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
  

Social Media Marketing in Foreign Countries and Languages

Social media marketing is now a key strategy for any business’s global marketing communication strategy – online marketers understand the benefits of social and know how to deliver a good return on investment in their social marketing endeavours.


However, many English-speaking marketers are missing out on the huge potential of foreign-language social media marketing. There are a number reasons why this may be the case, the most obvious being a lack of knowledge about which social networks to target abroad and how to devise a social media strategy for foreign-language markets.


According to data published by Internet World Stats in June 2010, the top five countries with the highest proportion of internet users are China with 21.4%, the USA with 12.2%, Japan with 5.0%, India with 4.1% and Brazil with 3.9%.  This means that three of the top five internet-using nations are emerging (mostly non-English speaking) markets – the BIC out of the BRIC countries.
These countries are prime opportunities for export and for marketing online, particularly by using social media, but how can you go about reaching these overseas audiences? Read on for some starter tips below – we’ll begin by looking at the most popular social networks in China, Japan, India and Brazil.


China


Renren.com and Qzone.com dominate the Chinese social networking scene. Renren, a clone of Facebook, claims over 120 million users and is popular with students, although the company hopes to capture a wider demographic in the future. Qzone claims to have over 380 million users, although it’s likely many of these are dormant accounts opened via the company’s QQ network, China’s largest instant messenger service. China’s third largest network is Kaixin001.com, which is popular amongst white collar workers. Kaixin001 has developed popular networking games like ‘Slave Manor’ and ‘Happy Farm’.


Japan


The Japanese market is dominated by Mixi.jp and Twitter.jp. Mixi is by far the largest with over 80% market share, which is around 30 million users. Twitter’s official Japanese site was launched in 2008 and has around 5 million active users. Twitter.jp has an interesting revenue model whereby users can charge their followers to view their tweets, either on a monthly basis or per single tweet.


In Japan paying for content, particularly on the mobile web, is something users are willing to do. From a marketer’s point of view it’s interesting to note that writing in Japanese and Chinese characters enables Twitter users to squeeze a lot more content into single tweets than writing in English.


India


In India, Facebook has just edged ahead of Orkut in terms of monthly unique visitors, with Facebook now at 20.87 million, compared to Orkut’s 19.87 (based on July 2010 Comscore data).
These two networks are already well-known to internet marketers in the English-speaking world, which may help to make India an attractive market to target. BharatStudent is another popular network in India with 4.32 million monthly uniques. As its name suggests, this network is aimed at the younger demographic.


Brazil


In Brazil, Orkut is the most popular network. In fact, over 51% of Orkut’s total traffic comes from Brazil. That’s around 20 million monthly visits. Sonico.com is another popular network, closely targeted to Latin American users, which has around 8 million members in Brazil. MySpace has been the third largest network in Brazil for some years, although it now looks as though Facebook is about to take the number three position.
To get started in foreign-language social media marketing, you need to decide which countries to target. One way to approach this would be to find out which networks in which countries most closely match the demographic profile you want to target. You could look at data from the likes of Nielsen and Comscore to gain this kind of insight.


Once you have identified some potential networks to target, you should probably enlist the services of a local social media expert within that country. This will help you to understand social media etiquette and online behaviours, which is particularly important in some markets, like China, where censorship and state control could have an impact on your marketing activities. For example, in China, there is a list of prohibited words, the use of which will trigger an automatic ban on your posts.


Most likely, you will also need the translation services of native speakers to copy write and translate your campaigns, ensuring your message is understood and trusted by local users. These modest investments in local expertise will very likely bring an attractive return when you consider the reach of foreign-language social networks.


source from:searchenginejournal.com

How to Learn to Love Your Blog

We bloggers have an intricate relationship with our sites. Some days, you can feel something akin to a genuine affection for the blog you’ve lovingly crafted. Other days, you want to throw a brick through the screen of your PC and walk away to retrain as a truck driver.

Love it or hate it, blogging is the cornerstone of any successful business, and it’s a vehicle which looks set to stay.

Given the fact that blogging isn’t a transient trend, is there a way of developing a genuine, long-lasting affection for your site?

Can we turn our feelings towards our blog in to the equivalent of soul mates, rather than bickering siblings?

Instead of feeling slightly nauseous at the thought of updating our blogs, wouldn’t it be lovely if it were possible to look forward to going online and updating our sites, with the same affection as we walk our dogs every day, or kiss our spouses goodnight?

Well, it is.

It may not be possible, as veteran bloggers, to recapture the first thrills of blog ownership. However, it isn’t too hard to find an easy relationship with our blogs which make us comfortable with making our livings online.

Yes, blogs are frustrating.
Yes, we can feel let down when our posts flop, or we don’t generate the comments we feel that we deserve.

