Category Archives: Search Engines

YouTube Slow Motion Tool Helps Turn Videos Into Epic Moments

On the YouTube Creator Blog, Software Engineer Eron Steger has announced that “Slomo” has been added to YouTube’s Enhancements tool and the Video Editor.

Although videographers already understand the benefits of using slow motion, an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down, marketers will want to understand when and how to use slomo (or slowmo), too.

Why? The effect can be used to illustrate issues or demonstrate products more dramatically than videos shot at normal speed.

For example, a nonprofit building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis can use a time lapse video (fast motion) to show “350 Days in the life of a retreating glacier” in just one minute and 11 seconds, as 350.org did with the retreating Mendenhall glacier near Juneau, Alaska.

Or, as SEW reported earlier this month in a story entitled, YouTube Contest Case Study: Intel Generates Awareness, Engages Consumers, Drives Brand Lift, Intel launched a five-month series of time lapse photography and slow motion videography contests on YouTube, supported by TrueView ads and Promoted Channels.

One of the winners was a short film by Jason Groepper titled, “A Ticket to Ride.”

The Intel campaign, “A Momentary Lapse,” resulted in the highest conversion rate from ad to response the team had ever seen, and was so successful that the team had to revise its original goals after targets were hit within 3 weeks.

In other words, when videographers or marketers shoot anything out of normal speed, they can get viewers to take a second look at even the most “normal” events.

As Steger observed, “Anyone who’s seen a slow motion video of a dog drinking water, rubber bands breaking a watermelon, or footballs in faces knows the age-old proverb: slomo makes everything better.”

So, YouTube has now let anyone make their own

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271708/YouTube-Slow-Motion-Tool-Helps-Turn-Videos-Into-Epic-Moments

Blekko’s New Search Results Aim to Take the Guesswork Out of Intent

Blekko, the “spam-free” search engine is on a mission to differentiate from the competition, and has been since launching in 2010. Today, Blekko unveiled a new layout for search results that aims to take the guesswork out of intent by offering users new choices to drill down search results.

Now when users perform a search on Blekko, they are presented with several categories related to the query, and the user chooses which category is most relevant to them.

In a statement, Blekko explained the new functionality:

“A search for Tesla will break results down into categories like Cars, Technology, History and Science, understanding that the search may be from someone planning to buy a car or researching a history paper on Nikola Tesla.”

Here’s what it looks like in action for the search query “apple.” You’ll see there are several categories to explore, including news results for the tech company Apple, or recipes for the fruit. Clicking on any one category expands the results.

Results are curated from Blekko’s own original search index, Dynamic Inference Graph (DIG) algorithm and editorial evaluation.

Blekko founder Rich Skrenta said the new search results empower users to get to the best content for any given query, rather than scanning through a “list of blue links.”

You can try out the new search for yourself at Blekko.com.

What do you think?

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271343/Blekkos-New-Search-Results-Aim-to-Take-the-Guesswork-Out-of-Intent

Twitter Lead Generation Cards Let Advertisers Collect Email Addresses

Select advertisers can now build their email marketing list right in Twitter. The “Lead Generation Card” is a new feature in Twitter’s advertising arsenal, and allows users to share their emails with brands in a tweet.

You can see an example of what that looks like here:

Twitter explains the new feature:

Think of a Lead Generation Card as a landing page within a Tweet. This landing page is streamlined to let users effortlessly express interest, but its simplicity also makes lead generation more efficient for you. Best of all, you won’t need to change your existing lead generation workflow—you can feed lead data into your existing marketing automation or CRM system, such as Salesforce.com or other software.

The Lead Generation Card is the newest addition to the Twitter Cards markup, which attempts to make sharing content within Twitter more engaging.

Twitter reports early wins with Lead Gen, saying, “Many beta participants found the streamlined nature of the Lead Generation Card was instrumental in driving a low cost-per-lead compared to other technologies in their marketing suite.”

For now, Lead Generation Cards are only available to Twitter’s managed advertising clients, with the promise of opening it up to small and medium-sized businesses soon.

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271016/Twitter-Lead-Generation-Cards-Let-Advertisers-Collect-Email-Addresses

Jeffrey Hayzlett to Keynote at SES Toronto 2013

Jeffrey Hayzlett will be the keynote speaker at SES Toronto 2013. Hayzlett will talk about “Driving Change and Growth for Marketers” in his keynote on Wednesday, June 12.

As a best-selling author, business change agent, and marketing expert, Hayzlett led the turnaround of one of the most iconic brands in the world as the chief marketing officer of Kodak with some of the most innovative approaches to marketing.

