For months, each played this coy game by refusing to directly engage or discuss the other. That changed yesterday with the arrival of the Don’t Be Evil tool, created by a conglomeration of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other unnamed social networks.

The Chrome extension bookmarklet and accompanying Focus on the User website have been designed to call Google out over the prominent placement of their own Google+ posts and pages in organic search results. This coincided with the launch of Search Plus Your World, the latest Google initiative to customize search engine results.

The creators of the bookmarklet say that Google’s new Search Plus Your World search results run counter to everything the search giant has said they stand for. That instead of using the entire social web, it unfairly gives precendence ato a Google product.

The group has created a video that details the difference in how a fairer Google results page might work that incorporates all social media platforms:

In an interview with Search Engine Watch, a Facebook spokesperson commented dryly that “I think the content of the site and the video say it all best and we don’t really have anything to add beyond that.”

No one is quite sure who sponsored the creation of the tool, but it seems to be just one more quiet blow in this war over social media and the web. This is a strange war to watch. It’s easy to see where Google is coming from. They have a new product they want their users to be exposed to, so they include it on their page. If users find that unfair, then perhaps they might try out Bing or go back to Yahoo. Our money is on users sticking with Google.

The real lesson to take away from all of this is that Google Plus is here to stay. “Evilness” doesn’t really enter in to the equation, Google is going to do what it’s going to do, and it seems unlikely that this new inclusion of Google Plus content will so thoroughly turn of f their users as to cause a mass exodus. By that same token, however, it seems unlikely that Facebook (or Twitter, for that matter) will lose users to Google Plus solely because Google is featuring results from that platform. Perhaps “war” is a bit too strong of a word. Schoolyard tiff might be more accurate, hmm?

Facebook’s continued growth is not really news, but this report does solidify our opinion that as more and more users come to associate Facebook (not just any social networking site, but specifically Facebook) with the web, it gives that organization more and more influence in terms of how people find and use information.

The social web is not just a fad, it’s a paradigm shift for web use. That’s why ArizonaSEO has a sister blog, PhoenixSMO, that reports and discusses recent social media news and information. For a complete picture of online marketing, we can no longer just rely on traditional SEO. More attention must be paid to Facebook as it continues to dominate the web. Below the cut is some more of the continued report from Hitwise:

Top-visited Websites in 2011
Facebook was the top-visited Website for the second year and accounted for 10.29 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2011 – a 15 percent increase from 2010. Google.com ranked second, with 7.70 percent of visits – a 7 percent increase – followed by YouTube (3.17 percent), Yahoo! Mail (2.95 percent) and Yahoo! (2.47 percent).

The combination of Google properties accounted for 11.98 percent of all U.S. visits – a 22 percent increase compared with 2010. Facebook properties accounted for 8.93 percent, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 6.81 percent. The top 10 Websites accounted for 32 percent of all U.S. visits between January and November 2011, which was flat compared with 2010.
The fastest-moving search terms based on absolute change in 2011 included hurricane irene, bin laden wives, osama bin laden dead, les paul, nick ashford dies, apophis asteroid, sheen dumped, osama bin laden dead, hurricane irene path and amber cole.

Important changes to note:
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.

• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.

• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.

• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content (page description): This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu. Google is extending these for pages with specific technical information. Snippets will now include more samples of the direct information sought such as prices and consumer reviews. Along these same lines Google is now culling the content for these snippets from the greater context of the body copy or text of a page. This is as opposed to grabbing a handful of header info and forming a page summary with it.

• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.

“What this is talking about is where it shows your actual search title in the results. The blue link you click on, that’s the title of the search result that’s built into the page.”
“A lot of the time these will be auto-generated based on back links, so Google is now choosing to pay less attention to that, and more attention to the actual content of the page and possibly auto-generate the link based on that content.”

“What might happen is that companies will go out, buy a whole bunch of back links, or they’ll have anchor text that points back to one page in the hope of ranking that page.”
“If that link is across the whole site and is part of the structure of the site, it doesn’t necessarily add any value. Google is going to pay less attention to it as a result.”

1. Do not offer incentives, monetary or otherwise. You’ll be pleasantly surprised the percentage of customers who will do it for free if you just ask. If you offer to pay these “brand ambassadors” it may be that they will get turned off to the whole idea. This could backfire in a big way.

