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If you’re an SEO Jedi, black hat tactics undoubtedly tempt you on a regular basis. Before giving in to the dark side, check out these SEO tips to renew your faith in the [white hat] light side of the Force!

In an earlier post, SEO Wars: Forget Black Hat, White Hat – What Color Is Your Lightsaber, I introduced six unique SEO styles (and respective lightsaber colors) for wielding the Force of magnetic content.

“The Force is what gives an SEO their power. It’s an energy field created by magnetic content that binds search engines, web visitors, and marketers together.”

White hat SEOs are called to a higher purpose of serving up quality content that web visitors would value, while [dark side] black hat SEOs are instead focused solely on the power of search rank, leveraging any tactics necessary to achieve it. Both sides of the Force leverage inbound marketing tactics to organically draw users to content.

The lightsaber color symbolism is fun, yet practical, as noted by this tweet:

Tired of swinging the blue light saber for one client. Its not working. Changing to orange j.mp/seolightsabers @sewatch

— Scott Hendison (@shendison) September 13, 2011

Perhaps you can relate? The rise of the black hat SEO dark side cannot be denied. However, the temptation and seduction can be …if you’re strong with the Force and leverage the right tools.

The SEO Jedi Order: A New Hope…

Listen up, fellow SEOs… it’s time to unite! Provide accountability to your fellow white hat SEOs and creatively contemplate ways to wield the Force of magnetic content.

• Believe in what you’re fighting for…Never forget that the purpose of SEO is to help users seeking your content easily find it. Moreover, search rank means nothing if it doesn’t produce results. White hat tactics fight for the greater good of a quality user experience. Wielding the Force of magnetic content not only boosts authority and relevance with search engines, but it also aids conversion, brand advocacy, and user experience.

  [Luke:] I don’t believe it. [Yoda:] That is why you fail.

• Recognize that black hat SEO is not stronger.Although dark side SEO tactics may yield faster results, the tactics are weak – inevitably failing and therefore only yielding short-term gains. For basically every black hat SEO tactic that “works”, there are white hat SEO tactics that work just as well, or better, because they have long-term value. (Check out these 12 examples of black hat SEO tactics transformed into long-term, white hat SEO wins.)

  [Luke:] “Is the dark side stronger?” [Yoda:] “No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.”

• Learn from SEO Jedi Masters, not just any SEO.With the abundance of SEO spam on the market, novice SEOs (a.k.a. SEO Younglings or SEO Padawans) easily interpret gray or dark side tactics as acceptable means for achieving search rank. Leverage these SEO training resources and learn directly from the [white hat] experts. (Note: A Jedi Master is one who has successfully trained a padawan into a Jedi Knight.)

  [Yoda:] You must unlearn what you have learned.

SEO Jedi Masters actively teach their trade and defend the white hat SEO Jedi Order.
(Action-Oriented, Content/Linking)

(Strategy Measurement)

(Specialized Skills)

6 Compelling SEO Jedi Tactics for Wielding the Force

If you’ve been wielding lightsabers of the light side of the Force and fear it isn’t working, check out these tips for inspiration. Each tactic has generally low competition and therefore presents great opportunity.

1. Universal Search Optimization

Leverage the diversity of Google universal search results mixed with videos, images, shopping, books, maps (local), and news. A SearchMetrics study recently showed that video and image formats dominate Google mixed results, yet few sites actually apply SEO to these assets. Include these assets on your pages and step ahead of the competition. Submit specialized XML sitemaps (image, video, news, local, etc.) to ensure these resources are adequately indexed and apply video optimization and image optimization to assets before publishing. Surround on-page images or videos with relevant textual content to help search engines better understand the asset and in-turn boost the relevance of the page as well.

Note: The Google video sitemap content “includes web pages which embed video, URLs to players for video, OR the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.” The embedded video indexing option allows you to potentially drive traffic and clicks to your site instead of YouTube. Huge!

Tip: For videos, write a blog post with the embedded video and include additional, relevant engaging info like statistics, commentary, quoted responses, or related remarks. Tools like SpeechPad.com and SpeakerText.com can help with transcription. The added value of the content/video combo will encourage users to link to the web page versus directly to the YouTube video.

2. Clever Link Bait

Link bait is a tantalizing “content treat” that web visitors love so much they’ll link to it via bookmarks, social shares, or blog posts. Fresh, unique content with an exceptional educational, entertaining or X-factor twist qualifies as link bait.

• Infographics or Industry Reports  (trends, historical timelines, statistics, comparisons)
• Comic Writing  (humor on brand-relevant topics that ring true for your audience)
• Comprehensive Guides  (detailed instructions, checklists, “top lists”, training resources)
• Badges  (awards, certifications, achievements, recognition, identity labels)

Examples of quality link bait include: marketing infographics by Unbounce [Oli Gardner], webcomics by the Oatmeal [Matthew Inman], and SEO lightsaber badges by yours truly.

Tip: Include easy-to-copy HTML source code for your link bait. This makes syndication of your content easier and also empowers you to search-optimize the reproduced content with SEOd URLs, link text and image alt attributes.

Webcomics and humor videos are a great way to show that your business/industry (no matter how boring) can be fun. Every industry has something to laugh about. How does Murphy’s Law apply to your business? What’s a bizarre implementation or use of your product? Use it! For example, how could B2B toilet seat sales possibly be entertaining? Get inspired from this video!

3. User-Generated Content (UGC)

Has the Google “freshness” algorithm update got you flustered? Stop fretting about creating great content yourself, and start brainstorming how you can identify and engage brand advocates to generate content for you. Guest blog posts, crowdsourced content, comments, ratings/reviews, QA, testimonials, and user-submitted stories/projects are all great opportunities for building fresh, diverse content that search engines love.

• Guest Blog Posts. Leverage the expertise, diverse writing style, and social network of influencers in your industry. The authors will help promote their articles for you. Example: Unbounce’s Conversion-Fest Blogging Contest.
• Crowdsourced Content. Identify top influencers in your network, ask them to answer a few brief questions, and aggregate their responses into one post. The participants will share the content for you! Example: Recent posts on Crazy Egg’s blog.
• Comments Reviews. Provide tools that empower web visitors to add fresh, relevant content to existing pages for you. Default the sort to display recent posts first to prioritize those for indexing. Make sure the tool provides a means for the content to be indexed by search engines. Example tools: Disqus, Livefyre, PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice. Note: The March 2011-released Facebook Comments Box plug-in is not SEO-friendly by default, but some hacks have been proposed. (In October 2011, Google began indexing Facebook comments generated by AJAX or JavaScript, but don’t forget about Bing and Yahoo.)
• Testimonials. Acquire recommendations by following the “give to get” principle. By giving an endorsement, you can also acquire a backlink. In accordance with testimonial best practices, include your full name, company, title, link and photo along with a “product X solved my problem by…” or a similar value-added description. The specifics for identity and experience provide credibility and a mini story to which readers can relate. When requesting testimonials, ask endorsees to use the same format.

