Search Engine Optimization SEO Articles

If you are struggling with the decision of whether to implement RSS feeds or not, consider the following pros and cons for webmasters who use RSS feeds as part of their content and communication plan... Benefits (Pros Of Using RSS) The benefits for a webmaster who opts to implement RSS feeds on their website are numerous: 1. Saves Time RSS feeds save time. RSS subscribers can quickly scan RSS feeds, without having to visit each and every website. Subscribers can then click on any items they are interested in, to get additional information. Pros and Cons of RSS Feeds - 2 years ago

It does not matter what you call them: vodcasts, vidcasts, videocasting, or video podcasting... there are a few behind-the-scenes actions you can take to help attract more attention to your video productions. Just like websites, it does not matter how amazing the content is if interested people are unable to find it. Use the following suggestions to help increase the exposure your videos receive... Tips to Optimize Video Podcasts. - 2 years ago

Sound effects are often used to compliment and enhance artistic presentations, whether they be podcasts, videos, or other audio/visual productions. Royalty-free sound effects are typically non-exclusive and can be used by anyone who purchases them. Professional sound effects can give a podcast or production a more professional sound. However, many new producers may not realize that sound effects have copyrights, and in many cases it is illegal to use a sound effect that you happen to find on the web without properly licensing it. Most podcasters and producers do not have the time or equipment to go out and record all the sound effects they may want to incorporate into their production. Podcasters are better off using royalty-free sound effects. Royalty-free sound effects are purchased, and there is no recurring fee for the use of the effect. The purchaser may use the sound effect(s) as often as required within the license terms and conditions, without paying for the use of the sound effect each time the effect is used. Sound Effects: The Power of Audio - 2 years ago

Growing subscribers of your RSS feed will expand your reach. Put the appropriate effort into marketing your RSS feed, so you can increase adoption and spread the message contained in the RSS feed. Increase RSS Subscribers - 2 years ago

Learn the ins and outs of using a sound effect to polish your presentation or podcast. What Is A Sound Effect? A sound effect is a ready-made sound for podcasters or producers. Typically, podcasters need to only incorporate the sound into their production for instant success. This can be done with various editors running in a very short amount of time. Sound Effects make the creation of a podcast easier and professional. Sound effects are usually easy to edit and customize using any sound editor, occasionally more sophisticated sound require precise tuning. What Are Sound Effects? - 2 years ago

Repurposing content is not a terribly new concept. Webmasters that picked up on the trend have benefited from traffic surges for a while now. Repurposing content is all about presenting the same content in a variety of different ways, or using different mediums to present the same content. Webmasters can manipulate content in order to provide the same content in any number of different formats. Re-Using Content - 2 years ago

Learn the ABCs of RSS Feeds - 2 years ago

There are a wide variety of things you can do in regard to blog promotion. Here are just a few... Promote Your Blog - 2 years ago

Amazon Kindle has a huge earning potential. However, the competition is fierce, too. This is why you need to know how to make your Amazon Kindle eBook popular. Read this article and you will learn what to do in order to promote your Amazon Kindle eBook.

Google Adsense might be the most popular way to monetize a website but it certainly isn't the only one. Here are 10 Google Adsense alternatives to explore that could bring you more money than Google Adsense itself.

The Panda update is one of the most serious changes in search engine algorithms in the last years. This update affected millions of sites (and their owners). If you want to learn how to make your site do well in post-Panda searches, read this article.

When your goal is to rank well with search engines, it is important not only what you do to optimize your site but also what your competitors are doing. This is why you need to keep an eye on your competitors' SEO activities, as discussed in this article.

Baidu is the most popular search engine in China, more popular than Google itself. This is why, if you have visitors from China, it makes sense to optimize your site for Baidu as well. The rules for ranking well with Baidu are similar to the rules of the other search engines, yet there are differences, as we show in the article.

When you are doing business locally, you need local traffic. Maybe you are asking yourself how this is possible, since search engines are global in nature. Read the article and you will learn what you can do to get targeted local traffic to your site.

It is very important to hire a SEO-friendly designer because if you don't and your site is designed in a SEO-unfriendly fashion, you can't compensate for this later. This article will tell you how to pick a SEO-friendly designer and save yourself the disappointment of low rankings with search engines.

obile search is different from desktop search and if you have lots of mobile visitors, you need to make your site mobile-friendly. Shorter keywords, shorter pages, current info, and compliance with mobile standards are some of the key points to follow in order to make your site suitable for mobile searchers.

