Everyone has their opinion about Peyton, including people in the office here at SEER.  Adam and I believe that Peyton will play the bulk of the season next year, where Mark believes he is washed up and is all but a press release away from announcing his retirement.

But we are not the only folks speculating about what happens next.  Peyton has created serious buzz in the sports world, as well as the search & Twitter worlds.  This morning, doing a Peyton Manning search on Yahoo showed something interesting:  a tab for the latest stories, and an additional tab for the latest Twitter results about Manning.  Even more interesting is that you can filter for the type of tweets you want to see – “Everyone” vs “Insider” tweets.

I wonder if baby bro Eli Manning, who just won a Super Bowl, is getting the same treatment when you search his name? Nope.

What about Tim Tebow, the most polarizing/debated QB in the league? Nothing.

Fine, let’s get off the QB kick.  What are some other hot topics trending right now?  Looking at the top 10 “Trending Now” topics on Yahoo, sure enough Peyton was sitting at number 2 around the time I searched.  Is this the criteria for a query to have a separate tab for the latest tweets?

I decided to click on Nicolas Cage to see if he receiving the same Twitter love as Peyton.  He sure is. But now you are filtering for everyone versus “Hollywood Insiders.”

What if we looked at a trend that wasn’t a person, say “Unemployment?”

This is something we’ve seen before (via Mashable): showing the latest Twitter results without filter options and included with tabs for photos and videos.

Okay. So only if you are a person trending on Yahoo do you get the latest Twitter results in a separate tab with filtered options?  Wrong.  “U.S. Stocks” results offer the Twitter tab with only one filter option of “everyone”, Reese Witherspoon defaults to an Associated Press photo slide show, and “gold prices” gets nothing.

Beyond Yahoo’s Trending Topics – Additional Queries Showing Twitter Tab in Search Results

The Top 10 trending results are constantly updating, but I wanted to run searches on other top newsworthy people/topics.  I decided to jump on CNN.com, and run Yahoo searches on some of the headlines across a number of categories.

Oh yeah, we are in an election year. A search for Barack Obama gets the Twitter tab with filter options. Rick Santorum as well.

What about countries being discussed on CNN? Searches for “Syria,” “Israel” & “Iran” are all showing the Twitter tab with filter options.

Any other people on CNN showing these type of results? Lindsay Lohan and Whitney Houston. Lindsay even gets an additional filter of “Official Tweets.”

Any Musicians, Artists or Bands Getting any Twitter Love in Yahoo Search Results?

A Red Hot Chili Peppers die hard, they were my first choice for inspection.  Not only do they have a Twitter tab, but an “Albums” tab as well.  This was seen for some other artists (Foo Fighters, Alicia Keys) but not others (Beastie Boys, Bob Dylan).

What does it all mean?

While it’s clear that Yahoo is ramping up its Twitter integration within search results by offering latest tweets for hot topics and people of interest, how they determine which queries will earn the additional tab is unknown.  Jeremy Lin is the most discussed athlete in sports right now; why doesn’t he have a tab for latest tweets? How is Yahoo deciding which queries receive specific filter options? What qualifies a Twitter handle to be classified as an “insider”?

What do you think?  Share your thoughts below in our comment section or connect with Ryan Fontana via Twitter.

Around Thanksgiving, one of my clients began seeing a huge spike in search partner conversions. While the conversion rate rose for search partners, the Bing & Yahoo conversion rate stayed pretty much the same. This was concerning.

I didn’t want to be the wet blanket. Is it possible that MSN added great new sites to their network and this is legitimate? Of course, but I needed to do several things to be sure I wasn’t wasting money.

#1 – Find the Big Fraudsters in Publisher Reports

Start with the basics. Run publisher reports to identify who the converting search partners are. In this instance, one Search Partners placement had 14 clicks and 14 conversions, yielding a conversion rate of 100%, while Bing & Yahoo converted at 2.20%. While Bing and Yahoo can convert at very different rates from search partners, this big of a discrepancy is odd. Even if a spammy site could convert at 50% (over 20x what Bing and Yahoo do) there is much less than a 1% chance (0.5^14=0.00006) that all 14 clicks will convert. I actually got an anti-virus warning when I tried to visit one of these domains. It’s safe to say that conversions from those sites are fraudulent.

