South Florida Web Marketing Blog

“People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.”

– Sir Edmund Hilary, First to reach the summit of Mount Everest

by SearchEngineWatch.com

The recently released Online Consumer Report from RichRelevance offers several valuable insights for online retailers in the lead up to the 2011 holiday shopping season. Data gleaned from over 200 million shopping sessions on major U.S. retail sites shows trends in browsing and online shopping behaviors and how consumers make purchasing decisions.

The study examined consumers navigating to a retail site via bookmarks, search engines, or social networks. In the reporting period, the month of August 2011, more than 4 million orders totaling $500 million were placed and included in the study.

How Search Engine Traffic Shops Online

Organic search engine results are still a top traffic source for online merchants, providing 18 percent of all traffic. Google takes the lion’s share of the credit for organic search engine traffic, with 81 percent of those visitors coming from Google search properties. AOL fared the worst, sending just 1.7 percent of organic traffic to studied retail sites. Bing and Yahoo drove 7.5 and 9.7 percent, respectively.

AOL traffic does, however, convert highest and places the highest orders, at $105.27 on average per order.

Twitter Traffic = Big Spenders

Facebook traffic to retail sites increased an astonishing 92 percent year-over-year for August, yet Twitter and Facebook still account for less than 1 percent of traffic.

Facebook and Twitter traffic showed conversion rates of 1.2 and 0.5 percent, respectively, but spent more than those who landed on the site through Google’s organic search. Twitter shoppers topped the list of big spenders across all traffic categories with an average order of $121.33.

“As retailers vie to get their share of an estimated $450 billion in holiday spending, there is a tremendous opportunity to respond to the different ways that people are shopping on their sites,” RichRelevance CEO David Selinger said of about the results. “The ones who succeed will be those who most effectively wrap the e-commerce experience around each shopper, whether they come from Facebook or Google or a direct email link.”

Increased 2011 E-Commerce Spending Could Mean Happy Holiday Season for Retailers

Q2 2011 U.S. retail e-commerce spending grew 14 percent over the year prior, to $37.5 billion, according to comScore. It was the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. eMarketer credits social commerce, mobile commerce, and daily deals sites with the continued growth of the online retail space. They predict over $100 billion in annual online retail sales by 2015.

Save up to $400! Register now for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. SES Chicago will be packed with sessions, keynotes, exhibitors, networking events, and parties. Learn the latest strategies on PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. Early bird rate expires October 21!

by SeachEnigneWatch

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and guests including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and Zuckerberg-doppelgänger Andy Samberg unveiled the third major evolution of Facebook today at the f8 developer conference. Pretty, shiny, flashy new Facebook aims to curate your entire life on a single page.

Zuckerberg likened the three major versions of Facebook to a conversation with someone you’ve just met. The initial Facebook had one photo, no wall, and was just the first five minutes of an introduction; this is who I am, nice to meet you. The second version, launched in 2008, was the next piece of the conversation: this is what I’ve been up to. This latest Facebook, he says, is a way to express who you are.

“The next five years will be defined by the apps and the depth of engagement possible,” according to Zuckerberg.

Two major announcements came out of the keynote: a new profile called Timeline, and a revamped Open Graph system with a new class of apps and analytics.

Facebook’s New Timeline, News Ticker, and GraphRank

The idea behind this new timeline is that users will curate their entire lives on a single page. Everything you’ve ever done and decided to share in one place.

Once we get into the new class of apps and how the average user is apt to use them, you may be as frightened as I am. Frightened, intrigued, yet hopeful. I imagine if I’m feeling this way, the average user is confused as hell right now.

Timeline has a glossy, magazine look, especially if you’re heavy on photo posting and multimedia use.

Facebook had identified a problem with the previous version; you spend so much time curating the story of your life, and it just falls off the bottom of your wall. To address this, they created Timeline, the official mantra of which Zuckerberg repeated several times: “All your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are.”

