In a typical organization, the social media tweets away in one department while content writers toil away in another. The social team links to fresh content, sure... and that’s about the extent of their interactions. But, at the end of the day, what you post and share on social media is content, and it’s time we start treating our social postings with the same amount of gravity as we do our content. Fact: social media posts are content. They may be abbreviated and (in some cases) more casual, but they’re content all the same. They’re written to get attention; they can be optimized f [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | How To | How To: Social Media Marketing | Intermediate | Search & Social

Building on last month's column, Five Linking Myths That Need To Go Away In 2013, one of the best and worst things about the Web is the never-ending supply of absolutely horrifying bad information that must be clarified. This helps keep people like me in business. I feel like a link doctor. A Link shrink. So thank you to all the folks who love to make completely unsubstantiated claims about links and linking strategies. Here's a few more things about links I have been told recently by content owners (who were told these things by their SEO or linking strategist). 1.  Anchor Text Will Ceas [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Link Building: General | Link Week

The UK has seen the closure of three high-profile, traditional retail brands in the last fortnight, following on from a dismal 2012 and an increased downturn for the sector since 2009. The recent closures had legacy presence in bricks and mortar on the UK high street (AKA: the UK's Main Street or Mall retail profile) in common: HMV, Blockbuster UK, and Jessops. All had been considered institutions in UK retailing. Since 2008, the list of once-stalwart bastions of the high street entering administration has been relentless: Base, the fashion retailer Toyzone Sleep Depot MK One ( [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Multinational Search

The Google Shopping gamble paid off – for both Google and e-commerce advertisers who ran product listing ad campaigns last quarter. A  report from Adobe and a study by RKG each highlighted consumer interest and advertiser opportunity in Google product listing ads. Today, Marin Software released findings showing that, after the transition of Google Shopping to an entirely paid model in October, advertisers increased their share of search budgets directed toward product listing ads by nearly 600%. Those advertisers were rewarded with higher click through rates and lower cost per click than [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Search Marketing: Shopping Search Marketing | SEM Industry: Stats | Stats: General | Stats: Spend Projections | Top News

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: With $14 Million More Q&A Site ChaCha Soldiers On Q&A is a great idea that really hasn’t worked. Although Yahoo Answers and a few others are still around — and Ask returned to Q&A as a way to differentiate from Google and general search — the segment is littered with dead bodies, including Facebook’s Q&A offering. The outlook for Quora in its current form [...] The BIG SMX West Preview: Why You Should Attend Search Engine Land [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

Q&A is a great idea that really hasn't worked. Although Yahoo Answers and a few others are still around -- and Ask returned to Q&A as a way to differentiate from Google and general search -- the segment is littered with dead bodies, including Facebook's Q&A offering. The outlook for Quora in its current form isn't particularly good, either. While human-powered Q&A should deliver better information in many instances than search, Q&A has largely failed to live up to that promise. Panda-related updates have also killed much of the traffic coming to these sites through SEO. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Search Engines: Help Engines | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines

Search Engine Land's SMX West search marketing conference is returning to San Jose on March 11-13, 2013. We've got a revamped, updated agenda, and have already confirmed more than 100 world-class speakers. If you're involved in marketing, PR, social media or any other customer-facing activity, you owe it to yourself (and your company's or client's bottom line) to attend the show. Here's why - then go register for your pass and save off on-site rates. 2013: New Trends, New Opportunities - And New Challenges For Online Marketers To borrow a famous slogan, "the hits just keep on coming." But fo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX | SMX & DMD Alerts | Top News

One area of mobile site design that is particularly important for mobile SEO is the blog. Blogs get special treatment in search engines, as sources of fresh content and easily-digested RSS feeds. In the mobile space, blogs are also one of the few areas where users expect to find lengthy text -- so, the pressure to abbreviate content for a small screen gets dialed back, making blogs even more useful for mobile SEO. Cobblers’ Shoes To take a closer look at the different approaches available to mobile marketers, I decided to look at the blogs of mobile phone manufacturers. As a writer cove [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | How To: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Search | Search Marketing: Mobile | SEO: Mobile Search

Many enterprise websites, particularly those associated with good brands, obtain lots of links to their home page without any focused link building effort. In some sense, you could say that they get these links "for free." Since this is the case, do these sites really need to have a dedicated link building effort in place? I thought you would never ask ... Algorithm Update Regularity Increasing I have been known to say that 2011 and 2012 marked a major transition in Google's spam fighting capabilities and mindset. Panda, Penguin, EMD, DMCA/Pirate, & Page Layout / Top Heavy Ads all had on [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Enterprise SEO

