tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24349333287146155822024-03-13T14:40:08.701-07:00The Latest SEO Updates | Hottest SEO NewsProvides the latest and the hottest SEO updates, news, and the newest trend in search engine optimization and world wide web.Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-40163598048259341602013-02-01T02:17:00.000-08:002013-02-01T02:17:11.371-08:00Good Bye Anchor Text, Welcome Co-Citations: Revolution in Link Building for 2013 Revealed<br />
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<img alt="goodbye anchor text" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/goodbye-anchor-text.jpg" /></div>
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The <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Google Penguin update</a> has changed the link building process forever. Gone are the days when it was easy to rank for desired keywords by building tons of links using exact keywords as the anchor text.</div>
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In the wake of Penguin, uncertain exactly where the thresholds and ratios are. Just how well distributed should our anchor text be in order to get the best results?</div>
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We have been busy with research on the subject and, not too long ago, discovered what <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/team/randfish" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Rand Fishkin</a> at the <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEOMoz blog</a> had to say for their Whiteboard Friday series. Much of what we’ve observed has fallen in line with his <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">predictions</a>.</div>
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So why might Google think about diminishing Anchor text?</h2>
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It’s too easily manipulated.</div>
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No matter how the link was obtained, you clearly have more control over the anchor text if have direct control over the link. Google isn’t, for the most part, interested in links that you have built yourself. There <i>are</i> exceptions. For example, if your reach is big enough to get links from prominent sites on the web, links that you directly build as a result are a genuine indication of your influence on the web.</div>
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But, in general, Google wants to see sites linking to you simply because they like the content, feel it’s relevant, and want to share it with their audience.<ins cite="mailto:Manish" datetime="2012-12-24T18:13" style="background-color: #fff9c0; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"> </ins>A link with highly optimized anchor text simply doesn’t look natural. It means there’s a much higher chance you had direct control over the creation of that link. If most of your links have optimized anchor text, it means you probably built most of them yourself.</div>
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What are co-citations?</h2>
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I found a page on SourceForge.net that gives <a href="http://webla.sourceforge.net/javadocs/pt/tumba/links/CoCitation.html" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">a nice definition of co citation</a>.</div>
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<i style="margin-bottom: 0px !important;">“Bibliographic Co-Citation is a popular similarity measure used to establish a subject similarity between two items. If A and B are both cited by C, they may be said to be related to one another, even though they don’t directly reference each other. If A and B are both cited by many other items, they have a stronger relationship. The more items they are cited by, the stronger their relationship is.”</i></div>
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We believe that Google is placing less emphasis on anchor text (and perhaps links in general), and is leveraging it’s massive data set to look for statistical correlations that it can use to determine relevance and influence on the web. Links are a good proxy for this, but as the search engines get smarter they will get better at measuring “buzz” unrelated to links and especially anchor text.</div>
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How to earn co-citations?</h2>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Stay up to date on trends in your niche</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Produce original content on the subject that hasn’t been covered extensively by others</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">If your content makes waves in the industry, it will influence the direction of posts made by others later on. Even if they don’t link to you directly, your impact on the industry will in some cases be measured by Google. The search engines will only get better at this in the years going forward.</li>
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Here’s an example. After the recent Google algorithm updates, “Post Panda/Penguin strategies” became a topic that people were looking for very frequently. As a result, that’s what we wrote about our earlier post. <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-post-pandapenguin-era-links-acquisition-strategies/50414/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Here it is</a>.</div>
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Afterward, we got a lot of natural citations from third party websites where people were talking about link building strategies that apply after the Google Panda and Penguin updates.</div>
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<b>Here is an example from Quora:</b></div>
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<img alt="Image1 (1)" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-57785" height="127" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Image1-1.png" style="height: auto; max-width: 100%;" width="620" /></div>
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<b><br />Here is the citation we got:</b></div>
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<img alt="image2" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-57786" height="222" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/image21.png" style="height: auto; max-width: 100%;" width="510" /></div>
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As you can see, this link doesn’t use anchor text at all. However, the entire page is about post-penguin/panda strategies, and Google is increasingly using this kind of information to determine what the linked page is about.</div>
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Why would Google give more importance to co-citations than anchor text?</h3>
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Simple. Logically, it’s harder to manipulate co-citations. You cannot have great co-citations unless you have actionable content which people love to read and share. Also, you cannot manipulate the industry influencers who make your co-citations possible. They only promote the content that they feel is best to share with their readers.</div>
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If you have an actionable post then you don’t need to manipulate things. You’ll get citations much like the one above.</div>
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<b>Conclusion</b></div>
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It is too early to say for sure, but we believe Google is not only pushing away from anchor text, but toward co-citation as one of the strongest relevancy signals. Co-citation, if measured properly, gives the search engine much more data to work with and will allow it to take the temperature of the internet community at large. Anchor text, on the other hand, is a small html quirk that few people even know how to use properly.</div>
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So do you think Co-citations will be replaced by Anchor text in near future? Let’s talk about it in comments. I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.</div>
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Image Credit: Shutterstock / woaiss</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/good-bye-anchor-text-welcome-co-citations-revolution-in-link-building-for-2013-revealed/57783/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/good-bye-anchor-text-welcome-co-citations-revolution-in-link-building-for-2013-revealed/57783/</a></div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-24032296518001140372013-01-28T23:15:00.000-08:002013-01-28T23:22:52.857-08:00The Intersection of SEO and User Experience<br />
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<img alt="SEO Usability" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/SEO-Usability.jpg" /></div>
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One of the biggest criticisms that exists regarding the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that it’s entirely self-promotional—that is, that it manipulates websites based on what the search engines prefer to see, not based on what’s most beneficial to website users.</div>
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As such, it would appear that a conflict exists between SEO and the creation of a good user experience. After all, if you’re constantly tweaking and tailoring your website for natural search success, doesn’t it also stand to reason that this diminished focus on your website’s users creates an environment that isn’t enjoyable or interesting for real people?</div>
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In fact, I disagree. As you’ll see in the following examples, there are plenty of instances in which these dual focuses actually work together—with best practices from both disciplines combining to create an environment that’s both easily accessible to the search engines and highly engaging to the actual visitors that wind up on your site.</div>
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Use Sitemaps and Simple Navigation</h2>
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It’s no secret that sitemaps and effective navigation strategies are important from an SEO perspective. Search engines operate on limited crawl budgets, meaning that they may only index a certain number of pages on your site on any given visit. If they have any difficulty navigating to different areas of your website (whether because of a lack of internal links or because of Flash-based navigation systems), you risk squandering this crawl budget unnecessarily.</div>
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As a result, sitemaps and efficient navigation options are great for the search engines, but their also great for your users. Keep in mind that users like things simplified as well. Really, nobody has time these days to click through page after page, looking for a single piece of information that could have been made easily accessible with a better navigation system.</div>
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So, do both your users and the search engines a favor by following sitemap creation best practices and implementing an HTML-based navigation system that ensures that every page on your site can be found within three clicks or less!</div>
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Combine SEO and User Experience Elements</h2>
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From an SEO standpoint, huge chunks of text are good. Not only do they give the search engines’ spider programs a better understanding of your site’s focus area (increasing the odds that you’ll rank for the right search queries in the natural results), they also improve keyword discovery for webmasters (increasing the number of search queries for which you’ll rank).</div>
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But from a user standpoint, long stretches of uninterrupted text-based content aren’t all that great. Nobody wants to click on to a new website—only to be assaulted by the sheer volume of required reading offered by some pages.</div>
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That said, you don’t need to choose between the text content that’s favored by the search engines and the graphic experience preferred by website visitors. Just keep “the fold” of your website’s pages in mind. Because the first few moments of interaction on your website are so critical to interesting and retaining new visitors, consider including graphic elements on the top of your pages (where they’ll be seen right away by users) and text blogs on the bottom (where they’ll still be accessible by the search engines). Everybody wins!</div>
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Write Content for Users and the Search Engines</h2>
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As any webmaster with at least a basic understanding of SEO knows, content is king. Content does your website a number of SEO favors—from increasing the odds that your site will be indexed for a particular target keyword to aiding your chances of ranking highly by improving your overall “<a href="http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/leveraging-googles-freshness-update-for-seo/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">freshness</a>” score. And for the most part, it should be obvious that adding high-quality content to your site on a regular basis goes a long way towards improving the user experience on your site as well.</div>
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That said, confusion occurs when it comes to <b>how</b> this content should be written in order to maximize its SEO effectiveness. The days of keyword density playing a role in SEO rankings has long since passed, and yet, many webmasters still believe that they need to create paragraphs like the ones below in order to secure the top spots in the natural search results pages:</div>
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<i style="margin-bottom: 0px !important;">“Melissa’s Gift Shop has the best low cost gifts on the Web. Her store sells women’s gifts, men’s gifts, children’s gifts, pet gifts and more. Her low cost gifts are great for any occasion, so be sure to check back the next time you need a low cost gift.”</i></div>
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No … Just no!</div>
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When it comes to keyword inclusion, it’s a good idea to include your target keyword in your page title, headline tag and body content, but don’t include more than one instance in any of these areas. More than this simply isn’t necessary when it comes to SEO (in fact, doing so could put your site at risk of an <a href="http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/penguin-recovery-plan-eliminating-over-optimization/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">over-optimization penalty</a>) and risks annoying your readers to the extent that they leave your site and never return.</div>
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Repeat after me: High-quality, natural-sounding website content benefits both my readers and the search engine spiders!</div>
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Avoid Flash</h2>
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Can we all make an agreement to simply stop using this outdated technology? Here’s the thing…</div>
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Although search engines have come a long way in their ability to recognize and parse the content found within Flash objects on websites, the still aren’t able to process this information correctly 100 percent of the time. So at best, you’ve filled up your site with content that the search engines can’t understand. At worst, though, you’ve diminished the overall SEO effectiveness of your site by including important information in a format that the search engines can’t process correctly.</div>
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And don’t even try to tell me that Flash is necessary for your user experience! We’re long since passed the days when website visitors were impressed by every moving object and animated experience you could cram into your site. These days, people want information ASAP, which means that they don’t want to waste time sitting through the minute-long Flash splash page or presentation your Web team is so proud of.</div>
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So yes, while I know it’s possible to work around the SEO weaknesses that Flash presents, my point is that there’s no reason to. Users don’t want to deal with these animations, so do everybody a favor and eliminate them from your website entirely.</div>
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Incorporate Microdata Markup into Your Pages</h2>
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One final intersection between SEO and the user experience that you’ll want to be aware of is the impact that microdata usage can have on your website’s performance.</div>
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When it comes to SEO, microdata—particularly those that follow <a href="http://schema.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Schema.org</a> protocols—can be incredibly useful when it comes to providing the search engines with extra data about your site’s purpose and intent. As an example, adding the system’s “itemtype” tag to your page’s HTML could allow you to clarify that your page on “Pride & Prejudice” refers to the original book, not the recent movie.</div>
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As a result, the search engines that are able to interpret this structured data could serve your site up for more relevant search result placements than sites without this additional information.</div>
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As you might expect by this point in the article, users benefit from the addition of microdata as well. In many cases, especially that of the “rel=author” tag, structured data provides additional information that can be displayed alongside a site’s listing in the natural search results.</div>
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Not only does this extra data help users to make more informed search decisions, these enhanced displays have a notable impact on SERPs click-through rates, increasing the likelihood that a search user will wind up on your page over a competitor’s.</div>
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As you can see, there are plenty ways in which SEO and user experience objectives can work together to create a website that’s both engaging to read and easy to rank in the natural search results. However, if you ever identify a potential conflict between the two, keep in mind that your first priority is to the user. While SEO best practices may come and go over time, making a commitment to serve your user first will never go out of style!</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-intersection-of-seo-and-user-experience/57562/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-intersection-of-seo-and-user-experience/57562/</a></div>
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Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-62370874364784681042012-12-20T00:36:00.000-08:002012-12-20T00:37:32.528-08:00Is Agile Marketing the Future of Search in 2013?<br />
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Over the last few weeks, the one thing I'm hearing a lot more people starting to talk about is the need to be agile in marketing campaigns.</div>
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At <a href="http://www.blueglass.com/blog/blueglassx-takeaways/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">BlueGlassX</a>, Greg Boser went as far to predict that agile marketing is going to be the new buzzword of 2013:</div>
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<img alt="greg-tweet" border="0" class="center" height="198" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/673/243673/greg-tweet-320x198.png?1355775340" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="greg-tweet" width="320" /></div>
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As I said in my last post, <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2223233/It-Doesnt-Matter-What-You-Call-Your-Online-Strategy" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">it doesn't matter what you call your online strategy</a> - and buzzword or not, that's not what's important - but there's a lot about agile marketing as a concept that makes perfect sense.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2012 Is the Year That Search Grew up!</strong></div>
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Looking back over 2012, we've seen a huge volume of changes.</div>
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The problem we've had with SEO in the past is that there was a huge gap between what Google<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">said the algorithm did</em> and <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">what it actually did</em>. Everyone knew all along we should be creating great content to build a brand online. But this year, more than any other, we've seen that gap close to the point that the only way to achieve sustainable results is to finally do what Google has been telling us all along!</div>
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This means we have to be nimble and able to think on our feet a lot more to <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2179778/7-Reasons-Content-Marketing-is-Better-Than-Link-Building" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">naturally acquire relevant links</a> as a by-product of high-quality content generation, not by traditional link building.</div>
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Andy Betts has <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2227499/SEO-Content-Confusion-Clarity" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">written</a> <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2179372/Future-of-SEO-Investment-Innovation-Integration" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">some</a> <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166570/7-New-Ways-to-Think-About-SEO-Converged-Media-Metrics" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">excellent posts</a> on the shifts we're seeing recently, and I spoke at<a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2156615/7-Steps-to-Measure-SEO-Like-Paid-Search" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SES London</a> back in February about the measurement of ROI in search. During this time I definitely feel that we've seen a significant shift toward the industry evolving in this way, with not just search marketers realizing the value, but also social, PR, content, and branding teams being integrated into the bigger digital picture, too.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Having a Great Strategy Doesn't Mean You Forget About the Tactics</strong></div>
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2012 has been a crazy year for seeing SEO evolve - how many years is an Internet year now? In 2012 I think we're looking at closer to seven years for every month!</div>
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And 12 months on, we now seem to be in a world where we realize having a solid, long-term strategy is a far more effective and sustainable way to get results.</div>
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But that doesn't mean we should completely forget about tactic-driven strategies. Tactics are still a key part of your strategy that gets you to the top - so as long as you apply tactics that complement your long-term strategy, as opposed to quick wins, you should still be trying out new tactics all of the time.</div>
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Everyone knows that the only constant in this game is change - even if you're staying on top of what's working now, you're still likely to be behind the curve.</div>
