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We know your New Year’s celebration may not be or should not be over yet. Most of us are still probably recuperating from last night’s revelry. So, what come’s after New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day celebrations, bowl games and lots and lots of food? How about starting to plan the things that we want to do this year? The bad habits that we’ve been trying to break, or the things that we’ve always wanted to do. You know what I’m driving at – it’s time to make our New Year’s resolution. So, what’s it going to be this year? What are the New Year’s Resolutions that you are going to break this year? More link love, comments and retweets to SEJ posts perhaps? If you have not idea yet what would be on your list or if this is the first time that you’re going to make a New Year’s Resolution, you might want to check out this New Year’s Resolution Guide which also features professional advice from University of Maryland experts. Another good guide is this guide on How to Make a New Year’s Resolution and Keep It . It might help you fulfill your New Year’s resolution in 2010. If after reading those guides and you still couldn’t start writing your list, here are some good examples of specific New Year’s resolution which seems feasible, practical and doable. 12 Social Media New Year’s Resolutions for 2010 by our friends at Search Engine Land would be most useful for social media companies and gives advices such as spending more of traditional ad budget improvment of customer service, to training and educating of works, among others. Five New Year’s Resolution for SMBs – tips that can serve as sample resolutions that can guide SMB’s social media and online strategies Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions – gives practical New Year’s Resolution which are geared for personal improvement. Popular New Year’s Resolution – if you’re interested to find out what other people are putting on their New Year’s Resolution, here are the most popular ones. And while you’re at it, you might want to check out some New Year’s quotes from the QuoteGarden . So, there you go some resources that can help you find New Year’s Resolutions online. You might also want to check out the top 10 tools sticking to your New Year’s resolution. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Find New Year’s Resolutions
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In what could be a preview of an impending battle between Facebook and Google in the coming days, Facebook has beaten Google as the most visited website on both Christmas Even and Christmas Day, says a tweet from Hitwise’s Twitter account. It was the first time that Facebook become the number one site during Christmas Day. Last year it was Google as the most visited site with Facebook closely following behind. But come to think of it, it is not surprising for Facebook to be visited more both during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day since majority of people are spending their online time during those days probably greeting their Facebook contacts, sending Christmas wishes and greetings to their loved ones, friends and family who are not with them on those days. Facebook after all is more of a communication tool than Google. What made the event surprising was due to the fact that Facebook has been lagging behind both Google and Yahoo! Mail all through out the year in terms of site visits. It only goes to show that email is a thing of the past during these days, as Facebook and perhaps other social sites like Twitter are the more preferred ways of communicating online especially during special occasions. Most importantly it is also quite surprising that online users still visited Facebook despite the slew of privacy issues that came out during the year. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Facebook Beats Google as the Most Visited Site on Christmas
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Entrepreneur or SMB marketer drawing up an advertising budget for 2010? Try this massive list of over 30 ad networks I’ve compiled while browsing around the web. I’ve tried to focus on those that are SMB friendly with self-serve platforms. I’ve ignored CPA networks and tried to eliminate advertising aggregators, and the search engines. Particular demographics / audiences 1. FARK.com – 18-28 year old men – Flat rate text links sold on a weekly basis (through a redirect; they’re not for SEO points) 2. Facebook – The biggest social network has hyper precise targeting. Don’t overdo it though, or you’ll end up like I did once, targeting merely 20 people. 3. PlentyOfFish – The web’s second largest free dating site has an self-service ad platform 4. MyAds on MySpace.com – Self serve banners like Facebook, with similar demographic targeting 5. AdEngage – A variety of formats focused on humor and games 6. Canoe Klix – French Canadian contextual CPC on premium French Canadian sites 7. Adknowledge.com – Social network ads published on social games 8. Click-Share – A variety of demographic targeting options are available, including some not seen elsewhere such as household income, children in household etc. 9. Chitika.com – A focus on monetizing SEO traffic has made them attractive to retail advertisers. General – Most of these are available on a CPC basis, even if the ad format is banners 10. AdRoll.com – Offers help creating display ads, retargeting and other capabilities 11. BuySellAds.com – Blog banners, mostly 125
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Have you ever noticed how many bloggers and social media marketers just tell people that they should go out try social media? How you shouldn’t worry about learning social it? That you’ll learn it on the fly and everything will be fine. Well, I’m not one of those. It’s absolutely in your best interest to learn the basics of social media before risking your time and money. Jumping into social media without at least learning the basics could be a major disaster. It probably won’t ruin your company. It probably won’t ruin you. But it will be a waste of time. Why do I say that? Well an understanding of social media theory and fundamentals makes your strategy better. How, you ask? Well… 1. It Helps You Create a Starting and End Point Taking the time to learn social media fundamentals gives you a starting point. It helps you decide where you are and hopefully where you should go. If you don’t learn what the marketing technique is, how will you know what it’s capable of? How can you create goals and work towards them? Taking the time to explore social media