South Florida Web Marketing Blog

by SEO Articles

Earlier this week I was headed down the elevator and a guy made small talk by asking what I do. As an entrepreneur it usually takes a bit of effort to get people to understand what is that I actually do. I told him that I run a bunch of websites that bring in visitors using search engine optimization techniques.  To my surprise he responded by saying: “SEO? Oh, I’ve heard of that before.”

After thinking about it for a little while, I realized that for the past 6 months, whenever I mention “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” to people not directly involved in the internet marketing industry the majority of them actually have a pretty good idea of what I am talking about. This was not the always the case. When I first started doing SEO in 2007 people always seemed convinced that I either worked for Google (especially if I mentioned AdSense) or they would just say something along the lines of “I’m horrible with computers” to hint that they weren’t quite following me.

What I have realized is that most people that have heard of SEO associate it with some news story, such as the J.C. Penney’s SEO story in the NY Times or Overstock getting caught buying .edu links off students and faculty. Many people have even heard of Google’s Panda algorithm change because it had enough of an impact on the average online business owner (either positive or negative) for it to spring up stories in major news outlets.

Here’s a Google Trends graph for the search term SEO over the past 6 years. While the top graph does seem to flatten off a bit in the past year I do find it interesting to also look at the bottom graph for “news reference volume” which shows a big jump starting in 2007.

What does all this increased publicity towards our industry mean? It means that we are in the right industry. It means that more businesses are seeing the value in showing up in Google, Bing, and Yahoo for search terms related to their own industry. Companies are hiring more SEO consulting firms and expanding their own in-house SEO teams and it means that companies are now searching for more well rounded marketing candidates that can also integrate SEO and social media into their marketing strategies.

As companies hire more SEO professionals and media outlets pay more attention to algorithmic changes the more likely it is that the next time you offer your business card to somebody they will understand what it is that you do.

The next time you are in an elevator ask the person next to you if they have heard of search engine optimization and then post your findings in the comments section!

Comments

The Internet is crammed with useful resources for online marketers, but it can be hard to know what you need and what’s most important.

New marketers often ask me which pages and tools are most useful. So I’ve compiled this list of 21 tools and resources it’s a good idea to have handy. Feel free to enhance this directory by adding your own suggestions in the comments.

1. Google AdWords

No matter what size your budget, a new marketer can score some easy wins advertising around Google’s search results and across relevant websites. It’s simple to use, there’s a lot of guidance provided, and there’s a phone number if you need some human help.

2. Google AdWords’ keyword research tool

Google’s keyword research tool is great if you’re using AdWords but it’s also really useful if you’re not sure which terms to optimize your website for. Play around with this tool and see what effective long-tail phrases you can find.

3. Business Link’s Ecommerce guide

Before you get busy marketing online, do you know your legal responsibilities? Business Link’s guide to ecommerce best practise tells you precisely what you need to do to remain compliant, so it’s a must-read for a new marketer.

4. Twitter

Your company cannot afford to ignore the micro-blogging platform Twitter. Even if you don’t use it yourself, it’s vital to monitor for mentions of your organization so that you can respond to any negative comments.

If you have time to really engage with it, you’ll be able to engage conversationally with your customers and build great loyalty.

5. Rank Tracker

This free tool is offered by SEOmoz and lets you retrieve, store, and monitor websites’ rankings for certain keywords. It’s a real timesaver and allows you to monitor results over time, showing you how effective your SEO is.

6. Google Analytics

Google makes it astoundingly easy to assess the success of your advertising and optimisation. You can see and analyse traffic to your site, helping you hone your marketing efforts and increase your visitor numbers.

There are also tools available for Yahoo and Bing.

7. Google Trends

How popular is a search term you’re considering optimizing your site for? How are some searches measuring up against each other? How have searches for a particular term changed over a fixed period?

Google Trends allows you to assess and compare search terms, helping inform your keyword decisions and track popularity over time. This is particularly great for assessing the value and scope of seasonal keywords.

