5 URL Expanders to Help You Avoid Spammy Links

When URL shorteners first came about, spammers used them to disguise malicious links. Now that social networks like Twitter have propelled shortened URLs into widespread use, people are more comfortable clicking through. However, there are still occasions in which you confront possibly dubious links.

Rather than debate the pros and cons of clicking (We’re guessing that ZOMG! video is never worth turning your PC into a spambot), we recommend bookmarking a URL checker to find out just where that enticing link points before you click through.

We’ve found five URL expansion services that will give you some peace-of-mind when browsing. Take a look through the gallery for our choices, and let us know in the comments about any other sites you use.


1. Where Does This Link Go?

The best-looking service for its minimalist design, Where Does This Link Go? is an elegant solution to a simple problem -- determining the destination of a disguised URL. The info this site returns is basic, but it worked perfectly for all the links we threw at it, so we're happy campers.

2. LongURL

In addition to showing where the shortened URL points, LongURL will dish up meta keywords and a meta description for the content, meaning you're clued-up before you click through.

3. URL X-ray

With a cool name and dark looks, URL X-ray is what the cool kids use. As well as the web version, there's a free bookmarklet that sits on your browser bar, ready to identify short URLs all over the web.

4. LinkPeelr

This service will "peel" shortened URLs to reveal the destination. Then you can click through, if you so wish.

In Chrome, LinkPeelr reveals the full URL when you hover over the short version.

5. Sucuri

Security company Sucuri offers a free link-checking service. Simply head over to the site, stick in your short URL and wait for the verdict. As well as the destination reveal, Sucuri also runs the link through safe site checkers for extra peace-of-mind.

Source :  Mashable.com

5 Best Practices for Digital Marketers in 2012

Jonathan Gardner is director of communications at ad company Vibrant Media. He has spent nearly two decades as an innovator at the nexus of media and technology, having worked in communications leadership roles and as a journalist around the world.

The egg nog’s been drunk, the bells are done jingling, and the mistletoe has been taken down. It’s time to ring in the new year with resolutions that’ll make 2012 one to remember — online and off. All signs point to an exciting year, with the arrival of new (and inevitably covetable) Apple devices. The expanding digital industry is destined to affect what we discuss, buy and watch, who we friend, what we Like, and how we share — all year long.

Plus, eMarketer projects a 14.4% increase in U.S. online ad spending, and Google says that video ads improve offline campaign results. Digital will certainly take on added prominence in the new year.

Even so, let’s resolve to keep our heads on straight and stick close to the best practices that have been winners in the past – they’ll be the ones to see us through a stellar 2012. With input from my colleagues and other experts in the digital ad industry, I’ve come up with five “resolutions” for marketers in the new year.

1. Own Your Voice, Don’t Share It.

These days, we’re talking “word ownership” for online branding. Especially in hyper-competitive categories such as consumer electronics and auto, these emotive and topical keywords are the name of the game.

But you’d better get there first — key terms such as “football” and “Valentine’s Day” are sure to be hot tickets in the weeks to come. Act fast, and the keywords will do the work for you. Have a smart contextual plan at the core of your strategy, and you’ll help your brand gain ownership of its voice around the web.


2. Resolve to Be Relevant.

Relevance reigns in 2012. More than ever, people will be in the driver’s seat. Therefore, keep consumers’ desires, hopes and aspirations central to your marketing and you’ll stay on top. This is especially true of groups like Millennials, who are dominating the digital space. Matt Briton, CEO of social media agency Mr. Youth, says, brands must address five “need states:” utility, entertainment, information, rewards and recognition.

In 2011, we also saw consumers become more spending-conscious as opposed to simply price-conscious. So, now is the time to make the strongest possible case for your product’s value.

Finally, tune in to what kind of content engages your audience and create advertising that aligns with what they watch and read. Take advantage of technology that matches ad content to the context of the page and delivers hyper-relevant ads to people who actually want to see them.

3. Context is King, and Content is Queen.

Steve Jobs showed that to create value in the 21st century, you need to connect creativity with technology. With all the focus on the amazing tech that enables our new era of advertising, it’s easy to forget that what’s in the ads matters too. You can roll out a remarkable initiative to find consumers, but how will you engage them? Time and again, the most successful in-text, toolbar and display ads bring relevant content within the context of the page. This year, like the last, the best advertising will be dynamic, providing provide useful information from weather reports and traffic updates to recipes and sports scores.

4. The Data is Smarter. Are You?

As industry guru Peter Horan told us, “Counting clicks for branding is flawed. Marketers know TV works even though viewers can’t click on a commercial.” Beyond the click, the revolution in data will continue. Marketers can now look more closely at consumer behavior to get more mileage out of campaigns. As technology gives us a clearer view of reader engagement and retention, we see that all content is not created equal, and that despite the recent increase in content volume, quality is what drives results.