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To quote Greg Boser again, "Chaos is good, complacency is the kiss of death" - and there's no way you can stand still in this game; everything changes so quickly. You need to be looking ahead to where things are going; <a href="http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus-as-an-identity-service-or-digital-signature/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">read the patents</a> (for example, this one on Agent Rank gives some very clear signs) and make sure you're testing all of the time. That way when your competitors are chasing you, they're always one step behind.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Learn From Agile Project Management</strong></div>
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There's a huge amount you can learn about marketing by reading about agile project management techniques and processes.</div>
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<img alt="agile-process" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/672/243672/agile-process.jpg?1355774885" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="agile-process" /></div>
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Image source: <a href="http://www.tutorialspoint.com/management_concepts/agile_project_management.htm" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Tutorials Point</a></div>
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This might be a very new way of thinking for search marketers, but it's not a new concept or model. In fact, it follows a very simple process:</div>
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<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Build</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Measure</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Learn</li>
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<img alt="agile" border="0" class="center" height="230" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/671/243671/agile-230x230.png?1355775546" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="agile" width="230" /></div>
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Image source: <a href="http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/29181/5-Tips-to-Be-a-Lean-Agile-Inbound-Marketer.aspx" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">HubSpot</a></div>
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If you're trying to prove a point to your boss or client, this is clearly the easiest route to getting that message across. This is exactly the same way you would create a prototype for showcasing a new product, or a pilot episode for a TV series.</div>
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For anyone who is experienced in SEO, I would suggest that rather than trying to develop new skills in search, perhaps you should buy a book on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=agile+project+management" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">agile project management</a> instead.</div>
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But with agile marketing there's no need to change your whole strategy, just make sure you're adaptable enough to learn what does and doesn't work - and be well prepared to take advantage of any opportunities that may come along.</div>
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I think the one thing I've learned, especially this year, is that it's not always a case of right or wrong. There's a good chance you're doing something that's working, but it doesn't mean it's your best option.</div>
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The great thing about this industry is that we're constantly surrounded by great opportunities - so the first step is often figuring out what you shouldn't be doing or how you can free up some time.</div>
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For example, where are you wasting your time? What don't you enjoy doing? What aren't you good at? Once you figure this out, everything else is much easier to fall into place. Whether it's reviewing a client fit, your career, or your online marketing strategy, it's exactly the same.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Agile Isn't Flexible, It's Intuitive</strong></div>
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In order to make your marketing campaigns agile, you need to fully understand what this means - and just as importantly, what it doesn't.</div>
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While it may seem like a campaign that's flexible, that's not what it's about. Yes, it's sensible that rather than having a rigid 12-month editorial calendar, you add flexibility in order to adapt and change. For example, perhaps you'll set 25 percent of your plan aside for topical issues, which may come up and allow time to be adaptable (depending on your industry, it may be much higher).</div>
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But flexibility suggests making a compromise, which isn't the most effective way of getting results. An agile marketing campaign needs to be able to adapt and intuitively grow based on your key findings and strategy.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Run Controlled Experiments and Prove a Point</strong></div>
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As Greg says, it shouldn't be a "throw stuff against the wall and hope that something sticks" model. Instead, you should be testing out new ideas and concepts by creating controlled experiments.</div>
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If you can closely measure the impact of a tactic on a small scale, and prove a point that if you do X, this Y happens, then you can make data-driven, strategic decisions on whether you'd like to roll this out more heavily across your campaign.</div>
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This makes you more agile in being able to move quickly . Plus, it means that by running small experiments in this way, you'll be able to prioritize decisions based on their likely success. And that's what it's all about - the building and prioritization of a clear marketing plan.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Marketers Need to Lose the Fear of Failure</strong></div>
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By being agile, you also lose that fear of failure. It's not about making every single thing you do a success - that leads to taking safe bets and consistently getting average to good results.</div>
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You might be happy with that, but if instead you accept that you're going to make mistakes along the way, you're incrementally improving your processes and likely to achieve much better results in the long term. Matt Roberts from <a href="http://www.linkdex.com/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Linkdex</a> made an excellent analogy recently, which was a comparison with the VC funding model.</div>
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"VC's will often back 10 companies, accepting that some will be complete failures, others will do ok - but if one is a big success that outweighs everything else they've backed. And this applies to search and content - it's much better to have one outstanding piece of content which outperforms everything else you've done, than it is to have 10 pieces [of] content which have had good results."</blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.socialtriggers.com/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SocialTriggers.com</a> by Derek Halpern is another good example of this. Derek would much rather have one great piece of content and then focus the rest of his time on promoting that content. His theory being "why create new content when there are still people who haven't seen your last post yet?"</div>
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It's a different way of looking at things, but again it makes a lot of sense - he's learned what resonates with his audience, to the point that every post he writes has over 100 comments. So now he gives his audience what they want to see - and follows up by promoting it as much as possible.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your Team Must Be Integrated, Not Siloed</strong></div>
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If you're going to have an agile strategy, the first thing you need to do is <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2205511/Ditch-The-Silos-How-to-Build-a-Great-Content-Marketing-Team" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">ditch the silos</a>.</div>
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In order to get the best results, you need to make sure that everyone is on the same page. The days of doing SEO, social media, PR/branding, and even content marketing effectively in silos have gone - each of these benefit and help each other in different ways, so to get the best value you have to look at the bigger picture.</div>
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By using an integrated model, you can figure out your internal restraints and challenges - and then fix them. It's not always easy when everyone is fighting against each other for their own individual goals and budgets.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">When's the Best Time to Publish a Story? When It's Most Relevant!</strong></div>
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I was asked this question after my BlueGlassX presentation. My answer was to find out more about your audience and to learn what works best with them, in a similar way to how you would test an email marketing campaign.</div>
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However, for topical stories, timing is everything. If there's big news that's happening within your industry, you need to be prepared to drop everything and adapt, so that you can instantly switch your focus to what's most relevant.</div>
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For example, following Michael Jackson's death in the early hours of the morning, Amazon very quickly updated its Amazon Store to make a tribute to him and cater toward the huge demand of people looking to purchase his music. You don't wait for the optimal sharing time for topical stories like this.</div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Summary</strong></div>
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For agile campaigns, you need to be on top of your game, and know what's going on around you. If you're prepared to adapt quickly when that topical story comes along, you're much more likely to reap the rewards.</div>
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Likewise, if you can ensure your campaigns are ready to adapt and you learn from both your successes and failures, then that makes you more likely to achieve that steady progress month-on-month, which is far more sustainable to long-term growth.</div>
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What do you think? Are your campaigns agile enough? And how important do you think this is going to be toward marketing success in 2013?</div>
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Source: <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232618/Is-Agile-Marketing-the-Future-of-Search-in-2013">http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232618/Is-Agile-Marketing-the-Future-of-Search-in-2013</a></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/chris-record-shows-us-how-to-add-categories-to-your-empower-network-blog/">Chris Record Shows Us How to Add Categories to Your Empower Network Blog</a></span></span></div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-55783775975261552762012-12-18T23:46:00.002-08:002012-12-19T00:04:59.584-08:008 Changes to Google AdWords in 2012 You Shouldn’t Miss<br />
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Every year, Google introduces new ad formats, changes AdWords settings and introduces a few high profile tests into the wild.</div>
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This year saw a lot more aggressive monetization by Google, with several high profile changes that increased the real estate for ads at the expense of unpaid listings.</div>
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This roundup covers eight key changes introduced to AdWords in 2012:</div>
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<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Overhauled Location Targeting</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dynamic Search Ads</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Enhanced Sitelinks</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Offer Extensions</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dynamic Display Ads</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Mobile App Extensions</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">AdWords for Video</li>
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1. Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads</h3>
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Google Product Search, formerly Froogle, was once a free tool to allow anyone with a Merchant Center account to include their products in the visual product listings that sometimes appeared in search results.</div>
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This year, Google shifted those results to be entirely commercial and rebranded it <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/building-better-shopping-experience.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Google Shopping</a>. These ads are now powered entirely by <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/shopping/getstarted.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blanK">Product Listing Ads</a> and take two forms.</div>
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First, they appear as a band of sponsored image ads, with product pictures, price and vendor, underneath the top search results listing:</div>
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<img alt="telescopes-google-search-results" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/315/223315/telescopes-google-search-results.png?1338865099" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="telescopes-google-search-results" /></div>
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Second, certain specific product searches will replace the right column of search results with a product description and links to retailers:</div>
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<img alt="google-shopping-ads-sidebar-results-calestron" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/333/242333/google-shopping-ads-sidebar-results-calestron.png?1354755665" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="google-shopping-ads-sidebar-results-calestron" /></div>
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This is a dramatic change to the search results, how Google monetizes and paid search in general. It furthers the 2-year-old march towards <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2064744/The-Dawn-of-Paid-Search-Without-Keywords" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">paid search without keywords</a>. Every retailer must incorporate these ads as a part of their AdWords strategy.</div>
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For more education, check out these resources.</div>
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How to create Product Listing Ads:</div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gMzWLt81-1M" style="background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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How to optimize your Product Listing Ads:</div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gMzWLt81-1M?list=SPA1BDD5AB4329808A&hl=en_US" style="background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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Watch <a href="http://www.rimmkaufman.com/resources/webinars/rkg-google-pla-webinar-for-q4-2012/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Rimm-Kauffman Group’s webinar</a> with Google about Product Listing Ads and read Google’s<a href="http://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/shoppingbestpractices.pdf" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blanK">best practices for Google Shopping</a> (pdf). Google blog post, <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/google-shopping-momentum-and-merchant.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Google Shopping: momentum and merchant success</a>, details some of the other changes and highlights merchants who have had success.</div>
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2. Overhauled Location Targeting</h3>
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Location Targeting in AdWords got an overhaul with a new location targeting tool and some more sophisticated options for local targeting. This change is particularly relevant for brick-and-mortar retailers with a limited service area and companies that need or want to target specific areas.</div>
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The most prominent change is the introduction of <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/get-local-with-adwords.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">ZIP code targeting</a>.</div>
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<img alt="adwords-zip-code-targeting" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/331/242331/adwords-zip-code-targeting.jpg?1354755495" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-zip-code-targeting" /></div>
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This targeting works well with <a href="http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2404180" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">location insertions for ads with location extensions,</a> which automatically creates custom ads based on the users location.</div>
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<img alt="adwords-location-insertion-with-location-extensions-someretailer" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/329/242329/adwords-location-insertion-with-location-extensions-someretailer.png?1354755411" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-location-insertion-with-location-extensions-someretailer" /></div>
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Other features, like <a href="http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1722043#airports" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">airport targeting</a>, can be a huge boon for car rental companies or local hotels:</div>
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<img alt="adwords-airport-targeting" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/327/242327/adwords-airport-targeting.png?1354755227" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-airport-targeting" /></div>
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Politicians got a break with <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/all-politics-is-local-introducing.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Congressional district targeting</a>:</div>
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<img alt="adwords-congressional-district-targeting" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/335/242335/adwords-congressional-district-targeting.png?1354756341" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-congressional-district-targeting" /></div>
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Watch this video to learn the basics:</div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/eVRDfzpcERQ" style="background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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3. Dynamic Search Ads</h3>
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If you really want to catch a glimpse of the future of paid search, pay close attention to <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/boost-your-results-with-dynamic-search.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Dynamic Search Ads</a>. This new technology will automatically crawl your site, according to <a href="http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2471185#DSAWork" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">logic you define</a>, and created dynamic ads that combine information from their crawl with your <a href="http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2471185#DSACreate" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">ad template</a>:</div>
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<img alt="adwords-dynamic-search-ad-example" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/328/242328/adwords-dynamic-search-ad-example.jpg?1354755281" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-dynamic-search-ad-example" /></div>
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The ads only trigger for search queries that aren’t eligible to match existing keywords in your account. Theoretically, this allows you to address gaps in your account and more quickly adapt to changing inventory.</div>
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<img alt="google-dynamic-search-ads" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/332/242332/google-dynamic-search-ads.png?1354755550" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="google-dynamic-search-ads" /></div>
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There are many technical nuances to setting up and tracking these new ads.</div>
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<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">RKG has a good overview of the <a href="http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/google-dynamic-search-ads/20102011/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">basics of Dynamic Search Ads</a>.</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Google: <a href="http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2471185#DSACreate" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Using, creating, and optimizing Dynamic Search Ads</a>.</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Google: <a href="http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2497706" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Create targets for your Dynamic Search Ad campaigns</a>.</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Google: <a href="http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2549100#DSATracking" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Using dynamic tracking URLs</a>.</li>
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4. Enhanced Sitelinks</h3>
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In many ways, paid search has become a <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2064781/PPC-vs.-SEO-Paid-Search-as-Your-Organic-Competitor" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">competitor to organic listings</a>. This has become especially true in the top listing, which appears above organic results and pushes them lower on the page.</div>
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Most recently, Google expanded their <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/ad-sitelinks-now-available-for-any.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">sitelinks</a> with <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/introducing-enhanced-ad-sitelinks.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">enhanced sitelinks</a>:</div>
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<img alt="example-pizza-store-enhanced-sitelinks" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/333/212333/example-pizza-store-enhanced-sitelinks.png?1329886426" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="example-pizza-store-enhanced-sitelinks" /></div>
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This creates a block of essentially five ads in the premier results location. Google automatically looks for text ads elsewhere in your account that match the sitelinks for your campaign and pulls in lines 1 and 2.</div>
