joi, 13 decembrie 2012

SEO Blog

SEO Blog


Top 10 Google Search Trends for the year 2012

Posted: 13 Dec 2012 04:41 AM PST

As the year 2012 has come to end, the Search Engine Giant Google had revealed the data for top trending searches in 2012. Whitney Houston’s is on top of the list followed by Gangnam style and Hurricane Sandy. The list is also categorised including images, people, movies, TV shows, airlines,...
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Top 1 SEO Tips for 2013

Top 1 SEO Tips for 2013


Top 1 SEO Tips for 2013

Posted: 12 Dec 2012 06:53 PM PST

Posted by Dr. Pete

If we’ve learned anything in 2012, it’s that Google isn’t letting up on low-value tactics. We’ve had the Penguin update, 13 Panda updates (so many that we needed a new naming scheme), and a crackdown on low-quality Exact Match Domains (EMDs), to name just a few. While I can’t tell you Google’s next move, I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty – there’s more to come. So, how can you protect what you’ve built in 2013?

I was going to write a long list of suggestions, but I realized that they almost all boiled down to just one idea. I’m not going to toy with you – my top tip for 2013 SEO is this:

1. DIVERSIFY

If at any point in 2012 you asked “What’s the best [X] for SEO?” (link-building tactic, tag, directory, etc.), you’re already in trouble. Any single-tactic approach is short-term at best. Real companies, real link profiles, and real marketing are rich with variety.

So, what does that mean, practically? I’m going to cheat a bit and split my one tip into five kinds of diversity that I think are critical to your SEO success in the coming years.

1A. Diversify Anchor Text

Let’s start with an easy one. We’ve all known for a while that overly aggressive inbound link anchor text was pushing the envelope, and the Penguin Update definitely reinforced that message. If every link to your site reads “buy best Viagra cheap Viagra today!”, it might as well read “spam spam spammity spam,” especially if it’s in a sentence like:

If you’re looking for the best price on the new iPad and iPad cases, then buy best Viagra cheap Viagra today! and get a free bag of Acai berries.

It’s not natural, and you know it. What’s the best way to make your anchor text seem “natural?” Stop obsessing over it. Yes, anchor text is a signal, but any solid link profile is going to naturally use relevant text and appear in the context of relevant text. If you want to tweak the text on some of your high-authority links, go for it, but I wouldn’t break out the spreadsheets in 2013.

1B. Diversify Your Links

Are guest posts the one true answer to all of life’s questions or are they a scourge on our fragile earth? To read the SEO blogosphere in 2012, it’s hard to tell. Any link-building tactic can be low quality, if you abuse it. The problem is that someone reads a tip about how guest posts make good links and then they run off and publish the same slapped-together junk on 15,000 sites. Then they wonder why their rankings dropped.

Nothing screams manual link-building like a profile that’s built with only one tactic, especially if that tactic is too easy. At best, you’re eventually going to be doomed to diminishing returns. So, take a hard look at where your links came from in 2012 and consider trying something new next year. Diversify your profile, and you’ll diversify your risk.

1C. Diversify Traffic Sources

There’s an 800-lb. Gorilla in the room, and we’re all writing more SEO blog posts to avoid talking about it. Most of us are far too dependent on Google for traffic. What would you do if something changed overnight? I know some of you will object  – “But ALL my tactics are white-hat and I follow the rules!” Assuming that you understood the rules 100% accurately and really followed them to the letter, what if they changed?

The more I follow the Algorithm, the more I realize that the changing search UI and feature landscape may be even more important than the core algorithm itself. What happens if your competitor suddenly gets site-links, or you’re #8 on a SERP that drops to only 7 results, or everyone gets video snippets and you have no videos, or your niche shifts to paid inclusion and you can’t afford to pay? Even if you’ve followed the rules, your traffic could drop on a moment’s notice.

You need to think beyond Google. I know it’s tough, and it’s going to take time and money, but if you’re dependent on Google for your livelihood, then your livelihood is at serious risk.

1D. Diversify Your Marketing

There’s been a very positive trend this year toward thinking about marketing much more broadly – not as a tactic to trick people into liking you, but as the natural extension of building a better mousetrap. I think this is at the heart of RCS (not to put words in Wil’s mouth) – if you do something amazing and you believe in it, everything you do is marketing. If you build crap and you know it’s crap, then marketing is sleight of hand that you hope to pull on the unsuspecting. You might score twenty bucks by stealing my wallet, but you’re not going to gain a customer for life.

Stop taking shortcuts and make a real resolution in 2013 to think hard about what you do and why it has value. If you understand your value proposition, content and marketing naturally flow out of that. Talk to people outside of the SEO and marketing teams. Find out what your company does that’s unique, exciting, and resonates with customers.