Content appears in chronological order down your wall. The further back you go in time, the more Facebook summarizes and collapses your content. Timeline can be sorted according to the type of content a user wants to see. You can choose to view only a user’s Videos, or Photos, for example.

One interesting change with the Timeline profile and the Newsfeed Ticker is that your posts won’t display in friends’ news feeds at all anymore, unless your posts are “part of a pattern we don’t quite understand yet,” or if the activity is generated by an app. Part of the Timeline/Ticker/Newsfeed change is a new algorithm called GraphRank. According to Facebook, GraphRank is an algorithm for apps “designed to give more prominence to engaging activity… GraphRank isn’t a global score, but a personalized view of you and your friends’ tastes.”

The New Open Graph and the Language of Like

Where the profile was an introduction and conversation, Open Graph is an evolving language, said Zuckerberg. Open Graph, when it first launched, added nouns to the conversations you had with friends: the who, what, where, why, when, and how. This new Open Graph (currently in beta) and coming apps add the verbs: Watching, Listening, Reading, Cooking, Hiking. It comes complete with a new set of analytics.

Zuckerberg commented numerous times on the magnitude of the information we share, and these latest developments allow sharing in an order of magnitude never seen before. As an example of an app developer contributing to this revolution in sharing, he brought to the stage Spotify CEO Daniel Elk.

Spotify is one of the dozen or so music app developers partnering with Facebook in this new generation of “canvas apps.” By simply hovering over content being watched, listened to, or otherwise shared by a friend, you will be able to listen to songs or watch entire movies within the Facebook platform.

Facebook wants to revolutionize the music industry, Elk said. They have spent the last few years building a service that is fair tot he music industry. You discover new music through friends, instead of being locked out of music you haven’t bought yet, and are actually enticed to buy more. And therein lies the crux of the problem with Facebook’s launch of the new design as a completely user-centric experience, friends.

“We Wanted to Design a Place That Feels Like Your Home” (Or: “Why You Should Lock Your Doors”)

That’s right, Facebook wants you to feel right at home sharing everything from what you’re cooking, to how often you exercise, to what you’re listening to and what movie you’re watching. All time-stamped and available online.

There are obvious privacy concerns here and Facebook is no stranger to public floggings over privacy issues. They have recently introduced in-line privacy settings to help users control how content is shared. However, the data that is shared with Facebook and with third-party app developers should be worrisome for the average user.

The words “frictionless” and “serendipitous” were used to the point of almost meaninglessness in the keynote; we are meant to believe that this new launch is all about the user experience and helping you, Dear Facebook User, to share all of that stuff you’ve kept inside that is just itching to get out.

Reality check time: There is a reason corporations want to know what you’re watching, who you’re sharing it with, what you’re cooking and who else is eating it, how often you go for a jog, what kind of music you like, etc. They are collecting data to market products to you.

Plain and simple, take all of the touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy life curation/scrapbooking out of it and understand that every time you check in, post, share your activities, or otherwise engage online, you’re being profiled.

What This Means for Marketers

This type of data, collected at such a personalized level, is a marketer’s dream. I suspect, though, that this could spell the end of Facebook as a marketing platform for small to medium businesses, at least outside of the Facebook Ads model.

Zuckerberg talked about how the new profile and apps models are going to revolutionize the music and film industries. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made a brief presentation and admitted that when first approached by Facebook, he had concerns about the social media giant having access to the user data of all Netflix users.

The new apps and profile, however, seem to have convinced him that sacrificing user data privacy is worth it in the long run. He explained that Zuckerberg has told him that success for Facebook is if Netflix wants to achieve “x” and Facebook can bring them to “2x.” This is great news for those in the entertainment industry. I suspect major brands like Starbucks and Coca Cola will also be just fine.

Those who will struggle with New Facebook are small and medium businesses. Facebook fans don’t engage and interact with Pages like they do with Friends. They may be listening, and your marketing message may have gotten through in the past, but with the birth of the News Ticker and the removal of most posts from the news feed, how will a business get noticed? We asked for clarification on GraphRank and its effect for Pages and were informed it does not apply to Pages at all; they still fall under the EdgeRank algorithm.