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Read more: <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/enhanced-sitelinks-rolling-out-globally.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blanK">Enhanced sitelinks rolling out globally</a>.</div>
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5. Offer Extensions</h3>
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Google <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/offerextensions.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Offer Extensions</a> add an offer below your text, similar to sitelinks. Offers can be redeemed online (trackable) or offline(not measurable in AdWords).</div>
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Offers only appear when you’re ad is in the top position. They’re primarily meant for brick-and-mortar retailers, but offers can be used online as well.</div>
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SEER Interactive has a nice write-up on the <a href="http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/adwords-extends-to-include-offers" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">ins-and-outs of Offers extensions</a>.</div>
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<img alt="adwords-offer-ad" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/358/235358/adwords-offer-ad.jpg?1349202502" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-offer-ad" /></div>
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6. Dynamic Display Ads</h3>
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Three years ago (!) Google <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/23/google-acquires-teracent-to-apply-machine-smarts-to-display-ads/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">acquired a company called Teracent</a> whose technology:</div>
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…creates display ads entirely customized to the specific consumer and site. The startup’s proprietary algorithms automatically pick the creative parts of a display ad (images, colors, text) in real-time determined by like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.</blockquote>
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This year, that acquisition finally came to fruition with the introduction of <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/dynamicdisplayads.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Dynamic Display Ads</a>. The ad is one template whose featured product varies based on where the ad is shown.</div>
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Like Dynamic Search Ads, this is a step towards full automating the advertising process. In this case, it makes scaling ecommerce display much more efficient.</div>
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Watch Google’s brief overview:</div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ia_clMaI0ok" style="background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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7. Mobile App Extensions</h3>
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Apple's App Store isn’t very marketer friendly. Google answered the call of advertisers looking to promote their apps for download with new <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/making-search-ads-work-for-businesses.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Mobile App Extensions</a>.</div>
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This adds a sitelinks-like option underneath your main text ad:</div>
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<img alt="google-mobile-app-ad-food-delivery-san-francis" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/643/219643/google-mobile-app-ad-food-delivery-san-francis.png?1335929863" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="google-mobile-app-ad-food-delivery-san-francis" /></div>
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These are an optional extension to your existing ads:</div>
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<img alt="adwords-mobile-app-extension-and-app-picker" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/330/242330/adwords-mobile-app-extension-and-app-picker.png?1354755458" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-mobile-app-extension-and-app-picker" /></div>
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You can even track downloads in iOS if you integrate a snippet of code into your app.</div>
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Watch Google’s video for a high level overview:</div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SKLIdpjThTc" style="background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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8. AdWords for Video</h3>
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YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google and in the top 5 sites on the entire Internet. Google simplified the buying of video ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network with <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/helping-all-businesses-play-big-on.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">AdWords for video</a>.</div>
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Targeting, measurement, and reporting for video ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network are integrated into AdWords.</div>
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To get a general overview read about <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/video/why-video.html" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Google video ads</a> or watch Google’s overview video:</div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jjJaNbMN6-g" style="background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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For detailed tactical advice, start with their <a href="http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.youtube.com/en/us/yt/advertise/medias/pdfs/advertiser-playbook-en.pdf" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">step-by-step guide to YouTube</a> (pdf).</div>
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Source: <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2230042/8-Changes-to-Google-AdWords-in-2012-You-Shouldnt-Miss">http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2230042/8-Changes-to-Google-AdWords-in-2012-You-Shouldnt-Miss</a></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/mashable-gets-a-facelift-does-it-look-like-pinterest-to-you/?id=breakthroughideas">Mashable gets a facelift. – Does it look like Pinterest to you?</a></span></span></div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-15146177412169096502012-12-18T00:08:00.000-08:002012-12-18T00:16:04.999-08:00SEO 101: How Your Website’s Structure Affects its SEO<br />
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When it comes to SEO training, most of the resources out there are quick to extol the benefits of both on-site optimization (typically, including your target keywords in key areas across your website) and off-site SEO (as in the case of external link building activities).</div>
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<img alt="Site construction - courtesy © Maxim_Kazmin - Fotolia.com" class="size-full wp-image-56680" height="218" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/website1.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.316666603088379px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" width="400" /><br />
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Site construction – courtesy © Maxim_Kazmin – <a href="http://us.fotolia.com/id/24576327" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Fotolia.com</a></div>
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However, many of these introductory guides gloss over a subject that’s just as important to your website’s natural search success—its underlying structure. In fact, there are a number of different ways your website’s structure can influence its overall SEO authority, so be sure to brush up on the following site structure elements to make your website is as search-friendly as possible.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Element #1: Site Navigation</strong></h2>
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At first glance, website navigation might seem like one of those things that happens organically. That is, you don’t plan out where you’ll place every page on your website; categories and hierarchies simply start to form on their own as the size and breadth of your website grows.</div>
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When it comes to SEO, though, this is a huge mistake! The structure of your website plays a tremendous role in its overall SEO authority, and the specific navigation elements you put into place deserve plenty of attention in this process.</div>
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Your first site navigation consideration should be to avoid using navigation types that make it difficult for the search engines to crawl through your pages. Particularly, steer clear of navigation structures that are built entirely in Flash or JavaScript. While these formats might look flashy to your visitors, they’re nearly impossible for the search engine spiders to parse and crawl.</div>
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Instead, stick with navigation schemes based in XHTML and CSS (or, if you must, images that use appropriate keywords in their ALT tags). These navigation structures are more easily read by the search engine spiders, making it more likely that your pages will be crawled, indexed, and displayed in the SERPs, where appropriate.</div>
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But beyond the initial setup of your website’s navigation structure, you’ll also want to pay attention to your website’s depth.</div>
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When it comes to websites, “depth” refers to the number of clicks needed to reach any page on your site from your home page. From an SEO perspective, a shallow website (that is, one that requires three or fewer clicks to reach every page) is far more preferable than a deep website (which requires lengthy strings of clicks to see every page on your site).</div>
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As an added bonus, don’t forget that shallow navigation structures improve your website’s usability, making it far less likely that visitors will give up trying to find the content they were looking for in your buried pages. This decreases your website’s bounce rate and may improve your overall average time on site, both of which are <a href="http://www.singlegrain.com/blog/the-new-seo-metrics-you-need-to-know-about/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">factors</a> that are suspected to play a further role in SEO rankings.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Element #2: Internal Linking</strong></h2>
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Of course, if your website is large, controlling the depth of your website through your site’s navigation structure alone isn’t entirely feasible. If you have 100 total pages, for example, you’d need more than 30 separate categories to make all of your pages accessible within three clicks using navigation structures alone, which would almost certainly bog down your site’s appearance and functionality.</div>
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So, while structuring your navigation paths correctly from the start can help to improve your website’s SEO performance, you can also decrease your site’s depth through the use of internal linking.</div>
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In the world of SEO, there are two types of backlinks:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">External backlinks</em></strong>, which are links that point to your website from an entirely separate site, and</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Internal backlinks</em></strong>, which consist of connections between individual pages within your website.</li>
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Creating internal links between the pages on your website offers a number of different SEO advantages:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">As mentioned above,<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> internal links decrease the number of clicks required to access each page on your website</strong>, allowing the search engines to use their crawl budgets more effectively.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Internal links offer opportunities to use keyword-rich <a href="http://www.sujanpatel.com/link-building/how-to-diversify-your-anchor-text/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">anchor texts</a></strong> throughout your pages (though you should be careful to only create internal links to relevant, useful pages, instead of using this as an opportunity to create keyword-stuffed links).</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Internal links improve the user experience on your website</strong> by providing readers with additional materials that may pique their interests. As a result, both average time on site and average pages per visit go up, leading to potential SEO and conversion rate benefits.</li>
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Fortunately, unlike plotting out your website’s entire navigation structure, getting started with an internal linking plan is easy. Whenever you add a new page, article, or blog post to your website, take a second to see if the readers who are accessing this new content might be interested in other topics you’ve covered elsewhere on your site.</div>
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If you do find opportunities to recommend related pieces, create internal links within your new content that point to these other website pages.</div>
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Again, keep in mind that, though there is some benefit to creating internal links that utilize keyword-optimized anchor text, this shouldn’t be your primary pursuit. Keep the focus on serving up interesting content to your readers, and don’t be afraid to skip internal linking on new content pieces altogether if you’d have to stretch to make other articles seem relevant.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Element #3: URL Structure</strong></h2>
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One final website structure element to consider is how your individual page URLs are built. As you might expect, there’s a potential SEO benefit to be had from integrating your company’s target keywords into this vital navigation area.</div>
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The specific steps you’ll need to take to set up an SEO-friendly URL structure depend on whether your site runs on HTML or a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla or Magento.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">HTML websites</strong></h3>
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If you run an HTML-oriented website, your page URLs will be built according to the file names of every new HTML file you create and upload to your site.</div>
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For example, if you use a desktop website editing program like Dreamweaver to create a new article and save your file as “my-new-article.html,” the full URL of your article once uploaded to the root domain of your website will be “http://www.mydomain.com/my-new-article.html.”</div>
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Now, in this example, odds are you aren’t trying to get your website ranked for the keyword phrase “my new article.” So, instead of using generic file names, take the time to label each file with a descriptive name that includes your target keyword.</div>
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Be sure to separate multiple words with dashes, rather than underscores, as the search engine spiders may interpret words separated by underscores as a single word (as in, the file name “apple_pie” might be read as “applepie” to the search engines in some cases).</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">CMS websites</strong></h3>
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Typically, most CMS websites make it easy to create search-optimized page URLs, though you may need to tweak a few settings to get the greatest SEO benefit possible.</div>
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For example, in the case of WordPress, you’ll need to first navigate to the “Permalinks” section of the “Settings” area within your dashboard and select a link structure option that includes your post title within the full URL assigned to each post. If you don’t take this action, your URLs will—by default—include the numbers and codes created for each new post by WordPress’s standard settings.</div>
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According to the default WordPress settings, a new post URL structure could look like this:</div>
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<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/?p=144" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">http://www.mydomain.com/?p=144</a></div>
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By selecting the “Post name” option within the “Permalinks” panel, this URL would be transformed to:</div>
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<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/post-title.html" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">http://www.mydomain.com/post-title.html</a></div>
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This second variation is both more appealing to readers (leading to higher rates of engagement on your website) and confers the SEO advantage of being able to include your target keywords in your URLs.</div>
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If you’re using a CMS other than WordPress, consult the Help section of your chosen platform for complete instructions on how to set up SEO-friendly URLs on your website.</div>
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Even if you’ve already built your website without these elements in mind, it’s still very possible to go back and make the changes needed to ensure that your website qualifies for full consideration by the search engines and their automated spider programs.</div>
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Try correcting one element, or even one element on one single page, at a time. With consistent effort, you’ll see substantial SEO benefits as the result of your site structure changes.<br />
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/website-structure-and-seo/54156/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/website-structure-and-seo/54156/</a><br />
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Attract your visitors through <a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/attraction-marketing-how-to-use-it/">Attraction Marketing</a>.</div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-85457197702351715192012-12-17T07:54:00.003-08:002012-12-18T00:02:50.198-08:00Why You Shouldn't Ignore Long-Tail Clients (Small Business Owners)<br />
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Hopefully most of you have already read the news, but in case you haven’t, I am very excited to be a full-time member of the SEOmoz staff! The <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seomoz-and-getlisted-ransom-note" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">announcement</a> came out as I was en route from <a href="http://blueglass.com/x" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Blueglass X</a> in Tampa to<a href="http://biakelsey.com/ilmwest2012" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">BIA Kelsey’s ILM West show</a> in Los Angeles. In fact, and I’m still trying to catch up on thanking everyone in<a href="http://www.twitter.com/davidmihm" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">my Twitter stream</a> and on <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-our-acquisition-of-getlisted-plans-to-help-local-marketers-seos" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">the original blog post.</a></div>
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Both conferences were excellent, but if you’ve never attended a BIA Kelsey show, it’s a completely different animal from conferences and seminars in the search industry. The conference contains very few “actionable tips that you can implement on Monday morning,” but that’s not the reason you attend. BIA Kelsey recruits executives from the major digital marketing technology and service providers to small businesses for extended 1:1 or 1:2 discussions with their analysts. By and large, these executives are surprisingly open about challenges they face, and although some sessions turn into sales pitches, the best ones give you real insight into the online marketing pain points <a href="http://getlisted.org/resources/digital-marketing-options.aspx" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">and opportunities</a> for small businesses across the country.</div>
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So, keeping that background in mind, I want to focus my first SEOmoz post on my #1 and #1a takeaways from the BIA Kelsey show. (There will be plenty of posts from me coming up over the next several months, and Rand’s excellent <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/discovering-local-citation-opportunities-whiteboard-friday" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Whiteboard Friday last week</a> will hopefully satiate you guys on local for the time being.)</div>
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<iframe allowtransparency="true" class="wistia_embed" frameborder="0" height="297" name="wistia_embed" scrolling="no" src="http://fast.wistia.com/embed/iframe/9giokz0tyz?version=v1&videoWidth=600&videoHeight=338&playerColor=565f66&canonicalUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seomoz.org%2Fblog%2Fdiscovering-local-citation-opportunities-whiteboard-friday&canonicalTitle=Discovering%20Local%20Citation%20Opportunities%20-%20Whiteboard%20Friday%20%7C%20SEOmoz&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5Bversion%5D=v1&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5Bbuttons%5D=embed-videoStats&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5Blogo%5D=true&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5BtweetText%5D=&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5BbadgeUrl%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.seomoz.org&plugin%5Bsocialbar%5D%5BbadgeImage%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fembed.wistia.com%2Fdeliveries%2F436f1a1e1d6736dfffdb6b0ac829f0d879325434.jpg%3Fimage_resize%3D100" style="border-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="480"></iframe></div>
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Small businesses vs. Search marketing </h2>
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I have lived, breathed, eaten, slept, celebrated, and advocated small business internet marketing for the last eight years. But not even I realized until recently:</div>
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<strong>1) How large the disconnect between the search marketing industry and the small business community is.<br />1a) The size of the market opportunity for the consultants and agencies who can bridge this disconnect.</strong></div>