#2 – Find the Little Fraudsters in Publisher Reports

As adCenter professionals know, a big chunk of publisher activity may be on sites with only one or two total clicks. If you’re advertising for multiple products and you don’t want to pivot ad group or campaign data to get more performance data on individual publishers, it gets even worse. Individual clicks can’t be analyzed like the bigger partners; however, you can look at aggregate small volume site performance.

For this client, I had 964 placements with only one click; 237 of them converted (24.58%). For a large number of very small search partner sites to convert at over 10x the rate of Bing and Yahoo is “strange.” What makes this even more odd is that the biggest search partner sites for this particular client (keywordblocks, financecity) were converting at rates similar to Bing and Yahoo search properties (3.67% and 3.52% for keywordblocks and financecity respectively).

Hundreds of small search partner sites were likely recording fraudulent conversions, but the biggest search partner sites were likely not doing this. Why was this happening? I think Google Analytics data shows how smaller sites could engage in widespread over-reporting of conversions.

# 3 Check Analytics Conversion Specific Data

This client has three website conversions, all of which get volume (there is a fairly equitable mix between them). The Bing pixel can record conversions in multiple ways (Clickable does a good job describing the different MSN tracking methods – one per click and count all for the pixel). However, the Bing pixel can’t distinguish between conversion types. If we had 100 total conversions, it couldn’t tell us that 30 were for goal one, 40 were for goal two and 30 for goal three. This can be a problem if computer program finds a way to exploit one conversion type.

SEER always sets up Google Analytics (GA) goals in addition to the AdWords, adCenter and other engine pixels. GA goal conversion numbers won’t match the Bing pixel numbers, but GA gives us a second source to compare conversion trends and we can get the breakdown of conversion types from GA. When MSN search partner conversions spiked, a large, disproportionate number of the new conversions were recorded in GA as goal type one. As you can see, goal one’s conversion rate mirrors the MSN search partner conversion rate as measured by the Bing pixel.

In this case, for technical reasons as to how the site records goal one (the client’s IT team can’t explain how and when goal one’s conversion page loads), we believe goal one could be getting exploited by computer programs aiming to maximize the number of conversions for search partner sites. It’s easy to block publishers in MSN. If search partners don’t convert, advertisers will drop them. My intuition is that there are unscrupulous websites looking to game advertisers by making it look like they have lots of conversions, so they won’t be cut from search partners. They found a weak goal conversion page and tried to exploit it, but fortunately we noticed them.

What have we done about it? We’ve paused search partners, informed the client, opened a click fraud investigation and I’m trying to get form data to see if the inputted fields are legitimate. The last part is hard slogging. I’m not sure if the system the client has will be able to associate form information with MSN campaigns and referring websites. I could then cross reference referrers to publisher report data. We’ll see how this finishes up; the click fraud investigation isn’t done yet.

What are your best tactics for monitoring Microsoft search partners? Feel free to add comments below.

(Correction: What I meant to say is that if you used =ImportXML("http://www.google.com/search?q=philadelphia seo company&num=100", "//h3[@class='r']/a/@href") it wouldn’t work.  ImportXML, the function itself, works fine.)

Google Scraper in Google Docs Spreadsheet:

Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Apam75iNJI9idHkteFpGYjNhcjRBeUxsRWI0VER6ZWc

Source code: https://github.com/chrisle/seer.js-public

How to use it:

1. Click on File > Make a copy.  Name it whatever you want.

2. In your spreadsheet, use this formula: =googleScraper("my keyword here")

That will default to 10 results.

To get more results:

Add a second parameter like this: =googleScraper("my keyword here", 30)

To add the formula to a different spreadsheet:

1. Go to the source code for google_scraper.js

2. Copy all that code to your clipboard

3. Create your new spreadsheet

4. Click on Tools > Script Editor

5. Paste all the code into the editor and save.

Updates

v1.0.1: Fixed Non-URL universal searches getting returned. Thanks Gareth Brown.

