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Content Is King – Does It Mean Something Or Is It A Myth?Has it already been a month since SES NYC? What a fantastic show! It certainly did not disappoint, with four great days chock full of the latest and greatest in SEO and search marketing.
I had never been to an SES before, and looking back on the show, there were a lot of things about it that surprised me. Oddly, the thing that may have surprised me the most was the number of times I heard the term “content is king”. Between search engine reps, speakers, and attendees, the phrase kept getting tossed around the show, like a beach ball in
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Search Engine Strategies Conference – New York 2011 RecapFirst off, wow, what a great week at SES! After a much needed mental detox from the overload of great sessions and networking events, I wanted to throw some perspective your way from what happened at SES New York this year. Hopefully you have had a chance to stay tuned to all of the great speaker highlights via our Facebook fan page. For those who didn’t, here is my take: Search Marketing, without question, forces us to be as proactive as possible. I had the great opportunity to participate in the first day panel, Search: Where to Next. With all of us ... Continue Reading »
Social Media Gives Shoe Retailer’s Promotion LegsShoe retailer Onlineshoes.com recently launched promotion called Shoestakes designed to entice bloggers to participate through Twitter and their blogs. The prizes are certain to hook a good number of entries. A lucky blogger will win a new pair of shoes every month for a year and Twitter entrants are eligible for weekly $50 gift cards.
Onlineshoes.com is one of many retailers who are engaging fans via social channels to communicate brand messages, get fans talking about their products and produce strong social signals for search. Onlineshoes.com Sr. Manager of Social Media & Ecommerce Jimmy Healey describes their social goals as multi-faceted.
“Our
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Reward your Affiliates!It is not hard to understand that those who are incentivized are those who are likely to perform at a higher level. At the basic level of an affiliate program, if people send you traffic/leads they are paid for their efforts. With that in mind, those who are paid more will likely provide you more traffic/leads.
There are multiple ways to reward your affiliates. This can be done by monetarily rewarding top performers, holding top performing affiliate contests, or rewarding exceptional lead generators with heightened commission rates. Regardless of your method you are most likely to pad your pockets in return
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How Good is Your Football Team…Organically?With NFL Playoffs around the corner many of you know how good your team is on the field, but what about in the search engines. For those of you who lack a love for football you can use your site/brand as an example and see how popular your brand is in the search engines.
Many of us in the search marketing industry gauge our success on specific rankings and referrals that lead to conversions. Often, clients or even yourself may itch to know how popular your brand has become in the search engines or how you fare from a brand perspective
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Google Gifts Local Search Lovers with HotPotWe are 39 days away from Christmas but Google decided to give local search lovers their Christmas present early, in the form of HotPot, a personalized rating and recommendation engine from the search giant.
While this is not the first type of rating/recommendation engine of its kind out there, i.e. Yelp, etc., the recently delivered HotPot is sure to be a big hit for local search enthusiasts out there. Who can argue that it’s a great way to get additional exposure for your brick and mortar location as well as within a web platform providing ratings and reviews? For those who yearn
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Is Google Testing CTR with Internal Pages?Recent SERP changes for top terms have some scratching their heads as usual homepage listings for top campaign terms have been traded for highly relevant internal pages. Over the past week we have noticed that for many clients, usual first page listings for top campaign terms which previously featured the homepage are now displaying internal pages URLs. While this is often what we would prefer as it delivers a more relevant page to the SERPs, thus a better user experience, it still leaves me perplexed at why Google is being so nice. Could this be since Christmas is nearing? It is often ... Continue Reading »
Google Takes Local To The Next Level!For those of you who do not live in a cave and thus use Google everyday, yesterday brought a change to the presentation of search engine results which favor the power of local search.
So, what happened?
The 7-pack has disappeared and in its place stands an integration of local results which better display as organic search results. While this means that someone looking strictly for a local listing may be a little confused at the absence of standard local listings in organic SERPs, they will now be given an enhanced listing which features an organic listing, a local address and the ability to see local reviews as well as
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Assessing Google Search VolumeFor many search marketers, at some point we have watched stable or improved Google rankings drive monthly referral losses. While an experienced SEO understands that this is due to keyword search volume down trends. This isn't always so easy for those unfamiliar with search space to understand. After all, ranking increases mean that referrals should increase, right?
When accessing the performance of your SEO campaign it is often necessary to look further than your analytics program or ranking software. Sometimes, in Google, your jump from 5th to second for your coveted term may bring a referral decrease to your reporting and
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New Keyword Targeting Feature – Google AdWordsMany of us know the different styles of targeting that you can implement with your Google AdWords campaign. The options that you have had so far is: broad, exact, phrase and negative. Let's recap on what these are:
Broad match: Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations.
Example: Red Shoes
Phrase match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase.
Example: "Red Shoes"
Exact match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively.
