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Google Confirms That SEOs Are Smarter Than It Is

Written on July 30, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

I’m not going to add any context to this quote from a Google employee–it would totally ruin the buzz you’ll feel for the rest of the day!

I can assure you that the last thing we want is for the business who hires the best SEO to win a better slot. But, the SEOs are, unfortunately, pretty good at what they do, and so sometimes they out smart us.

And that, my friend, is something you should send to the next prospective client that asks, “can you really figure out Google’s algorithm?”

P.S. If you want context, head here.

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Google Confirms That SEOs Are Smarter Than It Is

ComScore Report Says Divas Drive the Dollars

Written on July 30, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Divas drive the dollars.

That’s according to a new report from ComScore called Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet. The study shows that women spend 20% more time on retail websites overall than men. Not surprisingly, they lead in sales in every category except Computer Hardware/Software, Electronics, Sports/Outdoor and Music to a smaller extent. Movies is near even but when it comes to shopping for clothing online it’s women by a large margin.

Though women have been known to enjoy window shopping, in most cases they are actually spending. The ComScore report states:

“In February 2010, [women] accounted for 49.8 percent of the U.S. online population, but made up 57.9 percent of all non-travel buyers, made 61.1 percent of online purchases and accounted for 58.2 percent of online dollars.”

So shopping is popular, but that’s not all women are doing on the web. They’re managing their money online, they’re playing games and they’re dominating social media. The report goes on to say that many advertisers wrongly assume that women’s magazines, celebrity and baby sites are the top online hang-outs for women. But women are also the primary visitors to pet care, health and spiritualism sites. If you have something edgy to sell, the numbers also indicate that women are only slightly behind the men on gambling sites and there’s less of a gap than you would think when it comes to adult entertainment.

Speaking of entertainment, women find gaming online highly engaging particularly when it comes to puzzles, card and social network games. Men only dominate in the action and sports game arenas.

If you’re thinking of hitching your ad to an online video star, note that about the same number of US men and women watch videos, but men spend more time watching by a large margin. Women preferred short YouTube videos but that could be because we’re too busy shopping and networking online to sit for a whole movie.

When it comes to the future of online shopping, the ComScore report noted a huge increase in interest in group buying and “flash sales” sites which they attribute to the fact that they’re a mix of shopping and social networking.

“The rise of social networking has prompted women of all ages to engage in a host of associated online activities, such as photo-sharing, gaming, video viewing and instant messaging. All of these activities have benefited from their linkage with Social Networking sites in terms of their ability to attract new female users. Social retail, especially since it combines two activities that are already firmly in the mainstream of women’s Web activity, may be the next frontier in this evolution.”

If you go with that theory, then Twitter’s new Early Bird program should be a sure winner.

Does gender play a role in your marketing plan? We’d like to hear about it.

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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ComScore Report Says Divas Drive the Dollars

How to Cultivate Social Media Success

Written on July 30, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Sponsored by JenKaneCo, well known social media evangelist Brian Solis recently gave a presentation to an enthusiastic group of marketers in downtown Minneapolis to introduce the concepts behind his new book:  Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. The following is an overview of his presentation:

Relations vs. Relationships

There’s something interesting that’s happening right now on the web:  relations are starting to matter more than relationships.  The key lesson for marketers, and what the rest of this overview discusses, is that people will engage around content that compels them in networks where that content spreads.

We are all going to have to shift from relationships to relations:  having more thinner (but still relevant) connections is starting to matter more.  As a marketer, this shifts the power balance.  People are connecting around psychographics rather than demographics, and this means four degrees is the new six degrees of separation.  In plain English:  we’re all becoming better connected and users are vitally important to the equation of how information spreads.

A way for your marketing to succeed is to take the approach of a sociologist, an anthropologist and a philosopher rather than a traditional marketer.  That’s because it is people who are in control of the ideas that spread.  The web has changed things and marketing and PR have changed along with it.

Context Becoming as Valuable as Content

The challenges go deeper than marketing approaches.  When you join a company, you’re not given a Facebook page and Twitter account like you are an email account.  You already have those things.  And companies aren’t sure what to do or how they can leverage their own team members to increase their digital presence.  Your team members are vitally important because “content being king” is evolving into an era where context is king (yet, content still remains quite the powerful queen).  Context is proven to show who you are connected to and why around every conversation.  Your team members are a key ingredient to providing context, their actions equating to a type of social currency for your brand.

Speaking of content, how people react to your company’s content (something now public) equates to the stature of your community.  Reputation, trust and relationships are earned through these reactions and how you connect contextually is the experience prospects seek.

