I don’t like trying to package everything that’s happening in our industry into a neat little box, because it’s like trying to describe the cause of the Civil War in two sentences. I’m likely to leave some things out, overstate some factors, and unintentionally offend some people. But I do think that an individual perspective can add flavor and context to an interesting narrative that’s still unfolding right in front of us.

Whether you think all of the upheaval is great or terrible for the industry (or whether you believe there is no upheaval at all), you have to admit that 2012 has been a strange year for search engine optimization so far. It has left me reflecting on who must be loving SEO right now and who must be hating it.

Panda Ripples

Nearly every site was impacted by the original Panda update, which just had its year anniversary. This year, Google has rolled out a series of lesser updates to effectively tackle webspam, all under the Panda umbrella, beginning with version 3.2 and a tweak designed to target ad-heavy page layouts. While Google has been unusually public about this string of updates, it doesn’t change the fact that most SEOs say they haven’t recovered from the effects of the original sweeping update.

When one site gets devalued by an algorithm change, another site is positioned to gain rankings, but most of the sites benefiting from Panda have been big brands (no surprise since Google inherently stands to benefit from larger PPC budgets at these companies and hasn’t been shy of pushing the benefits of SEO + PPC through its own PR machine scientific studies).

There’s probably no better time than now to be an in-house SEO for a large company, based on Google’s update patterns. That said, by now we should know that Google loves high-profile site penalization, since the loss of a couple of high-budget advertisers like Overstock or JC Penney is worth its weight in improved public brand trust for Google.

The Penguin Drops

Google’s 2^nd nuclear algo bomb, code-named Penguin, dropped on those using “aggressive webspam tactics” in late April, 2012. Let’s be honest—this kind of link penalization was inevitable, especially since Google can fairly easily identify link portfolios that match a particular profile for aggressive SEO. Search leaders have been preaching a model of anchor text and quality diversity for several years now. Penguin was also preceded by the very public demise of a widely-used article network, Build My Rank, as well as automated Webmaster Tools messages about low-quality pages and “unnatural links.”

The effectiveness of the Penguin update is certainly up for discussion, though I think the update was positive. I think Joost de Valk is spot on in pointing out that Penguin and Panda aren’t easily distinguishable updates, so it’s hard to identify whether a site is being impacted by one or the other This is compounded by the fact that Penguin was rolled out around the time that Google accidentally deindexed some sites by mistakenly classifying them as parked. One SEO company got off easy by only being deindexed for half a day, but it sparked a wider concern over what Google is capable of doing to reputable businesses because of a few questionable link signals.

Negative SEO and Deoptimization

The ambiguity surrounding site penalization and ranking drops over the last few months has had some interesting consequences.

Penguin produced a lot of angry people who felt they had been penalized unjustly (Panda probably produced a lot more). In one representative incident, an SEO gloated over Google punishing spammers with Penguin and the blackhats retaliated. As a result:

1. SEOmoz became an even more polarizing entity after Rand offered up his site to the blackhats as a challenge.
2. “Negative SEO” was called into question as a legitimate threat for the umpteenth time.
3. The harsh reality of large sites given unhealthy advantage in the SERPs was reiterated.

One of the strange signs of the times I’ve seen from Penguin and the “negative SEO” discussion is the sudden prevalence of the word “deoptimization” in conversation. Last week, I got this email asking me to remove the link from a blog comment made on an old blog post.

How bad is it when your job is to make manual requests to remove legitimate (the comment was from a friend of mine) blog comments? Are SEOs doomed to ride some “SEO-SED(eoptimization)” roller coaster for the rest of their careers? Imagine writing link request e-mails, then later writing e-mails to the same people begging to remove those links. This was painful to read.

Google Giveth…

Google has provided a lot of help to webmasters within the last year.

• Supporting rel=”author” tags for better attribution.
• Collaborating on schema.org to serve more structured data in search results.
• Sending messages via Webmaster Tools to help sites be within guidelines.
• Releasing “Search Quality Highlights” which generally allude to the kinds of optimization improvements being made to the search algorithm (although one could argue that these create more speculation than utility).
• Introducing Google Plus.