4. Microdata Annotations Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are tiny excerpts of actual content identified via semantic markup and selected to display inline with search results. Star-ratings and reviews are commonly seen rich snippets.

Semantic markup and rich snippets work hand-in-hand. Just apply simple HTML attributes in accordance with semantic markup specifications, and you’ll enable search engines to uniquely index that data and potentially display the rich snippets. The common semantic markup formats have been microformats, RDFa and microdata. (These different types of structured formats are also sometimes referred to as annotations or markup.) In June 2011, Google, Yahoo, and Bing came together in support of microdata as the HTML5 standardized format for semantic markup. The recent hype on updates to Google authorship markup reference rel=author and rel=me attributes which are HTML5 microformats.

Apply these annotations to your content accordingly. Seriously, mark everything up! Well, everything relevant where you’d desire rich snippets. There are 100+ new HTML5 markup types documented with microdata at Schema.org, each of them presenting SEO opportunities. Although this tactic is technically purely aesthetic, tests have shown that rich snippets yield higher click-through rates. On the same note, I can’t help but suspect that search engines may boost search rank for “guinea pig” sites to test new rich snippet formats. Be mindful of this, and track your search rank trends and rich snippet displays accordingly.

Tip: Complete the Rich Snippets Interest Form to get your site on Google’s radar, and leverage the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool to validate your structured page markup/annotations and preview how it will look in search results.

Note: Although some of these annotations have been around for years, a consistent markup format has been lacking along with an adequate quantity of web pages that would justify rich snippet production. The consistent format issue seems to have been resolved. However, this early in the game there’s no guarantee that search engines will display rich snippets, even if annotations have been applied correctly. Be patient, and be ready. Your annotations will eventually bear fruit!

5. Social Media Optimization (SMO)

SMO is the process of optimizing content for social interaction, discussion and sharing. Since social influences are an integral part of SEO strategy from both a causation and correlation perspective, empower social interaction by providing on-page tools to make sharing easy. (Check out my comprehensive blog SMO guide for a plethora of tips and tools to get you started.)

To maximize sharing potential, publish new blog content at the start of the day and socially promote it immediately. Date posted plays a critical role in social shares. Share-savvy folks hunger for hot, fresh content… NOT day-old blog bread. Leverage super early publishing times to maximize your sharing window. This will also allow more shares to accrue on social sites across time zones improving the chances of being featured as “top [shared] news”.

Promptly submit content to social sharing sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious to jumpstart the up-vote process. Apply categories and tags accordingly to aid visibility. Delicious recommends tags used by other bookmarkers on new bookmarks, so tag your content wisely to feed suggestions with keywords you want others to use.

6. SEO “Social Networking”

If you have great content, look for new ways of promoting it beyond the standard of social posts and submissions. Start by “networking” with and investigating the social-savvy elite that regularly engage with your content.

Who submitted your content to StumbleUpon? Do you know or follow these people? (Folks you follow on StumbleUpon are denoted by the red person icon.) Be watchful of people with high numbers of “Favs”. Visit their profile and determine if they routinely share “your type” of content.

Who bookmarked your content on Delicious? Be mindful of folks using numerous tags. These people likely use Delicious often and need multiple tags to find content. These tags are handy for keyword research too.

Folks using social bookmark/submission sites are likely engaged on other social networks as well – just check their profiles or try their username on other networks. These people are your viral seed planters. Find them, follow them, connect with them, and retweet their content. When you have new content ready to post, notify them. Do this sparingly though. Don’t take advantage of the relationship, and be prepared to reciprocate in sharing their quality content.

Do You Feel Stronger in the Force?

Which of these tips might you pursue? How are you managing to resist the temptation of black hat SEO? If you’re compelled to defend the SEO Jedi Order, share this post! Add your feedback, success story, favorite link bait example, or newly selected SEO lightsaber color badge (just paste the HTML) in the comments below!

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2135348/6-SEO-Jedi-Tactics-to-Try-Before-Turning-to-the-Dark-Side

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Happy New Year. This is the first Whiteboard Friday of 2012, and today we’re talking about anchor text, which could seem like a basic topic. But, in fact, there are a lot of intricacies that we should cover. Let’s get right to them.

What I have drawn here is a web page, and it says, “I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks. You should check it out.” Now, this, this text in blue with the underline, that links somewhere, and that link points to another page. Let’s say it’s a page over here, a very nice page on Portuguese cooks. It has some pictures on it. I don’t know what it’s got.

What it’s saying to the engines is not only eye this page and this website, I’m voting for this other page over here, and I want to pass over some PageRank and link juice. I want to pass over trust. I want to pass over the domain diversity, whatever the signals, the keyword agnostics signals are, but I also want to say that I particularly like this web page about Portuguese cooks. That’s what I think you, search engine, should interpret and take away from it.

Of course, this anchor text with the keyword embedded in it becomes a very strong signal to search engines, and as we all know, this is one of the strongest signals that Google and Bing interpret, Bing maybe even stronger than Google. Because of this, lots of people go down a path of trying to acquire links that say the precise keyword that they want.

Of course, this is a challenge because most natural links on the Web don’t generally do this. They will say things like your brand name. They might say something about your site. They might use your personal name, if they’re linking to a blog or something. But it’s rare, it’s uncommon that they might say “Audi 87 engine parts for sale” or “best deals on holiday gifts.” These types of anchor texts, the things that people search for, longer phrases, in particular, are very hard to get as natural links, and this is one of the biggest reasons that gray and black hat SEO exist because manipulating the search engines by acquiring lots of links that have these keyword matches pointing to your page can, in fact, do a great job of ranking you up, at least temporarily until the engines catch up and do something bad to you or to the people linking to you.

What I want to cover is some intricacies around this, some details that you may or may not know about anchor text, and those include: Number one, multiple anchors from the same page “do not” provide more value. What I mean by this is if this page said I just found this great website on Portuguese cooks, you should check it out and a bunch of other text, and then it said Portuguese cooks again and linked over to this page, not helpful. It does not add additional value. There is no reason that you should be going, “Oh man, I wish I could get four anchor text match links from this web page.” No, that’s not going to help you.