What this means, though, is that users won’t see brand updates in their news feeds at all anymore, unless the user is incredibly active in liking, commenting, and posting to the Page. A Facebook rep told Search Engine Watch, “Ticker is designed to give people real-time updates, which includes Page updates from brands.”

I have to think it’s a calculated move on Facebook’s part. With more than 750 million users, they have the lion’s share of the consumer base already on board. If businesses now have to pay to be seen, all the better for Facebook.

If Google+ is able to draw Facebook users over to their platform and offer benefits for businesses at the same time, they’re going to give Facebook a run for their money in the social sharing = big business economy.

Save up to $400! Register now for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. SES Chicago will be packed with sessions, keynotes, exhibitors, networking events, and parties. Learn the latest strategies on PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. Early bird rate expires October 21!

from SearchEngineWatch.com

As social media gets widely adopted across organizations of all sizes we’re starting to see social media and search marketing teams operating in silos. That is already the case in many organizations. It isn’t unusual to have a 5:1 ratio where there are five community managers for every search marketer.

Due to nature of daily social media management, it’s natural that social media teams will outnumber small search teams (including one man teams!). This puts the onus on SEOs to reach out to their social media counterparts and ensure SEO is part of social media process as well.

An in-house SEO invests a lot of their time into creating an enterprise-wide process to work with developers, IT, and other important stakeholders. SEOs should also create a process for social media teams since they create a huge amount of content on a daily basis.

One of the first steps to get SEO integrated into any existing process is SEO training. But there are additional ways SEOs can work with social media team on an ongoing basis to ensure that even social media team members integrate SEO and leverage their daily community management efforts. Let’s jump in into what I think are the top 5 ways SEO’s can work with their social media counterparts:

1. Train Social Media Managers on SEO Essentials

SEO, especially in-house SEO, is a lot about demystifying the SEO myths across the organization and to me that starts with a ground level SEO training. I like to call this “Essential SEO Training” as the goal here is not to make SEO experts out of your social media managers but just enough to ensure that SEO is built into the social media process (most importantly not missed out on).

Many community managers come from a non-technical background so if you start with technical jargons like server response codes, faceted navigation, etc. then you will lose them. Instead, focus more on meta tags, H1 tags, alt text, page titles, and so on.

It is also assumed that you as an SEO would be working with IT or developers on the technical side of SEO so better to keep it simple for social media team members. Reaching out and offering to train them can be a good icebreaker of sorts and is also a great way to make an impression with the social media group.

Remember, most of the times blogging responsibilities also fall under social media team. Training them on how to write optimized blog posts can benefit your SEO performance a great deal.

2. Show Them the “Whys” and “Hows” of Keyword Research

Search marketers understand that keywords are the cornerstone of SEO. But not everyone understands that, so driving that point across to social media team members should be your goal.

Besides the obvious importance of keywords, you can show them how to use the various keyword tools.

One common mistake people make is picking keywords with highest number of searches. Instead, you want to train them on why that may not be the right approach.

It’s important that they learn how various keyword tools employ different data collection methodology. The other advantage of empowering them with tools is they are self-sufficient thus allowing you to focus on more strategic initiatives.

3. Optimizing Tweets For Visibility

As engines start integrating more tweets in their SERPs, we’ll see an increasing number of tweets show up for normal keyword queries. Twitter too is constantly updating their internal search engine, so getting found inside Twitter searches becomes critical as well.

Inserting one good keyword in each tweet is a good tip to share with social media managers. Think about the search impact social media managers can create if they target the same keyword while writing a blog post, creating few tweets, posting on Facebook fan page all the while using the same keyword.

I’m always amazed at the amount of content a social media team ends up creating on a daily basis. It is not just the original tweets but the retweets, mentions, etc. that makes up the lifecycle of a tweet.

Think of the SEO opportunity if you can take that content and house it in your domain – something to the effect that Zappos has done at twitter.zappos.com. I talked about this last year during SES Chicago in one of my in-house SEO panel. Again, SEOs are well suited for this kind of initiatives.