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<a href="http://www.biakelsey.com/Webinars/BIAKelsey-Survey-%20SMBs-Set-to-Spend-More-on-Web-Presence-Mobile-and-Social.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">One of BIA Kelsey’s forecasts</a> really crystallized this disconnect for me: their annual survey gauging the marketing mindset of the average small business owner. This survey breaks respondents into two categories: “<strong>core SMBs</strong>” and “<strong>plus spenders</strong>.” What is incredibly revealing for most people in our industry is the average annual marketing spend of these two groups: <strong>$3,000</strong> and <strong>$82,600</strong>.</div>
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Note: these numbers are TOTAL marketing spend. Annually, not monthly. Even the “plus spenders” would have a hard time finding anyone on <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">this list</a> willing to take them on for less than a $5,000/month budget, assuming they were looking for an end-to-end, search-and-social-media monthly arrangement. The level to which this segment is being served by the broader search industry <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/seo-industry-survey#spending-and-budgets" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">is substantial</a>, but economics dictate that more established agencies tend to go after bigger fish.</div>
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On the other side of the spectrum, BIA Kelsey is one of the few companies out there who even considers the plight of the $250/month small business. And if you think $250 sounds like a small monthly budget, wait 'til you hear that these businesses actually spend closer to <a href="http://www.biakelsey.com/Webinars/BIAKelsey-Survey-%20SMBs-Set-to-Spend-More-on-Web-Presence-Mobile-and-Social.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">$100/month on their website and web presence</a> (see slide 8)! This is the reality of operating a small business, though. <strong>Advertising costs for small businesses do not come from a corporate marketing budget; they come from family vacation budgets or college savings funds.</strong></div>
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Why do I think the market opportunity is so large, then, for agencies who can serve these average businesses? Surely there is no margin in a stable of $250/month clients?</div>
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#1 You have virtually no competition for these clients</h2>
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<a href="http://adsource.dallasnews.com/about-us/bios/james-m-moroney-iii" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Jim Moroney</a> of the Dallas Morning News candidly admitted that his newspaper had effectively “priced out” most small business advertisers years ago. His newspaper has a 600,000 subscriber distribution, and for the mom-and-pop dry cleaner or local restaurant serving one small neighborhood in Dallas-Fort Worth, those types of ads do not pencil out economically.</div>
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The analogy holds true today even in the digital era. Most small businesses in this $250/month segment are priced out of online advertising. Most of the major Internet yellow pages companies are thinking either of Adwords, display ads (whether they be CPM or CPC), or a combination of the two. There were very few presentations at the show focused on acquiring new customers via inbound marketing. Yet in many categories, $250 will only buy a handful of clicks per month, especially once you consider the Cost-of-Goods-Sold that third-party vendors need to build into their pricing.</div>
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The bottom line is that inbound marketing, i.e. “free” traffic, is the only sustainable marketing technique for this large segment of small businesses. No other option has enough margin to sustain a business on the sales side, so traditional advertising companies are simply not targeting this enormous potential customer base. The CEO of YP.com roughly admitted as much -- that his company was simply too big and too slow-moving to be able to compete effectively with a 2-3 person agency -- and I don’t think he’s alone in this admission.</div>
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#2 By default, all of your leads for this business segment are going to be high-quality, inbound leads</h2>
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At $250/month, only companies at the very largest scale (basically, Google, Facebook, and Apple) can sustain a business with a sales force. There is just not enough margin to support feet-on-the-street at this price point. So, at least among the BIA Kelsey audience, <strong>everyone</strong> <strong>is targeting the “plus spenders</strong>.” And even if those companies are able to bring on a business at this price point, they usually end up underserving them. Almost every company that has tried serving this segment at scale bemoans the tremendous “churn” rate when these clients cancel their contracts as a result of poor service.</div>
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No one is targeting these businesses from a sales perspective, so they’re literally forced to do their own research. Business owners making the effort to seek you out are going to be more engaged in the marketing process, more responsive, and more likely to implement changes or give you buy-in on your recommended tactics.</div>
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#3 The upside for these businesses could be huge</h2>
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Chances are, you are starting from scratch with this segment. If they have a website, it’s probably completely un-optimized, and a few Title Tag and H1 changes will dramatically increase the amount of business they get from the Internet. Maybe only a few have claimed local search listings, or maybe the business only has one inbound link from a local college or community organization.</div>
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Unlike more competitive categories in organic search (like e-commerce or travel), success can still be achieved relatively quickly in most local categories. You're going to see a "wow" factor associated with even moderately effective white-hat tactics. And while small business owners have a reputation for “churn” in this industry, as I mentioned above, most of them are incredibly loyal to companies who actually provide value with their services.</div>
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So, what can you do to serve business owners at this lower end of the market?</h2>
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Here are just a few basic tasks that rookie or junior search professionals can perform without requiring any time investment by a senior employee:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Improve Title Tags and H1 tags</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Submit citations (whether in-house or outsourced)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Set up Google Alerts</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Set up a WordPress blog</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Provide editorial advice for weekly blog post topics and Facebook posts</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Control blog commenting on the business owner’s behalf</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Draft review solicitation emails on the business owner’s behalf</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Track the success of review solicitation campaigns via a spreadsheet</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Reach out to business and community organizations for locally-relevant links</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Create hyper-targeted Facebook ad campaigns under $50/month in total spend*<br /><em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">*In my opinion, Adwords has effectively killed its own small business market opportunity with the increasing number of "not enough search volume" long-tail keywords and ever-higher minimum bid levels.</em></li>
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Let’s assume your agency wants 100% markup on your employees’ or contractors’ time. Let’s also say that a decent hourly rate for a recent liberal arts college graduate is about $17/hour (this works out to a $36,000/year annual salary). This means your agency can afford roughly seven hours per month of marketing on behalf of an average small business owner. Let’s be even more conservative and say that a more senior employee at $100/hour will need to review each account for 30 minutes per month. <strong>This still leaves five hours per month, per business for the college grad.</strong> Think of the number of tasks in the list above that could be completed in that amount of time!</div>
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Helping business owners at the lower end of the marketing spectrum has been a cause for me since I started in the search industry. Beyond the near-moral imperative that I’ve felt personally, I also see incredible economic potential from serving these long-tail customers.</div>
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<particularly a="" about="" agency="" at="" br="" business="" can="" dipping="" doing="" else="" extra="" few="" fill="" good="" help="" hours="" if="" into="" is="" job="" junior="" just="" looking="" neighbors="" next="" no="" of="" or="" point="" practitioner="" price="" re="" search="" serving.="" small="" solo="" some="" take="" that="" the="" their="" think="" this="" to="" toe="" truly="" trying="" you="" your="">OK, that’s enough out of me for today. I’d love to hear from you guys: how many of you serve clients anywhere near this $250/month price point? What kinds of services do you provide them? What has your experience been like? How many have served them in the past but moved onto clients with bigger budgets? Looking forward to the discussion with you in the comments.</particularly></div>
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<particularly a="" about="" agency="" at="" br="" business="" can="" dipping="" doing="" else="" extra="" few="" fill="" good="" help="" hours="" if="" into="" is="" job="" junior="" just="" looking="" neighbors="" next="" no="" of="" or="" point="" practitioner="" price="" re="" search="" serving.="" small="" solo="" some="" take="" that="" the="" their="" think="" this="" to="" toe="" truly="" trying="" you="" your="">Source: <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-shouldnt-ignore-longtail-clients">http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-shouldnt-ignore-longtail-clients</a></particularly></div>
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New topic: What is <a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/attraction-marketing-how-to-use-it/?id=breakthroughideas">Attraction Marketing</a>?</div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-83430833503563990572012-12-16T08:07:00.000-08:002012-12-16T08:07:06.272-08:00Is P.C.P the New SEO?<br />
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For years, optimizing a website was quite a simple affair. Through the course of search engines indexing sites, there were various algorithm updates too, but till Panda and its good friend Penguin came along, things like link building were quite easy to achieve. Article sites, blog comments, forum posts etc. and etc., these and other elements were great for bulking out a link profile and gaining some high PR. Exact match domains enabled many affiliate and Adsense based sites to ride high in the SERPs.</div>
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Fast forward to today, and if it is not crystal clear to internet marketers that things post Panda and Penguin are very, very , different, the it really should be. Proper Company Promotion, or P.C.P, is now the only safe and effective way to gain web traffic and also improve rankings.</div>
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<img alt="Proper Company Promotion" class="size-full wp-image-56635" height="501" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/pcp.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.316666603088379px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" width="600" /><div class="wp-caption-text" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; margin-bottom: 0.8075em; margin-top: 0.8075em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Proper Company Promotion – courtesy © alphaspirit – <a href="http://de.fotolia.com/id/47607271" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Fotolia.com</a></div>
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Is SEO Dead?</h3>
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Seo hasn’t “died”, but it has certainly changed dramatically. For one instance, back links now need to be earned, rather than created. That is one of the main rules now, covering the links that come back to the websites you are promoting. Links that carried a lot of value, for example article links, are now only really useful for adding a little bit of diversity to your link profile, the same with generic press releases that do not offer anything more than 400 words of empty writing.</div>
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For a long time the SEO world (in many, rather than in all cases) lazily adding masses of links to clients sites, many of which were empty and built just for the fact they would be a back link, was THE strategy. Finally in 2012 Google played the swan song for sites optimized so (or was it a Penguin song?). Sites disappeared from page 1 of Google quicker than a bowling ball dropped in the backyard swimming pool. Tears were shed, cries of unfairness echoed around the online marketing world. Much as I may have sympathy, I can’t help feeling that we should all have seen this coming. It is not as if the search engine gods at Google hadn’t explained to us all year after year, what they expected from those practicing SEO, and how to keep on the right side of search relevance, when promoting theirs or their clients sites.</div>
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P.C.P</h3>
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<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Proper Company Promotion</em> means exactly what it suggests. Rolling up your sleeves and actually earning the links and traffic that you have been trying to gain from various link building services, and short term blasts from this or that software link creator. PCP doesn’t have to be very expensive, though it is more time consuming, it’s all about value really. What is the true cost of improper SEO, after all? Sure, those paying you may have to pay more to get the job done properly and have some “future proofing”, but in the long run the proof will be in the pudding. Here are some examples of what can be done to create “real” links and also enhance company brands and exposure with their target clientele.</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sponsor an event</strong>, the size of which will always depend on your budget. You may supply the awards, or the cost of a kids’ football league with their equipment, for instance. Get local newspapers involved, release a press release that explains what you are doing and how it is benefiting the recipients. Make sure that any website that is involved with anyone benefiting from the sponsored event contains content about your business/website, and is linking back to your site. The press release will also generate real links that will also pass traffic, Google loves links that pass on traffic to a site. The buzz generated will help to enhance the company brand and the exposure will help generate more traffic to your website.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Guest post on blogs</strong> that are relevant to the niche your business is in. Most blog owners are always looking for high quality and information rich content. Blog posts still carry weight at the moment, this may change as the marketing spammers out there try to abuse its ability to help sites rank. Writing between 500 – 1500 words that are useful and informative to those reading within your industry will help gain you traffic through any links that are placed within the content you have written, and enhance the authority of your company within your business or customer community. Poor quality content is not accepted by most “authority” blogs so the content needs to be useful and therefore highly readable.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Advertising</strong> is still a great way to get traffic back to your website, and visibility for your business and/or product or service. You can place banner adverts on forums and blogs that are relevant to your business niche. You may well ask to add a blog post to the same sites you are advertising on as they will view you as a customer and be interested in keeping you happy, (hopefully). Make any advert links no follow so that Google doesn’t think you are merely buying a link. If you gain a blog post from the site(s) that you are advertising on you can benefit from a link and an advert from the same site. This is a perfectly legitimate thing to do in the eyes of Google, and will gain you a great deal of traffic and brand authority.</li>
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There are many other strategies that can help gain you proper, earned back links, as well as enhance the authority of your brand and get you very valuable exposure within your market place. No one tactic should be used on its own. Successful search engine optimisation entails a mixture of different strategies and making sure that company branding and information reach as many people, on as many different platforms, as possible. Making sure that you are also looking after your onsite affairs is obviously a must. There is no point driving traffic to a site that cannot give your potential clients and customers what they are looking for. Social media platforms also need to be used as much as possible, promoting offers, blog posts and any information that is seen as useful for the business community that you are in.</div>
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Lets all think about how we can earn a back link, rather than how we can create one. The long term benefits of any online marketing campaign should always trump the short term gains, and P.C.P is a long term thought process.</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/is-p-c-p-the-new-seo/56627/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/is-p-c-p-the-new-seo/56627/</a></div>
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New topic: <a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/how-to-save-your-time-by-using-gmail-filters/?id=breakthroughideas">Saving time by using Gmail Filters</a>!</div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-32549021754302891822012-12-15T10:17:00.000-08:002012-12-15T10:17:56.077-08:00How to Come Up with Share-Worthy Content Ideas for Any Niche<br />
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A common and convenient excuse for people who aren’t getting the traction they want with content marketing and SEO is that their industry is too boring and too specific, and as a result they can’t create interesting content. This is something that’s been talked about frequently by marketing blogs, and there are <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/companies-in-boring-niches-creating-great-content" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">a lot</a> of <a href="http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33330/How-Even-Boring-Industries-Can-Create-Interesting-Content.aspx" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">great resources</a> available for <a href="http://www.97thfloor.com/blog/content-marketing-friday-hooking-boring-industries-up-with-viral-bling/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">coming up</a> with<a href="http://kaiserthesage.com/viral-content-ideas/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">shareable content ideas for boring niches</a>. That said, it’s still definitely a pain point and something many people point to as a barrier to entry for content creation, so I want to share one specific tactic you can use to start to come up with content ideas that folks will share and link to.</div>
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<img alt="Content creation" class="size-full wp-image-56529" src="http://64.19.142.11/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/content2.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 7.316666603088379px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="" /><br />
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Content creation – courtesy © alphaspirit – <a href="http://de.fotolia.com/id/45313746" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Fotolia.com</a></div>
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Model Ideas After Content That’s Already Been Shared</h3>
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It sounds pretty simple but one of the best ways to create content people will share is to look at other content that they’ve already shared, and model your topics and the content of your blog posts, articles, infographics, and free tools after that content. If you had an online marketing software company this would be pretty easy: you’d look at popular publishing sites like Search Engine Journal, communities like <a href="http://community.seobook.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO Book</a> or <a href="http://inbound.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Inbound.org</a>, and see what online marketing related stories made it into larger publications and start to develop some ideas with a new slant but similar “hooks” to what’s already being shared around what tends to do well.</div>
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But what if you’re in a niche where there aren’t obvious central, “community” oriented sites to mine for topic ideas?</div>
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One tactic that tends to work well is to look at what some of the savvier communities on the Web are sharing, and create something similar for your niche.</div>
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Developers and people in the “tech space” are typically folks who spend a significant amount of time on social networks and are subsequently plugged into memes and frequently a few steps ahead of other parts of the Web in finding interesting content with share-worthy hooks and angles. One advantage to working in what’s considered a “boring” niche is that the niches that are more boring tend to also be behind the curve on content marketing ideas and different memes, so something that’s already become somewhat trite to an audience of software engineers and online marketers can be a brand new, totally unqiue angle when applied to a different niche.</div>
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Your niche may be more or less boring than these, but if we look at a single tech aggregator we can start to see some ideas for content that we know folks are interested in reading about and sharing:</div>
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<img alt="Articles" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56521" height="2186" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/tech.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" title="" width="550" /></div>
