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33 Mobile SEO & Mobile Analytics Resources

Tad Chef — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:57:22 +0000

Did you know that there is a whole mobile SEO and mobile Analytics industry on top or underneath the SEO and web analytics offerings we already got used to? I didn’t until this week. I underestimated the mobile Internet and it’s search by and large. I read about the iPhone impact on mobile Internet usage a few times and then forgot about it. Meanwhile others didn’t. It’s time to jump into mobile SEO now more than ever. You won’t be an early adopter of mobile SEO anymore but you’re not too late to table yet.

Don’t mistake local SEO for mobile SEO. While both overlap, mobile searches are more often local in nature than not, we’re not talking about the same thing here. Local SEO is done for the conventional Web as well while mobile SEO focuses mainly on the users browsing the Web on their mobiles. It sounds logical but some people seemingly mix up the two.

Two weeks ago when I researched the local SEO and search resources list I was overwhelmed with the wide array of available resources. This time it took just a little longer to find the best mobile SEO links for you. While at it I noticed that mobile SEO and analytics are both very much a whole new sphere with a different set of rules. A whole set of new vendors, experts and sources is involved here. Just check out the 30 Mobile SEO & Mobile Analytics Resources list below: You won’t find many names you know already.

Mobile Internet and Search

Mobile SEO Blogs

Mobile SEO Best Practices and Ranking factors

Mobile Web Design

iPhone SEO

Mobile Analytics

Other Mobile SEO Resources

Mobile analytics face several major obstacles in tracking users. Thus it seems many specialized companies have sprung up to deal with that. At the same time some established vendors attempt to get a share of the market. As of now none of them seems to have become the dominant force. Mobile SEO is not really that wide spread yet. As you can see I only list 2 mobile SEO blogs. I’ve seen a few more but I wasn’t convinced.

Did I miss something? I bet I did! As always you are welcome to add more valuable mobile SEO to the list! They can be your own as well. Just try not to ad your sales pages. SEOptimise is a SEO company too so we don’t directly advertise for others!

33 Mobile SEO & Mobile Analytics Resources

Twitter Friday: hashtag Marketing vs Spam vs Censorship

Tad Chef — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:29:12 +0000

Due to server problems we could not publish the Twitter Friday column last week. Now we’re back up. So here it is. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Some #moonfruit anybody? Yesterday’s no name is today’s superstar when it comes to effective so called “hashtag” Twitter marketing. It’s goal is to make it to the Twitter.com homepage popular topics list. Some already consider it spam. Why?

Moonfruit made people tweet their hashtag in order to win a prize. Their success was immediate, huge and long lasting. I won’t tell you what prize was offered in order not to advertise both the product and the company too much. They give away one prize per day to one of the thousands of people who tweet something adding their hashtag to it. So in a way it’s an indirect pay per tweet scheme.

While RWW already attacks all marketers as spammers (good old link baiting strategy) the issue at stake is more than marketing vs spam or even marketing = spam.

It’s also about free speech as the anti-spam filters already have blocked false positives. The most obvious example of this is the hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy a popular one among UK users and a censored one by the US Twitter admins with no understanding of British humor.

As a SEO I encounter the spam accusation quite frequently as you can imagine although I haven’t spammed anybody in my whole life. Thus I won’t accept this as well. First let me say something about Twitter and marketers to challenge the “Twitter needs a marketer filter” linkbait:

Statistics show that marketers are the hard core users of Twitter.

The most active Twitter users are marketers statistically. Knowing sites like Digg and elsewehere this is no surprise to you. Marketers actually need new media tools to spread their message thus they promote those tools that work in the desired way to stardom. Where would Twitter be today without all the marketers who uised an evangelized it for free? It would be another me too service among a myriad of startups.

When using Twitter correctly you barely get any spam. I don’t in spite of following approx. 400 marketers Unless of course you assume that links about marketing and SEO are spam like the average disgruntled teenage geek on Digg does while promoting Apple marketing messages at the same time.