Admittedly it can also be soul-destroying to keep checking our site rankings and see the product of our business planning and devotion floundering around with a poor status on the search engines.
Given all this, perhaps it is time for us as bloggers to remember the principles behind blogging, and get back to the real reason why we post our views online.

Responding to the ebbs and flows of blog ownership

Running a blog is a long-term prospect. Just as we only learn to drive properly after we pass our test, or fall fully in love after being in a relationship for a few years, so we need to think about our blogs as something which we subscribe to for the long haul.

Although the ‘newness’ of a blog fades like the first flush of a relationship, it can be replaced with a full understanding of the blog process; how it works, what you need to do to succeed, and what elements of the blogging process you need to focus upon to be successful.

There will always be times as a blogger that you lose your enthusiasm. In the same way as we have arguments with our partners, we can fall out with our blogs. It could be that we experience technical difficulties, or our viewer rate drops off, or we are so pushed for time that blogging feels like a chore rather than a pleasure.

When this happens, we need to go back to the first flush. Can you remember when you first got recognition as a blogger? When you got your first non-spam comment, and responded? When your blog got its very first ping-back?

These feelings do not go away, they just at times become eclipsed by the everyday grind of keeping your blog updated.

Falling in love again

Perhaps it’s time to fall in love with your blog again. Go and look at your beautiful site and admire the work which you have put in to it.

Check out the number of visitors whom you attract every day, and feel that first wonder at being able to provide the service to your customers. Read your comments and be proud.

Most of all, consider your blog as an extension of you, with all your foibles, faults and attributes, and learn to love it once again.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model: A Scalable Solution to Paid Links?

Google recently released a patent based on the browsing tendencies of “reasonable surfers”. Within, it details that previously, Google had followed a “random surfer” model – that every link on a page was equally important, without process or thought on user tendency or where the most used links would lie.
This new development, the reasonable surfer model, means that Google now judges a link based on standard user behavior – or is in the course of perfecting said process – giving more weight to links that are more likely to be clicked on, and less to those buried away in the nether regions of a page.

This means that certain links, like footer and sidebar links in particular, are likely to be devalued. And it’s as they should, right? If a link is tucked away in the footer, the webmaster is stating that he doesn’t care much for it – or it has little value other than for extraneous pleas to the search engines.

When this was released, my initial thought was that this made sense, sure, CTR, rationale, important links, etc. But what I didn’t weigh was the thing that it most importantly impacted – paid links.

Spammy, nefarious paid links litter sidebars and footers all over the internet. In droves. So, then, was this implementation one that was meant to find the strongest links – or, otherwise, had the most reason to devalue the spammy ones?

Not so long ago, Matt Cutts came out as saying that Google takes action against Conductor’s paid link network – one known to purchase links on some of the biggest, most valuable sites on the internet.

Despite this, murmurs persisted – and rankings seemingly backed up – that these sites still had value being passed to them – and for sure, none of them had been de-indexed or heavily penalized. So, then, what did Matt Cutts mean when he said “we do take action in response (to Conductor’s paid link network)”?
Maybe – maybe – what he meant was that Google was actively applying the reasonable surfer model to devalue these links – just as they were on every other website on the internet.
Yes, that’s right. You can guess where these links – Conductor’s links – are located on the biggest sites on the internet — the deep, bottom right section of the sidebar.

A Scalable Solution

There’s been complaints about the state of webspam, particularly from one of the biggest voices in the industry. However, I think Google is doing a fine job – and they’re doing it in a way that makes sense for them. Scalability. It is my theory that one of the biggest reasons for this patent is that it offers a scalable solution to paid links – devaluing a large majority of links that were improperly skimping the index.
Hand picking at scale is just not a reality – and in many ways, becomes extremely unfair to some webmasters who get picked out – and lose their welfare – while others continue to thrive based on brand identity alone. Scalable, reductionist models like this are the scalable offerings that make sense for the future. Identify paid link signals, and devalue them. Don’t penalize or de-index (unless done en masse) – just find the common threads, and cut them down.

Oh, Wait — The Problem

Before we go, let me offer one point of error with this model – sometime users don’t matter. Think about most reasonable blogs on the internet. Do you think the body content is the part where links should be given the most credence? No. The links on a blog – a natural blog – that are the biggest indicator of a “vote” for a website are in the blogroll – something that frequently goes ignored by the user.

In this instance, user behavior should be ignored – because the blogroll is the spot where the webmaster is willing to put their neck on the line. They are willing to put their neck on the line for links that sit there. And are sitewide. These are the links they visit frequently – and if someone who runs a website with 50k backlinks says THIS site is worth having in their blogroll, the users shouldn’t mean a damn.

