10 Things from 2010 that May Shape Your 2011

A compendium of random stats I’ve found interesting from 2010

It’s that time of year again, where people are in full swing of 2011 planning so I thought what better time to share a few of the takeaways from 2010 news and views that may well rock your 2011 world.

I normally write a more typical search business column, but this time around as I’ve been in 2010 review and 2011 planning mode recently, I thought I’d pull together a quick and random compendium of industry-level tid bits that give those trend munchers and stat lovers their daily fix.

So for instance, did you know that Internet World Stats states that of the 82.5% internet penetration in the UK – almost a 3% increase in a year?!   Bigger than that for ecommerce though is that a touch over 67% of the UK population is now thought to be persistent buying goods online.  Anyway, with such a great deal of this growth being driven by social, let’s kick things off there shall we…

Social Consumption

The consumption of social media is on the rise, we all know that, but did you know it now dominates 25% of time spent online according to Nielsen?

Interestingly, Hitwise suggests 13% growth in retailer’s traffic from social media year on year highlighting the importance of word-of-mouth and the optimisation of search and social media assets with such purpose.

Increasing monetisation of social media such as Twitter is also an area to keep an eye on, knowing the interest of clients in this area.

Businesses need to be aware of how forms of social media communication are informing business communications too…

The Bingoo Search Alliance

The Yabinghoo search alliance will deliver an aggregated 154 searchers in the USA alone!  The UK will not see anywhere near this sort of scale of searching with less than 6.5% market share of search volume being seen consistently across 2010 – even with Bing’s above-the-line presence…

Beyond Bing powering Yahoo’s search results and Site Explorer changes, there is little more that can affect SEOs in the UK but it’s more apparent changes are likely to be seen across PPC.  Regardless, it’s certainly one to watch – maybe two search minds will be better than one…?

Real-time, social Google and personalisation

It’s not too clear how Google is going to be pulling more real time functionality in to its search result, but it’s very likely.  Eric Schmidt has already admitted to adding more social media layers to its search results as opposed to all out social media platform creation and promotion – focussing mostly on search quality through social personalisation.  An example of Bing doing something similar can be seen in the strategic partnership with Facebook.

Mobile Search

The increasing impact and growth of smart phones is naturally hugely important for those online marketers that work with mobile search, and a 96% growth in smartphone purchases isn’t to be smirked at.  And with Google absolutely kicking competitor’s proverbial behinds at mobile search (with an incredible 98%) it gives us good cause to watch that little bit of digital space flourish over the coming months and years. The UK is leading the adoption of mobile search with 70% growth.

Growth of mobile search is at such a rate, than retailers are believed to be struggling to keep up!

Interestingly too, the mobile app economy, is in part, being driven in part by word-of-mouth – at almost 40% – reminding us of the importance of conversation driving so much demand online.

Online Video

More increase is seen across video too, with ComScore reporting a 37% increase year on year.  And with YouTube holding a dominant share in visibility can we safely say that we’ll see this continue into 2011?

And with UKOM/Nielsen reporting that of the 17.4m users in May, the average time spent on the site over month was 53 minutes, or 1 hour in the USA – far short of the 7 hours on Facebook:

Increasing Infiltration of The Google

With the ever growing reach of Google through the Google OS and Google TV are we going to see Google extend its advertising reach beyond more traditional forms of search?  Google quite clearly is working towards dominating those channels that influence such a large part of our media consumption.

Advertising

It’s great to see the online advertising sector performing so well as transparent return on investment and increasing time being spent on online properties.

The growth in display year-on-year is in part recovery but also due to an increasing sophistication, now seeing 34% growth since 2009 forQ3 – with Facebook drawing the most impressions of course.

Content paywalls

You could quite easily regard the decision of The Times and The Sunday Times to put up a paywall around their content as a flop, but maybe they are the trail blazers in attributing value to content.  For me it’s not a business model that is working well for them in the short-term but who knows what the world wide web’s trends and New International have in store to make or break this idea.

Maturing SEO Tools

Highlighting a few tools isn’t a logical step in this post but I just wanted to do it in order to give a nod to those companies where there have been such impressive steps in their maturity.  Increasing investment in tools that act as a window to indicative / sample data should be encouraged, so here’s a hat tip to Majestic SEO, Linkscape, Eight Fold Logic, SEM Rush and Dart Natural Search.

Economic Buoyancy

We’re in turbulent economic times, so keeping an eye on economic news might help you to feel more at easemacro level and search industry level are shaping up. with how things at a

Online as a research tool – the finance sector is often used as a benchmark for economic activity and with an estimated 10 million UK consumers seeking financial services / products online, with 15 minutes on average being spent on each site – a huge feat!

