We can now filter traffic into or out of profiles based on the following criteria:

• Campaign or AdGroup category:
• Campaign AdGroup
• Campaign Referral Path
• Audience category:
• Visitor Mobile (!!!!)
• Location category:
• Continent
• Event category:
• Event Category
• Event Action
• Event Label

Honestly, any new filter options are welcome, but I was most excited about the Event filters and the Mobile filter.

Back in December, Michelle walked everyone through the slightly complex process to create a mobile profile in Google Analytics. For the past six months, we found this method to be the best way to properly capture the most mobile traffic possible.

The new Mobile filter changes everything. This filter means we can quickly include or exclude only mobile traffic, negating the need for the multiple steps listed in our previous blog post. Now if you want your profile to include mobile traffic, just add this quick filter:

Easy, right?

Google just keeps innovating, adding more features to Google Analytics, and they’re not slowing down. Any predictions for future feature releases? Or are there any new filter options you hope Google adds? Let us know in the comments!

Props to Michelle for noticing the Mobile filter first!

One day this fall I learned the hard way another addition of this rule I had never heard of. I went into AdWords to do my usual checks on one of my clients’ accounts. I had seen volume drop down since the previous week and wanted to figure out what was going on. After digging I saw a lot of my ads were “suspended” due to landing page violations. The status notice pointed me to this link.

Once I looked around a bit more I realized our violation was specifically for “information harvesting” (See the AdWords help article here). Basically, this policy prohibits “websites that don’t have a clear privacy policy and solicit personal information from users in circumstances where it’s unclear how the information will be used.”

Well that was nothing new… Except I didn’t see how this applied to my ads. I was running ads that sent users to landing pages and had a link to the privacy policy at the bottom of the page. I was also sending traffic to the advertiser’s actual domain, but the pages on the domain where users were sent didn’t have a form or collect any personal information.

After a few calls to AdWords General Support, it turns out if you are sending traffic to a website’s main domain (i.e., not a landing page), anywhere on that domain that asks for personal information needs to have a link to a privacy policy. Not just anywhere on the page either (there was a privacy policy in the footer when I was suspended), but it needs to be connected to the form in some way. Or, in Google’s words, “easily accessible and prominent on the site before users enter their details.”  While my landing pages did have a privacy policy; just like the pages on the main domain, the link to the privacy policy was in the footer. Below is the landing page I was using and where the privacy policy was when we got suspended.

I should point out it isn’t just the link on the headline that is reviewed for privacy policy compliance. When Google’s team reviews your ads they will follow every link in an ad for possible pages a user could end up at, this includes pages that sitelinks direct to. So even if your headline is sending traffic to a landing page that has a privacy policy in the correct place, if your sitelinks are sending traffic to the main domain that collects personal information, without a privacy policy in the right place you could be at risk.

To fix this (and be sure it didn’t happen again) I did an audit of the entire domain to be sure anywhere we collected personal data- even just a simple email address- there was a privacy policy next to the form. Once everything was updated with a simply call to AdWords General Support I was submitted for re-review within a day of submitting my ads my ads were up and running again.

None of us on the PPC team had ever heard about how far this “information harvesting” rule could potentially be taken and result in negative (and not easy to fix) consequences. We have all checked our clients’ domains and landing pages to make sure we are proactive with this policy moving forward. Has anyone ever run into any issues with AdWords privacy policies they weren’t aware of? What were the results?

I became one of the hoards of shoppers who needed to do everything online. It’s almost cliché to point out that mobile shopping, or m-commerce, is becoming larger and larger. The research site eMarkerter has a great graph that shows exactly HOW large m-commerce is getting, projecting $11.6 billion in spend for 2012, up 73.1% over 2011.

So as I sat there eagerly ready to contribute my portion of those billions I ran into the same problem over and over again— subpar website experiences.

They were creative, they were good, but they were not optimal for viewing on a mobile device.

Since SEM is well, my job, I saw a great opportunity to dig in further to something that is already affecting search.

Google announced late last year that mobile site optimization would become a factor in quality scores for campaigns that were targeting mobile devices. It makes sense!  If a consumer is just going to get frustrated by your website anyway, why would Google reward you with a top spot in the paid search results?

Google put together the site www.howtogomo.com which has a lot of ways you can test your website for mobile usability, design tips, and even build your own. For now, I zeroed in on five of their ten mobile top practices!

1. 1.       Keep It Quick

This is for the impatient among us – which is all of us. Personally, if my little status bar takes more than three seconds I’m already hitting the back button and going to another site.

The Tip to Implement: compress images, use bullet points, and make it easy for your page to load

1. 2.       Simplify Navigation

Your mobile site is the place for your most succinct writing. Only put on the page what you really feel is important because here people will get lost in the details.

The Tip to Implement: Google’s recommendation is 7 links or fewer so make them count! Adding a search box for a complex site is ideal!

1. 3.       Be Thumb Friendly

Two words: Fat fingers. High on the list of annoying things about mobile sites is clicking a too small link and ending up somewhere I didn’t want to go because my fingers were too large!

Tip to Implement: Use large centered buttons and pad them!

1. 4.       Design for Visibility

SEER doesn’t give design tips. We won’t tell you what colors to use or which general images work best, but we can let you know that how you use your space is important for conversions. Do make use of size and color for the button that leads to your call to action. Don’t ask people to fill out long forms, mobile is not the place to get their entire consumer profile, and Do make sure that they are not having to surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it (Technologic!) in order to read your page. They may leave first!