Recently, I discovered yet another huge timesaver: the ability to link data from Excel to PowerPoint. This feature is perfect for PowerPoint presentations that are in need of constant updates. As we always love to share our favorite lifesaving formulas, tips and tricks, I wanted to share a quick how-to with you. Follow this simple step by step process to link your Excel data to PowerPoint.

Step 1: Create your table of data in Excel as you usually would. Make sure you save the workbook before linking it to the PowerPoint file.

Quick Tip: If you are sharing the PowerPoint with people who may not have the Excel file but might need to update the data, make sure you provide them with the most up-to-date Excel file on their device saved as the same file name as the original file. You may want to consider using the Microsoft Office “Save & Send” feature or online collaboration tools such as box or Dropbox.

Step 2: Insert a chart to portray your data and adjust the appearance of the Excel chart.

Quick Tip: If you have multiple Excel charts that you wish to link to your PowerPoint, make sure they are all in the same Excel file (they may be on separate tabs within the same workbook).

Step 3: Once you’re satisfied with your Excel chart, copy and paste special it to the corresponding PowerPoint slide. The “Paste Special, Paste Link” paste option will update the chart every time the presentation is opened to reflect the current data in the Excel file.

Quick Tip: Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + V for Paste Special Options when pasting charts into PowerPoint. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl + V will simply paste the chart into the PowerPoint Slide without linking it to the source file.

Step 4: Your charts are now linked between Excel and PowerPoint! Double-clicking on a chart in PowerPoint will open the Excel file where you can edit the data. Any changes you make in Excel will be reflected in both the Excel and PowerPoint charts.

Quick Tip: If you are adding rows/columns, you will have to right click on the corresponding chart in the Excel file and click “Select Data” to select the chart data range. The updated data source should then be automatically applied to both the Excel and PowerPoint charts.

Step 5: Each time you open a PowerPoint file that is link to a Microsoft Office product, you will be prompted to update the links in the PowerPoint file. Simply click on the “Update Links” button; this process may take a few minutes depending on the number of charts that are linked. If the linked file is not available, click “Cancel;” the PowerPoint will still work and the data will be updated once the linked Excel file is available.

Quick Tip: Before sending the PowerPoint presentation to clients (who will not be receiving the source file), you may want to consider breaking the link between Excel and PowerPoint. This can be done in PowerPoint from the Home Button > Prepare > Edit Links to File. Individually select each file you wish to unlink and click “Break Link.” Consider saving the unlinked file with a different file name so you can still access the linked PowerPoint for internal changes and updates. Another alternative solution is to PDF the presentation before sending it out. 

Now that you know the simple five step process of linking data from Excel to PowerPoint, check out Morgan’s blog to learn more lifesaving tricks and be sure to share your Excel lifesavers with us!

We’re going to use Google Suggest, Ubersuggest.org and Tag Crowd to find some excellent content ideas — a technique pioneered by Mr. Wil Reynolds. Like most things in SEO, let’s first start with Google.

Go to Google.com, and use the search query: how to [INSERT TOPIC]. For example, you would use the query: how to travel . This will bring up suggestions people have search for around how to travel.

In this example, we don’t have too much helpful information to start with. “How to travel around the world,” “how to travel abroad for free,” aren’t really groundbreaking. Once we begin finishing out our query with a, b, c, etc, we can see Google suggesting a lot of great content ideas. For instance, “how to travel by train in Europe” could be a great guest blog post on a travel site.

Going through the alphabet (e.g. “how to travel a,” “how to travel b”) in Google Suggest can be daunting and incredibly time consuming. This is where Ubersuggest.org can come in handy. It will use your query and go through the alphabet just like we have been doing in the above and Ubersuggest.org will give all results on one page.

Now begin scrolling down the page and as you can see, there are some really interesting ideas. For instance, “how to travel for free volunteer.” This could be a great blog post or on-page content about how to volunteer and travel abroad for free. Include some programs such as the Peace Corp and you have an excellent, informative post that people are searching for.

Another great example is “how to travel gluten free.” To diversify your backlink profile, you could use this content idea to guest post on food blogs.

