Wishing you a Happy Rosh Hashana!

We made a little something, especially for you…

Click Here to see our greeting.

Best regards,
The Compucall Family

Compucall Web Marketing is at Affilicon Israel 2009!

We’ll be at Affilicon 2009 today and tomorrow. Compucals CEO, Ophir Cohen, will also be speaking in three different sessions:

Day 1

10:15-11:30 SEO Panel: Latest developments in Organic SEO Issues (Powered by SMX).

17:30-18:30 The Right SEM Company: How to select the right SEM company

Day 2

9:00-10:15 SEM Panel: Effective Link Building (Powered by SMX)

See you all there!

Compucall Web Marketing
Afflicon Israel 2009
Booth 413
#affiliconil09

Then something happened. I came across a post on Outspoken Media written by Lisa Barone that talked about personal branding in SEO and the race to  follow the SEO Stars. I suggest you read it and read the comments too. Very worthwhile. I even learned a new word: Scoble. In any case, where it took me was what I took back from SMX West 2009 in Santa Clara and how it turned out to be much more rewarding than I thought because of the personal branding.

So when I flew off to SMX my expectations were mixed and completely unclear. I’d read about SES, SMX, PubCon, Adtech and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t tell you which one I could take more from. Then something unexpected happened, my pitch to be a speak on Up Close with Google Maps & Local was accepted and I found myself booking a 22 hours flight to Santa Clara.

My time at the convention was great, the panels were strong (most of them), I got to meet some great people and finally introduce myself after I’d been sending them various comments on Twitter. Before I knew it I was back in Tel-Aviv at work playing catch-up.

I didn’t bring back any clients, I didn’t brink back any big contacts (although I did make some relatively strong connections with some affiliates vendors). I did get to speak to Matt Cutts about a problem which mysteriously worked itself out 2 weeks later (If it was you Matt then thank you).

So what did I come away with? Great contacts in the SEO field. David Mihm, of getlisted.org, held a little local networking get together followed by burgers at In-&-Out Burgers (Yes Matt they were really good) and later on we crashed in the bar area of the Hyatt hotel (The permanent fixtures were Lisa Barone, David Mihm, Matt McGee and Eric Lander a bunch more just rotated in and out) . In that space of time between the get together and the Hyatt bar, I literally reached out and managed to finally introduce myself properly to all the people that make the SEO/SEM information bubble flow. We laughed, we drank, we smuggled beer out of the lame radio party and we laughed some more. That was the best quality time I had “branding” myself in the entire 3 days that SMX was held.

So yeah, I learned great things at the panels and I really enjoyed speaking at SMX as a first timer, but what really did it for me was the ability to connect with the people that really have been keeping me in the loop about what’s going on 7-10 hours back in the SEO world. The people who still keep me in the loop and magically respoond now when I message them on Twitter .

Should you go to one of the shows? Absolutely! If only to mingle and mix it up a little and get a feel for who and what your peers are about, it’s worth it. It also helps that they can finally see who you are.

Props go to Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick for the picture. Thanks Barry.

Every SEO expert knows that one of the biggest problems we face is duplicate content. When there are two different URLs for one page, the search engine is never clear on how to treat them. It has to decide which page to show for a specific keyword, which page to give the PageRank to and which page to consider as the main authority. It may also divide the authority and page rank, an action that will only take away from the page you’re trying to promote.

There are many ways to create duplicate content. Here are only few::
-    Different URL format for the same page (sort parameters are very popular here)
-    Print versions of pages
-    refid parameters (affiliates etc)
-    Different search query results and navigation issues

The canonical URL tag is a joint initiative of Google, MSN and Yahoo. All three united in order to create a common tag called “canonical URL tag”. This tag lets all the three big search engines know which of the duplicate pages is the main one and it can then pass all the authority, link juice and main focus of the robot to that right page. If there are two similar pages with slight different URLs, a canonical tag placed on the duplicate content URL will tell the robots which page it should promote. As for the importance of this tag, according to Google, “it’s a hint that we honor strongly”.

The canonical tag must be located in the header of the page should will look like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.compucall-usa.com/blog”>.

Why is it different from a 301 redirect?

1. As opposed to a 301 redirect that redirects the page both for the user and the search engine, the Canonical URL tag is just for search engines. Users will still be able to reach and view all your duplicate versions. Hence if you’re only trying to sort the results on a page, you can.
2. The engine will verify that the content is similar and that the use of this tag is justified. In a 301 redirect, you can decide whether the redirect is justified. Regarding how much similar the duplicate pages have to be, Google say that they “allow slight differences”.
3. The 301 URL redirect operates exclusively on a single root domain, so you can’t use this tag to redirect between two different domains.

Unclear issues

The “link juice” question is still unclear – we will have to test it and see the results.
Also, the transitivity of the links is unclear (only Yahoo mentioned that they support transitivity of this tag).

For more information, you can read Matt Cutt’s blog post and SEOMOZ’s blog post (by randfish).

So… What’s Flypaper?
Flypaper is an application which uses the Flash (Adobe) as a platform, and allows the user creating, editing and programing Flashy presentations, minisites and other interactive products with easier, simplified tools and templates. It also provides the client quite impressive tools to analyze the users’ navigation behavior.

flypaper Screens

What’s the difference between Flypaper and Flash?
The Concept, as I understand it, is to build a higher level of creation that will allow a wider range of users, beside the conventional Flash designers and developers, but including these groups also. The application pretends to upgrade the abilities and results of everyone who needs Flash-based products.