Tip to Implement: Make it easy for your customers to read and eliminate the need to pinch and zoom to view content.

1. 5.       Make it Easy to Convert

This is important for all websites but where could it be more important than PPC? If someone comes to your site through a PPC ad tell them what you need them to do and allow them to complete this step in as few actions as possible. You can make it even easier on your customer by trying a function like click to call!

Tip to Implement: Make it as easy as possible for consumers to complete your desired call to action.

Now that you have some of our tips here is a great example from Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia that has all of these tips in action:

• In just three lines of text you know the benefits of FastCare.
• There is a clear call to action (Call now for Hours Directions or services!)
• There is only one large button to press, and you know exactly where it will take you!

This page was created in less than 30 minutes using Google’s Mobile Landing Page site templates (http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/mobile-landing-pages/mlpb.html) and has seen a 30% call rate since implementation.

With so many tips and tools it doesn’t have to be time intensive to revamp your mobile site for success. When you are all done fixing it up, learn about Creating a Mobile Profile in Google Analytics.

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Ed Fry  -  Two burning questions about SEO for online marketplaces where users are creating listings where users buy and sell products. So here goes:

1. When a listing expires (e.g. product runs out permanently) should you 301 or rel-canonical, and point the result to either the users profile or back to a category page (the one you want to rank) based on link juice, optimal user experience and appeasing Matt Cutts. :]

2. How do you try and rank for competitive terms if you’re a marketplace and you’d really like to rank in one country where you have lots of users (e.g. the UK) without ranking in another country where you don’t have as many users (for instance, you haven’t got critical mass of sellers in the USA, and the USA is really several different markets – East Coast vs. West Coast if the product is really local). And no, we don’t have the budget or resources for the multiple TLD’s and hustling across every country :( Any advice?!?

Wil Reynolds  -  +Ed Fry thanks for coming out and supporting us…You are asking the tough questions. So here is my take… I am a bigger fan of 301′s than anything just because they are tried and true. +Rand Fishkin has done more research than I have on how they pass juice. The one thing I wonder about is how does 301′ing vs canonicaling impact social signals for a product (I know that 301′s don’t pass vote value) but let’s say that as Google starts using Google +1′s to value pages, then I bet you a canonical is better because you keep the social voting juice and push the link juice as well. I think as long as the 301 is on topic our buddy Matt Cutts would be OK with it. That is a great question, cc: +Mike Essex +Dana Lookadoo

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Andrew Dunkle  -  Do you guys have any advice for developing an effective SEO culture in a small business? We have a team of 8 and I’m looking for ways to get everyone involved in the process so important SEO related decisions are understood by everyone. Thanks!

Adam Melson  -  +Andrew Dunkle Love this question. It’s totally important to get this across your developers, PR person, President, etc. Everyone has to get on the same page as to why SEO is important and what you’re working toward. This can be shown to the web devs by showing them the impact of a page that was optimized. It helps get more conversions & doesn’t have to take forever. The PR person can start linking in releases and they’ll also be tracking who picks up the release and might have a contact at that website to get links in there if they were taken out during distribution. Copywriters can be briefed on different keywords they will want to include in their copy so that their articles/blog posts/pages get more visibility. The ego stroke is always a great route and if their content gets more eyes, your company gets more eyes. If there are 2-3 big keywords that you know are your money makers, share these as a goal with the team. Share that it’s important to have them rank. Maybe show how these keywords convert in PPC and the actual value of a sale. If you can save the cost of paying per click, it makes the company stronger, job security stronger, but more importantly it shows people that what they’re doing for SEO contributes to the bottom line of a company. If people are having trouble understanding why SEO goals are important, everyone can relate to dollars. “We need to get this SEO recommendation implemented because it could get us moved from #5 to #4″ isn’t motivating. “We need to get this SEO recommendation implemented because if we move from #5 to #4, it could bring in another $10k over the course of the year. Do you have an hour to implement?” is much more motivating.

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Cleo Kirkland  -  Hi all, What’s your process for a technical site audit? What are the top 10 errors you look for, how do you find them, and what tools do you use? I come from a link building and copywriting background, so trouble shooting site indexation issues is a bit foreign to me. Thanks!

Rachael Gerson  -  +Cleo Kirkland We have some basic starting processes, but every site ends up being different, so part of the plan needs to be flexibility. We may start an audit only to find there’s an issue with this particular site that we haven’t seen in hundreds of sites previously.
Some basic things to look for:
* Is the site content spiderable to the search engines? Try spider simulators like http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php.
* Is the navigation spiderable? The Web Developer Toolbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/) is an absolute favorite. Get it for Firefox and Chrome, b/c Chrome is missing the ability to disable JavaScript. Do basic things like checking out Google’s text-only cache of a page. 
* Do you have redirect issues on the site? We had a client previously on a platform that 302 redirected every single link on the site to another URL. Since 302 redirects tell the search engines the redirects were temporary, the actual pages weren’t being picked up. The platform couldn’t be edited. If the site was/is redesigned, make sure there’s a redirect strategy in place. My favorite redirect checker is http://gsitecrawler.com/tools/Server-Status.aspx.
* Using the same tool, check to make sure that either http://domain.com 301 redirects to http://www.domain.com, or vice versa.
* Make sure 404 pages actually return a 404 server status. 
* Go through Google Webmaster Tools. Find the errors, figure out how to resolve.
* Review the robots.txt. Are pages being blocked that shouldn’t be? This can be a huge issue!
* Are there duplicate pages/domains/subdomains? Would a multi-faceted navigation make more sense for the site? 
* Do they have basic things like HTML & XML sitemaps? 
* Check for pagination issues, mistakes with canonical tags, etc.