5. They’ve Changed the Channel.

An incredible 98% of 18- to 24-year-olds use social media. While debates continue to rage around ROI and how to quantify Likes, we’ve seen brands develop new ways to make their social media assets deliver, specifically, by bringing social content to new ad formats that push Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to the consumer in a relevant context. We can all learn from Best Buy, which connected consumers with its “Twelpforce,” Twitter-based help desk. And Axe is using an innovative social toolbar to push its clever content to consumers around the web.

Happy New Year! I hope that in 2012 you resolve to take your marketing to the next level of success

Source : Mashable.com

6 Tips For Building a High Quality Blog Following

In 2010, New York City startup, Birchbox launched a blog about beauty products before it had any customers. The beauty sample delivery service – and its blog – exploded in popularity.

Today, to keep up with its readers’ appetite for content, Birchbox employs multiple editors and publishes half a dozen posts a day, along with an online magazine. According to compete.com, Birchbox.com traffic grew 6,500% in 2011, to over 110,000 monthly unique visitors at last count.

But raw traffic data doesn’t tell the whole story about the value of a publication. Birchbox’s blog drives customer acquisition and retention, which means its readers are loyal enough to become subscribers, followers and customers. At last count, the company had 44,000 Facebook Likes, 14,000 Twitter followers, and 9,400 Youtube subscribers. New blog subscribers – people who had willingly opted in to Birchbox content – pile on every month. (The company declined to release hard numbers on total blog subscribers).

Ironically, the hit-based nature of social media means many blog owners have difficulty cultivating long-term loyalty from their users. It’s easy to get excited when the occasional “viral” post brings in a spike of traffic. But often that traffic melts away as quickly as it arrived.

Brian Clark, CEO of CopyBlogger Media, says a building a quality blog following means “attracting the right people in order to accomplish your specific goals.” In other words, he says, “you’ve got to put quality ahead of quantity.”

So, how do upstart blogs like Birchbox’s build such voracious followings? Here are six tips to attracting readers who stick around longer than the click of a StumbleUpon button:

1. Turn Existing Customers Into Readers

Current customers can be an excellent source of quality readers for a new publication. Often, they already identify with the target demographic. And they’re already familiar with you.

Whether it’s getting a customer to subscribe to a newsletter, blog, or Twitter feed during a signup or checkout process, or requesting they subscribe in a follow-up email or call, happy customers are highly likely to become readers. Turning customers into readers gives you the opportunity to reach other potential customers – your readers’ friends – through social media.

Birchbox benefits from this virtuous cycle as new readers become customers, new customers become readers, and readers share with friends.

2. Skip The Misleading Traffic-Boosting Techniques

Pageview-racking slideshows and catchy-yet-misleading headlines are commonplace in the blogosphere; many publications use them to increase traffic (and therefore advertising revenue). Unfortunately, however, these techniques often don’t result in quality readership growth.

“Headlines should be descriptive and tell readers what to expect,” says Chris Spagnuolo, Founder and Publisher of guyism.com, an independent men’s lifestyle site with 3.5 million monthly unique visitors.

Slideshows skew page views-per visit stats, making it more difficult to accurately gauge traffic stickiness; misleading headlines may put your content in front of new, unsuspecting readers, but those readers are less likely to stay, and may even have negative reactions to being tricked.

“We’ve always believed that the best way to get good quality readers is to create good quality content,” says Ben Lerer, Co-Founder of men’s city guide Thrillist. Lerer says Thrillist’s experiments with slideshows or tricky headlines never yielded valuable reader growth.

3. Speak to a Very Specific Audience

Casting a wide net can be good for generating traffic, but with a glut of reading options on the web, passionate blog followers gravitate toward hyper-specific publications. That’s one of the reasons many niche media sites are growing while mainstream publications bleed readers.

Thrillist benefits from targeting a niche audience, Lerer says, rather than broad categories like “New Yorkers” or “men.” The publication focuses on 20- and 30-something, nightlife-loving urban males, and it speaks to them as peers. Knowing its readers completely allows Thrillist to connect with them more effectively.

Often this means targeting a niche in which you – the blogger – already belong. “We [are] really writing for ourselves,” Chen explains. “And we never talk down to our readers.”

4. Guest Post and Use Guest Bloggers

Allowing guest bloggers to post on your blog brings twofold benefits: more content for your blog, and new reader exposure for your site. Guest bloggers often point their own followers to posts they’ve written for other publications (and you should encourage them to do so). Ideally, those readers start to recognize your blog and eventually subscribe to you, too.

“Our uniques have increased every month, in large part because we’ve been … using more guest bloggers,” Chen explains.

Likewise, guest posting your own content on relevant blogs in your niche can help you attract new audiences.

“We’ve built a number of valuable partnerships with brands and other publishers who have helped us educate other guys about Thrillist,” Lerer says. “But,” he adds, “we know these guys wouldn’t stick around if the quality of what we produced on a daily basis wasn’t top notch.”