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So obviously a lot of the things that get shared will just be “news” items, which is likely not something your manufacturing or call center company has the resources to crank out consistently. We also see some fairly obvious ideas you may have already thought of, like product reviews, but if we look closer we see some pretty interesting content ideas that we could apply to any of the industries above:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Making Cents</b></a> – This article goes into why bands are getting a raw deal on royalties from streaming music services, which is obviously a very interesting topic. What if you took that same topic and applied it to your niche? Let’s say you sell investment castings. An in-depth article on the real economics of manufacturing which looked at who is getting a relatively raw deal in the manufacturing business and even expanded to talk about topics like how manufacturing has changed over time, how the health of the manufacturing industry impacts larger economic trends, what factors lead to a healthy or not-so-healthy manufacturing ecosystem? This could be a pretty intriguing content piece that would give you an asset on your otherwise boring investment castings site that a number of blogs and Websites might be interested in linking to, sharing and visiting.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/business/as-boom-lures-app-creators-tough-part-is-making-a-living.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part is Making a Living</b></a> – This post looks at a specific couple who lost a significant amount of money trying to develop mobile apps. Let’s imagine you’re trying to see what content ideas you can get from this for your farm equipment site. What if you did one (or a series) of really in-depth portraits of folks within your industry who had hit rough times? Maybe for your tractor and farm equipment site you could go out and find some family farmers having a rough time of it and profile them. Maybe you’d also focus the articles on a specific issue that you see as problematic and would like to see changed (a specific policy or trend). This would give you something that other folks who are going through similarly difficult times would empathize with and likely share, and by addressing a specific issue you’ll also have the support of people who feel the same way you do, and the attention of people on both sides of the issue.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>When the Nerds Go Marching In</b></a> – This article looks at the role technology had in Obama’s presidential campaign victory. Let’s say we run a call center service and are looking for content marketing ideas. What if we created an infographic or in-depth article on the role that call centers play in political campaigns? Maybe we could highlight specific popular issues and/or movements that were propelled to victory with the help of really strong outbound calling strategies, and really detail how those strategies worked. Then we’d have a piece of broad interest that could also serve to humanize what many people consider a net negative in society.</li>
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Now that’s just three examples from this page – but now imagine if we do this process every day or every few days and keep a running list of all of the ideas we come up with. Then imagine if in addition to TechMeme we look at other aggregators like <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Hacker News</a>, the <a href="http://launch.co/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Launch Ticker</a>, or even broader sites like <a href="http://www.reddit.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Reddit</a> to find great content ideas and save anything that seems like something we could apply to our niche? We’ll have a nice, long list of ideas that we can consistently refresh over time.</div>
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And there are a lot of areas outside of tech aggregators that you can apply this methodology to: in going outside your niche and identifying the really remarkable, most-often shared content in other niches you’ll almost always come back with some awesome ideas for content, regardless of how “boring” your topic may be.</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/share-worthy-content-ideas/56514/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/share-worthy-content-ideas/56514/</a></div>
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An interesting topic about - <a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/the-first-steps-to-finding-employment/?id=breakthroughideas">Finding a Job</a>.</div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-28304108298121119542012-12-14T22:59:00.002-08:002012-12-14T22:59:46.165-08:00Forget Rankings: Here Are 6 SEO Metrics That Matter<br />
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It would be an understatement to say that the <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/seo" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO</a> landscape has changed a lot through the years. In just the last two years the changes have been <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">dramatic</em>.</div>
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Panda and Penguin top the list as the most visible game-changers, but there is another one that occurred somewhat under the radar – but has been equally dramatic in its impact on SEO.</div>
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That change is <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2136615/Google-Launches-Search-Plus-Your-World" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgb(255, 94, 153); background-color: transparent; color: #6100ab; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Search Plus Your World</a>. In a nutshell, Search+ personalizes your search results. Google evaluates your location, brand mentions, your friend’s search history, who is in your social media sphere and even your search history.</div>
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Think custom-tailored results.</div>
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What that means is you and I could both search for “swine flu” or “tablet” and come up with different results. Each of our respective result pages will be tailored toward those factors I mentioned above.</div>
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When the number of searches for those terms multiply into the thousands – now you, as an SEO practitioner, have a problem. A typical client is looking for consistent rankings in the top three spots on a number of key terms. That’s what he’s been trained to expect. He or she is thinking old-school search, and will be sorely disappointed in your results.</div>
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What you need to get him to think about are the new-school SEO reports, because Search+ killed normal rankings. What exactly are those new reports? Here are the six you need to pull from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.</div>
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1. Average Rankings</h3>
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Obviously Google knew what they were thinking when they developed Search+ from both sides of the equation. They are trying to give the end users the best possible results out there, while giving SEO practitioners, who are on the other side of the equation, the tools they need to stay on top of the game.</div>
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This is where the Average Rankings report comes in. Here’s how Google explained it:</div>
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<img alt="google-average-ranking-example" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/137/243137/google-average-ranking-example.png?1355371244" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="google-average-ranking-example" /></div>
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Average Ranking gives you the ability to gauge how many links in Google are being seen across the board. In other words, it’s a weighted measure of all impressions.</div>
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Start with this metric because the client, no matter what you tell them, will still want to see ranking reports. You probably won’t be able to break him of that. So, generate an average ranking report and show them how their pages and website is performing overall.</div>
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2. Impressions</h3>
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An impression report used to be the redheaded stepchild of SEO. Who cared about how many times your search query listing appeared? Who cared about eyeballs? What you want is action – people clicking through to the site.</div>
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So in the old days of Internet marketing you’d use impression against click-through rate to develop a conversion ratio. That was something you could visibly improve upon.</div>
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Well, now that we're in the world of Search+ it’s again important to know how many eyeballs there are on a comparative search term. You can’t work the white hat tactics anymore and nab number one, so now you need to know who is seeing what, where and how often.</div>
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What you really want to know is if your page is even showing up for your keywords. And where.</div>
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But impressions probably don’t mean what you think it means. And this is critical if you want precise tracking. See, Google looks at two things when it comes to impressions.</div>
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For example, if you do a non-personalized search on Google with “Search Engine Watch,” this is what you will get:</div>
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<img alt="search-engine-watch-google-sitelinks-non-personalized" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/140/243140/search-engine-watch-google-sitelinks-non-personalized.png?1355372354" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="search-engine-watch-google-sitelinks-non-personalized" /></div>
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Google displays seven possible URLs you could click on. But don’t count that as seven separate impressions. What you see above is one impression.</div>
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Here’s where it gets tricky: a hit on one of the sitelinks equals a hit to the top level domain. When people are clicking through to a page from a search query listing you might see an inflation of your top-level domain hits. So, if you want to deliver accurate reports, make the necessary adjustments.</div>
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However, if on the same page you have two different listings (your root and an interior page), then these listings will count as two separate impressions.</div>
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3. Visitor Growth</h3>
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<img alt="visitor-growth-graph-google-analytics" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/142/243142/visitor-growth-graph-google-analytics.png?1355372465" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="visitor-growth-graph-google-analytics" /></div>
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The next report you need to train your client to love is the visitor growth report in Google Analytics. It’s a baseline growth metric. What I like about this report is its simplicity: the trend shoud be going up. If it’s doing that, then you're succeeding. If it is flat-lined or going down, you're failing.</div>
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The other thing about this report your client might like is that you can calculate expected qualified leads from traffic – or your reach.</div>
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It’s necessary to report accurately by separating the new visitors and the repeat because that will impact your reports. For example, pulling in repeat visitors is a good sign that your content is compelling. If the ratio is skewed to new visitors, however, you might be delivering good headlines, but not substantial content.</div>
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4. Conversions</h3>
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<img alt="campaign-conversions-google-analytics" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/139/243139/campaign-conversions-google-analytics.png?1355372240" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="campaign-conversions-google-analytics" /></div>
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A conversion is what happens when somebody successfully completes a goal you’ve created in Google Analytics. These goals include things like buying or subscribing on a landing page.</div>
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This report will help your client see how those impressions that lead to visitors are actually turning into profit. This is also how to evaluate ads, copy and keywords. Are they working together? Can you isolate the weak link? Where are people leaving your site in your sales cycle? Conversion goals will help you decide.</div>
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This report is all about conversion, and that is decided on two measurements:</div>
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<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">One-per-click:</strong> A one-click conversion means you're measuring a single action like signing up for a newsletter or downloading a report. A conversion equals someone successfully performing your goal. Your ratio is simple: impressions versus conversions.</li>
<li style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Many-per-click:</strong> Sometimes you have goals that don’t end with a single action – like when you're trying to measure the path an agent takes through your purchase path. This will demand you use a many-per-click measurement.</li>
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5. Exact Match</h3>
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<img alt="adwords-keywords-google-analytics-exact-match" border="0" class="center" src="http://cms.searchenginewatch.com/IMG/138/243138/adwords-keywords-google-analytics-exact-match.png?1355372083" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; float: none; margin: 0px auto 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="adwords-keywords-google-analytics-exact-match" /></div>
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If you take a peek at the Google Analytics exact match you’ll notice that it looks a lot like the PPC exact match: you're targeting a specific URL, and will only get reports delivered on that particular URL.</div>
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Who should care about this? Established businesses that are going through a rebrand (you’ll want to avoid domains with keywords and focus on your brand name, which is what people will search for). Or even new businesses where local search (establishing the city name in the URL) is a key part of your SEO strategy.</div>
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This is important because you can narrow your efforts to one very precise URL – and eliminating any confusion that might come up from similar URLs. Say you're targeting /purchase-chickens. Google Analytics will ignore all variables that might fall under that variable (/purchase-chickens.html for example. If you want to measure that URL, then create a separate goal).</div>
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6. Regular Expressions Match</h3>
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I like to view regular expressions match as an extension of exact match because it allows you to bring under one umbrella similar goals. Using our example from above, inside Google Analytics identify your regular expression match by typing in “^/purchase-chickens”. In essence, you're telling Google Analytics to hunt down metrics on any page within that family of URLs: /purchase-chickens.html, /purchase-chickens/blog and so on.</div>
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What you won’t see are URLs with those keywords, but flopped: blog/purchase-chicken or subscribe/purchase-chicken (you can find that data, however, by using the $ symbol instead of the ^ symbol).</div>
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Conclusion</h3>
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Being a metrics rock star is definitely a requirement in this new world of SEO rules where the landscape is changing daily and c-level executives are demanding more and more accountability when it comes to your SEO endeavors.</div>
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In other words, you have to validate your work.</div>
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But that’s always been the case, really. Yet, now, validating your work is getting easier when you know the right metrics to share – and how to explain them to your client or boss.</div>
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Armed with these new tools you can explain how high rankings alone are not enough (or even the most important factor) when it comes to search. You can tell them that conversion is what counts. And you know how to increase their conversion.</div>
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Source: <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2231719/Forget-Rankings-Here-Are-6-SEO-Metrics-That-Matter">http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2231719/Forget-Rankings-Here-Are-6-SEO-Metrics-That-Matter</a></div>
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Please do read this blog: <a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/finding-and-snagging-a-part-time-job/">Finding and Snagging a Part Time Job</a></div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-26135042704583631862012-12-13T16:47:00.001-08:002012-12-13T17:01:49.040-08:00Building a Video SEO Strategy<br />
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The core tactics of technical Video SEO are pretty easy to pick up. You can read through the bulk of what there is to know about <a href="http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">getting rich snippets</a>, <a href="http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">optimizing for YouTube</a>, and <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/philnottingham/incorporating-video-into-your-link-building-strategy" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">driving links back to your site</a> within a couple of hours. While advice on these tactics will adjust and evolve as new technologies and iterations of the algorithm are released, there is an evergreen side to video marketing; one that both SEOs and creative marketers consistently fail to comprehend. And that is...<strong> </strong></div>
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<strong>Defining and implementing a goal-driven strategy.</strong></h2>
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Creative agencies often fail at this, simply because they don’t know how SEO works. Most creatives don’t understand the full consequence of embeds or pointing to YouTube and Vimeo rather than to a company’s site. Typically they don't understand how to get rich snippets, and so typically fail to get companies the SEO benefit due to them for the content they invest in.</div>
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SEOs fail because most have no say in the creative process for video, and are typically invited to do “video optimization” after the video has been shot, cut, and edited. Such a process ends up looking a little like this:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Take a look at the existing content.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Work out what goal best suits that content.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Implement the appropriate technical optimization.</li>
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And this is the consequence...</div>
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<img alt="" height="352" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/buildingblocks---bad.png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="400" /></div>
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Thus follows the often observed, awkward disconnect of marketers attempting to make promotional product videos “go viral.”</div>
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As with copywriting, content creation, and development, success in the video space looks like "integrating the creative and the technical aspects of SEO."</div>
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For video, this means taking a goal driven strategy from inception to launch:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Define the business goals.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Define the appropriate audience, hosting, and promotional strategy for the goal.</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Create content that matches the business goals and the audience demographic.</li>
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<img alt="" height="352" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/buildingblocksgood.png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="400" /></div>
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In this post, I want to take a step back and outline the core goals I believe video can provide for SEO, the kind of content required for each goal, and the common mistakes made by companies both big and small in this field.</div>
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Consider this post a prequel to <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">my last SEOmoz post</a> which has more explicit tactical details on how to match the creative ideas to the technical implementation required.</div>
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Possible Goals for Video SEO</h2>
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<img alt="" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/Rich-snippet-icon(1).png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; height: 207px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 200px;" /><img alt="" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/Conversions.png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 200px;" /></div>
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<img alt="" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/Brand-Awareness.png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; height: 200px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 200px;" /><img alt="" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/Links-and-Social-Shares.png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; height: 200px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 200px;" /></div>
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<strong style="color: #414040; font-size: 1.4em; line-height: 1.1em;">Rich Snippets</strong></div>
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Video rich snippets have a higher click through rate than normal organic results, and so are an incredibly valuable asset for the kind of pages you want to drive a lot of search traffic to, directly from the search results. In the vast majority of instances, these pages are typically “product” or “category” pages in some form.</div>
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In the simplest terms, you can get rich snippets by self hosting your videos and <a href="http://dis.tl/video-embed-generator" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">submitting a video sitemap</a>. Google is currently unable to read the “quality” of content outside of YouTube, so it actually doesn’t matter what kind of content you have if you’re trying to get a rich snippet. Indeed, for the more grey-hat minded...it's even possible to get rich snippets for images that are just encapsulated in a video container format.</div>
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<strong>Common objection</strong>: can I not get Rich Snippets for YouTube videos?.</div>