I mention Google+ as a positive in that it aids in the support of rel=”author.” It also confirms that Google is serious about legitimate social signals as ranking factors. This is great for an industry still plagued by some pretty ineffective link building practices. Some SEOs need to be forced to move from easy and automated links to earned and authentic links.  The downside to social signals is that we don’t have any conclusive causation data on the extent to which social impacts rankings. We’re getting there though.

Image credit

And Google Taketh Away

Two words. Not. Provided.

I can live without a portion of keyword data, since the remainder is probably a representative sample of the whole. But doing year-over-year comparisons of keywords and keyword groups becomes nearly impossible. This makes it difficult for agency or in-house SEO alike to benchmark their own success using analytics (this year, at least).

Are We Better Off Now?

Just looking back at everything SEO has been through in just one year has given me a much greater appreciation for Danny Sullivan and his search history lessons. chuckle

I honestly can’t imagine working in an industry that didn’t have much to talk about. And every shortcut that Google eliminates for SEOs is one more step in the right direction—toward helping us become great marketers beyond SEO.

Not everything is perfect. It never will be. I know legitimate business owners who lost 60% of their organic traffic to Penguin. And that can make you second-guess yourself.

SEO drama notwithstanding, I think 2012 is an amazing time to be in this industry. Count yourself lucky to be among those rolling with the punches right now.

Article source: http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=62541

Over the past two years, Pinterest has become a major factor in the online social space. The growth of Pinterest has gone from just over 4 million active users at the end of 2011 (according to their Facebook page) to just over 8.3 million active users currently.

Pinterest is the third most popular social website (Experian traffic report April 2012), just behind Twitter and Facebook. In just over six months, Pinterest has become more popular than LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, and Google+ (based on traffic volume).

Pinterest Audience Is Growing

With all the growth Pinterest has received domestically, the company is now looking to go global. Currently, they are looking to add French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

Also, another factor to consider is the growth of the male demographic on Pinterest. In September 2011 74 percent of the user base on Pinterest was female and 25 percent of the gender was male.

Fast forward to March 2012, the numbers are starting to shift to a more balanced gender viewership with 65 percent of the base being female, and 35 percent of the base being male (according to comScore March 2012). Also, during this time you will notice on the graphs below that overall age range of users in the 35-54 range has grown five percent.

Pinterest is growing in overall volume, becoming more gender balanced, increasing its age group range, and building out a global community. Much as Facebook and Twitter are a general part of your SEO/social strategy, so should Pinterest.

Social Link Signals From Pinterest

Our SEO team conducted a study recently to see the impact of Pinterest and the potential social link equity, one can generate from “Pinning” pictures. The results are quite interesting.

For the sample test we took a domain with very little equity (0 inbound links) and created a Pinterest account for it. Our team then pinned two recipes to share with people on Pinterest.

Within one week of pinning to the Pinterest wall, the site accumulated over 150 links.

The site previous only showed up for one keyword query. One week after pinning, the site was indexed for 25 queries (mostly long tail keywords, low competition terms), according to Google webmaster tools.

Pinterest pins for the two recipes were few and far between, however by merely pinning these two recipe pages to Pinterest, links from other sites such as WordPress blog sites, Tumblr, Google images, posted new backlinks. Thus, we were creating social buzz, and more visibility for the site overall.

Value of Pinning

Will this strategy necessarily bring massive boost for established brands or highly competitive keywords? Probably not!

Will this help diversify your backlink profile? Yes.

Does Google like fresh content from social sharing? Yes.

Is this an easy way to inject some fresh content and new social citation for your site? Yes.

If you create creative and interesting images, and have some influence on Pinterest, could something go viral? Yes.

Should companies and sites invest in using Pinterest? Absolutely!

Top Brands on Pinterest

Obviously due to the nature of the medium, lifestyle type brands do extremely well on Pinterest such as:

• Whole Foods
• Travel Channel
• Better Homes Gardens
• West Elm
• Martha Stewart

Brands that are not Lifestyles…Doing Well

Here is a list of some other brands you might not expect to do well but are:

• Oberlin College
• MLB
• Wall Street Journal

Pinning is Winning

Clearly, Pinterest is becoming a major social medium to build your digital strategy around. Creating interesting and creative images to share with others is the key to success.

