Adam's Blog

As I sit in my recliner with the Olympics glowing in the periphery, I can't help but think how few people have the motivation to devote four years at a time for their shot at glory.  I'm fairly certain a lot of these athletes forgo making a decent living to ...

Life isn't a beauty contest.  Plenty of ugly people can be successful (even *I* earn a living), and I've seen some horrific websites make money for companies.  One thing that I've learned in the SEO business over the last few years is that sometimes it pays to say no to ...

Blogging.  If you talk to the internet marketing snobs they'll tell you it's "so 2007".  If that were the case, there wouldn't be so many that are still so successful.  Sure there are other newer, shinier mediums, but a good blog still holds a tremendous amount of value and can ...

Many months back we began working with a client who had just launched a new website and wanted to get some quick SEO results.  Their portal site was an excellent tool, well set up for link building, but the site was almost entirely a graphic interface - no content. [caption id="" ...

This might not seem like the most original post in the world, as a lot of people have covered the topic of keyword selection before, and done so quite well.  One thing I've noticed that's usually missing from these posts, however, is a practical and quick methodology with some examples.  ...

There are plenty of web awards out there, and even some locally here in Lansing.  But we at Netvantage wanted to have a bit more fun with it and let the general public vote for their favorite websites.  With that in mind, we cooked up the Lansing Web Awards, our ...

Lots of people can debate what the best restaurant in Lansing is, and I don't want to step into that argument.  However, while searching for some ideas for a place to eat the other day I decided to Google "Lansing restaurant" and as a professional SEO I couldn't help but ...

Netvantage doesn't market itself as a social media company, but we end up in a LOT of conversations about it, and Twitter in particular.  Small businesses are still trying to figure out Twitter, and without knowing a lot of detail about a company or industry it's hard to just start ...

I've made my bones with Twitter in the past, but truth be told I've warmed to it over time and certainly understand it's value as a marketing and customer relationship management tool.  But when I see videos like this, I can't help but roll my eyes a bit. There are some ...

I'm sure this last could be a whole lot longer, but since I find myself doling out a lot of advice to SEOas and budding SEOs these days and while a lot of times people are on the right track, they tend to overlook little details that can make a ...

If you make your living in the world of SEO like me you've looked at the Google PageRank bar so many times that you probably have reached the point that you can identify the score by site. But now it's time to put your skills to the test. There's ...

This may seem totally out of place, but I have an audience and I'm also an acting member of the Mid-Michigan Red Cross Communications Committee, so I feel obligated to share the most recent Red Cross update on the disaster in Haiti.  If anyone else is looking for this information, ...

I don't like when things don't work.  A month ago Comcast decided to create a firewall to block our office from using a service we use every day.  It took three days of emails and phone calls before I finally got it fixed.  We didn't do anything wrong, Comcast's firewall ...

Perhaps my favorite part of search engine marketing is the chance to educate people about it. I never thought much about becoming an academic, but I really have taken a liking to teaching people about search marketing. This evening I had the opportunity to speak to a packed ...

Recently we decided to piggyback on SEOMoz's biannual search engine ranking factors and see what the average, non-SEO thinks about how Google's magic organizes the world's web pages and puts them in order for our consumption.  We generated a survey and shot it out to a broad web of professionals ...

You can't pinch your pennies enough these days, or pinch them at all if you're working with a broken hand as I am...ANYHOW, I figured it was about time for another quick hitting edition of SEO On A Nickel - so all of my penny pinching fans feel free to ...

I find a lot of small businesses and some SEOs get really locked in on the big fish in their SEO efforts once they do their initial on-site optimization.  This can be troublesome only because those big fish can take a long time to reel in, and it's good for ...

I'm back...did you miss me? After a recent broken hand (I'm still in a cast) my blogging has come to a screeching halt.  But I'm toughing it out tonight and firing out a quick post to highlight a couple of extremely cool, and more importantly FREE, tools for keyword research.  So ...

It was everywhere this week - Yahoo and MSN/Live/Bing have joined forces to try to take a bite out of Google. The net was aflutter with buzz. Me? I yawned and kept on with my activities. You see, I'm a bit of an MMA fan, and ...