Central Perk: SEOptimise

marți, 4 octombrie 2011

SEOptimise

Quick Poll: Is Google AdWords Remarketing a) Great for ROI or b) Annoying?
How to Use the New Delicious for Link Sharing
Top SEOptimise posts in September…

Quick Poll: Is Google AdWords Remarketing a) Great for ROI or b) Annoying?

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 09:41 AM PDT

There’s lots of mixed opinions on how useful Google AdWords remarketing is – so I thought it would be useful to run a quick poll to see how these are divided:

I’ll update this later in the week with the results – and if you have any comments please feel free to leave them below.

How to Use the New Delicious for Link Sharing

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 03:05 AM PDT

Bookmarks are now links. The artist formerly known as social bookmarking site Delicious.com has been relaunched by the new owners Avos, run by the former founders of YouTube.

The new site is clean, simple and image oriented.

Obviously Delicious has learned from the many image bookmarking sites out there that have sprung all over the Web in the recent years. On the other hand the new site focuses on social sharing and commenting as well.

The most important change is probably the new curation feature called “stacks”. Users can contribute so called “playlists for the web” [sic!]. A stack contains several links and images about one topic usually.

Said that there are also many features that have disappeared. I have tried to compile a list of both new features that have been added and old features that have been discontinued.

New Features

stacks (user curated groups of links)
one-click saving of links
two word tags with a blank space
tags separation by commas
“my inbox” with shared links
profile pictures (avatars)
featured stacks and links on home page

Old features missing

individual tag cloud
bookmark counts per tag in the sidebar
searching bookmarks in “your network”
subscribing to tags
blog/website widgets with bookmark count
news “floating around the Web”
Twitter integration

I think another main difference comparing the old and new Delicious is that now it’s about sharing links while in the past it was about saving bookmarks for yourself. So Delicious attempts to compete with big link sharing services like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I know they are called officially social networking but from a technical point of view the services are about sharing links. Linkless updates are allowed of course. Delicious focuses just on the links. This may be the remaining difference.

The new Delicious is less an aggregated bookmark collection and more a both curated and editorial publication.

There are no popular bookmarks anymore, there are “featured links”. The editorial team attempts to make Delicious appeal to the broad public as they push topic like politics, travel or entertainment. Until now Delicious was mostly used Web professionals who saved web development or design resources.

Also they want to stand out by making people subscribe to curated groups of links aka stacks like you can subscribe to a YouTube channel.

So it seems quite obvious to me that Delicious can once again be of use for getting website traffic. Also it seems to me that it takes less effort in the long run to get visitors to you site. Stacks can be established once and then once you get a few subscribers you can add a new link from time to time.

It’s not yet clear what the criteria are to get promoted to the frontpage.

I guess it’s mostly

potential mass appeal
visual attractiveness
a non-technical topic

as of now.

People can subscribe to your stack or follow it. New links show up on top so you can share your stack more than once and people will treat it like a link blog. In a way Delicious attempts to compete with Tumblr where many blogs are just link collection about a certain topic.

A user who has quickly grasped how to create useful stacks is sanclementejoe. He has created three stacks about SEO two of them I’d like to recommend: Best SEO resources and Google Webmaster Tools Guides. I have created a stack about SEO 2.0 myself so you can check this one out as well. Most other of the by now 150+ SEO related stacks are self-promotional in nature and either mediocre or downright spammy so there is still plenty of room to stand out.

Of course other more popular topics have more chances of getting decent exposure on Delicious as SEO is a niche topic even among the typical Delicious users. Also as I mentioned above Delicious wants to get out of the technology ghetto.

Choose a visually appealing topic.

Articles about SEO already fail here as most of them do not have inspiring imagery. Most of them use screen shots and diagrams. So arts or photography are probably good choices to get some editorial love.

To me the goal is always targeted traffic not the casual traffic of thousands of people who don’t care about a topic but the few dozens that really do. The new Delicious has potential to provide the people who care with the resources collection they seek and the content providers with the visitors they are after. As of now though the sharing features are rudimentary. There is no auto-suggest feature to address your followers when sharing links or stacks so you have the remember the exact user name.

You can’t share with all your followers.

You can’t even share with your followers at all, beacuse right now Delicious only displays the people you are following, not those you follow. I see only a 12 or so of them while I have at least a hundred people I follow on Delicious. Also at least half of them follows me as well as far as I remember.

So as of now you have to share your stacks on other social sites. That’s a good start though as a stack isn’t as ephemeral as a single link. You can share it today, a week from now again and in a month a third time. You’re not sharing just a link but a resource, a compilation of links.

For now I think a list of around 8 to 12 links is the best size for a stack.

Stacks that get updated continuously like a Tumblr blog could be also a viable and valuable option depending on the topic.

Personally I’m quite optimistic that Delicious will rise again. other than Digg where mismanagement led to a steady decline here two enthusiastic start-up entrepreneurs can fix it. The many years long impasse Delicious was subject to at Yahoo is over. The innovation is simple but useful. Link sharing is perhaps the most wide spread social networking activity right now and Delicious takes it to another level.

They are fixing the bugs, restoring missing bookmarks and features that have stopped working as well so they may retain many of their old users as well. Digg made the mistake of taking features away and insisting on removing them. Delicious is listening to its users.

Top SEOptimise posts in September…

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 12:46 AM PDT

September was a very busy month on the SEOptimise blog – so here’s a monthly recap, just incase you missed any of top posts – ordered by number of retweets.

Top 12 SEOptimise posts in September:

30 Google SERP Changes That Impact Your SEO Strategy by Tad Chef – 224 Tweets
74% of SEOs Buy (or Would Consider Buying) Links! by Kevin Gibbons – 172 Tweets
International SEO Strategy – Domains, Subdomains or Subfolders? by Kevin Gibbons – 149 Tweets
5 Low Profile/New SEO Tools You Should be Using by Matthew Taylor – 136 Tweets
Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes UK Brands Are Still Making by Kevin Gibbons – 124 Tweets
How to Write a Social Media Audit by Marcus Taylor – 124 Tweets
SEO Metrics Everybody Can Use – 124 by Daniel Bianchini – 122 Tweets
44 Google Webmaster Tools Resources by Tad Chef – 121 Tweets
Klout Score Optimisation or Influencer SEO by Tad Chef – 103 Tweets
Facebook Insights for Domains – Measuring Social Media Success by Shaad Hamid – 74 Tweets
How to Pass the Google Analytics Exam by Mike Browne – 62 Tweets
9 Ways to Sharpen Up Your Paid Search by Tamsin Mehew – 56 Tweets

Around the web…
In addition to the SEOptimise blog, we have also published the following posts around the web too:

How to Help SEO Customers Who Aren’t Always Right by Kevin Gibbons on Search Engine Watch – 357 Tweets
50 search marketing tips for beginners by Kevin Gibbons on Econsultancy – 297 Tweets
Four Ways to Optimise Social Sharing on Your Website by Marcus Taylor on State of Search – 32 Tweets
Ask the experts: Blogging to boost your career prospects with Kevin Gibbons on the Guardian

Lots more in October…
We’ve got lots more planned for October, so stay tuned. Plus in October, myself and Dan will be presenting at A4UExpo London and we’ll also be attending Econsultancy’s Jump conference – so make sure you see us there too!