8. Copyscape Plagiarism Checker

Unique, keyword-rich content that invites inbound links is a major part of any SEO campaign. But the web is full of plagiarized content – and you want to ensure you don’t publish any.

So, if you’re using a copywriter and want to check the content is unique, or if you want to see where your website’s copy is being used, this checker is a great tool.

9. Google Webmaster tools

Google provides so many fantastic, free tools that there’s really no excuse for not knowing how well your website is performing.

Its webmaster tools service gives you detailed reports about how visible your pages are within Google search results. You can see information on internal and external links affecting your website and discover how visitors arrived at your pages.

10. Google Mobile Ads Blog

Google has many useful blogs but this is a particularly useful one. Mobile advertising is increasing in importance but is still a developing platform. Stay ahead of the curve by subscribing to this informative blog.

11. Spyfu

When planning your paid search campaign, it’s useful to know what your competitors are doing.

Spyfu lets you search by domain and see what a website is advertising on through Google AdWords, as well as which phrases it ranks for organically. That can give you some real insights for optimizing your own paid search campaigns.

12. SurveyMonkey

What do your customers think of your website, your products, or even your promotional campaigns? You can survey them for free using Surveymonkey, helping inform your future campaigns and strategies.

13. LinkedIn

A new marketer must not forget to promote him or herself too if they want to achieve career success. LinkedIn is an essential tool these days, allowing you to chronicle your career development, publish personal recommendations, and network within your industry.

14. HootSuite

There are so many social platforms for marketers to monitor that it can be difficult to remain on top of them all. That’s why a tool like HootSuite is so useful. It allows you to post, monitor and analyze interactions across multiple social networks.

15. Hitwise

This company compiles some of the most useful reports into consumer’s online behavior, across more than 165 industries. While you have to pay for industry-specific insights and research, Hitwise regularly releases relevant research into general online behavior, such as search engine use.

Any marketer worth their salt will stay abreast of this kind of research – it can be really effective when you’re making the case for further online investment.

16. comScore

Marketers should also keep an eye on research from comScore, another digital marketing intelligence agency.

Again, your budget may not stretch to customized research but the research that’s released for free can be exceptionally insightful, particularly if you’re marketing internationally.

17. Nielsen

The third research company you should keep an eye on is Nielsen, which measures and analyses consumer behavior across 52 different countries. It regularly publishes insights that can really inform your marketing, including major research projects (for example, it recently revealed the UK’s most-liked TV ads of 2010).

18. SEOmoz GeoTarget tool

This free tool is another useful gadget from SEOmoz. Targeting location-specific search terms can be a great way of driving highly relevant traffic to your pages.

Use this website to measure how well your site is optimised for a specific region.

19. Pingdom

As a marketer, you work hard to drive visitors to your website. But your hard work is wasted if the website doesn’t function smoothly once they land – you risk them simply bouncing away.

That’s why it’s important to keep an eye on the customer journey once they land. Pingdom allows you to test your pages and find bottlenecks that are affecting your website’s usefulness.

20. UK Internet Advertising Bureau

There’s actually a trade association for online advertising – the Internet Advertising Bureau. Even if you aren’t a member, the site is a trove of valuable insights, research, and best practice guides (although non-members don’t have access to everything).

21. Search Engine Watch

It’s essential to stay abreast of developments and best practice in the industry and websites like this one will help you. Regularly reading features, news stories and research ensures you remain up to date and don’t become complacent.

Make time to read articles and perhaps even debate and discuss them in the comments. Make it part of your daily routine.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bslavin/2260190207/

Save up to $500! Register now for SES San Francisco. In addition to high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, and parties, you don’t want to miss out on the latest trends and strategies during sessions on SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, online video, site optimization, usability, and more. Early bird rates expire July 22.