5. Encourage Loyalty Through Consistency

Giving readers something to expect helps them work your blog into their daily or weekly routine. As your audience grows, you should increase your content frequency; however, from the beginning, publishing on a consistent schedule will help build loyalty.

“We try to post between 6-10 times a day … to keep people coming back,” Chen says.

Consistency also has to do with presenting readers with a unified voice or consistent approaches. Clark says fostering a quality audience means, “taking an editorial stand for what you believe in, rather than watering things down to avoid offending anyone. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to try to be controversial. In this day and age, simply taking a position and standing behind it will bring people who agree, and people who don’t.”

Clark continues, “Don’t be afraid of those who don’t [agree with you]. They galvanize your supporters who do agree, which turns them into fans instead of luke-warm traffic.”

6. Be Timely And Relevant

Blog to connect with what’s currently on your readers’ minds. This way, you’ll not be interrupting them; instead, you’ll enhance their routines.

“Be relevant, interesting, and digestible,” Chen says. “By giving people stories that are easy to click and share … you’ll instantly increase your reach.”

It’s all about social relevance, Spagnuolo says. “Think, ‘Will one of my friends from high school think this is worth sharing on Facebook?’ If the answer is yes, that’s a good start.”
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Shares, followers, bounce rates, and conversions can indicate whether a blog’s readership is engaged or simply transient. Any blog that’s tuned in to its audience can increase the above and grow loyal readers.

“To us, a quality reader is someone who stays or shares,” Lerer says. “If they’re engaged, they’ll be more likely to come back. If they’re sharing, they’re creating value. Either way, those are the two best kinds of readers.”

Source : Mashable.com

Top 10 Tips for Better Content Marketing

Here are 10 steps you can take to improve your content marketing and drive awareness around your products.

1. Determine Organizational Goals

Ask yourself: What is my goal, and how is my content marketing plan going to help me accomplish it? These are things that need to be thought out before determining your content. By doing so, you can tailor your content marketing plan accordingly.

Each goal should be measurable and have a deadline by which you perform this measurement. For example, increase website traffic 25% by Jan. 1, 2012.

2. Identify Target Audiences

The next step is to figure out exactly whom you are targeting. This means researching everything about the audience to whom you will be delivering your content. Ask them questions, research website traffic data and determine their demographic information, including age, gender, education, location, etc.

From there, you need to figure out what your audience is interested in, both online and offline. What are they reading? What are they talking about? What are their likes and dislikes?

In this step, it is helpful to think like one of your clients or customers. Envision that you’re writing for one specific person, and then tune in to his thought process in order to succeed. Above all, listen to what that person wants, which is not necessarily the same as what you want. After all, you want him to be receptive to your content.

3. Develop Key Messages

What exactly does your audience want/need to hear? In general, determine what will differentiate you and your product, as well as what will help you to achieve the goals you have set. The end result should be one to three main messages, each with one to five sub-messages that offer a bit more detail.

4. Decide on Overall Content Marketing Strategies

There are three different types of content marketing strategies: long-form, short-form and conversations (e.g. sharing).

Long-form includes blog posts, articles and press releases — basically, anything longer than a couple of sentences. Short-form includes tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates and graphics. Conversations and sharing includes participating in and driving conversations through blog commenting, link sharing and comments on videos. This type helps to encourage discussions between other thought leaders within your industry.

You can stick to one of these forms of content marketing, or you can use all three. They are each effective on their own, but they are also powerful when used together.

5. Draft an Editorial Calendar

Developing a plan is one of the most important steps to content marketing. However, it should be flexible. After all, things can always change. 

This is where an editorial calendar comes in. It should include strategies, specific tactics, suggested headlines, content deadlines and allocated responsibilities. This is a fairly major undertaking, but you’ll be thankful for your hard work once it’s complete — and you’ll save time in the long-run.

6. Develop Content

In order to even begin the marketing aspect of a content marketing plan, you need to develop the content you are going to use. It needs to be unique and different. Go back to your key messages and subtly incorporate them into the content without overtly selling your product. Content marketing is about creating trust through education and information, not using traditional sales tactics.

The infographic Is Your Content King? is a great visual of how important content is, especially for your marketing plan. 

7. Establish Relationships

It’s time to start building a relationship with your target audience. This means tapping into existing communities by sharing and commenting on their content, as well as establishing your own communities across various social networking platforms.

Remember, content marketing isn’t just about you. Like all relationships, you should aim to give more than you receive. Be sure to use the 80/20 principle: 80% of the content you share should be curated (in other words, not your own) and 20% should be your original content.

Find brands that have successfully made a name for themselves, and mimic the steps they’ve taken — but make sure to add your own unique flare.