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It’s not impossible to get a rich snippet back to your own site with a YouTube video. <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Yoast’s Video SEO Wordpress plugin</a> (which is excellent, by the way) offers a method of doing it. However, this and other methods only work with a hack and when the video isn't performing particularly well on YouTube, making it strategically redundant. If a video is not returning many views or generating engagement on YouTube, then it’s doing nothing except devalue the overall quality of a channel and restrict the ability of that channel to rank. Especially when you can get <a href="http://wistia.com/blog/free-plan/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">secure hosting for free</a>, there is no reason to do that.</div>
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<strong>Conversions</strong></h3>
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Video can be a fantastic way to improve conversion rate, again, particularly for commercial landing pages.<a href="http://www.appliancesonline.co.uk/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Appliances Online</a> have created videos that are a fantastic example of undertaking this goal driven strategy with immense success.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lDKQirXGYo4" style="border-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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A user who watches an Appliances Online video is twice as likely to convert and spends 9.1% more money on average. When considering the average price of white goods, it’s not difficult to work out how quickly those videos will pay for themselves.</div>
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These videos work because they carefully take into account the context of their target audience, which is “on the cusp of buying a washing machine.” The videos bridge the gap between interest and conversion, by engaging on a personal level with the likely questions and concerns of the interested party. Conversion videos should be informational, rather than promotional; more “shopping channel” than “TV ad.” However, these videos do not need to be "product" focussed, and can just as easily be created for service sector businesses. </div>
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Earlier this year, <a href="http://www.kurtzandblum.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Kurtz and Blum</a>, a Law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina - created <a href="http://www.kurtzandblum.com/video-center" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">53 videos</a> for $4000 ($75 per video) - each of which describes, on a very personal level, a specific service that they offer their clients in need of legal advice. Through this work alone, Kurtz and Blum saw a 14% month on month increase in traffic.</div>
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Videos for conversion should also <strong>almost always </strong>be self-hosted or hosted with a secure third-party solution, rather than put on YouTube. Why? Because these videos should invariably also be used to get rich snippets and drive additional traffic to the "money pages" of a website. </div>
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<strong>Common objection</strong>: can I put this “conversion focussed” content on YouTube as well as securely hosting?</div>
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Usually not, for the following reasons:</div>
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1. It’s very difficult to target specific, product focused videos to a different keyword</div>
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If you put content on YouTube as well as self hosting and embedding the content on your site, one of the ways of ensuring YouTube doesn’t outrank you for your site is to target this version to a different keyword. However, as with the Appliances Online example, if you have a video about the "Bosch Classixx Washing Machine," it’s very difficult to find more than a couple of variations of relevant keywords.</div>
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2. Potential cannibalization of shares and links</div>
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If potential customers/influencers share your YouTube video rather than your product page, you miss out on the link equity. This can also affect sales and word of mouth marketing, as product videos invariably make little sense outside of the context of the supporting page. Especially if you want to retarget visitors with PPC ads, driving customers to your site has to be the goal; and duplicating content on YouTube can hinder this. </div>
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3. Devaluing your YouTube channel for SEO through lowering the average quality of content</div>
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From some tests I’ve run at Distilled, I think there’s reasonable grounds to believe that YouTube algorithmically rate channels based on the cumulative and average “quality” of the content uploaded. Practically speaking, if your videos have all been very popular, your channel and new uploads will tend to rank very well. Conversely, if your channel has lots and lots of videos on it, few of which get much traction, then the SEO consequence is negative. Therefore, adding a whole bank of product videos (most of which probably won't do very well) can serve to dramatically devalue your channel. It’s possible to mitigate against this by creating a new channel for your product videos (as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/ZapposGear" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Zappos have done</a>), but you run the risk of setting this channel up for failure to a greater or lesser extent.</div>
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4. Generating negative brand awareness.</div>
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YouTube is a community platform, as much a social network as a search engine. For users discovering your brand, you want the first touch to be a positive demonstration of your identity and quality, which video can both help and hinder. Attempting to sell users a product before they’ve visited your site often isn’t going to work very well and you can turn off those who would otherwise have been positively disposed to your presence on YouTube. Product videos aren’t created with the intention of building brand awareness and as such, and they normally do a pretty bad job of it.</div>
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Brand Awareness</h3>
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Video is a fantastic form factor to improve brand awareness, as it's an easy way to display the ‘faces” of a company, either through actually filming the people who work there or by explaining the “character” of the company through the integration of story, imagery, and sound.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="371" width="450" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/20919822?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&badge=0&color=ffffff" style="border-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="620"></iframe></div>
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There are fundamentally two different methods of improving brand awareness through video: you can either pay for it, or generate it organically.</div>
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In both instances, the best place to host such video is on YouTube, the world’s second biggest search engine and absolutely best place to put video that you want to be “seen.” (You should also put branding video on other platforms too, such as Vimeo).</div>
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To generate that awareness organically, you need to create “a creative story, attached to your brand.”</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NeXMxuNNlE8" style="border-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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If you’re willing to pay for the awareness, either through <a href="http://www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/index.html" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">YouTube/Google Display Network Advertising</a> or viral seeding services (I recommend <a href="http://www.unrulymedia.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Unruly Media</a>), then you can alternatively create content in the traditional, promotional “Tv Ad” model. However, to get the most bang for your buck from CPV advertising, you should make sure any video you plan to seed is under 30 seconds in length.</div>
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<strong>Common objection</strong>: I don’t have the money to build anything that good, but want to have a YouTube presence. Why can’t I put my product videos up there?</div>
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While YouTube channels featuring a large number of product videos can be ROI positive, especially when combined with a paid video advertising campaign, my experience is that they are far less ROI positive than seeding a targeting ad campaign through YouTube advertising and having rich snippets point back to the product videos on the business’s own domain.</div>
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As well as creative stories, tutorials are also a great way to build up your brand identity as experts in a specific field. These can be extremely simple, easy to make either through filming physical products and providing advice...</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tWZ8I8DWyGw" style="border-width: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="560"></iframe></div>
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...or for software/services businesses, this can be done very simply <a href="http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">using screencasts</a> or by recording lectures/conferences e.g. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday.</div>
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Links and Social Shares</h3>
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Typically, the best way to get links back to your site with video is to create valuable and useful video content that simply does not make sense in isolation from a wider mixed-media page type. A perfect example of this technique is the Simply Business <a href="http://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/microsites/wordpress-for-small-businesses/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">guide to WordPress</a> that currently has 137 linking root domains according to Open Site Explorer.</div>
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Alternatively, another way to build links and shares back to your site is to take the kind of video you should create for organic brand awareness, but securely host the content on your own site, rather than putting it on YouTube and Vimeo.</div>
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Under this model, you'll also need to ensure you provide an embed code that features a text link at the bottom back to your site. I've built a tool to help you do this quickly, which can be found <a href="http://philnottingham.com/tools/video-embed-link-generator/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">here</a>.</div>
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<strong>Summary of Goals and Content Type</strong></h3>
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<img alt="" height="142" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/Untitled(1).png" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="400" /></div>
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<strong>Common objection: c</strong>an I target more than one goal with the same bit of content?</div>
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Yes. But, you probably shouldn't. That’s not to say you can’t use the same piece of content for two different goals, but when you do, you typically dilute the return you’re going to get, either because your content will not be particularly well suited for the goal, or because the technical implementation will cause compromise.</div>
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<img alt="" height="225" src="http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/Phil%20Nottingham%20-%20The%20Building%20Blocks%20of%20Great%20Video%20-%20Final%20V10.jpg" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="400" /></div>
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In most instances, it’s much more effective to directly and exclusively target one of the goals, rather than attempt to do everything with one piece of content. However, do remember that conversions and rich snippets should always be treated as conjunctive goals; as essentially two facets of the same strategic approach.</div>
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So what does a fully comprehensive Video SEO strategy look like?</h2>
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With some variance dependent on vertical and business model, companies looking to achieve all of the above should look into creating four different kinds of content: one to target each marketing specific goal and audience demographic :</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Video created to improve conversions (with video sitemap submitted to get rich snippets)</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Video created to increase brand awareness through inbound channels</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Video created to increase brand awareness through paid advertising</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 36pt; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Video created to drive links and social shares back to the company’s site</li>
</ol>
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I hope you found this post a useful resource. If you're interested to read more about the ideas and approaches suggested, then I've written a very large (but pretty comprehensive!) guide to online video marketing which can be found <a href="http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/" style="border: 0px; color: #0b72ba; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">here</a>.</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy">http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy</a></div>
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Interesting topic: <a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/how-to-save-your-time-by-using-gmail-filters/">How to save your time by using Gmail Filters?</a></div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-59906290983123207362012-12-13T07:24:00.000-08:002012-12-13T08:02:10.015-08:00SEO Software for Small Business and Startups – SearchEnabler Review<br />
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Some of the biggest problems that SEOs face while optimizing their website are to understand where their gaps are, how to improve, how to track results, and this problem becomes more acute when a website keeps growing. And, there are very few tools which cover all aspects of website SEO like crawling, content, links, rankings, and traffic in one place. Solutions to this problem are often designed for enterprise-level business, and with steep pricing to go along.</div>
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<img alt="SearchEnabler landing" class="size-full wp-image-54534" height="283" src="http://64.19.142.10/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/searchenabler.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.316666603088379px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="" width="600" /><br />
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SearchEnabler landing page screenshot</div>
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<a href="http://www.searchenabler.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SearchEnabler</a> is one tool trying to bridge this gap by not only simplifying the SEO process for businesses, but also making it affordable. Though it lacks some of the more advanced features, such as keyword research, at $15 with offered features it is well worth the money for small business, startups & SEOs who want to get started in the game. It is also unique in that it is the first SEO software developed by <b>an Indian company</b> and has <a href="http://www.searchenabler.com/blog/build-your-own-data-center/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">build</a><a href="http://www.searchenabler.com/blog/build-your-own-data-center/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"> its own data center from the ground up using FOSS</a>. All these factors allows the company to pass on cost benefit to users.</div>
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Let’s take a walk through the use of the tool, how it works, and how you can use it to improve results.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: #3366ff; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Setup Process</span></h2>
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First, let’s talk about the sign up process and what you’ll need:</div>
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- You can start by setting up a free account, and you may do this with your Facebook or Google account if you wish</div>
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- Afterward, you will need to verify your email address and start your configuration by entering you website address</div>
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<img alt="Configuration" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54509" height="307" src="http://64.19.142.11/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/configure.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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After that you will link the tool to Google Analytics, which is pretty much a necessity if you want to get the most out of it:</div>
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<img alt="Configuration " class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54510" height="316" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/google-analytics.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Then you will enter in your competitors or other sites you’d like to analyze for benchmarking, inspiration, etc:</div>
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<img alt="competitors " class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54511" height="375" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/competitors.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Finally, you’ll need to enter in your geographical information for more local usefulness, along with your first set of keywords (50 countries are available for rank tracking. You can add more keywords from the rank tracking page later on.):</div>
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<img alt="Configure website" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54512" height="560" src="http://64.19.142.11/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/website.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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After you set up the account, the tool will begin crawling your sites in order to gain as much information as possible. Basic information like domain analysis, rank, links & home page crawl is available within a few minutes, but complete site analysis takes about two hours. It is well worth the wait.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: #3366ff; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Tool Features</span></h2>
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After setup, you will have access to several features which are available in the sidebar on the left hand side of the page:</div>
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Domain Analysis</h3>
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<img alt="Domain analysis" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54513" height="60" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/analysis.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" title="" width="600" /></div>
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At the top of this page you will see a synopsis of your selected domain, like this:</div>
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Each one of these categories is explained in further detail for the remainder of the page. If there are issues with the site, you will be advised about the problem, what you need to do to fix it, and why it is an issue in the first place. Most of the issues and recommendations are linked to in detailed blogs which also serve as tutorials for new users.</div>
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Website Crawl Analysis</h3>
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As we know, the first step to get into SERPs is to get crawled and indexed. SearchEnabler provides exhaustive crawl analysis to identify issues which might impact search engine crawls and indexing. Crawls are repeated every week. Your Crawl Analysis summary will look something like this:</div>
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<img alt="webcrawl analysis" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54514" height="185" src="http://64.19.142.10/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/webcrawl.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Here we can see that our site has warnings which could make it difficult for Google to properly index our pages. Below the summary we see a detailed list of the types of crawl errors we are dealing with:</div>
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<img alt="crawl warnings" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54515" height="45" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/crawl.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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These pages are well linked throughout the site and Google shouldn’t have any problems indexing them, but as part of our best practices it would be a good idea to add these pages to our sitemap.</div>
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SearchEnabler’s crawlers are built from the ground up to keep costs lower and more efficient without impacting costs.</div>
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<img alt="summary" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54516" height="32" src="http://64.19.142.11/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/summary.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Other details listed on the page include:</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crawl Errors</strong></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Infected With Malware</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unreachable</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Having Broken Links</li>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crawl Warnings</strong></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 3em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unreachable From Sitemap</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Redirecting Temporarily</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Redirecting With Meta Tag</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wrong Usage of Domain Name</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Using Multiple Canonical Tags</li>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Crawl Notices</strong></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Denied Access to Crawlers</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Marked Not To Index</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Marked Not To Follow Links</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Redirecting Permanently</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Non HTML Content</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Canonical Tagged</li>
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From the top of this page, we can also click through to see more detailed information:</div>
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Content Analysis</h3>
