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joi, 26 mai 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Big Update to the SEOmoz Toolbar for Firefox!

Posted: 26 May 2011 08:04 AM PDT

Posted by adamf

I'm happy to share a bit of good news for all of you Firefox toolbar aficionados--we have just launched the MozBar V2 . This is the biggest update we have made to the toolbar in the past year, and includes a bunch of great new features, big and small.

Here's a quick rundown:

1. Enhanced link and keyword highlighting

We have always offered the ability to highlight nofollow links, but what about when you want to quickly see all of your followed links, or perhaps see the links that link to external sites? We now offer all of that. We also added the ability to highlight keywords to so you can easily assess the keyword on the page.

Highlight Keywords

2. Ability to create custom search profiles based on search engine, country, and/or region

Say, for instance, you have a pizza chain in three cities and you spend a lot of time checking local listings in each. Or, perhaps you're keeping tabs on the search results for the term "SEO" in 5 different countries. This new feature allows you to save up to 10 search engine profiles that you commonly use and quickly open and compare the results for each. Just run a search from your favorite search engine, and the SERP Control Panel will open up on the top right of the page. Select a profile to open that search in a new browser window.

SERP Control Panel

Click Add a New Profile to create a new search engine profile, and choose a name can find it easily.

AddSearchProfile

3. CSV Export from your SERP result pages

On the same control panel, you also have the ability to export that page of results, along with all of the high-level link data shown in the SERP overlay.

CSV Export for SERP Data

4. IP Location at a glance

You will now notice a new button with a flag that shows up in the toolbar as you surf the web. This new toolbar addition shows the country where this site is hosted. Click on the flag to see more details about the location and IP address. If you want to learn more, click on the IP to access WhoIs information.

IP Location Flag

5. A lot of other improvements to get you the data you want faster

A new dropdown in the domain metrics section of the toolbar lets you switch between root domain and subdomain metrics

Domain Type Selection

Link counts in the toolbar are now clickable and will take you straight to Open Site Explorer

Link to Domain Metrics

The Page Analysis button (with the magnifying glass icon) now allows you to jump to the data you want directly
- Page Elements: tags and metadata straight from the page source
- Page Attributes: detailed information about the page, including data like page load time, outbound link counts, and HTTP status codes for the current page and any redirects that directed you to the current page.
- Link Data: All of our top link metrics from our Linkscape index

Analyze Page Menu

Quicker access to make your browser look like the search engine of your choice and see your site like the search engines do. In your settings, just go to Browse As, and select a search engine to automatically set your user agent string, turn off javascript, and turn off your images. A handy overlay will let you return to normal browsing with one click.

Browse As Menu

Do You Like Movies?

If you want an even clearer picture of what is available in the toolbar, Cyrus has created an all new screencast walking through the top features of the toolbar:

Many thanks to those of you who have shared your suggestions and feedback for toolbar improvements. Without you, most of these features would never have been conceived. If you have more ideas for features you would like to see included in our next update, please visit our feature request forum and let us know what we can do to make the toolbar even better.

P.S. For those of you who prefer Chrome to Firefox, we are just starting work on a big update for Chrome as well. Keep an eye out for it in the coming months.

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4 Facebook Marketing Tactics You Might Not Know About

Posted: 25 May 2011 03:25 PM PDT

Posted by jennita

So you think you have Facebook all figured out. You have your fan page with a couple custom tabs set up, you've started an ad campaign and every one of your products on your site has the "like" button installed (which increases revenue). Easy peasy, this Facebook stuff is a cinch! Well you're right, it all is pretty easy to implement, but what else could you be doing? What other ways can you utilize Facebook (and its 500 million active users) to help market your company?

These four tactics we're talking about today aren't all new necessarily, but they're fairly new to me. Which got me thinking, if I didn't know about these (or why they were so great for inbound marketing) how many other people also don't know. I'm not trying to claim that if I don't know about it, no one does, because clearly there are people already using them. But the question is... are you? If not, could or should you be? Let's dig right in and take a look at these four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about (but now you will).