The Wrap Up

I think this just about does it.   In all honesty this list is kind of endless, but hopefully it reminds you of a couple of developments in the industry and how things are shaping up for 2011.

I’d be interested to hear what’s high on your agenda from 2010 moving in to 2011, so please feel free to share…!

Critical Thinking & SEO – Managing Learning and Your Approach to SEO

Tackling the development of a new search and social media course is no mean feat – ask Aleksej Heinze,search and social media course.
from Salford University’s Business School!  He’s been the driver behind a new academic-led, industry-supported
With MEC’s support for the course, Aleksej and I have met a number of times to discuss areas of the course’s content, with a view to develop not purely from an academic stand-point, but to consider real-life scenarios.  One of the things that came out of the debates we had then was this idea of posing several alternative approaches to search and social marketing in a way that prompted this idea of a course that promotes a foundational and more advanced level of understanding, with a thread of critical thinking throughout.

I love this idea.  I’ve previously shared what we work to deliver as part of our SEO training academy over on SEP, and one of the key items we raised here was in nurturing people’s analytical and inquisitive behaviour in SEO.  We’re working in a very subjectivity-led industry, as opposed to that of an exact-science.   SEO is an art built on the peripheral knowledge of the science of information retrieval after all, and even where people work towards making their approach to SEO more scientific, it’s nothing more than a weird science at best.

Critical thinking challenging misinformation

I like the idea that we dig in to out analytics and visibility, we test and explore on-site and off-site approaches to search engine optimisation.  As long as we share these observations with an understanding that isolating these test from unknown variables, sample sizes, caveats and a reframed methodology if necessary for the next round of tests, then I think this can be a healthy process to go through that just taking from elsewhere in the community.  This does not mean to say that all research should be shared, but just to say that even if you’re a bedroom SEO, then keeping an eye on the limitations of what you and others are testing is really quite healthy.

We recently shared some early observations on Google Instant usages in the UK.  We shared the shared the sample size, the number of verticals the test stretched across, limitations, a brief explanation of the approach to the analysis makes the research a little more valid, and very open-ended conclusions (making this more observational than definitive conclusions).  Through this approach it makes it easier for others to test for themselves the validity and value of what is being said, as opposed to just loose supposition.

I see Michael Martinez as someone with a very forthright opinion around the management and understanding of SEO, and certainly someone where critical thinking appears as a common thread in most of his articles.  For instance, on this very subject of science, SEO and chatter:

“…we share, we discuss, we analyze, and we critique. Scientists do this all the time. The chief difference between real scientists and SEO scientists, however, is that real scientists agree to be bound to a standard of quality that the SEO industry eschews…The science is based solely and completely upon what we do share that is confirmable and reliable. Everything else is just talk.”

This differentiation is a very healthy one.  Highlighting what is chatter, and what is definitively scientific in approach and output is all part of critical thinking, and I think that people can really take something away from this.  SEO is, without a doubt, still in its infancy.  It is still shaping up as an established industry, and it certainly hasn’t developed a comprehensive understanding of how to approach tests, knowledge sharing and the conclusions we pull from this.  But with that in mind, a little more critical thinking and a more resolute focus on the real value of what is being shared in training rooms, books and blog posts world-wide should almost certainly be a good thing.  I think so, anyway.

SEO Pride and Prejudice

Like many, I want to go to work and feel pride in what I do with the teams of people I work with, and this sense of pride may well be helped by the sense that collectively in our offices, we feel that we are delivering a solid SEO service, far beyond that what we are exposed to in many other places elsewhere.  So although we feel that other SEO propositions are misguided (which in itself is quite flattering and enlightening for our own), but it does require an element of astute critical thinking to highlight what we believe is good, bad and unhelpful information for how we approach SEO – and this is the whole point of this article.

Others though, see this wealth of misinformation as a real competitive advantage, including Aaron:
“I used to dislike misinformation in the SEO industry, but I have since come to realize that the more misinformed the public is the more opportunity there is for me. If it wasn’t abstract and full of misinformation then someone overseas would be doing it for $5 a day and I would lose most of my income. So I say let’s see some more bogus scientific studies.”

Now, I wouldn’t go down such a hard-line route as this, as I personally think that there are too many areas in the provision of SEO consulting that really can’t be provided in a more commoditised way (just in the same way as marketing, PR, creative teams haven’t been outsourced to more inexpensive regions of the world).  That said, I do think there is a great deal of value in the comment, as it essentially acts as a sort of filtering system – separating the wheat from the chaff.

