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Author: Search Influence Alumni

  • 5 For Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend

    Reputation And The “Right To Be Forgotten”: Spain’s Radical Approach To Search And Personal Privacy — Search Engine Land

    In an era where privacy norms seem to be eroding every day with the advent of up-to-the-minute social media, Spain is taking an interesting tack with regard to the “right to be forgotten.” A Spanish court is asking Google to eliminate information from about 90 private users from its index. While El Goog is fighting the petition, the case raises some interesting questions: on one hand 75% of Europeans polled wanted the right to delete personal information at any time, this movement would potentially allow private users the power to pull down information displayed on third-party sites such as news sources and Wikipedia. What do you think?

    5 Low-Budget Ways to Distribute Your Blog Content — WordStream

    Do you have a well-optimized blog with great content, but are having some trouble pulling in eyeballs? WordStream’s Elisa Gabbert shares five handy ways to spread awareness of your work, from savvy utilization of social media to tactics as simple as a well-crafted email signature.

    Interview with Robert Sheinbein About Creating Quality Content — Graywolf’s SEO

    Content provider and all-around creative Internet mogul Robert Sheinbein talks in-depth about the importance of crafting dynamic, interesting content for your website, communicating instructions to writers with regard to tone, style and end goals and a solid floorboards-up keyword plan.

    4 Tips For Success With Seasonal, Local SEO — Search Engine Land

    It’s back-to-school time, and if you’re a savvy backpack or school supply retailer you’ll have gotten your optimization ducks in a row ahead of time to capitalize on the incoming demand. Whether you’re in the business of firecrackers, Christmas trees or haunted houses, this article is an excellent resource on ways to plan ahead to get the most out of your business’s seasonality.

    Optimizing social in support of search marketing — B to B Online

    Mike Jarvinen, VP Marketing Strategy at the Search Agency, gives some pointers on “strong social media outreach” and its importance to organic and paid search. When performed correctly, a strong social media platform can help build trust in a brand. Among his tips: prominently-displayed authoritative content such as studies and lists of associations are a big boon to a brand’s impact.

  • Starting Out on Facebook: Small Business Marketing Solutions or Useless Sales Pitch?

    facebook small business marketing
    That’s some brand love.

    A few weeks ago, Facebook Marketing Solutions, the advertising side of the social media giant, released its new education portal for small businesses just starting out online, titled Facebook for Business.

    The Facebook page for the group is nothing more than a simple sales pitch for businesses becoming involved on the site. It’s tips for publishing, appeals to outmoded user statistics, and overall tone is clearly directed at the first-time Facebook advertisers. Promoting Sponsored Stories seems to be the main goal, though the ability for a small business to achieve such a close relationship with the company behind the site is not clear at first glance: Nike, American Express, and a page that can get 100 answers to the question “Blue or purple?” are featured, but no one just starting out with limited brand awareness. However, as you delve deeper into the videos, a number of case studies can be heard by the part-time Internet marketer to help understand the basics of the varied services Facebook offers, explained in a way that focuses on what makes social media advertising different from traditional venues.

    But July 27th brought a new arena for the first-time marketer. The Facebook for Business site offers a set of introductory slides more like what one would expect on the Facebook page. The Best Practice Guide and other tips take the unedited rambling of the taped live webinars from the Facebook page and put them into clear slideshows (though inexplicably as unsharable and minimally-graphable PDFs). Discussing Pages, Ads, Sponsored Stories, and the “Platform,” Facebook lays out its basic services in an all-too-simple way.

    The site is clearly for someone who doesn’t muck with websites, as just one tab describing the Open Graph protocol for a new marketer would show a whole new world, integrating on-site tagging with a need to contact a Preferred Developer to best take advantage of the depth of information one can provide, shape, and offer to their clients.

    It’s easy, at least for the somewhat experienced marketer, to come up with counterexamples, glossed-over topics that are the core of Facebook advertising such as effective demographic targeting, and the just-seething disdain for squares who just haven’t gotten how cool Social Media is. But I applaud Facebook for their efforts; the only other major social media outlet for business is Twitter, which starts its Promoted links at $5,000 per month and provides little information for its non-paid business partners. Google+ recently purged business accounts, asking creators of those accounts to “hold off,” and have been “focusing on the consumer experience” — words that are hardly music to marketers’ ears.

