Category: News

How Small Businesses Can Use Google Plus — Expand2Web

While Facebook is an excellent resource for small business social media engagement, Google+ is an up-and-comer that as of yet doesn’t allow business profiles. However, hope is on the way: winter of 2011 will yield the first allowed G+ commercial accounts, so if you’re a media-savvy business owner now’s the time to start formulating your strategy. Expand2Web’s Daniela Baker has the scoop on what you should be thinking about in the upcoming months to optimize your establishment’s chances on Google’s mean streets.

Friday Five: Optimizing Content & Visibility with SlideShare — Edelman Digital

In their own Friday Five tradition, the wizards at Edelman share their tips & tricks for using SlideShare, a cutting-edge “YouTube for documents” that offers a platform for information sharing and discussion.

Facebook Debuts Smart Lists: Is Google+ in Trouble? — Search Engine Journal

The G+/FB war continues with Facebook’s institution of “smart lists,” algorithmic sorting that automatically categorizes one’s friends into set groups. In addition to introducing the automatic methods of sorting, the ‘book is also pushing a lesser-known feature that allows one to manually separate out groups for maximum ease of social sharing. Combined with the updated privacy settings of last week, seems like Facebook is gearing up to address Google+’s emphasis on user privacy and share filtering.

Why not updating your Core, Themes & Plugins is Stupid — Yoast

We’re all guilty of it: when the upgrade alert appears on anything from our music players to website modules, it’s tempting to say “not now” and ignore the problem in favor of more immediate concerns. Joost de Valk has a blog up at Yoast warning of the perils of ignoring vital core, theme and plugin updates.

50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics — Copyblogger

Finding it hard to crank out blog after blog to keep your site full of fresh content? Use these fifty useful prompts to generate dynamic, juicy topics that will keep the entries coming.

Rethinking Deals After Facebook and Yelp Pullbacks — BIA/Kelsey

Hot on the heels of the Facebook and Yelp deal eliminations, Peter Krasilovsky offers this nuanced and insightful view of the situation — as well as the suggestion that the trend may have already peaked.

Twitter, YouTube, Facebook And Foursquare: Social Media Marketing By The Numbers [INFOGRAPHIC] — Media Bistro AllTwitter

This Mashable infographic displays the numbers on some of the most successful social media marketing campaigns, from clicks and retweets to subscribers and fans.

9 Reasons Why Your Content Is Not Shared on Social Networks: New Research — Social Media Examiner

Having trouble getting your content to stick out in a tumultuous sea of data? Interested in getting it out there via the social sphere, or in understanding why some pieces get shared but not others? Phil Mershon of Social Media Examiner is on the case with this handy list of nine reasons why your audience may not be publicizing your product and what to do about it.

Optimize The Google +1 Button — Blind Five Year Old

After Google’s rehaul of the +1 button for increased shareability on Google+, it seems like a logical conclusion that the feature will now be more or less a Like button in functionality (if not in form). AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old leads the charge in optimization endeavors using this new feature on a self-hosted WordPress blog with an eye on speed, placement, snippet richness and more.

Condensing & Repositioning SEO Copy with Jquery Sliders — Graywolf’s SEO

Breaking content up into digestible chunks that are still content-rich and won’t penalize your optimization or conversion rates is as easy as pie with Michael Gray’s guide to Jquery sliders.

Top 10 Actually Useful Tweets about Hurricane Irene — Social Times

While Twitter by its very nature lends itself to split-second buzz and instant information sharing, sometimes that buzz is neither constructive nor informative. If you’re in the predicted path of Hurricane Irene, here’s a collection of up-to-the-minute resources (in tweet form, no less) with a wide variety of useful information with regard to pet care, keeping track of precious possessions and the locations of local resources and shelters. Keep dry and stay safe, folks — and make sure all your bases are covered with these useful resources.

Facebook’s Massive Kitchen Sink Update: Photo Tag Approvals And So Much More — TechCrunch

The long national nightmare is over and the ‘book has finally implemented something that users have been calling for since its inception: users are now allowed to approve photo tags before updates are posted to said users’ profiles. This is just one part of Facebook’s kitchen-sink approach to “Mak[ing] It Easier to Share with Who You Want,” a new suite a features that pushes a common-sense approach to privacy via explicitly displaying whether posted statuses, pictures, et cetera are public or visible at varying levels of the users’ friends. Additionally, Facebook Places has been all but eliminated, with a lack of emphasis on Foursquare-esque checkin services and more attention given to location-based deals.

Google+ Now Lets You Ignore or Block People — Search Engine Watch

Social networks of all stripes are revamping their security policies this week as Google+ announces the new capability for users to ignore or block people. Ignoring will render all of the ignorer’s posts, notifications and Circles activity invisible to the ignorer without notification; blocking takes it a step further by removing the person from your extended circles and preventing interactions between the two of you via post. Additionally, it’s also now possible to see all photos one has been tagged in via one link, as well as a handful of other minor updates.

UK to Twitter, Facebook & RIM: We Won’t Ban Social Media — Mashable

With the buzz around social media revolution at an all-time high thanks to the still-ongoing events of the Arab Spring and other political upheavals such as the London riots, many are speculating that social media crackdowns are in the future for many. However, British officials are making it clear that they will not take the path of censorship.

Search Google Maps By Talking — Search Engine Roundtable

Google has announced that voice search is coming to Google Maps. Users will now be able to get directions by speaking their location and destination into their phones. As someone who tends to get lost often and is all too guilty of frantically mobile-mapping in the car, this is going to be very useful for the mobile user base — safer, quicker and more effective than juggling phone and steering wheel.

And as a bonus link…

In case you didn’t hear our big news, here’s the NOLA.com piece on Search Influence being named in the Inc. Top 500. So nice we had to say it twice! Congratulations to the other

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.

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.

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.