Multiple web pages will help you, but if they’re from the same domain, that’s not nearly as valuable as if they’re from different domains. That leads us to the next thing, diversity of anchor text, diversity of the source. The root domain source of the anchor text links provides the strongest benefit, meaning if you can get lots and lots of websites, not just individual web pages but different unique web domains, linking to you saying “Portuguese cooks,” chances are good this web page will do very well.

Number three, the fluctuating anchor text. This is something that people talk about all the time. They don’t just talk about diversity of the link location across different domains, but they talk about diversity of anchor text itself, meaning, “Oh, I should have one that says Portuguese cooks and one that says Portuguese cooking and one that says cooks from Portugal. I’m going to vary up the anchor text a lot.”

I’m a little skeptical about this, not because it’s not potentially useful, and it should be a natural thing if you’re going out and doing white hat types of link building and inbound marketing. But because the primary reason I think most SEOs do this is so as to not trigger pattern matching problems in the engines, meaning if every website that’s linking to me says Portuguese cooks, that’s suspicious, highly suspicious. That suspiciousness is the feature that people are trying to prevent.

So, I’m not so sure whether this fluctuation is all that important unless you’re doing manipulative types of link building, in which case SEOmoz is not all that helpful for you. So, you’re probably not watching this video.

Number four, the first anchor text in the HTML of a page is what Google counts, Bing as well. This was discovered on SEOmoz a couple of years ago. We ran some tests about it. We published the results. There was a lot of skepticism. I think Debra Mastaler from Alliance-Link wrote about it and said, “Hey, Matt Cutts, would you please confirm this?” And he did. He came out and said, “Yeah, that’s how we interpret it”.

So, basically, here’s what’s going on. If you see a web page and it says this website is awesome, it features highlights of great Portuguese cooks, now look, these two links are both pointing to the same page. I don’t know why my handwriting is so terrible in 2012. I hope that repairs itself soon. That means not that the website is going to get credit for the anchor text website and the anchor text Portuguese cooks, but rather they are going to consider the anchor text website and ignore Portuguese cooks.

It’s very frustrating, and something that you should think about when you’re doing internal linking and you say, “Oh, yeah, we should optimize this link.” If it’s already in your menu, if it’s already at the top of the page somewhere in a side bar and that’s higher up in the HTML code, then that is what the engine is going to count. So, do be aware of that and same goes for anything that you’re earning externally. If you’ve got the optimized anchor text for your website in the footer of the blog post where it talks about the author, Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOmoz, an SEO tools company, but I’ve already link to SEOmoz’s home page somewhere in the blog post above, that “SEO tools company,” that’s not going to help anything. That’s going to be discounted by the engines.

Number five, internal anchor text, meaning anchor text that comes from your own site, your own pages, it does help. It helps a tiny bit. You can see a little bit of benefit from that. I wouldn’t focus on it too much because tiny is a small amount. That’s probably the most obvious statement I’ve ever made on Whiteboard Friday. But nevertheless, tiny, small amount, therefore don’t focus too much energy on this. Link naturally, internally. Link in such a way that people think your site is good, and, yeah, if you can work in your anchor text, great.

External anchor text is where it really helps, meaning websites that are not your own linking to you. That’s where you really get value from anchor text, and you do need to worry about this a little bit. There should be some manual efforts, some efforts, whether that’s guest posting and blogging, whether that’s sponsoring an event, whether that’s getting your biography featured or something like that, getting a badge embedded somewhere or a graphic embedded somewhere that links back to you in a certain way, you do need that anchor text link match. So, working on at least a little of that external anchor text is definitely worthwhile.

Number six, if a link uses an image, like this, so check out this awesome site on Portuguese cooks, and then here’s a little screen shot of the Portuguese cooks website, and this is linking over. I tried to illustrate that in blue. This does not have any anchor text. It’s an image. So what could the anchor text possibly be?

The answer is they use the Alt attribute. The engines use the Alt attribute that becomes the anchor text usually, not always. If there is no Alt attribute, sometimes they’ll use something like the surrounding text, and you can sort of see and feel that association. Sometimes, they’ll use page titles. Sometimes, they won’t use anything, but they’ll have weaker signals from those other areas of the page, that kind of thing.

If you are embedding images and you’re linking back to yourself or you’re getting links from somewhere or you’re linking out to someone, you want to help them out, use good Alt attributes that describe the page that you’re linking to. This is a great best practice just in general for screen readers and usability reasons. It’s also good for search engines.

Then finally, number seven, no surprise, surrounding text can matter as well. Just as in this example where we said, “Hey, Portuguese cooks is mentioned right before the image,” the engines may be using surrounding text of an anchor, particularly where the anchor itself doesn’t have much value or context.

If something says, “Click here, you’ll find some great information about Portuguese cooks,” the engines might sort of glance around the page and look at the sentence, parse the paragraph, try and understand, “Hey, what do you think they’re talking about here? What seems relevant?” This is one of the reasons why you can see that people who have earned not necessarily great anchor text can rank very well for keywords because it’s often talked about. That topic is talked about when their website is talked about, and it becomes a brand association thing. It becomes a contextual association thing. This is a helpful thing to think about if you are earning links and you can’t control the anchor text. Maybe, at least, you can get them to mention what you do somewhere near the link.

All right, everyone. I hope this edition of Whiteboard Friday has been helpful. I look forward to discussing more details about anchor text in the comments and hope to see you again all next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Happy New Year! Take care.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/rVeCYIg7LRc/all-about-anchor-text-whiteboard-friday

The process has already started, and as a publisher you need to make sure you are adapting your marketing strategy to line up, or get left behind.

Google made the link building algorithm popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a revolution in its time because it provided search engines with a method for identifying the most important web pages for a given topic. However, as has been well documented, spammers have assaulted the algorithm with a wide variety of methods for buying links or creating them in other ways that don’t work for the algorithms.

Even if you generate all your links in a pure white hat way, through reaching out to site owners and requesting them without compensation, or are doing high quality guest posts, you aren’t necessarily generating the best possible signal for search engines. Certainly this type of link building done properly would not be a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, but from the perspective of the search engines it also doesn’t represent a groundswell of opinion raving about your product. It still means something, but it is brute force driven through your efforts, rather than resulting from the enthusiasm of your audience.

I don’t believe that search engines will penalize people who link build this way, but I think they will value the link profile that is manually built less than one that obtains unsolicited endorsements from the web.