2. Make it easy for your customers. Don’t send them a link to review you on Google unless they have a Gmail address.

3. Don’t ask people for Yelp reviews. You may get a few positive reviews in the short term, but if your customers are not active Yelpers, Yelp’s SPAM filters will eventually toast their reviews. You’ll end up with no reviews and potentially some angry customers who wonder why their review disappeared. if they happen to be active Yelp users, then excellent, but not a significant portion of the population is.

4. Do it promptly. Don’t wait. People are most likely to give you feedback right away. The longer you go from the time of service to the time of request, the likelihood of getting reviews drops precipitously. According to Ted Paff, CEO of CustomerLobby, a review service, “Comment card reviews solicited at the time of service can see completion rates of 80-90%” vs. much lower rates for other forms of review solicitation.

5. Follow up! If you have the customer’s email address, follow up your initial request three days later with a reminder email containing links of where to for review submissions. Reminder emails can account for a huge percentage of review conversions.
While positive reviews are great, the real power is in the reviewer. A customer willing to spend the time to review you is a brand ambassador. Instead of just asking them for reviews, you should be thinking about how you can harness your relationship with these valuable people to help spread the word, both online and off.

Which method is right for you depends on how you conduct your business. Consider the following:
Do you collect customer email addresses? Most of the businesses I work with know they should but rarely do, or rarely do it with any rigor.
Do you have more than 50% of your customers’ up-to-date email addresses? If so, then you can use email solicitations where you can ask them to provide a review via email or you can direct them to a website where they can leave a review.
If email doesn’t work for you, then you’ll need to consider how you typically interact with your customers. If most of your business is done in person then give them a comment card. If it’s over the phone, you may have to do it via mail. Try stapling a comment card with return postage to your invoice.

If you have any questions about why online reviews are so important for your business online marketing strategy, get in touch with the experts over at Phoenix Synergy.

1. My Places

Google launched a new tab on Google Maps called “My Places,” which gives users somewhere to see all of the places they’ve starred on Google Maps, rated on Google Places, or added to a customized map with icons and annotations through My Maps. It might be a good idea to encourage customers to star your business, which will keep you in their personal collection of places and encourage loyalty to your business.

2. Google Advertiser Tools

Google announced some tools for Google Display Network advertisers aimed at improving measurement, transparency and value for display campaigns. One feature is Relative CTR, which shows how ads perform relative to other ads running in the same places on the network. One feature is Impression Share, which represents the percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which they were eligible for. Another feature is the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool, which tells you why your ads aren’t showing on the Display Network. Finally, there’s the Unseen Impression Filter, which ensures CPM advertisers aren’t charged for impressions that have a small chance of actually being seen (like below the fold).

3. Google Offers

A mysterious ad from Google appeared on the web which led to a page called “My Offers,” which seems to indicate that Google will be using various means to get offers in front of customers (in addition to the recently launched Google Offers product, which is a Groupon-style service). Given all of Google’s various products, it has a lot of ways it could potentially expand its offers offering in terms of visibility and user engagement.

It is useful to start with Google’s official description of the project. They call it “real-life sharing rethought for the web.” It is in that statement that Google defines how it differentiates itself from Facebook. It sounds a little lame, but it is truly in earnest: Google has thought a lot about how people interact in real life and online, and how those two have some fundamental disconnects in the current social media landscape. To that end, Google has designed Google + with a number of features allow for more organic social interactions that more closely resemble our real life social habits. What it really comes down to in its essence is a communication tool for sending out information to specific groups of people instead of, for instance, every single one of your friends and acquaintances (ala Facebook) or every person on the web (as with Twitter).

The feature that allows for this messaging control is something called “Circles”. Circles allows you to put your contacts in to specific groups just as you do in your head with your mental catalog of who you know. So you can have co-workers in one circle, immediate family in another, and people you can’t really remember how you know but they should probably still be on your list in a third. In this way you can strictly control who gets to see that neat link to some political article on the web that you might not want to share with your annoyingly outspoken coworker. Circles also lets you control what information is coming in. If someone is cluttering up your feed, put them in a new circle, called “annoying people”.

It’s worth noting that this is hardly a new concept. Facebook has a “groups” feature for interacting with different people, and Twitter has a “lists” feature that sort of do what Circles accomplishes, but Google wants to do it in a cleaner, more intuitive fashion. Be honest: how many of you used those features, let alone knew they existed on those services? Google + puts Circles front and center. You literally cannot add a friend without putting them in to a Circle.

