Central Perk

joi, 7 martie 2013

SEO Blog

Local SEO Tutorial: Online Business Listings
Facebook News feed | Click here to Join the waitlist to get the new homepage
The Growth Of Social Gaming
Going Viral Just Got A Little Easier
Social Media Helps Spread The Word
Why SEOs Shouldn’t Forget About Usability
Social Media – Why Every Website Needs It
Taking Your Business To The Next Level Online

Local SEO Tutorial: Online Business Listings

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 11:48 AM PST

Yellow Pages and newspaper ads are on their way out. These days, the use of local SEO is essential for any business that caters to local, "offline" customers. Those customers can search online for a business offering particular products or services in their community and Google or any of the...
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Facebook News feed | Click here to Join the waitlist to get the new homepage

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 11:23 AM PST

Facebook has revamped its news feed for its users, assigning more space to music, games and advertising in a proposition to increase revenues. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and ceo, unveiled the redesign at a press conference in San Francisco on Thursday, saying the move was intended to “reduce clutter” on...
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The Growth Of Social Gaming

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 09:28 AM PST

There was a time when social gaming was alien to us but from 2007 to 2011, every time you logged into your Facebook you would be bombarded with updates and invites about Farmville farms. It seemed like everyone had joined the social gaming bandwagon. Statistics show that social gaming grew...
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Going Viral Just Got A Little Easier

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 09:25 AM PST

Viral videos have the potential to take over the world, influencing everything from water cooler conversations to commentary on major websites. What business or marketer wouldn't want their next YouTube video to garner that kind of attention? Going viral is tough, but with up and coming video advertising service Virool,...
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Social Media Helps Spread The Word

Posted: 07 Mar 2013 09:22 AM PST

Whatever your opinion on social networking, it has really revolutionised the way we communicate and the speed with which people are able to spread awareness about uplifting causes and mass action. If you want to organise a flash mob, you could easily do it within days, if not hours. The...
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Why SEOs Shouldn’t Forget About Usability

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 08:04 PM PST

Many SEOs and website owners can be guilty of being so focused on getting their website to page 1 on Google for their keywords that they forget to prepare their site for visitors. SEO is like the old adage, you can take a horse to water but you can't make...
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Social Media – Why Every Website Needs It

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 08:00 PM PST

Every single marketing campaign is driven by one primary goal, and that is to create a connection with customers. Marketers know that without this, their products are never going to leave the store shelves. It is why companies invest millions conducting marketing surveys and hiring the best marketing team. To...
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Taking Your Business To The Next Level Online

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 07:56 PM PST

The business world has changed substantially over the past few decades, and one of the most obvious changes is due to the advent of the Internet: every business, no matter how large or small, needs a website if they hope to be successful. This allows customers to find the company...
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The Google AdWords Landscape (Infographic)

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 07:00 PM PST

Posted by Dr. Pete

We tend to think of AdWords as the domain of PPC specialists, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Google’s SERP advertising has a huge impact on the position and effectiveness of organic results. So, I wanted to ask a simple question – what does the AdWords “landscape” actually look like in 2013? In other words, where are the ads, how many are there, what combinations occur in the “wild”, and how often do they show up? I’ll dive into some details below, but the answer looks something like this (click the image for a full-sized view)…

Embed this image:
<div style="width:604px;"><div><a target="_blank" href="http://cdnext.seomoz.org/1362430343_3b2eff4e74ca876e4317a7557b0ececc.png"><img width="600" height="795" alt="Google AdWords Landscape Infographic" src="http://cdn.seomoz.org/img/upload/google-adwords-landscape-600.png" style="border: #cccccc 1px solid; padding: 1px;" /></a></div><div style="text-align:right; font-size:11px; margin-right: 5px;">Produced by <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-google-adwords-landscape-infographic">SEOmoz</a>. ©2013.</div></div>

The Methodology

We collected data from 10,000 page-one Google SERPs via Google.com on a weekday during normal business hours. Personalization was turned off, and the crawler emulated a logged-out Chrome browser. We parsed the major ad blocks (which have consistent DOM markers) and the links within those blocks. Keywords and categories were pulled from AdWords’ keyword tools, with 500 keywords coming from each of 20 categories.

A Few Caveats

Naturally, keywords pulled from the AdWords’ research tools are more likely to have commercial intent than the “average” keyword (if such a thing exists), so these percentages may not be indicative of the entire world of search queries. We did run these numbers at other time periods and on other days, and the results were fairly consistent.

These statistics were computed by unique queries, not by query volume. The results seem to be very similar, though. For example, we found ads on 85.2% of the queries crawled – if we weight those queries by Google’s “global” volume, we get ad penetration of 84.5%. The correlation between the presence of ads and query volume was virtually non-existent (r=-0.018). The correlation between the presence of ads and Google’s competition metric was high (r=0.874). This is probably not surprising, since “competition” is essentially defined by how many advertisers are vying for any given query.