Prior to the emergence of Google, links weren’t a ranking factor in a significant search engine. At that time, any unpaid links were implemented solely based on merit, because the publisher had no other reason to link to someone else’s page. Even paid ads were based on the advertiser valuing the traffic from the target site enough to be willing to pay for it, since there was no other benefit – so these too went to highly relevant pages as a rule.

Short and simple: links were a better quality signal when the world didn’t know that they were a signal. But, those days are gone.

What the Search Engines are Doing

The search engines are constantly in search of additional signals to help provide better data on the best results to return for a given query, and to make it harder for spammers to succeed in ranking lower quality sites (lower quality than others that are available on the web). The increase in the use of social signals by the engines has been a part of that effort.

However, social signals are relatively noisy. As I documented in “Social Signals and SEO: Focus on Authority,” the number of people on the major social sites that are actively recommending sites/content is still a relatively small percentage of the population.

That same article also documented how using social media’s “wisdom of the crowd” (showing the most liked articles) was something that Bing tried, but then later removed. I believe that this happened because using social media mentions as votes in the same way that links were used did not really work, even in the limited fashion that Bing tried it.

I expect that for many categories of searches search engines will weight sites that show multiple types of signals more than those that show only one. Back in July I wrote about “The Dangers of a One Dimensional Link Building Plan.” However, in addition to not doing one type of link building, you should also be careful to not use old-fashioned link building as your only method for promoting the site. Find a way to get the web to generate other signals about what you are doing!

Some Ideas

The first key is to focus on where your audience is (what sites they visit, what videos they watch, whose columns they read, …). Think like a pre-Internet marketer would when trying to decide how to spend their ad dollars. Ranking signals can be generated by both your potential customers and the publishers of the content on the web that they visit.

Potential customers can create signals by:

1. Talking about you in social media.
2. Visiting your site.
3. Searching on your brand name.
4. Doing a search for products or services like yours and clicking on your search result.
5. Discussing you in comments on blogs or forums.

There are a lot more methods than these few!

Publishers of the content that your audience consumes can generate signals as well, in the form of good old-fashioned links. So what are the ways to encourage the generation these types of signals?

As per my recent columns, you should certainly focus on authority, and seek to become an authority. Even if you aren’t yet an authority yourself, you can do things to get your name out there to start getting exposure to authorities and to build visibility with others. Here are a few specific ideas on how you can do that:

1. Start a blog: But only do this if you can produce unique, high quality content on a regular basis. It is a real time commitment. However, don’t emphasize volume over quality. Two great articles a month will do far more for you than 4 decent ones a month, or 10 crappy ones
2. Start a social media campaign: Become an active community member. Read the Become an Authority article for more tips on how to do that effectively. Note that it is better to execute extremely well at one social media site than it is to do an OK job in several.
3. Participate in communities: If you can’t start a blog or drive a highly active social media campaign, you can still participate in communities. Comment on blogs, forums, videos, or whatever medium your potential customers consume. In other words, as a fallback to Becoming an Authority, work at becoming known. Drive interactions that take place in front of your target audience. Go to conferences and engage in dialogues. Be the person that asks a great question of one of the speakers during the QA.
4. Generate press releases: Issue press releases from time to time, but only when there is something worth talking about on the web.
5. Generate news: Do something newsworthy that someone else would be interested in writing about.
6. Advertise on web sites where your target audience goes: Not for the purposes of buying links, but for exposure to your target audience, and to the people that publish content that your audience consumes.
7. Advertise in search engines: More great exposure!
8. Advertise on Facebook: For the same reasons, but only use this one if you can reach your potential customers here

Regardless of where you are in the process of building your own authority, do some things to attract positive attention to your website. Participating in discussions online is a great place to start. Participating in offline discussions that you can use to help drive online interactions is also a great thing to do.

The key is to create great signals in addition to the links that your site attracts.

Summary

The past couple of years have made us all aware of the growing importance of social media, and Google’s Panda update made it common knowledge that other types of user behavior could be a factor in search engine rankings. Expect this trend to continue, and possibly even accelerate. What it means for you as a publisher is that you need to do more than old-fashioned link building.

While this type of link building can and should be a part of your marketing mix, doing it in isolation will send unbalanced signals to search engines. You can imagine a search engine thinking to itself: “Gee – if the link profile of this site is so hot, how come no one is talking about it online of searching for it”?

Search engines will continue to strive to understand how people evaluate the value of a particular website. Their goal is to get as close to that human evaluation as possible.

The process has already started. As a publisher you need to make sure you adapt your marketing strategy to line up. Otherwise, you’ll get left behind.

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2137556/The-End-of-Link-Building-as-Weve-Known-and-Loved-it

In September, Senators questioned whether Google had too much power. Lawmakers got a taste of just how much power Google can wield yesterday.

Blacking out its logo and urging its users to “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” Google added 4.5 million names to a petition opposing controversial anti-piracy bills SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), the Los Angeles Times reported.

The petition, which is still available via Google’s End Piracy, Not Liberty website, warned the millions who visit Google every day how the two anti-piracy bills would result in censorship and hurt American businesses: “Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late.”

The 4.5 million people who signed Google’s petition is in addition to the more than 3 million people who had already signed petitions opposing SOPA, according to Google’s “Congress, Can You Hear Us?” graphic on the website.

In addition to Google, here are some other stats the LA Times reported out of the mass online protest yesterday:

• 1.458 million people signed a similar petition to Google’s at Avaaz.org.
• Fight for the Future reported “at least 350,000 people have sent emails to representatives in the House and Senate”.
• More than 103,000 people signed petitions through the We the People website
• 25,000 WordPress blogs blacked out their blogs, while another 12,500 added a “Stop Censorship” ribbon.

Meanwhile, Twitter reported there were more than 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets between midnight and 4 p.m. yesterday. The top five terms were: SOPA, Stop SOPA, PIPA, and Tell Congress, and #factswithoutwikipedia.

Elsewhere, MC Hammer, the former rapper and man behind the forthcoming “deep search engine” WireDoo, spoke an anti-SOPA rally yesterday in San Francisco.

“We don’t want people who spend their days legislating trying to control creativity,” Hammer said, according to a WSJ report. “I speak on behalf of a lot of artists … who would like to be able to continue to utilize the valuable tools that the Internet has brought.”

Today, support for the bills seems to be eroding, and Bloomberg credits Google in part for “changing the legislative debate in Washington.” However, a visit to Wikipedia is a good reminder: “We’re not done yet.”

“SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows,” reads a message on Wikipedia’s site, which also noted that 162 million visitors yesterday saw their anti-SOPA message. “What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The Internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.”

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2140190/Google-Protest-Adds-4.5-Million-SOPA-Opponents

If you’ve visited the Internet today, you know that SOPA and PIPA are being protested by companies like Google, Craigslist, Reddit and thousands of others. To them, we at Moz (and all of us in the web marketing world) say, “Thank You.” It’s not often that the web’s interests align so clearly with the principles of economic and political freedom, and we appreciate those who are recognizing it today, along with those who’ll continue the fight in the future.

If you’re unfamilar with SOPA, please take a few minutes to watch this video:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

We’d also strongly recommend that everyone concerned about this take heed of Joe Brockmeier’s wise words on the topic (via RWW):

I’m glad that all of these organizations are taking a stand. But invoking what some call the “nuclear option” is only going to be so effective. Even if SOPA/PIPA are stopped this year, they’ll be back under new names next year. The entertainment industry can afford to keep at it, knowing that the public’s attention span is extremely short. The lobbyists who work on things like SOPA are paid to press these things through Congress. They can focus on them year after year, while the voting public has to make a conscious effort to keep tabs on their representatives.

Informing people about SOPA and asking that they call their representatives is all well and good, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

What the SOPA protesters should say is that even if SOPA goes down in flames, it’s not over. It’s never over. Further, the public can not rely on mainstream media to warn them of this sort of legislation. This is doubly true when the legislation is supported by the same organizations that own the media.

Sure, call your representative and senators today. Protest SOPA and PIPA. But beyond that, keep paying attention to what your elected officials are doing. Spend a little more time paying attention to your government, even if it means spending a little less time on entertainment activities.

Today’s events are a great step in helping to raise public awareness, but there is real danger in the long term, and advocates must take action more than just today. That said, I’ve personally signed the petition at American Censorship, and if your beliefs align, I’d encourage you to consider it.

SOPA + PIPA are real threats to Internet freedom, commerce, content and the marketing profession not just in the US, but worldwide (another troubling and terrifying issue that Moz isn’t really the place to discuss). We support all those helping to keep the web the amazing place it’s become and will put our names, our votes and our dollars to use stopping those who’d legislate against web freedom to help the wallets of self-interested non-innovators.

p.s. SEOmoz had originally planned to make some changes to our site today in support of the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest, but we’ve been having some release management challenges – for that we apologize. Please don’t construe this as a lack of support.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ddOu8Q8xeHk/everyone-in-web-marketing-should-be-against-sopa

I used to spend a lot of my time plowing through Google to find potential link targets for client websites. I still do this a lot but I’ve changed my approach a lot of the last 12-18 months to try and become a bit more efficient. I’ve changed my approach so that the first point of call when looking for link targets is lists.

Lists are awesome for link building because someone else has already done some of the hard work for you. If you can find good quality, curated lists of websites, then you can be reasonably sure that you have found sites that are good ones to get links from. You still want to run your own analysis and due diligence, but the end output is probably going to be a higher majority of quality sites than you would have gotten from pulling lists straight from Google SERPs.

I like to put link building techniques into processes which makes them easier to follow and easier to scale if you need to automate parts of it. The process I use can be broken down into the following -

1. Find your lists
2. Scrape together your master list
3. Filter and prioritize

I’ll go through each of these in more detail to explain the steps for each one.

1. Find your Lists

There are multiple ways of doing this and there are probably more places to find them than you think. To make things a bit clearer, let’s think about these “types” of lists, they are roughly in order of personal preference -

• Curated lists found on other websites
• Top x type lists found on other websites
• Public Twitter lists
• Good quality directories

There are more, but just these ones alone with give you enough link targets to keep you busy for a long time!

Curated lists found on other websites

For me, these are the best types of lists to find. They are hand curated which means that the quality of the list should be pretty good, usually they have also been curated by a subject matter expert who knows the sites in their industry well. I always try and find these first because they tend to give me the higher quality sites – albeit in low quantities.

My main method for finding these sites actually starts off very simple, it will be something like -

It really does start off that simple.

This can give me lots to get started with, just this search alone gave me a list of seven blogs curated by The Times, a list of ten law blogs from Cision and a list of employment law blogs curated by a professional lawyer. This was only taking a few from page 1 of the search results too, there were many, many more.

You can of course vary the types of searches you do, then you can go a bit deeper with some advanced search queries. Here is a quick example -

This search gave me some great results including this list from the Inner Temple and this curated list from a law firm.

Here are a few more that you can use -

• “list of * blogs” “uk law”
• “list of * websites” “uk law”
• list of uk law blogs inurl:resources

Garrett French also lists his method for link building with lists and some advanced queries on Citation Labs.

When I’ve found very high quality sites, I also tend to keep a note of them in my Chrome Bookmarks so I can easily find them again in the future -

You could use anything you want to do this really, for example you could use something like Evernote and attach the list to a project. At Distilled we also keep a record of link targets in Buzzstream which means they are easy to find again in the future for follow up or other projects.

Top x type lists found on other websites

This is a personal favourite, the quality can sometimes be a little dubious, but overall you will find pretty good quality websites. The great thing about these ones too is that they tend to be refreshed every year so lots of these lists exist.

Similar to curated lists, finding these can start off with something simple -

These returned lots of great results, one of which I’d class as a curated list from The Telegraph.

You can of course go a bit more advanced again and use some of the following -

• top * food blogs
• best * food blogs
• best food blogs inurl:links

There are so many of these it’s unreal. I’d like to think they were slow down as people get bored, but quite frankly, they still work well for things like link bait!

Public Twitter lists

You need to do a bit of extra work to pull the websites out of these ones, but it’s worth the extra effort and much of this can be automated. You can actually find these a number of ways. One of my favourites is this advanced query in Google -

Once you have found a list, you want to click on the “following” tab which brings up the people on the list rather than their tweets -

This brings you to a URL such as this one which (if you wanted!) you could scrape the usernames of the list members from. You could then scrape their profiles using something like Google Docs with Xpath and pull out their websites if they have them.

To help you with this task, I knocked together a very quick and dirty scraper in Google Docs which you can get a copy of here. It’s not that robust but will do the job on up to 50 usernames quickly and easily. Make sure you are logged into your Google Account then click “Make a Copy” from the File menu.

Another easy way is to use something like Listorious which has a nice clean interface and pulls back Twitter lists based on your keywords -

As I said, there are loads of ways to find these lists. I tend to find that just searching for my keywords in Twitter search and finding influential people often leads me to lists of some sort.

