Digital Marketing & Social Media News Blog

Interactive content tools for online marketing optimization

2014-06-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

SeoNat here, with a newly discovered published article by Andrei Petrik from Search Engine People (searchenginepeople.com).

He has written a very well presented and eloquent blog post regarding 5 proposed types of interactive content that can help you pump up your online marketing strategy.

Interactive content is labeled as a tool to make yourself stand out and gain leverage over the competition.

"Its [Interactive content] a type of content that requires a users action, input or a response to generate a result, activate and/or tell a story. The most common types are self-assessment tools, calculators and automated diagnostics."

The above mentioned tools are carefully explained, and solutions provided that will help you to 'create a richer user experience on your site, earn links, increase visitor stay times and reduce bounce rates'.

Sounds great, right?

It takes time and determination, but the results make it well the effort!

Click on the link below to read the original article

Content marketing is huge. In the post-penalty world, all marketers are rushing to create remarkable blog posts, amazing infographics, killer videos and stellar webinars. All are aimed at attracting and engaging their target audiences and pleasing the search engines. But if everyone is creating the same type of content, how do you stand out? How do you earn more links? How do you make a piece of content truly useful?

Differentiating yourself is one way to stay ahead of the competition. Creating a different type of content will help you cut through noise and triumph over your competitors. Enter interactive content.

Its a type of content that requires a users action, input or a response to generate a result, activate and/or tell a story. The most common types are self-assessment tools, calculators and automated diagnostics.

Although they require more resources and time to develop, when completed, they are the ultimate evergreen link earners.

Self-Assessments, Calculators and Quizzes

Self-assessments and quizzes vary from business applications to solely for entertainment purposes. In this category you'll often find quizzes that provide an assessment of everything from your marketing practices to insurance cost calculators. On the other side of the spectrum, for the entertainment value, Buzzfeed has it mastered with interactive quizzes that tell you what city you should live in or what Game of Thrones character you are.

Automated Diagnostics

A staple of many online services, such as SEO firms and SaaS providers, automated diagnostics tools automate an assessment of an entity — usually a website — and provide a score. Hubspot has a tool that provides you with a Marketing Grade and specific recommendations for improving your website. Meltwater has a Likealyzer tool that evaluates your Facebook Page and provides you with a feedback and recommendations based on your Facebook presence. Another very useful tool is the Headline analyzer. Just enter your headline and after you hit submit you'll be presented with score and feedback on the quality of your headline.

Interactive Microsites

These are mini-sites or mini-guides that can be found either on separate domains or exist as a part of a larger website. The microsites are often topic specific, and are complimentary to or an extension of the main brand or the parent company. What makes Interactive Microsites unique is that they are focused on guiding a reader through a narrative, whether its a story or a how-to guide. Check out Google's Inside Search portal. Google created a nice Interactive Microsite that explains how search works from beginning to end. Here's another great example of an interactive How-to guide by Shutterfly. It's an easy to use guide on how-to take perfect photos every time. All you need to do is pick your camera and what photo type you'd like to learn about.

Data Visualization

Everyone talks about data these days. Big data, small data, economic data, marketing data – you name it, there's a data visualization. Some companies are using their data to create interactive content to help their audience understand it better. Just take a look at LinkedIn's Education tools that allow users to visualize the data on where a specific school's Alumni have landed, their top skills and what they studied. Because this tool connects to continuously updated data, the findings and stats will shift over time as well.

But you don't have to be a multi-million dollar company or have millions of users to create visualizations from your data. There are many tools and applications online for you to help you make your data beautiful. Take a look at what Story Maps does. It allows anyone to use maps and other data to create a story with interactive elements. For inspiration and possibilities check out the gallery.

Idea Generators

Can't think of a blog title, a business name or baby name? There's an app for that. Idea generators are just that. You input a few parameters and a generator will produce a few ideas for you. Hubspot has a Blog Title Generator and so does Portent. There are also business name generators, plot generators, web domain name generators and someone even built a baby name generator.

Conclusion Interactive content is one of the best ways to create a richer user experience on your site, earn links, increase visitor stay times and reduce bounce rates. But it takes a significant amount of time and resources to plan, create, launch and support. However, when complete, the benefits are more than worth the initial time and resources investment.

Source: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/925-interactive-content.html#ixzz33UkM0T9x

Actiontags and your business

2014-05-29T05:32:00.002-07:00

Hello guys,

You are probably familiar with the word hashtags (#) and their use in social media networks in order to 'group' all posts on a related topic. Some social media networking services that use this 'method' are Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram.

Now, this method has gone a step further via Actiontags.

Actiontags are hashtags that trigger a response. For example, rather than just posting "We have a #NewProduct!" a brand can post "We have a #NewProduct! RT if you #want more information about it."

Jessica Williams (Marketing Profs) states three of the benefits of using actiontags in your social marketing campaigns:

Participation via actiontags. When consumers express their interest in or support for something using actiontags like #want, #buy or #enter, they are explicitly—and publicly—raising their hand. That kind of social opt-in gives the brand an opportunity to respond directly and capitalize on that intent.

Automated brand messaging. With automated messaging, a big brand now has the ability to reach out to each and every person who has raised their hand to be apart of a campaign that they have created. That allows brands to cost-effectively engage consumers one on one, opening up new marketing and conversion opportunities.

Built-in amplification. Most social posts and messages are buried among thousands of others and have a difficult time elevating above the noise without a significant paid budget behind them. However, using an actiontag in your post creates built-in amplification—since the message spreads organically every time a consumer takes action on it.

Its not enough to simply have people follow, you need to make them to want to interact and respond to you with a type of action.

Carolyn Cohn has written a very nice article regarding this method and how it can "take your business to the next level"

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the article

Undoubtedly, you work very hard to make your business a raging success. You do this every day and you continually go above and beyond what is expected. After all, it is your business and you are totally responsible for making it a success. You need to make sure that none of that effort is wasted and that it pays off in the end.

Seeing the fruits of your labor

As is the case with most business owners, you must be constantly trying to establish ways to get the most return on your money and the greatest return on your efforts. Of course, part of that thinking includes your social media marketing strategy and determining how your brand fits into all of those efforts. The way that you make the most impact and the most difference in that regard is through your content marketing efforts. The first thing that you have to do is to ensure that your target audience is fully aware of what you are offering. That means that your target audience must see what you are sharing, you must engage them, and you must do whatever it takes to get them to share your content with other people whom they know and trust. Once you have accomplished that connection with the members of your target audience, the next thing that you must do (and this is an extremely important step) is to work your social media channels until the result is that the people with whom you share a strong connection (which you have been nurturing all along) turn into loyal customers. There are many different approaches that you can use to accomplish this and not every business owner does things in exactly the same manner. Of course, the one thing that you don’t want to do is cross your fingers and leave anything to chance. You need to have control over this process and, to whatever extent it is possible, you need to have control over the outcome of your efforts.

How do you convert your online connections into clients?

First and foremost, you need to ensure that your online connections are engaged by you as much as possible. Once you have been successful at maintaining that level of engagement, you need to get them to become very active and to be willing to participate in as many ways as you need and want them to do so. The step that will follow this will be conversion. At that point, it should be relatively easy to convert them because you will have established a strong relationship together, you will have positioned yourself as a subject matter expert, you will have gotten them to trust you, and you will have successfully gotten them to find you credible. Buying what you are offering will certainly not be a chore for them at this point. It will be a pleasure because you will have cemented your position to the point where they will feel that they can’t live without buying what you are selling. It is extremely important for you to remember that the time and effort capacity of your new clients are extremely limited and you owe it to them to be respectful and cognizant of that at all times. However, that doesn’t mean that you should ignore them. Just give them some breathing room and an opportunity to come back to you, which they most certainly will. Additionally, remember to express to them how important their opinions are to you. You value what they have to say and you are excited to receive that information from them.

Using actiontags to make things happen for your business

You have undoubtedly heard of (and are probably using on a regular basis) hashtags. Actiontags are hashtags that elicit responses from other people. It is up to you to compel your online connections to want to respond to you with some sort of action. Actiontags will help you to bring your business to the next level and there are many benefits that will occur as a result.

Making your brand marketing automated: If you can automate your brand messages (which is pretty simple to do in most cases), you can reach an extremely large amount of people in a very short amount of time. It is an inexpensive, effective, timely, appropriate approach and it works very well in most cases. The opportunities that will be created as a result will be amazing.

Promoting participation through actiontags If your customers show their support and willingness to be involved with you and your business through actiontags, that says that they are stating for all to hear that they buy in (or opt in) to what you are offering. Nothing could be better.

Automatic amplifying: With all of the information online nowadays, it is easy for a lot of that information to get lost in the shuffle. If you use an actiontag in your content posts, you are, in essence, amplifying your message and it will come through loud and clear. Each and every time one of your customers acts on an actiontag, the message will come to the attention of more and more people.

Conclusion

Social media is here to stay. We have all known that for a long time. Not only is it here to stay but it is continually evolving and improving. The more that is made available to you as the consumer, the better your chances will be of taking a larger number of your online connections and converting them into paying customers. Using actiontags is a sound business decision because it brings more and more success to your doorstep. Actiontags have a tremendous amount of potential and you should learn to use them as much and as often as possible.

Source:
Allowing Actiontags to Bring You to the Next Level by Carolyn Cohn (Compukol)

Article: Landing Page Testing with DoubleClick Search

2014-05-25T12:18:00.002-07:00

Hi Guys,

I was reading through and came across this interesting article by Jennifer Johnstone of SearchEngineWatch, where she explains the process of testing your landing page using DoubleClick Search.

This is quite helpful and I hope you enjoy it...

Click on the continue reading link below and let me know your thoughts about the topic!

Original article by Jennifer Johnstone:

As advertisers, we have a lot of questions.

What type of messaging motivates users to act?

Is my CTR higher this week than it was last week? Why is that?

Yes, I know Bob, we've got a good landing page, but how can it be better?

The string of questions is never-ending, but it is all part of how we evolve to become better advertisers – who can pivot quicker, work more efficiently, and provide deeper insight at a moment's notice.
This post will give you an easy fix to help you solve the age-old question (or at least the one I've been asking since 2010) – how can I improve conversion rates?

Conversion rates can be affected by a whole slew of things – seasonality, time of day, price increases, etc. However, your best bet to systematically improve conversion rates is to start testing your landing pages.

Try a shorter sign-up flow, change your call to action, update the color of your buttons, put your call to action above the fold, or send traffic to a page further down your conversion funnel – the list of small tweaks you can make is endless. Glad we solved that.

The biggest question you have now is – how do I test these changes?

There are several ways to test landing pages, but I have a favorite. For those of you using DoubleClick Search to manage your campaigns – you're in luck. There is a simple feature that will make testing easy and provide you with clear results.

How to Set Up a Landing Page Test

First, select two to three landing pages you want to test, along with a list of the keywords you'd like to use for the test. It is easiest if the keywords you chose are in the same ad group or campaign. Remember, the more volume you get, the quicker you can gain significance – assuming it's achievable.

Once you've chosen the testing parameters and where it will run, you'll want to make a spreadsheet of the destination URLs you want to test. Feel free to add any UTM, ValueTrack, or third-party parameters to these URLs.

When you're ready to launch the test, open DoubleClick Search and navigate to the Keywords tab, where you can filter for the keywords you want to test. If your keywords are grouped together, try filtering by Campaign or Ad Group name. Select the keywords you want to test and click "Start Landing Page Test."