Pausing my response here b/c just got a note that you were already answered… :)

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Now what does this all mean?

Besides the 100+ comments we received and an admirable attempt at justifying having a Google+ page, what we noticed more was the increase in our overall social media following. Here at SEER, I help manage the many social media accounts we have and find myself always looking for innovative ways to increase our fans and followers. We know that as a company, we have extremely valuable insight in both the SEO and PPC worlds, and we want people to know our thoughts and opinions! Hosting this G+ Q&A gave us exactly the push that we were looking for! Using our lunch break on a Wednesday afternoon, we were able to boost our name virally for an all-time high of 63 mentions and gain over 1% more followers (and beat our competitor’s follower growth that day)! Using SEOmoz’s Social Dashboard (which I highly recommend), the below two graphs highlight my exact enthusiasm (SEER is represented as the green line in the Follower Growth graph and competitors are represented as the red, blue and purple lines, respectively).

In Conclusion

Now, looking back, I see that our first Q&A session was a huge success. We were able to inspire people with our knowledge and our creativity using Google+, all while enabling new benchmarks for our future social media efforts. My simple and quick words of advice for other small (or large) businesses that are trying to actively increase their presence online is to be provide knowledge or actionable items for your users, think of creative ways to invite and include your audience and have fun! I hope to continue learning more about social media and implementing new trends for SEER, but as for now, stay tuned for our next #SEERQandA session coming up in early February! We’ll be switching things up with SEO and PPC-themed discussions, so bring out your best questions and let’s rock and roll.

I’d love to hear about your social media successes and failures! Follow me @Melissa_Alam and fill me in!

It’s inevitable that clients will not be able to carry out every recommendation you may have. And let’s be honest, sometimes after looking back the idea isn’t always as earth shattering as we initially thought.

Part of being a great consultant is being able to pivot and take the project in a new direction when this happens. However, there are certain instances where a proposed strategy is critical to the success of the project and therefore to the client’s business (ALWAYS the ultimate goal).

When you get a “No” to a strategy idea that falls into this bucket, you shouldn’t just pivot in a new direction; you should sit back and analyze where the disconnect occurred and how you can get your client to understand the impact.

As I’ve been working in the Search space for over 6 years now, I’ve been challenged with this type of situation hundreds of times. Each time I’ve gotten a “we can’t do that” response, I’ve taken it as a learning opportunity to step back, evaluate and analyze my approach, and revise my next attempt to better connect with the client, often times re-proposing the same strategy idea!

By using the “No’s” as a learning opportunity and understanding how to better connect with clients to get them to approve my strategy idea it’s not by my mistake that I’ve been able to create account growth across PPC accounts for multiple years with increases of 1000+%, 800+%, 300+%, etc. And years ago, to get my SEO recommendations implemented, from linking strategies to content generation.

Growing the PPC accounts I am proud of, but what I am even more proud of is that by growing the accounts, I’ve helped my clients businesses grow as well – This is what the ultimate goal of getting your clients to being ‘Yes Men’ (& women) should always be!

So while this list is exhaustive, here are 10 tips that I’ve found to help connect with clients and get them to be Yes Men (& women).

Tip #1 – Honesty is the best policy

The age old idiom rings true in any partnership.

Start off a client relationship hiding the truth and you’ll find yourself covering your tracks instead of working on what matters to the clients business.

I’ve always found that by being an open book, from having clients own accounts (& therefore having the ability to login and see how things are going at any time) to being completely open about what exactly I am working on and all the details of the strategy, clients value the transparency.

Transparency builds a relationship.

A relationship builds trust.

Trust builds Yes men.

Tip #2 – Be Proactive

No one bats 100% all of the time.

As such, not every single strategy idea will result in success.

The key is to always be proactive in setting expectations, reporting on results and calling out failures FIRST.

If you notice your Adwords conversions take a dreadful downward trend for a few days after you implemented a change or the linking strategy you executed is not leading to the expected outcome – Be the FIRST to call this out.

It’s always better to be the one to call out a failed test and have a game plan ready for how to turn things around!

Tip #3 – Say “I’ll look into it”

Don’t answer questions on the fly if you don’t know the answer with 100% confidence.

When I first started at SEER 5 years ago, I knew little to nothing about SEO, my focus had always been Media & PPC. I used the phrase “Let me check with the team” more times than not and I never once had a client demand an answer on the spot.

Do your homework, tap your resources, get the accurate answer for your clients.

They will always appreciate the correct answer versus the fast answer (Check out Rand Fishkin’s take on this).

Tip #4 – Always do what is best for the client

Agencies overall have an unfortunately nasty reputation for doing what is best for THEM, not what is best for the client.

Our focus at SEER has been the complete opposite – ALWAYS do what is best for the client, even if that means it may decrease budgets for you or cause a pause in a project.

Check out Wil’s post where we outlined strategies for slowing down payments, or pausing projects when it benefits the client.

