Outdoor equipment and clothing company REI used SEO to boost its sales after seeing its competitors achieve consistently higher rankings in the search engines than they were.
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Press Web Marketing
REI boosts sales via keywords
Thought Leaders on Marketing Blogs - Part 2
Experts reveal their top most effective blogging tactics and talk about what business bloggers must do to be an accepted member of the blogosphere.
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Live from ACC: Power Forum Packs a Punch
This week at the annual ACCM conference in Orlando, FL, attendees gained a marketers share of Web insight at the Annual Catalog Conference’s power forum and brunch. Moderated by Sherry Chiger, editorial director, Multichannel Merchant, panelists Stephan Spencer, founder and president of Netconcepts, Ken Burke, president/CEO of Market Live, and Amy Africa, president of Creative Results shared their wealth of search engine expertise.
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Multichannel Marketing Power Forum
Annual Catalog Conference — Orlando, Florida
Multichannel Merchant editorial director, Sherry Chiger will moderate. Learn about the latest news, trends, and opportunities in multichannel marketing from a panel of leading-edge experts, and take away tips for improving sales and profits.
Sherry Chiger, Editorial Director, Multichannel Merchant Magazine
Amy Africa, President, Creative Results
Ken Burke, CEO, MarketLive Inc.
Founder & President: Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
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Thought Leaders on Marketing Blogs - Part 1
How do you make a solid business case for blogging for marketing? What about managing upper management’s expectations on the outcome? Should you hire a professional blogger to write your company blog?
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Traditional Vehicle, New Channel - Internet Word of Mouth Marketing
Strategic Branding — Auckland, New Zealand
- Where consumers gather and messages propagate: personal emails, discussion forums, chat rooms, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis and search engines.
- How to harness “word of mouse” to enhance existing relationship marketing programmes and your brand.
- Tips for facilitating the spread of viral messages about your brand.
- Who are the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message?
- Handling input and feedback from your consumers, the public, the media and analysts.
- Success stories and flops: what’s worked and what hasn’t.
- How can Internet word of mouth enhance existing relationship marketing programmes and your brand?
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Move over Blogs: Here come Podcasts
Think what audio books on tape did for the road warrior—turning our cars and airplane seats into mobile universities. Podcasting has the same capacity to change the way we learn and take in new information.
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Will Blogs Become the Ultimate Marketing Tool?
The once neutral territory of the blogosphere is enticing corporates who have awoken to the fact that business blogging entails relatively low startup costs. It’s potential for ROI hasn’t been ignored either.
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Search Engine Strategies Experts on Web Feeds, Blogs & Search
In a panel presentation to SES New York, Stephan Spencer encourages companies to offer complimentary RSS feeds. “Give them away” he says, and make it easy for your readers to subscribe. Store promotions, clearance specials, upcoming events, and new arrivals all offer great content for your readers.
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Google bug reveals favored web sites
A couple months ago I shared one of my Google secrets, since that secret no longer worked. 
Specifically, it was how to obtain a list of the most important web sites according to Google.
Now, surprisingly, this little trick appears to work again (it stopped working in 2003), thanks to a bug introduced into Google’s algorithm. Two months ago, a search for http would have revealed results like HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Overview and Welcome! - The Apache HTTP Server Project. Today, these sites appear nowhere near the top of the results. Instead, the top results are occupied by a “who’s who” list of highly important web sites — sites that don’t include the word http anywhere in the text of the page.
As already noted by blogger Nathan Weinberg, this same phenonemon occurs when you search for www.
One thing I found curious is that http and www Google queries return different results. Now these results are NOT in order of PageRank score, at least not the PageRank scores as revealed by the Google Toolbar. You can verify this to be the case yourself simply by using SEO Chat’s PageRank Search tool. Indeed, it’s a well-known fact within the SEO community that the PageRank scores served up by the Google Toolbar servers are not the actual PageRanks used by Google in the ranking algorithm. PageRank debate aside, perhaps this list offers us a (now) rare glimpse at some of Google’s Chosen Ones — the most important sites on the Internet according to Google.
What makes me say this is due to a bug in Google? For one thing, these results are NOT relevant to the search query. Secondly, I’ve uncovered another bug newly introduced into Google’s algorithm, namely that the inurl: query operator does not work properly, and I think these two bugs might be related. For an example of this second bug in action, search Google for site:blogs.msdn.com scoble inurl:msnsearch and the top search result is currently blogs.msdn.com/mikehall/archive/2004/11/10/255417.aspx. Note there’s no msnsearch in that URL!
I’ve compiled a list the top 1000 results for each of the two queries for your convenience. You’ll see, they do vary quite dramatically:
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