Once you click this, a drop-down will appear, allowing you to add a Test Name, Control Name, Experiment Name, and multiple URLs. Select "Split Traffic Evenly Between Landing Pages" and insert the correct URLs from your spreadsheet.

Click "Save" to start your landing page test.

How to Review the Test
To check in on your results, navigate to the DoubleClick Search interface, and select "Landing Page Tests" on the left menu. To review your data, select which columns best suit your test, and keep in mind that if your account is linked, you can use data from Google Analytics as well.

I prefer to see the name of the test, the start date, the visits, the actions (or transactions), and the ratio of visits to actions. However, there are many other column types available, so please chose those which work best for your business.

How to Gauge Significance
Now, to test significance and chose a clear winner, I recommend grabbing your click (visits) and conversion (actions/transactions) data from the interface above and plugging these metrics into a significance calculator. There are many choices for online significance calculators that will allow you to toggle significance between 80 and 99 percent. Once a test hits 95 to 99 percent, you've achieved significance!

After a test shows significance, you will have a few choices in DoubleClick; you can opt to send all traffic to the control URL, experiment URL, or you can revert back to the original URL. This makes changing your landing pages just as easy as setting up your landing page test.

Also, once you complete a test and chose where to send your traffic, the test will be logged in the "Completed" tab, so you can reference the data at a later time. Keep in mind that whenever you reference a test, you will need to change the time period in the top right to reflect when the test began. This ensures you will have a complete data set.

Conclusion

Landing page testing should be near the top of your list for optimization techniques – it's a no-brainer and can be incredibly insightful. Through these testing insights, you can learn how users are reacting to your landing pages and tweak those pages to increase conversion rates in just a few simple steps. If you have any questions about how to use the DoubleClick Search Landing Page Testing feature, please comment below.

Source: Easy Landing Page Testing Using DoubleClick Search

... and SeoNat is baaaack!

2014-05-25T12:11:00.003-07:00

Hello everyone!

SeoNat here, wanting to apologize for the MIA, as I have been taking care of some health issues which now are no longer issues :)

Have also been taking some time to do some traveling and charge up with power - and I am back and ready to rumble!

----------------

My mission is to inform you guys of all the news and new hot topics out there about Digital Marketing, Social Media and such... so stay tuned as the engines have started and we are off to a new and exciting start!

Have a great one!

Social Advertising Best Practices (mashable article)

2013-10-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

Here is a very interesting article by Todd Wasserman, Mashable's business editor, who points to 4 'best practices' in social advertising that you can apply to achieve a successful result in your social marketing attempts.

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the original article.

If a tree falls in the forest, it's debatable that anyone hears it. When your ad fails on Facebook, though, there's no confusion. It was a dud.
A lack of interaction tells the tale. Clearly you paid good money to expose lots of people to this particular piece of content, but most gave it little mind.
That doesn't have to be the case. There are people who do nothing but study the performance of social advertising all day. We talked to some and gleaned a few insights. If you want to run an ad with a halfway decent chance of getting a social lift, check out these pro tips.

1. Think About Who You Are Targeting

While we've established that an ad with no Likes is an embarrassing failure, it's also true that an ad with a lot of interaction from the wrong people is a waste of pixels. Lucky for you, Twitter and Facebook both have sophisticated turnkey programs that let you target users by demographic, location and affinities, among other variables.
For instance, say you wanted to target all the feta cheese fans in New Jersey. Facebook lets you do just that.

As Peter Goodman, VP of Social.com at Salesforce.com, notes, a successful social media ad program relies on good customer data. Who is really buying your products? What are they interested in? "You really need to start to think more deeply about these amazing targeting features," he says. "Concentrate on the demo you know are going to work and then build that out to scale."
How to do that? Back in March, Facebook released Lookalike Audiences, a program that uses Facebook's data to identify people who aren't currently fans of your site, but who have similar characteristics to your fans.

2. Not Every Ad Has to Be Social
Take a look at most advertising you see. Is it something you would want to pass on to a friend? No. That's because most ads are not entertaining in themselves, but are either formulated to propose a call to action or as a branding exercise. "If you think of the typical ad with the shot of the car driving on the mountain against the sunset, there's nothing particularly social about it," says David Berkowitz, CMO of the marketing agency MRY. "You have to consider if there's anything social about it."

There doesn't have to be. A very targeted ad with a call to action will be social because people seeing the ad are in the market for the product or service. Similarly, a branding ad might go over well with rabid fans of the brand.

Jimmy Kimmel notwithstanding, creating a viral video, though, is nearly impossible Berkowitz says. Jim Squires, director of ad product marketing at Facebook, says that video probably wouldn't do much for your business anyway. "Stay on point," he says. "Funny cat videos may pull likes, but they won't help you achieve a business objective. Make sure you're crisp on the business objective — as you would be for any ad campaign — and create content that is relevant and supports your story."

3. Social Ads Don't Have to Look Like Ads

Facebook's Promoted Posts and Twitter's Promoted Tweets look more like communication with consumers than ads. That's by design. The top social networks are pushing a native advertising experience, which translates roughly to branded content.

"Take the time to do great creative — asset planning and creation is often overlooked for this new medium," says Squires. "Sharing thoughtful, timely, iconic pieces is important, since it's being seen alongside compelling content from friends and family." At Facebook, they call these interactions "stories." Squires says marketers should think of them the same way: "Tell stories –- people remember stories, not facts."

Sometimes social ads don't even need to be ads. Berkowitz points to the Audi Instagram feed as an instance of non-advertising advertising. "Almost every image has an Audi logo in it," he says. "And there are thousands of interactions with each post."

4. Optimize for Mobile
Obviously, a desktop-first model for advertising won't work in a world in which Facebook's mobile ad revenues are on track to supplant its take from desktop. How do you make sure your ad works as well on a phone or tablet as it does on the web? Says Squire: "Make sure posts are succinct — your key point should be made in the first 90 characters — and ensure that any photo or video works well on mobile.

Image: Red Bull, Facebook

Source: 4 Best Practices for Social Advertising by Todd Wasserman

New Facebook Graph Search update

2013-10-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

Today we are going to talk about the new update that Facebook has made to its Graph Search feature, by allowing/enabling users to be able to search for comments (also based on time period or location), posts, status updates, tpics of interest and more!

Mashable.com's Kurt Wagner has written an article that describes this new update and how it can be implemented to offer you a more complete 'real-time conversations' platform, which is something that Facebook is focusing on as part of their competition with Twitter.

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the original article.

Facebook announced an update to Graph Search on Monday that will enable users to search for conversation topics within status updates, comments and posts. Some users with Graph Search can now browse Facebook for topics of interest — for example, "posts about Breaking Bad" or simply "Breaking Bad."

The update also allows users to search for posts or comments from a certain time period or location (for example, "posts by my friends from last month") or posts that they already composed or commented on.

The update makes Facebook much more conducive to real-time conversations, an area where it has been making major strides to compete with the likes of Twitter. The two social networks have been competing for eyeballs during primetime television events like the Emmys, the NFL's Monday Night Football, and Sunday's Breaking Bad finale. When users' eyes aren't glued to the TV screen, Facebook and Twitter want them to be having conversations or voicing their opinions on their respective networks.

Opening up Graph Search to enable post and comment searches will help Facebook to do so. When a user logs into his profile during a primetime event, he can quickly scan all conversations about the game or his favorite show — even if he isn't near the top of the News Feed. If a user want to talk about an event hours (or even days) later, he can search for all relevant conversations on Facebook, something users can't easily do using Twitter.

Facebook has been working to add partnerships around live media in an attempt to fuel this social conversation. Earlier this month, the social network announced a content deal with FOX Sports to promote Facebook data and conversations alongside live NFL and college football broadcasts. Facebook has also added features like searchable hashtags and verified accounts in an attempt to make finding topics of interest easier on the platform.

Facebook reported on its Q2 earnings call that 88 to 100 million people are actively using the social network during primetime television hours — a number that Facebook advertisers will pay close attention to.

Twitter is making similar efforts ahead of the company's IPO; the company is expected to file its public IPO papers as soon as this week. Just last week, Twitter announced ad partnerships with both CBS and the NFL, which will bring real-time video into your Twitter stream.

Facebook's search update is not yet available to all Graph Search users, according to a company spokesperson. It will be tested starting on Monday with a small group of users and will roll out more expansively after that. Users will only be able to search for content that has been shared with them, in addition to public posts. In other words, your conversations should not appear in a search run by someone outside of your network unless your comments and posts are public.

What do you think about Facebook's new Graph Search update to find conversations? Tell us in the comments below.

Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images, Facebook

Source: Facebook Graph Search Now Lets You Find Comments, Posts by Kurt Wagner

Google: 5 steps to being at the top!

2013-09-24T07:25:00.001-07:00

You want to take your product to another level, and be the king on SE's?

Yes, you do, don't deny it :)

One of the most important things you need to have is dominance over the competition, of course, in many levels -- product quality, marketing, pricing, but also on the Search Engines... as they offer the platform for your product promotion and success online... In other words, you need to command the SE's on your niche.

With Google being in the forefront of SE's, Jay Taylor from SearchEngineWatch proposes 5 steps that will allow you to be on the top of your niche on Google!

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the original article...

Dominating your niche on Google can be a very profitable SEO strategy. Ranking well for keywords related to a specific niche helps drive higher quality traffic to your site and differentiates your brand.

Follow these five steps to dominate your niche on Google.

Step 1: Determine Your Niche

If you haven't already, the first step to dominating your niche on Google is determining what it is. The more specific your niche is, the better.

Your business may offer many different products or services, but what is the one product or service your business is known for, or you would like to be known for? That is the niche you should choose to dominate on Google.

Depending on your competition and resources, it can be very difficult and sometimes impossible to dominate for multiple niches on Google. So, it usually makes sense to focus on one niche.

Let's take for example, a law firm that specializes in personal injury law, but also does criminal and family law. Ideally, this law firm would love to dominate Google for all three practice areas. However, unless they're willing to invest the necessary resources into developing three separate websites and managing three separate SEO campaigns, this would be very difficult to achieve. Because the firm in this example has limited resources, they would have a much greater chance for success by focusing optimization efforts on personal injury law, since that is their specialty.

Why? Google wants to provide users with information that is highly relevant to their needs.

When someone is searching for a personal injury lawyer, that is exactly what they want to find. A user will not respond favorably if their search for personal injury lawyers provides results for criminal and family lawyers who also practice personal injury law, because those results are not as relevant to the user's immediate needs.

Step 2: Optimize with Niche Specific Keywords

Once you've decided on a niche to dominate, you must choose the right keywords.

Determining the right keywords to optimize for is crucial. It requires understanding your target audience, and the keywords they use when searching for your product or service. It also requires being specific. You can't dominate a niche by going after generic keywords.

Optimizing for keywords specific to your niche has multiple benefits. These keywords will be less competitive, and therefore easier to rank well, and these keywords will deliver traffic to your site that is more likely to convert.

Going back to the previous example, the person who searches the keyword phrase, “lawyer + location” is far less likely to convert than the person who searches the keyword phrase, “personal injury lawyer motorcycle accident + location.” The latter search query is indicative of someone who knows exactly what they're looking for. When that person finds a personal injury lawyer who specializes in motorcycle accident cases in their area, that lawyer will have a great chance of converting them into a new client.

Step 3: Implement Google Authorship

Implementing Google Authorship will enable your face and name to appear next to your website in the search results. This not only allows users to associate a face with your organization, but also promotes your personal brand by allowing you to appear as an authority within your niche. This is especially powerful for medical professionals, legal professionals, and consultants, where your personal brand is strongly tied to your organization's brand.