1. Facebook Insights For Your Website

Yes, you read that right. Now, I'm sure you have all seen Insights for your fan pages, but did you know that you could get Facebook Insights for your website? This is a great way to get information about content people are sharing from your site, user demographics, likes and other goodies. We recently set this up and were quite surprised at how much data you could get. Here's a quick blurb straight from Facebook:

Facebook Insights for Domains offers a consolidated view of key metrics for any website, even those that have not implemented Facebook Platform. For example, if a user links to your site in their Facebook status message, that data is included in the analytics for your domain. You can access sharing metrics and demographic information per domain and per URL so you can optimize your content for sharing and better tailor your content to your audience.

First off, it's super easy to set up. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click the green "Insights for your Website" button in the upper right hand corner. You'll get a pop up box like the one below, then you just simply add the meta tag inside the <head> tag of your site.

Add Facebook Insights to your website

Once you have this in place, the next time you go to the Insights page, you'll not only see your fan pages, but you'll also see your website show up as an option. Below are a couple views of the data Facebook gives you about your site.

This view shows the organic shares of our content by days

This view shows the demographics on people who have liked our content. WHOA!
Facebook demographics

Additional information:

Official Insights page on Facebook
How To Activate Facebook Insights for Your Website from HubSpot
Facebook Launches “Insights For Your Domain” from All Facebook

2. Facebook Comments

I'll be honest here, I was a big skeptical about why anyone would want to use Facebook comments... that is, until I saw it in action. Let me just walk you through my reaction the first time I posted a comment on TechCrunch which now uses Facebook comments.

1. This is cool, it looks like my comment will get posted to Facebook. Hmm, I wonder what that means really?

2. Cool! It means my comment showed up on my wall.

3. But wait... what? It also showed up in my friend's feed! This is what my boss, Jamie saw in his feed:

4. Within minutes, my boss and husband replied to my comment on Facebook. But not only did their replies show up on Facebook, they also showed up in the TechCrunch post. Whoa... imagine the possibilities!

What makes Facebook comments so great:

Your comments get read by a lot more people.

Neither my boss or husband would have ever read that simple comment I made on TechCrunch. But because it showed up on Facebook, they saw it and replied right then and there. TechCrunch ended up with three comments which they would have only gotten one in a different commenting system. Hello UGC!
Cuts out a lot of spam!

Facebook does all the work of figuring out if a real person is commenting or not. The person has to be logged in to Facebook in order to comment, so you don't get anonymous users. Obviously there are some drawbacks to this since not everyone has an account (the horror!), but you could offer multiple ways to comment like TechCrunch does.
Simple comment moderation

Facebook makes moderation pretty darn easy. You have quick access to edit, ban and subscribe yourself to certain feeds.

Additional information:

3. Local Business Listings

If you're a small business owner or local business, you may have already noticed these random Facebook pages showing up for your company. These are pages automatically created by Facebook. Initially I was pretty annoyed by these, but then realized you could utilize them for your advantage. Let's take a look at an example of a bar in NYC.

Run a search for "billy marks west" and you'll see one of these pages in the SERPs

Ok so these pages can rank for your branded name, which could help you take over a SERP for your name. The crazy part though, is that Facebook lets anyone (yes... anyone) edit these pages.

Sure it's a little crazy that the edit button is open to everyone, but if you keep it on your radar and remember to check the page often, you can ensure the information doesn't get changed incorrectly.

Facebook is trying to get updated information about all types of locations, including cities. For example, when I went to the New York, New York Facebook City page, I got a pop-up asking me to edit it.

This page shows 3 of my friends have checked in at the MoMA

Which led me to the "community edit" page that asks me to add detail about New York City. Whoa... so I can add information about New York? Again, imagine the possibilities.

