Google announced the winner of the Doodle 4 Google competition and today that winner’s logo is on Google home pages around the world. The Winner is Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisconsin for his Doodle named “Pirate Times.” The Doodle won him a $30,000 college scholarship, a...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

If you have ever signed up for a new Twitter account you have been ‘offered’ a list of suggested people to follow. Let’s just say that unless you intend to use Twitter for the most shallow and useless reasons (which, let’s face it, most do but I digress) that suggestion list is awful.

Well, six long years into this Twitter has admitted as much. As a result they are introducing tailored suggestions. The Twitter blog explains

Currently, when new users come to Twitter, we show them all almost the same suggestions for what or who to follow. That isn’t ideal. Since you have individual interests, you should get individual suggestions. After all, even though millions of people love Justin Bieber, FC Barcelona or Kim Kardashian, not everyone using Twitter may want to follow them.

To make it easier and faster for everyone to get started on Twitter, we’re beginning some experiments with tailored suggestions in a number of countries around the world. The first experiment will show new users a list of accounts that we recommend you follow, alongside a timeline filled with Tweets from those accounts.

This kind of personalization along with yesterday’s Do Not Track announcement shows that Twitter is working to make it more useful and efficient for users and marketers alike.

In a world where most social media news is about how someone or something has either gotten worse or is further abusing your privacy maybe Twitter is paying attention and figuring they can look different by doing something useful. Wow, now there is a novel concept in today’s business world.

Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Google has introduced several new reporting improvements for AdSense publishers, and it has released new research that shows publishers make more money with “smart pricing” — even though their revenue-per-click is discounted as compared with search ads — than they would...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Webmaster level: All


At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've long known that even seemingly minor speed increases can have surprisingly large impacts on user engagement and happiness. About a year ago we rolled out Instant Pages in pursuit of that goal. Instant Pages makes use of prerendering technology in Chrome to make your site appear to load instantly in some cases, with no need for any extra work on your part. Here's a video of it in action:



We've been closely watching performance and listening to webmaster feedback. Since Instant Pages rolled out we've saved more than a thousand years of ours users' time. We're very happy with the results so far, and we'll be gradually increasing how often we trigger the feature.

In the vast majority of cases, webmasters don't have to do anything for their sites to work correctly with prerendering. As we mentioned in our initial announcement of Instant Pages, search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature: only results the user visits will be counted. If your site keeps track of pageviews on its own, you might be interested in the Page Visibility API, which allows you to detect when prerendering is occurring and factor those out of your statistics. If you use an ads or analytics package, check with them to see if their solution is already prerender-aware; if it is, in many cases you won't need to make any changes at all. If you're interested in triggering Chrome's prerendering within your own site, see the Prerendering in Chrome article.

Instant Pages means that users arrive at your site happier and more engaged, which is great for everyone.


Posted by Ziga Mahkovec - Software Engineer, Instant Pages

Communities are stitched together by numerous kinds of ties. In person there’s the smile, handshake, a shared laugh. From afar there’s the letter, email, a phone call. Twitter has a noteworthy power to bring you closer to a community instantaneously, and this week’s collection of #OnlyOnTwitter moments illustrates how this can be done with photographs.

Whether it’s Broadway actors sharing an intermission break despite being in different shows, or photos from far away that pierce the mystique to show real, human people. Or (my favorite), if on your band’s tour you suddenly stumble upon the Most Awesome Story to Tell Your Friends — with Twitter, you tell it in real time.

Saturday Intermission Pictures
The Broadway community is a tight-knit crew. But on Saturday afternoons, when they're all scattered across different theaters, how do they stay close? Intermission pictures!

Okay showfolk, if you're in a show today, at intermission take a picture of yourself and tag it #SIP (Saturday Intermission Pic)

— Andrew Keenan-Bolger (@KeenanBlogger) May 12, 2012

My first #sip!On to the fourth act of the day! @YFTOUR twitter.com/ajholmesmusic/…

— A.J. Holmes (@ajholmesmusic) May 13, 2012

Hobbit/Ugandan realness. @scottbarnhardt @FashionistaMJS #SIP twitter.com/asmeretyemane/…

— AsmeretGhebremichael (@asmeretyemane) May 12, 2012

What Finch eats at intermission. #SIP #fatnewsie twitter.com/aaronjalbano/s…

— Aaron J. Albano (@aaronjalbano) May 13, 2012
Journalist Jacob Weisberg takes you to China
On a trip to China, journalist Jacob Weisberg has been tweeting out photos and observations. This is a great format for feature reporters. Tweeting on the ground doesn't just have to be limited to breaking news. Jacob’s Tweets also offer an immediate and fascinating picture at life behind the Great Firewall.