Critical Thinking & SEO Strategy

Transferring critical thinking to the way we learn is only one application though; developing plans and delivering activity with critical thought can be hugely helpful too.  So let’s get down to a few tips…
Quite a few years ago, two gentlemen, Simon Wootton and Terry Horne, developed 6 suggestions for critically evaluating strategic ideas and plans.  These were:

• Competitiveness
• Controllability
• Compatibility
• Feasibility
• Impact
• Risk

At a strategic level you can quite easily see how critical thinking of this nature can really test the true value of ideas in the context of which they sit.

But, how do you teach day-to-day critical thinking?

Some might argue that critical thinking can’t actually be taught at all, and it’s actually more to do with what the person was born with between their ears, but I whole-heartedly disagree.  I think you can quite easily teach someone to work to a framework of which challenges the validity of an opinion, and develops a reasoned, critical judgement of their own.

The UK’s Open University provides a few ideas around how critical thinking can take shape, and importantly, how you can nurture critical thinking. A few take-aways from these articles that I think are especially helpful for those more SEOs interested in critical though include:

• Pause for thought when reading – we’re in an online industry where we know scanning of content is prevalent so occasionally pause for thought.
• Actively learn – critically engage in the content.  Ask yourself how, why, what, when, who, etc as often as you can about subjects you think are especially important.
• Work with others – learning alone is not going to be helping in moulding balanced and considered opinions as through shared-learning we naturally test each other’s understanding.
• Think independently – just because you’ve read something, doesn’t make it true!

There’s really isn’t anything too sophisticated in what is being said here – something I often think when reading management books, but challenge is really bringing to life as part of your day-to-day behaviour.  Are you up to the challenge?!

Anyway, give it a try – see if this sort of approach to reading blog posts, books, attending seminars or conferences, changes the way you understand and use the information around you.

How to Promote Your Blog Old Content to Build Links and Traffic

Blogging is exciting as each great published piece brings you new listeners and builds your community. But is it all about new posts? Is there any way to leverage the power of already written and published content – can it be used to build and strengthen your online presence?

Yes, this can be done, and here’s how you can do that:

1. Tweet Old Posts

“Tweet Old Posts” is a genius WordPress plugin I came across just recently. It lets you automatically tweet posts from your blog archives and allows you to set the following:

• Tweet prefix (to introduce each tweet);
• URL shortener to use;
• Hashtags to include in the tweet;
• Minimum interval between tweets – allows you to determine how often the plugin will automatically choose and tweet a blog post for you.
• Randomness interval – This is a contributing factor in minimum interval so that posts are randomly chosen and tweeted from your blog.
• Minimum age of post to be eligible for tweet – This allows you to set how old your post should be in order to be eligible for the tweet.
• Categories to omit from tweets – This will protect posts from the selected categories from being tweeted (Additionally you can exclude any specific posts as well).

When used properly (without spamming your followers with dozens of old and outdated Tweets daily), it can be a huge boom for your old content. I’d recommend setting it to tweet no more than once a day and exclude all “newsworthy” categories that could result in outdated Tweets.
Also getting creative in using the plugin would surely enhance it effectiveness: for example, with a niche blog (or blog category) you can create a tricky hashtag to introduce each tweet:

• #socialmedia start up of the day {here goes the tweet};
• #frugalrecipe of the day {here goes the tweet},
• etc.

This way it will be interesting to your followers and will probably create a popular hashtag (and even tradition) tied to your blog.

2. Feature Old Posts (“Most Popular” and “Related Posts”)

Displaying links to previously published posts has numerous benefits:

• Dramatically increase click-through (people who are very interested in the topic are most likely to want to read more on this);
• Increase the crawl depth by introducing additional inter-linking;
• Leverage your old content (you are likely to see your older posts commented, tweeted and stumbled).

I have done detailed overviews of various plugins that automatically link to your blog old posts as “Related” and “Most popular”. There’s no point in listing the tools again here.
Here are the round-ups:

• 3 Ways to Display Related Posts in WordPress Blog: YARPP, Arkayne and Google Related Links;
• An Alternative “Related Posts” WordPress Plugin – Where Did They Go From Here – The plugin that relies on “behavioral” relevance:
  When a visitor views a blog post, the plugin checks to see if the referral is another blog post on your site. If this is the case, then the referring post is updated with a reference to this post. And, the process continues as the visitor moves through the blog.
• 3 SEO-Friendly WP Plugins to Display Featured Posts: select which posts to feature manually;
• How to Smartly Interlink Your Blog Content with SEO Smart Links: the great plugin that automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Sidebar options:

• Most popular posts by number of comments: “Popular Posts” Widget and Intense Debate
• WordPress popular posts plugin lists your posts either by comment count, views or average daily views.