In addition to helping establish trust and credibility with your target audience, Google Authorship may influence rankings now and in the future, but this is highly debated. What we do know is that Google Authorship can have a positive impact on click-through rates (CTR), because Authorship increases a site's visibility in the search results. Just make sure to use a professional photo that will be well received by your target audience.

Step 4: Write Great, Authoritative Content Often

The next step is to write great, authoritative content often, on topics that are relevant to your niche. Writing great, authoritative content serves three purposes. It:

Shows that you're an expert and a thought leader in your niche.

Acts as a resource for potential customers, and gives them a reason to come back to your site.

Provides Google with more quality content to index, which can have a positive impact on rankings.

However, when writing this content, be sure to write it for your target audience, and not for Google. You can still incorporate keywords into the content, but just make sure it sounds natural, and reads well.

Step 5: Use Google+ to Promote Your Content

Google+ profiles and posts are included in Google's index, which provides potential customers with an additional avenue to find your content. You're already halfway there because you had to create a Google+ profile in order to implement Google Authorship in step 3. However, simply setting up a profile is not enough. You must post relevant content regularly (which you're already doing in step 4), as well as build an audience and engage them.

While we know that +1's don't directly impact rankings, we do know that Google+ does influence search results for signed in Google+ users. So, by building your Google+ network, and engaging your audience with relevant content that encourages +1's, you can actually influence their search results.

In addition to a Google+ profile, you can also create a Google+ Business Page, which allows you to share content and engage with your target audience as your brand, rather than as yourself. Whether creating a Google+ Profile or Business Page, or both makes sense for you depends on your business, and whether you have the resources available to successfully manage both.

Conclusion

It requires a lot of time and effort to execute these five steps successfully, but if you do, you will be well on the way to dominating your niche on Google.

Source: 5 Steps to Dominate Your Niche on Google by Jay Taylor (SearcEngineWatch)

HootSuite: Social Media Account Management tool

2013-09-18T02:30:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

I wanted to share this article by Marissa Cetin (Mashable.com) regarding the use of tools for managing your social media accounts. These management tools are essential for social media users, as they allow them to keep track and manage their accounts in one place and with ease.

The author offers a in-depth guide to a particular tool that is a top notch solution for "streamline sharing for work and play" -- this tool is the quite popular HootSuite. HootSuite allows users to "conserve precious tab space by connecting their Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (pages only), LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and Mixi accounts under the HootSuite umbrella, and take advantage of the convenient scheduling feature."

If you are a social media fan dont miss out on this article and tool as it will most definitely help you keep everything social in order! :)

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the original article.

Juggling multiple social media accounts across several networks can get hectic, especially when there's a fine line between a manageable number of browser tabs and a terrible guessing game.

Self-respecting social media addicts should test the many management tools available, and they will find HootSuite to be among the best to streamline sharing for work and play. Users can conserve precious tab space by connecting their Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (pages only), LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and Mixi accounts under the HootSuite umbrella, and take advantage of the convenient scheduling feature.

If you're looking to up your social media game, or just to make life a little easier at work or home, here's how to get started with HootSuite.

Getting Organized

Once you set up an account and log in, HootSuite will guide you through the basics of connecting networks and organizing streams.

The green menu tab displays the networks connected to your HootSuite account. From there, select the streams you'd like to monitor, such as your timeline, mentions and scheduled tweets.

The stream options vary for each network (for example, Facebook's options include News Feed, statuses, events and Wall posts), but the simple, no-frills layout remains the same.

HootSuite is optimized for managing Twitter accounts, but you can also post to your personal Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, as well as to pages and groups of which you're a member or administrator. HootSuite will not connect to personal Google+ profiles, but it allows you to manage your pages.

For free accounts, HootSuite initially limits each tab to only three streams, but opening multiple tabs seems to override that rule. Even so, streams are so easily closed, reopened and refreshed that the initial limit is only a minor annoyance. There are no rules against limiting one Twitter account to one tab.

Take advantage of quick customization (click on a tab's name to edit) to open more streams. Group your timeline, sent tweets and scheduled tweets under one tab, and then open a "connect" tab with mentions and direct messages.

Use the search option to create a stream for a specific hashtag, or to get involved in a Twitter chat. Use the refresh button at the top right to stay updated.

In addition to in-stream search, you can search for the latest happenings on Twitter with "Quick Search" at the top-right of the web app window. The search box appears on top of the page and it will remain within your workspace — a smart feature when balancing several tabs and streams. This search box will also reveal what is currently trending worldwide.

Posting to Your Networks

HootSuite's message-composing features follow suit with its simplicity. At the top of the page, you can create a new post to send to any one, two or all of your connected accounts. If you decide to change or remove the accounts you wish to post to, click on the icon in the top box:

Scheduling is HootSuite's most social media manager-friendly tool, allowing you plan ahead and keep your account actively engaged in just a few clicks. Scheduling can be found below the text field in the compose box. Select the date and time of your choosing, and click "Schedule" when the post is ready to go

HootSuite is also equipped with another social media manager friend — a link shortener, right inside the compose box. Paste the link in the box, click "Shrink" and HootSuite will place it at the end of the text in compose field.

Free accounts will have links shortened to the default "ow.ly," but Pro or Enterprise accounts can create customized shortened links, similar to Mashable's unique "on.mash.to" or the Apple App Store's "tw.appstore.com."

HootSuite's native link shortener will also track metrics on posted links. Access this data via the left sidebar's "Analytics" section, where you can create reports for specific accounts and observe engagement, clicks and aggregate data. Free users can create only two reports, though the overview sections provide quality data (including keywords, clicks and growth) to determine what is working and what's not.

Apps and Extensions

While HootSuite does not offer direct support for social networks outside of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and Mixi, its Apps feature puts Gmail, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr and others in your streams for the ultimate one-stop social shop.

Some apps come at a cost (such as Gmail and Statigram), but there are even more free options for your convenience, including Evernote, Reddit and MailChimp.

HootSuite does not allow posting to these connected apps via the compose message field, nor can you open up new streams with feeds from the connected apps. However, it's a simple way to condense the number of separate websites you check regularly, and helps you keep everything simplified within HootSuite.

HootSuite also offers multiple browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, so you can post to your heart's content without even opening HootSuite.

Install Hootlet (available for both browsers) to post right from a web page or tweet. Right-click or use the plugin button to open a small message window, from which you can post or schedule that thrilling article (or, you know, that hilarious GIF). This is similar to Pinterest's Pin-It button.

Security

Social media security is important not only for work or professional accounts, but also your private personal data, which can be dangerous if placed in the wrong hands. More social networks are stepping up their security game, such as Twitter's recent two-step authentication, and HootSuite is no different.

HootSuite enables login through Google, Yahoo, Open ID, Facebook and Mixi to make your social account inaccessible to someone who cracked your password.

To make your account more secure, find this option under Settings > Account > Authentication, via the left sidebar. Choose how you would best prefer to connect to HootSuite, and the sites will guide the rest of the setup.

Mobile

HootSuite's mobile app (for iOS and Android) follows the web app's use of simple categories and tabs to keep everything organized, much like an outline of your social networks. Within tabs, you can smoothly side-swipe between the streams for quick access.

The mobile app is perfect for checking on your accounts while on the go, or even when your laptop is on the other end of the couch. With virtually all the same functionality and customization, HootSuite's mobile app keeps you on top of your social presence and modify scheduling in the case of unexpected events.

HootSuite can save time for all social media lovers, from community managers, to power-users, to casual tweeters.

Source: HootSuite Begginers Guide

Facebook Autoplay Videos

2013-09-13T00:56:00.005-07:00

Facebook is slowly but surely moving towards the release of its autoplay video feature which many are anxiously waiting for as it will offer a profitable advertisement platform both for those interested in further promoting their brand/products.

As explained by Chistopher Heine in his article in AdWeek, Facebook is to allow some selected mobile users to test this new feature in their news feeds as a start and testing point towards the actual 'big picture' of marketing messages.

The test feature is said to allow specifically for the "Uploaded videos for those kinds of parties [to] autoplay automatically without the poster clicking a button—or having the ability to choose against autoplay. In other words, the news feed experience should closely resemble Instagram video." Furthermore, the types of videos that will be allowed to autoplay are those that have been produced via Instagram, Social Cam and Cinemagram. Other types of vides such as Youtube, Vimeo, etc., will not have the autoplay capability.

No specific date has been announced for the web-based version of this feature.

The actual news announcement by Facebook can be read here, which also contains some links for additional resources as well as some FAQ's.

Click on the 'continue reading' link in order to read the original AdWeek article.

Select Facebook mobile users [...] will see the first autoplay videos in their news feeds, the digital giant has revealed. Advertisers cannot employ the feature for the time being, but the move likely signals a baby step towards when video marketing messages roll into view regularly as Facebook users sift through their friends' thoughts and photos

Autoplay videos in the near term will exclusively feature a small test set of regular Facebook users and musicians/celebrities with verified pages, such as pop performer Lady Gaga or CNN's Fareed Zakaria. The videos will initially autoplay on mute, though users can click the multimedia player to hear sound.

Uploaded videos for those kinds of parties will autoplay automatically without the poster clicking a button—or having the ability to choose against autoplay. In other words, the news feed experience should closely resemble Instagram video.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook's test starts with consumers on the Android mobile operating system, but iPhone users will get into the mix sometime next week. Only videos uploaded to Facebook's platform will autoplay, including those shot via Instagram, Social Cam and Cinemagram. Videos from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources will not auto play.

No timetable was disclosed for Web-based autoplay video by Facebook reps.

Meanwhile, there's been plenty of speculation about when autoplay video advertising will come to Facebook. Originally, the marketing product was supposed to—per industry rumors—arrive in October. Adweek's sources confirm the initiative has been pushed back indefinitely.

Unless Facebook is mulling the idea of not enabling brands to participate in autoplay at all, it'd be surprising to see the month of November go by without letting video advertisers use the product.

The cash that CEO Mark Zuckerberg & Co. could collect with autoplay video during the build-up to Black Friday and in December would likely be staggering. Per one major agency player, an exclusive national buy for the news feed ad unit for a day would easily surpass a Super Bowl spot when it comes to sheer impressions.

Source: Chistopher Heine Facebook Autoplay Videos Come to Mobile, But No Ads Yet News feed feature launches Friday

404 pages and SEO

2013-09-11T09:24:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

One of the common questions I am asked is 'what happens when a page (or pages) in my site renders 404's?'.

That is a very good question, and the fact is that there are many aspects to consider regarding 404's for the site navigation, visitor experience, search engines, SEO in general, etc.

Let's take a look at an article written by Brad Miller from SearchEngineWatch that takes a close look and explain the good and bad of 404's from different aspects.

Click on the 'continue reading' link to read the original article

The Internet is no different than anything else in life.
Mistakes will always happen.

Whether it's because someone has mistyped your URL or you forgot to change an old link, at some point, one of your prospective customers is going to land on a 404 error page.

The error page is shown whenever a server can't find the specified page. Unfortunately, most marketers see an error page as a "tech issue" and don't give it a second's thought.

The 404 page is rarely given the consideration and importance it deserves. There are many different considerations that, if neglected, could have a significant negative affect on the performance of your site.

So, how should we approach 404s? Why are they relevant to marketers? Let's have a look at each of them in a bit more detail.

Limiting the Damage

You'll never completely remove the need for a 404 page. Even if you were to clean up your entire internal link structure, you'll always have people mistyping a URL into their search bar (especially if they are searching on a mobile device).
You also have very little control over the URLs that other sites use to link to you. Unless you make it your business to contact every website owner who links to your site, and make sure their links are accurate and up to date, you will inevitably get the odd mistake.

