This blog post comes from both a place of concern, and one of frustration. I see agencies and marketers left and right, promising you more page views and promoting “keyword density” and what I call “old-hat backlinking” practices as the primary way that businesses could drive new business — as if that’s all it takes, a bunch of words strung together to trick search engine web crawlers into ranking sites higher.

Aside from the fact that keyword density is not even a thing that the search engine marketing community has acknowledged since 1997, page view analytics are completely unreliable as a conversion factor.

Let me ask you something: if a website is at the top of Google, does that mean you’re going to magically become a customer? No, of course it doesn’t. You want to know why? Because you’re not a cheap whore who will give up your business to the first thing that comes along in a search engine.

You require some finesse, some class, a little bit of wining and dining before you seal the deal with some handsome suitor. You’re not just going to take home the first company that pops up — so why would you expect someone else to?

That basic principle is exactly why page view metrics fail on so many levels. Just because someone has been drawn (or duped) into visiting your site doesn’t mean that they want your services, so if you’re measuring page views as the key metric of your marketing campaign’s success, you’ve got it all wrong.

So, if Not Page Views, Then…

What you measure depends on what constitutes a successful conversion for your business.

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab ran a story on the complicated index of 7 factors that Philly.com, a news outlet, used to monitor reader engagement, measuring values like duration on site, interacting via comments, and sharing with others. Ultimately, the index helped Philly.com determine that they were receiving 13.3% more engaged readers via Facebook than through Google, which is fantastic. And if you’re trying to find that kind of information, then using a metrics equation similar to theirs may be useful to you…

However, the equation didn’t address revenue, and it didn’t provide them with any information that would help them increase conversions or sales. Does that mean it’s a useless metric? Not at all. As Chris Meares, a data analyst with the site, pointed out, the data helps Philly.com to “put traffic data in perspective. If overall traffic is down, but the number of engaged users are up, that still means the site is doing well.”

The metrics you choose to use matter, and before you can start counting up your successes, you need to determine what actually constitutes a success, period. In most cases, that means making money, and getting visitors to perform an action that brings them closer to making a sale with you. As we’ve already established, page views ain’t gonna cut it.

But Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Will

If this is the first time you’ve seen the phrase “key performance indicator,” don’t fret. It’s just a fancy phrase for a metric that helps marketers and business owners better understand the actual performance of web marketing initiatives by measuring them against business goals.

Theoretically, yes, page views could be considered a KPI, if absolutely all you cared about was getting people to your site. However, if you actually want to increase the number of customers your business has and make more money, you should focus on something with a little more punch, such as:

• Conversion rate. Conversions can mean sales, but they can also be other objectives, such as lead generations, form submissions, trial sign-ups, software downloads, and so on and so forth. Average website conversion is hovering around 2%, so keep that in mind when establishing your goal.
• Visitor loyalty. This is the top metric for any non-commerce website, and I use it as my primary measurement of the engagement impact of branded content. To access this data, be sure to filter out new visitors in your analytics dashboard.
• Share of search. If you’re targeting high-competition keywords in your SEO efforts, then hundreds or even thousands of search engine referrals still may not mean very much. As a result, a far more valuable metric than simple page views is what share of the search market your site absorbs. I recommend using a service like Hitwise or Compete.

Remember, however, these aren’t the only KPIs that are out there, and KPI will only be effective if it’s serving a critical success factor (CSF) that supports your overall, organizational objective.

In conclusion, if you take away only one thing from this article, let it be this: page views are a worthless conversion metric. Set specific goals for that your website is intended to perform for your business, take a baseline measurement, and track your data with relevant KPI, adjusting your tactics and re-focusing your approach as needed.

You won’t get that with cheap tricks or $17/1000 follower schemes, but you can do it by making free information about your specialty topic available. This past Saturday, I gained 1,000 followers in less than 12 hours. Wanna know how?

Well, I’ll Tell You: Give Information Away for Free

Recently, as I have mentioned in some previous posts, I presented a seminar at Social Media Day Miami. Social Media Day is the brainchild of Mashable, the noteworthy tech magazine, and events were held all over the world to bring together social media users, marketers, developers, and basically anyone with an interest in the past, present, and future of online connectivity.

My presentation was on neuromarketing, a topic that I’ve become more and more involved with recently. Specifically, I discussed how a few basic principles of neuromarketing can be applied to social media campaigns. I knew the presentation would go well, but I did not expect how well it would go, and to make a short story shorter, I ended up gaining more than 1,000 followers on Twitter, 30+ fresh subscribers to my newsletter, and more than a dozen warm leads on new business. I wanted to assess why this happened, so I dissected my success into 5 main principles that you can walk away with and apply to your own self-promotional activities, whether they be events, lectures, books, or any other content that highlights your expertise and services.

Click here to read the 5 Ways to Gain 1,000 Twitter Followers in One Day at The Market Hacker for FREE.

In the wake of the IPO tsunami and the GM’s cancelled $10M ad budget, Facebook has managed to pull off a groundbreaking success with its Sponsored Stories feature. Just a couple of weeks ago, the social giant told advertisers that it was going to begin offering the ability to exclusively place Sponsored Stories on mobile device streams.

(In fairness, Sponsored Stories have been their own controversial news piece, separate from the bottom line of this article but still worth mentioning.)

Before I can explain why Sponsored Stories are such a success for Facebook, I need to prime you with a little bit of background information. Don’t give me that face, it’ll only take a minute.

Facebook’s Advertising Model and the Importance of Mobile

Facebook is essentially a brilliant advertising model, and works much the same way a magazine would. The pages are filled with juicy content, and the readers (or viewers) leaf through the pages, simultaneously bombarded with paid advertisements. More or less, that’s the way – the only way – that Facebook actually pulls down a profit. The genius of Facebook is that instead of hiring writers or designers to fill that content space, everything is user-generated. Great, right?

Sure, until we start looking at the numbers. The CTR (that’s click-through rate, for those of you who are new here) of a Facebook ad is a little less than half the industry standard for display ads. That little known fact probably featured heavily in GM’s decision to pull the plug on a $10M ad campaign, a move that received more than its fair share of media attention because of its proximity to Facebook’s IPO.

And there’s been another problem: Facebook’s advertisements are displayed on the right sidebar, which isn’t visible on any of the mobile options. I’ve written extensively on the move to mobile, and while I maintain that desktop isn’t going anywhere, the fact of the matter is that consumers feel more confident about making buying decisions and exploring brands and products via their mobile devices.

Alright, so now that we’re all on the same page, let’s talk about these mobile Sponsored Stories a bit.

A New Age of Social, Mobile Advertising
13x as many clicks as a regular FB ad? 11.2x as much money generated? How, everyone is asking, how is this possible? Well, take a look at the format of the model.

Sponsored Stories turn friend activities into promotable content. The beauty of Sponsored Stories is that the advertiser is not creating the message, rather they have to capitalize on an opportunity – specifically, user actions on the site. As the result of Facebook’s newly settled lawsuit on the issue, users can now opt out of being featured in Sponsored Stories.

Sponsored Stories can use the likes, check-ins, or anything shared on Facebook that’s relevant to the brand or advertiser in question. Those stories, when promoted, are still only visible to the friends of fans who are either already fans of the brand or have interacted with it in some way on the platform. Honestly, this is actually pretty clever, and that’s why it’s been such a success.

So, the Sponsored Stories offer 5 different targeting options right now:

• Desktop news feed
• Mobile news feed
• Mobile and desktop news feed
• Desktop news feed and sidebar
• Mobile, desktop, and sidebar

Advertisers now have their choice, and the numbers are starting to show that choosing mobile might be the smarter option. 500 million of Facebook’s 901 million monthly users are mobile, so it’s not hard to see why the absence of a mobile ad format was so noticeable in the few weeks before Facebook’s IPO.

Of roughly 280 million ad impressions across 17 different clients, a handful of the largest API ad providers found that the CTR of desktop and sidebar ads is approximately 0.083% with a CPC (that’s cost-per-click) of $0.88. For just desktop news feed Sponsored Stories, the CPC drops to $0.63 and the CTR jumps to 0.588%. However… (wait for it…)

The CTR of a mobile Sponsored Story is a sexy 1.140%, and at a cost of $0.86 per click – still a hair cheaper per click than running desktop and sidebar ads, but with 13x the amount of bang for your buck. To get the skinny on some more data analysis on this subject, check out the TechCrunch article from earlier this week.

And for all you Like sharks out there? The study also found that the average number of Likes generated per impression was about 183% higher when those impressions were mobile.

The data on the mobile stories ad format’s success comes from studies by TBG Digital, Nanigans, AdParlor, and Spruce Media, some of the large Ads API partners that help advertisers buy ad space on Facebook.

So now that you’ve seen the success, will you be trying mobile Sponsored Stories on Facebook for your brand?

This article originally posted at The Market Hacker.

While it’s not always an easy task, it’s one that we enjoy so much that we wanted to share a bit about what these changes mean and how a company like ours interprets them when we’re hard at work for our valued clients.

Content Marketing in a Brave, New World

A 21st century marketer must be accountable not only to a rapidly diversifying demographic of consumers, but also to the ever-changing technologies that facilitate marketing messages. From an SEO and content perspective, these changes are more important than ever, because they signal an important and invigorating new direction for content marketing strategies.

You probably already know about the massive shifts that have been underway at Google and the ramifications that have been felt across the webscape as a result. Ranging from hints at over-optimization penalties to the Panda updates to new keyword encryptions, the search giant has been in a state of self-evolution, and the ripple effect has spread far and wide to all reaches of the content marketing industry.

We’ll touch bases on some of these shifts in a few short moments, but first, let’s talk about the single most important ingredient in your marketing recipe: your content marketing plan.

“Um… What is a Content Marketing Plan?”

We get this question a lot. Optimized content marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your prospective clientele needs to know and producing search-optimized content that responds to those needs. This content, in order to be successful, should be optimized based on keywords that drive organic search traffic, and it should be shared through social networks that maintain the tone and brand of the overall organization.