You don’t have to be a lifestyle type site to win on Pinterest, you merely need to figure out a way to creatively make your brand fun. Also, from the above case study, there are other benefits as well, such as social links generated from content shared on Pinterest.

For the modern SEO/social strategy you should look for ways to use Pinterest, because Martha Stewart does “and it’s a good thing…for your brand.”

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2175367/Why-Your-SEO-Social-Strategy-Should-Include-Pinterest

Over the past two years, Pinterest has become a major factor in the online social space. The growth of Pinterest has gone from just over 4 million active users at the end of 2011 (according to their Facebook page) to just over 8.3 million active users currently.

Pinterest is the third most popular social website (Experian traffic report April 2012), just behind Twitter and Facebook. In just over six months, Pinterest has become more popular than LinkedIn, Foursquare, Instagram, and Google+ (based on traffic volume).

Pinterest Audience Is Growing

With all the growth Pinterest has received domestically, the company is now looking to go global. Currently, they are looking to add French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish.

Also, another factor to consider is the growth of the male demographic on Pinterest. In September 2011 74 percent of the user base on Pinterest was female and 25 percent of the gender was male.

Fast forward to March 2012, the numbers are starting to shift to a more balanced gender viewership with 65 percent of the base being female, and 35 percent of the base being male (according to comScore March 2012). Also, during this time you will notice on the graphs below that overall age range of users in the 35-54 range has grown five percent.

Pinterest is growing in overall volume, becoming more gender balanced, increasing its age group range, and building out a global community. Much as Facebook and Twitter are a general part of your SEO/social strategy, so should Pinterest.

Social Link Signals From Pinterest

Our SEO team conducted a study recently to see the impact of Pinterest and the potential social link equity, one can generate from “Pinning” pictures. The results are quite interesting.

For the sample test we took a domain with very little equity (0 inbound links) and created a Pinterest account for it. Our team then pinned two recipes to share with people on Pinterest.

Within one week of pinning to the Pinterest wall, the site accumulated over 150 links.

The site previous only showed up for one keyword query. One week after pinning, the site was indexed for 25 queries (mostly long tail keywords, low competition terms), according to Google webmaster tools.

Pinterest pins for the two recipes were few and far between, however by merely pinning these two recipe pages to Pinterest, links from other sites such as WordPress blog sites, Tumblr, Google images, posted new backlinks. Thus, we were creating social buzz, and more visibility for the site overall.

Value of Pinning

Will this strategy necessarily bring massive boost for established brands or highly competitive keywords? Probably not!

Will this help diversify your backlink profile? Yes.

Does Google like fresh content from social sharing? Yes.

Is this an easy way to inject some fresh content and new social citation for your site? Yes.

If you create creative and interesting images, and have some influence on Pinterest, could something go viral? Yes.

Should companies and sites invest in using Pinterest? Absolutely!

Top Brands on Pinterest

Obviously due to the nature of the medium, lifestyle type brands do extremely well on Pinterest such as:

• Whole Foods
• Travel Channel
• Better Homes Gardens
• West Elm
• Martha Stewart

Brands that are not Lifestyles…Doing Well

Here is a list of some other brands you might not expect to do well but are:

• Oberlin College
• MLB
• Wall Street Journal

Pinning is Winning

Clearly, Pinterest is becoming a major social medium to build your digital strategy around. Creating interesting and creative images to share with others is the key to success.

You don’t have to be a lifestyle type site to win on Pinterest, you merely need to figure out a way to creatively make your brand fun. Also, from the above case study, there are other benefits as well, such as social links generated from content shared on Pinterest.

For the modern SEO/social strategy you should look for ways to use Pinterest, because Martha Stewart does “and it’s a good thing…for your brand.”

SES Toronto 2012 is June 11-13. Register before May 11 and save up to $300!