Hayzlett is the author of the best-selling book “The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?“, which was named to Inc. Magazine’s 2010 Best Business Books list.

Hayzlett speaks frequently around the world on business growth, communications, and marketing. This includes keynotes at SES San Francisco 2010, SES Chicago 2010, and SES London 2011.

Hayzlett leads The Hayzlett Group, an international strategic business consulting company focused on leading change and growth in businesses. Even when he’s away from his home in South Dakota, he can be seen in his trademark cowboy boots.

A QA With Jeffrey Hayzlett

Search Engine Watch (SEW) asked Hayzlett (JH) a couple of questions about his upcoming keynote. Here are our questions and his answers:

SEW: In your first best-selling book, “The Mirror Test”, you ask the questions that most business managers are afraid to ask. Why are most business managers so frightened to thoughtfully yet aggressively evaluate, deconstruct, and then reconstruct their business?

JH: Because they don’t want to ask the hard questions. It’s easier to put the blinders on and do business as usual, but “doing business as usual” isn’t getting it done anymore. A business manager needs to act as a Change Agent to save their company. They should be willing to fog the mirror, ask the hard questions and be prepared to continuously question,

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2270684/Jeffrey-Hayzlett-to-Keynote-at-SES-Toronto-2013

5 Content Lessons & SEO Opportunities From Bloomingdale’s

Bloomingdale’s is a leader in fashion in the brick and mortar world. But how does a store with history back to the 1800s adapt to the new online world? Let’s look at a few tactics Bloomingdale’s uses in content marketing to find a few SEO opportunities.

Content Marketing Lessons

1. Solve a Problem To Make a Sale

Finding the right jeans, for many women, is like finding a diamond in the rough. Bloomingdale’s understands its customers and made that search easy with an interactive Denim Seeker feature.

Not only does it describe why each jean was selected, but it uses real women, showing a keen understanding of its customers and the larger discussion of body image in fashion and pop culture.

2. Stay Fresh, Stay Relevant To Customers and Search Engines

Bloomingdale’s Guide To a Fashion-Packed Life, with interactive features and fun, flirty copy is updated monthly to adjust with the season.

This helpful guide for the fashionista is also fresh content for the search engines. The “What to Wear Where” section shows how product descriptions should be: engaging, personalized, and ending with clear calls to action.

SEO Opportunities

3. Finish What You Start

Bloomingdales put together a long list of fabulous designers. It’s the first item in their navigation bar. However, clicking on a designer name leads to a plain results page without any context.

Bloomingdale’s SEO opportunity is to include descriptive content about the designer to add interest and weight. Pages like this, if not handled with best SEO practices, could fall under Panda.

4. Look But Don’t Touch?

Visuals are amazing tools to pique interest and sell clothes. As Pinterest’s traffic generating reports prove, images are powerful.

However, usability is important too. If a product is featured in a lookbook or

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2270333/5-Content-Lessons-SEO-Opportunities-From-Bloomingdales

Guest Blogging vs. Guest Posting – Imagine A World Without Links

For several months now debate has continued about the merits of guest posting, the relationship between content and links, backlinks, publishers and signature links, guest posting, and comments.

It’s sad to read articles about the decline in the importance in guest blogging. It’s pure drivel and the irony is not lost on many a marketer. All this does is confuse people and tie in two separate discussions that should remain independent in many ways but are, however, intrinsically tied with a black hat ribbon.

It’s time to shed a little clarity on the subject in a simple format.

The Confusion

In the run up to Penguin 2.0 people have talked about two aspects of guest blogging:

Spam, backlinks, comments, and irrelevant content and outreach.
Content marketing strategies and guest blogging and outreach.

We all know that Penguin 1.0 was aimed to stop people “gaming the SEO” system. As I have mentioned in several past posts we subsequently witnessed a huge shift toward content marketing. Guess what? Guest blogging became an even more important part of many a content marketing strategy.

The dark side of SEO began to cast a wider shadow over the content marketing world with an even steeper rise in blog comment spam, links, and dubious and irrelevant requests to webmasters and blog owners to consider crap guest posts.

When people talk about Penguin’s evolution and discuss guest blogging and Google publisher paranoia, it’s important to remember that we’re talking about Point 1 above. The conversation should focus on spam and dodgy backlinks, irrelevant content marketing, and spam networks.

We aren’t talking quality, consistent and relevant content on quality publications.

A World Without Links

Let’s imagine for one moment that we had a world without links. Publishers went back to print material. Do you think people wouldn’t write for this magazines and publications and

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2270338/Guest-Blogging-vs.-Guest-Posting-Imagine-A-World-Without-Links

Ecommerce Title Tags: Top 5 Ways to Increase Clicks

Much has been written about the value of title tags, the most important of all SEO attributes. What’s often highlighted are the dos and don’ts in terms of syntax. From a pure conversion and marketing perspective, however, there is a lot of additional value to be squeezed out of title tags.