Keep in mind, it’s easy to make content that produces traffic. Just take a look at YouTube and you’ll find thousands, if not millions, of videos of cats doing cat-like things. That content drives billions of visits, but that content probably wouldn’t be useful for your business – unless you happen to own a pet accessory store, in which case, you need a YouTube channel immediately.

What’s more difficult is creating content that is not only shareable and “likable” but that also brings visitors who are seeking, whether actively or passively, the services that you provide.

What constitutes content? It’s essentially limitless, but the usual suspects include:

• Website content
• Blogs
• Newsletters
• Press releases
• Case studies
• How-to guides
• Current events
• White papers
• E-books
• Social networking updates
• Videos
• Infographics

You get the point.

It’s not enough to create these products and send them out into the ether – Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told a packed crowd at the LeWeb 2011 conference that social signals are a crucial ranking factor, so your content has to be accessible, high-quality, and well-positioned for not only maximum visibility, but maximum sharing.

Okay, so let’s get back to those SEO shifts that we were talking about earlier, because you’ve probably realized by now that SEO, social networking, and content are tightly integrated with one another.

First, SEO’s performativity and metrics are changing, and that’s a good thing.

Measuring traffic and page rankings is no longer the only, or even the most effective, way to gauge SEO and content marketing success. Advances in ROI analytics and a plurality of dashboard providers have upped the ante. Google has expanded its keyword cache from 30 to 90 days for webmasters, SEOmoz and Majestic have made it easier than ever to track keywords and assess competition, and social signals have finally become dissected into their relevant parts and integrated into metrics and objectives.

So, basically…? SEO is changing, and that’s great news. The trajectory is arcing the way the search engine community has been dreaming it would for the past 10 years. It’s a new day, and it’s sunny outside.

Second, and more importantly, SEO is inherently built-in to good marketing principles, and that is not going to change.

SEO is more vibrant than it ever has been before. Organic search represents a multi-billion dollar industry, and too much would have to happen in order to diminish the significance of SEO.

Just take a moment to think about how we look for things. We describe them. When we walk into a book store or ask a grocer for help in the aisles, we either use the name of what we’re looking for, or we use strong and clear descriptors that verbally illustrate our intent. SEO makes that possible in the digital realm, so until the technological equivalent of telepathy comes along, SEO will continue to play the most crucial role in being found because, as was mentioned in point #1, SEO is changing – and that’s fantastic.

Web presence optimization incorporates a number of different strategies, but instead of pitting those strategies against one another, it’s more useful to think of web presence optimization as a hierarchy of processes that each fulfill and augment certain aspects.

This illustrative breakdown from our good friends over at Search Engine Watchcaptures the essence of this optimization hierarchy:

The placement of each of these steps is as important as their weight. Good SEO must be done from the bottom-up, and even though “technical SEO fundamentals and foundation” may only comprise 10% of your efforts, if it’s not done first and not done adequately, it will hamstring the rest of your efforts and confound search engine variables.

The largest component of an effective strategy is the organic content marketing campaign. This plan should represent 55% of your efforts. This goes so far beyond blogging – your marketing plan is your customized blueprint to web presence in all of its forms, including press releases, ebooks, newsletters, videos, social shares, leveraging Google+, and so on.

So, listen: don’t get caught up in the panic about “what Google’s changing this month” – there will be algorithm changes every month, and every week, and maybe even every day, far into the foreseeable future. If you sweat the details, you’ll drive yourself into a panic. However, by putting your marketing efforts into perspective, you can adjust your strategy so that your efforts are reflected in your results.

Originally published at Searchcore and re-posted by the author with full permission.

Branding isn’t a recent phenomenon, and despite pop culture hype, it also pre-dates the Golden Age of advertising a la Mad Men (circa 1960s). The Michelin tire company was one of the first to leverage branded content in 1900, when it released a restaurant and hotel guide for travelers. Nearly 50 years later, Pan American Airlines unveiled the world’s first in-flight magazine.

But this was a different age. Although the principles of sound marketing and good business haven’t changed much (at their core), we live in a digital world where branding is no longer static. On a stage that is more populated by consumers than brand managers, brands are dynamic, palpable, and accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

This puts most brand touchpoints outside the silo they once existed in. As information is more readily available, more pressure is placed on advertisers and marketers to produce creative means of conveying a consumption-based message without “interrupting” the experience of the intended consumer.

To bring this history lesson full-circle, this is accomplished most successfully byproviding quality, branded content through multiple channels.

Social media and the age of sharing have changed the game. The modern day consumer is engaged; she has open lines of communication on all sides, talks with friends in Wisconsin, shares with co-workers, and engages multinational brands at the same time.

Brands can make the most of these opportunities to seamlessly become part of a consumer’s natural conversation by abiding by some simple, but key principles.

First, listen. The digital age provides unparalleled opportunity for marketing research. Before a brand even creates content, the decision makers need to have a fixed understanding of what people are discussing in the related markets, where they’re talking about those topics, and what factors can influence those consumers.

Second, target. You might hit some clay pigeons with a shotgun spray, but only precise and targeted shots will bring in the big game. It’s not enough to target consumers any more, however; brands need to focus on appealing to influencers. With the advent of digital influence measurement tools such as PeerIndex and Klout, this is a simple task.

Las Vegas hotels have been known to quietly check the Klout score of guests and offer free upgrades or amenities to those with a powerful score; those pleasantly surprised guests, in turn, share their positive experiences with their networks, over whom they wield powerful influence, and the hotels reap the rewards of the positive brand advocacy. Whether it’s reaching out to influential bloggers or giving perks to influential consumers, make sure you’re talking to an audience that will talk about you.

Third, understand the importance of tone. It’s no longer enough to be “clear” in your communications. Clarity isn’t what will make you stand out from the competition. In our new age, we’re inundated with messages, content, and distractions. We experience information overload on almost every topic.

However, we have become more refined at parsing through these messages and uncovering those that provide us with the most utility and that come through the noise of our chit-chatty landscape. To connect with your target audience and influencers, your content must clearly convey the essence of your brand, and it must demonstrate the fulfilling of a need.

So, conduct this short exercise: pick out a piece of content before you post it, read it over thoroughly, and ask yourself if it fulfills a need that your target audience has. Does it provide them with entertainment? Valuable information? The opportunity to win an all expenses paid trip for 2 to Cancun? Whatever your value-added proposition is, make it clear that your content is solving a problem for the consumer, even if that problem is boredom.

Originally published at Searchcore and re-posted by the author with full permission.

Some key findings this year included:

• 99% of respondents had used at least one form of content marketing
• Social content, e-newsletters, and blogging drive the best results
• 70% of marketers plan to outsource one form of content in the next 12 months
• The most important attributes in outsourced content, or content of any kind, areengaging and creative storytelling, customized content, and professional-level writing.

The Most Common Forms of Content Marketing

Surprisingly, the results showed that marketers consider words more powerful than images, and social content (90%), blogs (75%), press releases (73%) and online articles (73%) were all rated as being more popular than video (71%).

Whitepapers and eBooks, infographics and images all ranked in the middle, and mobile content and advertorials, both in their infancy, have only caught on with about a quarter of those marketers surveyed.

Content Marketing: What Works?

Based on the responses of those surveyed, it was determined that social content had the highest lead and revenue generation, beating out newsletters by 15%. Content dominates the top 4 results drivers in social (53%), newsletters (38%), blogging (37%), and online articles (31%).

Once again, whitepapers, ebooks, infographics and images all hovered in the middle and near the bottom, and mobile content and advertorials generated the least payoff for those who attempted them.

But identifying what is currently working only provides a snapshot, and as we well know, the internet marketing terrain is constantly in a state of evolution, which probably explains why, despite their poor performance currently, many plan to outsource for video (32%), images, and infographics (22%) in the next 12 months.

Conversely, only 9% plan to outsource their newsletters in the next 12 months, which leads us to conclude that some, if not many, are already handling their newsletters themselves with an internal staffer. Online articles, ebooks, blogs, social content, and press releases float in the middle, with more planning to outsource in the next 12 months than did in the previous 12 months.

What Do People Expect from Outsourced Content Marketing?

Across the board, quality writing is the most important asset a content or copy writer can bring to the table. The top 3 content qualities, according to those marketers surveyed are:

• Professional-level content (49%)
• Engaging, creative story-telling (44%)
• Custom, original content (38%)
  

Marketers place the highest value on content that is written for people, rather than that which is written for search engines, but this doesn’t diminish the importance of SEO optimization. More than one-third of surveyed marketers prefer a balance of equal parts engaging and optimized.

Survey conducted by:

At the panel, titled “Dear Google & Bing: Help me Rank Better,” Cutts broke tradition with his pre-announcement and said, “The idea is to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all the people who have been over-doing SEO, compared to people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to address that.”

Okay – but what exactly does that mean?

Cutts went on to address the increasing adaptability of the Google Bot, and mentioning that there is a place in relevant search results for those who don’t do SEO, and that there should similarly be a way to address those who abuse SEO. Although he didn’t use the word “penalty,” it’s clear that was what he was talking about.

This announcement ruffled the feathers of the SEO community, most of whom not only remember, but held sacrosanct, a 2009 YouTube video by Cutts win which he outright said there was no such thing as an over optimization penalty. It seems that in the last few years, either the need for such a penalty has grown, or Cutts and the Google team have changed their minds.
Neither is surprising, nor is the “why” of this rollout the point. Instead, we will address 4 “whats” today.

• What are the penalties for over-optimization?
• What qualifies as over-optimization or over-SEO?
• What can I do if I’ve been penalized?
• What does this mean for the future of search marketing?

Let’s begin.

What Are the Penalties for Over-Optimization?

As we all know, Google rarely does anything at half-measure. Traditionally, sites that violated filter algorithms like Panda took a hit in rankings, but the penalty for over-optimization is de-indexing.