4. Optimizing Facebook Fan Page

A tremendous amount of time and resources are poured into building a company’s Facebook community that it makes sense if we start optimizing that content on fan pages for SEO.

Jeff Widman and team at PageLever recently did an interesting study on the referral traffic that search engines send to Facebook fan pages. They looked at almost 1,000 Facebook fan pages and found that almost one-third of external traffic is sent by search engines.

The key takeaway here: optimize your Facebook page just like you would any web property. It would be a hard battle convincing social media managers to allow you to make changes on Fan pages (it’s their baby!) but looking at back end analytics (Facebook insights for starters) and then making an “SEO case” can help you win this battle.

You can customize your training session to tackle Facebook posts while keeping your SEO process transparent. This way social media team can integrate SEO on an ongoing basis without you being involved.

This is another social media property where so much content (and engagement) is created that it makes perfect sense to leverage it for SEO. This can also be another source by which SEO can attribute the gains to their performance.

5. Teach Them the Importance of Conversion Metrics

The science of measuring conversion metrics like a search marketer doesn’t come naturally to “many” social media managers. Most of the time, search marketers create campaigns with end conversions in mind. They launch campaigns only if the ROI makes sense.

Not so with social media as collectively we are still in the “figuring out mode.” On top of that, the social media customer conversion funnel is slightly longer with more emphasis on fan engagement.

It’s easy to get carried away with the “coolness factor” of social media like number of fans, followers, design, apps, and so on that folks forget the purpose of a business is to create customers, as Peter Drucker said.

True, direct marketers can get little disappointed with social media as there is no straightforward “input X amount of dollars to get Y number of customers” ratio on social media. This is where SEO’s can help social media team understand common performance metrics the “search world” follows.

Search marketers should realize the engagement factor of social media so search marketers can also do with some unlearning of their own. Collaborating and coming up with common set of metrics is the way forward.

Summary

Increasingly, more collaboration is needed between search and social teams if an organization’s digital marketing strategy is to succeed. The nature of search marketing makes it easy to measure performance in terms of dollar amount and this is also where SEO can take a lead and support social media activities.

These were some of my top items. Would love to hear yours now.

Save up to $400! Register now for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. SES Chicago will be packed with sessions, keynotes, exhibitors, networking events, and parties. Learn the latest strategies on PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. Early bird rate expires October 21!

by SearchEngineWatch.com

A recent study by Applum, published on their EdgeRank Checker blog, proves a theory widely held in the social media marketing community: auto-posting Facebook updates to pages using a third-party API reduces the level of user engagement.

The extent of the damage is surprising, though; in comparing 10 of the top APIs to manual Facebook posting, Applum showed that Likes and comments decreased by an average of 80 percent.

Social RSS topped the list of engagement killers at a 94 percent decrease. Dlvr.it, twitterfeed, Publisher and Twitter rounded out the five worst offenders list at 91, 90, 86, and 83 percent, respectively. They also tested auto-posting software RSS Graffiti, Networked Blogs, Sendible, TweetDeck, and HootSuite. The study examined over a million updates on 50,000+ pages.

Third-Party API Posting Affects EdgeRank – For Some

EdgeRank Checker offers a few different theories on why this is so. The first is that Facebook collapses the posts of third-party APIs, grouping them together and only displaying the most recent one and thereby negatively affecting EdgeRank by reducing the opportunity for people to view, like or comment … at least, this is what happens with those outside of its Preferred Developer Consultants program.

By default, Facebook collapses multiple posts from the same API. However, InsideFacebook.com seems to have confirmed the existence of Facebook’s secret white list, which protects third-party publishers in their PDC program from collapsed posts, meaning their posts have a much higher chance of being read.