Going through all of the ideas can also be daunting. So let’s extract the main themes around how to travel . Select the txt button below the search box on Ubersuggest.org and click the suggest button:

This will download all of the results into a .txt file. Copy the results from the .txt file and go to Tagcrowd.com and paste all of the Google Suggest ideas into text box.

Click “Visualize” and you’ll see all of the most commonly used words:

This will give you some insight into travel trends and what people are searching for around travel. As we can see, “cheap” is very popular. So we can go back to Ubersuggest.org and drill down on what people are searching for around cheap:

What I would encourage you to do is if you’re pursuing a  guest blog post linking strategy or optimizing pages on your site, go through the above process and see what comes up. Again, often times when we have been in an industry for a long time or are new to it, we sometimes have writer’s block.

The above process should help bring some fresh ideas to the surface to help you build out rich on-page content to rank better while also being a resource for guest blog post content.

When you’re kicking off a new client, you want to know everything about them. SEER gets this done through a lengthy questionnaire among other things. We get a ton of info, but there are always some items we’ve missed that are easy linking opportunities:

The larger the company, the more likely they will not know every event they sponsored. Running through the first few pages of SERPs could provide logo linking opportunities or branded anchor text links. If it’s already paid for, why not make sure you’re getting the link value?

Is your client/your company open to sponsoring events? Reverse that query so it looks like:

This will bring back all sites that have the word “sponsors” in the URL as well as bring back affordable sponsorship opportunities starting at $100. This query brings back GREAT results, but has two holes:

1. Brings back sites that may mention sponsors at a $100 level, but those pages don’t link out to anyone.
2. Brings back $100,000 sponsorship pages. I don’t want to knock $100k sponsorships, if it makes sense it makes sense, but I’m going to be looking for more affordable ones.

Are you in need of some higher domain authority sites? Add onto that query:

You can qualify the value of these sites by running it through OSE or other tools that can automate your evaluation just by dropping in the URLs. The big things on my radar when doing this are number of backlinks to that page, PR, DA & to make sure that the sponsorships aren’t outdated. We have a post from last year about 25 ways to qualify a link if you need some other suggestions on how to determine the value of a page.

Also, you don’t have to include the AND depending on your query, but it organizes the different variables in my mind.

You can switch it out to be .gov instead of .edu, but you can also make it even longer so that it fits your business:

Of course, switch it up to see what brings back the best results that fit your site:

Downsides to expanding your search:

1. Will bring back fewer results or zero results.
2. Will bring back other sponsors that are in your industry & less of a page related to your industry.

The second downside can then be turned into an upside. Find where else your competitors are sponsoring/advertising/promoted & figure out how to get there too.

Alright, so we have one idea about finding existing sponsorships and one about finding new ones. Insert your paid link argument here, but if your company sells skis and you sponsor a college ski club without being crazy about your anchor text, I can only see that as a win.

Moving away from sponsorships to other places where you client/business might already be mentioned:

The interview might be recent, it might be 5 years old, but finding existing interviews with your company/client should be easy wins to ask for a link.

Downsides:

1. Many articles might already be linking.
2. It could be a stretch to reach out about a link years after the fact.
3. There might not be any results if the client/company is new.

If you never ask, you probably (writing a post after a test is finished about NOT asking for a link) won’t ever get one.

For the #3 downside, again, reverse it to find where your competitors have been interviewed.

Repeat that over again with your competitor company name as well as their C-levels.

Hopefully these queries will help you find more linking opportunities. If you find these useful, play around with more. You can also follow me on twitter, @adammm, or find other SEER people on twitter by following @seerinteractive.

Lastly, check out the Link Search Tool from soloseo. There are a TON of queries there similar to those above that I go to on a regular basis.

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

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

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

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

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

Easy, right?

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

Props to Michelle for noticing the Mobile filter first!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. 1.       Keep It Quick

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

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

1. 2.       Simplify Navigation

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

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

1. 3.       Be Thumb Friendly

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

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

1. 4.       Design for Visibility

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

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

1. 5.       Make it Easy to Convert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Now what does this all mean?

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

In Conclusion

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

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