Good quality directories

I had to mention the D word at some point . Being honest, I don’t use this one that much but it can be useful in some very niche industries where there may not be that many lists created by individuals.

Luckily, it’s super easy and quick to find a list of sites in some of the better directories. My first point of call is usually Dmoz. I try to ignore the fact that many categories these days are controlled by SEOs! You can find some really good niche sites on Dmoz, for example did you know there was an association of tea drinkers with a directory of member blogs? I found this via Dmoz!

There are a few other directories out there which are decent quality, but you’ll probably find you get a lot more commercial and lower quality sites in the lists and will have to do some filtering later.

A few more directories I’d take look at -

• Best of the Web Blogs
• Yahoo! Directory

Please don’t dismiss the Yahoo! Directory without taking a look, there are some decent sites on there, for example on this list of photography blogs, which is quite extensive.

RIght, so now we have a number of places we can find lists. Next up is to collate these into our own master list so we can filter and sort to find our final list of link targets.

2. Scrape together your master list

Hopefully I don’t lose too many of you now, I’m not going to ask you to build your own tools to do this. Whilst we are big believers in hacking together your own tools for various SEO jobs, there are some very simple plugins that can do this job for you. Having said that, if you can build your own scraper to pull in link targets – go for it!

Here are a couple of ways of pulling link targets from a page very quickly without building a tool.

Multi-links for Firefox

I love this plugin. It’s a very handy tool for loads of stuff. In this case, we’re going to use it to pull the URLs of the link targets in our lists into a spreadsheet.

Lets use one of the examples I linked to above, say you wanted to pull the URLs of the websites in this list on The Telegraph -

Using Multi-links, you simply right click just above the first link, then drag the cursor down so all the links you want are within the red lines -

Keep pressing the right click button, then press the left click, then select “Copy URLs” -

You can then just paste it into your spreadsheet. Much quicker than going to each site and copying the URL!

Extra Tip – this tool also allows you to open highlighted links in other tabs which can be very useful for link prospecting. However be careful, if you do not want this, make sure you keep hold of the right mouse button! If you release it, all tabs will open at the same time. Opening loads of tabs in Firefox at the same time can slow it down a lot – I’ve done it with over a hundred links before and crashed it.

If you are looking for something similar that works in Chrome, take a look at Linkclump.

Scrape similar plugin for Chrome

This nice little plugin takes away a lot of the hassle of learning things like Xpath and allows you to grab elements of a page which are similar to each other – such as links.

Lets use the same example as above and scrape the links from The Telegraph again. I simply right click on one of the links in the list and click on “Scrape Similar”. I get the following list which looks accurate to me -

I can then export to Google Docs in the bottom right corner, easy!

For a more detailed look on using this plugin for link building, go and read Justin’s post which gives a great step by step guide.

3. Filter and prioritise

At this point we should have a spreadsheet of link targets, which we have gathered pretty quickly using some simple search queries and a few plugins or tools. Now we need to filter, sort and prioritise. Chances are that you have ended up with a pretty big list of potential link targets, so you need someway of knowing where to start to give you a good return.

I know some of you will prefer to use Excel at this point, some will prefer Google Docs. So I’m going to cover both and show you how to quickly prioritise your link targets using some simple tools.

Filtering using Excel

This became a lot easier recently with the discovery of these SEO tools for Excel by Niels Bosma. There are loads of features you can use which are for onpage SEO analysis which you should definitely take a look at. For the purposes of this post, I’ve taken the following screenshot of metrics for link building which you can get -

For those of you who have never seen it before, here is a very quick snapshot of just a few of the other elements you can gather with the plugin -

Richard Baxter did a great post on the plugin and all the different features you can use, it’s well worth a read over on SEOgadget.

Once you’ve gathered these metrics, you can start to filter and sort by whichever metrics matter to you. I tend to look for large numbers of social shares and then look at PageRank as a rough indicator. Whilst PageRank isn’t perfect, it’s still useful for filtering large sets of data.

Filtering using Google Docs

As much as I love SEO tools for Excel, I think I still prefer using Google Docs for gathering metrics on the fly. There are loads of posts for hacking together Google Docs to do various things (all with free downloads of the tools themselves) so I’d advise you go and take a look at those.

For this type of work, I tend to use a Google Doc which looks like this -

You can add loads more into here if you wanted, but I want to keep it simple for now. I like being able to pull Domain Authority straight into my spreadsheet which you can do with the free version of the SEOmoz API key.

Again, once you’ve got all your metrics, you can filter, sort and prioritise based on your key metrics. Then it’s a case of starting to contact each site and giving them a good reason to link to you!

Final Important Step

Go and do something with this list! Importantly, ask yourself the following -

What reason can I give these people to link to me?

or

Why should these people give a sh*t about my site?

If you can answer these questions confidently, you have your hook ready to go and do your outreach.

That’s about it for this post, I’d love to hear your feedback and comments below or feel free to tweet me if you have any questions or feedback.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/nusOHy_h1ak/the-power-of-using-lists-for-link-building

Predictions are popping up everywhere as the New Year begins. Instead of producing another list of things that are likely to happen, here are the five things I’d like to see happen in 2012 but in reality probably won’t.

Bing Takes 15% Search Market Share From Google

It’s not the first time I’ve found myself writing that competition spurs on innovation. While Google might be innovating without a strong search competitor in the west, increased competition can only be a good thing – and helps keep large companies honest.

Which brings me to one way Bing might achieve this, in my idealized version of 2012.

Bing and Facebook Crack Social-Assisted Search

Word of mouth is still the most effective form of marketing, with search engines often ranking as the second most effective. So taking the word of mouth nature of social and using this to influence search results sounds like a perfect marriage, but nobody has made it work, with scale, internationally – yet.

If Bing and Facebook could crack this, they might just have a competitive advantage over Google, which will be focused on growing their user base on Google+ and lack much of the data Facebook have. Microsoft invested in Facebook and powers its web search, after all.

Yahoo is Reinvigorated With a New Strategy

Poor Yahoo. Left behind in search by Google, lacking a CEO, and the subject of constant speculation, the company is a long way from the Internet pioneer it once was. A reinvigorated Yahoo would be great to see; they still have many great services they’ve built or acquired.

Clients Appreciate That Specialists Deliver Better Campaigns – and Are Worth Paying For

Recessionary pressure and the power of procurement departments has meant some clients have consolidated activity under one all-service agency – even if that agency isn’t strong in digital areas like search, ad exchanges or conversion optimization.