You can see more evidence of this in a post at AdAge’s DigitalNext blog, by Buddy Media Inc. CEO Michael Lazerow. Buddy Media is one of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultants and as such, is able to offer their clients the benefits of auto-posting software using multi-tenant enterprise products without running the risk of hurting their EdgeRank. In section 1.B) of his post, Lazerow shows that even single-tenant, branded applications used by large companies like Verizon, the subject of his screenshot example, are subjected to post collapsing by Facebook.

The moral of this part of the story is: auto-posting using consumer applications like HootSuite and branded single-tenant third-party APIs can hurt your EdgeRank and severely impact the level of engagement on your Facebook page. Using enterprise-level products by developers in Facebook’s PDC program may mitigate that risk, but that could change at any time.

Other Third-Party API Factors That May Affect EdgeRank

EdgeRank Checker hypothesized that three other factors may contribute to the drastic reduction of Likes and comments on third-party posts:

• Facebook penalizes third-party APIs EdgeRank – they believe Facebook manually reduces the weight (one of the EdgeRank algorithm’s factors) of these types of posts. EdgeRank Checker purports that this could be to encourage more content creation within the platform and increase ad impressions. In his post, Buddy Media’s Lazerow disputes this, blaming it solely on the collapsing posts issue and adding, “In my four years of working with Facebook, not once have I seen Facebook prioritize an advertising product above user experience.”
• Posts through third-party APIs are likely automated and/or scheduled. It’s difficult to create timely content days or weeks in advance. They suggest that “any negative impacts of scheduled posts are most likely correlations with poorly developed content.”
• The content is not Facebook optimized. Simply put, if you’re posting the same content to LinkedIn, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously, you’re missing your audience on three out of four. Optimize content for the audience you have on each platform.

Should you stop using third-party apps for Facebook? Not necessarily.

Bit.ly showed us last week that Facebook links have a 3.2 hour half-life (the amount of time by which half the clicks the content will ever receive is reached). It makes sense to share the same content at different times of the day, maybe two or three times over a period of a week. Auto-posting or publishing software can be useful for this, especially if you have fans in different time zones.

Other times it may be wise are when a small business owner or sole proprietor is away on vacation, or it’s simply not possible to post for a few days. Also, these apps still work well on other platforms, like Twitter.

We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water, but common sense is needed if your social media strategy is to include a publishing app. Auto-posting cannot replace a real person behind the wheel.

Targeting Users with Specific Content May Help

Facebook lists really haven’t proven themselves very useful, but Facebook has been testing new ways to filter friends and automatically categorize contacts using newsfeed filters and Smart Lists. This could be incredibly useful for businesses and marketers and ties in one of the major benefits Google Plus had going for them over Facebook. Friend filters and Smart Lists are not yet available to all users.

Another question that remains is whether this filtering capability, allowing users to target certain groups of people with content, will become available to business pages as well as personal accounts. Even so, content posted through third party APIs will continue to suffer the same fate as long as Facebook collapses posts by the same API together. Marketers will have to use these tools wisely and not rely on them for the majority of posts.

Graphics courtesy of EdgeRankChecker.com

Save up to $400! Register now for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. SES Chicago will be packed with sessions, keynotes, exhibitors, networking events, and parties. Learn the latest strategies on PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. Early bird rate expires October 21!

Posted by Daniel Dulitz, Group Product Manager

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Webmaster level: All

For the past few months, you might have used +1 buttons to help visitors recommend your content on Google Search and on their Google Profiles. We’ve just announced a few changes that make +1 even more useful.

First, the +1 button now lets visitors share links to your pages on Google+. If someone wants to start a conversation about your content, it’s easy for them to do so. Second, you can use +Snippets to customize the name, image and description that appear when your content is shared. Finally, new inline annotations help increase engagement after users see a friend’s recommendation right on your page.

Here are a couple of tips to help you take full advantage of these improvements:

+Snippets
The +1 button opens up your site to a valuable new source of traffic with sharing on Google+. +Snippets let you put your best face forward by customizing exactly what appears when your content is shared.