Content and context define the future of successful marketing.  You’re no longer marketing to individuals, you’re now marketing to “an audience with an audience.”  And every time they react to something you do, it shows the power of relations vs. relationships.  But without remarkable content and relevant context, you can never reach “an audience with an audience” effectively because you’re missing part of the equation of why people share ideas.

Getting Started

One of the easiest things to do is see what’s happening right now.  An approach that can be used is a “30 day window” to see a snapshot in time of what’s happening around a brand.  For a brand unsure about how much conversation was happening around their products – a sample search can reveal a staggering amount of messages across social platforms.  In many cases it’s a shock and can result in disbelief from management teams.  A social media monitoring service should be required for every brand to monitor the situation in an ongoing fashion.

Getting at least a snapshot is a good first step, and ongoing monitoring is even better, but equally important is to consider the data in perspective.  Or to put it simply:  share of voice vs. share of conversation.  Share of voice only gives you a partial view as it assumes everyone is talking about companies in a given industry.  A more relevant approach is to look at share of conversation.  As an example, consider  Old Spice – in the discussions on the social web regarding “body spray,” how well did they do?  While the overall conversations and reactions generated, putting it into context truly provides meaning of share of conversation.

Share of conversation matters more than most consider.  People are actively using the social web as part of the decision making cycle, and so this is the socialization of more than just marketing, but business as a whole.

Conclusion

How are you adapting to the socialization of business to help move these things in the right direction?  You need to extend divisions so that they are responding to consumers at the right point to become trusted and a part of the community.

All companies need to realize the fact that they are now in the media business, and that every company is now a media company.  This strategy is potent enough several companies embracing it have developed brands of media so popular they’re putting out best-selling books.  The influence they have over their markets is that big.

Influence is the ability to inspire desirability and measurable action and outcomes.  It is more than a click or more than a view.  As marketers, creating content and context to ultimately form influence is how to achieve long term, sustainable social media success.

For more on getting started in social media, consider creating a social media roadmap to plan your social media strategy.

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When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture

Written on July 30, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, seo

Have you ever heard the phrase search engine optimization (SEO) architecture? At first glance, it might seem like a good idea…but maybe not. Learn about 2 critical usability tests that help SEO professionals not make critical architecture errors.



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When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture

Whiteboard Friday - Outsourcing Content Creation

Written on July 29, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, marketing, seo

Posted by Danny Dover

7 Cutting Edge Web Design Trends (that Can Actually Improve SEO)

Written on July 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: seo

Posted by randfish

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love.

In this post, I’ll walk through examples of those design practices in use and describe how they can help improve your opportunity for organic search rankings and traffic.

#1 - Designing that Elicits & Conveys Emotion

A phenomenal article from Aarron Walter of Mailchimp on ThinkVitamin - Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users - deeply explores the trend of designers using their talents to imprint emotion on users. Personally, I love this practice, and professionally, I see it as incredibly valuable for SEO, too.

Rather than simply providing a user with information, these sites attempt to convey a sense of the companies, products and services they represent in a tangible way.

For McMiller’s Sweets, below, the website expresses the brand’s humor, whimsy and obsession with their product. I only wish I could buy online - there’d be a few boxes headed for the SEOmoz offices right now.

Box.net, an enterprise-focused software company, aims to achieve an air of simplicity and a feeling of the ease that comes from using a basic, consumer application but targeted at a business audience. Their redesign has me convinced - it’s light and airy, it’s up in the clouds (perhaps a double-meaning since they host in “the cloud”) and it even calls out the “sexiness”

4 Steps to Social SEO Success

Written on July 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, seo

The sheer volume of social media marketing and search engine optimization advice posted online can make it difficult for companies to make sense out what direction they should take. There are many models and approaches to leveraging  optimized content for discovery through search and how to develop social networks to engage customers and promote content.  It comes down to fundamentals and I think the following Four pieces of the Social SEO puzzle can help companies of any size get started in a more meaningful way on their journey towards becoming productive on the social web.

Listening, Content, Socialize and Measure could just as well be represented as a cycle, but I think the forward direction is important because you can’t reach outcomes without action. Any good social media marketing effort needs to begin with some kind of Listening program. That means using social media monitoring tools to collect, sort and manage social content according to topics being monitored.  Content is the glue that makes search engines work and content is a critical part of the social sharing experience within social media. Speaking of sharing, socializing with other like-minded individuals as a personal experience can fold well with brand interactions as long as the needs of the buyer persona has been reconciled with business objectives. Successful efforts within the social web can be measured, and should be, in a variety of ways.  Measurement justifies objectives and it’s important to identify the right tools for monitoring real time and web analytics.

