Posts by Bastian Grimm

Bastian Grimm is founder and CEO of Grimm Digital. He mainly works as online marketing consultant with a strong focus on organic search engine optimization (SEO). Grimm specializes in SEO strategy consulting, website assessments as well as large scale link building campaigns. More articles and bio from Bastian Grimm
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One step ahead in link-building: Make sure you’ll not get cheated

From what I heard, online marketers and especially SEOs might sometimes be interested in getting links pointing to a self-owned (or a client’s) website ;) OK, fun aside. When building links one of the things that really annoys me, are people trying to cheat you – and I’m not talking a PR 4 vs. a PR 6 link but more stuff like removing a link after a striking a deal (which is more or less the easiest to detect), cloaking content based on user-agents/IPs or using methods like X-Robots headers or the robots Meta tag to prevent indexing pages.

This article is going to be a small check-list on things you’ll have to watch out for – or if possible – your link-building backend should have “an eye on” (and really make sure you run these tasks on a regular basis, say at least once a week): (more…)

dmexco 2010 Cologne – Some impressions

Last week, September 15th and 16th I was visiting just another conference – this time a headed out for the dmexco (which is short for “digital marketing exposition & conference”) in beautiful Cologne, Germany. And I thought I’ll just wrap it up for you because – looking at the event from a (German) online marketing perspective – it surely has its place. But let’s start with the facts.

First of – let’s have a quick look on what the dmexco is all about: “The dmexco is the leading international event for the entire digital value chain. Comprising of a combination between an exposition and a conference, a concept that is unique worldwide, it stands for innovative and futureoriented marketing in the midst of a global growth market. […]”. Woho, sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

According to the organizers the expo hall was sold out with 355 national and international exhibitors with an exhibition space measuring 27,000 m². Around 15,800 branch visitors came to the dmexco and a conference program with over 150 speakers from all over the world. But… that’s what the official version is ;) OK, now… Let me throw in some thoughts here: I’m attending the conference since forever, basically I started going when it was still called “OMD” and took place in Düsseldorf, but anyways – even just comparing it to the dmexco in 2009 it doesn’t really “feel” that it got any bigger at all – maybe I’m totally wrong but to me it looked pretty “stuck” and more or less the same. (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: Quick-Summary

The conference went by quickly, way faster than I thought. Arriving on Saturday evening and leaving on Thursday morning is not really that long especially when you fly in from Germany. Unfortunately I do miss SES day 3 because of a speaking engagement on Saturday back in Germany but since I now do have to spend approx. 10 hours in the plane heading over from San Francisco to Frankfurt I think it’s a good time to wrap some things up and just write down some general thoughts on SES SF that I still have in mind. (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: How to Become a Link Magnet

All right folks, we’re back with another session at SES 2010 in San Francisco. This time we are talking links and actually “How to Become a Link Magnet”. This should be interesting especially with this great line-up having Aaron Kahlow, Rand Fishkin and Jim Boykin on stage. The session’s description looks promising as well: “Find out from a panel of experts how you can have your (metaphorical) 15 minutes of fame, become a link magnet and dominate search engines.” Oh yea…

First on stage is Jim, he’s going to talk on highly trusted links like those from edu’s, gov’s, etc. He actually divides between link bait magnets vs. trust bait magnets – the differences are: (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: Scaling Up Your SEO Campaigns

Here we are – back after the lunch break (ok yeah, I admit, lazy me skipped one session) with another session at SES San Francisco 2010. Now we’re moving over to some enterprise stuff titled “Scaling Up Your SEO Campaigns”. Taken from the official teaser: “In this session the panel discusses the need for enterprise wide planning, implementation and control of SEO campaigns for improved ROI.” We have actually four speakers up there: Russ Mann, Seth Besmertnik, Jim Yu and also Horst Joepen (yeah, Germany it is) – moderation by Mike Grehan. (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: News Search Optimization

OK, here we are – back in the game. First session of the day is scheduled to be “News Search Optimization” – featuring some really great speakers including Mr. Brent Payne, Allison Fabella, Topher Kohan, Eleanor Hong – the panel will be moderated by Dana Todd. The session description says, that “in this session, we look at how to make use of press releases and news content to tap into the power of news search”. We’ll let’s see… (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: BJ Fogg’s Morning Keynote

Good morning and welcome back for day two at SES San Francisco! Evert and I will be live-covering some of the sessions for you, so you should make sure to check back regularly. To not miss anything be sure to bookmark our SES event page and for the latest updates connect with us on twitter!

Today’s morning keynote will be done by BJ Fogg, he is Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University – and the keynote is titled “Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do”. So let’s see what he brought us. (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: Developing great content

Now here we are – last session of the day titled developing great content and packed with four speakers (Wendi Sturges, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Rand Fishkin and Michael DeHaven). Let’s see what those four brought for us.

Things get started and Wendi of Yahoo! states that they still think content is king (yeez… that thing just doens’t want to go away!) and as they do have a lot of different content resources like Editorial, blogs, video, 3rd party content, Y! Original, etc. the care about those (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: Link Building Basics

Here we are – back from the coffee break, had some nicely purred Starbucks – not too bad! I’m in the link building basics now; hopefully I can learn something there ;) I’m probably not repeating all the basics here (not sure how detailed they’ll be) but of course I’m trying to catch the most important message of each of the panelists.

Debra Mastaler is the first one up – let’s see what “basics” she brought. So according to her agenda, she’s going to talk about ink popularity and link influences. (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: Successful Information Architecture

We’re back after the lunch break with a session I’m really excited about: Successful Information Architecture. On the panel we have Shari Thurow and Eleanor Hong – moderated by Adam Audette. Let’s see what these three have to say about successful IA. Please also be sure to check out my introduction post on IA pitfalls I wrote a week ago.

OK – Adam Audette is not here so Bill Hunt takes over the moderation cause Adam didn’t make it. Anyways, first up is Shari. (more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: Search – where to next?

Here we are with the next session: “Search – where to next?” First on stage is Marc Poirer and he is going to talk about search marketing as a discipline and how it changed in the last years and of course where it will be moving to next.

Let’s start with some statistics:
- Adults spent 34% of media time online
- Online represents 12% of media spent
- But this is massively increasing: It will be doubled in 2014! (in the US)
(more…)

SES San Francisco 2010: Opening Keynote

A wonderful good morning from San Francisco – this is the first day at SES SF 2010 and State of Search will be covering live. We’re already having some delay but the opening keynote by Jeffrey Hayzlett is going to start any minute. Please also make sure you’ll be following @state_ofsearch on twitter for some real-time action.

I’ll be updating this post on a regular basis – hopefully taking away some interesting statements out of this keynote – so stay tuned. Well… at least I’ll try to – the wifi does not seem to be too stable right now… (more…)

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