For example, if you’re running a movie review site, you might want visitors to share posts containing the title, movie poster, and a brief synopsis:

You may already be using this markup to build rich annotations for your pages on Google Search. If not, marking up your pages is simple. Just add the correct schema.org attributes to the data already present on your pages. You’ll set a name, image, and description in your code:

body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article"
h1 itemprop="name"This is the article name/h1
img itemprop="image" src="thumbnail.jpg" /
p itemprop="description"This is the description of the article./p
/body

For more details on alternate markup types, please see our technical documentation.

Inline annotations
Now, when a person visits a page that someone they know has +1’d, they can see a name and face reminding them to pay special attention to your content. Here’s how it looks:

Inline annotations let people see which of their friends +1’d your content

To add inline annotations, you need to update your +1 button code. Visit the configuration tool, select ‘inline’ from the ‘Annotation’ menu, and grab a new snippet of code.

Both sharing from +1 and inline annotations are rolling out fully over the next few days. To test these improvements right now, join our Platform Preview group.

Update later the same day, August 24, 2011: If you have any thoughts or feedback you’d like to share, continue the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Daniel Dulitz, Group Product Manager

Posted by Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Thursday, September 01, 2011
Webmaster level: All

Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. During this ambitious quest, we sometimes encounter non-HTML files such as PDFs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Our algorithms don’t let different file types slow them down; we work hard to extract the relevant content and to index it appropriately for our search results. But how do we actually index these filetypes, and—since they often differ so much from standard HTML—what guidelines apply to these files? What if a webmaster doesn’t want us to index them?

Google first started indexing PDF files in 2001 and currently has hundreds of millions of PDF files indexed. We’ve collected the most often-asked questions about PDF indexing; here are the answers:

Q: Can Google index any type of PDF file?
A: Generally we can index textual content (written in any language) from PDF files that use various kinds of character encodings, provided they’re not password protected or encrypted. If the text is embedded as images, we may process the images with OCR algorithms to extract the text. The general rule of the thumb is that if you can copy and paste the text from a PDF document into a standard text document, we should be able to index that text.

Q: What happens with the images in PDF files?
A: Currently the images are not indexed. In order for us to index your images, you should create HTML pages for them. To increase the likelihood of us returning your images in our search results, please read the tips in our Help Center.

Q: How are links treated in PDF documents?
A: Generally links in PDF files are treated similarly to links in HTML: they can pass PageRank and other indexing signals, and we may follow them after we have crawled the PDF file. It’s currently not possible to “nofollow” links within a PDF document.

Q: How can I prevent my PDF files from appearing in search results; or if they already do, how can I remove them?
A: The simplest way to prevent PDF documents from appearing in search results is to add an X-Robots-Tag: noindex in the HTTP header used to serve the file. If they’re already indexed, they’ll drop out over time if you use the X-Robot-Tag with the noindex directive. For faster removals, you can use the URL removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

Q: Can PDF files rank highly in the search results?
A: Sure! They’ll generally rank similarly to other webpages. For example, at the time of this post, [mortgage market review], [irs form 2011] or [paracetamol expert report] all return PDF documents that manage to rank highly in our search results, thanks to their content and the way they’re embedded and linked from other webpages.

Q: Is it considered duplicate content if I have a copy of my pages in both HTML and PDF?
A: Whenever possible, we recommend serving a single copy of your content. If this isn’t possible, make sure you indicate your preferred version by, for example, including the preferred URL in your Sitemap or by specifying the canonical version in the HTML or in the HTTP headers of the PDF resource. For more tips, read our Help Center article about canonicalization.

Q: How can I influence the title shown in search results for my PDF document?
A: We use two main elements to determine the title shown: the title metadata within the file, and the anchor text of links pointing to the PDF file. To give our algorithms a strong signal about the proper title to use, we recommend updating both.

If you want to learn more, watch Matt Cutt’s video about PDF files’ optimization for search, and visit our Help Center for information about the content types we’re able to index. If you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst

from SearchEngineWatch.com

Websites that display Twitter’s Tweet button on their homepage get seven times more social media mentions than sites without the button, according to a new report out today from enterprise SEO platform provider BrightEdge. That figure is based on an analysis of more than 4 million tweets.