Of course, this leads to manipulation. And paid links show up there frequently. But the thing is, the blogroll should still be the spot where SERP positions are earned. Perhaps Google should uniquely identify this area (and maybe is?),  and completely ignore those links with commercial anchor text – thus removing any problem with manipulation. But it’s a difficult thing.

No matter, the reasonable surfer says the reasonable surfer generally ignores this area. But it’s the biggest damn vote on the internet. IT’S THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE OF THE INTERNET.

Google – the body content’s votes don’t matter – but the blogrolls do.
Frequently ignored links for President.


source from:searchenginejournal.com

How a Fortune 1,000 Company Got 88,000 Facebook Fans in 4 Weeks, and Only Paid For Half of Them

My major focus the last three months has been Facebook advertising. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get awesome results with Facebook ads. It’s been a personal challenge, because I have more or less mastered Google AdWords and SEO, so I thought: I should be able to figure this out!

It’s been very challenging. Facebook ads are significantly different from AdWords. It’s not just search keywords vs. interests. And it’s not just about applying lessons from display advertising. The entire process is different. What works is completely different.
I’ve been fortunate to be able to get experience with about 10 different clients, from unknowns to affiliate offers to Fortune 500 brands. My results have improved by a factor of five. I’ve chatted and compared notes with a handful of the best in the Facebook advertising business.
But there is a guy who keeps getting dramatically better results than anyone I’ve heard of… Jeremy Koch of Pertnear down in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He regularly tortures me with screenshots of CPC’s below $0.10. So I thought I’d ask him a few questions about some of Pertnear’s Facebook marketing successes and see what we might be able to learn.

=> Case Study One: A Fortune 1,000 Company
This is a publicly traded specialty retailer.

BBC: You got 88,000 fans for them in four weeks?
Jeremy Koch: Yep, and we’ve done more than that for other clients.

BBC: Are you paying for all of these fans? What’s the friend-recommending component?
Jeremy Koch: About 50% of them have been viral. This is fairly typical, this number will grow with time.

BBC: So you’re only paying for half of these fans- whatever you get from ads, you get that much more for free.
Jeremy Koch: That’s right. It’s fun.

BBC: What is the key to getting such a high viral %?
Jeremy Koch: The key is identifying the people that truly are Fans of the brand or the good/service the brand provides.  If they truly love the brand they are very likely to interact on the page, which draws in their friends.

The Virtuous Cycle of Facebook Fan Growth

BBC: So what are you doing on the the fan page itself?
Jeremy Koch: People go to the fan page and they see all these awesome posts from people who love the niche as much as they do. We’ve turned it into a “Bragging Board”.

BBC: What does the client think about all this?
Jeremy Koch: If we can reach our goal of 500k within 3 months, I think they will be OK with that.
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Commentary:

• These ideas seem no-brainer, but successful Facebook Marketing always looks no-brainer in hindsight. If you get the right things to line up with simple compelling incentives, it works and it makes sense. It looks so simple that you realize the real art is fighting your way through complication to the most direct, easiest path for the prospect.
• On the flipside, it’s too easy to operate with no process, no plan and no principles and end up with mediocre results.
• Some of this is just good marketing practice, like “find people who are really qualified prospects”. Creative advertising has been choosing TV shows and magazines to target the right prospects for decades. But Facebook gives us direct quantifiable feedback about how qualified those prospects really were. If you get bacon-lovers to fan a fast food joint’s page, do they engage as much as the people who love hamburgers? The combination of creative and affinities in highly quantifiable direct marketing is new, and interesting. AdWords has been this way for search keywords and search intent, but attaching this process to interest-based marketing is new.
• I’ve seen Facebook ad campaigns without good page management strategy get 5% or less viral friending. To see 50% from Jeremy’s techniques just shows how your page management strategies can make a 100% difference in your results.

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How a Regional Vacation Rental Company Tripled Their Sales with Facebook Advertising
=> Case Study Two: Brindley Beach Vacations
Brindley Beach Vacations offers vacation rentals in the Outer Banks, a 200-mile long string of narrow barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, beginning in the southeastern corner of Virginia Beach on the east coast of the United States.

BBC: How many fans did you get them?
Jeremy Koch: We started with 348 people on their page, we are now at over 12,000. They want to be at 20,000 by November 1st.  They already have more Fans than anyone we have been able to find in their industry.

BBC: How much business has this gotten them?
Jeremy Koch: Their reservations for June (the month we started) were triple their expectations. By July they told us to stop promoting summer reservations and work on the Fall.  They’ve had many days when their reservation staff reported almost everyone they talked to mentioned the Facebook page.