Having said all of that, the most embarrassing and detrimental of errors are when someone is sent to a 404 from one of your internal pages. This you can control!

To find out which of your pages are currently returning a 404, you can simply check your Webmaster Tools account or use a tool like 404 Checker. You can then check each of these pages and replace any internal links with a more appropriate page on your site.

How to Find 404 Pages

You can use any number of tools to identify 404 pages, such as Screaming Frog, Link Sleuth, or Google Webmaster Tools.

One of the easiest ways is just using a browser extension like Check My Links, which accessible from the Chrome Web Store. This will help you quickly identify internal broken links.

But what about the source of the broken link in the first place?
Google Webmaster Tools is best for this and will help you not only find broken links, but the source of those broken links as well. Here's how.

What About SEO?

Many SEO professionals and website owners will use a 301 redirect to take visitors to the site homepage rather than showing them a 404 error page. Though this is the safest option in terms of retaining the strength of your incoming links, it isn't always best from a user's perspective.

If you have a page on your website that receives a big number of high authority, relevant links, and you've decided to get rid of that page for some reason, then you probably should use the 301 to redirect the search engines and users to an alternative page (not necessarily the homepage). Assuming an alternative page exists.

These external links can be passing link juice, and in most cases they should also be corrected at the source. Meaning, reach out to the site owners and ask them to correct the linking URL or suggest a replacement page.

However, in most cases, it's actually far more appropriate to actually show your visitors the 404 page. If you expect to be taken to a particular page on a company's website and end up on their homepage, you will probably be a little confused and frustrated. In this situation, it's far better to return a helpful and informative 404 page.

Creating a Good 404 Page

A 404 error page is entirely editable and can be customized just like any other page on your site. If it's going to serve a positive purpose, you need to adhere to the following guidelines:

Appearance: It needs to look the same as the rest of your site. If someone appears on a page that has none of the branding or functionality that they were expecting, they are far more likely to close the window and go back to Google. Keep them engaged by keeping your branding and appearance consistent.

Content: Just like any other page on your site, the tone and function of your written copy is crucial if you are going to get your visitors to take the desired action. Make sure your language is welcoming and re-assuring.

Help Users Out: Also, make sure you tell visitors what you want them to do next! Give them a call to action. Help them find what they were looking for by either providing the most relevant links or by giving them an option to search within your site. Or, simply give them a positive experience by making them laugh or give them a game to play.

Make it Positive
There's no getting away from it. The 404 page will only be seen when a mistake has been made. However, it doesn't matter how careful you are, these mistakes will happen. If you're going to hold on to the respect of your visitors, it's up to you to take responsibility for that mistake.

Don't worry though; a mistake doesn't have to be a bad thing. There are lots of companies who take the opportunity to turn this into a positive. Check out some awesome 404 pages here.

The 404 page gives you the opportunity to show some of your personality, character, and humor. In some cases the 404 page can end up being the most memorable of all the pages on a site! Why not let your visitors play some space invaders?

Summary

Rather than seeing your 404 page as a technical necessity, see it just like any other page on your site. It serves a very specific purpose and, if it is targeted and designed in the right way, it can help re-engage your visitors and continue their positive experience on your site.

Source: "404 Page Best Practices" by Brad Miller

Facebook Video Ads?

2013-08-09T00:54:00.002-07:00

Facebook is working on adding a video ads option for its users, however they still have not put the project in motion as they are concerned about the user friendliness and how they can be displayed in a non obtrusive manner as they do not wish to 'annoy' their members.

Specifically, this ad service will allow for members to create 15 second clips that will be viewable via the web as well as smartphones. However, the 'glitch' is that Facebook needs to make this service as attractive and profitable as possible for both ends, they need to find the right balance in order to make it a '$2 million per day' rendering project. The team at Facebook is considering all options so as to not make the ads 'distracting and slow' and as a result lose users interest... 'the videos will appear prominently on members' homepage news feeds, the people familiar said'.

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the original article and let us know your thoughts on this latest Facebook venture...

Original article:

Facebook Inc. FB -0.85% has been planning for months to dive into the lucrative market for online video ads. The holdup: CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to annoy its 1.1 billion members.
As soon as this fall, Facebook plans to launch a video-ad service that will show members 15-second-or-less clips on both smartphones and the Web, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Facebook needs the ads to be sufficiently splashy that they will convince brands to fork over roughly $2 million per day.

Yet since earlier this year, Mr. Zuckerberg and his engineers have toiled over how to make the ads not so distracting and slow that they alienate users, according to current and former employees and advertisers. The videos will appear prominently on members' homepage news feeds, the people familiar said.

Striking that balance between consumer happiness and commercial opportunity has been a challenge for the young company, leading to delays and frustrations among the marketers it is trying to woo.
Some advertisers, for instance, began creating video ads in anticipation of a summer rollout, but had to find alternative marketing plans for time-sensitive products after delays, people with knowledge of the matter said. Despite some grumbles, several big brands have committed to buying ads for the launch, according to people familiar with the matter.

In large part, Facebook has dragged its heels because its video technology needed a major upgrade.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder and chief executive.

One particular concern for Mr. Zuckerberg was that the video ads should load quickly. His engineers have toiled to develop the needed back-end technology for fast delivery, according to the people close to Facebook. Meanwhile, the company had to build out the technology to give its members a more prominent tool to upload and watch clips, which is expected to debut soon.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who has squashed ad products in the past, "set an especially high bar for the team," said one former Facebook employee with knowledge of the process. Mr. Zuckerberg has been heavily involved in the development of video ads, approving changes at every turn and pushing his team to repeatedly test with small groups, to understand how the ads impact activity and time spent with Facebook, according to two people close to the company.

Internally, there were also many discussions about how to limit video ads, while giving advertisers enough room to showcase compelling content.

Digits

Facebook Gets Serious About Video Finally

Facebook debated, for instance, whether to give users the option to stop the video ads from playing automatically—a sensitive issue for users on mobile phones, according to one person close to the company.

Several ad executives said Facebook told them that the videos will automatically play without sound. But a user needs to tap an ad, to restart it and enable audio, these executives said. Users will only be exposed to one video advertiser per day, though may see content from this advertiser up to three times a day.

But Facebook also needed to give advertisers more than 15 seconds. To better compete with standard television ads, Facebook will allow brands to showcase up to three videos in "carousels," a feature in which users swipe from right-to-left to see two more videos from the advertiser, these people said.
"Time will tell if this is viewed as intrusive or highly relevant and welcomed by Facebook users," said Tim Spengler, chief executive officer of Magna Global, a media buying unit of Interpublic Group of Cos. IPG +0.31%

Facebook joins a growing legion of traditional media and Internet companies, including Google Inc. GOOG +0.23% and Twitter Inc., that are trying to grab money that advertisers currently spend on television, a decades-old medium. Advertisers are expected to spend $66.4 billion on TV ads in the U.S. this year and just $4.1 billion on online video ads during the same period, according to eMarketer. Still, the amount spent on online video is expected to grow by more than 40% this year, the research firm says.

For Facebook, video represents a potential catalyst for the company. In the past two weeks, Facebook's stock has risen 45% to above its IPO price after showing in an earnings report it is making money from mobile advertising faster than many investors expected.
With more than one billion users, Facebook can guarantee marketers a global reach that few can match.

But many advertisers are concerned about the high price of the ads themselves, several media buyers said.

According to executives familiar with the ads, Facebook will charge around $2 million per day to let advertisers reach the full Facebook audience of adults aged 18 to 54. As a comparison, a 30-second spot during the last Super Bowl cost advertisers about $3.8 million.
The company is also allowing advertisers to pay less money to reach segments of the Facebook audience, such as all males aged 18 to 54.

One marketer initially considered buying an ad, but ultimately walked away because it found the ads too expensive and struggled to justify the cost, according to an agency executive.

Facebook has told ad executives that the video content will be approved by the company, according to people familiar with the matter. Some advertisers worry they will end up spending more money on creative development, on top of what they are spending on the ad placements. Others, however, are repurposing content made for television, according to one ad executive.

Article: Facebook Moves Cautiously on Video Ads - CEO Zuckerberg Tries to Find Right Balance for Users and Advertisers by EVELYN M. RUSLI and SUZANNE VRANICA The Wall Street Journal

Video Marketing tips for Brand Marketers

2013-08-08T02:13:00.000-07:00

In his article (SearchEngineWatch.com), Greg Jarboe provides 7 tips, or best practices, based on a recent study made by Pixability that help brand marketers towards video and digital marketing success.

As stated in the article, "Pixability anticipates that by 2015, they will likely invest in the production, marketing, and distribution of more than 1 million new YouTube videos. The ones who don't? They end up back in the legacy marketing world wondering why their customers are somewhere else, such as a competitor's YouTube channel."

So, do you want to enhance your brand by exploring the possibilities in video marketing and drive your brand to success?

Take a look at the original article by clicking on the 'continue reading' link below, and see how these best practices can help you!

Feel free to post your comments!

7 Video Marketing Core Best Practices for Brand Marketers (by Greg Jarboe)

Pixability has just released a comprehensive industry study, The Top 100 Global Brands: Key Lessons for Success on YouTube, which details how global brands are successfully driving video and digital marketing success.

Revealing a 99 percent YouTube adoption rate and 73 percent year-over-year growth, the brands driving the best business results are moving beyond television-style brand awareness to much more socially-engaged, longer-form, content-rich channels.

Why YouTube?

Starting with the list of companies identified in Interbrand's Best Global Brands report, Pixability collected data from YouTube channels owned and managed by these Top 100 Global Brands. Pixability software collected a list of 2,214 candidate channels. A group of analysts then verified each channel according to the criteria listed above and reduced the list to 1,378 verified channels.

All individual metrics per video were added by channel and then by brand to get to the total values used in the study. The raw data was used as an input into Pixability's Online Video Grader software.

The data presented in the study represents full and exact counts of the metrics described above. No sampling, estimates, regressionsor projections were used.

"We knew that the data collection for such a large set of videos was a monumental task, but our software quickly delivered audience, usage, and performance data in every dimension," said Andreas Goeldi, study co-author, CTO, Pixability. "We found significant disparities between the top and bottom performers in this elite group, showing that some brands get YouTube and others just don't."

Top Brands Embrace YouTube, But Challenges Remain

Over the past five years, the top brands have gone from just a few dozen YouTube uploads in 2005 to more than 10,000 cumulative video uploads in a single month last year. These 100 brands alone now account for 9.5 billion collective YouTube views and more than 2,200 channels containing 258,000+ videos.

Pixability anticipates that by 2015, they will likely invest in the production, marketing, and distribution of more than 1 million new YouTube videos.

But brand marketers have work to do: the study uncovers that more than 50 percent of their videos get fewer than 1,000 views.

"The best brands and marketers understand YouTube and treat it differently to get stellar results," said Rob Ciampa, study co-author, EVP Marketing, Pixability.

"The ones who don't? They end up back in the legacy marketing world wondering why their customers are somewhere else, such as a competitor's YouTube channel."

Key Lessons for Marketers

Understanding that video marketing is just as important as video production, these brands offer valuable lessons. The report pinpoints seven core best practices for brand marketers.

1. Be a well-oiled, consistent, video content machine

The most successful brands have 50 percent more videos per channel compared to the least successful ones.

The best-performing brands publish high volumes of content on a regular schedule.

Top aggregate brands publish approximately 78 videos per month. Leading media brands produce even more: close to 500 videos per month.