Of course, this could also lead to people adding incorrect information, trolling your company and many other negative things. But if you keep your local page up-to-date and keep track of the edits, you have yet another page in your marketing arsenal!

Additional Information:

Anyone have a good post about this I could link to? :)

4. Facepile

I'm going to be honest here, I sometimes just like to yell out "Facepile!" It's just a fun word to say. :) Ok, ok I'll get back on the subject at hand. You may not know the name for it, but I'm sure you've all seen something the image below before, right? Facepile is the plugin that displays photos of your friends (as long as you're logged into Facebook) who like the particular website you're on.

But have you thought about taking this one step further and adding Facepile to a conversion page? Just how much do you think your conversions could increase if users saw their friends smiling faces right before they signed up for or purchased something? Foursquare does a great job of this if you go to one of their location pages not logged in.

I went out looking for other great conversion pages that use Facepile and I ran across the MailChimp sign up page. Sadly there's a big huge "white space" area which could probably benefit from adding this feature. Here's a (horrible) mock-up of what it might look like if they added Facepile to that bare area.

Additional Information:

Official Facebook Facepile developer page
If you can find other great information about using Facepile, please let me know and I'll link to it

Now there you have it. Four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about. For me it's always fun to find these "hidden" gems, especially when there right there staring you in the face. What other tactics do you use that may not be very well known?

This post was originally a presentation I did for our meetup in NYC earlier this month. Feel free to check it out on Slideshare:

4 Facebook Marketing Tactics You Should be Using

View more presentations from Jennifer Lopez

Rand, Rhea Drysdale and Avi Wilensky also spoke that night and you can find their presentations here:

Rand - Exploring the New Opportunity in Google's Social Search Features
Rhea - Supplemental Hell - How to Fix "New" Indexing Issues
Avi - Google Instant – For Keyword Research, Content Generation, and Competitive Analysis

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Five Days Left to Submit Your Nomination for the Citizens Medal

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, May 26, 2011

Five Days Left to Submit Your Nomination for the Citizens Medal

For over 40 years, the Presidential Citizens Medal has recognized Americans who have "performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens," and is our nation's second-highest honor. President Obama is asking for nominations for the 2011 Citizens Medal, and if you know someone who has performed exemplary deeds of service outside of their regular jobs, be sure to nominate him or her before May 30, 2011.

Learn more about the Citizens Medal and submit your nomination.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama is led through a hall outside of the House of Commons by the Rt Hon John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, during a tour of Parliament in London, England, May 25, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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How to Turn a Google Penalty into Great Linkbait, by J.C. Penney

Posted: 26 May 2011 02:13 AM PDT

Yesterday it was reported that J.C. Penney have showed signs that their Google penalty has now been lifted.

The original penalty was imposed at the end of Feb for “shady SEO practices”. Searchmetrics have published a report to show that organic search traffic is back on the rise again for J.C. Penney:

JC Penney Google Penalty

Obviously we can only speculate about the SEO activity that J.C. Penney have employed in order to get this penalty turned around so quickly. The obvious steps would be to clean up their backlink profile and remove any paid or suspicious links and then submit a re-inclusion request (which has been confirmed by Matt Cutts).

So when analysing J.C. Penney’s recent backlink history, wouldn’t you expect to see a drop in links?

JC Penney Google Penalty

No! Majestic SEO shows that they’ve actually had a significant increase in recent links. So what does this mean? Maybe they’ve bought more links :) Or perhaps they’ve had a very successful PR campaign? In fact, that is much closer to the truth!

So even when it’s assumed they’ve made large efforts to remove links, they’ve actually increased volumes by considerable amounts. But it’s not just about numbers - if you look deeper into the quality of these new links, you’ll find that the quality of these are very high. There are many global media and newspaper websites covering the story, along with hundreds of authority blogs such as Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy, Techcrunch etc – as well as the huge number of SEO blogs picking up on this.