The next feature is “Sparks”, and this is where the most interesting SEO angle arises, but will get to that in a minute. Sparks’ tagline is: “Nerding out. Together.” That’s what it’s designed for: discovering and sharing stuff on the web you’re interested in. You simply enter in your interests, and Google curates a feed of related content that relates to that topic. It’s very organic and straight forward. This feature sets Google + apart from the competition, and really connects it with the wider internet in a way that other platforms cannot match. It makes sense: Google’s strong suit is in search, and their profitability depends on people using the web in their everyday lives. If they can successfully integrate search and share functionality into user’s everyday social media existence, then they have won the war. Social media platofrms are only as interesting and useful as the cotnent that users bring into the ecosystem. With Sparks, Google is doing almost all the hard work for you. Indeed, they are calling Sparks an “online sharing engine,” and it is a brand new way of thinking about search. We’ll definitely be keeping our eye on Google + for no other reason than Sparks.

Instant Upload isn’t so much a social feature as it is an extension of Google’s cross-device integration. An Android Google+ app will upload every photo you take on your phone to a private folder in the cloud for later sharing. You have to give it permission first–Google definitely doesn’t want to recreate the Buzz privacy debacle here. An iPhone app is also on the way.

Huddles are–seriously–just group chatrooms. Google’s apparently banking on the idea that implementation really matters when it comes to building a successful chatroom. We’re not sure if the average group of friends wants to get together into a big IM chat to plan out all their activities, but Huddles hopes to alleviate some of the stress of aligning schedules by getting everyone into a virtual room together to bang out plans. Optimistic, but they’re off to a good start with the Google+ app and web browser support. Platform agnostic access is key.

Hangouts represent Google+’s strongest core idea and perhaps its least-likely-to-succeed feature. Hangouts want to tap into that experience of spending long nights with friends doing nothing but chatting and enjoying the company of the people you care about most. Those are the nights you remember for years: not because of what you did, but because of who was with you. Google aptly realized that adult lives with adult schedules make those moments rare. That’s a powerful experience to chase after, and Hangouts use video chats for up to 10 people to try to capture those moments. It’s an open-ended design that encourages people to stop by rather than plan get-togethers. Do people regularly do this with video chat? Some, definitely, but probably not as many as Google hopes.

Google+ represents an urgent need to add a social layer–a people layer–onto Google’s library of services. Instantly becoming the replacement for Facebook or Twitter isn’t the goal–this is the first step towards a transformed, more tightly integrated Google experience.

The New York Times recently published an expose concerning underhanded or “black hat” search engine optimization tactics performed on behalf of J.C. Penney in order to boost their rankings for a wide variety of keywords. According to the Times, these tactics may have boosted J.C. Penney’s profits in the short term a considerable amount. When these tactics were publicized, however, J.C. Penney’s search engine rankings were harshly penalized, which, when coupled with the bad PR for the company, contributed to a severe blowback against J.C. Penney’s online brand strength.

It’d be nice to think that search engine rankings are fair and accurate, but the fact is that they can be and frequently are being gamed. It’s not hard to see why: there’s some serious money to be made. That quick buck, though, is what could be making that new web-based business a venture capitalist is looking to invest in such a juicy proposition. But when that bubble pops, and those short term black hat SEO-driven profits dry up, what’s that investor left with? That’s where seeking out some SEO expertise comes into play.

SEO investigation can be done quickly, provided you know what you’re looking for. But it requires knowing the latest tricks and tactics that the less-than-savory SEO practitioners are employing. Reputable SEO firms have to stay on top of these trends to be able to remain competitive in their honest efforts. That experience and expertise could be invaluable to a venture capitalist about to sink a lot of money into a firm that is only getting page views and conversions because of dirty SEO tricks.

Consider the case of Business.com. It had just been acquired a few weeks prior before a major Google algorithm update rolled out, the now infamous “Panda” release. Business.com’s ranking were hurt, and while it may not mean the end for the site or its investors, one has to assume that the purchase price was negotiated based off of their rankings and page views before they got slammed.

An even more compelling example comes from a recent acquisition by Google itself. Google’s mergers and acquisitions team purchased a site called BeatThatQuote.com for £37.7m. After this deal had been pushed through, it came out that BeatThatQuote.com had been employing less-than-honest SEO tactics to game its rankings. Obvious tricks, too, like paid links and spam. Google was essentially shamed into removing BeatThatQuote.com from its index for a short time.