2. Take video optimization and YouTube channel architecture seriously

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so discoverability is key.

YouTube SEO follows very different rules than traditional SEO.

Within traditional SEO—Google prioritizes web pages with YouTube video embeds.

The best performing 25 percent of Top 100 Global Brands took more care in optimizing their videos and channels, maintaining twice the number of playlists and video tags than the bottom 25 percent.

3. Don't get caught in the overproduction trap; lesser quality video works well, too

The best YouTube marketers produce a broader range of video content.

Videos do not need to be prime-time quality because those with lower production value can be just as effective.

4. Apply an "Always On" strategy to video marketing

The most successful brand marketers on YouTube integrate their online video strategies with their traditional, offline marketing strategies.

Successful video marketers don't hesitate to produce video series for very limited, but highly engaged audiences, such as event participants.

17 of the Top 100 Global Brands use less than 50 percent of their channels.

Continued advertising results in sustainable channel growth and subscribers.

5. Apply branding consistently, intelligently, and methodically

The top performers consistently brand their videos in both the video content itself as well as in metadata, which includes titles, tags, and descriptions.

An appropriate level of branding within videos is essential because successful YouTube videos are often used outside of the context of a branded YouTube channel, such as website embedding.

Over-branding may limit sharing within independent communities of interest.

6. Adding more content is more important than adding more channels

37 percent of all channels have not been updated with fresh content for over 120 days.

Successful marketers have YouTube channels that clearly focus on specific target audiences.

7. Engage your community with social media

Facebook and Twitter are among the most important sources of traffic on YouTube within the Top 100 Global Brands.

Users frequently share videos on social networks, and video content is attractive for sharing.

The top 25 percent of brands had significantly higher social sharing of video than the bottom 25 percent.

Viewer sentiment is starting to show distinct trends by industry. Home and luxury segments have the highest sentiment, while financial services and consumer goods have the lowest.

You can download the report here.

Source: 7 Video Marketing Core Best Practices for Brand Marketers (by Greg Jarboe)

New Google Display Planner by AdWords

2013-08-06T02:41:00.000-07:00

A new announcement has been made by Google AdWords -- the launch of the Google Display Planner "a new unified research and planning tool, bringing you targeting ideas and estimates that can help you build better display campaigns"!

This new tool is based on three existing tools in Google AdWords, the Contextual Targeting Tool, Placement Tool, and Google Ad Planner. This new tool makes it easier for advertisers to find everything in one place. As explained in the announcement, "Display Planner is built into AdWords, so with one click you can add all the keywords, placements, or other targeting ideas you choose directly into your campaigns. Display Planner also makes them easy to download and share with your team members".

Both the Contextual Targeting and Placement Tools will expire in the upcoming days, and the Google Ad Planner will be made obsolete in early September. It is recommended that those advertisers using the Google Ad Planner should backup their data in the next few weeks.

For more detailed information on the Display Planner and how you can start using it, please click on the 'continue reading' link below and don't forget to leave us your feedback!

Original Blog Post Announcement:

All your display planning and targeting needs, all in one place

For some time now we've been working to unify all our helpful AdWords display tools in one easy and streamlined location. Today we're taking another big step in that direction by integrating three of our classic tools — The Contextual Targeting Tool, the Placement Tool and the Google Ad Planner — into the new Google Display Planner. As we mentioned in an earlier blog post, Display Planner is our new unified research and planning tool, bringing you targeting ideas and estimates that can help you build better display campaigns.

All the functionality you're used to is now part of Display Planner — and with all the tools in one place, everything's easier. Display Planner is built into AdWords, so with one click you can add all the keywords, placements, or other targeting ideas you choose directly into your campaigns. Display Planner also makes them easy to download and share with your team members.

The Contextual Targeting Tool and the Placement Tool will be sunsetted in the next few days, and Google Ad Planner will be deprecated in early September. If you use Google Ad Planner and have existing media plans and site lists, you should export and save them in the next few weeks.

Learn More

For more information on transitioning to Display Planner please check out the Guide to Display Planner for AdPlanner users and make sure to sign up here for our Display Planner Webinar on September 18th, 2013 1pm EST!

Ready to start using Display Planner now? You'll find it in the Tools and Analysis menu in your AdWords account.

Author: Max Cohen, Product Manager Google Display Network

Google Link Scheme (Webmaster Tools)

2013-07-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

In their Webmasters Tools website, Google has presented the Link Scheme guide which include scenarios that can have a negative influence on your search results.

Jennifer Slegg of SearchEngineWatch has written an article based on teh above mentioned guide that details the main schemes presented in the Google Webmasters Tools 'Link Scheme' guide , such as links, over-optimized anchored texts, advertorials, etc. and their effect on search results.

Take a look at the original article by clicking on the 'continue reading' link below and let us know your thoughts on the comment section...

Google Revises Link Scheme Definitions: Guest Posts, Press Releases, Advertorials Can Hurt Rankings by Jennifer Slegg

Google had issued two warnings about advertorials earlier this year, including one Google Webmaster Help video which dealt specifically with advertorials, as well as a separate video in which Google's Matt Cutts discussed upcoming SEO changes.
Not surprisingly, Google has now updated their webmaster guidelines to include advertorials, along with other popular spammy linking techniques, in their Link Schemes help document.

Google Further Downplays Links

First, perhaps the most significant change is the fact that Google removed the entire first paragraph from their link scheme help article which detailed how your website’s incoming links influenced your search rankings.
Here is the original first paragraph from the link scheme help article, which dates back at least a year:

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links influences your ranking. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.
Could this removal be indicative of something larger? Or was it simply done to streamline the help article with the new changes?
It's no secret that links aren’t as a valuable as they were a few years ago and SEO professionals have been adjusting their linking tactics because of it. But is this another sign that Google is reducing the emphasis it places on links in the search algorithm?
Last month, in a separate change, Google began advising webmasters that high-quality sites, not links, are the best way to improve search rankings.

Keyword-Rich/Optimized Anchor Text Links
Another change has to do with heavily-optimized anchor text used in press releases and articles that are distributed on other sites. This technique is seen very frequently, particularly in highly competitive markets. Google gives a pretty common example of optimized anchor text:

There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.
Google also brings up “Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links”. This has somewhat gone out of favor, particularly mass submissions to free article sites for all but very spammy churn and burn markets.
However, guest posting is still pretty popular, although many sites that accept guest blogging, as well as those doing the writing, have begun either using nofollow, or in an optimized straight URL link.

Advertorials and Native Advertising

The final addition is advertorials. Just as Google has been stating in the recent webmaster help videos, this is now an example of unnatural links that violate the Google guidelines.

Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank.
it is nice to see Google continue to update their help documents, especially for pages that are frequented by those webmasters to have received an unnatural linking warning from Google. However, the removal of the first paragraph will likely leave some SEO professionals pondering the change, and what exactly it means, if anything.

Source: Jennifer Slegg (Google Revises Link Scheme Definitions: Guest Posts, Press Releases, Advertorials Can Hurt Rankings)

Pinterest Personalized Pins

2013-07-28T02:45:00.000-07:00

Pinterest announced on Friday that it is rolling out new features/improvements to their service.

Edit Button to take control of what you get to see, or not (Follow/Unfollow Boards) as well as how you see it displayed in your feed.
You can also select to get personalized pins and boards based on websites you go to that have the Pin It button (detailed info at Help Center or updated privacy policy).

Set to be available in "the next few weeks", these proposed changes could create some privacy concerns; although there has been confirmation that Pinterest will update its privacy policies.

Take a look at the original post by Pinterest, by clicking on the 'continue reading' link below and share your thoughts on the new features and how they will affect user experience as well as privacy concerns.

Pinterest Post: Making Pinterest a bit more personal

We want you to feel like Pinterest is really yours—so in the next few weeks we’ll be trying out new ways to help you see more pins you love, and fewer you don’t.

Here’s what’s coming:

A new Edit button…

Use the Edit Your Home Feed button to get your feed just how you want it, from the web or your phone. Go to Follow Boards to see stuff you might like based on what you’ve been pinning. (So if you pins lots of outdoorsy stuff, we’ll try to show you rock climbing, kayaking or backpacking boards. And the more you pin, the better our recommendations will get!) Or, go to Unfollow Boards to stop seeing stuff you’re not that into anymore.

May we suggest…

If you’re interested, we’ll also suggest personalized pins and boards based on websites you go to that have the Pin It button. So if you’re planning a party and have gone to lots of party sites recently, we’ll try to suggest boards to make your event a hit. You can learn more about personalized pins and boards in our Help Center or updated privacy policy.
We’re excited to give everyone a more personalized experience, but we also understand if you’re not interested! We support Do Not Track, and you can change your account settings anytime.

Here’s to a homier home feed!

We’ll keep working to help you see more stuff you love when you come to Pinterest. Meanwhile, we hope you like the updates!

—Ke Chen, Software Engineer, Currently obsessed with pinning to Products I Love

I welcome your thoughts on the above new features and how they will affect user experience as well as privacy concerns...

Tips for Improving Your LinkedIn Marketing (article)

2013-07-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

In a very interesting article, Steve Rayson discusses 9 ways to improve your LinkedIn B2B marketing attempts.

As he explains, in a research study made by Hubspot results showed that "more companies had acquired a customer through LinkedIn than any other social media channel. There are now over 225m registered LinkedIn members, including 77m in the US and 50m in Europe." This provides an understanding of the importance of LinkedIn in B2B marketing and the opportunities that exist in its strategic usage.

Take a look at the original article by clicking on the "continue reading" link below:

9 Ways to Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing (Steve Rayson, SocialMediaToday.com)

LinkedIn is known as a networking and recruitment site; however, the unique nature of LinkedIn makes it a very attractive platform for B2B marketers. For example, a Hubspot research study found that more companies had acquired a customer through LinkedIn than any other social media channel. There are now over 225m registered LinkedIn members, including 77m in the US and 50m in Europe.

In my view LinkedIn should be a cornerstone platform in any B2B marketing strategy.

Below are 9 ways you can use LinkedIn to improve your B2B marketing.

1. Actively use your company page

You probably already have a company page on LinkedIn, if not, you should create one. The company page is more than a nice visual page with banners. The company page allows you to:

produce targeted status updates

display slide presentation content

promote your services and products

create brand ambassadors from your employees

customise your company page for specific audiences

build an audience of followers

2. Join Groups

Where do your customers hang out? Join groups where your customers are present and try to be a helpful member of the group and respond to questions. This takes time so don’t spread yourself too thin.

3. Share content that adds value

As with all of your content marketing, share all forms of interesting content and make sure it will be valuable to people in your industry. Share content regularly and vary your content, including pictures, videos and links.

4. Encourage your friends and colleagues to share and like content

People can be reluctant to be the first to comment in a discussion but once you have a discussion going it can be hard to stop people. One simple way to get things going is to encourage your friends and colleagues to share your content and to comment on it. Another way to engage your audience is to ask questions when you post content. A number of studies have found more interaction when the post starts with a question.

5. Listen and participate

Make sure you listen and participate in the groups you have decide to focus on. This is essential if it is your own group, see next item, but it also important if you want to actively participate in other groups.

6. Set up your own Group

Setting up your own group on LinkedIn can:

help establish you as a thought leader in your industry

enable you as moderator to develop a very focused group without the spam that can afflict many groups on LinkedIn

highlight and showcase your own content as you wish

be a more select group as you can control membership

develop relationships through interactions

potentially generate interest and enquiries about your services

If you establish a Group remember it is your responsibility to lead it. Post regular content, encourage discussions and comment on discussions. It is hard work and takes time but it is your responsibility.
ProjectManager.com is a great case study of how to build a LinkedIn Group.