Twitter itself did not remove the #moonfruit campaign. So obviously the staff does not consider it to be spam. To be honest: I think the line almost got crossed. We may see lots of copycats of that tactic soon so Twitter will probably act then. To me spam begins when you actually bribe people to say things. In this case it was almost bribery. Or when people promote things frantically just ta take part in a competition. One tweet about #moonfruit, two or three OK but more than that? If I were Twitter I’d curb this by a single line of code. Watch out, pseudo code ahead:

“If hashtag mentions more than 3 times by same user on same day delete from search and don’t count in popularity”

How would I undertake an ethical Twitter #hashtag marketing campaign? I would

not make the use of a particular hashtag obligatory. Usually people use a similar wording so at the end of the day you’d get popular anyways.
limit the number of tweets per user by stating that more than one tweet does not enhance the actual chances of winning
predefine a few tweets a person can use so that the effort of taking part gets minimized
require people to have a certain number of mutual friends in order to prevent setting up fake accounts
choose an intriguing word for the hashtag or slogan, part of the moonfruit success stems from the brand’s funny sounding name

One of the secrets of a successful marketing campaign is not to oversell and annoy people. The “any publicity is good publicity” proponents will disagree but what’s the use of a huge success when you get banned for it or there is a negative backlash for your brand like with the Oprah-KFC disaster?

Also note that nowadays not all popular items are hashtags so that you don’t even need a #hashtag probably. So don’t simply try to copy the for some people questionable success of the #moonfruit campaign. Be yourself and don’t try to bribe people.

Btw. I will try the Moonfruit service. I love their competitors Jimdo already! On the weekend another case of Twitter bombing has been done by some pranksters.

Twitter Friday: hashtag Marketing vs Spam vs Censorship

56 Local SEO & Search Resources for Business

Tad Chef — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:00:24 +0000

Update July, 3rd 2009: Added 12 local SEO & search resources suggested by readers in the comment section and on Sphinn + some newly researched links.

The most obvious trend when it comes to SEO is “going local”. Ever since Google introduced Google Maps and Local Business Center and later added local search results to Universal Search displaying them on top of everything else businesses everywhere strive to be there. Additionally the proliferation of smartphones and netbooks accelerates this development even more.

You have to perform in local search and on sites that enable users to find local businesses in their respective area. Classic SEO is just not enough anymore for small business owners and location based big business.

There is already a plethora of very helpful resources that deal with local SEO. While to some extent local SEO resembles traditional SEO with on site measures and link building the substantial differences have even led to a specialization in the industry.

By now we have SEO specialists and publications predominantly dealing with local search issues and local SEO.

Thus I complied a list of the most useful resources, mostly from blogs: 44 56 local SEO & search resources for business.

Why do I add the seemingly obvious “for business” part in the headline? In most cases you won’t optimize your private homepage to be found in a specific area. Local search is a mostly business only domain.

Local SEO & Search Blogs

Local SEO Overviews for Starters and Lists

Local Search Ranking Factors

Local SEO Techniques

Local SEO Internationally

Local SEO Case Studies

Local SEO Experts

Local Analytics

Other Local Search and SEO Resources

Initially I planned to compile a list of both local and mobile SEO resources due to their obvious correlation. After some research the sheer amount of must read resources for local SEO & search outgrew the combined list quickly. Thus I will publish a new list in 2 weeks from now: 30 Mobile SEO Resources.

As always this list doesn’t claim to be complete. So you’re welcome to add your links or resources you are missing in the comment section. You can also add mobile SEO articles for the next list post to be incuded.

56 Local SEO & Search Resources for Business

Visit SEOptimise at Online Marketing Show in London

Kevin Gibbons — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:08:23 +0000

SEOptimise will be at the Online Marketing Show this week at Olympia in London, so make sure you come and visit our stand.

The exhibition is hosted on Tuesday 30th June to Wednesday 1st July and promises to be one of the UK’s top online marketing events. Plus you can still get entrance passes at the show and follow the event on the official @OMS09 Twitter account and #OMS09 hashtag.

SEOptimise will be on stand A138, we’ll hopefully see you there!

Visit SEOptimise at Online Marketing Show in London

Twitter Friday: Twitter as a Weapon of Mass Distraction

Tad Chef — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:09:25 +0000

What’s the most important issue today? The death of Michael Jackson? No, it’s more of an distraction. Most probably the economy, your health or family still matter most to you. You got distracted anyways. Last week another issue was more important than anything else it seemed. It was the election in Iran or rather the ensuing backlash.

Now I don’t mean to say that the Iranian election wasn’t important. It was perhaps one of the more important issues lately compared to the misguided swine flu craze or todays celebrity death.

What’s more striking is that the US government was keen to make the point that the Iran issue was so important that it asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance.