That’s right – if you’re penalized, you are removed from the Google index and the bots stop crawling your site, which means that you are invisible to the search engine.

What Qualifies as Over-Optimization?

Over-optimized websites, contrary to a mildly popular belief, are rarely the result of a professional SEO consultant or firm’s doing. Typically, webmasters who understand only a shadow of the basic principles of SEO are responsible for the black-hat tactics that provoke the ire of searchers, honest sites – and now, Google.

There are over 200 signals that comprise the database of potential abuses, and the Google Bot assesses confluences of these factors to identify sites that are over-optimizing. Be on the safe side: don’t do any of them. Here are some of the strongest signals:

• Excessive keyword density – typically, anything more than 2-3% is too much. If your site crunches 3 to 4 keywords into its title, heading, meta description, and body content with 7% density, don’t be surprised when Google slaps you with a penalty.
• Inorganic or paid inbound links – you know you shouldn’t be doing this anyway.
• Strictly keyword-rich internal links – are you only linking to your internal sites with keywords? That’s another no-no.
• Listing keywords on the site – it makes me physically ill when I see a list of conspicuous keywords, usually all tagged with internal links, at the bottom of a page. This is sometimes done when a site is attempting to appeal to a broad base and stuffs internally-linked keywords anywhere in the body of the site to artificially boost rankings.
• Ugly site design – sites that rely on SEO manipulation rarely put in the effort or resources to create an aesthetically appealing, user-friendly site design.
• Weak content – if your site is re-hashing material from other websites and offers uninspiring content with a low value, you’re exposing yourself to a penalty.
• Few or zero value propositions – a value proposition is something that provides value to the searcher. Not only are these important to conversion, but the lack of one will make your site suspect. What are you offering your reader? An e-book? A white paper? A free consultation? Make it count. You brought them to your site for a reason, didn’t you?
• Domain name is keyword – did you buy kidsafegardensupplies.com for its SEO benefit? You might have wasted your cash. While this won’t trigger an automatic penalty, it is on the over-optimization checklist.
• All “home” link anchors in the site navigation use the keyword – this was long thought to be clever, but now it’s written off as a cheap trick.
• Excessive back-linking – if all of your back-links have the same anchor text and all point to your main URL, you’re in the danger zone. Please note, however, that organic back-links with unique anchor texts that lead to specific landing pages, articles, or blog posts are very healthy for your ranking.
• Back-linking to untrustworthy sites – if you’re linking to a low quality site, you may be exposing yourself to a penalty.
• Duplicate content – content duplication is when you use the same text over and over again on your website, changing only the keywords and links.
• Automatic page re-directs – anything other than a permanent 301 redirect won’t be supported by Google, and could signal that you’re trying to dupe searchers.
• Doorway pages – doorway pages are those that offer no navigation options to the browser, and instead only display affiliate links or advertisements so that the browser either “bounces” (exits) or clicks on an ad to leave the page.
• Excessive H1 tags – all together now: H1 is for the top heading; H2 and H3 for the rest. You should only have one H1 heading per article or page.

To find out if your site has been penalized by Google, you should compare the number of previously indexed URL’s from your site with the most current figures.

To do so, use the command site:yourdomain.com in Google’s search bar. If you don’t see any results, try link:yourdoman.com. If you still get nothing, then there’s a high probability that Google has targeted your site for over-optimization and has assessed a penalty.

What Can I Do if I’ve Been Penalized?

If your site has been penalized by Google for over-optimization, go through the above checklist and make the required changes to your site. Once finished, you can request that Google reconsider your site for inclusion in its index, and by then, you’ll hopefully have learned your lesson: write naturally, using SEO as an augmentation or as a guide, rather than dogmatically keyword stuffing. This isn’t 1999. The rules have changed.

Without addressing all of the strikes against you and making a formal request, there’s nothing you can do – other than hope that all of your intended customers use either Bing or Blekko.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Search Marketing?

As previously mentioned, the vast majority of these no-no’s are perpetrated by black hat SEO’s or amateurs, so above all else, do not panic.

SEO isn’t going anywhere, nor is its close cousin, content marketing. At this point, based on the infrastructure of how information is catalogued and shared on the internet, that would be impossible. Until Google switches entirely to natural language search interfacing, which it has all but sworn to never do, or until search engines learn to read people’s minds, we are dealing with a keyword-based information hierarchy.

What this does mean, however, is that it’s now more important than ever to hire an SEO and content marketing firm that not only understands the intricacies of SEO content and how it interacts with the rest of a marketing campaign, but can also fix potential violations you or others have made on your site in the past.

While SEO used to exist as an island in the sea of internet marketing, the tides have changed and we now find that SEO, like so many other aspects of digital advertising, is a peninsula of a Pangaea-like continent.

Or, to use a different metaphor, SEO is only one of many different working parts that keep the machine working. To do it properly is to reap the rewards – of two sites with comparable quality and content, the one that has been properly and legitimately optimized will receive a significantly better ranking.

This article originally published at Searchcore and re-posted with permission.

Google+ claims 170 million users, including those who share via Gmail, YouTube, Search, and other places on the Google network, discounting the idea that Google+ needs to be a destination in order to be successful as a social network. Still, the design changes indicate that Google is thinking seriously about people using the service on-band.

New Features of Google+

In addition to a new menu, the conspicuous addition of a “cover photo” on profiles, Google has added a stylish drag and drop functionality to make user actions both more intuitive and more aesthetically engaging.

There’s also a new, dedicated page for Google+ Hangouts, streamlining the rest of the interface and highlighting the free service, which has been one of the network’s stronger selling points.

You can hover over different points on the interface to reveal certain elements, and customize your dashboard by dropping icons you don’t care to see in the “More” folder.

The news stream has been revamped with full bleed images and a few design tweaks. There is now a dedicated Chat sidebar on the right hand side, and the “Explore” section – not dissimilar from Twitter’s “Discover” – is connected to the Trends visible from the Home page.

Unlike Facebook, whose changes inspire a polarized barrage of adoration by the few and ire by the rest, Google+’s design and functionality have generally received only praise. Meticulously designed, there has never been a question that Google+ was good at what it was developed to do.

The question has been instead, “Do users want to do what Google+ enables?”

That remains to be seen, but the design and usability changes are pushing user towards the seats.

Will Google+ Eclipse Facebook?

Google+’s new look will facilitate discovery and engagement, and there is at least one feature that puts Facebook to shame: the obvious and complete lack of ads. Google+ has regularly been described as a social layer that connects Google’s products as the Web becomes more social-centric, as opposed to the data-centric days in which Google was born.

As one of many products, Google+ doesn’t have to run extensive advertisements or utilize paid incentives with its regular userbase. Facebook, on the other hand, is the only product that Facebook offers, so advertising revenue is their broadest income channel.

In the meanwhile, Facebook and Google are not direct competitors, but Facebook’s impending IPO and its recent Instagram acquisition indicate that it has ambitions of providing more extensive Web services. As far as social networks are concerned, Facebook is clearly outpacing Google. However, Google has the resources to make every step count, and has relied on precision and testing to their benefit – much opposed to Facebook’s “move fast and break things” mentality.

Ideological differences aside, Google+ has delivered another interesting product for users and we suspect that, although they will continue to count any Google service usage as a Google+ visit, these design changes will bring more users to Google+’s dashboard to interact with others.

This article was originally published at We Do Web Content by Alex Wall and is re-posted with permission.

That’s right – as per usual, Google has released the sum total of changes made to the algorithm in the previous month.

Google’s official Inside Search blog unveiled the 50 tweaks, nudges, and adjustments made in March. Some of the most important changes for SEO include:

Indexing symbols (codename “Deep Maroon”) – in the past, Google has ignored punctuation symbols, but has now decided to begin indexing those with the highest frequency of use: “%”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, and “+”.

This change may be problematic for content managers and SEOs who break up long-tail keywords by using periods, commas, and other symbols. For instance, if you were trying to get a page to rank for “South Shore cleaning services discount” (for whatever reason) then you might have a sentence that runs “… our South Shore cleaning services. A discount may be available…”

Traditionally, Google has overlooked certain stop words and punctuation symbols to make this kind of flexibility possible, but if punctuation is now being indexed, then it’s not long until it starts affecting the algorithm.

Better scoring of news groups (codename “avenger_2”) – news results on Google are clustered into groups about the same story, and a slight change to the scoring system will lead to more effective news clusters.

Although this won’t change very much for SEOs or content managers, it’s an important reminder that tactics like newsjacking are not always effective – if you’re writing about the same topics as everyone else, it’s more likely than not that your content will be clustered in the News results, and therefore unseen.

High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements (codename “Panda”) – you’re probably already familiar with Panda, and no matter how long it’s been out of the news, it certainly hasn’t gone away. No, it’s been there all along, in the background, working away.

This month, algorithm data that had been processed offline was cycled into the database. Google gave this change away earlier this month on Twitter, but, as usual, failed to give any indication as to what kind of changes the data might have held. Watch your analytics for any bumps or dips.

Another change relevant to Panda (codename “Curlup”) is meant to improve the system that Google uses to rate the quality of sites, an important factor in a post-Panda world. Very little is released by Google about the qualities taken into consideration by the Panda change, but overall site quality is far and away one of the most dominant factors.

More relevant image results (codename “Lice”) – you might be wondering how an image search is relevant to an SEO, and if you are, you could also be missing out on the boon of image integration and alt-tagging. Since Google segregates image search from general search, you will now be able to find relevant, high quality images, even if they are on low quality pages. If you don’t use alt-tagging to differentiate your images, we recommend doing so immediately so that you can leverage this algorithm optimization.

Changes to how anchor text is handled (codename “PC”) – a classifier related to anchor text has been turned off; mum’s the word on this one from Google, but they claim their data suggests that anchoring text was more robust without this particular classifier.