Google is readying a Dropbox-like service and will soon enter the cloud computing storage market. The Google Drive is expected to allow users to store documents, photos and videos on the cloud and make them accessible from any connected device. - 17 hours ago

During its quarterly earnings call, CEO Jeff Weiner said mobile access represents an ever-growing share of time users spend with LinkedIn. He said the company is investigating ways to monetize those page views with mobile advertising. - 20 hours ago

A month after Bing surpassed Yahoo to became the No. 2 search engine in the U.S., Yahoo’s search share continued to decline in the New Year, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Google climbed past a 66 percent share of the search market. - 35 hours ago

Craig Silverstein, the first employee hired by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, is leaving the company. Silverstein, who helped build the Google search engine, met Page and Brin while the three attended Stanford. - 36 hours ago

Google’s drop-down menu, which was introduced in late November as part of the “next stage” of its massive redesign, is history. Google will revert to an updated version of the black navigation bar that began appearing ahead of the launch of Google+. - 37 hours ago

How to be smart with a strict budget, the importance of timing and levity in social media, retaining value in SEO, content marketing, and the convergance of search and social were among the hot topics, tips, and takeaways at INFLECTIONPoint 2012. - 39 hours ago

On-page optimization is just the beginning. In addition to having a deep understanding of web analytics and metrics, modern day SEOs need to be skilled in technical SEO, social media marketing, link building, usability, and content marketing. - 43 hours ago

Lead scoring could become a key component of the B2B marketing strategy. This column evaluates some of the factors involved in lead scoring, and how B2B search marketers can contribute to and ultimately step to the forefront of the process. - 44 hours ago

Pandia Guest Writer Divya Rawat argues that print publicity campaigns and organic search engine optimization are complementary, and may reinforce each other. - 4 days ago

The Web has changed shopping in a lot of ways. Easy access to an unprecedented amount of stores that will ship your purchase directly to me has made my Christmas shopping stress free. And it's so much easier now to find gifts for those friends with really special interests. All of this is taken one huge step ahed with the Social Web. Social shopping is online shopping with networks of likeminded friends, commenting, sharing and recommendations. Here are Pandia's top 5 social shopping sites. - 6 days ago

Here is this week's news from the world of search engines. - 6 days ago

Here are some interesting articles from this week's search engine marketing coverage. - 6 days ago

Here are some interesting post and articles from this week's social media buzz. - 6 days ago

The integration of social search data is nothing new for Google, but with the release of Google’s new Search Plus Your World (SPYW and also known as Search+) search engine experts and journalists have been raising alarms over privacy and search relevance. Are there new factors for businesses to take into account now that Search+ has become the default search setting for Google? - 12 days ago

Here are some of the search related articles we have found interesting lately. - 13 days ago

Up to date stories on social media and social networking from around the web. - 13 days ago

by Mike Fleming Company owners and other business decision makers who handle a web marketing budget are given, whether it's their fault or not, too much website data that doesn't directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What's wrong with this?  Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and the company.  So, when it's time to decide how to invest, there's nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money.  To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift to focusing on outcomes.Step One: What's the Point?The first step in this shift needs to involve laying out the ultimate reason the website exists, along with the micro-actions that signify the movement of a prospect toward that outcome (stick with 3-5 so you don't lose focus).  They could be purchases or certain behaviors.  Whatever these actions are, they are the ones that tell you if your site is successfully accomplishing its business purpose.  If you lay these out correctly, they will mostly be outcomes that can be given an economic value.  But, be careful not to focus on just e-commerce metrics like Conversion Rate. Why? People come to your site to do activities other than just purchase something.  They research, they look for jobs, they get support, read some content, etc.  They don't need to buy something for it to be a quality visit and for you to conclude that your website did it's job. Your website did it's job if visitors were able to complete the task they came to your website to perform.Here are some valuable metrics other than conversion rate that focus on behaviors that, if improved, directly impact the bottom line...Cart and Checkout Abandonment - This shows the people who commit to buying a product on your site and then bail.  Find out where and why people don't start the checkout process after adding to their cart and don't finish the checkout process after they start. This puts more money directly into your pocket.Free PDF Downloads - If you have a B2B site, you most likely have a longer sales cycle, and visitors to your site might typically do a lot of research before deciding to purchase. If they come to your site and consume a PDF of the information that leads to conversions, this is success.  It should be measured.Visitor Loyalty and Recency - This metrics distributes visitors in a chosen time period based upon the number of times they have visited a site and the time period between visits. If you have a content site that makes money based on page views, then improving this will directly affect your bottom line.Average Order Value - If you improve conversion rate, but your average order value is less, then you may end up with less revenue.Primary Purpose (Identify the Convertible) - Again, not all of your visitors come to your site to buy.  So, to get a true picture of how your website performs, you need to know why they come and if their purpose is satisfied.  This gives you a better picture of how your website is doing.The challenge for you is to decide on metrics that are most important for your company to improve that will directly impact your bottom line. They are different for every business and site, so make sure you really think and consider the critical few that are most important so that you can have laser focus.Step Two: What's It Worth?Now that you know what metrics will tell the story of whether your website is doing it's job or not, you need to make sure that the outcomes are given economic value. If you don't, you won't be able to communicate what improving a metric will do for the business. If business owners and executives are going to disperse resources, they need to know how the efforts to improve visitor loyalty or support tickets submitted is going to affect the business in dollars and cents. If the outcomes that occur on your site are not credited with economic value, you can't do this.Even if the behavior is not an e-commerce transaction, give it value if it increases revenue or reduces cost for the business.  I might have 10,000 e-mail subscribers and they brought $100K in revenue last year to the company.  So, each subscriber is worth $10.  Some calculations may be more complicated, so get help from offline people and data if you need to.  Then, make sure you track what happens in the online channel to the best of your ability to be able to adjust for more accuracy going forward.After you've started measuring what's important and seeing how much it's worth, you can then start analyzing this essential and extremely valuable data.  You can segment your data and look at visitors who only completed a certain action and see where they came from, what keywords they used, other common behavior they exhibit, etc.  This is where the gold is! Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 3 days ago