The Changing Landscape

This is only a snapshot of a rapidly changing picture. For example, paid shopping results are still relatively new, but we discovered them on almost 20% of the queries we crawled. Unlike the traditional AdWords blocks, paid shopping can appear in multiple positions and forms, including the larger, upper-right format previously reserved for Knowledge Graph.

Even traditional top ads are evolving, with ads showing extensions, expanded site-links, lead generation forms, etc. Expect Google to experiment with new formats on the top and right, and to blend advertising into the Knowledge Graph area to increase CTR. This changing landscape will impact the efforts of people in both paid and organic search, so keep your eyes open, and don’t assume that this is something only the PPC team has to worry about.

I just wanted to thank Dawn Shepard for all her help putting together the infographic. I know it was probably a bit painful to hear "Make it kind of boring!" ;)

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Announcing Fresh Web Explorer

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 01:01 AM PST

Posted by Matthew Brown

Have you ever wished you had an easy way to track all of your links, social mentions, and web citations in one place? If so, you're going to like the latest addition to your SEOmoz PRO account. Today, we are releasing a new beta product to our PRO subscribers: Fresh Web Explorer.

Try Fresh Web Explorer

Why did we build Fresh Web Explorer?

One of the most challenging tasks as an online marketer is keeping track of all the latest blogs, forums, and news sites on the web that mention your brand or site. Many of the tools out there can be frustrating to use and don't have the metrics, scalability, or features that I need to effectively keep track of important links and mentions. Google Alerts can be hit or miss. Topsy is terrific, but it only covers social mentions. Trackur, Ubervu, Buzzstream, and SocialMention all offer a unique set of features, but I frequently rely on a number of different tools to provide me with an instant look into mentions of the sites and brands I track.

We built Fresh Web Explorer to provide an easier way to give you a fast, comprehensive look at the latest mentions of and links to your content across the web.

What's different about Fresh Web Explorer?

Fresh Web Explorer (FWE) functions a lot like Open Site Explorer, so the interface will be familiar to OSE users. However, the data is extremely recent, and rather than just show you links, we grab full text content of articles, blog posts, forum threads, user comments, and other web content. FWE doesn't just show you links, but all term, brand, or phrase mentions as well.

FWE is powered by our Freshscape Index, which is a 30 day index of 4.3 million feeds (and counting). There's a new Freshscape index every eight hours, sortable by one week, two weeks, or 30 days of mentions. You can also sort your data by Feed Authority, our new metric created specifically for Fresh Web Explorer:

Feed Authority directly measures the importance of any feed on a scale of 1-100. It is a machine learning model that predicts the number of subscribers for a given feed and distinguishes among the many different feeds on any site. For example, it wil assign a lower score to a comment feed associated with a six-month-old blog post than the main feed associated with the blog. In this way, it is analogous to Page Authority, but applied to feeds. We currently use features extracted from crawling the feed (number of posts, post frequency, etc.) as well as Mozscape metrics to compute the score. Our data scientists are working to improve this metric, so expect to see some of the scores change as they refine the algorithm and introduce additional features.

Warning: We're going to get even more nerdy about Feed Authority for a quick second. The chart below shows the distribution of Feed Authority across the Freshscape index:

Approximately 25% of the index has a Feed Authority less than 2.0, with the other 75% having higher values. The feeds with low scores are mostly stale (no longer updated), have very few or no links, or have malformed XML. A similar graph for all feeds on the internet would have the opposite shape, with 75%+ of feeds having Feed Authority less than 2.0 (we confirmed this with a random sample of feeds from our Mozscape index). We minimized the number of low-quality feeds in our index by carefully building it from a set of high-quality blog directories and a curated list of feeds.

Smooth Operator

Bringing it back to using FWE, there are a number of operators you can use to customize your search:

In particular, you may find yourself making extensive use of the 'Match phrase exactly' operator, by using double quotes around your search term or phrase. This cues Fresh Web Explorer to only return results where your phrase of terms appears on a page exactly as you searched for them in FWE, rather than returning results where the terms may appear anywhere on the page and in any order. When searching on non-branded or very popular terms, using this operator may surface a more precise set of results from FWE.

Export FWE data to customize your reports

If you're inclined to mix and match this data with other sources, FWE provides you with the ability to export up to 10,000 mentions in the Freshscape index, in .csv format:

This export allows you to sort a large number of mentions by date found, Feed Authority, domain, HTML title, and URL. One of the additional fields available in the export that's not in the FWE web interface: the feed source where FWE found the page containing the mention. This can provide useful insight into why a Feed Authority score might be low, even though the page mentioning your search is located on a strong domain.