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The next logical step after removing hindrances to crawling and indexing is to optimize content with titles, URL’s and other tags. That’s what SearchEnabler has done. The complete site is analyzed for content issues like duplication, missing tags, alts, links etc.</div>
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The Content Analysis page has a similar layout:</div>
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<img alt="content" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54517" height="93" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/content1.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Issues covered on this page include:</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Content Errors</strong></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 3em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Missing Title</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Missing META Description</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Duplicate Title</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Duplicate META Description</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Duplicate Body</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Not Linking to Home Page</li>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Content Warnings</strong></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em 3em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Missing ALT Tag For Images</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Too Many Outbound Links</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lengthy URL</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Long Title</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Short Title</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Long META Description</li>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Content Notices</strong></div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Missing H1 Tag</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Having Large Body Content</li>
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Another menu at the top is available for in depth information:</div>
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<img alt="summary page" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54518" height="56" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/summary1.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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This will point you to the specific pages with the issue.</div>
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Meta information isn’t always all that vital, but issues like missing titles or title length are a larger concern. Remember than meta descriptions aren’t used for rankings, but they appear in the search results and can be used as a call to action. However, if you focus more on long tail, meta descriptions can actually work against you, because Google will not highlight the content on the page that uses the searcher’s keywords.</div>
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WebPage Analysis</h3>
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This page combines together content quality and crawlability issues in one place for specific keywords. This allows you to test how well optimized each page is for specific keywords using a wide range of factors.</div>
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<img alt="webpage" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54519" height="192" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/webpage.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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A useful feature here is the option to view only specific issues using this drop down menu:</div>
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<img alt="factors page" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54520" height="401" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/factors.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Some of the more useful factors measured here are the presence of a unique title and unique body content. Of course, it also tests to make sure the keyword is used in the title, URL, etc, and a total of 33 factors.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: #3366ff; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Keyword Rankings</span></h2>
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Now we start to get into the fun stuff. You will probably be spending a lot of time on this page:</div>
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<img alt="rankings page" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54521" height="376" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/rankings.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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This allows you to track your keywords, see how well you are ranking, and see changes in rank, in Google.com, andBing.com, as well as country specific Google search engines. Here you can see google.co.in as that was the geography target selected in settings.</div>
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You can also see changes in traffic that result from this. The analyze button on the right-hand side will take you directly to the WebPage analyzer, where it will tell you if there are any specific improvements to be made to rank for the keyword. Obviously, the button at the top right is used to add new keywords to the list.</div>
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At the top of the screen, you can switch over to “Trend” to see a detailed history of how your visits and rankings are changing over time.</div>
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<img alt="keywords analysis" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54522" height="416" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/keywords.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Link Analysis</h3>
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In combination with keywords, links are your bread and butter. From the summary page, you can compare link performance with your competitors:</div>
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<img alt="Links analysis" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54523" height="134" src="http://64.19.142.11/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/links1.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Link factors considered include the number of followed links, linking domains, and no-followed links. You can also see your link errors. The “Linking Invalid Pages” menu selection will point you to broken links, both on and off your site. Other menu options will show you your nofollowed links, top pages, linking domains, anchor text, and a raw list of all of your links.</div>
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You may have noticed that the focus is less on comparative analysis and more on actions. Since SearchEnabler is positioned for small businesses, some of the link metrics you might expect are not available. The advantage here, however, is lower costs.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; color: #3366ff; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Track</span></h2>
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You can also use this tool to track your traffic and social media activity.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Traffic</strong><br />
From the summary page, you can see how your traffic from various sources is doing:</div>
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<img alt="traffic stats" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54524" height="220" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/traffic.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Above the visual graph is a list of more granular information about the number of visits from search engines, links, and social media. Improvements and declines are also listed, and declines are listed in red.</div>
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The menu items at the top will take you to data about search engine and referral traffic specifically.</div>
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You can see drill down information on search engine traffic with important metrics tracked like keywords driving traffic and pages receiving traffic from search engines (organic traffic).</div>
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<img alt="traffic metrics" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54525" height="278" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/traffic1.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Social Media</strong><br />
A similar graph is visible from the social media page that tracks visits as well as “likes” on Facebook, “followers” on Twitter, and +1s from Google+. You can also view Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ information individually.</div>
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<img alt="social media tracking" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54526" height="410" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/social.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Mail Reports</strong><br />
Apart from viewing all data online, you can also get weekly mail reports. Below you can see weekly crawl and content summary with incremental errors, warnings and notices.</div>
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<img alt="mail reports" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54527" height="435" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/mail.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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You can receive a concise keyword summary in your inbox every week:</div>
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<img alt="Summary of details" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54528" height="344" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/summary2.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="600" /></div>
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Some Improvements</h3>
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I would recommend SearchEnabler to further enhance Link analysis and to provide actionable recommendations, as well as provide some mechanism for keyword research and keyword suggestions. Such features would be extremely necessary for novice users to understand what keywords to target and how fast one can rank.</div>
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That said, overall SearchEnabler has been successful in bringing together all the important features. It helps you identify elements that haven’t been fully optimized and allows you to track key metrics, all without creating hole in to your monthly budgets or becoming a time sink.</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/sme-seo-software/54506/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/sme-seo-software/54506/</a></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">Want to know "<a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/the-first-steps-to-finding-employment/">The First Steps to Finding Job Employment</a>"?</span></span></div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-63298163365932411902012-12-12T16:10:00.001-08:002012-12-12T16:12:33.940-08:00Top 10 SEO Startups of 2012<br />
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Is that time of the year, when we look at our industries in retrospect. Today, however, instead of telling you what was, we bring you something that could be… All these SEO/SEM startups launched in 2012, and aim to become stronger, better and more popular in 2013.</div>
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PlagSpotter: duplicate content checking</h3>
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A must have tool in any SEOs arsenal is a content checking tool – something to scan the web and find scrapers, and something to protect original content. <a href="http://www.plagspotter.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="plagspotter">PlagSpotter</a> is such a tool, an alternative to CopyScape, an online duplicate content checking and monitoring tool, that scans your URL and generates a duplicate content report showing all external URLs that copy your original content.</div>
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<img alt="PlagSpotter" class="size-full wp-image-52900" height="235" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/plagspotter.png" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="PlagSpotter" width="585" /><br />
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PlagSpotter: duplicate-content scanning and detection tool.</div>
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SEOClearly: A/B testing</h3>
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Recently <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seoclearly/52146/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="SEOClearly">featured by Search Engine Journal</a>, <a href="http://www.seoclearly.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="seoclearly">SEOClearly</a> produces a variety of split tests (A/B) reports, based on data grabbed directly from Google through Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools.</div>
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<img alt="SEOClearly" class="size-full wp-image-52149" height="159" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SEOClearly.png" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="SEOClearly" width="585" /><br />
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Site SEO improvements can be seen through testing elements like copy text, layouts, images and more. SEOClearly makes sense of A/B testing results.</div>
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Agency Spotter: Find your SEO agency</h3>
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OK, this is not just to help you find SEO agencies, but all kinds of professionals, from branding to SEM, PR, social media and beyond. You can also add your business. <a href="http://agencyspotter.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="agency spotter">Agency Spotter</a> aims to reinvent how businesses find and work with creative agencies – check them out, and see if they deliver.</div>
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<img alt="Agency Spotter" class="size-full wp-image-52917" height="234" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Agency-Spotter.png" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="Agency Spotter" width="585" /><br />
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Agency-Spotter: find and work with creative agencies.</div>
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SEMhit: Outsmart your competitors in Search Marketing</h3>
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Still in closed alpha, <a href="http://signup.semhit.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="semhit">SEMhit</a> is an interesting promise: to enable you overtake your competition in search by analyzing the performance of their paid and organic campaigns on Google.com. Once SEMhit lets you in, you can find new keywords, improve your ad copy and revise your landing page strategy. Also, check and understand the SEO techniques of your challengers. This is another startup we are going to test for your in the near future.</div>
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<img alt="SEMHit: Outsmart your competitors in Search Marketing" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53265" height="324" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SEMHit.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" title="SEMHit: Outsmart your competitors in Search Marketing" width="585" /></div>
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Rankpanel: SEO overview for any site</h3>
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<a href="http://www.rankpanel.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="rankpanel">Rankpanel</a> shows you a compact SEO overview for any site, which is not only the summary but also starting point for further in-depth SEO statistics. It also gives you access to keyword ranking data for 500,000 pre-selected keywords from 6 key countries. We will be testing Rankpanel in the near future, to give you a more in-depth overview of the tool and what it can achieve.</div>
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<img alt="rankpanel" class="size-full wp-image-52907" height="313" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/rankpane.png" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="rankpanel" width="585" /><br />
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Rankpanel is described as a fast and intuitive online SEO tool that provides essential insights for you to help yourself and your clients rank better.</div>
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Lucidel: really simple analytics</h3>
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<a href="http://lucidel.com/landing/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="lucidel">Lucidel</a> cuts through the clutter of traditional analytics platforms to bring you actionable insights into your site’s visitors. You will learn which demographic segments bring more ROI; who are your visitors and what they want; where your revenue is going and which segments are causing a trend; who is coming to your site and why; and much more.</div>
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<img alt="lucidel" class="size-full wp-image-53275" height="307" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/lucidel.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="lucidel" width="585" /><br />
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Lucidel answers the questions that impact your bottom line.</div>
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Infogr.am: create infographics with ease</h3>
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<a href="http://infogr.am/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="infogr.am">Infogr.am</a> is a free tool to create and share infographics and online charts. You can pick a pre-designed, pixel-perfect infographic template, then make it interactive, by adding charts, videos and maps.</div>
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<img alt="Infogr.am" class="size-full wp-image-52923" height="250" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/infographics.png" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="Infogr.am" width="585" /><br />
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Add interactivity to your data stories. Infogr.am is built with newsrooms in mind.</div>
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Yet another search engine: VerticalSet</h3>
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It seems like every year we witness the birth of a new search engine. Well 2012 is no exception. Meet <a href="http://www.verticalset.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="verticalset">VerticalSet</a>, the “next generation search engine” developed by Amit Ambardekar. The search engine can be adjusted to optimize the search performance, through a series of search extensions like Google News, Wikipedia Search, Twitter Search, IP2location as well as GRE word, Urban Dictionary, Blekko Slashtag Sear…, QWiki, Stackoverflow Search and DDG Goodies.</div>
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<img alt="verticalset" class="size-full wp-image-52913" height="211" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/verticalset.png" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="verticalset" width="585" /><br />
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With VerticalSet you can change the search experience the way you want.</div>
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SRCH2: Enterprise search software</h3>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 1em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<a href="http://www.srch2.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank" title="srch2">SRCH2</a> attempts to fill a gap in the search industry, especially for enterprise solutions, where search engines are built on software that is more than a decade old. The software is built from the ground-up by Stanford and Google alums. SRCH2 sees search as a friendly, meaningful and convergent conversation between the user and the data.The SRCH2 engine uses in-memory algorithms to support ultra fast instant search on large amounts of data. It is 10 – 100x faster than the most commonly used enterprise search software. Its built-in error-tolerance, forward indexing, and rapid geo-search make it the best available mobile search tool.</div>
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<img alt="SRCH2" class="size-full wp-image-53272" height="395" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SRCH2.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.133333206176758px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" title="SRCH2" width="585" /><br />
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SRCH2 is feature-rich, and blazing fast.</div>
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Browseo: Browse any site like a search engine</h3>
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Browseo is a web app that allows you to view any web page without distractions caused by styles. It also highlights parts of a page that are relevant for SEO.</div>
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<img alt="browseo" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53280" height="183" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/browseo.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" title="browseo" width="585" /><br />
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If you have some time, please know more about <a href="http://www.empowernetwork.com/breakthroughideas/attraction-marketing-how-to-use-it/">Attraction Marketing</a>.</div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-41625069662612069542012-12-12T08:11:00.000-08:002012-12-12T08:11:07.379-08:005 Mind-Blowing SEO Tools Every Industry Expert Needs<br />
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I love this quote from Jill Whalen:</strong></div>
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<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“Even the best search engine optimizers are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.”</em></div>
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The various delegates at the recently held SES conference spoke about the importance of<a href="http://www.stateofsearch.com/seo-tools-for-pulling-rank-ses-new-york-2012-sesny/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO tools to improve rankings on search engines</a>. It was evident from the discussion that the shift towards authentic SEO tools is brisk and widespread. This is especially the case with<a href="http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Google algorithm updates becoming an increasingly regularly feature in the industry</a>. The shift is being adopted by the SEO community via such methods as keyword research, monitoring visitors’ behavior back link and link profile analysis, monitoring rankings, and others.</div>
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In an endeavor to be authentic while still giving a thrust to the rankings, newer and even more innovative methods are now entering the SEO space. This post endeavors towards appraising professionals at all levels of the best ones out there:</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">BuzzStream</strong></h2>
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Link / Blog Prospecting and Outreach / Communication Management</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why It’s Awesome: </strong> The first reason is because everyone is falling in love with it, put simply it is just popular. BuzzStream allows you to create your marketing campaigns with various inbound marketing channels. Users can take notice of the number of micro-influencers having conversations related to their products and services, and across a wide swath of the social web world.</div>