7. Ask for recommendations

It may seem obvious but ask people to recommend you or your company on LinkedIn. Recommendations are still one of the most powerful ways to establish your credibility.

8. Use LinkedIn Services

The LinkedIn sales solutions team a mine of useful information and advice. There are many paid services from premium membership to ads which may help you. Many people use Google Ads but LinkedIn ads can be equally as effective as LinkedIn allows you to focus on people rather than keywords. You can decide the level of executive you want to target in specific industries and sectors, you can place an ad directly on their pages.

9. Monitor your performance

As part of your LinkedIn strategy you should set yourself performance targets. The targets to monitor might include:

the number of followers of your company

the number of people joining your group

how often your posts are shared

the level of engagement through comments, discussions and polls

number of click throughs to your website or landing pages from LinkedIn

number of leads, track where your leads come from and be sure to have a lead category for LinkedIn in your CRM

conversions achieved

With the purchase of Pulse and Slideshare, LinkedIn is going to grow in importance as a marketing platform. Take your time now to fine tune your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Blog Tips: Increasing Blog Conversions

2013-07-19T02:53:00.001-07:00

Blogs are all about the reader, and as such you need to invest in making their experience in your site the best possible one.

Author Brian Casel (Mashable) does a very good job presenting various web page design related steps that you can take, which can play an important role in attracting more readers to your blog and making the stay!

As you know, content quality and optimization is of major importance to a visitor's site experience, and as such these few design implementations can enhance and affect a reader's overall interaction with your site as well as affect "social shares, newsletter subscribers and even sales (if that's your goal)".

Take a look at the original article by clicking on the 'continue reading' link below

Brian Casel

Educational and inspirational content has a powerful impact on your audience, but design plays a huge role in your blog's performance. How your readers experience content on your site directly affects social shares, newsletter subscribers and even sales (if that's your goal).

If you’re serious about building an audience through blogging, it's important to optimize your blog to convert visitors into regular readers, subscribers and customers.

Quite a few design considerations come into play when optimizing your audience’s experience on your blog. This article covers five design tips to help you improve the overall blog experience and, in turn, increase conversions.

1. Place your newsletter signup at the end of every article.

If you aren't already collecting email addresses through your blog, you should be. Your newsletter is the most important thing to keep your most loyal visitors coming back to your site, again and again.

Most blog owners place a callout to their newsletter signup at the top of the sidebar, which is a good idea — that's where most visitors will expect it to be. But there is one place even more important for your newsletter callout to make an appearance: at the very end of your blog posts

Here’s why: Those visitors who stick around long enough to make it all the way through your article are much more likely to enter their email address in order to hear more from you. You delivered on what they were searching for after they clicked the link that led them to your blog. Now you’ve converted a casual visitor into a loyal fan of your blog (and eventually a customer).

You can also implement a newsletter signup box that slides up from the bottom of the screen once you’ve scrolled down near the end the article. This kind of animation is attention-grabbing, which can help increase conversions. However, be aware that some visitors might find it overly intrusive to their reading experience.

Image: HitTail

2. Include high-contrast calls to action.

It's important to include high-contrast elements that stand out on your page (newsletter signup boxes are a good example). These design features elevate their positions in the visual hierarchy of the page, making it one of the first things the visitor sees when his eyes scan the screen.

If the background color of your blog is white, try using a dark background for your newsletter signup box. To make it really stand out, be sure this is the only element on the page with that background color.

Don't go overboard. A simple, stark contrast of color will be enough to draw plenty of attention to these calls to action. Don’t boost the font size, add circles and arrows, or make it blink — you’ll be competing with other elements on the page, diminishing the experience.

Image: Buffer

3. Consider relevance for the blog's navigation.

There are two very common mistakes when it comes to navigating a company blog. First, the company blog shares the same top navigation with the rest of the company website.

Links to products, pricing, information about the company and quote requests are perfectly fine to include on the company homepage or when viewing product information, but they aren't relevant to visitors who are reading the blog. The goal of the blog navigation should be to encourage further exploration of your other articles.

Remember, most of your blog visitors arrived via a Google search or social media. They came for your content; they can discover your products later.

Second, too many navigation links compete for the reader's attention. Keep it simple with just a few key links to help the reader discover the very best content on your blog.Adding a list of "popular posts" to the sidebar is a good idea, especially if it is curated to direct traffic to your highest-converting blog articles. You don't need to include the tag cloud, archive links, author links and other links here, too. Of course, you will want to have one callout to draw attention to your company or product, but it shouldn’t be the primary attention-grabber when viewing your blog.

Successful blog navigation keeps the emphasis on content by directing readers to key blog categories and a list of popular articles. A small callout to the product can be present but de-emphasized.

4. Include great images.

As important as your writing and topics are for your blog, there’s no getting around the simple fact that most readers will respond to engaging visual elements. That’s why it's so important to incorporate beautiful, bold and high-impact imagery in your blog posts.

You can find free images by searching Flickr Commons. Compfight is a popular tool for searching Flickr, and another free resource is Wikimedia Commons.

You can also find higher quality photos by spending a little money. Sites like 500px and Photodune are quite affordable.

Don't limit your blog to just photos. Add custom illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs and wireframes to really drive your points home. It’s easy to whip up charts and graphs using Powerpoint or Keynote. Wireframing tool Balsamiq helps you sketch a diagram to illustrate a point.

Image: Nathan Barry

5. Include strategic social sharing buttons.

The conversion goal for your blog isn’t only to convert visitors into subscribers, or subscribers into customers. You also want your visitors to share and spread your content on social media.

When people share your content, they feel a sense of responsibility to their followings; what they’re recommending is worth their followers' time. That’s why delivering valuable articles is so critical.

There are a few ways to make social sharing easier for your audience. One very popular technique is to add social sharing buttons that remain fixed or "float" alongside your article as the reader scrolls down.

The key to making these floating social buttons really have an impact is to carefully select which social networks to include. This comes down to knowing your audience — you don't want to overload it with every single network on the web. Pick the three networks where you know your readership is most active, and add those buttons.

Another useful tool is ClickToTweet, which lets you create a custom "Tweet This" link. You can place this link anywhere within the content of your articles. The most effective way to use this tool is to place a “Tweet This” link right after a sentence that is particularly insightful or worthy of sharing.

Like everything else, it's important that you don't go overboard. Add no more than two “Tweet This” links per article in order to avoid diluting your content. The more prevalent something is, the less noticeable it becomes.

Source: Brian Casel, 5 Design Tips to Boost Blog Conversions

SEO and Content - the unbreakable bond

2013-07-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

Based on the latest changes that Google has made to their algorithm (see Panda and Penguin updates) which has definitely influenced the workings of marketers and how they implement their strategies, author Nathan Safran has taken a look in his article "SEO & Content: The Time is Now for Collaboration! [Data]" at the correlation between SEO and content and how closely they are linked.

A study made showed that there is a strong correlation, and that SEO and content teams need to increase this collaboration further to increase results.

Despite the increased focus on content in today's online landscape, search marketers don't think the right place for content to live is under the umbrella of SEO. They do, however, overwhelmingly want to collaborate more closely with content than they currently do, in order to give their content the best possible visibility in the search results.
As search marketers, we can infer that the overwhelming desire to work more closely with content teams implies that they strongly believe doing so will only help their natural search visibility.

Take a look at the original article by clicking on the 'continue reading' link:

Post by Nathan Safran (SearchEngineWatch)

Given Google's search algorithm changes in the last 12+ months that have placed increasing focus on quality content, have things changed to such a degree that content creation must now be a core competency of SEO professionals?

To find out, earlier this month we surveyed 50 search marketers – a mix of in-house and agency professionals – to test for the degree that content and SEO are now intertwined.

Search Marketers: Content Isn't (and Shouldn't Be) Under SEO

To obtain an accurate assessment of both whether content has now migrated under SEO and whether search marketers think it should fall under SEO but it has not migrated because organizational changes have lagged behind the landscape, we asked the search marketer respondents to indicate where content falls in the organization and where they think it should fall.

Interestingly, there wasn't a significant difference between where content currently sits and where search marketers think it should sit. Only 21 percent of organizations have content currently falling under SEO and a smaller percentage (14 percent) actually believe it should be under SEO.

At first glance these findings seem strange. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 6-12 months, you would be hard pressed to have missed the degree to which content – unique, quality content – has become the cornerstone of pretty much everything marketers are doing online.

Given content's foundational significance to the practice of search marketing, how could marketers not be chomping at the bit for the chance to bring it under their direct purview?

Search Marketers Want More Collaboration With the Content Team

The answer lies in the next survey question. When asked to consider the extent to which SEO works with the content team to ensure maximum search visibility, nearly 8 out of 10 (79 percent) respondents indicated they should be working "more" or "much more" closely.

Taken together, these two survey questions strongly point to search marketers' belief that content need not fall under SEO's direct control, but boy do they want to work more closely to ensure that the content is properly optimized.

Conclusion: Consider Close Collaboration With Content Creators

Despite the increased focus on content in today's online landscape, search marketers don't think the right place for content to live is under the umbrella of SEO. They do, however, overwhelmingly want to collaborate more closely with content than they currently do, in order to give their content the best possible visibility in the search results.

As search marketers, we can infer that the overwhelming desire to work more closely with content teams implies that they strongly believe doing so will only help their natural search visibility.

Whatever your current level of collaboration with content teams, consider ways in which you can work more closely with them. The data suggests that doing so will only help your organization's content perform better in the search results.

Source: Nathan Safran, article "SEO & Content: The Time is Now for Collaboration! [Data]"

Search Engine Ranking Factors by Moz for 2013

2013-07-12T04:31:00.000-07:00

Matt Peters wrote a post with an overview of the results and key factors that played a role in the 2013 study by Moz. The actual data will be presented sometime during the summer.

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the detailed overview of the study:

By Matt Peters (2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors)

Yesterday at MozCon, I presented the results from Moz's Ranking Factors 2013 study. In this post I will highlight the key takeaways, and we will follow it up with a full report and data set sometime later this summer.

Overview
Every two years, Moz runs a Ranking Factors study to determine which attributes of pages and sites have the strongest association with ranking highly in Google. The study consists of two parts: a survey of professional SEOs and a large correlation study.
We'll dive into the data in a minute, but some of the key findings include:

Page Authority correlates higher than any other metric we measured.

Social signals, especially Google +1s and Facebook shares are highly correlated.

Despite Penguin, anchor text correlations remain as strong as ever.

New correlations were measured for schema.org and structured data usage.

More data was collected on external links, keywords, and exact match domains.

Survey
Cyrus Shepard and Matt Brown organized this year's survey of 120 SEOs. In a few weeks, we'll release the full survey data. For now, thank you to everyone who participated! This wouldn't have been possible without your help, and we appreciate the time and effort you put in to answering the questions.

The survey asked respondents to rate many different factors on a scale of 1-10 according to how important they thought they were in Google's ranking algorithm. We present the average score across all responses. The highest-rated factors in our survey had average scores of 7-8 with less-important factors generally ranging from 4-6.