Tip #5 – Know what resources are available, or aren’t

Resources to carry out recommendations when it comes to things like developing content for example, can be a hindrance for driving clients toward success.

Without understanding resource situations for your clients, your strategy recommendation may have been shot down for a simple reason that you can offer help on or better yet build directly into your recommendation!

Tip #6 – Track your results

Nothing is worse than hearing a really great idea, hear it was implemented, and then hear crickets.

Before you propose any great strategy, be sure you have a plan to track and report on results throughout the execution phase. This is key to how SEER has developed our processes.

Tip #7 – Prove it

Nothing helps a client see the benefit to their business quite like showing them real results.

Do you want your client to buck up for a linking strategy? Show them what success you’ve had with a similar strategy for another client!

Share blogs (like this and this ), case studies, share real examples, create scenarios that show them the potential success.

Tip #8 – Understand the BUSINESS

Even if you are the PPC consultant, or SEO consultant, you need to understand your clients’ business, not just the small slice of the pie you focus on.

What are the overall goals for the company? What future initiatives are they focusing on?

By understanding the business, you can tie how your PPC strategy recommendation or SEO strategy recommendation ties back to the overall business goals, which ultimately is why they are investing in PPC or SEO. Check our Ryan’s Post on Talking Revenue With Your Clients.

Tip #9 – Be a student

You should always be pushing yourself to learn more – about the clients business, industry, about your own industry, about competitors, etc.

The more knowledge you bring to the table, the better strategy recommendations you can propose that tie back to the clients business.

Tip #10 – Be persistent

Hearing “No” to a strategy idea that you really believe will drive success for the client can make you feel defeated and feel intimated to bring up future “great” ideas.

However, it’s important that each time you hear a “No” you don’t give up or get frustrated that you have a “No” client.

Instead, evaluate the situation – it’s likely that there was a miscommunication in how you presented your idea, how it ties into the clients overall business goals or even who you presented the strategy to.

Analyze what you can do differently the next time to help get your strategies approved that will drive success for the clients business!

Overall Takeaway

You can only understand the overall business and goals by becoming a true partner and become engrained in the clients business and industry. To get your ideas and strategies approved by clients consistently, you need to earn the trust & clearly tie everything back to driving success, not just for PPC or SEO (for example), but for the overall business!

What is Tynt?

Tynt’s website states that for every user who clicks on a “share this” button, there are 90 users sharing through copy and paste. Tynt is a free tool that aims to leverage this fact by automatically inserting a link back to the site whenever a user copies and pastes an image or text.

How does it work?

You can install Tynt by adding a snippet of javascript to your site’s source code. If you’re working with a WordPress site, there are also two plugins available.  Once the code is in place, Tynt’s attribution link will appear whenever someone pastes your content into an email or adds it to a website. It is then up to the user to decide if they would like to keep this link in place, or easily strip it out by deleting it.

Results

Three months ago, we added Tynt to a client’s blog. Now whenever someone pastes their content, an added link reads “More from [Client Name]: URL.”  In the past 30 days alone (Dec. 24 – Jan. 22), Tynt monitored 778,154 total page views, 41,196 image copies, and 391,039 word copies, which lead to a whopping 4,614 new links.

There are some important things to note about this data. First, only 1.07% of image and text copies generated a link, meaning that 99% of users either pulled this link out before republishing online or shared the content through email.

Second, the majority of these links are nofollowed. In this case, three of the top sites where this content was shared were Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and while it is great to have visibility on these platforms, the links pass little to no SEO value.

Lastly, very few of these links are high quality. Tynt separates the links into three categories: Gold for sites the search engines will find, Silver for sites behind logins or of low quality, and Bronze for sites that won’t impact SEO, but may refer traffic. Of the 4,614 links Tynt contributed, only 25 qualified as valuable Gold links. While this is small fraction of the links Tynt reports, I don’t know a single SEO who wouldn’t gladly take 25 easy links.

Additional Benefits

Tynt has its own analytics suite that provides some interesting metrics. For example, you can see which images and features generated the most shares, broken down by the top 28 images and top 20 posts. You can also discover which regions generated the most copy and pastes. This information can then be used to plan and create new content that caters to user preferences and these geographic areas.

In conclusion, Tynt is a low maintenance tool that quietly works to drive SEO value to your site. It requires little effort once it is set up. If you have a client with engaging content, we recommend testing Tynt for a month to see if it can benefit as an easy supplement to your current linkbuilding efforts.

If anyone has any experiences with Tynt or questions about the tool, feel free to leave a comment below or reach me on Twitter at @alliebrown89.

Huge thanks to our resident Analytics junkie @RachaelGerson for introducing me to this tool! 

Remember when Facebook started? I do. I was still on MySpace and in high school – I couldn’t wait to get my college .edu so I could get an account. They made people wait, and slowly opened the social network to more and more people to create demand. First Harvard, then ivy leagues, then top colleges, then all colleges, ect ect… You can contribute some of Facebook’s success to starting out and limiting users. Once you tell people they can’t have something they just want it more. Then fast forward 5 years and Google wanted to get into the social media game. I remember Google announcing it and I was so pumped to get one, and then I did a week later… and so did everyone else. And then after checking it out, people moved back to Facebook.

But Google is now pushing it on to us whether we like it and with help from our favorite brands and celebrities. You might have noticed a new thing in Google this week. On the right hand side of the SERPs above the ads is now some pretty…pretty…pretttty good real estate. There’s box that will show you the top Google+ results. However these results aren’t placed there because of some fancy algorithm they are there for other reasons which I will explain in this blog post.

