Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: New “Save To Foursquare” Button Reaches Into The Real World Publishers and developers: are you ready for another button (or buttons I should say)? Joining the Facebook, Twitter, +1 and StumbleUpon […]
Publishers and developers: are you ready for another button (or buttons I should say)? Joining the Facebook, Twitter, +1 and StumbleUpon button family are new “save to Foursquare” and “follow Foursquare” buttons. Users who click “save to Foursquare” (next to local content) will have that place added to their To-Do Lists. Publishers that have started […]
Yesterday there were several articles about how, if you asked Siri for help in finding a place to have an abortion, it wouldn’t show you abortion clinics. This is something of a false controversy. It’s really about understanding Siri’s modus operandi and its limitations rather than an expression of any political or social agenda. If […]
Tis the season…to wrap up budgeting and forecasting for 2012. As the year begins to draw towards a close, the hope is that your search engine marketing initiatives have an upward trend attached to them. According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook, SEO ranked as the fourth most effective B2B marketing tactic. For […]
The holidays are a wonderful time for conversion optimization, especially for e-commerce. I hear that even Santa is willing to accept third-party cookies, if they’re offered with milk. So in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d begin this column by sharing with you an adapted poem I first started playing with a few […]
Adobe has agreed to acquire digital marketing agency Efficient Frontier, which has a strong search marketing practice and technology to manage Facebook advertising. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal. The companies said Efficient Frontier would become a part of Adobe’s Digital Marketing suite, which includes technologies and services it acquired with web […]
Interestingly, Google made two big announcements right around the same time and one clearly overshadowed the other as far as attention from the press goes. On November 7th 2011, Google announced Google+ Pages for Business, which got everyone excited. But then Google also made a very significant algorithm update right before that called the “Freshness” […]
Ironically, the trade group that created the Cyber Monday concept had its own CyberMonday.com site lost in cyberspace this week. Lost, that is, if you tried to use Bing to find it. The site, along with some Black Friday deals sites, have been deliberately dropped from Bing as being too “thin” in content. Bing’s Version […]
It’s perhaps one of my favorite special Google logos ever, one honoring the 176th birthday of American novelist Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens. It shows the classic scene from The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, where Tom gets someone else to paint his Aunt Polly’s white picket fence. It’s Wide! It is also […]
It’s been about a year since Ask went back to its roots as a full Q&A site and at the end of last year, we offered up its most popular questions of 2010. In that story from 2010, note that Ask.com claimed 90 million users at that time, and in this year’s followup release of […]
Google might like to apologize to those of you who are just now getting accustomed to the new black menu bar that appears at the top of most Google properties. You know, the one that just launched at the end of June? Well, skip that. As the saying goes, what’s new is old. The black […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: AdWords Unveils New Top-Of-Page Bidding Options Google introduced a report in July that let AdWords advertisers compare performance between top-of-page ads and those appearing on the side (and now the bottom) […]
Google introduced a report in July that let AdWords advertisers compare performance between top-of-page ads and those appearing on the side (and now the bottom) of the page. Then it began letting advertisers know how high they have to bid to appear at the top. Now, there are a couple more ways to capitalize on […]
Facebook and the US Federal Trade Commission announced their formal privacy settlement today. Facebook and the federal agency each put their spin on it, with Facebook saying it was very similar to “agreements” previously reached with Google and Twitter: Recently, the US Federal Trade Commission established agreements with Google and Twitter that are helping to […]
Cadbury posted on their Google + page a picture of their latest milk chocolate bars named “Dairy Milk+ Bars.” The Milk+ bars come in two flavors, Sergey Brin & Larry Page – i.e. the co-founders of Google. As part of a social media experiment, Cadbury posted this on their Google + page, saying: Remember our […]
Google is bringing the blue dot indoors. Google Maps for Android 6.0 is going to start showing interior maps of airports, select malls and retail stores in the US and Japan. In Japan transit stations are also mapped. The floor plan data has been obtained from all the participating entities, which Google’s Steve Lee says […]
Previously in Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization, I covered how to use Google Analytics to choose the organic keyword phrases to focus on first in your optimization efforts: those keywords already contributing to the business goals. We then looked at how to use Google analytics to help “map” those keywords to existing […]
Google’s hiring process is pretty infamous. Multiple interviews. Sign-off at the very top. And those crazy interview questions! It’s a wonder that anyone gets a job. The folks at Jobvine have put together an infographic illustrating the hiring process at Google, along with some interesting employment stats about the company, including salaries and growth in employees, […]
Link building is hard work. Allow me to clarify that: Building legitimate links that have genuine value in search is hard work. Some folks don’t have patience for that hard work, so they turn to alternative means to acquire links. Sometimes they simply do ineffective work. Sometimes they seek links from junk sites that accept […]
Mindboggling. That’s the only word I can use to describe the fact that still today there are agencies and professionals who think that the right approach to generating keywords for international search marketing campaigns is to translate them. I have wasted so much of my time on this planet saying “Do Not Translate Your Keywords” […]