It was also announced that the anchor text interpretation systems have been improved, which will augment how an anchor might be relevant for the query that led to the website. What this essentially means is that you should ensure that any anchoring you’re doing on-page should be reflective of the keywords and topics you’re trying to rank for.

Improvement of searches with navigational and local intent (codename “ShieldsUp”) – this change balances results for search queries that have local intent and an obvious navigational intent, such as “New York Times” “Florida accident.” Instead of weighing one more heavily than the other, search results will include highly relevant results from both categorizations.

Freshness rollout (codename “Freshness”) – when this improvement was released last year, the resources were significant enough that Google opted for a soft-rollout, affecting only news-related queries and traffic. This month, that freshness update has been applied to all queries. As has always been the case, this means your websites should be updated regularly, if not daily, to maximize freshness and leverage this and other changes that prioritize recency.

“Freshness” also includes some changes to how old pages are detected. Now, stale pages will be detected more quickly by the index, and as you can imagine, this means fewer stale results will be shown to users. Does your homepage look the same as it did last month? What about your contact page? Your product’s landing page? Change them.

This is only a sampling of the changes that were released and unveiled in March, but you can read the entire list of changes at Google’s Inside Search blog.

Although not all of these changes are released on the very morning of the last day or first day of the month, it’s not a bad idea to take a monthly baseline of your analytics so that you can keep a general sense of how the changes are affecting your traffic and performance.

This article was originally published at Searchcore and has been re-posted with permission.

SEOs sometimes become so focused on crunching data and playing the algorithm to facilitate strong organic traffic that they often overlook the entire reason you need traffic to your site in the first place – to convert readers into leads, and to convert leads into clients.

So, what can you do, if you can do anything? Is there a secret sauce to help you increase your copy’s conversion? Actually, yes.

By extracting a few principles from the study of neuromarketing, you can have better performing copy right now.

Neuromarketing is by no means a perfect science, and the majority of conclusions reached about its effects have come from research funded by the private industry, as opposed to academia. In order for research to truly take hold in the medical field, it must be peer-reviewed, and the pool of research on neuromarketing that has been peer-reviewed is quite small.

Most of the private industries that fund these studies refuse to publish all of their results, and we can assume that’s either because they’re uncertain of their conclusions or because they don’t want other brands to dip into their new secret sauce recipe.

Whatever the reason for this lack of literature, the problem itself will likely resolve in the next few years as the field matures, but all the same, big firms are investing in neuromarketing agencies; case in point, Nielson Holdings partnered up withNeuroFocus last year.

In the meanwhile, we can use what we are sure of to amp up your copy and boost your conversion rate. 95% of an individual’s decision making is subconscious, which means that there’s only so much you can say to directly influence a person to make a purchase. The rest is, as they say, beneath the surface.

First, once someone has navigated to your page, you need to get them to read your content. Eyetracking studies have taught us a lot about how visitors absorb content To get a visitor to read your content, you only need to get them to read the first few sentences, and the best way to coax them into that is to make the first few sentences a shorter line length than the rest of the article. The most effective means of doing that is to add a half-width image below your headline. You’ll snag your reader and you’re providing some visual stimulus at the same time.

Second, tell, don’t sell. Use stories instead of directives to engage your reader. While calls-to-action are necessarily direct, you will find that by creating a narrative context around your reader’s commercial intent (i.e. their willingness to buy), you will enhance the reader’s emotional connection and receptivity. My fondest example of this is theWall Street Journal piece of direct mail that generated over $2 billion in revenue alone.

It tells the story of two young men who both graduated from the same college, were both friendly, ambitious, married, had children, and worked for the same Midwestern manufacturing company.

The letter continues:

But there was a difference. One of the men was the manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president. 

What Made the Difference 

Have you ever wondered, as I have, what makes this kind of difference in people’s lives? 

The answer, the letter goes on to explain, is (of course) The Wall Street Journal.

The story was not overly-detailed or flowery, nor did it use excessive descriptors to create the scene. The image is easy to grasp and conceptualize.

Third, remember the reptilian brain. It sounds gross, but the “reptilian brain” is a reference to the oldest part of our brain, where our survival instincts are housed. It plays a dominant role in our subconscious decisions, and recall that 95% of a human decision is determined by the subconscious.

The reptilian brain is egocentric, and you can leverage this by relating the issues discussed in your content or copy directly to the reader. How does your suggestion, your content, your product, or your service help the reader? Will it help them to survive, reproduce, solve a problem?

Another question that isn’t asked enough: will it make them laugh? Research shows that smiling has an impact on memory recall, so if you can make your reader smile or laugh with your copy, you’re embedding your brand in that reader’s subconscious preferences.

Fourth, put your reader in the story you’re telling. Social personalization has provided creative and memorable opportunities to embed readers. If you can get your reader to see themselves participating in your service, consuming your product, or engaging your brand, they become more receptive to those actions because they’ve already gone through all of the psychological motions.

This is due to the principle of mirror neurons – when we witness someone else perform an action, our brain goes through the same processes it would as if we were performing it ourselves. All of the same areas of your brain will light up when you watch someone else do something. Through regular exposure, you can facilitate certain connections. Since the dawn of time, advertisers have shown people consuming products and appearing happy.

The other principle at work is known as the doppelganger effect. When we seeourselves perform an action, we are developing a subconscious brand preference. The TV shows Dexter and True Blood have both leveraged the doppelganger effect to their advantage through social advertisements and customizable videos.

Last summer, HBO and Definition 6 partnered together and released a video application on Facebook that would pull data from the user and some of his or her Facebook friends to render a personalized video in which characters in the show were shown communicating with and discussing people you know. This experience made fans a part of the show, and the same was true for the “Hit List” video released on behalf of Dexter, which pulled friend information and assembled the data into a news video discussing the people revealed to be on a serial murderer’s hit list from the show.

However, you don’t have use viral videos or social personalization to put your reader in the story. You can craft your copy to provide vivid, life-like contexts crafted around your intended demographic to achieve comparable success.

But what about social? We’re going to discuss neuromarketing principles in a social media context further down the road, so make sure that you subscribe to our site’s RSS feed or bookmark our blog, but in the meanwhile, keep these 2 things about social media engagement in mind:

• People go to Facebook to find out 2 things: does someone want to be my friend, and can I express myself?
• They post on Facebook to do 2 things: to get others to appreciate them, or support them. 

Gamification and paid advertisement spots aside, these underlying psychological factors provide a wealth of data on how to increase user engagement.

What other tactics have you used to increase the conversion of your website’s content? Share them with us in the comments below.

This article was originally published at Searchcore and has been re-posted with permission.

Google Analytics Hacks (Photo credit: Search Engine People Blog)

Last week, Google posted an update on the company’s referrer service to the Webmaster Central Blog. While announcements like this may pass under the radar of a media more engrossed in frenzied topics like Google’s recent backlash over its new privacy policy, if your business employs any degree of SEO to leverage organic traffic and conversions on your website, you need to be paying attention.

What Google Says They’re Doing with the Referrer Data

Google announced that they will be using the “referrer” meta tag to simplify the referring URL information that is automatically passed from the visitor’s browser when the visitor reaches a page organically.

First, you need to understand the lowdown on what “referrer” data really is and what’s been happening with it the last 6 months. A referrer tells a site where someone came from when they got there. This information is aggregated in web analytics and provides juicy data for SEOs to use when strategizing search marketing campaigns.

Now, Google claims that doing so will result in a “faster” and “more streamlined experience for the user.” While the faster part is likely debatable and will probably only work for compatible lightweight browsers (like Google’s own Chrome), there is a tradeoff. Before we look at that, let’s take a little stroll down memory lane to catch up on the last 6 months of search referral analytics, shall we?

Google’s Controversial SSL Referral Encryption

In October 2011, Google started blocking some of this valuable data by making it so that all logged-in users were forced to go through SSL search and that none of the referrer data would be captured by analytics. (SSL, by the way, is secure socket layer, and the difference between http:// and https://.)

As you can imagine, this was a huge loss to the SEO community. In fact, we wrote about it and how the phenomenon of Google+ would lead more users to be logged in, creating a massive data leak, although Google was claiming “single digit losses” at the time.

That turned out to be a laughable understatement, and some sites have reported 20%, 30%, and even 50% referrer data loss as a result of the switch. Paid advertisers continued to receive that data, however, a blow to integrity for Google, who claimed the switch was the sake of privacy. Sure, it was for the sake of privacy unless there was a chance that they could sell that data for money. Okay.

Two weeks ago at SXSW, Vic Gundotra, SVP of Google’s Social Product Division, dodged a question about the SSL data encryption, saying it was a glitch and it was being fixed. This answer didn’t seem to satisfy the crowd, and had the members of the audience been aware of the direction Google was going with the “fix,” they might have become flat-out rabid.

How the New Google Change Completely #$%@s Up Your Analytics, Again

That brings us up to speed. The new “simplification” of referrer information, instead of giving something back to the data crushers, takes even more away. How, you might be asking, is that even possible? It all comes down to how the simplified referrer process works.

Let’s say that you do a search for “designer shoes” and click on a top organic listing. I clicked on Zappos.com, the third result on the SERP. But when I click on that link, it doesn’t take me straight to zappos.com/designer, which is what the link is connecting to.
Instead, I’m segued through this URL:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=designer%20shoes&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CJYBEBYwAg& url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zappos.com%2Fdesigner&ei=fCBqT9nTDOPL0QHYsPSNCQ& usg=AFQjCNF2oUF1YbMzW_9dO9IdkPrcoZg6Rw

This redirect allows Google to grab up all of the data on how I found this site. You can see that the query I used (bolded) is denoted by a q= at the beginning, as that query is ultimately what led me to find the page. Analytics systems use that data to aggregate information on which search terms are leading visitors to your site.

However, if you’re logged in when you do this, the designer%20shoes part is gone, and there’s no query data available at all. That information is stripped out by Google unless you’re a paying advertiser, but at the very least, your Google Analytics or similar analytics dashboard can tell that a search actually happened.

