The most unique aspect of the Internet, the very thing that makes it different from every other communications medium is, in many cases, one of its least understood characteristics. Unlike print, audiotape or video recordings, the Net is an interactive medium requiring an ongoing investment of time, knowledge and capital. For those who make best use of it, the Net provides such a versatile communications environment; a virtual storefront can easily out-perform a traditional brick-and-mortar storefront. Read more…

September has graduated into October and there is simply no more time to whine about a summer spent staring at the screen. Autumn is upon us and the retail world is gearing up for what should be the most wonderful time of the year. Not only is my birthday just two days away, Christmas is coming. With the traditional surge in consumer activity spurred by both events, I am curious about what is happening on the local search front. Read more…

Search advertisers are offered two basic marketing models, paid-ads and free organic ads. While there are advantages and disadvantages to both models, one clearly stands out as a better advertising option than the other. Why is it then that advertisers from small business to mega-corporation tend to show higher interest in the more expensive and least effective of the two? Read more…

For budding Internet entrepreneurs Andrew Holt and Rishi Khaitan, building a better mousetrap was the key component in their vision of the upstart comparison search engine dontbuyjunk.com. Behind the sparse front page is a wealth of products, information and consumer recommendations on a wide array of consumer and business electronic goods. Read more…

I have recently learned that students as young as grade 6 and 7 are being pressured to declare career interests in order to best direct the limited public education resources after years of funding cut-backs. I don’t recall that sort of pressure in school twenty years ago. I completed my schooling in the days before the Internet existed in the public realm. Things seemed a little less focused back then though I must admit the core curriculum placed in front of today’s students is much more challenging than those placed in front of my generation. There is simply far more knowledge to share today then there was when I was a public school student, especially in math and the myriad science-based specializations. Read more…

Two weeks ago, I used this space to write about the importance of usability in website design. The article was supposed to act as a lead-in to a short series of articles on the basics of search engine optimization and as a gentle suggestion for webmasters concerned with converting visitors into buyers. As it turned out, the article was long on style but short on substance, a fact that was quickly pointed out by Kim Krause Berg in a blog entry entitled, ” Don’t Tell Me I Need Usability Without Explaining How “. Kim Krause Berg, for those unfamiliar with her, is one of the leading usability experts in the United States . Read more…

It is hard to believe the all too short northern summer is almost over. In less than two weeks, kids will be going back to school and commercial webmasters will be gearing up for the autumn and winter sales seasons. This is as good a time as any, perhaps better than most, to cover SEO 101, the basic techniques that form the foundation to an advanced SEO or SEM campaign. Read more…

Imagine the ability to create your own 45-second audio/video commercial in less than 15 minutes. A new service from SiSTeR.TV, Pic2Vid.Com allows you to do just that, allowing users to create, store, send and link to, a self-made online audio-video presentation without special hardware or software. According to SiSTer.TV’s Tomer Alpert, “Every small business that doesn’t have a $10,000 budget can look to Pic2Vid for answers.” Read more…

Spiders make great geek pets, at least virtual ones do. Here at StepForth, we keep a couple spiders on our system to test sites, pages and documents in the hopes of learning more about the behaviours of common search engine spiders such as GoogleBot, Yahoo’s Slurp and MSNBot. Read more…

In nearly every technical trade from auto mechanics to refrigerator repair, a series of four letter words are used to express frustration or to project one’s vexation on an inanimate object. Frequently these words, regardless of the shop in which they’re said, bear a striking similarity to each other. For many search engine marketers, one of the strongest four letter words is spam. On the Internet, the word spam is most often associated with unsolicited junk email but search engine marketers use the word to describe techniques that violate search engine guidelines or are in some way or another based on offering search engines spiders one set of data while presenting another on the site. Over the past three weeks, threads about search engine spam at various SEM forums transited from discussion to debate, at many points descending into downright nastiness and incivility. Read more…