Google+ is making your brands advertise for them

The new episode of “This Week in Tech” was one of my favorites of all time – they talked very extensively about “Google plus your world” and had some awesome examples that got me thinking about Google alternative motives. The first example was when they searched for “Cars” and got this:

Wow, Ferrari and BMW are both displayed at the top of the first page for such a competitive keyword? I don’t have them in my circles and I don’t talk about them on Google+ (I’m more of an off road truck kind of guy) so why are they there? They are there because they are car companies that have the most followers. (At time of writing General Motors is in 2,532 circles and Ford Motor Company is in 4,266 circles.)

So then my marketing degree kicked in, and it sparked, I think I know what they are doing! They are making companies start advertising their Google+ pages and thus advertising Google+!

Ok so how did I get to that conclusion? Let’s backtrack here, Ford and GM are definitely some of the automobile industry dominators who are usually on top of their marketing game, so once this comes on their radar they are going to want to beat Ferrari and BMW out of their spots in order to show up on the first page.

But how will they do that?

By getting people to add them to their circles on Google+.

And how do they get people to add them to their circles?

The same way people get Facebook likes – marketing campaigns. Give the public a reason to “like” them/ add them to your circles. So that could be giveaways, deals, exclusive offers, and concept cars pictures. Just cool stuff that we want to see and get that we can’t anywhere else.

So let’s say Ford and GM start dumping all this money into their Google + pages.

But they think, if no one is following us on Google+ how do we get the word out?

Advertise these exclusive offers on their Google+ page on their website and across their competing social networks! (The Ford Facebook fan sites have over 6 million fans across their different pages and General Motors has over 3 million across theirs).

In summary, by having these exclusive offers, to get followers, in order to have their company name show up on the top of page for the search term “Cars” (that is searched locally 45,000,000 times a month), they have to also promote Google+ itself, and get their fans, follows, and visitors of their far greater networks to sign up for Google+. And the more people that sign up the more information about you Google gets! Genius!

Google+ gets celebrity endorsements

Here’s another example from Danny Sullivan’s post on Search Engine Land. Just like the Cars search term showing the Google+ pages for Ferrari and BMW it shows the same for “music” and “movies”. Here’s what it looks like for those search terms:

Just like your favorite car company’s celebrities are singers and pop stars are brands, and their management team market them like a brand. The more they are in the public eye the more famous they are. So I think that you will see a lot more celebrities start showing up in Google+ thus more people joining Google+ to follow them. In fact, Lady Gaga who has the largest twitter following and over 46million Facebook fans did not have a Google+ page last week until Sunday when she created one. Did she start a Google+ page just to be more in touch with her fans? I think NOT! She wants to beat out Britney and Snoop for that spot. And she is doing just what Google wants her to do, advertising Google+ on her other networks and basically telling her fans and followers “Hey, I’m on Google+ you should come join me, if I [Lady Gaga] am on it, it must be cool!”

Just wait, I am predicting a sudden shift in Google+ users because there is going to a fight for those top when entertainment key words are used.

But what does this mean for SEO?

First it means that you better have a Google+ page and start thinking about it more and more. You are going to need it, if you want to achieve page one domination in the future. Also the Google+ accounts that show up on the right hand side, as far as I can see, are only based on the amount of circles you are in. Personally I think that’s a little messed up, and contradictory to Google’s algorithm for search results. They have over 200 factors to rank sites organically and even have a complex formula for the ad rank quality score (thanks for the ppc info Aaron!). But for top of the page real estate it’s only the amount of circles you are in? C’mon Google, your better than that. I tried the searches logged in and out of Google+ and even tried it in incognito mode and got the pretty much the same results. If you refresh the page a couple times you will see some other accounts but they are still the top people in the Google+ field and not ranked on relevance. Another test I did was I logged into Google+ and added both Ford and GM to my Circles and refreshed the “car” SERPs and still got Ferrari and BMW. I even tried a branded search for Cyangenmod (the brand name) the community based firmware for Android and it didn’t even rank 1^st for its own Google+ page.

Ya, its #2 but when I refresh it doesn’t even show up – for a branded search?! (And look at the organic results, why is their Google+ page showing up ahead of their Wikipedia page? I can bet that the wiki page gets a lot more traffic and has a lot more links then its G+ page. But organic social results are a whole other story for another post.)

What do you do you think about the new Google+ integration have you noticed anything funny or odd about the accounts that show up for different search terms? Do you like the changes in social search? If so, please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments box. And don’t forget to follow me on twitter.

Hey there! My name’s Ryan and I am another new member to the SEER team. I’ve learned so much since starting at SEER but I thought for my first blog post I would cover something I have some background in, WordPress. I am helping to set up SEER’s upcoming blog on SEO for college students and I thought I would share the checklist I go through every time I start a new site on WordPress. If anyone’s New Years resolution was to finally start blogging then hopefully this post will give you a few ideas and tips or possibly save you a headache down the road.

The great thing about WordPress is that it really does simplify every step of creating and running a site. I was in a meeting with SEER’s developer Chris Le and half the time I thought he was speaking a foreign language when talking about advanced site design. I know some coding basics but thanks to WordPress and the plug-ins and themes created around it I’ve built more than a dozen sites ranging from your basic blog all the way to e-commerce and password protected membership sites. Although WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System) that will simplify running your blog it doesn’t mean you won’t run into any issues along the way. For SEO purposes and your readers experience it’s important to get your initial setup as close to “optimal” as possible. So without further ado, here is my 10 step checklist to creating your WordPress blog.