Pretentious? yes. (But evolution is also pretentious)
I can’t say that this application is a finished solution for the destination it aims to yet, but the first steps are behind, proving that in quite simple tools you can communicate with complicated-code-based features and graphics, that can give us the WOW effect that we look for.

Creating interactive structure of screens easily
The program interface is highly visual and intuitive, though it also supports AS (actionscript) codes, even ones that weren’t created in Flypaper. The structure window below the main stage allows you to drag and drop slides into it and create a schematic structure of your product, laying slides one next to the other, one after the other, vertically and horizontally navigation.

flypaper - Interactive Structure

Using Ready-Made objects and templates
the application contains dozens of slide templates, in different styles and for different causes. It contains buttons and ready-made animation editable templates. I still haven’t checked the verity of styles but it looks not bad from the Webinar’s review.

Web Analytics tools in Flypaper
The program contains this exellent tool which is a must on anything we create and want to improve. These tools can track almost any event or action that the end-user made, from page viewing, through the time he watched specific items/pages, and even if the end user copied certain parts of text from the content (If I got it right). Nice. BTW, the analytics data is being stored on Flypaper’s servers.
As for my question if it is synchronized with Google Analytics Tool, I got a “Not yet” answer

Flypaper - Analytics Tools

Finished Product formats
The program offers quite comfortable formats for your product, from Flashy ones to linear-video formats, through the familiar .exe format.

SEO abilities? No Comment (Flashy, remember?)
This is an assumption, since it was not mentioned, and my question regarding this matter stayed open. Therefore it’s a small disappointment. For this kind of evolutionary progress I would expect a reference, even the minimal one. It looks like Google will solve this matter since no one else seem to challenge it.

Open Source
As far as I understand, the program isn’t an open source but released a Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) for developers to build components.
Well, I guess that we all know a little more now. my two bottom lines are:

1. It looks a bit early to put all my “Eggs” in this “Basket”
2. I’m certainly going to drill deep on the trial version, and decide if the licensed $795 application worth the cost.

So here we go again. A full new release of our favorite Google PPC editing software, Google Adwords Editor, was released covertly in the middle of the night. So let’s see what’s new and we’ll also go over what we think is still missing!

New features available:

First page bid estimates: First page bid estimates for all the keywords in the campaign. There is no longer “Minimum cost-per-click” (CPC) bids. Yay!

Keyword Quality Score: A new tab for the quality score of every keyword in the account. About time this feature graced us. We don’t have to go back and forth with the web version to find out what where we went wrong.

New feature for Keyword Opportunities: Tailor your keywords according to location and language. With all the international clients we have, we’d been begging our local Google representative for this for a long time. This is a big deal for us.

The ‘Volume’ column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool is now showing absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.

Campaign targeting in the data view: You can see the location and language settings on the data view. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser on the campaigns tab.

What I think is still missing?

• Changing the delivery method: when setting up a campaign I still miss the ability to determine if the delivery method will be standard or accelerated.
• Device platform: show the campaign on desktop or laptop computers or on mobile phones (or both).
• Ad serving: optimize or rotate ad texts.

This is a great step forward from Google. I’m not sure if it’s a full version upgrade, but I’ll take it. The location and language options are a huge plus. This is a better morning for the PPC team here.  Way to go Google.

You can read the official Google Release for Adword Editor 7.0 here.

Mobile SEO Basic Guidelines

Mobile search is growing rapidly and Google is, as usual, very dominant. When you create the mobile version of your site, follow the basic SEO guidelines, but pay attention to the following issues:

1.      Include the word “mobile” in the search term you’re aiming to.
2.      Keep your titles short and your content in small amounts. Remember the mobile site is targeted to people on the road or on their way to some place – They need this info fast and simple and preferably on one page.
3.      Submit your mobile site to Google, Yahoo and other directories – it can’t hurt.
4.      Don’t waste your time on building links. Will Critchlow wrote in SEOMOZ blog that according to his experience, links are not a factor in the mobile search algorithm. It also makes sense because mobile users don’t tend to link to other sites or to click on links due to the nature of their searches. Therefore, at least for now, it is advisable not to waste your time on link building for mobile sites.
5.      Will Critchlow mentioned that keyword phrases in the domain name are not required

Technical Mobile Marketing Guidelines

1.      Google advises to upload a mobile sitemap.
2.      Use well-formed markup (WML, cHTML, XHTML Basic or XHTML MP) – Validate your markup through the W3C Validator.
3.      The W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative published their own recommendations of Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0.
4.      Create a Small, lightweight and fast-loading site (which means smaller than 20kb per page). Remember that in the mobile world, usability and minimalism are very important.
5.      Use UTF-8 character encoding.
6.      Use JPEG / GIF images.

Some Useful Mobile Tools for Marketers

1.      This tool enables you to test your mobile site in various mobile devices – Dot Mobi Tool.
2.      A great testing tool that gives your mobile site a grade and in-depth analysis of pages – Ready.mobi.

Potential mobile users have lots of constraints – they have shorter searches, more misspellings, and only parts of the products are appropriate for

mobile marketing. You can’t sell furniture through a mobile site, at least not yet. They are also usually short on time and need to find what they need to quickly. Therefore, your whole marketing approach should be different – and you should always stay up to date with the latest changes in this unique and fast-growing market.