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<a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?attachment_id=54131" rel="attachment wp-att-54131" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter wp-image-54131" height="283" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/image0013.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%;" title="" width="578" /></a></div>
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Image Courtesy of<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> buzzstream.com</strong></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unique Factor:</strong> There’s a two dimensional benefits to be had with <a href="http://www.buzzstream.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">BuzzStream</a>. First, users can build strong relations with the other influencers through via campaigns. Secondly, the user actually become easily find-able by via targeted customers, too.</div>
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Broken Link Checker</h2>
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Available on Google Chrome. This is a tool that I have used for a long time.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why It’s Awesome: </strong>It reduces your efforts of checking each webpage for broken links. In other words, you can launch the application and it will crawl through your complete webpage and look for broken links. For instance, if have a bunch of links to check when you are in the process of editing, <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">this tool</a> can be a boon to save you of the laborious job of checking them manually.</div>
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<a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?attachment_id=54132" rel="attachment wp-att-54132" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter wp-image-54132" height="363" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/image0021.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="578" /></a></div>
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Image Courtesy of <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">chrome.google.com/</strong></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unique Factor: </strong> The above image reflects to you how links are represented on the screen for a quick and handy reference. All comments are highlighted on the same page with percentage of broken links evidently on the screen.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO-Browser</strong></h2>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></strong>See your site like a search engine sees it.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why It’s awesome: </strong>Once you use the tool for the first time you’ll recognize the power behind it. When we make a website, we check for its compatibility on different browsers; however, sometimes even seasoned pros tend to forget about a site’s compatibility with the search engines.</div>
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Have you ever thought about how your site is seen by the search Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or another search platform? <a href="http://www.seo-browser.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO-Browser</a> is here to show users exactly that. It shows each part of a webpage’s content, images, and other elements exactly in terms of how they are viewed by the particular search engine.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Uniuqe Factor: </strong>This is unique because the users can know which parts of their sites are making the most impact and which ones are not being read by the search engines as desired. This is a feat that is difficult to be achieved through any manual process.</div>
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<a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?attachment_id=54133" rel="attachment wp-att-54133" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter wp-image-54133" height="309" src="http://64.19.142.10/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/image0031.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="578" /></a></div>
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Image Courtesy of <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">seo-browser.com</strong></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">SEOMOZ Tools</strong></h2>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></strong>All in one.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why It’s Awesome: </strong>The most comforting thing about this toolbar is that it is provided by the <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEOMOZ</a> community, which is authorized in the search industry. This tool is designed to provide you a complete bunch of SEO metrics’ information absolutely quickly. In short, it is trustworthy and complete.</div>
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Moreover, you can also check all your site statistics by using this tool like link analysis, on-page checkpoints, site server details, keywords and rank tracker, follow-no follow links, site location, and others. As this suggests, SEOMOZ is, and should be, a “go-to” for any toolbox.</div>
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<a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?attachment_id=54134" rel="attachment wp-att-54134" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54134" height="340" src="http://64.19.142.12/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/image0041.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" title="" width="642" /></a></div>
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Image Courtesy of <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">seomoz.org</strong></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unique Factor: </strong>All the statistics are made available to you in a matter of seconds.</div>
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ifttt.com</h2>
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<a href="https://ifttt.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">IFTTT</a> is a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement. If you are planning to promote your site, this one is a great tool to have.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why It’s Awesome: </strong>On offer are 57 channels where you can integrate everything you could possible need to get nearly unimaginable results. You are required to setup triggers on your specific website. As an example of Twitter where you can set triggers on the basis of such ingredients as tweet words, specific with hash tags, emails, and more.</div>
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You have to make the combination with your channels like ‘if’, ‘term’, ‘then’, ‘send me an email’, and others. Moreover, the triggers can be activated and deactivated at any time.</div>
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<a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?attachment_id=54135" rel="attachment wp-att-54135" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54135" height="261" src="http://64.19.142.13/www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/image005.jpg" style="border: 0px; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" title="" width="482" /></a></div>
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Image Courtesy of <strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ifttt.com</strong></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unique Factor</strong>: You can setup 57 channels for updates in a matter of seconds on events triggered.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Final Thoughts</strong></h3>
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When it comes to Internet marketing, there is indeed no foolproof formula. Every professional needs a a strong strategy that is custom-tailored and best for each particular brand. To be successful, you need to be creative, to have the best tools, and to stay abreast of the latest information. Hopefully this list of tools has helped add to at least your tool box. With passion and some smart direction, <a href="http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/content-marketing-guide/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">content marketing can be your company’s secret weapon</a> too.</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-mind-blowing-seo-tools/54130/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-mind-blowing-seo-tools/54130/</a></div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-65609187129818653462012-12-12T00:53:00.000-08:002012-12-12T00:56:37.079-08:00How to Teach Yourself SEO<br />
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<em style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">So, you want to learn what all those techie-types are referring to when they talk about link building, <a href="http://www.sujanpatel.com/link-building/how-to-diversify-your-anchor-text/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">anchor text</a>, title tags, and on-site optimization? Welcome to the SEO club!</strong></em></div>
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<img alt="SEO Self Learning 101" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54106" height="352" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/SEO-learning.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" title="SEO-learning" width="600" /></div>
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Teaching yourself SEO can be a challenging process, but it’s not impossible. Take a look at the following step-by-step plan and then get started. Remember, SEO changes every day, so there’s no time like the present to get started learning!</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Step #1: Seek out beginner-level resources</strong></h3>
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Now, I’m assuming that you’re reading this article because you want to learn SEO on your own time, as a supplement to whatever else your full-time job may be.</div>
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If you have the time or resources, there are plenty of great “all inclusive” training courses that’ll take you from beginner to advanced student in the shortest amount of time possible (for example, check out the <a href="http://sesconference.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SES series of conferences</a> if you’ve got a few thousand dollars to invest in your education).</div>
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But if you’re doing this on your own, you’ll want to begin by seeking out well-regarded beginner-level resources. There are plenty of different training programs out there, though you’ll want to pay special attention to the following options:</div>
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<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">SEOMoz’s “<a href="http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Beginner’s Guide to SEO</a>”</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO Book’s “<a href="http://training.seobook.com/seo-training-overview" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO Training</a>”</li>
<li style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bruce Clay’s “<a href="http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/search-engine-optimization.htm" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Search Engine Optimization Tutorial</a>”</li>
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Any of these resources will give you a solid background in the principles and techniques underpinning the practice of search engine optimization. Once you feel comfortable with the concepts covered in these beginner-level resources, begin to seek out more advanced training programs to refine your skills and understanding even further.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Step #2: Put what you’ve learned into practice</strong></h3>
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As you begin your SEO training, you’ll encounter plenty of different tricks and techniques that will help your future webpages to perform well in the natural search results. However, keep in mind that learning SEO from an ebook is a lot like learning to drive from a book. There’s a pretty big difference between reading about the subject and actually putting it into practice!</div>
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If you really want to learn SEO, you can’t just read about the approaches taken by others. Instead, you need to practice implementing them on your own websites and measuring the impact that each change you make has on your site’s overall performance.</div>
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Don’t have a website? Well, there’s never been a better time to start one!</div>
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Your new website doesn’t need to be complex, and you don’t need to have any business goals associated with it. It doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition either. In fact, it’ll take less than $100 to purchase the Web hosting and domain needed to create your own static HTML or WordPress website.</div>
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What’s important is that you see, in real time, how different SEO concepts are put into practice. While it’s one thing to read about techniques like optimizing your title tags or meta descriptions, carrying out these tasks in real time will give you a better understanding of how SEO functions overall, making you a more effective website optimizer in the long run.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Step #3: Find a mentor</strong></h3>
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Of course, building a five-page website on which to practice SEO isn’t nearly the same thing as optimizing a 1,000+ page e-commerce website!</div>
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With SEO, there’s a tremendous learning curve that separates SEO newbies from more advanced practitioners. So, while you’ll certainly learn plenty by studying and implementing the practices you learn about on your own website, you’ll advance your skill set even further by finding an advanced SEO mentor who can give you helpful guidance on how to improve your techniques.</div>
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Finding a mentor can be a challenge, as many practitioners within the field are too busy with their own projects to offer suitable guidance to a beginner. Ask around at local business networking events, Web forums, or SEO groups, but don’t be surprised if it takes some time to find a mentor who’s both available to work with you and well-suited to your unique learning style. Keep searching until you find the right person and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your SEO skills can improve!</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Step #4: Join an SEO group</strong></h3>
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In addition to finding an SEO mentor, search your area for any in-person SEO meetup groups. Though smaller, more rural areas may not have established groups of this nature, most cities offer at least a handful of SEO or digital marketing meetups for participants of all skill levels.</div>
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To find these gatherings, try searching for your city on <a href="http://www.meetup.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Meetup.com</a> to view all existing local activities, or try entering the phrase, “SEO group + your city” or “digital marketing group + your city” into Google. If your search turns up multiple options, check them all out to determine which groups are the best fit for your skills, interests, and personality.</div>
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Or, if you aren’t able to find information on any existing SEO groups, why not start your own? Services like Meetup.com make it easy to organize groups and promote your new organization to a wide variety of members. If you do decide to go this route, try partnering with any SEO or digital marketing professionals in your area to bring a more experienced viewpoint to your new group.</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Step #5: Monitor SEO news sites for industry updates</strong></h3>
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Finally, to really grow your SEO skills, you need to remain on top of the industry’s many changes. Think about it … If you select a single SEO training program from the list above to work off of and never change up your learning materials, you aren’t going to be informed on any changes that have occurred within the field of SEO since your materials were initially introduced.</div>
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As a result, it’s imperative that you set aside time every week to browse through SEO news websites. You can navigate directly to sites like <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Search Engine Journal</a> or <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEOMoz</a>, or you can use aggregation services like Alltop’s <a href="http://seo.alltop.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">SEO page</a> or <a href="http://inbound.org/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Inbound.org</a> to get a quick overview of what’s hot within the field of digital marketing.</div>
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While browsing these pages, keep an eye out for trending topics that are covered in multiple articles or across multiple websites, as these subjects typically indicate issues you’ll want to be aware of.</div>
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For example, if Google rolls out a <a href="http://www.sujanpatel.com/seo/why-i-love-google-algorithm-changes/" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">change to one of its algorithms</a>, you can bet you’ll see a handful of different articles about the specific update and its implications on every SEO news website out there. The fact that so many people have covered a given topic makes it one that you’ll definitely want to pay attention to!</div>
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Yes, it will take time to learn SEO. It’s a complicated field that few have mastered, so plan on putting in plenty of time hitting the books and looking up new terminology. But don’t let this discourage you! Remember that even the most advanced SEOs started out where you are today. Although you might feel overwhelmed right now, know that with consistent, dedicated studying, you’ll soon be talking Web with the best of them!</div>
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Source: <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-teach-yourself-seo/53574/">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-teach-yourself-seo/53574/</a></div>
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Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2434933328714615582.post-77852713734744925762012-12-11T16:31:00.001-08:002012-12-11T16:55:30.140-08:00Bing Brings People and Landmarks To Snapshot<br />
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Bing’s latest effort to get one over on Google has seen it decide to imitate rather than innovate, adding a <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/12/10/find-famous-people-and-places-in-a-snap.aspx" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">new feature</a> to its snapshot sidebar that seems to imitate Google’s hand Knowledge Graph feature.</div>
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For those unfamiliar with the term “Knowledge Graph”, this refers to the sidebar in Google’s search results that throws up instant information when a user queries a famous person or landmark.</div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-54304" height="309" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/bing-search-637x309.jpg" style="clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1em; max-width: 100%; text-align: center;" width="637" /></div>
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Now Bing users will be exposed to the same treatment, with relevant information being provided without needing to click on any links. As with Google, much of the info is taken from Wikipedia and similar, trusted sources.</div>
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Snapshot itself isn’t a new feature, having been <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/05/15/start-doing-more-now-try-the-new-bing-today.aspx" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">introduced back in May</a> of this year, but until now its usefulness has been fairly limited. Hopefully, with the introduction of more contextual information about people and landmarks, users will begin to find the feature a bit more useful.</div>
<blockquote style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 0px 0px 20px inset; background-color: #f3f3f3; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 0px 5px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0980392) 0px 0px 20px inset; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; margin: 1em; outline: 0px; padding: 0.75em; quotes: ''; vertical-align: baseline;">
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“In May, Bing launched a <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/search/archive/2012/05/15/start-doing-more-now-try-the-new-bing-today.aspx" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">new three column look,</a> which was designed to fundamentally change how you interact with search to help you do more. One of the key elements of the new search experience is the middle column, which we refer to as snapshot. With snapshot, Bing brings relevant information and services, such as maps and restaurant reviews and reservations, which are directly related to your search within the main results page,” states Microsoft in a <a href="http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/12/10/find-famous-people-and-places-in-a-snap.aspx" style="border: 0px; color: #8db232; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline;">Bing Community blog post</a>.</div>
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As of today, when you enter a query about a famous celebrity or place, Bing’s results will very familiar to those produced by Google, with relevant information and images of the person or place displayed in the center column. As well as these, searches for restaurants and hotels also make use of Bing Snapshot in a similar fashion.</div>
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For searches related to people, much of the info provided is recent, with lists of new movies or albums the celebrity in question has produced. In some cases, Snapshot will also provide movie trailers and the ability to buy music with just one click.</div>
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<img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-54301" height="418" src="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Bing-Snapshot-Bill-gates-637x418.jpg" style="display: block; height: auto; margin: 7.349999904632568px auto 0px; max-width: 98%;" width="637" /><br />
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No it’s not Google. As of today, a search for Bill Gates on Bing brings up a whole bundle of instant info via Snapshot</div>
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Microsoft that the Snapshot’s aim is to help people come to decisions more quickly, but one can’t help thinking that they’ve simply latched onto Google’s idea – reason being, if it works for them, why not for Bing too?<br />
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Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-snapshot/54300/</div>
Jenohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01834606222145572083noreply@blogger.com0