So, if even Goggle itself is failing to do some basic SEO due diligence, can a venture capitalist really afford not to? The question then, is why are investors and acquirers apparently not using seeking out expert help concerning the long-term SEO viability of their prospective investments? If they’re smart, they probably will be soon enough.

We here at Arizona SEO are big believers in the benefits of using pivot tables for Pay-Per-Click analysis. Managing and optimizing a large number of text ads can be a cumbersome and tedious task (especially if you’re trying to use split testing, a concept we’ll discuss in a later post), but the clever use of pivot tables in Excel helps simplify the process by systematically aggregating AdWord performance stats across a large volume of ads to make ad copy optimization faster and easier, as well as providing more insight into something works as opposed to another option.

Creating a pivot table isn’t that difficult, but using them correctly and efficiently is a skill that needs to be cultivated. To that end, here’s a quick run-down on how to create a pivot table, and then how to begin to use them. (This guide will assume a certain level of familiarity with Google’s AdWords interface.)

1. Run an Ad Performance Report on whatever campaign and ad groups contain the ads that you’re seeking to fine tune, and then open that report up in Excel.

2. Now highlight the data with Ctrl + A, choose ‘Insert’ on the tool bar and select the ‘PivotTable’ option.

3. Now choose the columns in the ‘PivotTable Field List’ that you want included in your pivot table.

And that’s it! Ahh, if only it were that simple. Yes, you’ve created a pivot table, but now, what do you do with it?

4. Well, to begin with, you might notice that calculated information like your CTR, the Cost/Conversion, and your Conversion Rate will now need to be recalculated because the Pivot Table has summed these stats together. Annoying. Rectify this by using simple formulas in the first row of each column and then drag that formula into each cell in that column.

Alright, so now we’ve got a pivot table, but how do we use it?

5. Look at your conversion rates. Some are high, some are low. What gives? This is where the pivot table proves to be so useful. It enables you to begin to notice the differences between distinct sets of keywords and ad copy.

6. Now you can start to ask “Why?” Why is one piece of copy converting more than the other? Why does one ad get more impressions, but fewer clicks? Pivot tables put the information out in front of you so you can start to puzzle this information out.

It’s that question, the “why?” question, that so many people get hung up on. And that’s where experience and expertise comes in. Learning the basic tools of PPC management is useful, yes, (especially the pivot table) but learning to parse the information that the pivot table makes readily available to you is another thing entirely.

If you are looking to invest in Pay-Per-Click, or you want to maximize your ROI on your current campaign, give the experts at Phoenix Synergy a call.

1. The Bottom Line
You’re a business owner. You want to know that you’re getting the best bang for your buck in whatever you invest in. We get it. That’s why going with a local SEO company makes the most sense. Large SEO companies uniformly charge more to pad their profit margins so they can cover their higher overhead costs. Small, local SEO companies can and do undercut their prices.

2. Smaller Doesn’t Mean Less Capable
So, you might think that the larger companies charge me because they can do things that small companies can’t. That’s simply untrue. Their scale does not afford them any opportunities that aren’t available to smaller business. The results don’t lie, either. Just check out a local SEO company’s track record for their past clients.

3. Smaller Does Mean More Focused
A small to medium sized SEO company, by its very nature, is far more adaptive and responsive to the rapid changes in the market. Fewer campaigns to manage means more customization, more feedback, and more personalized results. Each keyword gets the attention it needs and every proposal matters. To your bottom line as well as theirs.

4. You’re Not Just Some Number; You’re Number One
Local SEO companies can afford to understand your business on a more intimate level. They don’t just have your site on a pre-configured SEO assembly line, they are willing and able to learn more about your industry to better pare their expertise with yours. A successful small SEO company doesn’t want you to see them as a vendor, but as a vital business partner with a vested interest in your success.

5. Versatility. Flexibility. Adaptability.
When a change comes in the online tech world, it comes fast and without warning. The big guys can get caught flat-footed, with all of their eggs in one basket. A small SEO company has the ability to rapidly change their practices, figure out what works, and implement it all before the big guys have even developed (and voted on) a game plan in some boardroom somewhere. Weeks and even single days matter in the SEO world, so why get stuck with a slow-moving behemoth? Small companies are nimble and can adjust very quickly.