8. Spread the Word

Determine industry keywords that are not only relevant to your product, but also are going to generate enough buzz. Search engine optimization (SEO) can play a huge role if you research thoroughly. For example, make sure the tags you’re adding to your blog posts are going to generate traffic, since this can help you get found in the first place. I’m a huge fan of both Scribe SEO and InboundWriter to help you accomplish this.

Also, spread the word through Twitter, Facebook, e-newsletters, etc. But be careful not to force your content where it doesn’t belong. It may seem like you’re trying too hard, and in turn, people may not be interested in what you have to say.

Eloque came out with a free ebook, The Grande Guide to B2B Content Marketing, a helpful read when it comes to content marketing. Plus, it’s useful for deciding which platforms you should employ and how to effectively use them.

9. Measure Effectiveness

Although this is one of the last steps, it’s one of the most important. By measuring the effectiveness of your content, you can determine whether or not your plan needs to be altered, or whether it’s working in the first place.

Keep an eye on pageviews, retweets, Likes, +1’s, shares and so on. Anything your audience can take action on is something, you need to pay attention to. Figure out how well everything is working — or why it’s not working at all.

10. Change the Plan As Needed

If something isn’t working, change it up. Be sure to pay attention to results, and then use them to your advantage.

The most important thing to remember about content marketing: It’s all about building connections and improving your audience’s product loyalty. One of your goals should be for people to recognize your product based off of the content you’ve been placing both online and off. For a more in-depth look into how to create your content marketing plan.

Source : Mashable.com

4 Tips for Optimizing Your Resume with Social Media

1. Link to Social

Nowadays, 10.9% of resumes include a social media link, and the number continues to rise. The more transparent you make yourself to potential employers, the the more comfortable they’ll be hiring you.

Include your Facebook, Twitter and especially LinkedIn profile URLs along the top of your resume, next to your name, email and phone number. Make sure the links are handy so the employer can quickly learn more about you, without having to do a lot of digging.

2. Fact-Check Yourself

While sending your information out in a dozen different directions, it’s easy to overlook outdated information. Therefore, update constantly. An employer shouldn’t see one thing on your resume and something different on LinkedIn.

Keep a list of all the social media and career sites on which have professional accounts or information. Once a month, check to make sure everything is up-to-date and matches your current resume.

3. Don’t Just Copy/Paste

Your resume is full of content that also works great for your social media profiles. Feel free to use information from your resume for social network sections like “work experience,” “about me,” etc.

However, remember to share carefully selected content. Don’t just copy/paste your entire resume into your “about me” section. Not only will this flood your profile, but your resume’s formatting probably won’t travel well either.

Instead of copy/pasting, select a handful of solid phrases or anecdotes for your social profile. That way, you’ll guarantee that anyone reading your profile will get the most important information.

4. Use Keywords for SEO

Beyond your experience, skills and goals, remember that keywords are king. The unfortunate truth about today’s job search is that potential employers use Google and almighty Applicant Tracking Systems to peruse social media sites for the best candidates.

To stay on top of current industry jargon, study similar job listings for words that pop up frequently. Additionally, a variety of powerful SEO tools, which already exist for marketers, can easily be re-purposed to optimize your resume for search.

What do you think? What other tips should social media-savvy job seekers keep in mind when optimizing their resumes for social media? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Source : Mashable.com

Google Product Ads Now Show 5 Products

The holiday shopping season is coming. Are you ready? The holiday season is one of the busiest seasons for shopping online. Online retailers should have already started seeing an increasing trend in sales online.

In order to prepare your business for the online season, Google announced an improvement to its Product Ads: the ability to show up to five different products at a time. Giving users the ability to see more shopping choices increases your chances of conversion while pushing your brand out in front of more people. The ability to show five products at a time is available in all countries with Product Listing Ads.

This improvement will help shoppers to see your exact products before they come to your site. Google said this will help your business get more clicks, higher conversions, and a much higher ROI for your search ads.
Product ads are twice as likely to get clicked over text ads in the same location. Since launching Product Listing Ads in AdWords, Google has seen a 600 percent increase in traffic to retailers in compared to last year. This is a significant amount of traffic for online retailers.

With the holiday season approaching, more people are searching online for products and Product Listing Ads are one of the key focuses for Google to target online shoppers.

If your business plans to take advantage of Product Listing Ads, make sure to check out our article about 10 Takeaways from Google Holiday 2011 Report. Here are six tips to help you make better use of your ads this holiday season:

• Plan of optimizing bids for the holiday season. 
• Bid compatibly as to get the most clicks possible. 
• Feature all your products to ensure that you will be selling everything possible. 
• Take advantage of ads shown below search results. 
• Review your Merchant Center data for quality errors. Due to recent changes in Merchant Center, your Product Listing Ads may not be being showed. 
• Use promotional messaging such as "Free Shipping" or "Coupon Code", or other like things to help your ads stand out.