Example:
Negative match: Ensures your ad doesn't show for any search that includes that
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Google’s Social Search and Its Effect on Internet MarketingFacebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. They’re all huge in the online world. Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site just reached 500 million users. Director David Fincher is set to release a movie this October about Facebook’s conception, history and founder. It even cast Justin Timberlake. But how do these social networking sites impact Internet marketing efforts?
Top social networking sites have changed the online marketing landscape, with a focus on social media optimization(SMO). In the past online search ratings were dependent upon the positioning of a business Web site in the search engine result pages (SERPs), particularly how many links were pointing
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Traffic’s Up…So What!Many SEO practitioners as well as clients of SEO firms like-mindedly dream of watching organic search referrals climb from month-to-month and from a year-over-year perspective for that matter. While any SEO firm can boast the ability to lift organic traffic to a site, the dream of this success is much like that of my fantasy of a red Ferrari…without an engine.
Why you might be scratching your head at my analogy(and they are not always the best), there is quite a lot of validity in this statement considering that organic traffic increases can be much like that shiny car, pretty on
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Posting to Your Google Local ListingFor those of you who came across my column last month, Local Search Convertibility at Search Engine Watch, The overarching theme was that local presence is great but it is what you do to promote and convert at a local level which is even more important. Here is something new from Google to help you out in this arena.
I found a recent change in Google Local Business Center or Google Places as it is now called that is closely related to the message above. There is now the functionality to post short term "tweet"-like posts to your Google local listing.
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Monitoring Your Link-Building ProviderNo time to build links to your site? Hire a link-building provider and then you don’t even have to think about inbound linking. Wrong, bad link-builders will likely set you back further then where you are now in respect to link-building and your trustworthiness with the search engines.
Much like the three-month probationary period you would endure with a new employer, the same is advised for any relationship you would engage in with a link-building provider. Not paying attention to their structure of link accrual, if they are paying for links, what types of topic relevance are associated with your site
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Mobile Search – Time to ActAt this point in time, it has been estimated that one out of three search queries from smart phone users are looking for a business local to them. The advantage for the local business is that the user is nearby and that the searcher is looking to take action pretty quick. This frontier of search is still new, as this medium of search is on the rise.
A couple tips to optimize your experience with mobile search...Ensure that your business listings can be found easily on Google.com and on Google Maps (if you are a local advertiser). Simply creating a Business
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Google Retargeting Feature for Content Advertising in AdWords AnnouncedGoogle just rolled out a new program out to all AdWords users today that will allow advertisers to target ads at "users, based on their past interactions with your website." This new remarketing feature will have great results for advertisers when used properly.
So what exactly does this new retargeting feature do? According to Google:
"Let's say you are an online retailer who sells printers and TVs. You can show TV ads to those people who visited the TV section, and you can cross-sell, up-sell, and promote other relevant products: surround sound systems or DVD players, for example.
Here's
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Using Hootsuite & Twitter to Stay on Top of the Subjects That Mean the MostI’ve been reading a lot of negative things about Twitter lately and every article I read leads me to believe that the author really has not captured the true value of what Twitter brings to the table in regards to its power as a search tool. If set up properly Twitter can not only deliver instant and real time information, but it can drastically change the way you search for that information. Instead of a proactive search method, Twitter can deliver a passive way to collect information on the subjects that mean the most to you. Think of it as
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404’s: A Great Way to Lose Site Traffic!404 errors, dead pages, bad links, whatever you like to call them are a great way to increase your bounce rate, decrease your online revenues and make you look sloppy. This form of conversion suicide can be corrected by monitoring your site well to make sure that you are not contributing to the probability of your site rendering 404 errors or that others on the web are not properly linking to your site.
Not ensuring that all site pages are linked correctly and redirected appropriately is like waving good bye to site visitors. There are a couple reasons why your site
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Search Engine Optimization: Pushing Google to Display Real-Time Web for Any KeywordBack in Dec 09, Google announced the integration of the real-time World Wide Web in their organic search results. Google told us that their goal is to strive to bring us "the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices" we "use to access it." They introduced real-time into the search results like this:
I would equate this move to Google Universal, where they algorithmically add news, images, blog results, music (if it's related to music), and video into the organic search results. Somehow, algorithmically, the Google search engine adds
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Search Engine Optimization: Should You Optimize for the LeapFish Search Engine?I have written about the LeapFish search engine earlier, as you might recall. I am a fan of LeapFish, not only because LeapFish is the fastest search engine, but because I believe LeapFish is one search engine that might really have a chance of making it to the big-time. Further affirming this, LeapFish continues to grow its user base.
LeapFish anticipates that there will be more than 20 million searches in 2010 at their search engine. They have lately reported strong early adopter growth in 2009, and they have reached a 10,000 Alexa rank in one year.
So, if you are optimizing
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