Virtual gifts may be nice but Facebook is putting actual goodies behind the way to spread cheer on their social platform in the UK. A UK company is behind the application to allow easy purchasing and sharing of Mars related products on Facebook. Once being sent a real chocolate bar on Facebook you can redeem it at local UK grocers.
Business Week explains why Social Media is a great business and market research tool. Social media is essential for advertising and building your on-line presence. New technologies gather and analyse data on products and services from throughout the blogosphere, news media sources, and on-line communities. They stress the importance of monitoring your online presence and the influence of social networks. They point to Google's "growing ability to incorporate blog posts within Web search" to show the influence of social media content on the web.
Here are ten tools that should help any company keep track of whats going on within the social media world in relation to their business. These tools help you find out who's saying what about you and your company.
Google is cashing in on video popularity as it is testing adding video to their search results page. Google is trying to draw your eye towards video images and provide interactive advertising to their search results.
Ever wondered how social media helps already established individuals build their image. NBA all-star Steve Nash is trying his hand at LiveVideo.com, a social networking and video sharing site. It fun to watch celebs like Steve Nash and Will Ferrel build their audience through social media channels.
The following was the second interview I did with Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today while I was at PubCon Las Vegas. In this interview we discussed the horror stories I have seen over my 10 years of SEO. The focus was on how important it is to involve an SEO in the initial planning of a new website because you never know if you are going to use a technology that may hamper or completely block search engines. A SEO consultant doesn't need much time to tell you if you are on the right track and it will save you a lot of headache down the line.
Back in December I attended the PubCon conference in Las Vegas and I was fortunate enough to meet my friend and Internet celebrity Ralph Wilson for an interview. Ralph has me regularly contributing tutorials and articles to the SEO section of his popular Web Marketing Today website and decided to interview me for a feature video on the website. The competitor analysis interview turned out pretty well I think - thank you Ralph!
Written by Scott Van Achte and published at 10:42 AM
According to a recent CNN Money report published Thursday, more than 75% of American web users viewed at least one video online with an overall average time spent of 3.25 hours per person.
Google, during November, held on to a 31.3% market share when it comes to video services including YouTube and Google Video, which is a 2% increase over stats for the month of October.
With a total of 9.5 billion videos viewed back in November, and nearly 3 billion of these on Google properties, it is a wonder why Google has not yet capitalized on the money making opportunities these massively popular sites provide. While a variety of ideas have been put out there such as pop-ups & pre and post roll ads, very little has been done to date.
I suppose it is just a matter of time and as video popularity continues to grow on the web, ads will become an unavoidable reality, so we may as well enjoy it as is, while it lasts.
Mike McDonald of WebProNews conducted a great, very informative interview with Live Webmaster Tool's Product Manager, Jeremiah Andrick.
Jeremiah discusses paid links, cloaking, the backlink function at Live Search and my special favorite - the incident where Adwords ads got indexed. Check it out, I think you will appreciate the frankness of Jeremiah's answers. You can certainly tell that Microsoft has finally figured out that Webmasters need to feel the love.
Special thanks to Barry Schwartz and the SE Round Table for recommending this video. I am glad I fit it into my busy day.
The following interview was conducted at PubCon Las Vegas and it focused on StepForth competitor analysis/competitor intelligence services. In hindsight I didn't give much away in the terms of competitive analysis and frankly the interview could have gone better (what with the sun glare and a lil'memory loss). So feel free to view this and then follow it up with my notes below where I will provide a couple examples of the strategies/resources used in our basic and advanced competitor intelligence reports.
Additional Competitor Analysis Tips We provide a listing of our recommended competitor research tools which Mike McDonald kindly previewed the link to but let me give you a few more tips... it is the least I can do if you watched my interview ;-)
Use Technorati to determine the networks that publish your competitors content. Often I identify some great sites that are more than happy to publish the material my client has... which in turn can build valuable links.
Use Compete.com (the one I forgot in the interview) to get a hint of the keywords your competitors may be focusing on and to gauge their success in each one. Please note, however, that I definitely do not recommend accepting everything from Compete.com as writ; accept it with a grain of salt because their intelligence network is far from flawless.
Use OptiLink to create a maximum list of backlinks for each competitor using Yahoo and have the system fetch PageRank and Alexa ratings. Then copy the results into Excel and then sort the results from highest Alexa rating to lowest first and then highest PR to lowest as the secondary sort rule . Now you will have the beginnings of a very useful list of likely respectable sites. Review each to determine which ones may accept your content/links as well.
Note: I sort by Alexa first because Google's paid-link PR penalty has caused many high quality resources to falsely look like low quality ones.
Here is more information on StepForth's SEO research services that focus on competitor analysis.
On the 6th of December at Pubcon Las Vegas I was fortunate enough to speak with Karla and Lacy of PRWeb.com; two wonderful ladies who were running PRWeb's exhibit booth. After a short discussion I decided it was time to put Karla and Lacy in the spotlight. You see I have used PRWeb many times in the past and I have always been impressed by its excellent press release promotion network. PRWeb is the perfect vehicle to get the word out on your new products/services and the circulation of your press release can provide valuable incoming links to your website.