Correlations
To compute the correlations, we followed the same process as in 2011. We started with a large set of keywords from Google AdWords (14,000+ this year) that spanned a wide range of search volumes across all topic categories. Then, we collected the top 50 organic search results from Google-US in a depersonalized way. All SERPs were collected in early June, after the Penguin 2.0 update.
For each search result, we extracted all the factors we wanted to analyze and finally computed the mean Spearman correlation across the entire data set. Except for some of the details that I will discuss below, this is the same general process that both Searchmetrics and Netmark recently used in their excellent studies. Jerry Feng and Mike O'Leary on the Data Science team at Moz worked hard to extract many of these features (thank you!):
When interpreting the correlation results, it is important to remember that correlation does not prove causation.

Rand has a nice blog post explaining the importance of this type of analysis and how to interpret these studies. As we review the results below, I will call out the places with a high correlation that may not indicate causation.

Enough of the boring methodology, I want the data!
Here's the first set, Mozscape link correlations:

Correlations: Page level

Correlations: Domain level

Page Authority is a machine learning model inside our Mozscape index that predicts ranking ability from links and it is the highest correlated factor in our study. As in 2011, metrics that capture the diversity of link sources (C-blocks, IPs, domains) also have high correlations. At the domain/sub-domain level, sub-domain correlations are larger then domain correlations.
In the survey, SEOs also thought links were very important:

Survey: Links

Anchor text
Over the past two years, we've seen Google crack down on over-optimized anchor text. Despite this, anchor text correlations for both partial and exact match were also quite large in our data set:

Interestingly, the surveyed SEOs thought that an organic anchor text distribution (a good mix of branded and non-branded) is more important then the number of links:

The anchor text correlations are one of the most significant differences between our results and the Searchmetrics study. We aren't sure exactly why this is the case, but suspect it is because we included navigational queries while Searchmetrics removed them from its data. Many navigational queries are branded, and will organically have a lot of anchor text matching branded search terms, so this may account for the difference.

On-page
Are keywords still important on-page?
We measured the relationship between the keyword and the document both with the TF-IDF score and the language model score and found that the title tag, the body of the HTML, the meta description and the H1 tags all had relatively high correlation:

Correlations: On-page
See my blog post on relevance vs. ranking for a deep dive into these numbers (but note that this earlier post uses a older version of the data, so the correlation numbers are slightly different).
SEOs also agreed that the keyword in the title and on the page were important factors:

Survey: On-page

We also computed some additional on-page correlations to check whether structured markup (schema.org or Google+ author/publisher) had any relationship to rankings. All of these correlations are close to zero, so we conclude that they are not used as ranking signals (yet!).

Exact/partial match domain
The ranking ability of exact and partial match domains (EMD/PMD) has been heavily debated by SEOs recently, and it appears Google is still adjusting their ranking ability (e.g. this recent post by Dr. Pete). In our data collected in early June (before the June 25 update), we found EMD correlations to be relatively high at 0.17 (0.20 if the EMD is also a dot-com), just about on par with the value from our 2011 study:

This was surprising, given the MozCast data that shows EMD percentage is decreasing, so we decided to dig in. Indeed, we do see that the EMD percent has decreased over the last year or so (blue line):

However, we see a see-saw pattern in the EMD correlations (red line) where they decreased last fall, then rose back again in the last few months. We attribute the decrease last fall to Google's EMD update (as announced by Matt Cutts). The increase in correlations between March and June says that the EMDs that are still present are ranking higher overall in the SERPs, even though they are less prevalent. Could this be Google removing lower quality EMDs?
Netmark recently calculated a correlation of 0.43 for EMD, and it was the highest overall correlation in their data set. This is a major difference from our value of 0.17. However, they used the rank-biserial correlation instead of the Spearman correlation for EMD, arguing that it is more appropriate to use for binary values (if they use the Spearman correlation they get 0.15 for the EMD correlation). They are right, the rank-biserial correlation is preferred over Spearman in this case. However, since the rank-biserial is just the Pearson correlation between the variables, we feel it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison to present both Spearman and rank-biserial side by side. Instead, we use Spearman for all factors.

Social
As in 2011, social signals were some of our highest correlated factors, with Google+ edging out Facebook and Twitter:

SEOs, on the other hand, do not think that social signals are very important in the overall algorithm:

This is one of those places where the correlation may be explainable by other factors such as links, and there may not be direct causation.
Back in 2011, after we released our initial social results, I showed how Facebook correlations could be explained mostly by links. We expect Google to crawl their own Google+ content, and links on Google+ are followed so they pass link juice. Google also crawls and indexes the public pages on Facebook and Twitter.

Takeaways and the future of search
According to our survey respondents, here is how Google's overall algorithm breaks down:

We see:

Links are still believed to be the most important part of the algorithm (approximately 40%).

Keyword usage on the page is still fundamental, and other than links is thought to be the most important type of factor.

SEOs do not think social factors are important in the 2013 algorithm (only 7%), in contrast to the high correlations.

Looking into the future, SEOs see a shift away from traditional ranking factors (anchor text, exact match domains, etc.) to deeper analysis of a site's perceived value to users, authorship, structured data, and social signals:

You can also visit the site to view the slide made by the author with more details (or read the post)...

Source http://moz.com/blog/ranking-factors-2013

Online and Offline marketing sales

2013-07-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

One of the most beneficial tactics to search engine marketing is being able to make online and offline marketing attempts effectively come together and work for your business.

Joseph Kerschbaum (SearchEngineWatch) has proposed in his article "5 Tactics to Bridge the Online and Offline Sales Funnel", a series of techniques that can be used to effectively help businesses increase their online ROI while at the same time improving their offline results.

Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the original article.

article:

SEM managers face a daunting challenge: marrying online and offline marketing initiatives. I've worked with numerous companies that utilize PPC to initiate a conversation with a lead/customer and then close the sale offline via a sales call. Over time, I've learned a few techniques that help companies boost online conversion rates while enhancing their offline close ratios.

Awesome Content that Motivates

Awesome content is the foundation on which you should build your sales funnel. The content on your landing page should be inspiring, informative, and memorable.

Your content should motivate a visitor to take the desired action. What content will your core audience find irresistible?

Contact Form that Collects the Appropriate Information

As a general rule, the lead generation form on your landing page should be as short as possible. What is the appropriate contact form length? Honestly, I don't know. It depends on your business. However, think about it this way: what information will aid a salesperson the most when they follow-up at a later time?

Your contact form should gather enough information for a successful follow up call, but the form shouldn't ask unnecessary questions – or questions that are inappropriate for this visitor's station in the conversion process.

A great way to determine the appropriate questions for the contact is to talk with your sales team. Find out what they would like to know before getting a prospective customer on the phone.

Conversion Confirmation Page that Sets Proper Expectations

Someone comes to your website/landing page. You effectively influence that visitor to complete your contact form. This looks like success – but you aren't done! The conversation with your prospect is just getting started! You need to utilize the conversion confirmation page to set the proper expectations of the next step of the conversion process.

The confirmation page should provide additional supporting content. Go ahead and include information to validate your prospect's decision to interact with you. This would be a great place to provide whitepapers, case studies, client testimonials, or any industry accreditations.

Remember that the point of conversion, when someone has made a decision to possibly purchase from you, is filled with hope and excitement. Go ahead and fuel that excitement!

Follow-Up Email that Continues the Conversation

Another great way to set proper expectations is a follow-up email after someone completes your lead form. Many companies utilize this strategy but they do so with such lackluster effort, and they probably generate mediocre results.

Make sure this follow-up email is parallel to the tone of your website. Make it memorable. Let the prospect know when they will receive a follow up. Don't forget to provide additional supportive content. Include links to case studies and other sales/supportive content on your website.

Call Script that Bridges the Communication Gap

Once you've generated a lead and followed up appropriately and thoroughly, then you need to close the sale. Make sure that your sales team knows what content is displayed on the website and the content provided during each step before actually getting on the phone. Your sales team member will have a fuller understanding of the sales process which will help them enhance their follow-through.

Pull It All Together

You may be doing all of these for your lead generation efforts or perhaps none of them. Even if none of these tactics fit well for your business, that's OK – but hopefully this article got you thinking about your conversion funnel and how you might be able to improve your sales process.

Source: Joseph Kerschbaum "5 Tactics to Bridge the Online and Offline Sales Funnel"

SEO leading indicators and progress.

2013-07-01T07:57:00.000-07:00

In her article for Search Engine Watch, Purna Virji successfully presents the importance of leading indicators when presenting the progress of a campaign to clients or management.
As she explains:

Economists regularly use leading indicators — the measurable economic factors that change before the economy as a whole changes — in order to analyze and predict future performance. Lagging indicators, on the other hand, are factors that change after the economy as a whole does.

[...] More valuably, these quick reports will build the client’s understanding of the different KPIs we SEO professionals monitor, and will be great for assuaging impatient clients and sparking a very productive dialogue each month.

The top 5 SEO indicators proposed/covered are:

SEO Visibility (with Competitive Intelligence)
Links Acquired
Domain Authority
Search Traffic
Core Rankings

Click on the 'continue reading' link in order to see what these leading indicators are and how you can benefit from using them.

Original article:

Economists regularly use leading indicators — the measurable economic factors that change before the economy as a whole changes — in order to analyze and predict future performance. Lagging indicators, on the other hand, are factors that change after the economy as a whole does.

Since SEO is typically a long-term strategy, clients tend to gauge success based on what would be more of a lagging indicator (i.e., profits). Proving the worth of a campaign on this sole lagging indicator can be inadequate, as profits will only come in after the SEO channel as a whole has changed sufficiently. Clients can get antsy as they wait for their goals to be reached, and though a link building campaign may be going spectacularly well from an SEO professional’s vantage point, the time it takes for links to mature may be something many non-SEO folk have difficulty fully grasping.

By borrowing the economist’s mindset and identifying a core set of SEO leading indicators, we can better showcase how things are progressing to clients or senior management. This allows small wins to be celebrated or problems to be identified and understood by the client throughout the life of the campaign.

More valuably, these quick reports will build the client’s understanding of the different KPIs we SEO professionals monitor, and will be great for assuaging impatient clients and sparking a very productive dialogue each month.

In addition to being uber-useful, the five SEO leading indicators outlined below are quick and easy to pull together and review. While SEO professionals might be very familiar with some of these, and may review them in depth, the trick here is to boil them down into the bare essentials (i.e., the top-level view that clients can quickly read and easily understand).

1. SEO Visibility (with Competitive Intelligence)

Want to be able to monitor progress over time, not just for your site, but for your competitors as well? What if you could see this data in a single graph with just the push of a button?

Co-founded by the noted SEO analyst Marcus Tober, SearchMetrics is a phenomenal SEO analytics tool that tracks a vast amount of actionable data and presents it in concise and easy-to-read formats.

Use their SEO Visibility report to track the current trend and historical development of a domain's visibility in search engines. Essentially, the index reflects how often a website shows up in the search results. You can even add in up to four competitors to track against as well.

As per SearchMetrics, SEO visibility is composed of search volume and the position of ranking keywords, wherein each position is individually measured by a specially calculated factor based on their formulae.

Why use this as a leading indicator?

Looking at this historical, top-level view of the site’s visibility in the search engines allows for both problems as well as improvements to be quickly identified.

Additionally, comparing the SEO visibility of thematically similar websites or competitors will provide the most value as industry-wide developments will be factored in and market trends easily identified.

It’s also a great way to benchmark the client against their competitors and show how the campaign has been growing.

2. Links Acquired

Showing how content-based outreach or link building efforts have grown the link profile of a company validates the effort put in and can succinctly convey the success of these efforts.

Here we’ve quickly pulled the report of backlinks discovered from Majestic SEO, which can showcase the progress of link building in a simple graph.

Why use this as a leading indicator?