Here are a few more details on each of these steps. I encourage you to think about how your company is implementing these steps in your own social media marketing efforts. Are you taking shortcuts? Are you following through? Have you found more important steps to follow?

Listening

An essential start and ongoing component for a social media marketing and optimization effort is to leverage listening tools.  As companies struggle to understand where the social web fits within their online marketing strategy, a social media monitoring program (listening) should be implemented immediately.  Collecting social web data, organizing and managing it is essential for tapping into the conversations, influencers and real-time marketing opportunities that abound in today’s internet environment.  While there are many things you can listen for with a social media monitoring effort, here are four key elements for Social SEO success:

• Social Channels - Which social destinations are your customers frequenting? Social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn? Or Twitter? What about media sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube? Forums, Blogs or Social News and Bookmarking sites? Social media monitoring will help you decide which social channels you should start testing and digging into deeper for participation, networking and promotion.  For example, why invest in videos if the majority of influencers in your category spend their time on Twitter?
• Social Keywords - Good social media monitoring tools analyze tags, comments, anchor text and other forms of text to identify keywords associated with the monitoring topic. That keyword insight can help identify topics of interest as they emerge and influence content strategy decisions as well as social media optimization. Social conversations influence search behaviors and if you can identify relevant concepts that are emerging in popularity on the social web, why not create and optimize content around those topics so you’re easily found via search engines?
• Influentials – A listening program will help identify the influentials within the topics you’re monitoring providing the ability to prioritize who to connect with. As Brian Solis mentioned yesterday, Influence is the ability to affect intended outcomes and if you can provide influencers with something of value to them and their networks, it increases the reach of your own message and content substantially.
• SERPs - Social media monitoring tools don’t track search engine results pages and that’s why you should. All major search engines purchase data feeds from different social media sources and incorporate social media content within search results. Therefore, it’s important to monitor search results for key terms relevant to your business and identify what social sources are being included.  If Google is showing blog posts above the fold for a competitive keyword phrase, it might be easier for you to get exposure by commenting on those blog posts with a link back to your site or making blog posts about that topic on your own blog.

Content

Content makes the Social SEO world go round.  One of the biggest growth areas in Online Marketing is the business of creating, optimizing and promoting content. Brands are becoming publishers, which isn’t really new, but becoming more common.  Big brands have funded TV shows, Radio networks and other forms of editorial ie content, for years. The ease of publishing online provides many opportunities for companies to engage customers with content. It’s no longer enough to simply publish features and benefits information on products and services. Customers want more.  Marketers would do well to create a content marketing strategy or as I like to call it, a Content Marketing Optimization Strategy.  Inventory content assets such as web pages, images, video, audio, rich media and file types such as HTML, PDF, MS Office docs, Structured Data Feeds and RSS to assess what can be promoted via social channels and be ranked in search results. Map search keywords to search engine optimization content. Map social keywords to social media content.

If content can be searched it can be optimized and a well planned digital asset optimization effort that works in sync with social networking and promotions can efficiently get content to those that want it and also facilitate better search visibility. That is the essence of Social SEO.

Socialize

With insight into the appropriate social media channels, influentials and a rock solid content marketing optimization strategy in place, it’s important to have a plan on how to connect with the communities where customers and prospects spend their time.  Three key pieces to socializing your marketing efforts include:

• Buyer Personas – Research what your customers do on the social web. What are their social information discovery, consumption and sharing preferences. What influences them to share and buy?
• Grow Networks – Time strapped marketers often fail to spend time growing networks. Some try to buy friends literally or through repeated incentives. Spend a small, but consistent amount of time growing networks organically. That might mean 10-30 minutes every day commenting, friending, following, liking and updating on a daily basis. There is no substitute for participation when it comes to growing a network that can have a real effect on your ability to promote content that gets passed on and on and on.
• Promote – Plan to develop a cycle of social interaction by reconciling the needs of buyer personas with business goals in your content marketing strategy. Grow networks that you can promote optimized content to.  Blogs can often serve as an ideal hub for this kind of content with spokes to the various social channels for content promotion such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc..  A cycle of social participation starts with creating & promoting optimized content & assets. That content gets noticed, shared & voted on, growing awareness.   The increased exposure attracts more subscribers, fans, friends, followers & links. Increased links & social  exposure grow search & referral traffic. Traffic & community help with research to develop & further grow your social networks for content & SEO.