by Jennifer Cario (If you are new to Pinterest and don't already have an account, make sure to read part one in this series.) Now that you've gotten youself up and running with a Pinterest account, it's time to put it to use to start collecting ideas, links and pictures. Remember, Pinterest is a powerful online filing system that gives you visual access to the things you might wish to use down the road. Back in part one we talked about setting up some topical boards to sort the "pins" you find. Today we're going to talk about how to find those pins. Browsing Your Friends' Pins and Repinning The absolute easiest way to find pins (and the way most people get started) is by looking though the feed produced for you by your friends' activity and "repinning" their pins. A repin is the Pinterest equivalent of a Twitter retweet or a Facebook share. When you log in to Pinterest, your friends' activity feed is the first thing that pops up. You can scroll through these listings to see if anything strikes your fancy. If it does, you have one of two options. The first is to hover your mouse over it and wait for the Repin, Like and Comment options to pop up. Clicking the like button will add your vote to the mix right there on the page. Clicking the comment button will add a comment window to the bottom of the listing and clicking the Repin button will pop up a screen designed to let you pin the item to your own boards. It's important to note you can also check the Facebook and Twitter boxes in this window to automatically share your pin there as well. You can select the category you wish to pin it to from the drop down menu or create a new one right there in the menu. You can also choose to pin it with the existing description, or write your own. Once you've hit submit, the pin will be added to your category and will show up in the streams of users who follow you. Your other option when you see a pin you are interested in is to click on the image itself. This will take you to the actual pin listing page, which looks like this: Apart from getting a larger picture and a full description plus comments on this page, you also get some interesting information to help you dig deeper with your Pinning habits. At the bottom of the listing, you'll notice three key areas. "Pinned onto the board," "Originally Pinned by," and "Pinned from." The first one tells you what board the person who pinned it placed it in. The thinking here is that if you like this pin, you may like the other pins they've collected on that topic. It will also give you some thumbnail snapshots of other pins from that board to check out. Below that, you'll find a link to the person who originally found the post and added it to Pinterest. Again, chances are high you may want to consider following this person as well, since you like the content they added. Finally, the "pinned from" section will give you a full page showing the other pins that have been added from that site. This can be an excellent way to find a new site to visit and even more ideas to pin. Finding Pins by Topic One of my favorite ways to use Pinterest is to browse the pins being added by all members to specific categories. If you look at the top of the page when you are logged in to Pinterest, you'll notice a link that reads "Everything." Click on this link and you'll get a drop down menu that allows you to select a category. Select your category and you'll be taken to a real time feed of the most recent pins added to that category. (There are also links to view the latest video pins, the most popular pins and a breakdown of product pins by price.) This is one of the things that makes Pinterest such an addictive time killer and that keeps people on the site for so long. In fact, the average time on site for a Pinterest user in the month of November last year was 88 minutes. Making it the third most "sticky" social media site behind Facebook (394 minutes) and Tumblr (141.7 minutes), according to Billboard. Finding Pins by Searching The absolute most useful thing about Pinterest, in my opinion, is the search feature. Take a gander at the top left side of the Pinterest home page and you'll spot the search box. Type in almost anything you can think of and you'll be treated a vast array of ideas gathered and archived by millions of Pinterest users. It's one of they key features I use when I need a specific answer or idea. Trying to figure out how to create an indoor herb garden for my kitchen? I ask Pinterest: Looking for some color palette ideas for a new web site design or for a home decorating project? Yep, you can ask Pinterest. But it's not just about using the content that is already on the site. Pinning Content Using the "Pin It" Button Another common way to pin items to your board is to make use of the "Pin it" social sharing buttons that have started to pop up on web sites across the web. For the most part, this button is still rare, showing up mostly on wedding, recipe and craft related sites, but as more and more Internet users discover the benefits of visual bookmarking, it's beginning to spread. When you visit a blog post or product page, just look for the red "Pin it" icon that often shows up along side the +1, Like and Tweet buttons at the top or bottom of a post. Clicking the button will launch a pop up window much like the Pin it option within the Pinterest site. Use the drop down menu to select your category, edit the description to something of your choosing and decide whether or not to share to Facebook and Twitter before hitting "Pin it" and sending the image to your board. Pinterest will take care of linking the image to the proper page. Pinning Content Using the "Pin It" Bookmarklet Since so few sites have added Pin it buttons to the mix, most Pinterest users rely on the Pinterest Bookmarklet. To install it, go to the Pinterest Goodies page click on the Pin it button and drag it to your tool bar. This will create a handy little bookmark on your tool bar that you can simply click on any time you are on a page you'd like to pin. The nice thing about using the bookmarklet is that it gives you a choice of what image to use for your pin. (The other options select the picture automatically.) Clicking the bookmarklet while on the blog post shown above will take you to a page like this: Simply browse through the images from the page and click the one you'd like to feature. This will launch a pop-up window like the one seen before, allowing you to select a category, add a description and publish it to other social networks. Coming up in Part Three Ok, so maybe you are sold on the idea of using Pinterest as an image based bookmark solution, but you're asking what it does in terms of marketing. In other words, can you use it to drive traffic to your site? The answer is a definite yes, but hinges on the concept that most traffic campaigns do...high quality original content. We'll talk more about this coming up in part three. Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 8 days ago

