In a conversation I had some time ago with E-Consultancy.com CEO Ashley Friedlein, I remarked that I felt the future of public relations was in search marketing. He gave me a very puzzled look from under a furrowed brow and said something like, “How do you mean?”

My brain hurts. OK, with such a small brain, it can’t be a big pain. But it’s an aching pain nonetheless. I’ve just absorbed as much as my head can take from “Successes and New Directions in Data Mining.”

The search industry seems to have been fairly dominated by two major topics this year: the introduction of universal/blended search results and Google’s heightened alert regarding the issue of buying links to artificially inflate PageRank.

Putting to one side the search-engine-optimization-isn’t-rocket-science debate, I had cause to ponder over just how broad and deep the SEO discipline is. The occasion: I took part in a two-day intensive workshop/training event with a large client.

As I’ve said before, one man’s spam can often be another’s cutting-edge SEO tactic. No, I don’t condone spam in the true black sense of redirecting an innocent end-user query to an adult-related site or something like that. But you have to admit, in the highly competitive field of SEM/SEO, some tactical ingenuity gets tarred [...]

About five years ago, I had an interview lined up with Tim Mayer, currently Yahoo’s VP of product management, back when he was with Fast/AllTheWeb. Because I ended up at the end of a drip in hospital the night before, the interview never happened. (Long story. Catch me at a conference and ask me about [...]

Analytics and online marketing guru Avinash Kaushik came up with a particularly memorable quote at last week’s eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit: “I came, I puked, I left!”

Because my wife does that sideways glance (you know, the one that only wives can do) when she sees me reading a business book or white paper on vacation, I’m a little behind on my industry reading. On returning to my office, then I was happy to see a copy of “Mastering Panama,” by the [...]

I’m sitting on a beach in the Algarve, Portugal, as I write this column. My late vacation just happens to collide with a ClickZ deadline. So I wanted to think of a topic I could cover pretty quickly. If you’re familiar with the late Douglas Adams, you’ll know I could just answer my title with [...]

I did a search on “starbucks” and on “wal-mart” as part of a little experiment. Both sets of results could be characterized as sweet and sour. Sure, both brands are well represented at the top of the pile, with Wal-Mart even getting a universal-search-style Google News result (complete with image) in the middle of the [...]