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2175367/Why-Your-SEO-Social-Strategy-Should-Include-Pinterest

I don’t like trying to package everything that’s happening in our industry into a neat little box, because it’s like trying to describe the cause of the Civil War in two sentences. I’m likely to leave some things out, overstate some factors, and unintentionally offend some people. But I do think that an individual perspective can add flavor and context to an interesting narrative that’s still unfolding right in front of us.

Whether you think all of the upheaval is great or terrible for the industry (or whether you believe there is no upheaval at all), you have to admit that 2012 has been a strange year for search engine optimization so far. It has left me reflecting on who must be loving SEO right now and who must be hating it.

Panda Ripples

Nearly every site was impacted by the original Panda update, which just had its year anniversary. This year, Google has rolled out a series of lesser updates to effectively tackle webspam, all under the Panda umbrella, beginning with version 3.2 and a tweak designed to target ad-heavy page layouts. While Google has been unusually public about this string of updates, it doesn’t change the fact that most SEOs say they haven’t recovered from the effects of the original sweeping update.

When one site gets devalued by an algorithm change, another site is positioned to gain rankings, but most of the sites benefiting from Panda have been big brands (no surprise since Google inherently stands to benefit from larger PPC budgets at these companies and hasn’t been shy of pushing the benefits of SEO + PPC through its own PR machine scientific studies).

There’s probably no better time than now to be an in-house SEO for a large company, based on Google’s update patterns. That said, by now we should know that Google loves high-profile site penalization, since the loss of a couple of high-budget advertisers like Overstock or JC Penney is worth its weight in improved public brand trust for Google.

The Penguin Drops

Google’s 2^nd nuclear algo bomb, code-named Penguin, dropped on those using “aggressive webspam tactics” in late April, 2012. Let’s be honest—this kind of link penalization was inevitable, especially since Google can fairly easily identify link portfolios that match a particular profile for aggressive SEO. Search leaders have been preaching a model of anchor text and quality diversity for several years now. Penguin was also preceded by the very public demise of a widely-used article network, Build My Rank, as well as automated Webmaster Tools messages about low-quality pages and “unnatural links.”

The effectiveness of the Penguin update is certainly up for discussion, though I think the update was positive. I think Joost de Valk is spot on in pointing out that Penguin and Panda aren’t easily distinguishable updates, so it’s hard to identify whether a site is being impacted by one or the other This is compounded by the fact that Penguin was rolled out around the time that Google accidentally deindexed some sites by mistakenly classifying them as parked. One SEO company got off easy by only being deindexed for half a day, but it sparked a wider concern over what Google is capable of doing to reputable businesses because of a few questionable link signals.

Negative SEO and Deoptimization

The ambiguity surrounding site penalization and ranking drops over the last few months has had some interesting consequences.

Penguin produced a lot of angry people who felt they had been penalized unjustly (Panda probably produced a lot more). In one representative incident, an SEO gloated over Google punishing spammers with Penguin and the blackhats retaliated. As a result:

1. SEOmoz became an even more polarizing entity after Rand offered up his site to the blackhats as a challenge.
2. “Negative SEO” was called into question as a legitimate threat for the umpteenth time.
3. The harsh reality of large sites given unhealthy advantage in the SERPs was reiterated.

One of the strange signs of the times I’ve seen from Penguin and the “negative SEO” discussion is the sudden prevalence of the word “deoptimization” in conversation. Last week, I got this email asking me to remove the link from a blog comment made on an old blog post.

How bad is it when your job is to make manual requests to remove legitimate (the comment was from a friend of mine) blog comments? Are SEOs doomed to ride some “SEO-SED(eoptimization)” roller coaster for the rest of their careers? Imagine writing link request e-mails, then later writing e-mails to the same people begging to remove those links. This was painful to read.

Google Giveth…

Google has provided a lot of help to webmasters within the last year.

• Supporting rel=”author” tags for better attribution.
• Collaborating on schema.org to serve more structured data in search results.
• Sending messages via Webmaster Tools to help sites be within guidelines.
• Releasing “Search Quality Highlights” which generally allude to the kinds of optimization improvements being made to the search algorithm (although one could argue that these create more speculation than utility).
• Introducing Google Plus.