The holiday season is right around the corner. Are your ads ready?

Source : Searchenginewatch.com

Social Signals in PPC: Google’s +1 Feature is Getting Better

Back in September I wrote about Google’s integration of social and search with the +1 button. In the time since, there has been plenty to discuss as advertisers learned more about this feature and began incorporating +1 buttons on landing pages.

More importantly, Google has expanded the available +1 features. Now you can show +1 buttons on Display Network ads, you can connect Google+ brand pages to AdWords for shared +1 accumulation and Google is providing +1 annotation reporting.

+1 on Display Network Ads

For a few months now, searchers have seen the +1 button on Search ads when they are logged into their Google account. Now they can see +1 buttons across the AdSense / Display Network when they are browsing the web. Just like with search ads, when you +1 a Display Network ad, your “friends” (based on your Google account) will see an annotation that you have recommended that advertiser/brand.

What really makes the +1 button unique for Display Network ads is that it can influence how your ads rank. Google sees the +1 recommendation as a strong relevance signal and uses that information accordingly. Once you have +1’d a Display Network ad, Google will then include that ad “in the auction for any page a friend visits.”

Link Google+ Brand Page to AdWords

Earlier this week Google announced the release of brand pages for the Google+. As businesses the world over scrambled to secure their brand page, Google released information on how to link your new brand page with AdWords.

The benefit? Shared +1 activity. Any +1’s that occur on organic, search, or display ads will be reflected in Google+ and vice versa. Google has added a new ad extension called “Social Extensions” that allow the link to take place at the campaign level. Word of warning – the social extension option isn’t yet available in all accounts (including mine).

+1 Reporting Segmentation

Advertisers now have some reporting transparency into +1 activity. Using the “Segments” drop down menu, you can view +1 annotation activity at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level.

How is this helpful? You can see your impressions broken down as follows:

Impressions with personal annotations (these are where the annotations stated that a friend or contact +1’d your ad). 

Impressions with basic annotations (these simply state an anonymous number of people +1’d your ad). 

Impressions without social annotations.

You can actually see if +1 activity is improving your campaign performance!

What Comes Next?

Now that we have all these great features, what comes next? Here are my thoughts on what’s coming:

• Advertisers will become more engaged and make changes to boost +1s from their landing pages to bolster a performance lift from +1 annotations. 
• Engagement with +1 will increase as searchers and Google products users continue to become more comfortable with this new activity. 
• Google will fix the domain vs. landing page +1 allocation (I’ve heard this on good authority), thus increasing the overall +1 numbers on your ads. 
• Google will try to push the search and social integration harder and make this stick permanently. What does +1 look like in 6 months? One year? I don’t know, but it will be there and advertisers will need to be on top of their game to make it work!

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com

Google May Penalize Your Site for Having Too Many Ads

Google is looking at penalizing ad heavy sites that make it difficult for people to find good content on web pages, Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam team, said yesterday at PubCon during his keynote session.

”What are the things that really matter, how much content is above the fold," Cutts said. “If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” inferring that a if a user is having a hard time viewing content that the site may be flagged as spam.

Google has been updating its algorithms over the past couple months in their different Panda updates. After looking at the various sites Panda penalized during the initial rollout, one of the working theories became that Google was dropping the rankings of sites with too many ads "above the fold."

This is an odd stance, considering Google AdSense Help essentially tells website publishers to place ads above the fold by noting, "All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold."

Cutts also encouraged all websites that have been marked as spam and feel they should not have been marked as spam to report their sites to Cutts and his team. Cutts stated that he has a team of web spam experts looking into problem sites and that the Google algorithm still misses a site or two in its changes.

SEO is Not Dead, Is Always Evolving

Leo Laporte took the stage Tuesday as the keynote speaker at PubCon. Laporte talked about video and how getting your audience involved with you is the next step to online media.

Later, Laporte said he believes SEO will be dead in the next six months. As you'd expect, the crowd responded negatively to this assertion, even causing many of them to walk out.

Yesterday, Cutts responded during his keynote talk. Cutts started by setting the record straight, letting everyone in the audience know that SEO will still be here for the next six months, let alone the next six years.

Cutts joked by mentioning a a tweet about him "spitting out his morning coffee" in reaction to Laporte's statement the earlier morning. He thought it was more of a joke and laughed about the whole thing.

SEO will always be evolving, Cutts told the audience. Search will always be getting better, getting more personalized for each one of us. Google will always be striving to help people to get the best results possible while getting fresh real time results.

Later he talked about how if Google and every other search engine were to die that Internet marketing and SEO would still be alive because of social. Looks like SEO is here to stay!

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com

6 Best Practices for Modern SEO

If you rely heavily on search engines for pageviews and sales, as many businesses do, Google search results will drastically affect how your customers find you. If your business needs to be seen and clicked, take into account the following six search engine tips.