BBC: How are they doing compared to their competitors?
Jeremy Koch: That is an interesting question… Not only have they been doing well, but because they have been creating so much new business, it appears it has even spilled over into their competitors.  I think we have helped create a demand that may be surpassing the supply, at least for the peak seasons.

BBC: Is this helping them in their off season?
Jeremy Koch: They are seeing an increase in bookings for the shoulder seasons.  Facebook is a great avenue to subtly recommend coming in the shoulder seasons. We see people even planning additional trips.

BBC: How is Brindley feeling about the results?
Jeremy Koch: The owner of the company has given us permission to give his personal cell phone number out to prospective clients.

Discussion and Take Aways

BBC: Ok, well let’s talk about the HOW. What, that you’re willing to reveal, are you doing to get such remarkable results?
Jeremy Koch: We like the people we work with, we take the success of each client personally.  When we take on a new client we want to exceed their expectations… under promise and over deliver.  I know that is not what you were looking for… The real key to what we do is identifying the people and/or the target audience that already wants what our client is offering.  It becomes very expensive if you are trying to convert people who are unaware of your product or service.  Find the people that want what you have, then get them to make the introduction to their friends, even if they don’t realize they are making the introduction.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Why Small Advertisers Can’t Use Adwords Anymore!

Remember back in 2001, during the good old days (of the internet) when you could actually use Google Adwords as a means to drive quality traffic to your website, at an extremely low investment to the advertiser? Back when niche keywords cost .05 – .20 per click and if you really wanted to open up your pockets and bid on broader terms, you would pay .25 – .75 per click.

Now days you would be so lucky to find a niche where you can pay under $1.00/click. What I am saying is that the days when small advertisers could gain visibility (at least in the paid results) on Google are over. Small advertisers don’t have a budget to “test” keywords, landing pages, offers, etc… For a small, local businesses, $250/month is a lot of money!

The problem is that over the past 10 years, the competitive landscape has gotten much more saturated. There are bidding wars between advertisers to push their ads towards the top. I know, I know…Ad Quality Score plays a factor in how much you pay per click, but I’ll tell you something, if you have deep pockets and are willing to pay a lot per click…Google will put you at the top. So when push comes to shove, the big brands and large corporations with the bigger budgets, are the ads that are still going to be showing.

The Solution

So what can small, localized business do? The good part is that there are so many new and innovative ways you can drive traffic to your site. Just to stay focused on Paid Search, you can try newer ad platforms like Facebook Ads and MyAds (Myspace Ad Network). Facebook Ads in particular has been getting a lot of attention recently because the CPCs are reasonable, you have a ton of awesome targeting options, and…oh yeah…Facebook gets a ton of traffic!


To the Small-Business Owner: Don’t let Adwords put a bad taste in your mouth about paid search. Paid search can still be a valuable marketing tactic; you just need to find other outlets that can still drive quality traffic at lower costs. I would strongly recommend to keep your mind open to other paid search techniques. It may be that you can drive the same amount of traffic that Adwords would bring you, with Facebook and MySpace ads at half the cost.


Using best practices to increase ROI:

• Create relevant landing pages
• Use strong call to actions
• Use free content as a means of lead generation
• Use promotions and timely specials to entice user action

source from:searchenginejournal.com

SEO News of 29-7-2010

Why SEO Gurus Got Slapped in the Face

t felt like only yesterday when SEO gurus ran the search world.

There they were, changing hundreds an hour while they poked around on their computers, analyzing keywords, calculating algorithms and directing cheaper labor overseas to conduct their link building projects — all with the belief that these tactics were the only thing needed to gain top rankings on Google.

Once upon a time, that's all that was needed to rank high on Google.

Flash forward to today and now SEO "gurus" who once killed it on the search scene, are scratching their heads and screaming at their offshore partners.

News flash: your tactics are now considered spam.

It could be said that social media hit mainstream about four years ago. Around that same time, all hell broke lose. Facebook's flood gates opened to everyone; YouTube was crawling to the top of Alexa; and, everyone wanted to know what Ashton Kutcher ate for lunch on Twitter. Once everyone else started to care about what everyone else was saying, search started to listen.

Of course search engines started listening to the massive amounts of conversations and user generated content created online, which is called real-time search.

That content has answers and we're all just searching for answers anyway aren't we? Who better to trust than Kim Kardashian or your best best friend from high school on Facebook? (slight sarcasm).

Nevertheless, social is now important for search marketing and the agenda of Search Engine Strategies (SES) SF 2010 is a reflection of that.

SES is a global conference held annually in cities around the world. Less than a month away is SES San Francisco, which starts August 16th. While previous years conferences have focused primarily on SEO, SEM, PPC strategies for search, the focus more recently has shifted to social media. But why?