No more. The simplified referrer data will instead take out everything except the following:

http://google.com

This means it’s impossible to tell whether a visitor arrived at your site via an organic search, or simply a link that was posted on Google – anywhere on Google.

Currently, Google Analytics separates Search and Referral traffic, but come April, it won’t even be able to tell the difference.

But Will it Enhance the User Experience?

Our verdict: no. The simplified referral process does not eliminate the redirection; the only change is that a shorter URL is passed on by the browser. Short URLs might be a hot commodity on Twitter, where space is limited, but we’re skeptical that a handful of characters is going to make or break a website’s clock speed.

Overall, it’s not time to panic… yet. Continue to watch your analytics, and keep track of your partition between Search and Referral traffic. Take advantage of the Python script that allows you to download the last 30 days of search query data. We will keep you posted on future developments.

An important caveat: This change will only affect users who are using Google’s SSL-search (https://google.com, which is automatic for all logged-in users) running “modern browsers such as Chrome” – which means that for now, this is guaranteed to happen on Chrome, and will probably start affecting other browsers as future updates are rolled out.

This article was originally published at Searchcore and is re-posted with permission.

Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs, posted the documents in the format in which he received them.

The Facebook documents claim that the new premium ads will originate from Facebook Pages and will replace the current, classic premium ad format.

Facebook claims that posting on your page will allow you to reach out to your own fans, and that by making 1 post per day “into” your Ad will allow you to reach 3x to 5x as many fans. Facebook claims that “expanded” Premium Ads with a 20x-30x frequency will be able to reach friends and fans of target audiences.

This is yet another evolution that is indicative of the trend of social advertising, or advertising exclusively or primarily through network connections, a trend we’ve seen reinforced by Google’s recent “Search Plus Your World.”

The new Premium Ads boast improved performance and offer these statistics as proof:

• 40% increase in engagement
• 80% more likely to be remembered
• 16% increase in Fan Rate
• “significant” increases in purchase intent

Facebook is phasing out the Classic Premium Ad formats – premium like, premium event, video comment, and premium poll – starting on the same day as the rollout of the new ads, February 29. However, premium standard advertisements that link to destinations off Facebook will still be available, and marketplace ads will still be available. Only advertisements originating from Pages or Page content will be affected by the switch.

The new Premium Ads will work like this:

• First, make a post on your Page – video, status update, photo, link, question, or event.
• Second, promote it as an Ad. Anything you can post on your Page, you can turn into an Ad, and you can use the same targeting options you’ve become used to.
• Third, whenever a fan has friends who are also fans of your page, the Ad will be enhanced with social context. For instance, if you and I are both fans of Coca-Cola, when you see the Ad, you’ll also see that I’m a fan of Coca-Cola. That’s what’s known as social context.
• Fourth, when fans see the Ad, they’ll see an interface below that lets them like or comment directly on it.

And voila! Facebook’s reporting metrics won’t change, so you can still rely on getting all of that delicious data you’ve become so used to. Facebook also insists that you will continue to be able to reach non-fans with the upgraded advertisement format. “Ads and featured stories from Page posts allow you to reach anyone, just like with any ad,” claims one of the documents.

It’s also been recommended that if you want to continue using Like Ads to acquire fans that you transition to Marketplace Like Ads as an efficient alternative, although Photo Posts (one of the new formats) are more effective at driving fan acquisition, according to internal testing.

We’re excited to see changes in the current Facebook advertising format, which has approached MySpace-esque spam levels in the past year or so, but we’re skeptical to see if the “internally tested” numbers pan out once they hit the market. What are your thoughts?

You can read the full Facebook Premium Ads guide here.

This article originally posted at We Do Web Content and re-posted with permission.

The Efficient Frontier (EFF) in conjunction with Macquarie Capital released a report in late 2011 that predicted mobile paid search spending could total as much as 22% of 2012’s overall search revenues in 2012 (although a less aggressive projection put that marker at 16%). If we follow the numbers, then that means that mobile search could be shaping up to account for anywhere between $2.7 and $3.7 billion dollars in 2012.

That’s a tremendous growth projection for a sector that only accounted for a little more than 1.5% in early 2010.

Making Your Site Mobile

Companies have been scrambling to try to leverage maximum value from this transition, producing a new submarket known as mobile optimization. One tactic of mobile optimization addresses what to do when a mobile user visits your site on his or her device. Since the inception of the Internet, websites have been made for one thing – computers. Whether desktop or laptop, the Web has been oriented around the idea that your site will be displayed on a computer monitor of some variety, but the injection of mobile devices into the consumer market has shifted that long-standing paradigm.

There’s some controversy surrounding the argument for separate mobile sites; although it appeals to mobile users when they’re using their devices, it creates an entirely separate site on your server and dilutes your SEO authority. Think about it – an entirely new body of programming, content, links, and SEO that has to be managed and maintained. Not fun.

On the other hand, responsive web design identifies the type of device you’re using when you visit a site and adapts, providing the user with an on-screen optimized display. This means that businesses only have to worry about one website, and it means that SEOs and webmasters have all of their analytics in one, centralized place, allowing them to segment their marketing data according to the channel delineations they prescribe.

The Quandary of Siri

The advent of the iPhone 4S and Siri has single-handedly changed the mobile search game. The personal assistant feature of Apple’s most recent smartphone evolution and relies heavily on a few databases from which it pulls information to respond to user queries. For instance, since its release in October of 2011, Siri has accounted for 25% of all searches performed on Wolfram Alpha, a powerful search engine that does for mathematical and scientific calculations what Wikipedia does for topics of general interest.

Of somewhat greater interest to business owners and marketers is the fact that Siri partnered with Yelp to mine for its local business data, placing increased emphasis on the importance of Yelp business profiles and compelling some businesses to upgrade to a premium business listing, an amenity that costs a cool $300 a month. If you can afford it, it’s well worth it – the listing gives you primo real estate on mobile searches in your industry and some business owners claim their business volume has more than doubled since October.

Siri also introduces a new challenge for marketers – people speak differently than they query. We ran an article on the difference between how we speak and how we search in late 2011 that addressed the question of natural language search. Put briefly, although the technology has long been in development, it re-centers the emphasis of search engine algorithms on grammar rather than on the data. However, with the influx of spoken queries, longtime holdouts on natural language search like Google may be forced to adjust their position or face being left behind by Apple in the race for digital dominance.

Mobile Search Users are Consumers Waiting to Happen

Finally, mobile search opens up a boulevard to consumers that businesses and marketers just cannot afford to ignore. If we had to choose just one element of mobile search that differentiated it from desktop search, it would be that mobile search is actionable.

Andy Chu, director of Bing for mobile, recently claimed that identified that over 50% of mobile queries have local intent, which means that when a mobile user queries something on his or her smartphone, there is an intention to do something with that information. In 2011, 33% of the searches for “flowers” on Mother’s Day were from mobile devices; those are actionable searches.

Google released some more statistics pertaining to actionable searches:

• 15% of mobile searches are for consumer electronics,
• more than 29% of searches are for restaurants, and
• more than 16% of searches are related to cars and automobiles.

This makes sense; we might research a restaurant in depth from our desktop computers at home or at the office if we’re planning a special date, but when we’re on the go and in need of organic Mexican cuisine or an auto mechanic who’ll give it to you straight, we turn to our devices.

Google’s product manager for mobile search ads, Surojit Chatterjee, told TechCrunch that mobile search volume more than doubled from 2010 to 2011, giving credence to the mobile ad surge. A new product unveiled called click-to-call allows users to click on a phone number from their mobile search engine results page and be connected directly to the advertisers; this technique has already been leveraged by over half a million advertisers and, on average, Google alone connects over 10 million calls between mobile users and businesses.

The conclusions are obvious: mobile search is a marketing channel that businesses cannot afford to ignore. Making your business visible to the mobile search market – and doing so now – will allow you to reap the rewards while others are still catching up.

This article originally published at We Do Web Content.

This week, we’re going to analyze what you should be doing, and tracking, with your social media channels.

#1 – Lead Generation via Email Subscribers

The number of followers you have represents your maximum reach, and having a solid following on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or any other social media channel helps you stay in touch with people, whether they’re clients, industry influencers, or general people of interest. But they don’t necessarily generate any real revenue for you or your company.

The single most profitable channel is still email marketing, and if you’re not doing it, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of profit generation. You should be using your social media profiles to funnel visitors to your email signup list, collecting leads that you can use to directly market your products and keep in touch with via quarterly, monthly, or even weekly newsletter mailers.

Using tools like MailChimp or Constant Contact (our favorites), you can intelligently use customer data and automate newsletter and email marketing efforts, customizing the messages you send to your recipients. What else can you do?

• Email your high-value customers with special promotions;
• Offer promotions to lapsed customers;
• Segment lists based on purchase history or email behavior; and
• Identify your most-engaged prospects, and more.

#2 – Conversation and Engagement

Like we mentioned before, the number of followers, fans, and friends you have represents your maximum reach, but Facebook’s EdgeRank system will prevent your page from being visible to all of the people who “liked” you unless those users actively engage your page already. This not only means that you really have to make your posts count, but it also means that the number of fans or friends you have is not an effective measurement of who is looking at your content or of what those impressions are worth.

A more effective measurement is your conversation rate, or your total engagement. This can be simply defined as the number of comments or replies you receive per post, and the beauty of this metric is that it can be measured on every social channel – your blog, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and so on and so forth.

Paying attention to your conversation and engagement rate helps you stay connected with what resonates with your readership in real time. While it’s not difficult to take a snapshot glance at a post and see the number of replies, you will have to keep a manual total and averages of your replies per post, but this can be easily accomplished in a spreadsheet.

If you know of a measurement tool or dashboard that accomplishes this task, tell us about it in the comments!

#3 – Amplification and Shares

Finally, instead of focusing on the number of friends you have, why not measure how much those friends are promoting you? This is called your amplification rate, and it takes into account the full potential of your network.