1. Local SEO Is Taking Over

There’s a good probability that a large chunk of the Google searches you perform will display Google Places listings – and consumers are taking notice. SEO software firm SEOmoz did some eye-tracking case studies on Google’s SERP (search engine results page). The results show that users heavily gravitate toward any of Places’ listings, whether they’re mixed into organic lists, concentrated in a group of seven or even listed in the middle of the results page. The heat map above shows the activity around a Google search for “pizza.”

If your business relies on local listings, concentrate on scoring a seat at Google Places. You can do this by using:

Citations: Ensure that your correct business information is listed in as many (reputable) sources as possible around the Internet. As always, consistency is king. If you write “Blvd.” instead of Boulevard on your Google Places page, make sure your other listings reflect the same.
Google Places page optimization: Just like your website, make sure your Places page is properly optimized. Include categories that match exactly, and point your Places page back to a city-specific landing page if applicable.
Reviews: Google will only display reviews from Google, but getting reviews from aggregators like Yelp, Superpages or Trip Advisor will help increase your presence.

2. You Can’t Have Search Without Social
The separation of search and social has officially ended. Social cues such as Twitter shares, Facebook likes and social bookmarking heavily influence search rankings. Essentially, search results are personalized for each person. With any SEO campaign you put into motion, include a social aspect to it to facilitate information sharing.

3. Think of People, not Robots, When Optimizing Keywords

People search in Google because they have a question. Anticipate those questions — whether about the best style of yoga pants or where to get the lowest mortgage rate. Your keywords and the content on your pages should reflect the answers to those questions. Keyword research is tedious, but it’s arguably the most important aspect of SEO. Transition away from thinking of keywords like data, and put more of an emphasis on the person who will be typing in that keyword.

4. Content Links Are King — Good Writers Are Sorcerers

Google is not stupid — it can spot paid and spam links. For the most effective long-term SEO strategy, move the focus back to great content, both on your website and across other sites. Guest blogging is great, for instance, but to get a leg up on your competition, target blogs that aren’t direct matches to your industry.

For example, a client of my company sells golf carts, so we wrote a blog post about the most tricked-out golf carts for tailgates, and the link we got back was one their competitors didn’t already have.

5. Check your Backend: Schema.org, Microformats and Rich Snippets

The Big Three (Google, Yahoo and Bing) have worked together to develop Schema.org, a set of website standards that will tell search engines what your site is about, making it easier for those engines to read the site’s data and index accordingly.

By using rich snippets, for example, you’re able to tell Google what information to feature in SERPs: product reviews and prices, upcoming events, recipe cooking times, etc. The added data will increase your click-through rate because users are able to preview more about the link before they commit to the click.

6. It Doesn’t Mean Anything Without Data

Whether you’re a one-man SEO show for your company or working in an agency with several clients, your site needs to see results. While ranking reports of keywords is still a great indicator of progress, personalized searches make it difficult to get the most accurate readings. Plus, when Google defaulted to private searches for users signed into their Google accounts, the company made it harder to track how people arrive at your site.

Start relying more on simple key performance indicators (KPIs) to show results, for instance, the number of landing pages you have, the bounce rate of those pages, and the number of keywords driving traffic to each of those landing pages. Google Analytics displays all of this data.

What are some other things you see that are affecting searches, and what are you doing to improve your rankings in these areas?

Source : http://mashable.com/

Google Now Shows Ads Below Search Results

Ads that were previously shown to the side of the results may in some cases appear below the search results, Google announced via Inside AdWords. Google reports that ad click-throughs are higher when the ads are integrated into the search results instead of being displayed on the side.

Google will now be classifying the ads as "Other" in your AdWords account. These are also known as experimental impressions, but should easily seen at the bottom of the page. Google should rename this from Top vs Side to "Top vs Other" in the coming weeks as not to confuse people.

Google has confirmed that ads will only be displayed on the side or at the bottom, at least for now. When ads appear on the right, no ads will appear on the bottom; when ads appear on the bottom, no ads will appear on the right.

Will this will work out for advertisers in the long run? I’ve found that 90 percent of clicks come the top three ad positions. The other 10 percent of all AdWords clicks come from rest of the ad positions. Now, 10 percent of the clicks can be a lot but when you're looking for the best clients and easiest to sell, those people are the ones that are clicking on the top of the page.

Over the past couple months Google has been updating many different features in AdWords, search, and the way they work with local advertisers. Google even now allows us to block ads from advertisers.

What do you think about the new changes to AdWords? Do you think these changes will help advertisers or hurt them in the long run?

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com

45 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

If you’ve been too busy doing push-ups to get ready for the mobs of Black Friday, we’ve got the weekly features roundup packaged nicely for you right here.




Read Full Story Click Here ......