Social media is playing a huge factor at SES this year, according to Byron Gordon from SEO-PR.com. This has nothing to do with social media as a buzz word or a fad. It has to do with the undeniable fact that search has changed, dramatically and quickly. One minute you are showing up on the first page for keywords with their queries, the next minute, Google ignores you as spammer. Why? Too much SEO and too little SMO (social media optimization).

SEO and Social now need to work together. An SEO practitioner can no longer apply the same tactics to be a top rank without integration of social media as well. Further, the way people search, make decisions, and what they click on has change. In fact, there is very little discussion of paid search at this years SES San Francisco event.

There are some great topics and speakers to be discussed at the event. Agenda topics range from Introductory SEO or Social Media to in depth topics like Augmented Reality and Facebook.

What I do not see covered in depth however, is social search — a new way people are starting to search and make decisions about what to click on and even buy.

I would expect to see a full discussion period blocked out for this topic. While I do see mentions of the changes to search, etc. the face of social search in itself deserves more consideration at a search engine strategies conference.

Aren't the new strategies involving social to optimize search essentially what people expert to learn from attending? What do you think?
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Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O.

Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”

So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.

In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.

Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.

Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.

Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.

In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.

Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.

She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.

She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.

Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).

“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
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Image SEO Expert Knocks On Bing Image Search

A WebmasterWorld thread has Zeus, someone well known in the SEO forum space as tracking the image search engines, as not speaking positively about Bing Image Search.

The thread talks how Bing is slower than Google to index new content. Which is often the case, simply cause Google is much faster than most search engines. But Zeus breaks it out to say that their image search is even more disappointing.

Zeus said that typically he sees at most 10% of his pages or images in Bing Image search, sometimes only 5% or less. He said:

Bing Image which in my case has 45 images listed of 22,000.

Now, Bing has made some very good strides and I believe many are rutting for them to gain some more share. Heck, I even think it would be a good idea and I am an Apple guy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Algorithms: The Cure for Copywriter’s Block

Writer’s block, or perhaps more accurate these days, blogger’s block, is a common occurrence. Great bloggers try to pump out insightful and engaging content daily, but eventually the question becomes, what more can you write about? It’s at times like these when I suggest you delve into a little keyword research.

Rather than struggle internally to find topics for your next blog or article, let data drive your reporting or writing. Tools like Google’s Adwords KeyWord Tool, BlogPulse and Wordtracker are good for discovering what topics are trending for Copywriting inspiration.
Content Farms vs. Attention Mines

Newspapers and journalists have bemoaned the growing industry of “Content Farms” in recent years. As sites like Examiner.com and Demand Media grow in prominence, traditional publications are losing web traffic and thus, advertising opportunities. But how are Content Farms getting so many readers? Shouldn’t the journalistic reputation of major newspapers and magazines be enough to attract readers? Not anymore, thanks to search algorithms.
Algorithm as Editor

As online journalist Jason Fry (@JasonCFry) explains in a recent post, Content Farm sites use of algorithms to create story ideas in an “algorithm-as-editor” model. This flies in the face of the traditional writing style in which editors or bloggers assemble story ideas through a keen journalistic, yet un-digitized public awareness or crowdsourcing. Now, writers are guided by search engine queries, a model you can use when attempting to ward off copywriter’s block.
Attention Mines

Noted journalism entrepreneur Michael Tippet (@MTippet) reengineers the somewhat spammy reputation Content Farms have evoked by calling the collection of sites Attention Mines. In this sense, writer’s still hold the key to the car, so to speak. Writers, bloggers and professional journalists can all use algorithms in developing story ideas, but don’t let search queries alone guide your pen. Keyword research is only one component to identifying what readers want and what they need. If we let search engines write the stories, we’d read nothing but Justin Beiber

Make Headlines, Don’t Write Them

There’s a big difference between merely commenting on search queries and using them to write good copy. If you’re posting a blog or article, strive to create a headline and add to the conversation, rather than merely rehashing the keywords you saw in your keyword research.

Algorithms can tell you what readers want, but more importantly, they help you understand why. In your keyword research, you’ll come across story ideas that make sense, but a few that are out of the blue as well. A great article can come from those outliers. Keyword research can help you find what an audience wants to read, but as a writer, you must give them what they need..
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How to Automate and Scale Your Guest Blogging

One of the things we do to help our SEO efforts is to write professional articles about our niche. We believe this is a great way to get links, and anyone can do this in their own niche.

Let’s say for the sake of example that we sell wedding shoes. Our staff knows a lot about this subject, and is very experienced in that field of work. Therefore this niche produces the most natural topics to write about. We would write about how to choose the most comfortable wedding shoes, or how to choose ones that will support your feet best and still have high heels, or what is trendy currently … You get the point.

The next step is to publish these articles as guest posts in as many blogs and websites as possible, so we can get the precious links.