For example, you have a limited number of friends and followers, and the most people you can reach with any given message that you send is limited to that number. So if you have 11k Twitter followers, then the most people you can directly reach is 11k. However, your second level network (meaning the people who follow those that follow you) is exponentially greater, so how much your messages are amplified by your direct followers can expand your reach from several thousand to several hundred thousand.

In Twitter terms, these are the re-tweets; for Facebook and Google+, we’re talking about “shares.” This makes your content visible to entirely new audiences, and is fairly easy to track. It also places an emphasis on creating shareable content, which you should already be doing, so that your second level network will, over time, become part of your first level network.

So, what we really want to pay attention to with our social media efforts are these things:

• Lead generations on our email lists;
• Conversation rate, or total engagement; and
• Amplification, or shares.

Can you think of an important metric that we missed? Let me know in the comments!

This article was originally published at We Do Web Content and is re-posted with permission.

If you’re engaging in social media marketing simply because it’s all the rage, you’re probably not being effective. Next week, we’ll discuss the metrics that you can use to power your digital marketing success. But for now, here are the 3 social media metrics that you don’t need.

#1 – Klout Score

The idea behind the Klout score is a good one, no doubt. And it does indicate, at the very least, authority on a topic. But remember the example of @horse_ebooks – a spam account that randomly tweets snippets from the ebooks that it hawks (presumably about horses) that has gained a cult following on the Internet. The root of its Twitter popularity and a resultant Klout score of 74 was best summed up by Jon Hendren, writer at SomethingAwful.com:

“@Horse_ebooks is a Twitter bot designed and automated by apparently some Russian guy to sell worthless, horrible ebooks about horses. In order to avoid being detected as a spam bot, it occasionally posts a text snippet or two from one of its ebooks, chosen at random. I will never buy an ebook from it, but I will follow this Twitter account until I die or horses become extinct, whichever comes first.”

The tale of @horse_ebooks should drive this message home: just because something is popular on the internet doesn’t mean it can convert followers into customers or fans into clients.

#2 – Your Facebook Fans

In just a minute, we’re going to explain why the number of friends, fans, and followers you have doesn’t matter, period, but Facebook fan count deserves its own assessment because it’s the most commonly misconstrued marker of digital success. Facebook’s EdgeRank system is designed to only allow your well-branded messages to reach users who already engage with your Facebook page.

Instead, you should take a look at the “People Talking About This” metric. This number better reflects your social influence and what (if any) impact you have on your followers.As people engage with your brand, you’re more likely to appear on the feeds of “friends” of your fans, thus funneling new traffic to your page.

#3 – The Total Number of Friends, Fans, and Followers You Have

That’s right. That Facebook fan page you’ve been cultivating for months, or that Twitter feed you’ve been pouring hours into means next to nothing when compared to a healthy email marketing list. Banking on social platforms to drive the majority of your business is a principle known as digital sharecropping, and it’s dangerous.

The idea of digital sharecropping was outlined by Nicholas Carr in 2006, and can be boiled down to this: you don’t own the Web platforms that you’re building your digital bases on. If that platform changes its service or evolves in a direction that no longer drives your business the way you’re used to, you’re up a creek without a paddle.

You’re using the Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn platforms not just because they are popular, but because they’re currently and demonstrably successful channels of marketing and business success – granted. And these tools might be useful to you for a long time, but what happens to your business when Facebook becomes the next MySpace, or when the next craze in digital business, management, or marketing rolls into town?

This doesn’t mean that these platforms are bad for your business, and you should leverage them to your advantage to drive traffic to your website and to your opt-in email list. You control these assets. Even if your email account is hacked, you can export your mailing lists to other providers and keep a back-up copy on your hard drive – or even a hard copy on your desk, a printed list of your contacts. If your Web host goes under, you simply upload your backed-up copy of your website to another hosting provider, and re-direct the URL.

It’s OK to keep an eye on these numbers, but remember that when it comes right down to it, they don’t influence or measure the volume of your business or its projected growth. Invest your time in assets that will drive your business with demonstrable success, like an informative website, email list, or promotional ebook.

This article was originally published at We Do Web Content and has been re-posted with permission.

These changes will make it easier for users to find and access private data their friends have shared with them, which normally only appears in the chronological sequence of social layouts, and as a result, dated entries become buried and are often undiscoverable.

For the privacy-conscious, fear not: the new format’s SERPs are only visible to individual users, and you have to be signed in and using the English version of Google in order to see the personalized results. No one else will be able to see your personal results, and you can toggle the personal results off if you find the experience invasive.

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the new layout shows the traditional count of Web results, but adds “x personal results,” a clickable link that you can follow to isolate your personalized search results from the rest of the pack. Results that have been shared by people in your Circles will have that little blue stamp next to them that looks like a head and shoulders. Those that are standard Web results will show nothing new.

Google has been at the forefront of social search for the past few years, and Google Fellow Amit Singhal introduced the newest iteration of the enterprise.

The Search, plus Your World features highlighted by Singhal include:

• Personal Results - will enable users to find information that is just for them, like Google+ photos and posts, including those that have only been shared specifically with you;
• Profiles in Search - will allow users to have straightaway access to profiles you’re interested in or people you might be interested in, based on your activity; and
• People and Page - will help users discover Google+ profiles and pages most closely related to the topic in which you’re searching, because, as Google puts it, “behind most every query is a community.”

Google has tirelessly reinforced the idea that “Google+ is Google” and the social service is a thread that has been woven into the fabric of virtually all of Google’s most popular and widespread services.

Granted, “Your World” is limited to the extent that only Google+ social data is integrated into your search engine results. Some early critics have responded that the integration is shallow because of that limitation, but Google told Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan that it would be willing to work with other networks that would provide it with “deep access to their data.”

Considering the relationship that already exists between Bing and Facebook – Bing SERPs show information on what your Facebook friends “like” when you search based on the data provided via this relationship – a collaborative effort between the two giants is a possibility, but we’re not betting the farm on it.

The change is being rolled out slowly over the next few days, so don’t panic if you haven’t spotted it yet. If you just can’t wait to get a glimpse of the new features, Google released this charming promotional video that sums them up nicely.

I’m ecstatic over this new feature for a few reasons: first, Search, plus Your World makes it easier for users to find information that has received votes of confidence from others who we already trust; second, it typifies the constant, rapid evolution of search that characterizes the industry; third, it proves my prediction from late October – that “the Internet is evolving towards a people-centric climate” – was right on the money.

This article originally appeared at We Do Web Content and is re-posted with permission.

2011 brought us Google+, Siri on the Apple iPhone, the Internet cloud, the Panda updates, and widespread changes across every major search engine and social platform. With all of these new technologies at our fingertips, the only thing that remains uncertain is what changes and challenges the New Year will bring. With that in mind, here’s our forecast for search engine and social media marketing in 2012.

Prediction #1 – Search and Social Will Become Irreconcilably Intertwined

Bing took a bold step when it upped the ante on social signal integration in May 2011 and pooled data resources with Facebook. You may have noticed that when you search through Facebook, beneath your standard Facebook search results is a listing of Bing-powered Web results.

By the same turn, Bing began to incorporate social signals from Facebook, creating a more personalized search experience for its users. It’s important to point out, however, that this isn’t a seamless integration. You have to sign in to Bing and use your Facebook log-in credentials in order to see the effects.

This integration is similar to – and, in fact, nearly mirrors – Google’s integration of Google+ social signals and +1 indicators. By using likes, retweets, and +1s as votes of confidence, these search engines are pooling the collective intelligence of your trusted social connections to influence the search results that you find.

As social media plays an increasingly larger role in the search algorithm, social media marketing will become a necessary component of SEO, likely to the point that they will nearly be indistinguishable.

Prediction #2 – Customer Interaction as a Vital Marketing Strategy Component

In 2012, Facebook will reach 1 billion users, and social network profiles have become an extension of modern identity as much as, if not more, than our cars, cell phones, and homes. Social signals have become a part of search, Google has started to index Facebook comments, and Google+ has started to play a native role in search engine results pages.

If search and social are indeed wedded for life, the companies that will outperform will be those who find a way to manage customer relationships while balancing perceptions. This is a bigger task than a marketing department can handle alone, and calls employees and brand loyalists to influence consumer perceptions of brands, services, and products through the creation and sharing of organic Web content.

So what are savvy SEOs and inbound marketers to do? Stay engaged. It’s much easier to say than to put in to practice, we know, but in terms of staying power, long-term strategy will trump a viral YouTube video any day of the week, for not only brand recognition, but also for conversion.

Prediction #3 – Mobile Search and Social Will Grow Exponentially

Try though you might, you can’t keep hardware out of the picture – tablets have fundamentally changed the game of content consumption.

Studies have reported that as many as one-third of American adults use smartphones, a number that’s expected to grow. An entire generation of teenagers and adolescents are growing up using smartphones and tablets, so companies who optimize their strategies for mobile devices will benefit the most.

Online purchasing has been moving in an irrefutably mobile direction – Google has estimated that 44% of last-minute shopping searches originate on mobile devices. Click-through rates are already higher on mobile devices than they are for their personal computer corollaries, and location-based services like FourSquare, Gowalla, and Yelp continue to expand as they battle one another for geolocation supremacy.

Whatever changes 2012 has in store, the path to success will be one that integrates strategic search and social campaigns, and we expect that 2012 will also be the year of refined social ROI tools so that marketers can effectively and efficiently monitor multiple channels of interaction.

What are your predictions for the New Year?

This article was originally posted at We Do Web Content and has been re-posted with permission.

As SEOs, we grapple with new (and not so new) questions about search engines on a daily basis. One of the most common quandaries we come across: “Why can’t I just ask Google a question?”

The answer, of course, is that you can, but you have to articulate your question in such a way that it makes sense to the search engine. In doing so, you can maximize the effectiveness of the algorithms powering the search. Simply put, this means using keywords when you type in your query. If I wanted to know whether or not it was raining in Dubai, for instance, I would type something along the lines of “weather Dubai,” rather than “Is it raining in Dubai?”