I enjoyed a fantastic overview of a press conference presented by Steve Jobs today. Among other cool news such as a new line of iPods Steve Jobs announced huge price slashes on the iPhone (sorry those who already bought it!) and added a particularly cool product called the iPod Touch which looks identical to the iPhone but lacks the phone capabilities.
Complete with WiFi I expect the iPod Touch to be a new rage... I want one badly! I also expect theiPhone Touch will vastly increase the frequency of mobile search since it uses the far less expensive (or free) WiFi networks that seem ever-present in the big cities.
A company by the name of CambrianHouse got some free press by getting 1000 pizzas to Google employees on the Google campus - bypassing security. So it looks like CambrianHouse has set the bar on outrageous press stunts in the social media industry. Now... I wonder who will try to one-up them? I look forward to finding out. Check out this video, it is a bit long but a lot of fun.
This week the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog announced an addition to Google's spam reporting form for people to report sites that appear to be buying paid links in order to influence search engine rankings. This addition ties in with Matt Cutt's none-too-subtle warning at a recent SMX Advanced interview with Danny Sullivan. Matt essentially reinforced to the audience that buying links is against Google's guidelines and that those who are buying links may feel the heat soon as Google tries to patch this chink in its armor (see the video below).
Does this Mean Buying Links Has Become Too Dangerous? I expect Google will follow through on its threats to take a more forceful approach against buying links but at the same time I am betting that buying links won't be gone anytime soon. After all, buying links is not JUST used by companies to garner link popularity. The fact is that some buy paid links for the clickthrough traffic and Google must be careful not to penalize anyone for that. Google's point of view on legitimate link buying is that such links should have a nofollow attribute on them or the landing page should be blocked from robots.
What Might Google Do? I am no mind reader but I see two approaches that Google can take here:
Shock the Community - The Strong Arm Approach: Google could tweak its algorithm to penalize any website with purchased links that clearly don't conform to guidelines (i.e. no 'nofollow' tag). In this scenario Google would have to find some way to identify paid links as accurately as possible before checking them for guideline conformity. One manner would be to look for links found alone within tables or cells that specify "Sponsored Links" (or other phrases with the same connotation). The resulting Internet-wide impact would shake up the community enough that paid links would get some seriously negative press and many who profit from this field would feel the hit. The end result of this action would be an immense Floridian backlash on Google - but the Google Guidelines for paid links would be more likely to get some respect in the short term.
Be SMART and Just Negate Links: If Google wanted to soft-slap paid link abusers they would simply negate the benefit of the links. For example, they could start by identifying the most obvious paid links and literally ignore their weight. The resulting drop in rankings for sites that have depended entirely on paid links would be practically equivalent to removing them from the index; their rankings would plummet.
All in all I can only hope that Google chooses #2 but knowing the ego that is Google they will combine the two approaches and make an example out of a few companies. Sad yes, but it rings true to me. I would certainly not want to be investing in any link brokerage company startups any time soon.
How to Minimize Paid Link Risk If you have to buy links then be sure that your links are not all using the exact same link and descriptive text. In fact, I highly recommend working with your paid link vendor to implement a rotation script that switches the content of your paid link(s) on every page reload. In addition it would be best if the link vendor did not blatantly identify your link as paid by placing it in a "Sponsored" table or cell within the layout.
If you want to be completely safe then I recommend requesting a nofollow tag be added to your backlinks ASAP. After all, following Google's guidelines is always the safest approach. On the bright side, if paid links become devalued then many people will be pushed toward making better content that naturally generates backlinks which is never a bad thing.
As a follow up to my article "So Google Has Feedburner, What Now?" I thought this Wallstrip video interview with Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo was a perfect addition. If you are at all curious about Feedburner this is a clip for you:
Here is a direct link to the clip on YouTube in case the video has difficulty showing on our blog. Unfortunately this is more often the case than not. Apparently YouTube is not very Blogger friendly which seems ridiculous to me.
The following video is an excerpt from the 2007 Search Engine Strategies Keynote discussion between Danny Sullivan and Windows Live Chief, Steve Berkowitz. In this excerpt Steve Berkowitz explains that "it is not ever satisfactory not to be number one" in the search engine industry. He further explains that Microsoft's first goal is to reach critical mass from an advertising standpoint and how Microsoft's search platform will continue to evolve.
At the 2007 SES New York, Google's Shuman Ghosemajumder responds to the question: (abbreviated) "How is it possible for Google to identify click fraud when an aggressor utilizes rotating proxies?". Shuman responds by discussing the Clickbot A botnet case and how Google deciphered the click fraud in that situation. This video was taken during the "Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues" seminar that took place on April 12, 2007.
Introduction I have long been a fan of ClickTracks and it's professional line of analytics software. In my experience ClickTracks is leaps and bounds above its competition both for quality of software and quality of service. In the interests of full disclosure StepForth has been an advocate of ClickTracks since we bought our first copy in 2003 (or thereabouts) and I (Ross Dunn) recently completed my Professional ClickTracks Certification.
The following video interview was recorded at the ClickTracks presentation booth at the New York Search Engine Strategies Conference, yesterday, April 11th, 2007. To view the videos just click on the question and you will be taken to the appropriate YouTube page to view it. I hope you enjoy StepForth's first round of video journalism.
The Interview with John Marshall of ClickTracks Just click on a question to see John's answer on YouTube.
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