NOTE: I am not going to cover how to install WordPress. If you have a hosting company they will almost always have tutorials or customer support on installation.

1.)  Layout: Draw up a layout of how you would like your site to look. Brainstorm the major categories you are going to cover. Research other blogs that you enjoy reading to help you get a feel for how you want your site to look. One big decision is whether you want to have more than one navigation bar.

•  Tim Ferriss’s site Four Hour Blog covers a wide array of topics, way too many to fit across his primary navigation bar. He uses his primary navbar to cover the basics and then a site wide sidebar to cover the topics he frequently writes about.

•  This navigation bar was taken from a successful affiliate site. They are using their targeted keywords across the navigation bar to maximize the link juice passed across each page. From an SEO perspective, their can be a benefit to limiting the links you have on your navigation bar and each page in general. This sites news section uses a sidebar but it is not used site wide.

2.) Choose a theme:  Many themes are available for free and some great ones are out there for purchase. If I had one piece of advice for choosing a theme it would be to keep it clean. You don’t need a million widgets, images or menu bars on your pages. If you are providing educational or entertaining information that is what the readers will be there for. If you are researching other WordPress blogs while planning your design then at the bottom you can often see what theme they are using.

• If you just want to use one of the many free ones available then in your WordPress dashboard go: Appearance —> Themes —> Install Themes —> Search

3.) Get a Logo/Header: One of the things I love the most about WordPress is outside of a theme, a logo is the only thing you have to spend extra time or money on. Unless you are great with photoshop, I recommend hiring someone from ELance or a forum to design a logo for you. I know I have gotten really nicelogos for as little as $20.00. Make sure you get the pixel specifications from your theme correct and that the logo will mesh with your sites theme and color scheme. Also tell your designer that you want at least one edit as part of the agreement.

4.) Set your permalinks structure: I’ve seen some debate on what the best permalink structure is but you definitely don’t want to leave it on the default. Below is my recommendation but feel free to do some more research.

• In your dashboard go to Settings->Permalinks. Change the URL to a custom structure, and use /%category/%postname%/ as this will allow for SEO friendly URLs like yoursite.com/SEO/links/ as opposed to: yoursite.com/?p=001.

• Change the Category Base to ./ then click save.  Once you do that, only the . will remain there.  If you leave it as is, your SEO category URL will be yoursite.com/seo/links/ when you want it to be yoursite.com/seo/

5.) Create your primary pages: Now that you’ve set your permalinks it’s time to decide on what will be included in your primary navigation bar and any site wide sidebars. This is a good time to breakout the Google keyword tool and run through some searches on what topics you will be covering the most. Test your assumptions and try to come up with at least five primary keywords for each category. Create these pages (even if you don’t have all your content ready) and organize your navigation bar. On your blog you might want a secondary navigation bar that expands on the topics you will write posts on.

I always recommend creating the following pages which are considered fundamental on a legal and ethical level:

• Privacy Policy: A privacy policy is where you disclose if you have cookies on your site, what your doing with e-mail you collect and more. Here is a free template but I recommend doing more research specific to your site.
• Terms & Conditions: This describes how users are allowed to use your website. These vary based on what you include on your site (software, free downloads, etc.) so research what other people in your industry, topic are using.
• About/Contact: It builds user trust to know who runs the site and if they have a way to get in touch with them. This doesn’t need to be long just a short bio and an e-mail or contact form will suffice.
• Disclosure: The FTC requires bloggers to disclose if they are getting paid or compensated in anyway for the content on their blog. Many use a disclosure page to go over what content is and is not sponsored or affiliate related.

6.) Set your home page: The WordPress default is to show your latest posts on the front page. If you’d like to have any kind of landing page for home and a blog section than do the following.

• Settings – > Reading: Choose a static page then select your desired home page from the drop down menu. Right below it you can select the page where you would like your blog posts to show up.

7.) Set your navigation menus and widgets: Now that you’ve created your pages you need them to show up on the page where you want. This is very specific to the theme you choose so I don’t want to show visuals that could end up being contradictory. That being said, the general steps are:

• Dashboard —> Appearance —> Menus – From there you can add pages to your top navigation bar and put them in the order you want.
• Dashboard —> Appearance —> Widgets – This is generally where you would build your sidebars. You can have more than one sidebar on a page and you can customize what pages they will show up on. As I mentioned previously many sites only have a side bar on their blog page.

8.) Plugin’s: WordPress has a huge variety of  plugins available to help you improve site functionality, SEO, collect e-mails and thousands of other things. The plugins I am recommending here are all free and can be found by going to Plugins —> Add New and searching for the name.

• XML Sitemap Generator – Generates an XML Sitemap for better indexing of your site by the SERPS. This also makes it much easier to get your site setup in webmaster tools (Don’t even consider not using this one)
• SEO Ultimate – Another plug-in you shouldn’t go without even if your theme has solid SEO capabilities. This is the best all around SEO tool for WordPress and its free. You can do everything from changing multiple title tags to editing your meta tag descriptions and adding pages to your robot.txt file.
• W3 Total Cache and W3 Super Cache – These can majorly improve your sites loading speed and greatly lower the risk of your site crashing from too much traffic.
• Broken Link Checker – Will notify you of broken links on your site.
• Permalink Trailing Slash Fixer – If you used my recommended permalinks structure this will add a trailing slash in the URLs if its missing.