I mention Google+ as a positive in that it aids in the support of rel=”author.” It also confirms that Google is serious about legitimate social signals as ranking factors. This is great for an industry still plagued by some pretty ineffective link building practices. Some SEOs need to be forced to move from easy and automated links to earned and authentic links.  The downside to social signals is that we don’t have any conclusive causation data on the extent to which social impacts rankings. We’re getting there though.

Image credit

And Google Taketh Away

Two words. Not. Provided.

I can live without a portion of keyword data, since the remainder is probably a representative sample of the whole. But doing year-over-year comparisons of keywords and keyword groups becomes nearly impossible. This makes it difficult for agency or in-house SEO alike to benchmark their own success using analytics (this year, at least).

Are We Better Off Now?

Just looking back at everything SEO has been through in just one year has given me a much greater appreciation for Danny Sullivan and his search history lessons. chuckle

I honestly can’t imagine working in an industry that didn’t have much to talk about. And every shortcut that Google eliminates for SEOs is one more step in the right direction—toward helping us become great marketers beyond SEO.

Not everything is perfect. It never will be. I know legitimate business owners who lost 60% of their organic traffic to Penguin. And that can make you second-guess yourself.

SEO drama notwithstanding, I think 2012 is an amazing time to be in this industry. Count yourself lucky to be among those rolling with the punches right now.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/6krBkPx4w5A/

I spend a lot of quality time in Private QA here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way (please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions…

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up.

It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options.

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO. People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed.

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

…might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in QA is Rand’s 2010 post “All Links are Not Created Equal”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on.

Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk.

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly.

At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.”

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated.

6. Check Your Headers

Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook.

7. Use Basic Tools Well

There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog, but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall.

8. Learn When to Be Patient

Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information).

9. Stop Scheming Get to Work

This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)…

The most frequent excuse I hear in QA is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/UoDrGovSDlg/9-lessons-from-1000-seo-questions

Got up two mornings in a row at 6AM and it’s taken two strong coffees to appreciate that the sun is shining today. However (and how nerdy have I become!?) the first SMX session ‘Social shares, the new link building’ woke me up and cheered me up to no end. There must be many of you -tucked away in an office somewhere- that are the only one in their office dealing with PPC, SEO or social. Isn’t it nice to meet colleagues that a similar job to you at a conference discuss?

Six Link Builder’s Treasures Social Media Managers Should Link to:

Lisa Meyers from Verve Search says SEO pros should engage in social media and there are some link builder’s treasures social media managers could do their benefit with as people love to share them.

1. Research + whitepapers
2. How to articles and blog posts
3. Breaking industry news
4. Infographics
5. Competitions
6. Interviews

Simon Heseltine – AOL / Huffington Post

Which social platforms may suit your business best?

With what social media you should be spending your time can depend on your vertical says James Carson, digital strategist at Bauer Media:

• Facebook: Great for the entertainment vertical and big brands.
• Youtube: Pretty much suitable for anything.
• Twitter: Particularly successful for news and technology.
• Pinterest and Tumblr: The fashion industry’s dream.

Followers – How to find your influencers

It’s not size that counts. Key performance indicators solely focused on numbers are crazy says Carson. It’s much more valuable to be followed by people that always retweet you and that share your content with their audience. Tools to find followers mainly seem to work well in the US. Europeans can do their benefit with Followerwonk and Klout.Competwitions (competitions where people have to retweet you to participate) can also be useful.

How to increase Facebook engagement?

1. Aim for engagement
2. Ask questions
3. Post games and trivia
4. Interact with fans
5. Incorporate wall apps
6. Incorporate relevant photos
7. Relate to current events
8. Incorporate videos
9. Include links in posts
10. Give call to actions to followers (if you agree then ‘like’ our post!)

The Huffington Post – Badges are Back!

Simon Heseltine, Director at AOL surprised me by spending considerable time talking about badges. I never thought people would care an awful lot about these but apparently they do and it is working wonders for the Huffington Post.