The use of organic sentences, as opposed to strategic keywords, is called natural language search interfacing, and it’s by no means a new concept, but it hasn’t yet been adopted by any major search engines for mainstream use  (although Bing introduced a natural language search interface for shopping and retail in March, 2011).

What difference does keyword search versus natural language search make? Well, when I input “weather Dubai,” I get the following:

However, if I type in “is it raining in Dubai,” then my top results are these:

The search engine is searching for instances of the word “raining” instead of picking up on the semantic clues that would indicate to a person (or, arguably, a natural language search interface) that I want to know whether or not it’s raining, (and so, would need to see the most current weather report, because that’s where the information would be).

Google has repeatedly shot down the idea of transitioning their interface towards one that is more based in natural language, but over time, they have reinforced a commitment to helping users find the information they’re looking for. In some instances, that information doesn’t manifest in the search algorithm, but is accomplished by processes that bring up widgets when words are structured in a specific fashion.

For instance, type in “Where is Hawaii” in the Google search bar and a Google Maps image pops up at the top of the SERP, showing you the islandof Hawaii. Type in “What is Hawaii” and you are instead shown a short, encyclopedic entry on Hawaiithat strongly resembles a dictionary listing. The search results beneath, however, do not directly address either question. Thus far, this is the closest Google has gotten to natural language search interfacing.

Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, explained more about why Google has ignored natural language search in a 2007 interview for the MIT Technology Review. “Typing ‘What is the capital ofFrance?’ won’t get you better results than typing ‘capital of France.’ But understanding how words go together is important,” he said.

To give some examples, Norvig explained that “New York” is different from “York,” but “Vegas” is the same as “Las Vegas” and “Jersey” could either mean “New Jersey” or something else entirely. “That’s a natural-language aspect that we’re focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we’re not concentrating on the sentence,” Norvig said.

Despite Google’s stance, people prefer natural language searching over the use of keywords, and as people begin to interact with search in more diverse ways – 2011 heralded voice-search with Siri – natural language expression becomes more and more the norm of users.

According to a study on search query length, searches between 5 and 8 words increased by 10% between 2009 and 2010, while searches of 3 words or less were down by 2%. This suggests that users need to more thoroughly explain their queries, an inclination that makes sense as more and more services and data become accessible via the Web.

Google’s emphasis has always been on statistics. The leading minds at the ‘plex have insisted that a statistically-centered approach to search is preferable to a grammatically-centered one. Time will tell if they stand firm on this assertion.

As high technology becomes more of a consumer product, mobile devices have flooded the market, enabling fast access to the limitless knowledge bank of the Web. For most of these users, search is just a means to an end, so change to the dominant paradigm of input-keywords/read-drop-list-of-results is difficult to come by. Such a change would have to be usable and learnable by a massive, and massively diverse, population.

But aside from Bing’s venture into natural language search for retail, which will allow you to specify, for instance, that you want “cashmere sweaters under $100,” the competition hasn’t provided any reason for Google to adapt. It is possible that voice interfaces, like Siri, may force a change, but Google has already released its own Google Voice actions, which have enjoyed widespread appreciation by Android users, although it lacks the natural language interfacing that Apple fans have touted and embraced.

Based on the last year of algorithm changes, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google will not put much effort into natural language search developments until one of its competitors successfully implements it. Then, we can probably expect Google to swoop in, develop a $1 billion product, and leave everyone speechless. But for now, it seems as though they’d rather not.

This article was originally posted at We Do Web Content and is re-posted with permission.

As both a business and a crucial Internet utility, Google has expanded in some tremendous ways in 2011. Not all of those changes have been welcomed by the Internet community, however. The much feared Panda updates and the heavily criticized keyword encryption move are still the source of some derision for the search giant.

In most ways we believe that when Google grows, the Internet benefits, as well as the billions of individuals and businesses who traffic it. We’d like to take a moment to look back on some of the biggest changes Google released in 2011 and recap how those changes have affected the Web, the way we search, and how we’re found.

The folks over at Higher Visibility put together this wonderful infographic on the Google algorithm changes of 2011, and we’re going to explore some of the most important changes in some more depth.

February 23 – Google Panda’s First Update
The first Google Panda update (which, at the time, was known as the Google Farmer update) was devised to weed out low-quality sites, content farms, sites with too-thin content and too-heavy advertising, and scraper sites.

The first update impacted a staggering 12% of total search results and prompted a massive shift in focus for SEO Web content providers and Webmasters across the board, as organic and custom content finally got the credit it deserved as a crucial traffic driver. (But hey, you don’t have to tell us twice. At We Do Web Content, we have long been the evangelicals of organic Web content!)

March 30 – Launch of the +1 Button
This represented the first time a search engine had attempted to add a social component to search on a broad scale, although the term first started emerging in 2004. The +1 button allowed users to give their recommendation of a site to users who were connected to them, and search engine result pages (SERPs) began to reflect those changes.

Later on, the +1 data was integrated to users’ Google+ profile, and the button is now a hallmark on most pages. Unlike Facebook Likes or Twitter’s Re-Tweets, the +1 button is the only social ranking feature that has the potential to directly impact a final SERP for a user, and it’s also placed increased importance on Google+ circle expansion. The more people to whom you are connected, the more influential your +1 votes really are.

June 28 – Google+ Released by Invitation-Only*
Higher Visibility didn’t include this landmark on their infographic* but we couldn’t possibly write a Google 2011 wrap-up without including it. Google changed the game by introducing Google+ for individuals (and shortly after, for businesses), which has thus far been the only social network to viably compete with Facebook and its 800 million-strong user base.

Special Vice President of Social at Google, Vic Gundotra, has said that “Google will be a social layer over everything else, built into all of Google’s Web products,” so don’t expect this update to go the way of Google Buzz, which was phased out in 2011.

October 18 – Secure Socket Layer Encryption of Keyword Referrer Data
In one of the most controversial moves of the year, Google opted to encrypt the search queries of all logged-in users. They did this by re-directing all users who were logged in to https://google.com, the secure socket layer version of the site. This had the effect of removing valuable query data from site analytics, replacing the keywords that users had typed into the search fields that led them to a website. Matt Cutts of Google initially promised that the impact would be small, and that only single-digit losses in data would be sustained, but some sites have reported more than 30% data loss since the change was fully implemented.

Although Google claimed that the privacy of their users was their primary motivation, this valuable data was not extracted from the analytics of AdWords customers, meaning that the data was taken away from all but people who were willing to pay for it. This prompted many to accuse Google of violating its unofficial motto: “Don’t be evil.”

November 3 – Google’s Freshness Update
Google released the Freshness update in an effort to make search results more responsive to the search’s need for fresh content. For example, if you’re looking for a summary of the Civil War, the “freshness” of an article may be of little importance, since it’s an event fixed firmly in the past. But if you’re looking for information on a topic or subject that’s currently evolving, you are probably looking for the latest developments, not last week’s news. As well-respected Googler Amit Singhal explained, “Different searches have different freshness needs.”

The Google Freshness update indexes the freshness of documents by inception, amount of change to the site since its inception, the rate of change, the rate of new links, and user behavior on the site. This was the first major change of its kind from any of the dominant search engines, and it’s no surprise that it was pioneered by Google.

In conclusion, it’s been a big year, but we expect that 2012 will be even bigger, both for Google and for the millions who use search every day. As we evolve towards a Web that balances raw data processing power against intricate social cues, we inch closer to a new age of information access, one that is streamlined, seamless, and even enjoyable. We don’t know if Google will always be the herald of a dawning digital age, but as for 2012, the ‘plex has it in the bag.

Here’s the infographic from Higher Visibility:

This article was originally posted at We Do Web Content and is re-published with permission.

The new Twitter claims to be new-user-friendly by providing a tighter, more controlled, and more intuitive interface. Following close on the heels of Google+, Twitter has also implemented the ability for companies to launch customized brand pages, complete with embedded multimedia.

The #LetsFly redesign (Twitter’s codename for the project) gives companies a better opportunity for effective branding, making a business’s Twitter page a true extension of discourse and engagement. These sleek new design changes make Twitter.com a more attractive Web destination, as many charged that previous Web interfaces for Twitter were enough of an impediment that third party dashboards have become a must for most companies with an eye on social engagement.

When asked how Twitter would stand out in the social networking field, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo responded, “We will offer simplicity in a world of complexity.” If Costolo and Twitter make good on this promise and streamline the navigation through its jargon-filled, hash-tagged conversations, Twitter houses exponentially more traffic potential than previously suggested.

Structural Changes and What They Mean for Users

Users have responded positively to the featured video component that #NewTwitter introduces, which may help grow the already staggering amount of video footage that has been uploaded to the Web in recent years.

YouTube alone claims that more than 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, which means an incredible 8 years worth of footage is uploaded to YouTube each day and that more than 500 tweets per minute include a YouTube link.

Twitter has poised itself to take advantage of this wealth of YouTube virality by giving it a natural home in the Twitter architecture. With changes geared at making conversations easer to follow, we expect to see a marginally increased social ROI and content traffic for companies that aggressively take advantage of the available branded resources Twitter offers.

The rollout of embeddable tweets means that a user can, in one click, place a tweet on his or her website, porting to any destination on the Web. With this all-important functionality, readers can click on links and #hashtags as well as follow, retweet, favorite, and reply directly from the embedded tweet.

So far, the changes seem to be well received. A recent poll of Mashable readers found that 41% of respondents “love” the new changes, citing ease of use and sleek design as key opinion drivers.

Twitter SEO Tactics You Can Still Count On

Even though this seems like a cosmic shift in the Twitterverse, some basic laws still prevail for SEOs keen to glean as much traction as possible from the brevity of tweets.