A study from BrightEdge examining the prevalence of social plugins on the home pages of major sites shows that Facebook is still the most dominant social button on the web. Google +1, however, is growing quickly, having seen a 28 percent increase in adoption over the last month.

The Dominance of Facebook

BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform, examined the 10,000 top ranked sites on the web to see what social elements were present on the home page. The study looked for standard links to Twitter, Facebook, and other social profiles, as well as buttons or plugins provided by the social sites. The data was pulled using the “inaugural version of our SocialShare Site Analysis,” as specified by BrightEdge’s CEO Jim Yu on the post announcing the findings.

For both plugins and standard links, Facebook is the leader. 10.8 percent of the top websites posted a Facebook “Like” button on their home page, compared to 4.5 percent for Google +1 and 2.1 percent for Twitter share buttons. Three additional Facebook buttons also placed high on the list, with the Facebook “Like box” present on 6.1 percent of top sites, the Facebook Connect plugin present on 1.9 percent, and Facebook recommendations present on 1.2 percent. Twitter’s “instant share” also made it to the list, with 1.3 percent of top sites adopting the plugin.

When it comes to standard links, Facebook is seen on the home page of nearly half of the top sites, with 47.4 percent linking to a Facebook page. Twitter fared better here, with 41.8 percent of major sites linking to a Twitter profile. YouTube was also a popular site to link to, with 16.75 percent of major sites adopting it.

The Rapid Rise of +1

Whilst Google +1 button adoption is on a smaller-scale in comparison to the Facebook Like button, the Google plugin has seen rapid growth over the last few weeks. Since figures were tallied in June, Google +1 has risen from 3.5 percent adoption to 4.5 percent, a 28 percent increase. In terms of button presence on the home page of the top 10k sites measured, Google +1 has already surpassed the Twitter tweet button plugin in web popularity (but a Twitter social profile is more commonly displayed on every page).

Commenting on the findings, BrightEdge’s CEO Jim Yu said to SEW, “What is surprising is the magnitude of the spike in publisher adoption that we are seeing following the launch of Google +1. However, the broader story here is the missed opportunity among large websites to fully leverage the top social networks, as over half are still missing basic social optimizations on their homepage.”

Save up to $500! Register now for SES San Francisco. In addition to high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, and parties, you don’t want to miss out on the latest trends and strategies during sessions on SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, online video, site optimization, usability, and more. Early bird rates expire July 22.

by searchenginewatch.com

The Huffington Post has started a flame war with The New York Times claiming higher online users, but the integration with AOL has a lot to do with that and appears as if many parts of AOL are being rebranded under the Huffington Post. The increase at HuffPo has been largely at the expense of AOL and not some sudden increase in popularity or search engine rank dominance.

It is clear that HuffPo has benefited from redirects from AOLNews.com following their acquisition in February and AOL websites with their own domain names are being converted into directories on HuffPo.

The metered pay wall NYTimes introduced in March, which limits readers to viewing a maximum of 20 articles online for free each month, has lower numbers. The number of unique visitors to the site has since dropped 11.7 percent.

“The May numbers reflect a boost seen by a number of news sites. But passing The Times is a different kind of milestone for the battle between Arianna Huffington’s five year site and the Gray Lady. While our source could not confirm the numbers, a report from Twitter claims that HuffPost bested The Times with 35.5 million unique visitors to The Times’s 33.59 million unique visitors on comScore. While other traffic sites reported HuffPost passing The Times earlier this year, comScore is the advertising industry standard,” the Atlantic Wire reported.

The way AOL is being used to boost HuffPo numbers is easy to see. AOLNews redirects directly, but more interesting is the numerous links on the AOL homepage that go to HuffPo – see the pic below.

AOL has shown an accute awareness of SEO tactics and the anchor text of news items helps raise the HuffPo rankings both in the Google News listings, as well as regular search. Yesterday, on Father’s Day, they were looking at ways to get more pageviews – the full above the fold image and headline is conducive to getting that second click and if you had typed in AOLNews.com you would be giving them a hit before reloading and making another pageview for the second site.