    What the shortcomings of the Facebook for Business and Facebook Marketing Solutions pages really show off is that a business needs dedicated social media management, whether through an SEO firm or internally. The waters are murky and best handled by someone who knows not just the sales pitch for getting involved, but also the mechanics of the process and what little stuff can greatly improve the social footprint of the small business. It’s too hard to sum up everything that should and could be done to optimally advertise using social media just on a few webpages or through a few taped webinars — the best thing is to call Ghostbusters and let Peter and Ray and Egon worry about the ghosts so business owners can get back to directly helping their customers.

  • My Space’s Tom Anderson gives Google+ a stamp of approval

     

    Okay, so MySpace may be “dead” now that it’s been sold to Specific Media for a paltry 35 million, but you can bet that many of its years of success had something to do with its founder, Tom Anderson. Your first friend on MySpace now has a shiny Google+ account of his own, and he also had plenty to share about the new social network in a guest post on TechCrunch, most of it positive.

    The main theme of Tom’s post has to do with Facebook and how it is reacting to the debut of Google+. According to Tom, Google has the advantage. “When it comes to “monetization” on the G+ “website,” Google’s trump card against Facebook is that we may never even see an ad on G+.” Tom says.  “Google has plenty to gain without ever showing an ad and, put simply, Google doesn’t need the money. Facebook’s got to know this, and it’s got to have them just a little bit concerned.”

    Tom also alludes to Facebook considering changes to make their feeds real time rather than the current “Top News” setup because of complaints from advertisers and app developers. In fact, Facebook has taken some defensive actions since Google+ launched, which surely shows that they are considering the new social network to be a threat.

    Tom also mentions that Facebook gaffed when it came to the way they handled their relationships with developers, and that how Google handles this delicate issue will be crucial to the next step in Google+ development. In fact, he stresses the balance between advertisers, users, developers as crucial, and I absolutely agree — too much in one direction and social networks seem to suffer. We’ve seen plenty of that with past sites such as Friendster, Tribe and even MySpace.

    In summary, the social network field is in an interesting place at the moment, with Facebook and all its massive popularity up against Google and its bright new ideas and excellent resources. Google has something of a clean slate on this playing field, while Facebook has made its mistakes. But can Google capture the user base that Facebook has? It seems without those numbers, the key to success still would be out of reach.

    What do you feel is key to the success of a social network?

  • 5 For Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend

    We’re back with another 5 for Friday, a collection of the freshest and tastiest SEO news stories, blogs and recommendations from across the web!

    Google’s Spam Report Page Gets “Biggest Refresh” In Years — Search Engine Land

    The Webmaster Tools spam report form has been completely updated and refreshed, heralding the biggest change to the feature in a good 10 years. There are now several discrete forms for different kinds of spam instead of one catch-all field, with options for “paid links” and “malware” among other specific spam issues.

    The 3 Pillars of Local Search Reviews — Search Engine Journal

    Local search is a significantly dynamic and shifting branch of web search — just think of the onslaught of check-in services that have cropped up in recent memory — and this changeability has led to what SEJ’s Mike Ramsey dubs as “storm chasers,” those who are so quick to cash in on the next big thing that they abandon their efforts as soon as shiny new feature or social app comes onto the scene. This has proven true with Google’s recent focus on user-generated reviews and all but exclusion of third-party sources. Here, Ramsey gives a few pointers on the discerning review-seeker’s strategies for the local search industry.

    Outbrain for Mobile Integrates Content Recommendation Links for Mobile Websites — Social Times

    In some circumstances, a well-placed related content link can do a lot more for your viewing stats than the most carefully targeted advertisements. Outbrain, the recommendation engine that powers related content discovery services for high-profile sites such as USA Today, the New York Post and the Atlantic, has now adapted this strategy for mobile websites to “[enable] publishers to boost their mobile traffic and revenue, while enhancing the user experience by providing personalized links to recommended content for readers who are accessing the site from their mobile device.”

    Small Business SEO: How to Check Your Backlinks — Search Engine Watch

    Are you a small business just starting to navigate the wide world of SEO? Take a gander at this handy guide to basic backlinking and kick-start the journey into off-site marketing, monitoring your links and figuring out the numbers.

    Google Buys The Dealmap for Offers — ProNet Advertising

    Google has acquired DealMap, a local deal-mapping service that provides location-based deals to potentially tens of millions of bargain shoppers. For a company that was only just started in 2010, DealMap has had an impressive growth rate, already breaking the 2 million users mark with a substantial 85 million US visitor demographic. With the recent launch of Google Offers, the company’s foray into local Groupon-like deal networking could be picking up steam.