Observant users of Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool have noticed something odd in recent days — when you do an exact match search on certain terms, the volume reported is zero. Surely someone has been searching on terms like wine, iPod, and dogs. Indeed, a Google spokesperson confirms that it’s a bug. “We’re aware of a […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How To Get Started With YouTube Promoted Video Earlier in the year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the world’s second largest search engine. In June 2011, ComScore reported that in the U.S., […]
Earlier in the year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the world’s second largest search engine. In June 2011, ComScore reported that in the U.S., YouTube attracted 5.6 billion viewing sessions per month and the average U.S. visitor frequents the site 23 times a month with each visit lasting on average 26 minutes. And, just today, ComScore […]
A new directive by the European Commission may stop advertisers from leveraging users’s information when advertising on Facebook. The Telgraph reports that the EC is looking into the way that Facebook “eavesdrops” on users and how personal data is made available for ad targeting. This new legislation will be introduced in January and will be applicable […]
Online video viewership reached record levels in October, with YouTube passing the 20 billion views mark for the first time. That number represents a little less than 50% of all videos watched in the U.S., according to the latest statistics shared by comScore. U.S. Internet users watched an all-time high of 42.6 billion videos during […]
First out of the gate this year in the annual rush to declare search winners is Bing, who earlier today unveiled the top searches of 2011 at BingTrends.com. Bing.com also created an original video to recap the year in search, ending the clip with the Twitter hashtag #My2011. Video: Bing Originals: Decisions That Shaped 2011 […]
Google released a short video today highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It’s both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years. The video is also a nice follow-on to the look under the hood of search that […]
Many paid search advertisers send visitors to landing pages that sell specific products and/or services. Landing pages are not the only option available to PPC advertisers – there are many more things paid search advertisers can do in order to generate leads, sales or just plain old allow people/prospects/visitors to obtain basic information about businesses. […]
It’s holiday time and I thought I’d spread a little cheer by talking about negative reviews and how fun they are for local businesses. As Yelp says, “negative reviews can feel like a punch in the gut”. Even better, according to a recent study by Cone Communications, four out of five consumers have changed their […]
The data were coming in all weekend; retail sales on Black Friday broke records this year. Figures released by a varied group of sources, including IBM, the National Retail Federation (NRF), comScore, Channel Advisor and ShopperTrak all reported significant increases in Black Friday consumer spending. Lured by “doorbuster” deals and earlier opening hours, Black Friday […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google+ Is Slowly Invading Google’s Main Search Results Google+ content is slowly — but very surely — expanding its footprint inside of Google.com’s main search results. The latest integration comes via […]
Google+ content is slowly — but very surely — expanding its footprint inside of Google.com’s main search results. The latest integration comes via the rel=author tag that Google’s been supporting since the summer. Mike Blumenthal tipped us to this latest change, which may (or may not) still be in testing. Here’s how it works for […]
When creating a search-engine friendly website, do you follow the principles of user-centered design, usage-centered design, or both?
We’re already well into Black Friday. In many US stores the frenzy began last night at 10 pm or midnight (as opposed to the normal 4 am door-busting start time). People barely had time to overcome the sleep-inducing effects of L-tryptophan before getting out into the melee. And the word “melee” aptly describes the scene […]
When I first started using Google Analytics, my “goal” was to not run away screaming. The intense amount of information, seemingly disconnected, made understanding what I needed so overwhelming. In my last article,we talked about the basic reports you should watch as a beginner. This week, we’re going to work on how to make Google Analytics […]
SEOnomics (pronounced ‘see-oh-nomics’) is a term I conceived to meld SEO with economics, but in a style and fashion not usually covered by traditional SEO experts. SEOnomics interweaves elements of SEO (especially Web Analytics), buyer psychology and business administration to positively impact the economics of a business. When businesses move online, they need to migrate […]
Google aired a 90 second TV commercial on Thanksgiving Day during the Lions/Packers Football game. The commercial highlighted some of the features of Google +, focusing on the circles and hangouts features – but mostly on circles. The goal of the commercial was to communicate how Google + enables you to share as you would […]
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! Below is a collection of the 2011 Thanksgiving logos and themes from the search engine industry. Including Google’s logo , which went live a couple days ago, and logos from Yahoo, Bing, Dogpile, Ask.com, and others. Today will be a light coverage schedule on Search Engine Land. Enjoy the day and […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Evokes Holiday Nostalgia In New Stop-Motion Animation Ads If you know that Hermey the elf longs to be a dentist, that Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer’s girlfriend is named Clarice, and […]
If you know that Hermey The Elf longs to be a dentist, that Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer’s girlfriend is named Clarice, and if you can sing “Silver and Gold” as well as Yukon Cornelius, Bing’s new holiday ad campaign will be right up your alley. The Microsoft search engine’s newest video spots play off the classic Rankin/Bass Christmas […]