If you look at the Alexa numbers for AOL, NYT and HuffPo below, you can see that while the Huffington Post has increased their numbers the falling AOL ones more than offset the overall company numbers. Meanwhile, the New York Times has slowly been increasing despite the paywall problems they have made for themselves.

AOL has had a method of writing that helps search engine rankings and the company’s video ranks number two below YouTube. Their Demand/ROI technology, discussed earlier this year, provides topics that will generate pageviews and search rankings. A recently released slide about this gives more insight.

Between the two, the mechanics of search engines are well known – AOL uses Google results and has engineers that no doubt have the ability to monitor them closer than the average site partner, while HuffPo has been heavily testing anchor text use to improve search rankings and gain more pageviews with anecdotal and teaser headlines. Their coverage of the Charlie Sheen story could almost be called carpet bombing with the endless variations of articles on the celebrity.

The battle between these two companies should be an alert to advertisers and how the numbers are counted. There are ads on the buffer pages either when finding a page in search that gives a synopsis and a read more link or on the counts that redirects can muddy.

Arianna needs to concentrate on her properties and forget competing with other publications and be realistic about her combined numbers. She works for AOL and the shell game to promote HuffPo only hurts your new parent corporation.

“As former HuffPo chief revenue officer Greg Coleman told Forbes of the AOL deal, ‘she wanted three things: a big bag of gold, a big fat contract, which she deserved, and … unilateral decision making over her world. And that is where you’re going to have some problems… Arianna’s a world-class politician, a world-class media maven and a genius at p.r., but she’s not an experienced manager,’” Gawker reported.

“The Huffington Post acquisition was one of the smartest deals we made, and it’s gotten a lot of attention, a lot of press,” Armstrong said during the AOL analyst day last week. “If you have negative opinions on that acquisition, you don’t understand it.”

The Huffington Post will be concentrating on creating content for numerous countries, with 12 planned to be added this year, including France, Germany and England getting their own versions like HuffPo Canada. Guess AOL does limit itself given it is America Online – and to the Huffington Post it means All Our Links.

Some HuffPo board members thought an IPO could have raised more money, but would not have given the opportunity AOL offers Huffington personally.

I won’t get in to the treatment of the free freelancers, but will be watching the lawsuit. The backlash on that one could lose HuffPo its trendy writers and audience that helped launch the site.

Save up to $500! Register now for SES San Francisco. In addition to high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, and parties, you don’t want to miss out on the latest trends and strategies during sessions on SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, online video, site optimization, usability, and more. Early bird rates expire July 22.

by searchenginewatch.com

Tips are the smallest documentable unit of “how-to” do something. Their presence – or absence – within a target market’s SERPs provide phenomenal opportunities for link strategists and other content marketers. Here’s a proposed definition of “tips” for marketers and ideas and direction for link strategists and other content marketers on how to utilize tip-based content to meet marketing goals

Importance of Tips to Marketers

You know what a tip is. They’re so mundane you may not have examined them at close range.

Tips are tiny concept vessels for preserving and passing along distinct units of practical advice from subject matter experts. From the information-seeker’s perspective, tips provide a perceived shortcut to subject matter mastery, and provide a solution to their painful inability.

By providing a tip that enables someone to complete a task, the marketer builds trust and creates further promotion opportunity – from links to shares to downloads to signups. When researching a space, “tips” can include other units of knowledge such as “steps,” “checklists,” “work sheets,” “guidelines,” and more.

4 Tips On Understanding the Significance of Tips Within a Vertical

Tips tell marketers a great deal about a given vertical, its publishers, its audiences, and their pains. As you hone your tip-research skills here are 4 things you can look for.