• Write tweets that are keyword-rich. Use buzz words, and always try to start your tweet with the primary keyword you are targeting;
• Remember the importance of a tweet’s lead-in. The first 42 characters of a tweet are what’s indexed in Google’s title tag, so make them count.
• Spread the link love. Take advantage of #NewTwitter’s media embedding options. Remember to use a link shortener to control your character usage and to track the performance of your links. Bit.ly and TinyURL are two of many that provide this effective, free service.
• Optimize your Twitter bio. You get an extra 20 characters in your bio, so try to use all 160 to convey the focus of your brand.

Do you have any other tips? Please feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

So, Just How Important is Brand Engagement on Twitter?

According to Entrepreneur.com, only 53.6% of the 10,000 largest websites have at least one social plug-in or link to one of the 4 major social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. It’s not indicated how the firm that conducted the study, BrightEdge Technologies, defined “largest.” A Facebook display icon or plug-in is present on approximately 50.3% of those largest sites, with Twitter following behind in second place at a respectable 42.5%.

The same study found that websites that display a Twitter share button are linked to nearly 7x more often than sites that do not have Tweet buttons embedded. Websites that featured a Twitter share button were mentioned 27 times on average in user tweets, while those that do not have feature buttons are mentioned only 4 times on average in user tweets.

As with any strategy, it’s important to keep context in mind. Twitter is an important part of an inbound marketing strategy, but it’s not the only channel you should be paying attention to – nor is it, according to the numbers, the most important. The SEOMoz team ran an analysis on the impact of actionable social media features – likes, tweets, shares, and so on. The correlation of page rankings matched up the closest with total Facebook shares, followed by the sum of Facebook shares, comments, and likes. Twitter lingered in the bottom half of the data set, promising only a .15 or slightly better correlation between top ranking pages and a high volume of tweets to a specific URL.

Image courtesy of SEOMoz

However, this data was aggregated from #OldTwitter, and time will tell whether the Twitter changes have been substantial enough to keep the social media giants in a neck and neck race, constantly attempting to outgun and outperform competitors. And if #NewTwitter turns out to be less than impressive in the long, run, well, nothing says it better than this:

This article has been re-posted from We Do Web Content with permission.

Last week, Google had plenty of reason to celebrate after the United States Department of Justice cleared their $400 million acquisition of Admeld, a New York-based display advertising company that helps publishers maximize the strength of their advertising space.

So, what exactly does this company do? I’ll let Admeld explain it themselves in this admittedly adorable video that details their methods and processes.

How Will Admeld Change Google’s Existing Services?

If you use an existing Google service to manage your online ad campaigns, don’t expect any big changes in your advertisement management… yet. Google intends to add Admeld to its “stack” of ad technology properties and acquisitions that it uses to enhance their display advertising network and the DoubleClick ad exchange. Admeld, however, will also work with other advertising exchanges operated by competitors Microsoft and Yahoo.

In an AdAge interview with Google’s Vice President of Display Advertising, Neal Mohan, Mohan described the acquisition as a move that would further assist digital media growth, enabling publishers to maximize their advertising opportunities and revenue.

In a blog post announcing the DOJ’s approval of the acquisition, Google summed up its goals in the Admeld acquisition:

• To give publishers more control over their advertisement space;
• To offer more customizable, flexible options to manage and sell that space;
• To provide publishers with superior analytics and metrics (“insights”) on their ad performance; and
• To simplify and integrate ad network management across multiple platforms and devices.

Although Admeld will operate separately from DoubleClick, the post promised that, “over time, there are opportunities to bring the best of both businesses together in a variety of ways and to develop entirely new solutions.”

This move represents yet another step Google has taken towards positioning itself at the helm of digital content consumption. Google already overpowers online advertising competitors, managing about 44.1% of global online ad space, up from 41.9% in 2009. Despite that, Google commands only 9.3% of online display spending, trailing Facebook (16%) and Yahoo (13%).

As more content becomes available online and as users consume more content, the bigger the opportunities for online advertisers become, and the spoils will go to those who take advantage of the most effective tools – tools which, through this acquisition and a slew of others, are now predominantly properties of Google.

What you can conclude from this move is that Google is investing in and banking on the increased consumption of digital content. The $400 million bill the search giant will be footing in exchange for the Admeld acquisition will be a drop in the bucket compared to the increased revenue to be had as the result of future growth of online content consumption, affirming the close relationship between search engine and content marketing.

This article has been re-posted from We Do Web Content with permission.

While this has the benefit of making SEOs and Web content managers some of the most agile around, the constant state of flux can lend itself to confusion. That brings us to today’s topic, which is how duplicate content and syndicated content are treated in a post-Panda environment.

Understanding Duplicate and Syndicate Content

First thing’s first: duplicate content is defined as the whole or partial replica of an original article, blog post, or other substantive piece of written content. Duplicate content is generally the result of one of two things – either the malicious efforts of a scraper site that copies content from legitimate sources, or a technical error. (It’s surprisingly easy to accidentally post an article twice or produce two pages of significantly similar content.)

It was once the case that duplicate content would only work against the piece of content in question. After Google Panda, however, the cost of duplicate content has become much heavier, and the impact can damage the ranking of non-duplicate pages on your site.

On the other hand, syndicated content is content that has been distributed for re-posting to other sites or outlets (with the permission of the author or owner of the content). For instance, this blog, Searchcore, is syndicated to the Business 2 Community blog. This content syndication reproduces original content on a different website.

High-quality content, such as news articles and press releases, are expected to be syndicated to a number of other sites. As a result, Google Panda knows how to differentiate between syndicated and duplicate content, although there are some practices you should follow to make sure that the Panda doesn’t get confused and to ensure that your original content is ranking.

Best Practices for Content Syndication

If you are syndicating your content to another site, there are a few simple steps you should be taking so that your original content won’t be accidentally filtered out of search results, as can sometimes be the case with syndicated content.

About syndicated content, Google has said:

“If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.”

To tip the scales in your favor, implement the following best practices when you syndicate your content.

• Link back to the source. This can be as simple as adding a one-line disclaimer that indicates the blog has been re-posted with permission, and providing a link that navigates users back to the original article.
• Use cross-domain canonical tags. These tags allow you to specify the canonical (read: primary) version of a page.
• If you are able, use no-index meta tags on the syndicated content page. This will prevent search engines from indexing that version of the content. Webmasters may be reluctant to comply with this goal.
• Use Google’s syndication-source tags. About a year ago, Google quietly rolled out a set of experimental tags for syndicate content publishers. Their impact has not been 100% confirmed, but considering the rise of syndication sites, they will likely be something to watch out for in the future.

These simple steps help Google Panda differentiate between a syndicated piece of content and duplicate content that has been erroneously posted or maliciously scraped from an authentic source. It’s great when you have the opportunity to syndicate your material to other outlets, but it’s preferable to have your original source article ranking first.

This article was originally posted at We Do Web Content’s SearchCore blog and is re-posted with permission.

The participants were prompted to respond to a number of questions about two products or services they had recently researched online, and the findings offer valuable insight into the habits and profile of an emerging figure in marketing: the social consumer.

High Sharers and Low Sharers – and Who You Need the Most

According to the report, there are two types of consumers who engage products over social media channels, differentiated by the quantity of content they create and share. These are the “high sharers” and the “low sharers,” and they react to products and brands differently, but sometimes predictably, according to which “sharing” category they are in.

It was found that high sharers:

• tend to be young;
• are 3x as likely to recommend products;
• have a strong sense of brand loyalty;
• own multiple Internet devices;
• research low involvement products; and
• constitute 20% of total consumers online.

On the other hand, low sharers:

•  tend to be older;
• are more likely to research high involvement products;
• are more likely to purchase a researched product; and
• are less loyal to brands and more concerned with product quality.

High sharers are of particular value to marketers and form a de facto foot soldier force for brands, carrying their message and distributing it to others. These sharers are also 3x as likely to review a product, which is one of the leading factors driving conversion of researched, high involvement products. So, high sharers are important to companies because they act as brand advocates and generate more trust and interest in those brands.

The study also determined that the high sharing population is more likely to make a purchase from a brand that has a modern image, an important detail to keep in mind for marketing groups that want to target this demographic.

How Much Do We Talk About Our “Stuff” On the Web?

Of the participants surveyed, the following additional findings were made:

• 53% of participants who had researched a product online had interacted with a brand via Facebook;
• 40% had liked a product on Facebook;
• 20% used Facebook to research products at least once a week;
• 42% made some kind of social or online post about a product or brand; and
• 33% wrote a review of a product online.

People are Researching Brands and Products – But Where?

If you’re asking yourself how you can best influence these high sharing groups and other social consumers, don’t worry – the study covered that, too. Across the board and among all groups, organic and paid search channels reigned as the most influential resources for those researching brands and products. “Owned” channels, such as websites and social media profiles, and “earned” channels, like rating sites, news articles, and word-of-mouth feedback, were found to be mostly neck and neck for secondary influence.

It comes as no surprise to savvy SEO-ers, but despite all, search results are still considered the most influential online source for brand interactivity, followed by a brand’s website, review sites, news clips, and online advertisements. Least influential in the decision-making process are Facebook comments, blog posts, Wikipedia, Foursquare, and – surprisingly – Twitter.

What we can conclude from this is that while brand interaction is certainly a social business, it’s still dominated by the regular players: search results and organic web presence.

Here is the infographic that accompanied the white paper documenting Beyond, M Booth, and Lexis’ findings.

Google finally unveiled its Google+ business pages this week, much to the chagrin of Facebook and social media managers who thought they had all their bases covered.

Experts are tussling over whether it’s all hype or if you should be creating a Google+ page for your company right now. For my money, I say full steam ahead. Facebook may be at the center of the social world, but Google is positioned firmly at the center of the business world.

Google+ brand pages will become a more important destination for business interaction than the current Facebook fan pages for a number of reasons, not least the fact that Google is already a destination for information discovery, whereas Facebook is a social destination.

Google is an Information Destination