The same report also finds, however, that only half of the web’s top 10,000 sites have added a social sharing button from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn to their homepage.

After evaluating those 10,000 sites, BrightEdge found that 53.6 percent display “some social links or buttons” on their front pages, a slight increase from 52.8 percent in late July. Breaking it down further:

• 50.3 percent have adopted a Facebook Like/Recommend button.
• 42.5 percent have adopted a Twitter Tweet button.
• 8.1 percent have added a Google +1 button.
• 4 percent have added a LinkedIn Share button.

But the key takeaway here is that half of the web’s top websites still need to add a Tweet button to drive social traffic that will help drive sales, brand awareness, and affinity, says BrightEdge. And BrightEdge isn’t alone in this assessment.

Another study from Exact Target last year noted that consumers who follow brands on Twitter are three times more likely to amplify the influence of that brand. Some statistics on daily Twitter users:

• 72 percent publish blog posts at least once a month
• 70 percent comment on others’ blog posts
• 61 percent write at least one product review a month
• 61 percent comment on news sites
• 56 percent write articles for third-party sites
• 53 percent post videos online
• 50 percent make contributions to wiki sites
• 48 percent share deals found through coupon forums

Yes, Twitter is not for every site, and many people follow brands simply for freebies or to complain, but these statistics show that conversations that begin on Twitter aren’t limited to the 200 million tweets on Twitter every day. Or, simply, what happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. After all, Twitter is faster than earthquakes.

If you want to get started on Twitter, here are 10 things you need to know – and here are some tips on how to increase retweets. Also see: “5 Ways Twitter Can Be Leveraged for B2B Search Engine Marketing“ and “5 Tips on Building Brand Loyalty via Twitter.”

Save up to 30 percent! Register now for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. Hurry, pre-agenda rate expires September 1!

From SearchEngineWatch.com

Blog links can be amazing. Links from real, powerful blogs that have a strong subscriber base and an active community are worth their weight in gold. Not just in the usual way links are useful, but they are great for increasing brand awareness and industry authority.

But sometimes the natural format of a blog can dampen their power.

For example, over time blog posts move deeper into a site. They fall off the homepage and they get pushed out of category main pages as newer posts take their place. This natural progression results in most blog posts having limited internal linking from archive pages.

Sure there are plenty of add-ons and plug-ins to help keep posts interlinked and out of archive obscurity. There are plug-ins to help with interlinking and related posts plug-ins. But not every blogger utilizes these tools and you can’t twist their arm to make their blog more SEO friendly for you.

What you can do though is use a few proactive and preventative measures to help fight the natural dampening of link velocity from blog links.

Recommend Some Good Plug-Ins

If you have a link from a blog, and especially if you had a hand in making it happen, why not make a recommendation? If you asked for this link, or wrote for this link then you have an existing relationship. If a blogger isn’t interlinking their blog posts in any significant way, a little friendly advice might be warranted.

Try not to talk about SEO though. Instead suggest that interlinking could help their readers stay more engaged. Sure if they know about SEO they might appreciate the sentiment. But if they don’t, you might find yourself teaching a 101 via email.

Keep it simple and focused on the one thing every blogger cares about: their readers.

Build Links

Like it’s not hard enough to get links, now you have to build links to your links? Hey I didn’t invent the system, I just make observations.

If your blog post link doesn’t get some external link attention it’s not going to give you as much benefit as it could. Whether you wrote a guest post or got mentioned in a collection of useful links, if that page only has internal links, then it’s a minor league player in your profile. But if that page picks up a few outside links then at least it becomes Double-A.

Don’t leave the social media just up to the blog owner who hosts your link. They have tomorrow’s post to think about. Make sure you pitch in on the social promotion and help the post containing your link gain as much traction as possible. And when it comes to building links getting people to link to someone else’s content, that already links to you, is often easier than begging for links to your landing pages.

Title Tags

Optimizing title tags is a big part of on-page SEO work. But sometimes it can be useful in off-page SEO too.