6. You Can Hold Them Accountable.
If you have a business partner, you want to be able to meet with them. Ask how things are going, if you can help in some way, or maybe things aren’t progressing as quickly as you’d like. A local company can meet those desires so much more easily than any large player in this market. Whether it’s a quick ad-hoc meeting at a lunch spot downtown, or a simple telephone call, local businesses are on your time table and willing to talk to you when you need them. You won’t have to talk to a junior-level account executive with no authority; you’ll be able to call up the person who’s actually in charge.

7. SEO Creates a Synergistic Relationship
Every other business relationship you may have may ultimately just boil down to dollars and cents, but an SEO partnership is different. You need a company that’s going to work alongside you to help your company grow. Because when you grow, they grow as well. They can’t survive if their clients aren’t successful, so they won’t be happy unless their partners are too. A local SEO company’s entire business model is fundamentally based on seeing your company succeed.

8. The Local Search Market is Booming.
Used Google lately? Go there now and try searching for “pizza”. Just “pizza”. Did you notice? You just got a local result. Neat. But it’s happening for more than just pizza. Location-influenced search results are here to stay, and their reach is ever-expanding. A local SEO company, then, will best know how to integrate your company into that growing web of local results. The number of online searches for local businesses is up 58%, year-over-year, and that number will continue to rise.

9. Local Search Delivers Better Results, For the User and For You
Local search is catching on in a big way for one reason: it’s really useful. Better results for users means more and more people turn to the search engines to find what they’re looking for in their town. And if you go with a local SEO company, your site will be there waiting for them. A local SEO company knows the market, because it’s where they live and work too. They’ll know all of your top competitors, and how to beat their strategies (especially if your competitors have chosen to go with one of the big SEO companies)

10. You’re Keeping Your Money in Your Local Economy.
Your business depends on your hometown thriving, and what better way to ensure that the local economy grows than by choosing to keep as much money as possible within its borders. You might think that your choice to do might be insignificant, but it can pay back dividends in all sorts of ways. Helping small businesses keeps the money in their local economy promotes a better life for the whole community, in the short and long-term.

Well, what are you waiting for? Give a local SEO company a call today.

Bright Builders had entered in to a contract with a gentleman named Christopher Prince to design, host, and optimize a site called www.copycatclubs.com. The only merchandise offered on this site was a variety of counterfeit golf clubs based off of the Cleveland golf club line. Apparently the copy of the site (not to mention the name of the site itself) made it clearly evident that these were copyright-infringing knockoffs. The owner and operator of the site, Mr. Prince, who was responsible for the idea of selling these clubs in the first place, was only fined $28, 250. This shocking disparity in damages awarded brings this to the attention of every web design, hosting and SEO firm out there.

What makes this case particularly troublesome is that it is the first time that an SEO/Web Host or other Internet intermediary was found liable for contributory infringement without first having received actual notification of the counterfeit sales from a third party. In other words, Cleveland Golf Clubs never reached out to Bright Builders to mention that maybe the site they were hosting was hawking illegal goods.

The case that Cleveland Golf Clubs did pursue was based off of the theory that Bright Builders knew or at least should have known of the infringing conduct based on the name of the website, the content of the website, and certain discussions Bright Builders had with Prince regarding his web site. Needless to say, the tactic worked.

Now, most web design and SEO firms who have a hand in guiding the content of a given site will probably already have a decent amount of common sense and advise a client of the potential legal ramifications of going live with a site that so obviously infringes on trademark, but should that make every small scale SEO or hosting company liable for the content of their client’s sites?

One of the lawyers for Cleveland Golf says:

“The jury found that web hosts and SEO’s cannot rely solely on third parties to police their web sites and provide actual notice of counterfeit sales from the brand owners. Even prior to notification from a third party, Internet intermediaries must be proactive to stop infringing sales when they knew or should have known that these illegal sales were occurring through one of the web sites they host.” (Source)

That’s a somewhat reasonable assumption, but it is a rather dangerous legal precedent moving forward. It also highlights the disparity in the damages awarded. How is that the hosting and design company could be held liable for so much more damages than the man who came up with the idea to sell trademarked goods in the first place?

Regardless of whether or not this particular judgment seems fair or balanced (maybe Bright Builders should’ve hired a better lawyer), it still means that moving forward, SEO and hosting businesses need to understand that in today’s courtroom, the distinction between hosting content and being responsible for it is growing ever murkier.