by Jennifer Cario Pinterest is a virtual pin board that allows you to collect images and links to things you like on the web. If you've ever seen someone pull out a scrapbook filled with recipe clippings or a binder full of wedding or home remodel ideas, you've got the general idea. The difference with Pinterest is the fact that it all takes place online in an environment where you can share your collection with your friends and vice versa. To put it in the simplest of terms, Pinterest is an image based version of bookmarks. Pinterest is Growing Rapidly A few months ago, I would have forgiven you if you hadn't heard of Pinterest. It was like a sneaky, lovable cat. The kind that curls up in your lap and gives you the warm fuzzies while you pet it, but that remains quietly invisible to anyone not already in the know. The past month or so though, it's all begun to change. Pinterest has finally reached it's tipping point and the masses are starting to pour into the site to explore what it has to offer. If you are a marketer, a blogger, or a business owner, it's time to invest some effort into learning whether or not Pinterest needs to be part of your marketing strategy. I first heard Pinterest mentioned last summer by a friend who is a professional photographer. She mentioned it as a great place to stash your collection of ideas and inspiration. It sounded intriguing, but not enough so to actually visit the site. (Since I was sort of busy with an out of state move and planning a wedding of my own.) I found my way back to the site last fall while hunting for some Christmas ideas online. Every other crafting site I ran across had a "Pin it" button showing up s part of the blog post. Within ten minutes of finally visiting the site, I was hooked. Since then, I've been a daily Pinterest addict. It's my new time killer when I'm waiting in line or killing a few minutes of boredom. It's my source (and storage) for inspiration on food, my home, and a huge portion of the things I do in my every day life. Intrigued yet? You should be. Let me give you a tour. When you head over to Pinterest, you're going to see a bunch of random picture with commentary and some numbered tallies underneath them. There's no rhyme or reason to it because when you first log in, you're just going to see the current most popular posts. At this point, if you click on an image, you're going to get a notice to sign up for an account. When you fill out the request for an invite, don't fret. Most folks seem to get their invite within 12-48 hours these days. You'll be up and running in no time. Of course if you have a friend using the service already, they can send you an invite which you'll receive almost immediately. Once you get your invite, click the link in the email to get started. It will take you to this page. You'll have the choice to link your account to either Twitter or Facebook. It's a personal preference that doesn't hold a LOT of weight because Pinterest will only share your pins via those networks if you ask it to. For the purpose of this article, we'll go with Facebook. Clicking on it will take you to your Facebook sign-in page. Once you're signed in, you'll need to approve the app to work in Facebook. To note, if you haven't already upgraded to Facebook Timeline, you'll need to do it to get Pinterest synched up. Consider whether you want to leave things set to display to all your friends or if you want narrow the friend group, then click through to move along. From there, it's onto finally setting up your Pinterest account. Once you've finished this step, Pinterest will try to get you started with some people to follow. My suggestion? Refrain from picking categories you like unless you want Pinterest to fill up your boards with people you don't know. For the sake of this article, I set up an account for my husband and it set him up with a dozen people to follow. I had to then go unfollow them all. It will also look to see which of your Facebook friends are on Pinterest and will follow them as well, so plan to edit people out accordingly. Your next step in the process is to create some boards. Boards are Pinterest's version of visual filing cabinets. They are usually topical and give you a chance to categorize your pins for easy access. Take a minute to set one or two up, but realize you can add more at any time. Once you've set up your starter categories, you're ready to get going. At this point, you'll be able to view your Pinterest stream. In this case, that stream looks like this: Of course chances are high you'll see a lot of things you aren't interested in. Just because you're friends with someone on Facebook doesn't mean you're interested in every little thing they want to save in their scrapbooks. There are two different ways to work around this. The first is to delete people totally. To do this, click on the username that shows up under the photo. This will take you to their Pinterest page where you can find the greyed out "unfollow" button under their avatar. Click this button and you'll remove them from your stream. Now, let's say you've got someone in your stream that you want to follow, but who posts WAY more content than you are interested in, or things you simply don't care about. Say, for instance you have a friend who has great taste in food, but also has a love for polymer clay and crafting that is flooding your stream. Find one of their posts, click the username and go to their page the same way you did when you planned to unfollow someone. Click the unfollow button again. At this point, each of the "boards" (categories) the Pinterest user has created will have a follow button associated with them. Scan through their list and follow any of the boards you think you might be interested in. This will segment their feed and serve up only a portion for you. (One of Pinterest's strongest features, in my opinion.) Once you've done this, you'll find your feed has cleared out a bit and feature more post you are interested in. Now that you've gotten everything set up, you can begin using Pinterest. There are three primary ways to do this. You can browse the overall database of pins you can browse your individual feed or you can go looking for new things to add to Pinterest. We'll explore those options coming up in part two of this series on Pinterest. Want to learn even more about Pinterest and how to use it to market your business or drive traffic to your web site? Join Jennifer Cario for a FREE Market Motive workshop on Pinterest next Thursday, February 9th at 12:30pm EST. Registration is required. Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 10 days ago

