Thom Craver has been coding HTML since 1993 and has been involved in search marketing since 1999. He led one of the first web marketing firms in Rochester, NY for eight years until successfully merging with an interactive agency in 2004.
His employment experience also includes a senior search position at nationally renown TopRank Online Marketing and US News Top-Ranked Rochester Institute of Technology. Thom led all Web and social presences for the Saunders College of Business and led analytics strategy efforts for RIT's mobile initiative. He still serves as an adjunct professor for Saunders College and tutor for National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
Part of the ClickZ Academy faculty, Thom is a regular contributor to Search Engine Watch and has authored training manuals published by SVI Training Products and Technical Learning Resources. His book on web analytics drops in 2013.
Have you noticed as few as 4 or 8 search results on Bing? That's because more than 50 percent of searchers click on Bing's first organic result. If you don't find what you're looking for, Bing may show 12 or 14 results after an unsuccessful search.
The new Google Analytics Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool lets you interactively explore the typical online buying behavior of your site's visitors and see how different marketing interactions affect your sales and conversions.
The average size of web pages has increased by 56 percent. Desktop page load times have decreased slightly. However, mobile page load speeds have decreased by 30 percent. Nearly every county is trending toward faster page load times on mobile.
Separate from Bing's social sidebar efforts, the folks at Bing have added a "Pin it" button to the Bing image search results. No more copy-and-paste. No more extra plugins. Now you can Pin images you find directly from Bing to your Pinterest boards.
Google Analytics has revamped its social reports. The Data Hub Activity report shows a timeline of activities and offers filtering by network, while Trackbacks show you what sites link to yours, plus how much traffic those links drove to you.
Mobile engagement and activation, while consumers are watching TV or out in the real world, is becoming more and more prevalent. Twitter VP Joel Lunenfeld shares new data and examples that show where second screen activation is headed in 2013.
Google's Universal Analytics aims to help you understand how customers interact with your business across devices, give insights into mobile app performance, and improve your ROI by helping you understand which channels drive the best results.
If your website has a high bounce rate, you shouldn't panic – it doesn't mean your marketing campaign has failed. Here's how segmentation can give you a more accurate measurement of people who had an intent, but left your site prematurely.
Borrowing heavily from the look of Google+ authorship, Bing is experimenting with small pictures on its search results pages – but the pictures aren't only of authors. The pictures are of people mentioned on the web pages that appear in Bing's SERP.
A new tool in Bing Webmaster Tools will help webmasters performing site moves. Whether you're moving URL structure internally or changing your whole site address, the Site Move tool in Bing Webmaster Tools wants to help your site survive the move.
Change History records changes made to pretty much everything that happens in the admin area of your account: user changes and access, account settings, profiles, site properties, goals, filters and every Google Analytics admin function available.
Bing rolled out a trio of changes this week. In addition to revamping the design of Friends Photos search and changes to the autosuggest algorithm, Bing also unveiled a plugin to help webmasters more easily generate XML sitemaps.
Redesigned your site in the past few years? Making sure your Google Analytics code is modern will ensure your page load speed isn’t impacted and you can use some cool newer features. Here’s how to check if your code needs an update.
Majestic SEO is expanding yet again. Fresh off of announcing the Majestic SEO Fresh Index increased to 90 days, the Majestic SEO Team has just introduced a new URL submission tool open to everyone, not just their paid subscribers.
Google's logo today combines Valentine's Day with a tribute to American engineer George Ferris. When you click on the heart button, the Ferris wheels stop rotating and two animals are left side-by-side to (hopefully) fall in love at first sight.
Whether it’s QR codes or innovative apps, digital disruption is here – and it’s already transforming traditional search marketing. It's a great opportunity for agile innovators. Here’s how search marketers can combat digital disruption.
For search marketers in 2013, the message today at Covario’s INFLECTIONPoint conference was clear: know your audience, use all your channels, data still rules, and come up with innovative ways to test from which you can learn and succeed.
Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt suggests in his upcoming book that search engines will give priority and higher rank to content created by those with verified accounts. "The true cost of remaining anonymous," he writes, "might be irrelevance."
Celebrating what would have been his 94th birthday, Google in honoring Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball, with a portrait of Robinson swinging a bat in front of a logo resembling classic Dodgers script.
The combined suite of software, now renamed to Rio SEO Social Media Suite, includes three products that assist with large-scale, social-sharing campaign analysis, as well as social advertising initiatives and digital-influencer activation programs.