3. Round-up Old Posts

Round-ups are great for generating additional exposure to your previously published articles. If you get a bit creative, you can make thematic round-ups for really old articles, for example:

• “Top social media start-ups we reviewed last summer (and where they are now)”,
  
• “Best frugal recipes we discovered last year”,
• etc.

These types of round-ups will be both useful for your readers and allow you to naturally link to a bunch of your last season articles.

Now, to the good news. There’s a great plugin that lets you automatically generate roundups for you to save time!

It won’t publish the roundups automatically - it will only generate them based on the specified criteria and let you copy-paste and customize your roundups.

The features:

1. Build the roundup or the summary post for any time span, may be week or a month or any time span(this is great if you want to round-up last year’s posts)
2. Use (or change) the default CSS of the roundup;
3. Select only required categories for the roundup
4. Reorder the posts and the category headers in any order
5. See flags for the duplicate posts (those that got included from different categories). So you can remove that post from either or the category list while generating the roundup post.

Enjoy!

4 Tools to Find Related Keyword Phrases for Varied Anchor Text

Recently, I have been hearing complaints about having websites drop out of rankings (or at least get bumped down a bit) for one particular keyword phrase, but not others. The assumption is likely that it is a penalty based on un-natural linking activity for that keyword phrase.


If this is happening, how can you prevent your top keyword phrase from getting slapped by Google? Vary your anchor text of course.

Natural Anchor Text

Google likes natural, and, if you think about it, people who are not SEO’s are going to link to a variety of things that you should be using on occasion too, including:

• Website Name or URL
• Company or Brand Name
• Click Here – as generic as it may be, it also entices more people to click on the link, so while the SEO value may be low, the CTR will be rewarding.

Anchor Text Research Tools

First off, if you’re completely stumped, you can start with Open Site Explorer to see the anchor text distribution that your competitors use. All you need is a free account with SEOmoz to see the top 20 keyword phrases used.


If you’d like to know who’s ranking for your keyword phrase organically, as well as some related terms that have high CPC value, check out SEMRush and search for your keyword.


Once you have your primary keyword phrase, use the following to get ideas on other phrases that you might want to rank for, or at least include in your mix of anchor text.


1. Google Suggest

As mentioned above, Google Suggest provides a nice selection of related keyword terms to your own. Simply start typing in your phrase and it will do the rest for you.

And it’s not a bad idea to branch out and think of other phrases to use as anchor text. Someone may enter your targeted keyword phrase and get distracted by some of the suggestions that pop up in the search, more specific terms you may not be ranking for.


2. Google “Searches related to” Links

A little less popular in the scope of things, considering the positioning, but Google also gives searchers who haven’t found what they are looking for on the first page additional popular searches related to your search term. These may provide additional ideas for keyword anchor text phrases.

3. Google Insights

If you would like to dig into trends related to your keyword, take a look at Google Insights. It will show you the trending popularity of a search term, which you can view within a time period of 7, 30, or 90 days, 12 months, a particular year, or the default of 2004 to the present.

Below this, you will see your keyword based on regional interest, where you can drill down into specific locations. For example, in the map below, you can see that the top states interested in link building.

After the map, based on the region you are viewing, you will see the top searches within the time frame specified related to your keyword phrase, as well as rising searches for new trends that may be emerging in your niche.

4. Commercial Intent

Microsoft adCenter Labs offers a tool for detecting online commercial intention that will tell you whether a term is more likely to be searched for based on informational value or actual intent to make a commercial transaction.


This tool can help you gauge whether some of the additional phrases you are looking to build links for will be likely to result in someone looking to purchase your products or your services.

As you can see from the above example, “link building company” has a commercial intent probability of .87, whereas “link building strategy” has a non-commercial intent of .62. You can also offer your feedback about the tool’s accuracy if you feel the result is skewed.

Your Anchor Text Strategy

Have you ever been sandboxed for over-linking to one phrase? How do you vary your anchor text to make your link building campaign look as natural as possible?

source from:searchenginejournal.com

If You Tweet In A Forest… Blah Blah Blah No One Cares

According to a new study, no one really cares what you’re tweeting.* … #wtvr
Of course, it didn’t really take a study of 1.2 billion tweets to find that out, though at least now we know just how much people don’t care!