by Mike Fleming Cutting through all the clutter of data, which metrics are your critical few?  You probably have at most three critical few metrics that define your existence...If you can't take action with anything, then perhaps you are using the wrong metric for your business...the simple process of identifying a metric as your key performance indicator and creating a graph of it rarely helps you find insights...before you diagnose how to improve a metric, you have to identify all the influencing variables...analyzing the variables will help you identify where the true opportunities for improvement are...it forces you to dig in a methodical manner and let the data, not opinions, drive action... -Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0   We've talked about what makes a good metric to look at for your business.  But, you have to be careful here.  There is soooo much data wrapped up in what seems at times like an endless amount of possible metrics. If you are not careful, you will catch yourself wasting your time lost at sea with no idea how to get back home where you belong.  By "home" I mean those critical metrics that will measure what needs to change at this specific point in time for your online efforts to improve.  So, before you dive in and drown in data, the first and maybe most important thing you can do is determine where to focus your attention.  By doing this first, you create a map that will guide you to the right places to dive for those golden insights you so desperately need to make your next decisions for action. This is what you want, right?  Don't get me wrong, it's great to take a few moments and bask in the glory of your achievements or sulk in the pain of your failures.  Both can be tremendous motivators.  But the bulk of your time looking at all the pretty charts, graphs, numbers and arrows should be to find out what to do next.  What should you do more of?  Less of?  Who should get a raise and who should get fired?  Remember, these decisions shouldn't be faith-based initiatives.  Don't let your opinion get in the way.  They should be backed by solid data that tells a story that leads you to conclusions that show you actions that give you results. But, remember the data you're looking at should be that which will tell you if what you were shooting for with your previous actions was accomplished or not.  This is how you and everyone else working with your site should be judged.  If what you were shooting for was to sell 20% more stuff than last year, who cares if visitors went up by 40% if it didn't result in 20% more sales!  There's a problem.  And who cares if visitors didn't go up at all if sales went up by 20%!  Someone deserves some love.  Sure, the two will most likely be intimately tied together, but why worry about what doesn't directly matter.  Focus on what matters and figure out what you can do to make it better. Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 10 days ago