Measure

Success comes in many forms and with social media marketing and social SEO, it’s the combination of social media monitoring and web analytics that provides the most actionable value. Social media monitoring tools are not only effective for initial Listening, but also to determine the social effect of your optimized content marketing on the social web. Off site engagement can be monitored, measured and analyzed in combination with web analytics tools that provide insight into what social traffic does once they get to your web site. Leveraging monitoring and analytics to inform future content creation, keyword optimization and social promotion is essential for staying ahead of the competition and being effective at meeting customer needs.

Obviously, the implementation of such a simplified strategy can vary widely according the the purpose, but with so many companies unwilling to commit to developing an overall Social Media Roadmap, experimentation becomes a more reasonable alternative. Following a basic structure like the four steps listed above can help make a social media test or even a modest social media marketing program a lot more productive.

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Optimize Your Social Media Pages for Top Rankings - 5 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now

Written on July 27, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, searchengineguide, seo

by Stone Reuning

Though the likes of Facebook and Twitter have taken the marketing world by storm, many of our online experiences though still start through search. With well-known brands and small businesses alike now using social media marketing in earnest, it’s worth exploring how to get more from your company social pages, namely helping them rank higher in online searches, alongside your corporate website.

After a few tweaks, your social media pages can give you more opportunities to dominate page one of Google and other search engines. Here’s an example. If you look at our properties, SEO Advantage isn’t only our company name - it’s also an important keyword and source of traffic for us. So we want all our web properties to dominate for that term. If you seach on “seo advantage”, you’ll see first our corporate website, then our Facebook page, our Twitter profile, our reviews on Kudzu, our marketing blog, our LinkedIn profile, and also a press release or article we’ve recently written. 

The best thing is that most social media platforms allow for some customization that lets you optimize them, even if the standard no-follow tag applies to links. Here are 5 things you can explore across the various social media platforms you’re currently using.

1. Grow your following. Tthis seems to hold true for Facebook and Twitter as it does in the general realm of web sites - the more followers you have, the more authority your social media page carries. (Except when it comes to websites, you’re usually evaluating links, not followers, and the exact number can be a little harder to assess.)

Of course there are great benefits to having a large number of followers even beyond ranking higher. But did you know that the people you follow may also impact the search engines’ assessment of relevancy? That’s right, there may be benefit to following people in your direct line of business most importantly, as this helps strengthen the signal of what your business is all about.

2. Optimize your profile page’s meta tags and URL. Twitter creates your page title from your username and your name. Your bio becomes the description tag. Kudzu is using our company name and address as the title tag, which is great for local searches. Take note of which parts of your page are comprising the meta data and make sure it’s optimized accordingly. You can also nab your own name as part of your Facebook page URL now, too. (It used to be that you had to have a certain number of fans.) And your Twitter URL includes your username, so choose wisely.

3. Post links to your newly produced content to help it get indexed faster. Though social media sites use the no-follow tags, new content seems to be getting indexed faster when posted to Twitter and other social media sites. One reason may be that it gives an opportunity for your followers to link to it from other sites, like their blogs, for example. Since your Tweets and Facebook updates get exposure for pages you reference faster, your linked content can also gain exposure much faster than previously.

4. Optimize your updates. This will depend on the platform, but especially Twitter can offer opportunity here, since tweets themselves can show in search results.

The title tag for a tweet is around 42 characters: the first 30 characters or so of the tweet together with the username of the account tweeting it. So make sure any keywords appear as close as possible to the front end. You may also want to append RT@username at the end of your tweets when retweeting, and keep your tweets to 120 characters or so to avoid truncating.

On Facebook, keep your updates related to your company’s line of work as much as possible. This helps build the theme for the page.

5. Build links to your social media profile pages. As with any web page, inbound links matter. Include links to your pages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. in your site footer or elsewhere so it can be found from every page of your site easily. 

In closing, one word of advice. As with your regular online marketing and SEO efforts, the needs of the users take precedence. The above points are tweaks only. Build up the value of your social media accounts by serving your customers and followers well, and the rest will follow.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Optimize Your Social Media Pages for Top Rankings - 5 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now

SEO Chrome Toolbar is Here! Download the Mozbar for Chrome Today

Written on July 27, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Posted by Danny Dover

Well folks, this may be the biggest tool introduction since Ryan Seacrest started hosting American Idol. Today we are launching our SEO toolbar for Google’s Chrome browser. This sexy beast is full to the brim with SEO insight and time-saving SEO goodness. This free add-on is ripe for picking and available for download right this second.