  • Influencer Profile: Scott Shockley

    This week’s profiled Influencer is Assistant Production Manager Scott Shockley. Originally from the Greater New Orleans area, Scott graduated from LSU in 2008 with a degree in Marketing after four years in Baton Rouge. He’s worked for a tech startup and Capital One, as well as serving as Tulane University’s Marketing Manager.

    Scott exemplifying the professional demeanor we strive for at SI.

    He finds himself interested in the technical side of marketing and business and appreciates SEO’s demand for these skills on a daily basis. Scott’s also a longtime Influencer, tied with developers Luke Ledet and Doug Thomas for longest-tenured Production member — all three have been with us since the company was based out of Will and Angie’s living room!

    What do you find yourself doing on a day-to-day basis? Any particular skills you’ve had to develop since joining SI?

    One of my biggest responsibilities is making sure that approximately 600,000 words per month are in proper order, not misspelled and make sense, and that approximately 21,600 links per month are intact and functioning properly. I spend a lot of my time looking for issues, fixing some and having good training in place to minimize errors. We do a great job at getting a massive amount of work done and it’s mostly because the work we do as individuals comes together like a nice smooth roux at the end of every month.

    At Search Influence I’ve learned a ton about management but also the technical skills required to work in this industry. I have also learned that you actually can go to Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge for several hours after work, with coworkers, and still have a job the next day.

    You were recently promoted from an Internet Marketing Associate to Assistant Manager of the Bad Boyz of Production. Congrats! How’d the changeover go?

    It wasn’t much of a change because it has been a constantly evolving progression for the last year. I’ve done almost everything in Production, from editing websites to being the subject of a horribly corny snakes in a can prank (Psych! I played along to be a good sport). I was here near the inception of the Production department and wanted to get my hands as dirty as possible from the beginning.

    Is there anything you’d like to be doing more or less of around the office? In a perfect world, what would you be doing all day?

    It would be pretty awesome if Will retired and made me CEO, but I don’t see that happening any time soon! It would be pretty cool to do some statistical research about correlations between all of the known SEO variables and rankings on search engines. I’ve also always fantasized about trading lives with Just Blaze or Diplo.

    Does keeping track of the hundreds upon hundreds of content we process every month get overwhelming? How do you deal with it?

    It’s usually not overwhelming because the training process is so thorough that we usually don’t make very many mistakes. On top of that, when I export task data from our project management system, I plug it in to one of the sickest spreadsheets known to man [=SUMPRODUCT(–(input!C2:C2000=””&A14&””),–(input!D2:D2000=”Deferred”))], and it warns me about many of the problems we might be having.

    Scott Shockley's own smoked pork shoulder.

    What do you find yourself doing outside of SI? Any cool projects?

    I’m trying to redesign my currently ugly, but juiced up website to promote 24 hour restaurants in New Orleans, mainly because I love SEO but I also love to eat. I’m also into cooking, especially smoking food, and will be roasting my first whole pig this Labor Day! On top of that, I manage to find time to tell all the jokes that are too inappropriate to tell at work.

    The editor would like it to go on the record that she appreciates both inappropriate jokes and copious amounts of pulled pork. Thanks for all the work you put in wrangling writers, content and SI employees, Scott! We’ll be back in two weeks with another exciting Influencer profile.

  • Can Bing Ever Compete with Google?

    If you keep up with what’s in the news in the world of search engines, you know that there’s been a bitter little rivalry between Bing and Google for some time. In early February, Bing accused Google of stealing their search results. It didn’t help Bing’s case that they didn’t deny the claim either, instead saying, “…we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking, but like the rest of the players in this industry, we’re not going to go deep and detailed in how we do it.”

    Fast forward to now, where Microsoft was recently the topic of discussion in a lengthy article in the New York Times about Bing’s profitability — and how long it may take them before they have any chance of breaking even. Other reports claim that Microsoft has claimed 30% of the search market and that Google is “slowly sinking”, even though it still controls roughly 65% of the search market.

    Bing has made respectable strides since its launch two years ago, but even so, it hasn’t been able to match the brute force of Google, which was the leading search engine among ten competitors back in 2002, only two years after its launch.  Surely, Bing will continue to grow, but even if can find itself on equal footing with Google, can that be considered success?