Source : http://mashable.com

Google Keyword Tool Now Ranks Keywords by High, Medium, Low

Many Google AdWords users are reporting a change in the Google Keyword Tool. Competition data is now showing a ranking between High, Medium, and Low instead of the green bar that you used to see when you searched for terms.

Until today, the green bar represented how competitive the keyword was in Google AdWords. You could more or less calculate based on how much green you would see a figure between 1-10.

Now with the High, Medium and Low rating scale you can see how Google ranks their keyword competitiveness based only by three metrics. These are shown in a text based description where it no longer shows the competitiveness in green.

While everything has been replaced by the High, Medium, and Low text you can still login to Google and download a report to get the exact number that the green bar used to represent. This should be given to you in a number figure as it always has. It's not said if the download feature will last but for now it still reports the same data that you could see before.


For anyone that follows this or uses it daily to determine keyword competition you will now only be able to see High, Medium and Low that represent:

• Low — Competitiveness in AdWords is under .33
• Medium — Competitiveness in AdWords between .33 and .66
• High — Competitiveness in AdWords is over .67

All data that is shown is related directly to AdWords data, costs, and competitiveness and not organic search in general. The more competition there is, the higher the rating will be. Here are the Top 20 most expensive AdWords keywords. The top keyword is "Insurance" being at a high level and average cost per CPC around $54.91 per click.

This new change, like other changes in AdWords in the past couple of weeks is a step to make AdWords easier for business to use. Now instead of going to AdWords and having to figure out what the green bar means, Google gives you a very easy to read metric. For those of us that use AdWords Keyword tool on a daily basis, it just takes one more step to figure out exactly what we want to see.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com

The 4 Pillars of a Successful PPC Campaign

The web is full of great articles covering the myriad of advanced PPC techniques and features. I’ve written a few myself.

Every now and then, though, we all need to remember the basics that are the framework behind every successful PPC campaign. And if you’re new to PPC, step away from the AdWords interface now and take a look at these mainstays before you do another thing with PPC.

Pillar 1: Goal Setting

Setting goals is the cornerstone for your PPC campaign. Without clear, measurable goals, your campaign will be built on quicksand.

Before logging in to AdWords, take the time to think about what you want to accomplish with PPC. Is it selling products, generating leads, increasing awareness, or something else? The point: don’t skip this step, or your whole campaign may collapse on your head.

Pillar 2: Keywords

Much has been written about keyword research. Yet new PPC advertisers still slip up when it comes to this pillar of a campaign.

Building Block 1: Match Types
Educate yourself on the various match type options. A lot of new advertisers struggle with the mechanics of keyword match types and how they affect ad serving, and their campaigns are either too restrictive (all exact match) or too broad (all broad match). This isn’t a “one size fits all” thing, either – just like a builder uses different nails on the roof than they do on the finish carpentry, PPC advertisers need to use all match types.

Building Block 2: Negative Keywords
OK, technically this is also a match type, but it’s so critical that it gets its own building block. I can always tell when a campaign was set up by an inexperienced advertiser, because the campaign is using all broad match, and has no negative keywords.

Here’s a simple example: you’re selling something online, and are using PPC to promote it. At a minimum, you’ll need one negative keyword: “free.” Without this negative, your ad will show up on searches for “free {whatever it is you’re selling}.” How do you think that will perform? Like a house built out of plywood, maybe?

Pillar 3: Ad Copy

Most keywords will be relevant for a decent number of advertisers; even branded terms often have competitors bidding on them. How do you set yourself apart from the pack? Simple: write good ad copy.

Building Block 1: Unique Selling Proposition
The best way to set yourself apart from the competition is to include your USP in your ad copy. This alone should make you stand out from the pack, as long as it’s really a USP and not a slogan (which a lot of people confuse for a USP).

Building Block 2: Call to Action
Anyone who’s taken Sales Training 101 will tell you that you won’t close many sales if you don’t ask for the order. PPC is no different – for your ads to be truly successful, they need a call to action.

Below are a few examples of ads on a search for “air purifiers.” The first two ads have the call to action “Buy Now!” But the third ad has no call to action – only a few uninteresting facts about the product.

Pillar 4: Landing Page

All the advertising in the world, of any type, isn’t going to increase conversions if you can’t deliver the goods. In a brick-and-mortar store, facets like merchandise display, store layout, and sales staff skill will affect your sales.

Online, your landing page does the merchandising, layout, and selling. Therefore, it’s crucial to send your PPC traffic to a page that makes sense to the user – a page where they can take the desired action with few distractions.

Building Block 1: Relevance

First and foremost, the landing page must be relevant. If I searched for air purifiers, don’t send me to the QVC homepage where I have to perform a few more searches to find what I already searched for once. Send me to a page where I can buy an air purifier!

Building Block 2: Call to Action

Yes, like 2x4s in home construction, the call to action has multiple places in the PPC process. Not only does ad copy need a CTA, but the landing page does too. You’ve already paid for the visitor to get to your website – don’t squander the opportunity to close the sale by forgetting a call to action!

