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How can content strategy help your users and your search engine optimization efforts? How should you go about developing great content? More...

“Let’s make good better.”

One of my favorite journalism professors had a way of working with students that was respectful and positive while still instructional. During our weekly reporting assignment, he encouraged each of his students to bring a draft of their article to him during office hours. This session was invaluable. He would offer feedback on the story and guidance on how to improve it.

These meetings were the most useful when the story had already been given a lot of attention but needed a little extra polish to truly shine. In those situations, my teacher would compliment the story and discuss its merits. Then he’d say, “Now let’s make good better.” More...

Super Bowl XLVI offered more than dueling quarterbacks and an excitement-packed last minute of gameplay. In addition to wings, dips, and beer, an extra helping of insight into user behavior was made possible by the big game. More...

Web content is more important than ever. Users want relevant content that is up-to-date and easy to process. They want to find information as quickly as possible, and they want to share what they find. More...

Everyone (well at least those of us in the SEO world) knows how valuable a strong, high quality inbound link can be for your website's link profile. Inbound links help drive traffic to your website, influence your search engine rankings, and help search engine spiders find and index your site's pages (among other benefits). What some people may not know is that all links are not created equal. Links from popular blogs with a strong community following not only offer the same benefits as any other link but also provide increased brand awareness and can help build industry awareness. However, due to the format of most blogs, the power of these links can begin to decrease as time goes on, even within a few days. As new blog posts are written, older posts undoubtedly move deeper into the site. More...

You may have thought that Aztek was only a Cleveland web design firm. However, you would be wrong. Aztek is also a provider of a wide range of web marketing services including SEO (search engine optimization), online marketing, social media integration, email marketing and more. Not only do we offer these services, we are experts in online marketing. Aztek has been an Adwords Certified Partner for over a year now. Just this week, our web marketing team successfully renewed our partnership with Google by passing an updated advanced Search Advertising exam. More...

1. Content is a cookie, and once they're done eating it, they should want more.
2. Tell a story.
3. Tell your story one snippet at a time. Being too broad makes you boring.
4. The hook comes first. More...

With all the hype and excitement around Twitter, Facebook and Social Media Marketing lately, it is easy to see how other forms of online marketing may have fallen out of fashion. Marketing coordinators and managers can become so excited about the next big thing that they sometimes forget that older, established marketing tactics are still a great way to gain customers, reach out to your target market and generate leads. More...

Search Engine Optimization is a well known term and online marketing tool. Most companies spend a pretty penny on SEO and consulting services. A good portion of these same companies become so wrapped up in optimizing their websites for the search engines with the goal to drive the most traffic as possible to their site. "The more eyeballs the better", they might say. While it is essential to drive targeted traffic to your website, it is also important that these visitors take action once they get there. This very important step is often times forgotten. If your website's visitors are not taking the next step and becoming a customer or a lead- in reality, this traffic isn't helping your bottom line. This is where conversion optimization becomes part of the website success equation. More...

PPC (pay per click) advertising is an online marketing model that is used to drive qualified traffic to a website. This can take the form of ads that run on search engines or other content sites. For our purposes, we are going to focus on ads that run on search engines such as Google. An advertiser's ads are shown when a specific keyword phrase is entered into the search box. The advertiser is charged when a person clicks on one of these ads. Unlike other types of online marketing, you only pay when your ad is clicked on not when your ad is simply shown (this is called CPM advertising- cost per impression). More...