1E. Diversify Your Point Of View

I recently had the pleasure to finally see Michael Dorausch (a chiropractor and well-known figure in the local SEO community) speak. Dr. Mike arrived in Tampa for BlueGlassX and built his presentation from the ground up, using photography to tell stories about the neighborhood and local history. It's hard to explain in a few sentences, but what amazed me was just how many ideas for unique and original content he was able to find in less than 48 hours, just by having a fresh perspective and passion for the subject. I'd like to say I was inspired by the presentation, but to be totally honest, I think the emotion was embarrassment. I was embarrassed that he was able to generate so many ideas so quickly, just by coming at the problem with the right attitude.

In 2013, if you tell me your industry is "boring," be warned - I'm going to smack you. If you're bored by what you do, how do you think your prospects and customers will feel? Step out - have someone give you a tour of your office like you've never been there. Visit your home city like you're a tourist coming there for the first time. Get five regular people to walk through your website and try to buy something (if you don't have five normal friends, use a service like UserTesting.com). The New Year is the perfect time for a fresh perspective.

1F. Happy Birthday, Erica!

Ok, this has nothing to do with the post, but today is Erica McGillivray's birthday. If you don't know Erica, she's our Community Attaché here at SEOmoz. So, diversify your communications today and wish her a happy birthday.


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Why You Shouldn't Ignore Long-Tail Clients (Small Business Owners)

Posted: 12 Dec 2012 04:08 AM PST

Posted by David Mihm

Hopefully most of you have already read the news, but in case you haven’t, I am very excited to be a full-time member of the SEOmoz staff! The announcement came out as I was en route from Blueglass X in Tampa to BIA Kelsey’s ILM West show in Los Angeles. In fact, and I’m still trying to catch up on thanking everyone in my Twitter stream and on the original blog post.

Both conferences were excellent, but if you’ve never attended a BIA Kelsey show, it’s a completely different animal from conferences and seminars in the search industry. The conference contains very few “actionable tips that you can implement on Monday morning,” but that’s not the reason you attend. BIA Kelsey recruits executives from the major digital marketing technology and service providers to small businesses for extended 1:1 or 1:2 discussions with their analysts. By and large, these executives are surprisingly open about challenges they face, and although some sessions turn into sales pitches, the best ones give you real insight into the online marketing pain points and opportunities for small businesses across the country.

So, keeping that background in mind, I want to focus my first SEOmoz post on my #1 and #1a takeaways from the BIA Kelsey show. (There will be plenty of posts from me coming up over the next several months, and Rand’s excellent Whiteboard Friday last week will hopefully satiate you guys on local for the time being.)

Small businesses vs. Search marketing 

I have lived, breathed, eaten, slept, celebrated, and advocated small business internet marketing for the last eight years. But not even I realized until recently:

1) How large the disconnect between the search marketing industry and the small business community is.
1a) The size of the market opportunity for the consultants and agencies who can bridge this disconnect.

One of BIA Kelsey’s forecasts really crystallized this disconnect for me: their annual survey gauging the marketing mindset of the average small business owner. This survey breaks respondents into two categories: “core SMBs” and “plus spenders.” What is incredibly revealing for most people in our industry is the average annual marketing spend of these two groups: $3,000 and $82,600.

Note: these numbers are TOTAL marketing spend. Annually, not monthly. Even the “plus spenders” would have a hard time finding anyone on this list willing to take them on for less than a $5,000/month budget, assuming they were looking for an end-to-end, search-and-social-media monthly arrangement. The level to which this segment is being served by the broader search industry is substantial, but economics dictate that more established agencies tend to go after bigger fish.

On the other side of the spectrum, BIA Kelsey is one of the few companies out there who even considers the plight of the $250/month small business. And if you think $250 sounds like a small monthly budget, wait 'til you hear that these businesses actually spend closer to $100/month on their website and web presence (see slide 8)! This is the reality of operating a small business, though. Advertising costs for small businesses do not come from a corporate marketing budget; they come from family vacation budgets or college savings funds.

Why do I think the market opportunity is so large, then, for agencies who can serve these average businesses? Surely there is no margin in a stable of $250/month clients?

#1 You have virtually no competition for these clients

Jim Moroney of the Dallas Morning News candidly admitted that his newspaper had effectively “priced out” most small business advertisers years ago. His newspaper has a 600,000 subscriber distribution, and for the mom-and-pop dry cleaner or local restaurant serving one small neighborhood in Dallas-Fort Worth, those types of ads do not pencil out economically.

The analogy holds true today even in the digital era. Most small businesses in this $250/month segment are priced out of online advertising. Most of the major Internet yellow pages companies are thinking either of Adwords, display ads (whether they be CPM or CPC), or a combination of the two. There were very few presentations at the show focused on acquiring new customers via inbound marketing. Yet in many categories, $250 will only buy a handful of clicks per month, especially once you consider the Cost-of-Goods-Sold that third-party vendors need to build into their pricing.

