Strategy

Dublin Web Summit / Short-Term Thinking / Transition Rank

by Barry November 28, 2012

State of Search was given a press pass to the Dublin Web Summit – Europe’s largest technology conference – and as the Irish resident on the blogging team I got to attend. Here’s my write-up of the first day: State of Search: Dublin Web Summit The 2012 edition of the Dublin Web Summit is a [...]

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Problematic Personas / Ideal Digital Team

by Barry July 11, 2012

In my latest post for Search News Central I explain my discomfort with using personas in online marketing. It boils down to the fact that online marketing is a data-driven industry, and personas are mostly guesswork supplemented by wishful thinking: Search News Central: The Problem with Personas in Digital Marketing At best, personas are extrapolations [...]

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It Starts With Marketing / Web Analytics / Interview

by Barry June 14, 2012

My latest for State of Search is the spelling out of a thought that’s been careening around in my head for a while: that all we do online to make our client sites a success needs a coherent, well thought-out marketing strategy: State of Search: Everything Starts With a Marketing Strategy But what drives the [...]

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Google’s Job / SEO and SOSTAC®

by Barry June 27, 2011

In light of Google’s recent announcement to support the Schema.org semantic framework, I wrote a rant about how the big G is getting webmasters to do the hard work: State of Search: We’re doing Google’s job for them Google, as a search engine, exists to find all the information on the web (crawling), make sense [...]

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The unlikely persistence of Email Marketing

by Barry February 17, 2010

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 17 Feb 2010.) Almost as soon as email was invented, it was used as a marketing instrument. The first unsolicited marketing email was sent back in 1978, and since then spam has continued to grow exponentially. It’s estimated that today 90% of all email is [...]

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Site Migration SEO Concerns – The Results

by Barry February 8, 2010

About nine months ago I was facing a sizeable site migration project at my employer at the time, and I was tasked with mapping out the best way of handling this migration to minimise the impact on our search engine rankings. I wrote a post summarising my research into the SEO aspects of a site [...]

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The Changing Face of SEO

by Barry February 5, 2010

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 3 Feb 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is defined as ‘the process of improving ranking in search engine results’. When search engines first appeared on the scene in the 1990′s to help people make sense [...]

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Connect With Your Website Visitors Through Email Marketing

by Barry November 21, 2009

The steady rise of spam (which is now said to make up over 90% of all emails) has resulted in less emphasis on email as an instrument of online marketing. But well-managed email marketing campaigns are still, and will continue to be, an important instrument in your online marketing toolbox with a great ROI. Email [...]

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Google Explains How To Make Your Website Work

by Barry September 24, 2009

After their successful Search Engine Optimization Guide, Google is continuing to provide excellent entry-level guides for website owners. Their latest guide, Make Your Website Work, gives best practices that help turn your website’s visitors into customers. The guide is viewable online at Google’s Conversion Centre or can be freely downloaded in PDF format.

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Building a Website – Do It Yourself or Hire a 3rd Party?

by Barry June 9, 2009

So you’re thinking of redoing your existing website, or perhaps you don’t have a site yet and want to set one up. One of the first questions that you’ll face is whether to build and maintain your website in-house, or to hire an external agency to do it for you. What approach works best depends [...]

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