Social traffic at the Huffington post is so large that they have created various Twitter and Facebook accounts targeting readers with varying interests and in different geo-locations. If users interact with content they can earn an array of badges which in turn will give them benefits such as being able to edit other user’s comments or leave longer comments themselves. The badges encourage readers to comment and share, growing the Huffington Posts’ following.

Simone Schuurer – EMEA Community Site Manager

Article source: http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=62516

Pete and Repete were walking on a bridge. Pete fell off. Who’s left?

Repete? Ok, Pete and Repete were walking on a bridge. Pete fell off. Who’s left?

Repete? How about we just move on…

In marketing, when something works it gets repeated and repeated again and again. Never letting a good campaign go to waste, imitators will jump on board and drive it into the ground until it’s no longer effective.

We’ve seen this with the Got Milk? campaigns. It wasn’t long before we started seeing imitators touting got sand, got rice, got mold, got Jesus and even got poop! (Like, who doesn’t?)

The same thing happens with TV and movies. Someone breaks an “edginess” barrier and it’s soon a race to see how soon it can be topped without losing advertisers or getting crushed by the FCC. It’s hard to believe there was once a time when it was taboo to say “damn” in a theatrical movie, or that depicting a married couple in the same bed was just not something you did on TV!

It’s inevitable that yesterday’s “big thing” is today’s normal thing.

What’s new is old again

Online marketing runs on the same principles. While solid SEO and link-building concepts remain universal, there are a number of strategies of years past that no longer work today. Why? Because they have been done to death, rendering them almost completely ineffective.

Remember reciprocal link pages? Mass article submissions? Mass directory submissions? Comment spamming? Link wheels? These are all but virtually dead, dying or soon to be declining link-building strategies that have been used, abused and discarded in the cyber junkpile of once successful SEO strategies.

All this shows the danger of jumping on any single “trick” when pursuing the holy grail of SEO: search engine rankings. These tricks often turn into nothing more than short-term gimmicks, and sites fall down just as quickly as they rose up in the search results.

In online marketing, there are many paths to the same goal. Many will work for most, some may work for all, and others only work for a period of time. Many business owners find one strategy that works and they stick to it, even long past its usefulness. Not every marketing strategy works 100% the time. Those that put all their marketing eggs into a single basket find themselves with egg on their faces when that one strategy comes crashing to the ground with the changing tide of online marketing strategies.

But I get it. We do what we are comfortable with and venturing outside of that is the unknown. The unknown means taking risks and possibly experiencing losses. But it also means possible rewards, and that’s what businesses need to be looking at.

Developing long-term strategies that get results

In any kind of marketing, its good to have multiple strategies at play at any given time. Putting aside the whole concept of marketing to specific customer personas, it’s not a good idea to put all of your time, money or effort into a single marketing approach. I can easily make an argument for investing not only in SEO and link building, but also in social media, PPC, content, analytics, etc.

Focusing all your marketing efforts onto a single avenue of growth can be effective for a time. However, marketing diversification gives you more opportunity to be even more effective.

If you’re limiting your marketing efforts to one or even two avenues, it might be time to branch out. Look at other successful marketing avenues and see how you can venture out a bit. Look at specific tactics and campaigns and see what makes sense for both short and long-term success.

Sometimes it takes trial and error to find strategies that work. Your first attempt isn’t always the best attempt, and it should never be your final attempt. You can always piggyback on what others are doing, just don’t mimic exactly. Use others’ success to build successful campaigns unique to you.

Article source: http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=62518

There are times that effective pay-per-click strategies can work for search engine optimization and vice versa. In addition, whatever you gain or loss with one can affect your decision for the other. Because a tiny tweak on your PPC campaign can affect your click-through rate, you can borrow its techniques and use it for SEO.

Using Exclamation Points

It is popular to PPC copywriters that using an exclamation point can increase an ad’s CTR. That’s because it is equivalent to someone raising a voice. Although it is less likely to boost your website’s page rank, a title with an exclamation point can get more attention and gain more clicks from search engine result page and social media. Just be cautious of using exclamation points. It can make your content awful-looking and sound angry.