by Stoney deGeyter In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer! There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing! Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts. How are you perceived?My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it. Perception matters. If your potential customer's perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you're going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn? You might, but I guarantee you'd think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can't take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you? When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site's of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you! The little things matter the mostBusinesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don't follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn't always fall on the marketer's shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run. The SEO's job doesn't include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO's area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings! As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We'll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for. Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn't great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can't change it right away. Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It's not just website design, it's also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more. A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you're perceived to be. That's true whether you believe it or not. Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg. Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 10 days ago

by Dave Cosper A business owner recently asked me how to go about building positive reviews in a way that would "optimize" their Google Maps listing. This is about as provocative a topic as it gets in the Local Search community, I know, but it's also an unavoidable subject worth addressing. Search marketers ponder the same "How To" question, if for nothing else to try and understand every aspect of local search ranking factors and translate this to practical advice for SMB's. Google Places has become an essential tool in increasing popularity of a business on the Web to attract local consumers. It is a huge opportunity for local businesses to get exposure, but ranking in Google Places does not happen automatically - and building reviews takes time (any effort to improve ranking should be measured in months not weeks). For every local search, Google does its best to display relevant businesses, favoring those its algorithm determines to be prominent (well-established) and well-liked in the area. If Google made a habit of recommending local businesses that offered poor products and service, how long do you think people would continue using Google Maps? So Google has more confidence in "recommending" a local business if it has mostly positive reviews and ratings. Google Places reviews have four primary signals that affect local search ranking: Volume of reviews/ratingsVelocity of reviews/ratingsSentiment of reviews/ratingsKeywords in reviewsVolumeThe quantity of reviews needed to improve rankings depends on the business type and the number of reviews relative to local competitors. It's important to identify how many reviews competing listings have acquired and use this as the relative benchmark. VelocityAmassing lots of reviews is great, but acquiring them all in bulk or too quickly is not - this will set off red flags. Steadily building quality reviews is ideal. SentimentWhile most review building strategies focus on soliciting reviews from happy customers, a natural distribution of mostly positive and even some negative reviews is best. There are a number of signals Google relies on, and crawling review content and extracting sentiment analysis is one of them. KeywordsThe quality of the written review is also important. While keywords in the review have been shown to help a listing rank, it's important that the description not appear spammy. Keyword stuffing in reviews is NOT good. But, the appearance of multiple reviews with consistent use of the right keywords, used sparingly, typically has a very positive impact on rankings for those particular keywords - especially long-tail keyword phrases. Some examples: Not good: General dentist Dr. Williams in Chicago, IL provides general dentistry and general dental care procedures, such as: Chicago general dentistry for children, general dentistry in Chicago for adults, and Chicago general dentist for seniors. Good: Chalk up another great appointment with Dr. Williams in Chicago. He really cares about your teeth and takes the time to explain all procedures to make you feel comfortable. The entire staff is very friendly and prices are reasonable. Beyond general dentistry he also offers cosmetic dentistry like dental implants and natural looking filings. I highly recommend Dr. Williams! To sum up Google's review policy: No fake reviews, no keyword-stuffed reviews, and no direct incentives for reviews. And apparently, according to Mike Blumenthal's blog, representatives of Google claim on-site review stations are permissible and even encouraged. Additionally, other factors of influence include quantity, velocity and sentiment of reviews stemming from relevant third-party sites: IYPs, vertical/niche directories, and data aggregators, Facebook page likes, social media mentions on sites like Twitter, Foursquare check-ins, and Google+ shares. The entire local-social-mobile ecosystem is becoming increasingly more connected and continuing to play a bigger role in ranking. Google's assessment of reviews also relies on the relative prominence of the person (account) posting the mention. A person with a history of quality reviews, on Hotpot for example, carries more weight. The Anatomy of Stellar "Optimized" Reviews: After five or more reviews, an average star rating with the total number of reviews appears on the search results page along with the listing: It's common to see a boost in both ranking and conversion once five reviews are achieved and the average star rating has been activated - as long as the reviews are good! Optimally, the person writing the review places the best descriptive text at the very beginning of the review as a concise summary statement. The summary can then be expanded upon in the rest of the review. Google routinely places select keywords from the review in bold. Below is an example of how bold keyword phrases appear in the published review: Google also offers review guidelines to share tips on how to write constructive reviews. Some of these tips include how to make the reviews informative and insightful, using real stories and not stuff that didn't actually happen, being nice even with negative reviews by making them constructive and not disrespectful, and finally writing them using proper grammar - avoiding excessive capitalization or punctuation. Spammy Reviews Can do More Damage than Good: What happens if business owners write their own (fake) reviews? The business can end up in Google purgatory! Google employs a number of measures to prevent fake reviews including checking to see if reviews are being left by an email address tied to the business's domain or stemming from the same or similar IP address. If Google is suspicious of fake reviews or sees too many reviews all happening over a very short period of time, the listing could wind up suspended and perhaps even permanently blacklisted if the tactics are blatant enough. Bottom line is, if you own a business you need to commit to an effective and long-term strategy in building online reviews. Instead of direct incentives, focus on encouraging happy customers at, or shortly after, the point of sale. From a local search marketing standpoint, this topic cannot be ignored. After all, Google Maps is, at its core, a recommendation engine. Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 11 days ago

