constituents is to recognize them when they come to your Web site, or are entered into your email stream. It’s just a good practice, and you can say you are doing great customer relationship management.
Or ARE you?
Simon, our Director of Search, or Search [...]