Building Block 3: Tracking

All the pillars I’ve mentioned so far are useless without accurate conversion tracking. Leaving off this critical building block is like building a house without a roof – all the best construction and finishing in the world is going to go to waste if it gets ruined after the first hard rain. Same thing with your PPC campaigns – if you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t, don’t even bother!

Make sure you have conversion tracking in place before you pay for the first click on an ad. There are lots of great analytics packages out there, and some of them are free. At a minimum, install the free conversion tracking scripts offered by the PPC engines.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com

Agency SEO Pain Relief

Just because your SEO campaign is experiencing hiccups doesn’t mean you aren’t a good SEO practitioner. Certain situations like this force you to look at the alternative factors that can affect SEO success.

When you work within the agency world, managing SEO campaigns will make you privy to a host of several different situations. Some of these are good and some are bad.

For those who work in this space, you may very well agree that when SEO is working, clients love you, and when it’s not, they starting calling you a lot more. I would love to say that I am the world’s best SEO and have never seen a down-trending month of organic traffic, a dip in organic sales, or user behavior hitting the dumps. But I won’t, I will however admit, and those in all walks of SEO (agency/in-house/site-owner) should typically agree, there are good months, great months, fair months and *gasp* bad months.

The focus here is on enduring the bad months. For those of you hell bent on white hat SEO and creating search engine friendly sites it is all but a punch in the face when you look at analytics daily, MOM or even YOY to see a loss in traffic. The rankings are there, how did this happen?

The same goes with organic conversions. The traffic is still there, why did the conversion percentage fly south?

We’ve all been here several times, scratched our heads, and sometimes even banged it against a wall, resulting in more than a few headaches trying to find out why tried-and-true SEO methods aren’t working. Despite this self-inflicted mental abuse, most of these dips aren’t the fault of the SEO. These are in fact caused by several different factors which the most frequently seen are listed below.

And as a disclaimer for the FDA, I am not stating in my column title that I can cure SEO pain, only that I can provide relief.

We can sum up the success of most SEO campaigns as the collaboration of rankings and traffic working together with usability and conversion optimization to form the end goal of a conversion. While we could write a dozen books on the last two elements, I will leave exact science of that to the usability gods such as Tim Ash and to the conversion optimization gurus such as Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.  What I do want to touch on are the quick-check items to understand unfavorable SEO data.

The Rankings are There, the Traffic is Not!

• Find the top referring organic keywords for the past few months. Apply them to Google Insights . Is there a seasonal/economic/media related trend for these keywords you are unaware of? For example, your reliance on “buy red dog leashes” is down after Casey Anthony is seen walking her dog with a red dog leash. OK, a bit extreme.
• Review impression vs. CTR data in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Have impressions decreased while your average rankings have remained stable?
• Run your top campaign keyword terms through the Google AdWords tool, export and review the by-month breakdown of search volume trends. This is something you want to pay attention to if your client is selling ice cream cones in December.
• Has your client made changes to SERP specific elements, title/meta/page-name without telling you? A quick change of enticing title element text and description to “Acme Brick Company”, ”Welcome to the homepage for Acme Brick Company” can do a number on click through rates.
• Do you have analytical tracking code on all your site pages? Run a tool such as Analytics Checkup. You never know when the client or dev team could have mistakenly dropped tracking code from important pages. Another beacon that may show this problem is a MOM Landing Page or Content comparison in analytics.
• Are the rankings really there? Relying on a keyword ranking report can be deceiving. Rankings fluctuate continuously and other SERP factors also come into play. For example, you may still have that 4th place listing but through manual review you can see that images are now displayed via universal search and your listing just got pushed under the fold of the page.
• Don’t just look at the rankings, look at the landing pages. If you have top ranking page that is now 404ing awaiting SERP elimination in the next crawl you can have a ranking that isn't driving traffic. Remedy this in the future with a custom 404 page to hopefully retain visits.

The Rankings are There, The Traffic is There, but Where are My Conversions?

• The likely culprit here is that someone has adjusted the analytical goal URLs, match type, funnel URLs or through site maintenance has dropped the conversion tracking code.
• Are you attuned to your client’s promotional schedule? Not checking the site often makes it hard to see that an important call to action may have expired, been removed, etc.
• Has your client recently removed main and sub-navigational links? Alterations to the click-path can leave visitors disconnected with the previous well performing conversion funnel.
• The traffic is there, but is it the “right” traffic? Your recent blog post may have provided a lot of heavy bounce traffic while your usual top converting terms may be trailing this month due to various reasons listed above.

While our industry serves us a plethora of other situations, these are the typical issues you'll see on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and even year-to-year comparison review. While you are likely to see even stranger predicaments, these are the quick checks you should review to avoid data review headaches.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com