The bottom line is that inbound marketing, i.e. “free” traffic, is the only sustainable marketing technique for this large segment of small businesses. No other option has enough margin to sustain a business on the sales side, so traditional advertising companies are simply not targeting this enormous potential customer base. The CEO of YP.com roughly admitted as much -- that his company was simply too big and too slow-moving to be able to compete effectively with a 2-3 person agency -- and I don’t think he’s alone in this admission.

#2 By default, all of your leads for this business segment are going to be high-quality, inbound leads

At $250/month, only companies at the very largest scale (basically, Google, Facebook, and Apple) can sustain a business with a sales force. There is just not enough margin to support feet-on-the-street at this price point. So, at least among the BIA Kelsey audience, everyone is targeting the “plus spenders.” And even if those companies are able to bring on a business at this price point, they usually end up underserving them. Almost every company that has tried serving this segment at scale bemoans the tremendous “churn” rate when these clients cancel their contracts as a result of poor service.

No one is targeting these businesses from a sales perspective, so they’re literally forced to do their own research. Business owners making the effort to seek you out are going to be more engaged in the marketing process, more responsive, and more likely to implement changes or give you buy-in on your recommended tactics.

#3 The upside for these businesses could be huge

Chances are, you are starting from scratch with this segment. If they have a website, it’s probably completely un-optimized, and a few Title Tag and H1 changes will dramatically increase the amount of business they get from the Internet. Maybe only a few have claimed local search listings, or maybe the business only has one inbound link from a local college or community organization.

Unlike more competitive categories in organic search (like e-commerce or travel), success can still be achieved relatively quickly in most local categories. You're going to see a "wow" factor associated with even moderately effective white-hat tactics. And while small business owners have a reputation for “churn” in this industry, as I mentioned above, most of them are incredibly loyal to companies who actually provide value with their services.

So, what can you do to serve business owners at this lower end of the market?

Here are just a few basic tasks that rookie or junior search professionals can perform without requiring any time investment by a senior employee:

  • Improve Title Tags and H1 tags
  • Submit citations (whether in-house or outsourced)
  • Set up Google Alerts
  • Set up a WordPress blog
  • Provide editorial advice for weekly blog post topics and Facebook posts
  • Control blog commenting on the business owner’s behalf
  • Draft review solicitation emails on the business owner’s behalf
  • Track the success of review solicitation campaigns via a spreadsheet
  • Reach out to business and community organizations for locally-relevant links
  • Create hyper-targeted Facebook ad campaigns under $50/month in total spend*
    *In my opinion, Adwords has effectively killed its own small business market opportunity with the increasing number of "not enough search volume" long-tail keywords and ever-higher minimum bid levels.

Let’s assume your agency wants 100% markup on your employees’ or contractors’ time. Let’s also say that a decent hourly rate for a recent liberal arts college graduate is about $17/hour (this works out to a $36,000/year annual salary). This means your agency can afford roughly seven hours per month of marketing on behalf of an average small business owner. Let’s be even more conservative and say that a more senior employee at $100/hour will need to review each account for 30 minutes per month. This still leaves five hours per month, per business for the college grad. Think of the number of tasks in the list above that could be completed in that amount of time!

Helping business owners at the lower end of the marketing spectrum has been a cause for me since I started in the search industry. Beyond the near-moral imperative that I’ve felt personally, I also see incredible economic potential from serving these long-tail customers.

OK, that’s enough out of me for today. I’d love to hear from you guys: how many of you serve clients anywhere near this $250/month price point? What kinds of services do you provide them? What has your experience been like? How many have served them in the past but moved onto clients with bigger budgets? Looking forward to the discussion with you in the comments.


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President Obama Talks Middle-Class Tax Cuts with Mayors and Their Constituents

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, December 13, 2012
 
President Obama Talks Middle-Class Tax Cuts with Mayors and Their Constituents

Yesterday, President Obama held a conference call with a bipartisan group of mayors and community leaders from around the country to discuss preventing an income tax increase on middle-class families.

Several of the mayors asked some of their constituents who had shared what a $2,000 tax increase next year would mean for their families to join the call as well.

Check out some photos and tweets from leaders who listened in from cities and towns nationwide.

President Obama Talks Middle-Class Tax Cuts with Mayors and Their Constituents

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

New Report Shows Volunteering and Civic Involvement at Five-Year High
In the latest version of the Volunteering and Civic Life in America (VCLA) report published yesterday by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), we see the national rate of volunteering has reached a five-year high.