These brands are getting a “cheap” deal overall but are often missing a vital point – as Honda CMO Steve Center has said, “If you grind the margin out of your agency you will get a marginal agency.”

This especially applies when a digital department is charged out with a low fee to protect an all-service deal; that department’s PL might not be funded to hire the best digital people (or simply enough people). Specialist agencies know these accounts well – they’re the ones you onboard and have to rebuild from scratch, or achieve amazing results for quickly – because there was so much low hanging fruit left by the other agency.

CMOs and CEOs Finally “Get Digital”

Many digital marketers will tell you how frustrating they find senior executive attitudes to funding digital. They’re happy to spend millions on TV ads, but ask them to agree to fund a landing page optimization tool and they recoil – even though the latter will bring concrete sales improvements.

Offline and branding are vital parts of the marketing mix – but the appropriation of budgets between channels is often out-dated. Twenty-five percent of time spent in media was on the Internet in 2010 in the U.S., but only 19 percent of budgets were spent on the channel; mobile saw 8 percent of time with only 0.5 percent of budgets. Print, by comparison, received 27 percent of budgets but only 8 percent of time.

There’s still a long way to go before the top execs at many brands truly “get” digital and budgets are more fairly apportioned.

Do you have a wish list of digital in 2012? Leave a comment below.

Image Credit: Felipe Venâncio 

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2133549/5-Things-That-Should-Happen-in-Digital-in-2012-But-Probably-Wont

Google introduced huge new features today that bring some clarity to many of the changes they’ve made over the past several months, including the creation of their own social media network and the implementation of SSL search. Their latest search engine incarnation is called Search Plus Your World and it’s rolling out on Google.com over the next few days.

The new features bring personal results, largely from the Google+ network, into the SERPs at the click of a button. People, Pages, and Profiles are also fully integrated in search results. A look at a few of the new features:

Personal Results from Google+ Fully Integrated in SERPs

Users can click a new personalization icon at the top of the search results page, which pulls relevant posts and pictures from their Circle of friends into their search results. This is already happening to some degree, as people have noticed Google+ posts sometimes outrank even the original content to which it refers. The new icon, however, drills down further to limit these personalized results to those from within the user’s network, including content shared privately with the signed in user.

Notably, these are results from their Google+ network, not Facebook or Twitter. If ever the two other major social media players might have felt Google, as the search giant, had an edge in promoting their social platform, this pretty well seals the deal.

Amit Singhal told Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land this morning, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Google+ Profiles in Search

In another thinly veiled jab at their competitors in the social arena, Google wrote in their blog post about the release:

Every day, there are hundreds of millions of searches for people. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the person you’re looking for. Once you do find him or her, there’s no quick way for you to actually interact. Starting today, you’ll have meaningful ways to connect with people instantly, right from the search results.

Typing in the first few letters of a person’s name allows Google to autocomplete and bring up their own search results page, which includes their Google+ profile page and “other relevant web results.” Once you’ve found the person you’re looking for, you can see every single web result Google attributes to them, leaving out all others with the same name.

This feature alone has the potential for great convenience for the average user, as well as massive abuse. A result about a person could be highly relevant and “do all the right things” as far as SEO is concerned, but malign the person it’s about. It will be interesting to see how Google handles complaints about content generated by others when it’s now available curated on a single page.

Google may also suggest to users others they may wish to search by autocompleting with popular Google+ profiles, which they can add to Circles with a single click from the results page. In particular, this feature builds on the author profile markup that Google introduced towards the end of last year.

People Pages Suggestions in AdWords Territory

Google started embedding Google+ brand pages into primary search results in mid-December. At that time, Brightedge VP Brad Mattick said he believed that “blurring the lines between G+ and search results parallels Microsoft’s inclusion of the Internet Explorer browser in its Windows OS in the 1990s.”

The integration of People Pages results on the right side of the SERPs is an interesting idea, as these listings of suggested users to Circle seem to take the place of PPC ads normally displayed in this area. This will also be an interesting area to watch, as it’s not clear at this time whether users will see ads, or how often, using this type of personalized search.

Unprecedented SERPs Security – Just Like Gmail

Google explains the switch to SSL search for signed-in users, the cause of much angst in the search community:

Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption on Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That’s part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results—including your private content—are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.

While this sounds like a wonderful feature for users, it could also mean that secure personalized search results and history are subject to the same draconian search and seizure methods the government now employs under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to access personal email accounts. As we discussed last year, government officials may seize electronic data including email accounts under this legislation with no probable cause a crime has been committed, no search warrant, and without notifying the user.

Google received 4,601 requests from July to December 2010 to hand over user data as a result of search warrants, subpoenas, and requests under the ECPA. They complied with 94%, according to their Transparency Report website.

Google put out a video explaining the new features of Search Plus Your World, which is currently available only at Google.com and in English.

What do you think of Google’s new vision for search, is it the next logical step or are they treading further into antitrust territory and total domination of the web? Let us know in the comments!

Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2136615/Google-Launches-Search-Plus-Your-World

Are you competing in a high-stakes PPC market with bids in the $25 to $40 range? If you are, don’t simply fight your competition head on; if you do, you’ll end up paying premium prices for clicks you might capture for far less. There are several shrewd approaches you can employ to side-step your less-vigilant competitors. We’ve learned a few valuable tricks that can earn you valuable clicks for less-than-premium prices. The techniques begin with carefully monitoring PPC activity throughout the day to discover low-competition time slots in the PPC bidding and striking while your competition snoozes.

Getting Started

The types of campaigns for which these techniques will work will be high bid environments with smaller but determined competitors. You want to look for competitors bidding for terms in the $20-and-up range, but whose campaigns are not fully budgeted to run at the maximum number of available clicks. Specifically, we want to look for competitors’ ads that don’t appear consistently or whose ads disappear later in the day. Smaller competitors tend to fit this model fairly often. An illustrative keyword example we see in our local market of Austin Texas is “Personal Injury Lawyer”. We know the bids in that space are $24 to $30 depending on the time of the day–but we see some advertisers drop out at various times of the day. For illustration, we’ll examine Google’s Adwords system, but these principles will apply to any PPC program.

Identify Your Competitor’s Ad Schedule

Google’s Adwords system has a scheduling feature that allows advertisers to run ads during particular times of the day, and even enter positive or negative bid adjustments based on times of the day.

Here’s the catch: the Adwords system only allows the scheduling to be made in increments of 15 minutes, as shown in the screenshot below.