by Miriam Ellis If you've been walking on the sunny side of a clean street on your Search Marketing journey, hopefully you've skipped right past that dark and narrow alleyway in which lurks the spin monster. The practice of 'spinning' articles for directory submission isn't new, but it has come to my notice that marketing firms are currently utilizing this as a post-Panda effort for avoiding the dread Google duplicate content label, and I'm writing this article today to describe what the process is. If you're about to hire a marketer/SEO whose methods of promotion include submitting 'spun' articles to content sites, read this first before you sign that contract. How To Spin An Article In a rancid little nutshell, spinning articles involves creating synonyms or alternates for words and phrases within the body of the copy so that the text can be hashed up and put together again as though it were multiple pieces of content instead of just one. Here is an example of what this looks like: {Some marketers | Some SEOs | Some consultants} {persist in | insist on} believing that it is better to {attempt to | try to} {hoodwink | fool | trick} Google than to devote {time | effort | money} towards playing by the rules for their clients' long-term success. From the above example, you can see how choosing the alternate wordings would enable one to create copy with a certain percentage of distinctness. The whole point, as far as I understand it, is that you can then submit the spun articles to multiple sources for the sole sake of backlinks. The education, engagement and reading pleasure of human beings is definitely not the object. You can hire a 'copywriter' to manually spin articles for you, or you can shove the task off onto a helpless computer program which is, of course, incapable of protest. Either way, you are engaging in a practice which I can only view as one of those ugly outcomes of Google's historic dependence on links as a metric for relevance and authority. Why I Think Article Spinning Is Shady As a professional copywriter, my instinctive response to what this practice does with the English language is one of revulsion. Language can be so powerful, and to see it reduced to this purpose is like watching someone whittle a Redwood into a toothpick. In my opinion, this type of marketing hinges on the lowest form of communication of feeding the stupidest of the bots. Why settle for this when your alternatives have the potential to inspire, enlighten and satisfy those real human beings - your customers? My tender personal feelings about fine prose aside, every business owner must realistically confront the fact that everything published by him and about him on the web is a piece of his reputation. Do you really think that having your linked signature on an article at garbage-content.com is going to show you in a professional light? Consider that. Thirdly, I find article spinning to be a poor concept from its very foundations because it is built on deception. The intent is to deceive Internet users, search engine bots and, possibly, content sites. If your marketer thinks that the best way to get ahead is with a good old lie - well, you've got a problem on your hands. Finally, the fact that dubious marketing firms are apparently seeing this as the answer to Panda means that some people have come out of that web-wide shakeup without having learned a lesson. Instead of trying to become more genuine in their business practices, some business owners/SEOs are simply trying to find other ways to game the system. Of course, there is some money to be made in being tricky, or no one would be doing it, but in my opinion, everyone comes out of this situation a loser. Why? The public loses because the web is further polluted with flotsam and jetsam that is devoid of usefulness or real expertise. The business owner loses because he is wasting his own profits on a marketing strategy that will attach his name to idiotic documents across the web. Further, the next panda-esque debacle may include new sophistication that will render an increased number of content farms inert. The time and money invested will thus be voided. The marketing firm loses because it is risking being called out for selling bad product and it is making its money by offering the worst kind of education to its own clients. It may well be soliciting its own demise. But Isn't There Any Value In Article Marketing Anymore? We can debate this for days. I thought Michael Gray's 2011 article on post-Panda article marketing was pretty on-target, but frankly, I am still convinced that building out your own website's content brings greater rewards than handing it away to somebody else. There will, of course, be exceptions to this, and linkbuilding is every bit as much on the SEO table in 2012 as ever, but be honest with yourself about what you're actually doing. I have found it exceptionally interesting to watch Social Media begin to sway the big discussion towards genuineness. Being real with your real audience, being accountable, being transparent and honest - these are the practices that are now being cited as carrying the richest long-term rewards. I can certainly recall the days of the really dumb bots of a decade ago, and confess I was even amused at some of the gaming going on, but remember this - the humans were never dumb. All of this stuff your business is putting out there on the web - an audience is on the receiving end. That audience contains your potential customers. And, honestly, they are not going to be impressed by finding 6 versions of your story about pet allergies that cleverly substitute the word 'canine' for 'dog'. There are more intelligent ways to engage people. We can do better than this. Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 2 weeks ago