First we need to make contact with bloggers that tend to write about weddings, introduce ourselves and offer articles to them. These bloggers are more open than others to receive and publish guest articles about wedding shoes.
At this point, we encounter the first problem – How do we find a large number of these bloggers?

Our immediate solution was very simple – We search for posts regarding weddings, so we can contact their authors. We do that by utilizing Google Blog Alerts on one generic keyword that appears in these posts in high probability: “wedding”.

You can do this by going to Google Alerts, then type “wedding” and choose “Blogs” as the type, and fill the rest of the fields. If you’re logged in to Google when you do this, then you have the option to receive the alerts in a feed instead of email.

An employee reads the alert feed frequently (let’s say twice every day), looks at all the new blog posts about weddings, and identifies bloggers that we can contact.

This employee then tags these blogs in Delicious, with the tag ‘GoodBlog’.

If you are not familiar with Delicious tagging, this is the time to explain that each tag creates an RSS feed (we call this a tag-feed), which gets filled with URLs as you tag them. This usage of Delicious Bookmarks is a very powerful productivity tool, and it’s free!

So these blogs get tagged as GoodBlog, and thus an item is generated in the Delicious tag-feed, and we let another employee read this tag-feed and contact the bloggers. A rather simple process that is also mostly scalable. This process so far requires only little man-power.

While doing this, we found out that a single Google Blog Alert on a generic keyword like ‘wedding’ ends up with a huge quantity of results… Some of them are interesting and related to weddings – so we can contact their authors, like this one. But others aren’t relevant at all, or are spam blogs (splogs), scrapers (a growing phenomenon), and other Internet junk.

For example, a few irrelevant sites that keep popping up are gossip sites and magazines that talk about celebrity weddings and stuff like that (for example, this one). They are not likely to accept out wedding-shoes articles, so we prefer not to contact them. If possible, we prefer not to see them at all in the alerts.
So this brings us to the second problem – How do we separate the wheat from the chaff?

We observed early-on that it would be enough to filter out a limited amount of specific spam sites and other unrelated sites that, for one reason or another, appear again and again in the alerts.

Our first idea for a software-based solution was to write a PHP script to filter certain URLs from the alert feed, and thus generate a filtered feed. A quick sketch for such a script is:

1. Read the alert feed
2. Iterate over all items
3. Remove items from sites we don’t want
4. Keep all others
5. Output the kept items as a feed

This kind of script would do the job, but it would require tweaking the script every time we wanted to add a new site to filter.

So we came up with another trick, and this is the main point of this essay: The list of sites to filter doesn’t need to be hard-coded into the script.

Instead, the script can use several Delicious tag-feeds that contain the list of the sites to filter out.

So now we have an improved feed filter that generates a modified feed on-the-fly. The employee who reads the modified feed, can use one tag (‘GoodBlog’) to mark a blog for later contact, and another tag (‘BadSite’) to mark a site for future filtering.

The feed-filter script will filter any entries from a site that was tagged with any of these, from then onward!

The end result: A large and ever-growing list of good wedding-related blogs that we can contact and publish articles on.

Any blogs that we already identified and maybe contacted, as well as any spam/junk/irrelevant sites that we don’t want to see anymore, are all filtered out of the alerts feed. As an added bonus, the whole process tends to optimize itself over time, so the employee has less and less spam to go through.

From the productivity and usability point of view, the most important aspect of this whole system is that the user interface is dead-simple and intuitive for the employee. They tag a site, and it works as expected.

We want to share this element of the system with everybody, so you can all do this kind of thing. We call it the PHP Feed Filter, and we give it to you here for free, so you can use it for your SEO efforts.
A word about how it works

We use very simple RSS parser and writer classes, based on PHP’s XML facilities. However the parser doesn’t work well for Google Alerts ATOM feeds, so we also included SimplePie, which handles those feeds well.

If you wish to use the feed filter for your own system, you should:

* Generate a Google Alerts feed and put its URL in the sample script file where it says “Unfiltered alert feed”.
* Generate tag feeds in Delicious as you see fit (they appear at the bottom of the page when you look at tagged entries), and put them in the sample script file where it says “Filter feeds”. You can also use private feeds if you wish to keep all your work hidden from competitors.
* Let your employee enter the sample script’s URL in their RSS reader, like Google Reader.
* Remember to tag the homepage, and not a specific post or page, so that they get filtered correctly.

Summary

Note that the code is not very optimized and a bit crude, but it is very simple and straightforward. You should be able to modify any part of it quite easily to fit more complicated use cases. This is also why we used free 3rd-party services like Google Blog Alerts and Delicious Bookmarks.

A system such as this allows you to scale your article distribution and guest blogging efforts while maintaining efficiency. In fact, in some ways efficiency increases over time as you learn which sites you wish to avoid in future.