So, if your PPC competition is employing the ad scheduler, it become fairly easy to identify when they stop running ads by running test searches throughout the day at 15-minute intervals. Once you’ve identified a competitor using the ad scheduler, you’ve just found a soft spot–your bid competition will be lower during the times of the day when that competitor isn’t bidding on ads. If you can identify more than one competitor, then you’ve found and even more favorable environment.

Identifying Competitors’ Under-Budgeted Campaigns

There is another way to determine soft spots in PPC bidding: look for under-budgeted campaigns. You can identify your competition’s under-budgeted campaigns fairly easily. An under-budgeted campaign is one where the advertisers daily budget will not supply the maximum number of clicks available to that advertiser. So, say a competitor is paying an average of $20 per click for a particular keyword; assume further that their daily budget is only $60–yet there are ten clicks available to that advertiser.

That advertiser has only budgeted enough to purchase three clicks, so Google is forced to economize ad delivery–and it gives advertisers only two choices: standard delivery and accelerated delivery.

Standard delivery means that Google will spread the ads throughout the day. In practice, Google might show an ad every third time a keyword is searched. Accelerated delivery means that Google will simply show an advertiser’s ads every time they are triggered by a search query until the advertiser’s daily budget is exhausted.

There lies the opportunity: if your competitor is employing the accelerated delivery method with an under-budgeted campaign, that means their ads will eventually stop running at some point during the day. You’ll know that your competitors are employing accelerated ad delivery if their ads show consistently in the morning (in 99% of cases, advertisers set their time zone correctly so a Google Adwords “day” begins in the morning) but their ads disappear at random times in the afternoon from day to day.

Outsmarting the Under-Budgeted Competitor

So, how can you capitalize on a competitor that employs accelerated ad delivery? Say your competitor is fighting hard for position one for a particular query and will not yield on their bid price in order to stay on top (that’s a fool’s approach, as we’ll see). You can force your competitor to exhaust their budget more quickly by simply raising your bid as high as you can without dislodging the competitor from position one. Google’s bid price calculation system takes care of the rest: Google adjusts the actual cost-per-click to be based on the dollar amount needed to exceed the “next ranked ad.” If the next ranked ad (you) has a higher bid then the ad that got the click (your aggressive-bidding competitor) costs more. Thus, you can knock your competitor out earlier in the day while at the same time increasing their cost-per-click. Be warned though, you will, of course, be raising your bid, so you could potentially wind up paying more for clicks you do get.

Now to Enjoy the Lighter Competition

With your competitor’s budget exhausted in the later hours of the day, the competitive bidding for a particular keyword/keywords thins significantly. If circumstances line up properly, you can lower your bids in the afternoon hours and enjoy far less expensive clicks, and better click-through rates (and, ultimately, higher quality scores). There are two ways to approach lowering your bids in the later part of the day.

The first approach employs the advanced “bid adjustment” feature in the Adwords ad scheduler described above. To use the bid adjustment feature, log in to your Adwords account, click on a campaign, and then click the “Settings” tab. From there, scroll down to the Advanced Settings section and select “Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling” and then click on “Edit” in the “Ad scheduling” subsection. This will reveal the ad schedule pop-up window (shown below). At the top of the pop-up window, you want to click “Bid adjustment” mode. You can then set specific time periods on specific days and apply a percentage multiplier to lower your bid. In the screenshot below, we’ve adjusted our campaign from 4pm to 7:30pm to adjust our bids to 72% of the standard bid. At all other times, our bid prices stay at the standard bid prices we’ve selected. There it is, we’ve just adjusted our bids downward to enjoy the lighter competitive market we’ve identified that takes place during later hours of the day.

There’s a second approach to lowering bids later in the day that is a bit less elegant, but still effective. The second approach involves simply creating two ad campaigns: a first campaign scheduled to run during the earlier, more competitive hours of the day, and a second campaign with lower bid prices that is scheduled to run from say, 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The advantage to this approach is that you’ll have separate analytic data for the separate campaigns. We prefer this second technique for specifically this reason.

We hope you’ve learned a bit from this article. While a bit Machiavellian, the techniques we’ve outline can help in competitive markets, and certainly the lessons here can be transposed into your daily PPC activities.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/a14twcV1OrE/outsmarting-your-competition-in-highstakes-ppc-markets

This is an extremely valid question and one that doesn’t really have a definitive answer as such. But, having said this, it is also fair to say that any small business that has a website which they hope will generate them some revenue stream, it will almost certainly be a worthwhile endeavour to seek the services of SEO specialists.

It is natural that small businesses will have fewer resources at their disposal that can be utilized for online marketing campaigns but this isn’t to say that they won’t be able to achieve some extremely positive results for their website within their budget. A good team of internet marketing professionals will have the necessary knowledge and skills to tailor a target campaign that will help to yield results for small businesses.

Differentiating the Types of Small Businesses Online

First and foremost, an awful lot of small businesses will just have a purely informational site that has no capacity to purchase their products or services online. This type of website is extremely commonplace amongst small businesses as they don’t have the capacity to venture into the world of ecommerce at the present time. However, with platforms such as Magento and Shopify, it is becoming much easier for these types of businesses to take their retail efforts online.

In terms of providing SEO to a client who only has an informational site, there are still a variety of tangible benefits of doing this. In most cases, the small businesses with purely informational websites will have a retail shop or some sort of premises for customers to visit so undertaking an online marketing campaign can be instrumental in driving traffic to the website which will increase the company’s visibility and this will usually have a positive impression on footfall to their business premises.

The other type of website that many small businesses tend to have is a small but not well optimized online shopping facility. Having e-commerce capabilities but no site traffic doesn’t make much of an impression on a company’s sales figures so it is always worthwhile scoping out a team of online marketing professionals to establish the sort of services that they can provide from an SEO perspective to help increase the flow of traffic to your website and, more importantly, ensure that this increase in traffic converts into more sales for your business.

Both these types of websites that are commonly utilized by small businesses can benefit from an SEO campaign but it is important to set out some goals in the first instance and share these with the online marketing professionals whose services you choose to utilize as this will give them a target to work towards.

It doesn’t matter what type of website that you have and the goals that you hope to achieve – a skilled team of online marketing professionals will be able to work alongside you to help your website realize its potential. Most internet marketing and SEO agencies will also offer web design services, so it may well be the case that you will be able to kill two birds with one stone by making your site more appealing from a visual perspective whilst also simultaneously making it more SEO friendly and attractive to the search engines.

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Article source: http://isedb.com/20120112-16230.php