    Microsoft’s Qi Lu says, “To break through, we have to change the game. But this is a long term journey.” He’s right … but how long will that journey be? Sources seem to think that Bing will need to demonstrate some sort of clear success before its tenth birthday to remain a contender.

    How can Microsoft accomplish this? Voices all over the web have tons of ideas, but several of the key ones seem to stick out. Some suggest that Bing work both ends of the user spectrum, finding a way to appeal to every age range (much like Nintendo did with the launch of their Wii videogame console). Since Google tends to appeal to a young, tech savvy audience, this could be a valid approach for Bing. Microsoft should also focus carefully on their acquisitions, and try to see what could work best for them (here’s a hint: buying Skype for $8.5 billion might not have been the best choice).

    Personally, I’m a fan of Google’s products, so until Bing can offer something better, I’m staying put. How do you feel about it?

  • 5 For Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend

    How SEO Can Work With Content Strategy — TopRank

    While much of SEO is focused on the technical aspects such as linkbuilding and algorithm reputation, the quality of website content itself is of at least as much importance. TopRank’s Lee Odden and Content Specialist Margot Bloomstein give you the skinny about how organizations can reach and engage their audience through careful content development, producing an end product that’s “Findable, Readable, Understandable, Actionable and Shareable.”

    Think Blogging is a Dead-End for Your Small Business? — Search Engine Journal

    If you’re a small business interested in online expansion, you may be wondering if setting up and regularly maintaining a blog is worth the effort. While the motivations for blogging can be radically different from establishment to establishment, the end goal is the same: to target your customers. This article discusses the many advantages of blogging and how to avoid some common pitfalls such as failing to consistently update with fresh content, analyze the blog’s metrics or respond to user feedback.

    How to Tweet From Your Archives Without Pissing People Off — Graywolf’s SEO

    Do you have a large backlog of interesting, pertinent archived content that you want to expose to new users or followers? In this handy how-to, Michael Gray explains the ins and outs of grooming your list of selections to create a sleek and multi-faceted campaign to get your older content maximum exposure.

    IT and SEO Teams Should Work Together — SEO Chat

    All too often SEO and IT professionals end up at odds throughout the course of a project, slowing work progress and creating discord in the team. SEO Chat’s Terri Wells gives examples of some common causes of this friction, as well as tips on how to resolve the problem and create well-functioning team in which all facets collaborate and respect each other.

    Bing Unfolds a New Set of Finance Tools — ProNet Advertising

    If you’re a NASDAQ news junkie who’s considering making the switch to Bing, you’re in luck. The Microsoft-driven Google competitor has unveiled a whole new suite of financial tools designed to allow you to keep track of social stock conversations, display recent news stories applicable to your researched companies and share decisions to buy, sell or trade via a Facebook widget. By aligning itself with well-established third parties in the sphere such as Seeking Alpha and StockTwits.com, Bing has created a hithero-unseen conglomerate of resources designed to get you every bit of financial information you could ever ask for in a single service. Click through to get the goods on how this social search bigwig is turning its focus to Wall Street.

  • Pittpatt Puts Google Acquisitions To 100

    Thursday, Google acquired Carnegie-Mellon University spinoff project PittPatt, which specialized in facial recognition software for businesses like GE. We’ll be a bit naïve here and take Google at their word when they claim they won’t implement full facial recognition software without “strong privacy protections” and intentionally excluded the feature from Google Goggles. It seems clear that Google will use the technology to enhance video quality and would otherwise be caught in crass doublespeak during a time to play it straight.

    It is striking that Google seems utterly unfazed by two government commissions investigating it for its aggressive vertical integration into niche search and social media.

    PittPatt marks the hundredth merger by Google, the sixteenth this year. For comparison, the slightly older and smaller Yahoo has acquired 64 companies and the more traditional technology company Microsoft purchased 144, both with only two acquisitions over the past seven months.

    Google seems to be almost thumbing its nose at both European and American investigators. Not only are they explosively expanding and refining their social tools, they are reinforcing use of Google properties on Maps and de-emphasizing other sites’ role in local search. Google is even boasting its wide variety of overt technologies by giving the user everything they could love (with a layout ripped from a Mahalo demo video) even as they take away a line of customer interaction with the company.