1. The presence of tips in your vertical demonstrates that there is task-based information demand. Even if your content isn’t tip-based, the presence of tips indicates that your market needs information on how to execute relevant tasks. Gathering and organizing tips will help you to understand the range of information demand as well as the various tasks that your audience has problems with.
2. The absence of tips indicates subject matter mastery may require understanding principles rather than following tips. From a content perspective this will require you and your writers more effort to create successful content. Assuming you’re an agency specializing in tip-based content creation, you may be doing the principle to tip distilation based on conjecture or – better still – interviews with subject matter experts.
3. The absence of tips indicates a content opportunity. Even if subject matter expertise in a vertical requires the understanding of principles, or even an advanced college degree, years in the field, passing a bar exam, etc., the absence of tips means that a smart content marketer can begin the work of distilling general principles into distinct task-oriented directives. You will have difficulty in sourcing your tips, but being “first-to-market” with tips can create significant value for a company.
4. ID any tip gaps as they overlap with business objectives. Markets with tips are likely to still have “tip gaps.” Being able to identify these gaps – especially as they overlap with your content marketing objectives – requires a systematic inventory and categorization of existing tips.

3 Tip Research and Categorization Tips

Digging into a vertical’s tips provides a rich well of direction and source material for your own tip-based content.

1. Inventory tips by combining your subject matter phrases with tip-discovery stems. Your “subject matter phrases” are typically non-PPC, big head keywords that describe your target market, its various practitioners, and/or core concerns that can serve as a root for your tip queries in Google. “Tip discovery query stems” are words like “tips,” “ideas,” “techniques,” “ways to,” “how-tos,” “advice,” and more.
2. Verticals typically have unique names for types of “tips.” “Recipes” are common collections of tips in the cooking vertical; “drills” are ideas for exercises that sport coaches can implement at practice; and “lesson plans” are a sort of education recipe for teachers to follow in class. It’s vital that you identify any standard, codified groupings of information in your vertical!
3. Create a “tip-lopedia” for your vertical’s body of tip-based knowledge. If you’re working in a vertical for the long-term, or at least for a 6-12 month content-oriented engagement, it makes sense to build your own “tip-lopedia” or tip inventory for cataloging and categorizing all the tips and their sources in your vertical. Then, when it comes time to create content, you can parcel out your tips based on the requirements the given piece. When you’ve thoroughly collected tips from a vertical you can more easily discover appropriate categories and groupings for them. These categorizations themselves can become a value-add to a given body of knowledge.

5 Tips for Scalable and Unique Tip-Based Content

Simply rewriting tips doesn’t help differentiate your content – or add anything new to your vertical. Here are some ways to use existing tips as a starting point rather than an end goal.

1. “Unpack” and/or “debunk” tip cliches in your vertical. As you build your vertical’s tip-lopedia spreadsheet, track the number of times a tip is mentioned or suggested. The most frequently mentioned tips can potentially be split into even smaller tips, or at least written about with more depth, deliberation, and care. It may also be possible or useful to debunk, disprove, or in some way debate the most frequent tips in a vertical.
2. Many subject matter experts haven’t reduced tips and advice to their smallest form. Your vertical’s most prominent and important subject matter experts – your niche celebrities – have probably come up with some amazing, if not fully-articulated, tips. It’s also probable that they haven’t broken these tips down to their smallest possible form.
3. Tips and tip categories can serve as a basis for group interviews. Knowing the most-frequent tips can be a great place to start an interview with your niche expert celebrities. Ask them to debunk the common tips, or to provide their unique spin on that particular tip. Further, you can ask “what tips besides these most-common tips would you recommend?”
4. Tips can serve as a basis for infographics or other “utility enhancers.” Providing new wrappers for old or standard tips can give your content new life in a vertical. Can making tips printable in some way improve their utility? Can you turn your tip-lopedia into a simple fact-finding or diagnosis application?
5. Tips in forums, Q/A, and other social media sites are poorly organized. While forums often provide the most useful, actionable tips, they often poorly organized, incompletely explained, and have no “architecture” to them. If forum-based tip sharing happens frequently in your vertical, this is a huge opportunity for tip-sourcing.