We've put together a video walkthrough and a detailed FAQ to get you started as well as answer additional questions.

Getting agile with FWE

Fresh link and mention data have become critically important to online marketers. If you're engaged in link building and outreach, having the ability to quickly sort recent mentions by source and date can make a world of difference in quick outreach to build audience for your content or brand. If you're in the SEO trenches, you're probably all too familiar with how freshness plays a role in Google and Bing search results. If you've watched the meteoric rise of sites like Buzzfeed, Business Insider, or Huffington Post, the formula to their success is pretty clear: Match content to the most recent user intent you can surface, then build links and social mentions to that content like crazy.

To get started, you can use FWE to engage in several high-ROI activities:

Find recent mentions in FWE where you aren't being linked to - On news publications and high-volume blogs, the quicker you ask the writer for a link, the better chance you have of actually getting it. It's much harder to convince them it's worth the effort a month later. An effective technique that increases your chances even more is to add something new to the content that increases its value or changes the narrative of the story.
Competitor analysis - Where are your competitors being mentioned? Are there feeds that highlight their content frequently? FWE is a good tool to build up your outreach list.
Content Strategy - FWE allows you to check on or keep track of a set of terms over time, and helps you get a sense for what type of content gets a lot of mentions, shares, and links. For instance, a term like "World Cup 2014" is already drawing significant interest as we get closer to the 2014 event in Brazil. Sites like Bleacher Report and Goal are already starting to stake out their claim in the SERPs.

FWE can help you make strategic decisions on how to create and focus both new and legacy content on this type of quickly evolving user search intent. Our engineers have put in a lot of work to make the Freshscape index, and we will be using it to power additional features in the near future.

Ready to give it a spin?

Try Fresh Web Explorer

Just like you, we're just getting started with Fresh Web Explorer as a new tool in our marketing workflow. It's a beta release, so we're making improvements and squashing bugs quickly. You can flag suspicious results within the application, and we will use that feedback to make adjustments to the index.

Please send us over any questions or comments you have, and be sure to check out the Help video and FAQ.

We can't wait to hear how you're using it.

Watch: Signing the Violence Against Women Act

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, March 7, 2013

Watch: Signing the Violence Against Women Act

Today, President Obama will sign legislation to strengthen and reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. The new law will provide resources for thousands of victims of domestic violence and sexual assault -- and better equip law enforcement officials to stop violence before it starts.

Tune in to WhiteHouse.gov/Live at 1:55 p.m. ET to watch.

Photo of the Day: New Secretary of the Treasury

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew in the Oval Office, March 6, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Seth's Blog : De-escalation

De-escalation

Marketers want commitment. They want the big finish, the closed sale, the new customer. Buy Now!

The goal then is to create tension, to escalate need, to amplify conflict until action is taken. Escalation causes us to commit to our original need, by reinforcing it.

It goes beyond the retail store, of course... it's deep within our culture. Noir novels show the hero goading the guy in the bar until a small dispute escalates into a beat down. Movies create drama (and entertainment) by escalating the small-time heist into the next world war. And commercials, retailers and demagogues take every opportunity to find the smallest thread of disclocation and amplify it into real commitment to action.

But what happens when we do the opposite? If we think about connection instead of power, if we think about abundance instead of scarcity, we can turn this on its head.

What if we de-escalate conflict?

What if we don't try to turn shopping desire into a fever pitch? What if later is just as good, or better, than now?

What if we back off occasionally instead of pressing forward?

What if playing the game starts to become at least as important as winning it?

De-escalation creates connection, not commitment to previously made choices. It trades the short-term battle for the long-term relationship.

Taking our time and letting air in (and heat to escape) might be precisely the best way to build the relationships we need for the long run. It leads to better decisions, less shrapnel and work that truly matters, without regret.

• Email to a friend •

miercuri, 6 martie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Rare Senate Indictment of the War on Terrorism; Rand Paul's Courageous Effort

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 06:48 PM PST

To what extent should US citizens loses their constitutional right in the "war on terror". Can US citizens be apprehended without charges? Killed by drones? On US soil?

John Brennan, Obama's nomination to run the CIA, refused to disavow even that last question. In response, Senator Rand Paul courageously, and single-handedly sponsored a filibuster in the Senate to block Brennan's appointment.

Wired reports 11 Years Later, Senate Wakes Up to War on Terror's 'Battlefield America'

Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster will inevitably fail at its immediate objective: derailing John Brennan's nomination to run the CIA. But as it stretches into its sixth hour, it's already accomplished something far more significant: raising political alarm over the extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year "war on terrorism."