That’s all without looking at the PR value of how much coverage and brand visibility they’ve generated from this. Being from the UK, I’ve got to admit – I’d never even heard of J.C. Penney before this.

So what can we learn from J.C. Penney?

Admit your mistakes – it’s great linkbait! It would have cost them a fortune to buy links and coverage like this from the NYTimes otherwise!
Clean up your act, quickly – figure out why you were banned and fix it. In this case it appears to be more of a manual penalty than an algorithmic one, so it’s likely to require a re-inclusion request to make sure Google are aware that you’ve corrected any issues and can reconsider the penalty.
Make sure everyone’s aware when ban is lifted = more links! They didn’t even have to leak the news this time, there’s so many SEOs watching the outcome of this one that any change in rankings/traffic was always going to picked up on.

The end result: J.C. Penney have set a great example of how to turn a negative into a positive.

They’ve cleaned up their backlink profile, replaced these with a huge volume of very high quality media and blog links which are far more natural and defensible – and are likely to return to Google in a much stronger position than ever (certainly long-term).

30 SEO & Social Media ROI Analytics Resources

Posted: 25 May 2011 06:23 AM PDT

ROI or Return On Investment is on everyone’s lips these days. It’s become so widespread that you could call it a buzz word now. Although its meaning gets a bit diluted, I have to admit that I use it sometimes outside its strict sense myself.

Originally ROI meant the extra monetary return, while increasingly it may mean any value that you get back for something you invest in, be it time, effort or money.

With SEO, and especially social media, ROI has become very fuzzy.

Everyone wants it but it’s not so obvious, so more and more people come up with their own notion of how the actual ROI of SEO and social media might look, and how you can measure it.

Over the recent months I have collected a multitude of ROI-related resources that often introduce new concepts of it or try to adapt the old definition to the new areas the metric isn’t native to.

SEO ROI

While SEO and analytics are closely related, for years many people focused on old school SEO metrics like rankings and traffic, instead of hard core business metrics. More recently there is a growing trend to measure SEO success in ROI. It’s not easy but it’s not impossible. Still, it’s not as exact as in other areas. Nonetheless we can already clearly see that some aspects of SEO have a tangible ROI.

Social Media ROI

The spectre of social media ROI has been among us for years, but there are many issues with measuring social media as a business metric. There are many ways to deal with the ephemeral character of some social interactions online. You can either just focus on them, or you can try to redefine ROI for an actual social media campaign as something other than actual revenue.

Analytics and ROI Metrics

So how do you actually measure the actual ROI? What factors can be measured? There are many approaches. Some use common tools like Google Analytics, while others depends on their own ways to collect data and calculate ROI. Additionally you have to dig deeper than the numbers. You have to understand how they affect your business.

“ROI of Human Relations”

The obsession with ROI has also created some considerable backlash among Web professionals. Some of them already question ROI as it is or parody it, while others use the term in a metaphorical sense.

So as you can see, ROI is not always what you expect it to be, and without measuring ROI or anything else that lets you determine the actual value of what you do on social media and in search, you can end up wasting your money.

Even in cases where the investment is still higher than the benefits you can measure, now you can at least determine the long term or soft factors of your investment in SEO and social media.

On the other hand, you can’t measure everything – especially on social media, where monetary metrics often collide with human relationships you can’t easily quantify. There is also the question of whether you should quantify relationships; this is one you have to ask as part of your social media strategy.

* Image by Gunni Cool.

joi, 26 mai 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

1. Facebook Insights For Your Website

2. Facebook Comments

3. Local Business Listings

4. Facepile

Five Days Left to Submit Your Nomination for the Citizens Medal

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Persoane interesate

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joi, 26 mai 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

1. Facebook Insights For Your Website

2. Facebook Comments

3. Local Business Listings

4. Facepile

Five Days Left to Submit Your Nomination for the Citizens Medal

SEOptimise

SEOptimise

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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