and soak up as much information as possible gives you a better understanding of what social media can do and how to create a plan. 2. Knowledge Leads to Fewer Mistakes On social media, a misstep can spread just as fast as a good campaign and consumers can be less than forgiving. Learning how to interact and promote a business shouldn’t endanger the brand. Start with baby steps. Minimize the likelihood of something to go wrong. Learn as much as you can about web culture and online customer service. Online consumers expect something much different than offline customers. You should know how to deliver it. 3. Experience Comes With Time – Who Has the Time? Remember the common phrase, “don’t reinvent the wheel?” – Well don’t do it. Marketers have been testing and exploring social media theories and sharing them online. Why would you want to go through that powerful information and have to learn it on your own? You can test and explore and research your content, but we know that more often than not list posts go viral. There’s no need for you to take the time to test and explore that. Take advantage of other’s experiences to bolster your marketing. Don’t try to recreate or “re-find” what others have already shown works. Save your time for actual marketing. 4. Learning Keeps You From Getting Frustrated Think back to your childhood. If you’re anything like me, than math class was a horror. I’d sit there trying to do a problem and just not knowing how. After a few minutes of trying, I’d get frustrated and give up. It wasn’t until someone taught me what to do and explained to me why it is that way that I began to enjoy math. Social media is the same way. There are fundamentals and there are strategies that you should know and understand. Don’t allow frustration lead to you giving up. We know social media is a powerful marketing tool. Don’t let it go. 5. How Are You Investing In Something You Know Little About? It all comes down to money. How are you supposed to decide how much to invest in social media if you don’t know what it can do? Learn what you’ll need to invest, both time and money, before throwing resources at it. Have a plan and create a budget. This will help increase the likelihood of success. Information is key. To have a positive social media strategy you need to know as much as possible. That means both in regards to social media knowledge as well as strategies and fundamentals. How are others in your industry doing? Why did their campaigns work? How can you recreate their success without copying them verbatim? Is social media for you? If you don’t understand these fundamentals or have this information you’re marketing with a disadvantage. I’d love to know what you think. How are you learning social media? Where do you go for research and strategies? Are you learning from example or creating your own ideas? Check out Samir Balwani’s new social media guide at Training Social , a resource for anyone interested in learning social media marketing. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . 5 Reasons to Learn Social
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training-social
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Google’s announcement of personalized search for everyone has stirred a lot of mixed reactions from the search industry. Eric Schmidt’s interview on CNBC has even provoked various sentiments on privacy issues. I think Aaron Wall of SEOBook.Com has an excellent take on this one. Personally, I agree with Kalena Jordan’s conclusion on whether or not SEO can exist beyond personalization , in which she said: Personalization has been in place on Google for over 4 years. This isn’t a new algorithm, it’s simply a new delivery mechanism. It’s important to remember that a large number of Google users are logged in to a Google account of some kind when conducting searches anyway, so they won’t even notice the difference. The other thing to keep in mind is that personalization is all about relevance and usability. And then there’s the launch of Real-Time search results from Google (just a few days after the rollout of personalized search). So expect conversations your favorite social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to show up in your respective search results. However, I wasn’t surprise to see some questionable results in the early stages. But I won’t go on explaining what these two features mean for Search Engine Optimization. After a few weeks of reading experts’ views on the topic, by now you already know what it does for our users, what challenges it poses to us SEO’s, and what benefits Google gains out of these intriguing additions. Instead let me show you how we can still win the battle for search rankings with these new set of rules. Why don’t we explore our weapons in modern warfare? 1. Quality Content with Value – Ever since I started out as a SEO content writer 4 years ago, I’ve always been a believer in the “Content is King” school of thought. But SEO has evolved so much that great content may not be enough. Thus, you have the popular viral content and link baiting trends. I believe in today’s context, content should be beyond quality, relevancy and link worthiness. Let’s just say you’re a movie website and you want to drive visitors to your AVATAR page (oh Yes, It was phenomenal!). Typically, you’d be providing a brief synopsis of the film, movie ratings, and screening times. Will that be enough? Well you should throw in a video trailer, a listing of local cinemas in the area featuring the film, movie reviews from selected bodies like Rotten Tomatoes, tickets and seats reservation system, or maybe a list snack items your visitors might want to grab while watching (maybe that’s a bit too much, but hey it’s possible). You don’t have to be a one-stop shop website, but your site must be what your customers need and even more. Great content will not be merely something to read and understand. Great content will be something tangible, something that customers can act upon, something that entices emotion, something that is real and beyond just characters in a white space. 2. Increase ClickThrough Rate – Personalized search will mean effectively manipulating influencing your users to click on your listing. Of course you can always conduct your own tests and come up with your own tactics to exploit personalized search . Here’s one simple tip: improve your page titles and your meta descriptions. These elements will reflect how you’ll appear on the SERP’s. Your description should inform your customers who you are and what you can deliver. If you can add a call to action line in less than 160 characters of your description, you’re off on a great start. If you can capture your customers in the first 3 lines of your search listing, you’re definitely a mile ahead of the competition. 