Cite Evidences when Stating a Statistic

Presenting can also improve a PPC ads’ CTR. When it comes to SEO, it is important that you cite statistics and present factual data instead of making vague claims. It will also be better if you link your source, as this will give your data additional credibility.

Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is the effective integration of exact search query wording in an ad. For example, when a user types in “coins of gold” in a search bar, he or she will most probably click the search result which carries the exact keywords he or she used. That’s why you should anticipate keyword variations and create a content that incorporates all possible queries. You can follow the same technique for SEO, and support it with keyword research. As a result, your content can rank for all the keyword variations.

Do a PPC Copywriter Test

Although it can be tedious, split testing a PPC ad can be handy. Use the Google Website Optimizer and test two versions of your content for SEO. Analyze your web content’s title, word counts, images and its layout, sidebar links, and many more. That way you can improve your page’s SEO without the need to run individual test.

Apply Brevity

Making your message short and straight to the point, and avoiding redundancy is important in PPC. It’s the same when it comes to online content writing. Avoid beating around the bush because it doesn’t really make you sound smarter. It actually wastes your readers’ time.

Shifting from organic to paid search may mean that you have to adjust your online marketing strategies. But anything that can improve CTR in paid search ad could work if applied to SEO. All that you have to do is check out what’s applicable and experiment on it.

Article source: http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=62485

The last couple of years have seen the Facebook fan page become an all-important part of any realtor’s marketing strategy. Virtually everyone who is anyone in real estate operates a page on Facebook these days – but just having one isn’t enough. Realtors need to understand what it takes to capture the attention of the millions of Facebook users who are online every single minute of the day.

Choosing a Page Name (carefully)

It’s only possible to do this once, when the page is first set up, so it needs to be done very carefully. Admittedly, this is too late for many realtors, but those just setting up a new Facebook page would do well to consider the keyword phrases they want to rank for.

For most realtors, it’s longtail keyword phrases that lead to the most exposure, something like “Apartments in Upper West Side”. While this may sound a little spammy, it’s what people are searching for and there’s nothing misleading about it, so those who add and share this page are going to be genuinely interested in its content.

Choosing a URL

Once the fan page has secured 25 fans, it’s possible to customize the URL. This needs to be done very carefully, for two reasons. Firstly, a keyword-targeted URL is able to provide lots of SEO juice, but at the same time, it has to be visually appealing as it could end up being posted in many different places. Be warned, once a custom URL has been set, it cannot be changed.

Optimizing the “About” Box

The about box is one of the few places on a Facebook fan page where users are able to add some all-important keyword-rich text.

This space is limited to 250 words, but definitely needs to include the main keywords being targeted. The good thing about this section is that it can be updated whenever necessary, so realtors with older fan pages will be able to edit theirs and make sure this section includes their targeted keywords.

Pack that Info Tab

One of the easiest ways to add content to a Facebook fan page is by jamming as much information as possible into the Info Tab. It’s important that this section isn’t neglected, not only because Facebook users will want to read it to know more about the company or business. It can also be optimized with keywords again, while adding relevant geographical data will surely give it a boost in local search engine rankings.

Get (Inter)Active!

All of that optimization is pointless unless a concerted effort is going to be made to interact with fans. Facebook is all about social interaction, and those pages which accumulate a greater following and encourage more discussion will receive a huge boost in their SEO worth. Users need to invest quite a bit of time, sharing and linking to relevant content, crafting interesting posts to get people talking about (and liking) whatever it is they have to say.

No one said it would be easy, but Facebook is just begging to be exploited by those with the time and patience to learn how to do so.

Image vie Fotolia

Article source: http://www.seocentro.com/cgi-bin/rss/go.pl?uid=62496

This video which was put together by UK SEO Sam Applegate is making the rounds (hat tip to Gareth Hoyle and Barry Schwartz for spreading the word as well).

We’re running it because A) it’s pretty funny B) we trust that Matt Cutts has a good sense of humor and C) it’s pretty funny.

Enjoy and don’t take a single “Um” seriously.

Article source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/05/seos-need-a-laugh-too.html