Ecommerce businesses have already begun to differentiate themselves within the search engine results pages to steal more clicks from the competition. To do so, they have looked at title tags as another marketing platform – to convey offers, details on what’s inside (the site), to reinforce the brand’s value proposition, and to position by pricepoint.

1. Keyword Placement – Exact Match, Listed First

Keywords should be placed as exact match, starting with the most important term and following with the brand at the end. (If the brand is in the domain, this is already going to be a known match for the query.) Titles must be less than 70 characters; any term after this length is completely ignored.

Search engines read terms exactly as they are written, this means singular and plural are considered different terms and word order matters. By writing out key terms as exact match “emerald dresses” vs. “casual emerald cotton dresses” in the title tag, the page will more likely match the broader term.

In doing so, the site is giving the page better chances of being listed higher on the page in the results, which correlates with increased click-through rates. This also reassures searchers of the likelihood they will find product matching their query.

In a search for “popcorn maker,” the first result is a company’s name, followed by an Amazon category. (Unfortunately beating out Amazon in results is very difficult.) The first ecommerce result is

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2270335/Ecommerce-Title-Tags-Top-5-Ways-to-Increase-Clicks

Google’s Top Charts Offer Engaging Visuals for Popular Searches Over Time

Google has launched Top Charts, allowing users to visualize and share the most-searched people, places, and things in more than 40 categories, all the way back to 2004.

Derived from Google’s Knowledge Graph, the data is featured in Google Trends and updates dynamically. Users can choose from categories such as actors, animals, and athletes to scientists, software technology and sports cars.

Here’s what Top Charts looks like when you land there:

Google Top Charts are sharable, too. Users can embed select charts that allow others to explore the data and share again.

Here’s a couple interesting comparisons from searches in 2013 versus 2004 using those embeddable charts. Just click on any one of the trending searches within the embedded chart for more stats.

Google Checkout Going Out of Business in 6 Months

Google Checkout will be retired in six months, Google has announced. The service, which has been used by many web merchants as an alternative to PayPal and has been the default payment option for Google Play developers, is going away Nov. 20, 2013.

All Google Play developers will continue to be supported – or rather assimilated – to Google Wallet, according to the announcement.

For web merchants who need an online payment processing solution, Google has partnered with Braintree, Shopify, and Freshbooks, all of which are not free services. The partnerships, according to Google, have been made to offer merchants “discounted migration options.”

Google is also offering a “Google Wallet Instant Buy” solution as a “fast buying experience” for shoppers who use Google Wallet. An Instant Buy API is provided for merchants to start developing against for websites or Android apps.

Merchants will now also be able to take advantage of the Wallet Objects API to better engage with customers by offering loyalty programs, special coupon offers and more.

For shoppers, the experience hasn’t changed. Google Wallet will still be active to make purchases on Google properties as well as merchant apps and websites, as usual.

Will this impact your business? Is six months too short of a notice to take action? Let us know in the comments.

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269990/Google-Checkout-Going-Out-of-Business-in-6-Months

With Rich Pins, Pinterest Begins Working Better With Brands

Pinterest has received its first significant update with how pinned images appear on the website. Called “Rich Pins”, these images that are pinned contain a host of more information right from the originating image site, such as product purchase information or ingredient listings for recipes.

Pinterest has detailed several types of pins that have added information on them, including product pins, recipe pins, and movie pins. But this move is really seen as Pinterest working better with brands who get their products pinned frequently, and gives Pinterest users who see those pinned images better information about where the product can be found and purchased.

This should hopefully also help the issues of some product images being uploaded directly or from a site that later removes the image, making it difficult for people to track down more information about the product in the image.

Pinterest has a huge number of big name brands who were part of this launch, including eBay, Walmart, Sephora, and Target.

While the new Rich Pins don’t seem to be directly monetized, it does raise the question of whether we will see these types of product pins somehow result in revenue being earned by Pinterest. They have had a few rough attempts at monetizing that caused pushback from pinners, but as a business model, Pinterest will need to look at how to earn revenue from their business.

If you’re a website owner who gets many of their images pinned, you can include specific meta tags to those image pages to have that information included on the Pinterest pin pages. You can find the developer information page for Rich Pins here and test them with the validator.

If you have pins that have been previously pinned to Pinterest, those images can be converted

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269604/With-Rich-Pins-Pinterest-Begins-Working-Better-With-Brands

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