If link building is done well, there is often a correlation between the growth of incoming links and an increase in the search visibility metric that can make a case for causation to the client, that essentially the improvement in the link building campaign is showing improvements in search visibility.

This can often help make the case for increased budgets for content or outreach efforts to the clients, since they can tie it back to actual numbers and see the trend.

3. Domain Authority

Domain Authority represents Moz’s best prediction about how a website will perform in the search engine rankings. It is a good indicator of trust of the site, quality of the link profile, user behavior and likelihood of a domain ranking higher up in the SERPs.

Note that since domain authority can sometimes fluctuate, it’s not a precise historical measure to use, but snapshots of the score over time can be a good indicator, especially if the score changes by several points.

Why use this as a leading indicator?

Essentially, the higher the domain authority, the better the chances for overtaking competitors who rank higher and the better trust signal in the eyes of the search engines.

Use this to explain to clients the quality of the SEO work being done, since a well-executed campaign that builds trusted, high-quality links while emphasizing a better user experience on site, will typically yield higher domain authority scores.

A higher domain authority site will be more competitive in the rankings and have a higher chance of moving up in the rankings.

4. Search Traffic

A simple snapshot of organic search traffic trends pulled from Google Analytics provides a useful graph to see how SEO efforts have grown traffic over time.
Why use this as a leading indicator?

Comparing monthly visits at the start of the campaign to the present time is a simple and easy-to-digest metric to showcase the progress and success of the campaign.

As keywords move up in the SERPs to reach the tipping point for click-through rate and outreach efforts create more searches for the brand, the organic search traffic is bound to improve, and will show the growth created simply as a result of SEO efforts alone.

5. Core Rankings

Often we share with clients large lists of keyword rankings. Especially for clients with very large volumes of keywords to monitor, these reports can get cumbersome and thus ignored far too often. On a twice monthly basis, take the top 10 highest value keywords for the client and run manual rank checks to track progress over time.
Why use this as a leading indicator?

A shortlist of the highest value keywords will be of the most interest to the clients and will show how close to the tipping point they are; thus clients can see how much closer they are to their ultimate goal of large volume increases in profit. Use an easy-to-read key, such as a highlight for keywords on page 1, green to show improvements and red to show declines in rankings.

Source: Top 5 SEO Leading Indicators: The Best Way to Enhance Your Monthly Client Reports

Google AdWords and Google Analytics integration made easy!

2013-06-28T02:29:00.000-07:00

If you have been having issues integrating your Google AdWords account with your Google Analytics account, then you are in for a treat! Google has optimized its support for this, and is now offering a new and improved way of linking your accounts.

The benefit of being able to linking these 2 products and integrating the data received is that users can have more detailed and essential information in order to analyze the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and of course, Return On Investment.

This linking process will be available on all accounts in the upcoming weeks

To read the original post, please click on the 'continue reading' link:

Original post:

Many businesses advertise to find new customers, and optimizing advertising campaigns to reach the right people will increase marketing effectiveness and ROI. Google Analytics helps marketers achieve this by offering insights into customer behavior on an advertiser’s websites, apps, and other properties. By linking AdWords and Analytics accounts together, these rich insights from Analytics can flow into AdWords.

Today, we’re happy to announce some useful improvements making it easier for Google Analytics and AdWords account owners to link their accounts.

Here are a few specific benefits of combining AdWords and Analytics data:

Importing Analytics goals and transactions into AdWords allows marketers to define success in powerful ways, often without having to retag your site

Site engagement stats help marketers better understand marketing performance and how to optimize

Remarketing with Google Analytics allows marketers to reach new audiences

Importing AdWords data into Analytics lets marketers see data across many accounts in aggregate and combined with rich site metrics

All of these features depend on linking AdWords and Analytics accounts, and this process is now easier than ever before. Previously, linking accounts involved multiple steps on many pages spread out between two products, and this process has now been consolidated into just a couple steps all in one linking wizard.

Once the new linking process launches to all Analytics accounts in the coming weeks, you’ll be able to create additional links from the Admin section of your Analytics account. (If you’re logged in to your AdWords account, you can also link accounts by going to Tools and Analysis > Google Analytics and following these same instructions.) Just click AdWords Linking in the Account column, and then click the New link button to start the linking wizard.

To take advantage of simplified account linking, benefit from combining data in both products, and get more out of your marketing campaigns, follow the steps above to link your accounts or learn more in our help center.

Posted by Chris Morgan and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Source: Improving Analytics & AdWords Account Linking

Dynamic Remarketing by Google

2013-06-26T00:51:00.001-07:00

Great news for those who are interested in expanding their marketing attempts via dynamic remarketing, Google has announced the availability of its new Dynamic Remarketing program to all clients with a Google Merchant Center account!

What does remarketing do exactly? Via remarketing, you can display relevant ads to a specific sector of your audience. Basically, you can create automatic, customized ads that 'link' to your shoppers past views or purchases in your site and suggest other products they might be interested in.

Is it successful? Google states that "our clients have seen clickthrough rates which were as much as a 450% higher from dynamic remarketing campaigns vs. campaigns that did not use dynamic creative for remarketing."

Want to learn more? Click on the 'continue reading' link below to read the announcement

Original announcement:

As we continue to expand our advertising solutions, our goal is to provide a great user experience for both advertisers and consumers. We know that advertisers are always looking for new ways to reach their customers with compelling ads that drive engagement and conversions. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of dynamic remarketing to all clients with a Google Merchant Center account. We are also currently piloting this new feature in the travel and education sectors and plan to expand availability to more sectors later this year.

Beautiful, tailored ads to reconnect with customers

Dynamic remarketing lets you automatically create beautiful, customized ads that connect with shoppers across the web, by reminding them of items they've seen on your site. You can build ads quickly with dozens of templates to choose from that you can customize to reflect the design elements of your brand. We have also made it easy to get started by automatically creating dynamic text and display ads for you.
Sample dynamic ads (see more here):

Click to enlarge
Advertisers have seen great results compared to their traditional remarketing campaigns:

Sierra Trading Post, a U.S. retailer of outdoor gear and clothing, saw a 2x higher clickthrough rate and a 5x higher conversion rate

As Europe’s premiere “heavy metal online shop,” EMP Merchandising grew conversion rates by 230% and decreased their cost of sale by 30%.

You can read more about other client successes on Think Insights.

Optimizing dynamic ads to drive performance

Dynamic remarketing delivers tailored ads across the web that combine the layouts, products, messages and offers that your customers are most likely interested in, based on what they viewed on your website. You can benefit from our:

Auto-optimized layouts which predicts the best performing layout for each impression

Product recommendation engine which optimizes the combination of related and popular products that show in your ads [Learn more]

Real-time bidding algorithm which helps boost performance by calculating the optimal bid for each impression

For help on getting started reference this Help Center article.

Making it easy for advertisers

Managing campaigns more efficiently is just one of the many benefits of remarketing with Google. Last year, we introduced a site-wide remarketing tag and remarketing with Google Analytics that both made it easy to get started with your campaigns. You can also use the tag to discover new customers similar to your site visitors with Similar Audiences, which has been recently made available to all clients in AdWords.

Remarketing drives great ROI for advertisers, it can also bring publishers significant revenue lift, as studies have shown, and compelling ads for consumers. We’ve also given consumers options to exercise control over their ad experience with features like the Ads Settings and Mute this Ad.
To learn more about what remarketing with Google can do for your business, register for our upcoming Learn with Google Webinar: Reaching the Right Audience with Remarketing on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 1pm ET.
Posted by Aitan Weinberg, Group Product Manager

Source: http://adwords.blogspot.gr/2013/06/reconnect-with-site-visitors-using.html

Bing announces Bing Boards

2013-06-23T01:27:00.001-07:00

Bing has announced the launch of its newest project, Bing Boards.

What exactly are Bing Boards and what are they useful for?

As explained in the announcement:

Bing Boards are visual collections of images, videos and links that tell a story from a unique point of view. They are created by people who are passionate about the topics they blog, write or talk about – not companies or algorithms. Bing Boards are designed to be complementary to web search results, appearing in the middle column of Bing, and are aimed to help people to discover new, visually rich content.

Click on the 'Continue reading' link below to read the announcement

At Bing, we believe that for every search there is someone who can help. During the last year, we’ve introduced features that pull knowledge from friends and experts alongside traditional search results and are continuing to explore the intersection of social and the collective community of the web to help people do more with their experience.

On any given day, Bing runs hundreds of experiments that help us improve the search experience. Most are nearly invisible, ranging from small tweaks to the search algorithm, to changes in our ad selection, to optimizations in the color, size, and placement of features.

In addition to minor tests, we also try out more noticeable features to determine whether they are helpful, engaging, and informative. We are currently testing several of these features, which a limited number of people may notice over the next few months. Although people can't opt-in to experiments, if you do notice something different, we encourage you to give it a try.

Introducing Bing Boards
While we won’t announce every experiment, today we wanted to put the spotlight on one called Bing Boards. Most people spend at least some time every day on sites dedicated to a particular area in which they have a special interest. It could be a hobby, a political or social issue, an area of pop culture: the topics are as varied as the people who are interested in them. Now, in the same way that we’ve brought knowledge from friends and recognized experts into search, we’re providing a new way for passionate people to create highly specialized content, specifically for search.

What is a Bing Board? Bing Boards are visual collections of images, videos and links that tell a story from a unique point of view. They are created by people who are passionate about the topics they blog, write or talk about – not companies or algorithms. Bing Boards are designed to be complementary to web search results, appearing in the middle column of Bing, and are aimed to help people to discover new, visually rich content.

Who exactly is creating Bing Boards? At the moment, we’re working with a small group of food and lifestyle bloggers, experts and social influencers that have helped us iterate and evolve the experience. As more people create and interact with Bing Boards over time, we’ll evaluate and determine how to broaden and evolve the offerings. To learn more about Bing Boards check out this Bing Explore page.
To get an idea of how Bing Boards appear, search for “photo booth backdrop” to see a board created by Chelsea Costa from Lovely Indeed.

This is the first of several upcoming social and community experiments. If you see something new, play with it and see what happens – your interest might help make it a permanent part of Bing.

- Chen Fang, Program Manager, Bing Experiences

Source: Bing "Trying New Approaches to Social and Community Search"

Facebook's Instagram announces Video Instagram for iOS and Android

2013-06-21T01:40:00.000-07:00

So a few posts back, I informed you that Facebook is getting ready to announce new product. There where many speculations as to what that product might be. Well, its a secret no more... Facebook has announced that Instagram will now be offering Instagram video!

Now users can record 15 second mobile videos and edit them accordingly via available features.

Basically, what this new feature offers includes the recording of 15 seconds of video, editing, filters (13), anti-shake functionality, cover frames and of course sharing (Facebook and Instagram web file)

As explained by Kevin Systrom (Co-founder, Instagram) in his post on Instagram's blog:

When you go to take a photo on Instagram, you’ll now see a movie camera icon. Tap it to enter video mode, where you can take up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera.
You’ll also find that we’ve added thirteen filters built specifically for video so you can keep sharing beautiful content on Instagram. When you post a video, you’ll also be able to select your favorite scene from what you’ve recorded as your cover image so your videos are beautiful even when they’re not playing.

So what does this mean for your content? Nothing’s different from photos. We’re still committed to making sure you have control over all of your content. Only the people who you let see your photos will be able to see your videos. And as with photos, you own your videos. You can learn more about Video on Instagram—including our new Cinema feature—by visiting the Instagram Help Center.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll create.

Instagram for iOS version 4.0 is currently available for download in Apple’s App Store and Instagram for Android version 4.0 is now available on Google Play.

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