    Of course companies change, and to be mired in chasing the FTC algorithm would be much more likely than and as damaging as wrongdoing being found by the inquiry. Even more important is that these acquisitions allowed Google to provide a wide range of products, most of which were cobbled together from multiple targets’ technology. But is Larry Page’s aggressive business strategy going to engender the company to the FTC during the Google Antitrust case?

    Check back tomorrow for an informative infographic from SI’s own Joe Luft on the situation!

  • Google Isn’t Bowing Down

    So, in case you haven’t heard, there was a major update to Google Places late last week. My Friday was filled with confusion, frustration and a feeling of something worse to come. It was sort of like a David Lynch movie with a Local twist. Now that the smoke has cleared, one question remains. What is Google up to?

    Google Places Update

    Before I get into the possible reasons for this update, here is a rundown of the most prominent changes that have been made to business listings on Google Places.

    • Google reviews are the only ones to include snippets now.
    • Third-party reviews have been relegated  to a  “Reviews from around the web” section at the bottom of the page.
    • Third-Party citations have been removed completely.
    • A big red “Write a review” button has been added in two prominent positions.
    • The “More about this place” section is gone.
    • The “What people are saying” section has been replaced by “descriptive terms”.

    Now, back to the question-at-hand. What is Google up to? The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati suggests that Google is bowing down to it’s competitors under growing pressure from the FTC’s antitrust investigation. Saying that, by removing third-party reviews from Places pages, Google is distancing itself from the claims that they “steal” content from the likes of Yelp and Citysearch, post it on their own Places pages, and give those pages preferential rankings in search results. While I see where Amir is coming from, I don’t think that Google is bowing down at all. Quite the contrary, actually. I believe that Google is putting their attack plans into motion.

    Google was initially designed to index third-party content in an easily searchable and user-friendly format. By removing third-party citations and review snippets and promoting their own reviews in what is usually the #1 ranked search result within it’s own #1 ranked search engine, Google has formatted their local search results in a way that obviously favors their own content over that of their rivals. This is the exact reason why the FTC is investigating Google in the first place.

    In other words, Google isn’t interested in displaying reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, and other prominent sites, they want to make those reviews obsolete. If you look at the changes to Google Places from this perspective, it doesn’t seem like Google is that worried about the FTC’s investigation. With all that money they are spending on federal lobbying, I guess Big G thinks they’ll come out on top like Microsoft did in the 90’s.

    Ultimately, not much has changed when it comes to what really matters… getting results. Google Places is still the holy grail of Local SEO. There haven’t been any reported drops in rankings due to this update, so no major algorithm changes are believed to be involved. This means that while Google may not be displaying third-party reviews and citations, they still matter when it comes determining the rankings of local search results, for now.

     

  • 5 For Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend

    4 Reasons Why Contests Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy — Mashable

    While contests and sweepstakes can be intensive campaigns to undergo, they can have an enormous impact on your customer base and should be part of every media marketer’s toolbox. Check out Ben Pickering’s concise list of four reasons why you should consider one today.

    Google Overhauls Place Pages, Emphasizes Reviews & Kills Citations — Search Engine Land

    Google’s recent overhaul of their Place Page system and elimination of third-party review snippets has set a lot of tongues around the SEO community wagging. Check out this article for a brief overview, but be sure to come back next week for Joseph Henson‘s in-depth review of the change.

    YouTube SEO – 5 Step Formula To Dominate YouTube & Google — Tom Breeze TV

    YouTube videos have enormous potential for attracting traffic, but are consistently underrepresented in the optimization community. This handy video from Tom Breeze gives a step-by-step explanation of just how valuable video content can be to you, as well as tips to engage the community and divert traffic to your site.

    Google Adds URL Parameter Options to Google Webmaster Tools — Search Engine Land

    Google has added a feature enabling webmasters to specify how URL parameters can communicate how content is viewed on a webpage for sorting, filtering and pagination purposes (among many others). SEL’s Vanessa Fox has the technical details and the nitty-gritty on what this means for your site configuration.

    38 Million in US Purchase Under Influence of Social Media — Social Times

    While you probably already knew that social media marketing holds a large influence over consumer behavior, it’s only now coming to light how strong a grasp this really is. The purchase decisions of a staggering 38 million 13 to 80 year olds in the United States are now influenced by social media, and the number is growing — up 14% in the last six months. Check out this study and see how you can be making the “ripple effect” work for you.