This weekend, DejanSEO noted Google may have stepped up its promotion of its simplified SEM offering for small businesses, AdWords Express, in Google+ as a way to "get more followers." AdWords Express has now been around officially since July 2011. However, it has seen a number of changes and refinements. Google initially rolled out this particular pitch in December, as we covered on our sister site Marketing Land:Is Google Using AdWords Express Budgets To Promote Google+? But now, small ads or promotions are appearing in Google+ pages: Google is apparently trying to cross-promote [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Top News

For local business listings, ranking well in Google search results is highly important. So, many proprietors attempt all sorts of things to get their businesses to rank well, and they often unintentionally break Google's rules in the process. Yet, there's no real means to get forgiveness once their listing is burned. Confusion surrounding this further exacerbates the issue. For years now, I've provided recommendations on how to improve one's local business rankings in Google. (Your business listing with name, address and phone may appear embedded in the regular keyword search results along wi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Local Search

Google has written a blog post documenting their legal process and approach to dealing with government requests for user and search data, highlighting a new section now available in Google that also answers more of these questions. Governments routinely ask search engines like Google for access to user data for various reasons. From search logs, to email accounts, to browser history, to purchase history. Google says they take each request incredibly seriously. They post transparency reports for all user data requests issued by governments around the world. In the U.S. they even document [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Business Issues | Google: Legal | Top News

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: A Year Later, Google’s Block Sites Feature Remains BlockedIn 2011, Google rolled out a feature allowing searchers to block web sites they don’t like from appearing in its search results, which drew great attention. That got dropped last year, when Search Plus Your World was launched last January. A year later, Google says there are no firm plans for it to return. Google’s [...] Search In Pics: Brin On NYC Subway, Google+ On Who Wants to Be a Mill [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

In 2011, Google rolled out a feature allowing searchers to block web sites they don't like from appearing in its search results, which drew great attention. That got dropped last year, when Search Plus Your World was launched last January. A year later, Google says there are no firm plans for it to return. Google's Blocked Sites Feature The block feature, which was released in March 2011, placed a small "block" link next to any result in Google's listings: Clicking on that link prevented any pages from that web site from appearing again in your results at Google. At the time, Googl [...]

Related Topics: 1 | Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: Search Customization | Google: Web Search | Top News

In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google+ On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Source: Google+ Yahoo China: Every Drop Counts: Source: Flickr Android Train: Source: Google+ Ukrainian Google AdWords Team: Source: Google+ Google's Sergey Brin On NYC Subway With Google Glass: Source: Twitter [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search In Pictures

When looking for opportunities for growth, most search marketers try to find ways to estimate how much they can scale up their paid search effort, and what would be the impact on ad spend, revenue volume, and efficiency. There are lots of different ways to go about this – one way I’d like to cover in this post is to leverage impression share data. We’ll see how to aggregate and dig into impression share data, and how to estimate incremental revenue opportunities based on those impressions missed due to insufficient budget. Due to the length of this post, I thought I’d cover those im [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Yandex Launches Experimental “Wonder” Voice Social Search App For The US Yandex, the company behind the leading search engine in Russia with a presence in Turkey, has taken a radically different direction to its search activities by launching a voice social search app called “Wonder” on Apple’s iOS platform for the US market. Described by the company as “experimental”, the app responds to users’ spoken queries [...] Four Ways You Can B [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

This white paper discusses: Why 77% of firms #1 goal is improving customer experiences How analytics and testing boost online relevance Download now » [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Sponsor Messages

Yandex, the company behind the leading search engine in Russia with a presence in Turkey, has taken a radically different direction to its search activities by launching a voice social search app called "Wonder" on  Apple's iOS platform for the US market. Described by the company as "experimental," the app responds to users' spoken queries and displays results from that user's social connections in a horizontal format which Yandex believes may be the best way to display social search for the future. One key aspect of the app is the historical nature of the data queried. "Wonder" is not [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Search Engines: Yandex | Search Features: Search By Voice | Top News

The best kept secret for saving time and improving results in AdWords may very well be AdWords Scripts, a lightweight automation tool that is easier to use than the API but more powerful than the standard interface and the AdWords Editor. As highly as I think of the AdWords UI (I helped build it for 10 years, after all), when I recently started working with accounts of big advertisers, I found myself frustrated at how manual, repetitive, and slow it was to generate custom reports and act on my findings. The API could let me automate to my heart’s content, but getting started meant wait [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | Google: AdWords