We hope you find our code useful and please do let us know if you have any ideas for how we can improve it!

Latest SEO News of 28-7-2010

Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O.

Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”

So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.

In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.

Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.

Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.

Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.

In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.

Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.

She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.

She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.

Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).

“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
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UK SMEs 'failing to pick up on SEO'

Small businesses in the UK are not taking advantage of search engine optimisation (SEO), according to a new report.

Analytics SEO found that more than half of the 1,000 SMEs surveyed had negligible, ineffectual levels of SEO, while some had none.

Seventy per cent of firms with fewer than 50 employees had basic or non-existent SEO.

Overall, only two per cent had invested in analytics software to monitor return-on-investment – meaning that more than nine in ten businesses were failing to track responses.

There was a huge disparity between small and large companies, with the average small firm only possessing 408 inbound links.

In comparison, the average UK company has 6,874 inbound links.

Writing in Econsultancy, media expert Graham Charlton commented that companies could be losing out on sales.

"[Small] businesses should be looking to correct this as, implemented well, SEO has the potential to be a very important and cost-effective sales channel.

"Whilst not every company will have the resources or know-how to run an effective campaign, simply getting the basics right, such as ensuring that a site can be indexed and contains relevant content, can make a noticeable difference to search results," he said.
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Firefox – SEO Programmers Heaven

You’ll have no doubt been working one day and asked yourself, “There must be a simpler way to do this”. You’re right, there probably is, in the form of a Firefox add-on. There are thousands of add-on’s to choose from for Firefox, some are useful, some are pointless, and many you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.

For SEO purposes, Firefox add-on’s are a programmers heaven. There are dozens of useful add-on’s for SEO in the Mozilla database. A few of SEO Consult’s favourites are listed below with a description of their use. Try them out, you won’t be disappointed!

Firebug – This tool is not just one for the SEO programmer, but also for any website developer too. It gives you a small icon in the status bar which when clicked brings up a console style window. Inside is a multitude of tools designed to help you diagnose and repair broken web pages. By far the most useful feature is the ability to edit and monitor on the fly changes of CSS, HTML and JavaScript live on any web page. This is far quicker than editing a page, uploading and refreshing.

Live HTTP Headers – This tool shows you the headers served up from the web server so you can see if there are any redirects in them, such as 301 or 302 redirects. It will also show you if there are any elements not found with a 404 error. 302’s and 404’s are like the plague to Google, and they won’t get indexed. Use this tool to help you identify and remove them.

Server Spy – This is a basic but very useful tool to tell you which version of Apache, IIS or other web server software the server hosting the website is running. This is especially useful if you need to know whether you can use an htaccess file or not, or see if a script is likely going to be compatible with the website or not.

HTML Validator – Tired of the W3C Validator being so slow? We were too, so we installed this tool which uses a very close algorithm to the W3C Validator to help us diagnose HTML/XHTML errors. The tool installs itself to the status bar where it displays the number of errors on each page you load automatically. Double clicking brings up the source code window and the validator console for your diagnosis. When all the errors are repaired, finish off with a check using the W3C Validator to be sure, as the algorithms aren’t identical. A validated page is a good looking page to Google.

Web Developers Toolbar – This is by far the most useful tool any web or SEO programmer can use. The variety of features included is huge, and it allows you to do hundreds of things you would normally crawl through browser menus to do. Some examples are outlining elements, disabling images and JavaScript, viewing the CSS file, disabling CSS, resizing the browser window, view the source code and page headers… The list is almost endless. Ease of use and compatibility is a large factor in conversion rates, so make sure your website works the way it should.

Now you have some useful tools, install them and see how well they help you. And remember, they’re all free and get regularly updated. From an SEO perspective, you can increase your throughput by a long way with these simple tools.

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5 Things You Need to Know to Succeed With Bing

With the impending implosion of Yahoo’s disappointing Panama project and seeming overnight surrender of search to the big boys of Google and Microsoft it’s time we all started paying a little more attention to Bing and particularly Microsoft adCenter.

Just the other day I was talking with some bright minds in the search space and when we got to the topic of Bing the lights were on but no one was home. Which got me think about how since its launch most of us have largely ignored the MSN/Bing advertising platform, as illustrated by the small number of advertisers on Bing compared against Google’s estimated 1.5 million advertisers, due in large part to the limited consumer reach and previously very poor functionality. And while it’s still a few months away I think it is high time we start thinking about how we manage search in Bing and want to share with you 5 things you’ll need to know to find success with Bing.