First Lady Michelle Obama and Toys for Tots Spread Holiday Cheer
First Lady Michelle Obama stopped by a Toys for Tots service project on Monday at the Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling with “boxes and boxes” of gifts that were donated by White House staffers, American CEOs, and even First Daughters Malia and Sasha.

President Obama's Record and Proposals for Cutting Spending
The President has signed $1 trillion in discretionary spending cuts into law through the Budget Control Act, and his budget calls for more than $340 billion in entitlement savings from Medicare and Medicaid, and $250 billion from other mandatory programs.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time (EST).

9:45 AM: The President and the Vice President receive the Presidential Daily Briefing

1:00 PM: Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney WhiteHouse.gov/live

7:40 PM: The President delivers remarks at the Hanukkah Reception; the First Lady attends

WhiteHouse.gov/live Indicates that the event will be live-streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/Live

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Google AdSense Newsletter - December 2012

bubbles
December 2012 Publisher ID ca-pub-1492172262972996

Dear publisher,

With 2013 just around the corner, we're taking a look back at another successful year with over 2 million AdSense publishers globally. It's been a busy twelve months of continuous improvements to the AdSense program, and equally busy is our last newsletter issue for 2012:
  • Learn about the core principles of user experience
  • Watch our new DFP Small Business videos
  • Search for ads by image in the Ad Review Center
  • Apply new controls to the ads on your site
  • Try the new 300x600 ad unit size in AdSense
  • Benefit from enhanced AdSense text ads
We wish you all the best for 2013,

Sophie
On behalf of the global Google AdSense Team


Was this newsletter useful? Share your feedback with us.

Updates

Search for ads by image in the Ad Review Center

To help you review ads even more efficiently in the Ad Review Center , you can now search for ads based on a specific image. Just upload an image, for instance a competitor's logo, and we'll return image ads that contain this image for you to take action on. For more details visit our Help Center.


More control over the ads on your sites

Interested in customizing the blocking settings for different sites you own? Visit the 'Site management' section in your account and build a list of all your sites to apply site-specific actions to. Under 'Allow and block', you'll then be able to block general categories, sensitive categories and advertiser URLs for AdSense for content on a site-by-site basis. Learn more about this new feature in our Help Center.


Launching a larger, brand-friendly ad unit size in AdSense

One of the top requests from publishers in the last year has been to add larger ad sizes to our network, and so we're excited to announce that the popular 300x600 unit is now available in your AdSense account. Because this unit is new to our network, you'll currently see a large number of text ads in these placements. Over time we'll continue to build a wide range of text and display ad inventory eligible to appear in this full slot as well. Read more information in our blog post.


Enhancing text ads on the Google Display Network

You may have noticed that we've recently updated the look and feel of most text ads on publisher sites (see an example below). We've integrated optimizations to font size, spacing, padding, and text layout as well as a new clickable arrow icon - our experiments have shown improved performance as a result of these changes. We'll continue to innovate on new formats in order to drive significantly higher performance for both publishers and advertisers, so stay tuned. For more information on this update, visit our Inside AdSense blog.



User Experience

Learn about the 5 core principles of user experience

Have you thought about user experience and design lately? User experience can make or break your site's success and, with many other sites offering similar services, it's important to differentiate your site in the eyes of your users by providing a better experience. Check out our three-part blog series (part I, part II, part III) to learn about the five core user experience principles.

Also, watch the Hangout on Air recording (only available in English) to hear from an AdSense publisher about his user experience strategy, and follow the AdSense +page to stay informed on additional tips.




DFP Small Business

New videos to help you get started with DFP Small Business

Interested in maximizing the yield from your ad inventory? Already partnering with other ad networks, or are planning to? If so, DFP Small Business, Google's free hosted ad serving solution, might be for you.

We recently hosted a Google+ Hangout series explaining how to use 'Dynamic Allocation' - one of DFP's most powerful features to maximize revenue from every single impression - and how to get started with targeting in DFP. Have a look at the recordings (only available in English) on our AdSense YouTube channel.




More about AdSense:

Inside AdSense Blog

AdSense Google+ Page

AdSense Forum

AdSense on YouTube


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Seth's Blog : Design like Apple, but name like P&G

 

Design like Apple, but name like P&G

Apple's naming approach is inconsistent, it begs for lawsuits (offensive and defensive) and it shouldn't be the model for your organization. iPhone is a phone, iPad is a pad, iPod is a ... (and owning a letter of the alphabet is i-mpossible).

Procter and Gamble, on the other hand, has been doing it beautifully for a hundred years. Crisco, Tide, Pringles, Bounty, Duracell--these are fanciful names that turn the generic product (and the story we believe about it) into something distinct.

If you can invent an entire category, fabulous, that's an achievement. For the rest of us, resist the temptation to be boring or to be too aggressive. It's your name and you need to live with it.

[More on naming]



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