9.) Google Analytics: For those that don’t know, Google Analytics (or any other analytics service you might use) allows you to see how many visitors come to your site, what pages they visit, how long they stay and much much more. You may want to do add your analytics code earlier in the process but if you have a theme or plugin that can post your analytics code site wide then it’s fine to wait until the rest of your site structure is setup. To register your site go to Google Analytics and they will walk you through the process.

10.) Webmaster Tools: Submit your site to Google and Bing Webmaster tools (which now covers Yahoo). They have solid instructions in both Bing and Google so I won’t explain this step by step. Depending on the XML sitemap plugin you choose the instructions will also vary slightly. My only other point would be to do this as soon as your site structure is setup if you want the SERP’s to start indexing your pages. I once forgot to do this for two months and couldn’t figure out why a lot of my pages and links weren’t showing up. The data you get from using these tools is also crucial.

Now you have your site setup. It’s getting crawled by the search engines and feeding you data. The hard part comes next, you’ve gotta start posting! Blogging can be very competitive but if you have something interesting to say and you stick with it then good things will happen.

P.S. – I know I didn’t cover how to setup your RSS feed or integrate with your social media (facebook, twitter, etc.). Although that stuff is important I didn’t consider it fundamental in the first steps to getting a site up and running. Leave me some feedback and if anyone would like me to cover that I can come back with a separate post.

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This December 25^th I was at my family’s annual Christmas party. This isn’t just any Christmas party. My last name is Donohue, which means my father was 1 of 10. So, with about 30 cousins and countless offspring, this is one massive group. With any large group of extended family or friends that you only see a few times a year, the same questions are bound to arise in each conversation as you attempt to catch up on everyone’s lives. Here is a paraphrased conversation, with my responses omitted, that I had multiple times over the holidays.

“Heard you got a new job? SEO, what’s that? Hey I have a website I’ve been working on, how do I get it to be #1? I’m not sure, I never thought about that, what does that mean? Oh, ok… well there must be something. Just give me the 3 things I can do right away when I get home later that will put me on top. I’m confused. Ok, how about the one thing, like the secret one thing I can do? Oh, that’s not what I was expecting. So much for my dream to get rich quick. Let’s get some more eggnog!”

If you’re an SEO professional, you may have had a similar conversation before and can easily remember how you responded to the same questions. Perhaps, with more experience and better salesmanship, your answers were better than mine. With time, my responses will improve, but the situation got me to think about what I’ve learned thus far. Here are a few basic principles that I’ve come across while learning SEO. Some of this may seem simple to a seasoned SEO professional, but these are actual things that your neighbor or friend with no SEO knowledge hasn’t even considered.

1. Treat your backlinks like your children. Would you send little Ralphie outside in the middle of winter without a coat? No! So don’t do it to your backlinks! Dress them up in the warmest anchor text you can find. Your link won’t be as valuable if you have “click here” as the anchor text. You want your children to succeed, be happy and healthy. The same goes for your backlinks. Know your target keywords and use those as your anchor text. Once they’re out there, don’t forget about them. Check up on them to make sure they are still active, still followed, and are pointing to the right page. You’d make sure your children are safe, healthy, and pointed in the right direction, wouldn’t you?
   

   Picture found at http://www.achristmasstoryhouse.com

2. It’s ok to peak at your classmate’s test answers. In school we would be punished if we were caught looking at any exam other than our own. This isn’t school, this is the internet. Your competitors already took the time to do research, find backlinks, and optimize their websites. Save yourself some time by looking at what they’ve done and then copy them. If they have a backlink from a valuable blog, maybe you can get one from that same blog. Once you have leveled the playing field, you’ll also be able to point out what your competitors did wrong or haven’t done yet. Pounce on those opportunities so you can get ahead, and then you’ll be the smart kid in class everybody wants to sit next to.
3. Have patience, manage your expectations, and be practical. Let’s pretend you started holding on to your friends’ money for them, even gave one of them a small loan, and decided to make a website for your services. If you really believe that your day-old website deserves to out-rank financial giants like Bank of America and Wells Fargo for the keyword “bank” then you’re going to have some frustrating days ahead of you. It’s great to dream big and go for the top, but be realistic and start small. Try more specific long tail keywords. Once you’ve built up your brand a bit, then perhaps you can start thinking about those primetime keywords.
4. Stay fresh. If you’re looking in the refrigerator and there are 2 cartons of milk, one brand new and the other 3 months expired, which one are you going to drink? Google likes freshness too. Just because you finally got your website up, it doesn’t mean your work is done and your website is good forever. Your competitors are adding new content regularly, updating their strategies, tweeting about every new blog post, and 301 redirecting defunct pages to new ones. If you want to beat them then you need to keep up. Nobody is searching for your event from 6 years ago and the more times I visit your blog only to find the same old post, the more likely I am to stop visiting. Keep it fresh!
5. Be who you say you are. Google wants to provide the most relevant websites for the keyword you searched. If you keep blogging about surfing on your auto parts website, people will be confused why Google has brought them surfing stories when all they wanted was to buy new tires. They will immediately leave your site and then Google will realize you’re not relevant for that keyword and you’ll drop in the rankings. This same principle applies to who you are getting your links from. A link from a well-known car enthusiast’s blog will be more valuable to your auto parts website than a link from Nana’s Blankets or Tom’s Turtle Farm. Be consistent. Decide who you are and stick to it, Google will appreciate it.