3. Brand & Online Reputation Management – When we do research on certain topics, we tend to look for sources coming from brands even though they might be beyond page 1 of our searches. In the same way we try to avoid clicking through listings which come from dubious providers despite their top positions in the results pages. The reason being – TRUST. People trust brands. People trust businesses, individuals, and groups who have made the effort of developing their brands and delivering no less than the best to their customers. You may have won the battle for the top rankings but if you’re sitting beside the big fish in your niche market, they’ll definitely choose the neighboring giant. 4. Get Active on Social Media – This goes without saying. Even before rumors of real-time search came to life, marketing, PR, and online professionals have taken advantage of social media to its fullest potential. Well for those who haven’t, now is the time to get cracking on social media optimization (SMO). If not for real-time search, then you’ve got more reasons to embrace social media in 2010 . It would be naïve for us to think that we didn’t see this coming. Personalized and real-time search was definitely the next step for Google (and probably for the rest of the search engines). And we, as SEO’s, are expected to rise up to the occasion to do what we do best – to quickly adapt to the environment and to deliver the right results. Dave is currently working as an SEO Analyst for Nurture3 , and online marketing company based in Dubai, leading a team of junior SEO?s optimizing in-house web projects. He is also the author of Click-Dubai.Com , which talks about the basic functions of organic search engine optimization and its importance in the Middle East & GCC markets. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How SEOs Win the War on Personalized & Real-Time
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Last week Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, put out a link on his personal blog and stated: Here’s how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing. It was a pretty shocking move by a member of a company that has seen most of its revenue come from Google . It was a move brought on by concerns over the search giants view on privacy. The comment was spurred by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt comments on privacy: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt told CNBC. “If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities Why are they watching and storing what we do? Data. The more data they can collect, the more they can personalize search. How does Schmidt feel about personalized search ? From his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load. Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt’s Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right… Personalized search can only happen with data collection, this is a reality. How does Google collect data ? Gmail and Google Accounts Adsense Adwords Google Analytics Google Chrome (browser and OS) Google Toolbar Android On and on and on… Their new love? Real Time Search data. This data comes in the form of APIs from places such as Twitter in some cases, and can give the engines much of the information they need to fuel time based elements in the ranking algorithm such as Query Deserves Freshness (QDF). Real time data allows them to pull in trending information, links, and pages linked from conversation without a crawl. Why stop there? Enter Goo.gl, Google’s URL shortener. What kind of information can you pull from a URL shortner? 1. What information people care enough to share – will likely be a huge signal if you are logged in 2. What information people are clicking on 3. Referral sources for differing pages that do not include Google Analytics The really strange component of this addition to Google’s product set is that it goes against what initially made them THE search engine, the interlinking web’s use in ranking. 301 or no, that loss of anchor text and the credit from direct citation are something that seem to be against everything the engine was founded on. However, they are everything the engine is moving towards. Data driven results. Eventually this data will not only mean your results being shaped by what you like, but also your social web. Think about this, if I am logged into Google and share 30 pieces of content and you click on 25 out of the 30, do you think this will begin to shape your SERPs? More involuntary personalization. Less of the web delivered. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Answers Privacy Questions with Call for More
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Keeping up with your social media activity may be exhausting. You have to be everywhere at the same time asking and answering questions, expressing your opinion, commenting, etc. SEJ tools feature called “ Personas ” offers a handy way to monitor your Twitter activity and profile popularity: 1. Start by adding a new persona: Go “ Social ” > “ Persona Manger ” and click “ Add a new persona “ Provide your persona details: your full name, your usual user name and password, your website, address and avatar: What you should see then is the summarized view of your persona: 2. Add your Twitter account: See that little link above your avatar that says “Add website”, click it and add your Twitter profile: ( Note: if your login details on Twitter are different from those you provided when adding the persona, you’ll be able to use a custom login information, so don’t worry ). Choose “Twitter” from the drop down list behind the “Add Website” link; Select the login type (either default or custom) and click Add. The tool will login to your Twitter account and analyze your Twitter activity to show: Your friends and followers; Your recent mentions; Your recent retweets, Your recent posts. The stats will be visualized in the form of a graph and a table (where you can compare your daily activity). Your Twitter posting activity: How many replied you receive : How many Retweets you get: How the number of your friends is growing: You will also be able to see daily change (isn’t it encouraging to tweet more?) visualized in a table: Now you can easily monitor your Twitter activity by day and see analyze the effect. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Track Your Twitter Activity & Popularity w/ SEJ
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