So the US state department obviously recognized that Twitter was crucial to its interests in Iran. This was really news because usually we don’t hear much about direct government involvement in making news or getting the news heard the government prefers. It happens all the time but in most cases behind the scenes.

What does it tell us about Twitter as of today:

Twitter has become a crucial mass medium
Governments make sure their voice gets heard on and via Twitter
Twitter has the power to distract
Twitter can make the world population focus on one single issue at a time
Twitter is the first truly globalized medium

Twitter also is a so called “weapon of mass distraction”

Remember? In recent years we were mostly told that Iran is

evil (hates Jews, women and gays)
dangerous
“a regime” rules there.

Also Iran allegedly develops nuclear weapons (weapons of mass destruction). The US was always short of invading Iran.

Not only the US government cares for Twitter. Iranian government agents have been reported to use Twitter to spread misinformation as well. So you see that Twitter is not really a medium you can trust to be impartial.

Single tweets and whole trends can be be entirely fake or meant to distract you.

We have seen the swine flu panic spread virally unlike the virus itself that took weeks or months to spread and until now it was less deadly than most average seasonal flu viruses.

So there is a striking misrepresentation spreading via Twitter. How can you deal with that? Stop using twitter altogether? Well, no. You won’t stop reading newspapers or watching TV either inspite of them spreading lies repeatedly as well. Like with all mass media you can’t trust them. Unlike with old media like newspapers and TV though here we have a way to determine directly what’s true and what not by relying on personal networks.

Listen to the people you know already.

I knew some bloggers and social media users from Iran before the recent elections so I could ask them. I didn’t trust the hastily made up accounts all in green, all in English with almost the same avatars everywhere (in English as well).

Former president Bush readily acknowledged years ago that the US is engaging in infiltration and sabotage inside Iran. So basically you never now what’s going on out there unless you find a person you can trust. Robert Fisk is a journalist who is an expert on the Middle East for decades by now and he went to Iran himself.

No what the hell does it mean for Twitter, marketing and business? Well, you can read tons of business, marketing and SEO advice on Twitter but can you really trust it?

Anonymous SEO experts with names like “SEOsomething”?
Kevin Rose of Digg who banned SEO there and now advises you how to artificially inflate your umber of followers on Twitter?
SEO celebrities with 30k followers?

I don’t think so. You need people you really trust. You only know you can trust someone when you communicate with that person.

Twitter Friday: Twitter as a Weapon of Mass Distraction

Google AdWords Session Based Broad Match?

Richard Fergie — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:10:21 +0000

Google are now including a 4th match type in their search query reports: “Broad Match (Session Based)”. I think it is great to have some reporting about the search history issue so I quickly got to work to see how this match type performed.

A Broad Toad by Pixieslayer on Flickr

I ran a search query report for one of our accounts and then I compared “Broad Match” with “Broad Match (Session Based). Here are my results:

Just under 2% of all broad match queries were session based. As speculated in my last post I think this number will depend a lot on your vertical and how much you bid per click.
Click through rates for session based broad match are ridiculously high. For the account I tested the average CTR is 64%! This illustrates the importance of having an advert that is different from the competition.
The average cost per click is about 10% higher. I think this will be another thing that varies quite a lot depending on the account. For the account I checked the average CPC is normally very close to the CPC bid; I think the cost per click for Session Based Broad Match would be propotionally higher if you have a larger gap between average CPC and max CPC.
The conversion rate is 14% lower. O’ dear. And I was going to say that things weren’t as bad as I thought.
Because of the higher CPC and the lower conversion rate the cost per conversion is nearly 30% higher. Cost per conversion is a major KPI for this account. For standard broad match keywords it is just under the target figure. For session based broad match it is well over.

Hello, Google? Richard Fergie here. Can I have my account back?

Google AdWords Session Based Broad Match?

Is Social Media Future Proof? Here’s the Verdict!

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:22:23 +0000

Thanks to everyone who took part in our is social media future proof online poll, we received a great response and the results are now in!

We have published all results below, along with any comments and our own conclusions for each question. If you are reading this in an RSS reader or email please click through to view online.

Question 1) Which social media website is most likely to still be around in 2020?

Comments:

NikkiPilkington: No reason why they won’t all still be around, just hopefully in advanced forms.
Zigmas: I suppose that the most professional social networks will live.
heidiboesdal: I don’t think any of these will be around in 2020
maverickny: I don’t think any of them will be around as a force. Most online trends last 5 yrs or so - look at Usenet, AOL and Yahoo as examples.