These are only 5 principles. There are many more, but at this point you may be drowning in analogies, so I’ll get back to the answer that I ultimately gave to many people over the holidays asking for THE SECRET TO SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS. Drum roll please…..in just 1 word, the secret is….

WORK!

Sorry folks, I know you’re disappointed, but the sooner you come to terms with it, the sooner you can wake up and go get yourself some rankings. This is a new year, a time when we make resolutions, reposition our focus, and get back to grips with reality. We finally stop waiting for that magic pill that will make us fit and beautiful (cake doesn’t make me skinny?) and instead reacquaint ourselves with the gym. We stop day dreaming about what we will do when we win the lottery (this is the winner, I just know it!) and actually figure out a budget and ways to save money. Basically, we have to stop waiting for good things to come to us. Sure you could be the lucky winner, but if you want something, you can’t sit and wait, you need to go get it. SEO is the same way. You may find some quick wins for links (directories?), but there is no secret formula that will vault you to the top of the rankings by week’s end. The search engine landscape changes every day. You have to put in the time to research, implement, and research again. So make it your new year’s resolution to put the work in, remember the basic principles, and earn your way to #1.

As for that old friend that won’t settle for your “hard work pays off” answer, just hit him with one of the 5 basic principles above. They’re simple enough for anybody to understand, yet important enough that it will actually improve their website. They get their answer and you can get back to your eggnog.

Happy New Year!  Now, get back to work.

WHO – Demographic Report

In an ideal world, we’d know who we are trying to reach as well as who we are actually reaching. Your client should be able to answer the former, but the latter we have to figure out ourselves. For standard search campaigns, this can be difficult (if not impossible) to figure out. But if you’re running on the Display Network, you’ve got the help of the Demographics report under the dimensions tab. Here you can see information about the domains to which your ads have been served, as well as information such as age and gender of users that saw your ad. This data is limited because it is pulled from websites that collect member data and elect to provide it for Google, but can still be useful to get an idea of whose eyes are seeing your ads. If you’re running on Facebook or LinkedIn, you’ve got even greater control over who sees your ads through their very targeted demographic bidding options.

WHAT – Search Queries

Knowing exactly what users are searching for is one of the greatest assets we could have. We can figure this out using regular search query reports, which provide the exact words users typed into the search box that triggered your ad. Use these reports to create a negative keyword list of words that don’t apply to your client AND to come up with new ideas for terms on which you should bid! Another way to answer the “What” question is paying attention to auto-complete. Start typing some of your terms into the search box and see what it suggests to complete it. Use Soovle to test this out on multiple engines simultaneously!

WHERE – Geographic Analysis

Where are all these clicks, impressions and (hopefully!) conversions coming from anyway? You can figure it out by utilizing the geographic reports available to you in AdWords and Google Analytics. You can look as broadly as country-level or as narrowly as city-level. Use the information to figure out where your ads perform best and take the opportunity to separate those locations out into their own campaign so you can bid higher on them. Conversely, look for locations where performance is poor and separate them out so you can lower bids; all without affecting overall campaign performance everywhere else!

WHEN – Day-Parting Analysis

Knowing when users are searching for your clients’ products or services is another one of the most valuable pieces of information we’re lucky enough to be able to find out. Using AdWords or Analytics, you can pull reports showing performance on each day of the week. You can go even further and pull a report that shows performance during each hour of the day. That’s pretty huge! If your analysis shows that performance drops way off over the weekends, you can set your campaigns to only run during the work week. Similarly, if you’re losing money by showing ads during the overnight, you can set your campaigns to pause nightly and resume in the morning. This can help you save money and improve overall performance metrics.

WHY – Google Insights

“Why” is one of the harder questions to answer, mostly because we’re not privy to exactly what is going on in the heads of our audiences. Fortunately we have ways of making informed guesses as to why our performance fluctuates as it does. If you notice a big spike or dip in performance, ask yourself what’s going on in the world that may have caused it. Saw a spike and your client provides clinical services? Well, if it’s flu season, you can probably guess that’s why your search volume jumped up. Use Google Insights to figure out less obvious causes by searching for some of your search terms where you saw jumps in volume. News outlets can also be a valuable tool on figuring out what may have caused a performance spike, particularly when it’s concerning local campaigns.

HOW – Visitors (In Analytics)

Knowing how users visited and interacted with your landing can be very helpful in improving conversion rate. Using the Visitors tab in Google Analytics can help you in crafting your landing page. Here you can see which browsers, screen resolutions, flash versions, operating systems, languages and more visitors are using when they get to your landing page. Using this data you might find that a large number of visitors are using a screen resolution that puts your form below the fold! Or you could find out that a lot of your potential converters are using a browser in which your landing page is not optimized! Put this information to good use to help refine and improve your landing page, and hopefully help encourage additional conversions!

So those are the six big questions you should be asking yourself whenever you’re looking at your account’s performance. If you can answer all six, you have the keys to optimizing your campaigns to help drive more clicks and conversions. But these are just the basic questions you should be asking, what other questions do you find yourself asking when you’re optimizing your accounts? Let us know in a comment!