The latest SEO Industry news, notes, and chat.
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Joe Hall is the Senior Marketing Analyst at Internet Marketing Ninjas. By working in web development, SEO, and social media marketing, Joe is prepared for almost any internet marketing task! Over the years Joe has worked with small nonprofits to large Fortune 100 companies.
In 1996 Joe Hall started teaching himself HTML and JavaScript with free accounts from the now infamous “Geocities” and “AngelFire”. One of his first web projects was a directory of web games written in JavaScript that he called "Joe's World". Still to this day, Joe’s favorite HTML tag is, the now defunct, tag.
Joe received a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Winthrop University with minors in Art History and History. During college Joe became the executive director of the National Disabled Students Union and spearheaded several national lobbying efforts. During this time, Joe studied the work of Dr Richard Wallace and his revolutionary “AIML”, which led to the development of SivleBot.com in 2002.
After college, Joe worked with a handful of nonprofits to develop sustainable web properties with open source software. In 2007 Joe founded JOZSOFT to provide the same services to small businesses. In 2009 Joe launched a social media search tool called WhosTalkin.com. WhosTalkin garnered the attention of some of the biggest technology publications in the world, including white papers from MIT and The Department of Homeland Security.
“Empowerment” has always been a central tenant to Joe’s professional philosophy. Around 2009 Joe realized that web properties alone wouldn’t empower his clients and users. Therefore, he rebranded his company to 22 Media LLC and started providing full fledge internet marketing services. In December of 2012, Joe closed 22 Media LLC to come work at Internet Marketing Ninjas.
Joe pulls from his experience in web development and grass roots politics to influence his understanding of marketing. He is currently a Senior Marketing Analyst at Internet Marketing Ninjas and writes for numerous online marketing publications and journals.
You can read Joe’s work on this blog, or follow him on Twitter at @JoeHall.
Metrics are awesome! Seriously I know I sound like a nerd, but the truth is, metrics make our jobs as SEOs easier because they allow us to quickly identify complex aspects of large data sets. If used correctly they can show patterns and trends that need to be identified. However understanding which metrics are the most important is a hard task. This is largely because some metrics are better than… [Read More…]
I often hear people in the SEO industry talk about which metrics they use. Sometimes I will hear that some swear by a given data set. Others will completely ignore some data, and some develop their own metrics. Personally I like to collect as many metrics as possible and judge the quality of the site/page based on their relative context to other sites/pages in the same niche. But then the… [Read More…]
We already know that Google is keen on identifying patterns in their data that are likely the result of a brand presence. This is largely because it has become universally understood that brands are trust worthy and deserving of attention. Whether or not you agree with that, the fact remains that brands perform better in search results. It may seem like common sense, but it’s worth noting that larger brands… [Read More…]
Building back links can be the most tedious process of any SEO effort. Therefore, looking for low hanging fruit that can make the process easier, can be a very effect use of one time. The best way to identify low hanging fruit is to take an inventory of the assets already at your disposal, and look for new opportunities. For example, if you are wanting to develop new content ideas,… [Read More…]
Building a web site is a lot like making a cake. There are lots of different types, and millions of different recipes. But my favorite type of cake (and web site) is one made with simple but, high quality, ingredients. When I was in grade school I remember writing an essay and my teacher telling me after, that I needed to KISS my work more. I thought to my self, “heck… [Read More…]
Let’s pretend for a moment that NBC’s Today Show wants to do a story on politics in the Middle East. For some odd reason the producers can choose to have either me, or General Colin Powell on as a guest. Can you guess who they are likely to pick? Despite the fact that I have a degree in political science with a concentration in international politics, they will always pick… [Read More…]
Last week Panda 4.0 rolled out and along with it a lot of new analysis as to what can trigger it. I started to write up my own analysis today, but decided to table that until next week when I can collect more data. However, in the meantime I think we should still talk about Panda. But instead of hashing out how to escape this filter, I would rather talk… [Read More…]
When you want to learn something new how do you go about doing that? Personally I approach new topics by writing about them, and asking questions to folks that know a lot more than I do. Which is why when I decided to learn more about mobile marketing, I immediately decided I needed to interview, Cindy Krum. Cindy Krum, is the CEO and founder of MobileMoxie.com as well as the author of… [Read More…]
Last week I talked about optimizing the comment section of a blog post. After I published that article I thought, Wow, I just ignored the rest of the page! While the comments are important, there should also be a whole body of content above the comments that is also important as well. Therefore, I figured I would put together some tips this week for optimizing a blog post template for SEO…. [Read More…]
Sometimes the comment section of a blog can be way more interesting than the entire article itself. In fact it seems as if sometimes the best information is found with in a post’s blog comments. Which is why I hate seeing blogs that haven’t optimized their blog comment sections for SEO. I mean lets think about it: This is free content on your site that came from users that are… [Read More…]
Last week I talked about the amazing world of information architecture. We discussed how important it is to correctly classify information not only for the user’s benefit, but also to help power things like recommendation engines. I briefly mentioned then, that from an SEO perspective, correctly classifying information can aid in the form of creating powerful archive sections of web sites that can rank extremely well. In this post we will… [Read More…]
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? What about a cucumber? The answer to these questions really depends on the context of the dialog. If we are talking about them in a botanical context then they are fruit. But if we are discussing them in a culinary sense, they are vegetables. How we classify information is extremely important because every classification can transfer an inherent normative value. Many like… [Read More…]
Big brands seem to have a much easier time ranking now a days right? Well that may be true, but, one positive point that is rarely discussed is, many small businesses can rank well too by taking advantage of local SEO. Now of course local SEO won’t apply to everyone, but if you own a local business then it might be the perfect solution to your ranking woes. Essentially, what… [Read More…]