About Tommy Swanson

Tommy Swanson is a search & web marketing consultant and works with a number of nationally-recongized organizations. Swanson provides expertise in the strategic design of online marketing campaigns. He is also a serial entrepreneur, having built and sold several large online businesses in his early teens. Swanson runs the twitter account: @charity

How to Spot a Link Builder (Infographic)

June 11, 2012 by 5 Comments

Links are the backbone of the entire internet and have been since it was invented. A link is quite literally linking two documents (or pages) together, and is one of the most important aspects of SEO efforts. Because they are how Google finds and crawls pages, links are a major influencer in Google’s algorithm that determines where to rank a page in their index.

As a profession, link building is fast-paced with best practices changing regularly. As a practice, it doesn’t always get the attention or respect it deserves amongst the online marketing community. It can be exciting, soul-destroying and really good fun all in equal measures.

My good friend James Agate and his team at Skyrocket SEO created this graphic as a light-hearted way of “spotting” a link builder, as many have similar characteristics, frustrations, worries and habits.

Filed Under: Infographics, Search Engines

CTR: An Up-And-Comer in the Ranking Factors?

April 6, 2011 by 8 Comments

Click

Tommy Swanson is a social media specialist  for KMA, A Pursuant Company. Swanson is in charge of SEO and social media for numerous nationally recognized non-profit organizations. He is also a serial online entrepreneur who has built and sold several large businesses since his early teens.

When the term CTR is brought up, most marketers turn their attention to PPC. It’s a metric that plays a fundamental role in different strategies surrounding paid search. But what most seem to dismiss is CTR’s influence in SEO. Up till now, it’s most frequent use was to project numbers to clients, but now—it could be an up-and-comer in the ranking factors.

Role in PPC

We’re told that the “quality score” is the primary metric that determines your search marketing effectiveness, where your daily budget, maximum cpc bid, keyword relevance and clickthrough rates are all considered in determining this value. Let’s put this into perspective.

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Filed Under: Search Engines