No, it didn’t take a study because if you just use Twitter, you’d know it intuitively.
And if you speak to Twitter advertising networks, they’ll admit that their CTRs are terribly low (far below 1%). (Ditto Wayne Liew’s data.) In fact, here’s some campaign data of mine from Ad.ly.

And similarly, other people like Leo Laporte notice that Twitter is really about … wait for it … ME!
Not you…

Not being social…

It’s about me! @Reply me? W000h00000! DM me? Yessss!

Ok, I’m exaggerating.

But it’s a lot easier to just focus on who’s paying attention to you than to go out of your way to pay attention to others (except for news, humour and other tweets with really engaging material, because those feed our reward systems similarly to the attention given us by @replies and DMs.

So what?

Well, for everyone using social media to [officially] you know… be social… you may need to measure the strength of your relationships.

My best guess is that the most effective way to measure the strength of your relationships is something like TwitterBFFs.Or maybe using friendfeed.

Maybe with the help of lists, as Wayne mentions.

Maybe your friendly neighbourhood HR manager might help out.

And why would you measure the strength of these relationships?

Because what gets measured… gets managed.

*(According to another study**, Wired paraphrased the study in roughly its entirety, adding no unique new value and sold ads on those pageviews. That’s l4me aggregation. Aggregation post via Quebec tech journalist @mcken.)

** Really my own unscientific observation from, y’know… reading the piece.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Local Business Listing Wars

Have you noticed the number of commercials being run by high-profile tier one companies and websites that are in the local listing industry?

For example you may have seen TV commercials for Angie’s List, SuperMedia, Yellow Book, and of course AT&T.  If you add Internet advertising that includes but not limited to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Merchant Circle, Yelp and Citysearch many others, you have to start wondering how all these websites can attract a finite number of businesses and visitors to use their website.  The other more significant question is how a business will manage their local business listing at all the local listing websites?


History of Local Business Listings


As a business, if you have not kept up with the evolution of local business listings you will need a quick primer to know where things started and where things are today.

The origins go back to the early 1990s when search engines had directories listing businesses by categories in addition to their basic search results.  These basic business listings gave way to business directories giving the business the opportunity to add more information to their business.  Of course, while this evolution was taking place so did having the yellow pages on the web.  Business directories then gave way to the idea of rating a business with companies like Angie’s List, Merchant Circle and Yelp in social communities.  In 2007 business listings began showing up in search engines and consumer reviews were already showing up in these local business listings.

So, in summary, a local business listing is a combination of yellow pages information, business description, business marketing information, consumer ratings and consumer reviews.

Local Business Listings as Interactive Yellow Pages

Calling these listings a business directory does not do them justice considering all the content that is available.  Not only is this about getting your business marketing information into these listings, but they also become mini-websites for your business and more importantly allow consumers to quantitatively rate and subjectively provide commentary about their experience with the business, products and services.

Local business listing websites that are social communities allow customers and consumers to collaborate.  We are distinguishing between customers being B2B and consumers being B2C.  We will discuss B2B customer comments in a future article.

Live social communities that provide location based services like Four Square, Twitter and Facebook create instantaneous feedback to friends, family and followers alike. This collaboration not only allows for ratings and comments, but the information is posted permanently.  This will require a business to ask satisfied customers to post commentary and manage those postings that are negative…..at multiple local listing websites.

Manage Your Local Business Listings Everywhere!

Unlike the traditional yellow pages where business information was located in a single source, the Internet lets business information be found everywhere. With so many sources, it becomes imperative for a business to stay on top of its information, description, marketing materials and consumer reviews at various local listing websites.

If you wonder why, the answer is simple.  Your business information shows up in search engine results, mobile search results and is available to mobile application developers for mobile apps.  Since you don’t know what source your local customers or mobile application developers are using, you need a way to manage many sources simultaneously.

Select a Company to Help

Whether we are talking about website local optimization, local business listings, mobile marketing or geo-social marketing, a business needs proper support to succeed in this new era of local business marketing.  You need a partner with experience and expertise in multiple digital marketing fields and can adapt to the progression of new technologies that will become available over the next few years.
Some key elements for a company to provide local business listing marketing services include:

• Claim your local listing at multiple local listing websites
• Providing both data and marketing services
• Update your basic business data information monthly
• Update and manage your business marketing information that include photos, videos, coupons, offers, discounts, and events monthly
• Consumer review monitoring and management monthly
• Analytics review of local business listings analytics and the appropriate changes to your local business listings monthly
• Expertise in Mapping Technologies and GPS