The Kentucky Republican's delaying tactic started over one rather narrow slice of that war: the Obama administration's equivocation on whether it believes it has the legal authority to order a drone strike on an American citizen, in the United States.

Paul recognized outright that he would ultimately lose his fight to block Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief and architect of much of the administration's targeted-killing efforts.

But as his time on the Senate floor went on, Paul went much further. He called into question aspects of the war on terrorism that a typically bellicose Congress rarely questions, and most often defends, often demagogically so. More astonishingly, Paul's filibuster became such a spectacle that he got hawkish senators to join him.

as the filibuster picked up more and more media attention — and especially social-media attention — hawkish senators began joining in. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) praised Paul's efforts at compelling transparency from the White House. What Paul is arguing is "no less important than our Constitutional government itself," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), no dove.

It would be foolish to presume that Paul's moment in the spotlight heralds a new Senate willingness to roll back the expanses of the post-9/11 security apparatus. Rubio, for instance, stopped short of endorsing any of Paul's substantive criticisms of the war. But Paul did manage to shift what political scientists call the Overton Window — the acceptable center of gravity of discussion.

Paul's filibuster posed a challenge to the Senate more than it does Brennan or President Obama. "Is perpetual war OK with everybody?" he asked.

Brennan will be confirmed anyway, but Paul's firm stance in the face of his chicken-hawk and constitutional-hypocrite colleagues is very much appreciated.

I support Rand Paul for president in 2016. It was a pleasure meeting him in person Monday evening at a fundraiser in Palatine Illinois.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Eurozone Downturn Accelerates Despite German Growth; Divergence to France Widest in 15 Years

Posted: 06 Mar 2013 10:34 AM PST

The Markit Eurozone Composite PMI Final Data shows the Eurozone downturn accelerates.

Key Points:

Final Eurozone Composite Output Index: 47.9 (Flash 47.3, January 48.6)
Final Eurozone Services Business Activity Index: 47.9 (Flash 47.3, January 48.6)

At 47.9 in February, the Markit Eurozone PMI® Composite Output Index came in above the earlier flash estimate of 47.3 but remained down on January's reading of 48.6. The index therefore signalled a steepening of the downturn in business activity, contrasting with the easing trend which had been evident in the three months to January.

Divergence to France Widest in 15 Years

Chris Williamson, Chief Economist at Markit said: "The dip in the Eurozone PMI compared to January is a disappointment, but the region still looks set to see a much smaller drop in GDP in the first quarter compared to the 0.6% decline seen in the final quarter of last year, with the PMI so far consistent with a 0.2% GDP decline.

"Worryingly, the divergence between Germany and France so far this year is the widest in the 15-year survey history. Germany is on course to see the strongest quarterly growth since the spring of 2011, but France is contracting at the fastest rate for four years.

"The deteriorating picture in the periphery is also a concern. Rates of decline picked up in Italy and Spain, with further weakness likely in Italy especially in coming months due to the uncertainty caused by the elections.

"The outlook therefore seems to largely depend on whether Germany can continue to expand and offset the weakness in France, Italy and Spain, which seems a tall order, meaning hopes of a return to growth for the region by mid-2013 are now looking too optimistic."

Illusions of Stabilization

Williamson has now changed his tune to something more in line with what I stated on February 7 in Illusions of Stabilization

In Germany Rebounds but ... I noted a recovery "of sorts" in Germany, a contraction in France at the steepest rate in four years, and a record decrease in services employment in Italy.

Thus, it should be no surprise to see the Markit Eurozone Composite PMI® shows national divergence hits record high.

Yet, in aggregate, the eurozone contraction decelerated with the eurozone composite PMI rising from 47.2 to 48.6.

So, what's it all mean?

Chris Williamson, Chief Economist at Markit offered this interpretation: "The eurozone is showing clear signs of healing, with the downturn easing sharply in January and the region moving closer to stabilisation in the first quarter. ...."

No Signs of Healing

I disagree with Williamson. Those divergences show the eurozone is getting sicker, not healing.

If there was any healing, and certainly if there was any rebalancing, manufacturing and export growth would be picking up in Spain, in Italy, and in France at the expense of Germany.

A quick check of the Markit Eurozone Manufacturing PMI will show that is not what's happening.

There were no signs of stabilization last month, in January, or in December. And with the clear deterioration in France, imbalances have accelerated to the downside.

In regards to Williamson's forecast of a 0.2% GDP decline, I will take "the under". Should "the over" line be right, don't expect it to last too long.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

joi, 7 martie 2013

SEO Blog

SEO Blog

The Google AdWords Landscape (Infographic)

The Google AdWords Landscape (Infographic)

The Methodology

A Few Caveats