4 Tips for Promoting Tip-Based Content

Tip-based content can earn links, shares, and other citations with no promotion. Tip-based content can also perform poorly even with extensive promotion. Here are some tips on promotion:

1. Cite and notify your tip sources. You are rewriting, rearticulating, and reorganizing their tips to the point that they are no longer recognizable to their originators. However, citing your sources provides an anchor of trust and reliability to your content, and provides you with a promotion opportunity as well when you write to the esteemed subject matter expert to let them know that you referenced them in your humble work.
2. Target roundup writers. If your vertical has round-up writers, then these are some of the first folks you should target for mention/share/link requests.
3. Distribute it yourself. Tweet it, share it, put it on your homepage, link to it from guest posts, include the URL in relevant comments, and add it to your monthly email newsletter.
4. Make sure your content targets a conversion. Tip-based content conversions can include things like signups, downloads, installs, follows, friends, shares, links even sales if you have ebooks or other content for sale.

Photo credit: rietje

Save up to $500! Register now for SES San Francisco. In addition to high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, and parties, you don’t want to miss out on the latest trends and strategies during sessions on SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, online video, site optimization, usability, and more. Early bird rates expire July 22.

by searchenginewatch.com

Apple continues to build its position of dominance when it comes to app sales. Having just hit 15 billion app downloads, Apple is also revamping their approach to selling iAds in an attempt to win over more app developers.

The 15 Billion Benchmark

Between all iOS devices (i.e., iPods, iPhones, and iPads), Apple App Store has seen 15 billion total application downloads. That’s coming from 200 million iOS devices that have been activated in over 90 countries, and which have access to “425,000 apps and [...] an incredible array of over 100,000 native iPad apps,” according to the Apple Press Release. And what does all this mean for developers? Well … cash. “Apple has paid developers over $2.5 billion to date.”

The 15 billion figure puts Apple at three times the Google figure for downloads, which was at 4.5 billion during Google I/O. A huge chunk of iOS’s lead, however, stems from the popularity of the iPad – which, in the U.S., holds more than 90 percent of the tablet market.

As a footnote, the news of this success comes at the same time that Apple failed to garner the term “app store” as its own, exclusive title. This ruling comes in response to the injunction attempt against Amazon’s app store. While not seen as a generic title just yet, U.S. Judge Phyllis Hamilton indicated that “Apple has not established ‘a likelihood of confusion’” for the term, according to Reuters.

The New Sales Approach to iAds

iAds, Apple’s in-app advertising system, has previously been seen as little more than a niche option for Apple app developers. Sine iAds are costly and are exclusive to iOS devices, many developers have chosen Google’s AdMob or one of several third-party advertising mechanisms to monetize their app.

According to Bloomberg, “iAd mobile-advertising business has cut rates by as much as 70 percent.” Additionally, Apple is selling advertising packages to ad re-sellers in dramatically smaller chunks. While the previous minimum purchase was one million dollars, Apple is now cutting ad agencies deals for batches of as little as $300,000.

Beyond allowing Apple to better monetize its apps and keep iOS advertisements out of Google’s hands, this move from Apple creates additional incentives to have developers focus on iOS app creation and optimization.

Save up to $500! Register now for SES San Francisco. In addition to high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, and parties, you don’t want to miss out on the latest trends and strategies during sessions on SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, local advertising, mobile engagement, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, online video, site optimization, usability, and more. Early bird rates expire July 22.

By Pete Yost, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Fourteen people were arrested Tuesday for allegedly mounting a cyberattack on the website of PayPal in retaliation for its suspending the accounts of WikiLeaks.

Separately, FBI agents executed more than 35 search warrants around the country in an ongoing investigation into coordinated cyberattacks against major companies and organizations.

Read more…

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
– Mark Twain