by Mike Fleming ...life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot...hits and pageviews don't mean anything except that someone came to your site and consumed some content...metrics are a dime a dozen, so how do you know which ones to use?  They should have the following four attributes...Uncomplex - If you want action, everyone involved in the decision-making must easily comprehend performance.Relevant - they must be measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.Timely - Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if it takes nine days while your world changes every three days.Instantly Useful - you need to be able to find insights as soon as you look at it.-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0 Your business is different than everyone else's, so why would you look at the same measurements of success as everyone else?  Everyone looks at visitors to their site, but what does that tell you about how your business is doing?  If you sell a high-end product and the only people coming to your site are those looking for a cheap solution, it doesn't matter how far up and to the right that blue line goes for visitors, your business isn't growing. You want to look at the metrics that will tell you if you are progressing with growth.  That's why the most important step you can take toward success is identifying the metrics that will tell you if what you really want to happen for your business is happening or not.What actions do you need your customers in order to achieve the site outcomes you desire?  Do they need to consume more content?  Do more of them need to make it to your product detail pages instead of bouncing off your home page?  Do you need to increase visitors from a certain website that sends high-converting traffic?  Do you need more conversions from PPC traffic?  What needs to happen on your site to get your business to where you want it to be?  Once you've got this down, you can now find out what metric will tell you if it's happening or not.If I need visitors to consume more content so that they can learn about how my product or service benefits them, my metrics for success might be Time on Site or Pageviews/Visit.  If more visitors need to make it to my product detail pages, I might make Product Detail Page Entrances on my site my chosen metric and ramp up my PPC and SEO to those pages.  If I need more conversions from PPC, I might use clicks and conversion rate as my primary metrics. Bottom line: what you spend your time looking at and trying to improve should align with the outcomes that will grow your business. Be sure and visit our small business news site. - 2 weeks ago

A couple months ago, I wrote this about SOPA: SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. Well, guess what? Now the internet is awake. And I don’t think it’s going back to sleep any time soon. We might [...] - 3 weeks ago

I’ve been reading a lot of the coverage of the Search plus Your World launch and I wanted to share my story and then clarify something. I love to stay up until early in the morning playing Werewolf. In early December I went to a journalism conference called “News Foo Camp” in Phoenix and played [...] - 4 weeks ago

Larry Lessig has a new book called Republic, Lost which discusses the corrupting influence of money on politics. I would highly recommend the book, because it gets to the heart of why things so many things in Washington, D.C. seem broken today and how to fix them. If you don’t have the time to read [...] - 2 months ago

A lot of the time, I dispel misconceptions by leaving comments on blogs. That works great, except for the rare occasion when someone pretends to be me and leaves a rude, fake, or otherwise untrue blog comment. Over the previous decade, I’ve only seen 4-5 times where someone impersonated me. But in the last month, [...] - 2 months ago

When I did my blog post about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last week, things looked quite grim. The fight isn’t over, but there’s been a lot of great developments in the last few days. If you’re not familiar with SOPA (and the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate), here’s a video that covers [...] - 2 months ago

(This is post is my personal opinion.) Normally I don’t like to ask people for help, but I could really use your assistance. If you’ve ever watched one of my webmaster videos, or if I’ve responded to you on Twitter, email, or somewhere else online, please take 5-10 minutes to help me out today. Here’s [...] - 2 months ago

For my next 30 day challenge, I’ll be growing a mustache to raise awareness and money for men’s health issues, and specifically prostate cancer research. Men of search and SEO, please join our team. You can raise awareness, or raise cash. And it’s super simple: just don’t shave your moustache for 30 days. The name [...] - 3 months ago

For Halloween this year I asked people on Google+ what I should be for Halloween, and someone suggested going as the blackhat stick man from xkcd. You know, this guy: That sounded like a good challenge. I finished the costume and taped a video, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to get the video [...] - 3 months ago