* Dynamic Text Insertion: Most advertisers are familiar with Google’s dynamic keyword insertion function that allows an advertiser to take the search query and dynamically insert it into ad text. Bing takes this feature to a whole new level. Not only can you dynamically insert the search query into the ad but you can also conditionally insert other pieces of text into the ad or display url. For example, if the search query is red roses you could insert the word red rose into the ad text but could also make a condition that shows a price of $24.99 when the search query is red roses but $19.99 if the search query is yellow roses. Proper use of this should improve relevance which will help improve CTR and/or conversion rates.

* Scheduled Bid Adjustments: On both a campaign and ad group level advertisers can both increase or decrease their bid levels based on geography (by city, metro,. state/province, country/region), demographics (age and gender), day of week, user device (mobile or desktop/laptop) and time of day. This requires marketers to really understand their underlying core business metrics but the marketers that know their metrics and understand these features can heavily skew the Bing search landscape in their favor.

* Bing Uses Quality Score Metric: While this doesn’t come as a surprise to many it is important to note that Bing also uses a similar metric to Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo’s Quality Index (they call their metric Quality Score Unfortunately this is one area that is pretty crappy in Bing. At this stage Bing doesn’t display quality score that ties to a keyword, ad, or account. However, there have been some instances we’ve heard of that in order to establish high quality scores bids have been increased by 2x which have driven bids down in the mid to long term. Note that everything we’re hearing is that Bing is in alpha or beta of rolling out Quality Score for advertisers.

* Search Management Tools: Microsoft’s adCenter has a tool similar to Google’s desktop tool (Adwords Editor) that resides on an advertiser’s local machine. The name of the tool isn’t the most original – Microsoft adCenter Desktop but the tool has some great functionality
o Extract keywords for your ad group based on a URL or MSN’s keyword tools
o Ad distribution (search vs. content) and geo-targeting and add ad group-level negative keywords
o Similar functionality to the excel plug-in described below.

On top of their desktop application adCenter also offers an excel plug-in feature with features that provide deep keyword research insights. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.

* Dedicated Time and Resources: Once Bing is powering the organic and paid search results for Yahoo there reach will be extended and their resources will be more heavily focused on improving their advertising tools to allow them to increase monetization per query. The advertisers who will win in the land grab for search real estate are those who are willing to dedicate their time and resources to test and optimize Bing early and often.

It’s going to be rocky at first and there are lots of things that adCenter needs to fix such as exposing their quality index, improving their reporting interface, and many more items but with nearly 30% market share (Yahoo+Bing combined) we can’t afford to ignore Bing any longer. Check for more information about Bing in the upcoming weeks. I think you’re going to love Bing!
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How to Re-Purpose Your Content to Optimize it for Traveling Season

I feel lucky enough to work from home for about 3 years now and to be able to travel wherever I want with my family. This is what I have actually been doing for the past month – traveling (and struggling with somewhat screwed schedule). However another side of this story is that being an Internet marketer who works from home, I am never free. I work while traveling and try to make each of my vacation minute “useful” for my work and business.

This has inspired me to share some ways that would help those hard-working travelers like me and let them use your content while on the go.
1. Offer Various Ways to Download Your Content

I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:

* This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
* It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
* This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):

Besides simply offering your readers an alternative format enabling them to download and access your content, a pdf file could also increase your reach. For example, Scribd, a popular document sharing site may generate some decent traffic to your blog.

2. Create Quick Outlines of Your Monthly Editorial

Imagine how many people are now coming back home from holidays: you may help them a great deal by offering a quick but useful recaps of your previous posts (for the past month, week, etc). These overviews won’t probably generate many Tweets or comments but they will engage users in another way: they will encourage them to go through the content they may have missed.

An alternative way to represent the information you have previously blogged about would also be nice. For example, a well-branded PowerPoint file representing your previous posts will be much appreciated. Besides, this way you can re-use your content by publishing it to SlideShare (which, in turn will be shared in your LinkedIn network if you use SlideShare official LinkedIn application):

You can also create a downloadable copy of your recap (in an eBook format) to allow various ways to access and go through your outline on- as well as offline.
3. Create an Audio Version of Your Content

An audio post comes incredibly handy (and appreciated) while you are on the go. While PDF version of your content makes it more “offline-friendly” as well as easier to use on iPad, the audio version makes it possible for your readers to listen to your articles on their iPod while on the plane or even on the beach.

I have reviewed one plugin that “adds voice to your posts” – Odiogo automates the process of turning each of your blog posts in a podcast (as well as adds the option to download your content to your blog feed):

If you want to make the process more selective and the voice less “machine-like”, there are other applications like Audacity which is free recording software.

Creating an audio version of your blog posts will also increase your exposure as you can submit your content to heavily-used podcast directories like iTunes (To submit to iTunes, go to the iTunes Store, navigate to the Podcasts directory, and click on the Submit a Podcast link.)