If you’re doing content placement, or you’re featured in an interview or review, then you may be able to impact the title tag of the blog post holding your link. Do you want that blog post to rank for your keywords? Not necessarily. But a targeted title tag can add a bit of extra contextual relevance to the blog post and your link.

If your link has keyword anchor text and the page title contains relevant keywords as well, that’s a great combination. You’re sending a double whammy of signals to search engines about what this page is about, and also what your site is about. And those signals are incredibly important when Google or any other engine is trying to figure out who should rank for what.

Vary Your Bios

Guest posting is becoming a highly popular way to build links. If you’re doing it right you spend a fair amount of time pitching bloggers and creating content.

Obviously getting your link right in the content of the post is a little better than just having a bio link. But not everyone is game for that and you have to play by the rules.

Fortunately, the bio link is pretty standard on the guest posting circuit; you can at least impact that. Mix up the pages you target, the keywords you use and the text of your bio. These kinds of links are an excellent opportunity to target sub-pages which don’t get a lot of love and not using a boilerplate bio on every post helps keep each guest post free of any duplicate content.

Skip the Bad Blogs

Seriously, the best way to make your blog links more powerful is to be more selective about which blogs you get links from. You can’t control the links you pick up at random without asking. But if you’re going to actively pursue blog links through guest posting, outreach, or reviews, make it truly worth your while.

Settling for the bottom of the barrel links is almost as bad as not getting links at all. Why not really invest the time and talent to score placement on a truly great blog?

Getting a review for your electronics site on a blog that reviews everything from cheap office furniture to the best credit card offers isn’t really all that useful. Be honest with yourself, will the blog in question review anyone or publish anything? Does anyone even read these posts let alone comment on them or share them? If not, skip it. Ten of those links aren’t as good as 1 link from a blog that genuinely takes pride in its content and community.

Summary

Blog links can be a great way to pump up a link profile. They can be good for your brand and they can be good for your rankings. But all things considered they can have some drawbacks. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the details.

How a blog is interlinked, how many outside links a post gets, the placement of the link, the words in the title tag, and the quality of the blog all affect the overall value of the link. If you can address any of those weaknesses then you can consider it a win.

Getting new links is hard, but making your blog links better? Well that’s just smart.

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from Searchenginewatch.com

Facebook may be toying with a remake of their News Feed that exposes users to a dramatically higher level of content while bringing new user interactions to posts, comments, images, and other content.

An Unfiltered Feed

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is playing around with some new options in the News Feed. The new rendition may involve showing users far more of the content that’s now being filtered out and giving users the option to interact with posts in different ways.

Currently, the News Feed filters out large chunks of information, including some posts from fellow users if they’ve been posting a high volume, certain updates from pages that a user “liked,” and more. Users are shown only content that Facebook thinks will be most relevant, based on a combination of how recent the post is, how much activity it’s seen, and more.

The new version of the feed would open up the floodgates, allowing more posts to be seen. That doesn’t mean that chronology would be the only important factor, though. Facebook confirmed that “We are currently testing a feature within News Feed that gives people the ability to see what their friends are commenting on and ‘liking,’ as these actions are being taken on Facebook,” meaning that interactivity will become a key factor to ranking high on the page.

New Post Interactions

Another element that Facebook is considering, according to WSJ’s sources, is adding new ways to interact with posts. CNET got in touch with a Facebook rep, but wasn’t able to get any feedback. That leaves us in the oh-so-delightful realm of speculation.

Many assume that the “dislike” button, which has been a popular third-party addition for quite some time, is likely to become standard. Another semi-likely possibility is the “re-post” feature. Of course, because we’re just guessing, people haven’t limited themselves to the likely. Some are still hoping for an “eye roll” or “lick” option.

The possibility of deeper interaction, including re-posting, would be a boon for companies marketing on Facebook. As we discussed previously, it can be tricky to optiimize for the current feed. However, we won’t know exactly how much help the new feed gives until those involved in the test provide us with details.

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