Ai Weiwei taking a picture of me taking a picture of him. Or vice-versa. twitter.com/jacobwe/status…

— Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) May 15, 2012

Young Mao. Or possibly Beethoven. twitter.com/jacobwe/status…

— Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) May 17, 2012
Indie Band Picks up a Hitchhiking John Waters
John Waters was making his way across Ohio with his thumb and indie band Here We Go Magic picked him up. He rode in their van, and they reported the details of the incident on Twitter. (via DCist)

We found John Waters hitchhiking on the side of the 70 fwy, he bought us lunch. What a guy! @herewegomagic @turnerjen twitter.com/avtark/status/…

— Avtar K (@avtark) May 16, 2012

Posted by Andrew Fitzgerald, Manager, Editorial Programming (@magicandrew)

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Search API Now On Paid Platform About a month ago, Microsoft informed us the Bing API would no longer be free and today is the day they migrated the Bing...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Posted by randfish

Starting up your own consulting agency can be quite a difficult process and often times the most challenging step to your endeavour will be finding new customers or clients.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday we will be covering some tips and tactics that you can use to get referrals and win customers. Don't forget to leave your own advice in the comments below.

Happy Friday Everyone! Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Last week I got an email from a Moz fan who said, "Hey, Rand, I am trying to start up my SEO consulting business. My network is not that great yet. How am I going to find clients? Can you point me to a blog post?"

We've done several over the years, but I thought it was a great time to refresh and offer some practical tips and tactics for finding new business. I know there are a lot of folks out there who are seeking clients, who are considering going out on their own and starting their own consulting business, who've had success in-house, who've had success at other agencies. Let me give you some of the things that worked for us when we were in consulting and that work for a lot of the folks that we connect with in the field. Obviously, nearly 40% of SEOmoz's membership are folks who do consulting and agency work, the other 60% being in-house. Of course, we get to interact with a lot of these people and hear their stories of what works well for them. I thought I'd start with a few of those.

So number one, if you're just starting out and you have nothing else going on, I strongly recommend building a handful of case studies. What I mean by this is having a few sites and pages and projects that you can point to, even if you're very early stage. Even if you're saying, "You're my first professional customer," that's fine, that's okay. But have a few things that you've done in the past to show off your work.

So your brother has a hobby site, great. Maybe you've helped him to rank for a few keywords. Maybe you've helped him to build up a powerful Facebook fan page. Maybe you've helped him with some web marketing efforts on his Etsy store, whatever it is. Your friend's got a LinkedIn profile. Maybe she needs some help outranking some other people who are ranking for her name. She knows that she's going to be on the job market. You want to help her get position for that. You're going to help her create other profiles and write some guest pieces and all this kind of stuff that's going to help her show up highly in Google for her particular name. Maybe there's a personal blog, either one that you're running, one that someone else is running, a family member, a friend, and you can help optimize that site, get the right things installed in WordPress, get it moved over from Blogspot, get the post titles, doing some keyword research, having a few of the posts go hot. Great.

Now you can point to all of these case studies when clients talk to you and say, "Well, let me tell you about some of the things that worked well for this. Go to Google and search for this, you can see this page ranking, the reason that it's ranking so well are these different things that I did. I can help you with that kind of stuff." Having those case studies in your back pocket makes you very credible and believable, even if you are a very first-time consultant.

Of course, if you have a history of working with clients, one of the biggest problems that the SEO field has always had is that a lot of clients say, "Hey, I don't want you discussing my particular project. I'd prefer you didn't share and disclose which types of things you've worked on for me or what you've done." That's okay, and that's another great reason to have this handful of case studies that you can show off so you can say, "Hey, here's a few clients we've worked with" or "I can't tell you who they are, but if we sign an NDA, I'll be happy to disclose the names, and then they can serve as references, and then you can see the projects publicly that we've worked on, and those include some of these other ones."

A great follow-up to this is to actually offer some pro bono work, and there are two types of organizations that I strongly recommend this for. The first one is local charities or non-profits. It could be national non- profits and charities if you have a high profile and you want to do that. So here's Adorable Adoptions. It's an animal shelter. It's not actually an animal shelter. It's an animal shelter I just created in my mind. Lives here in Seattle on this whiteboard only. Fantastic, right? So you can do some SEO work to help them rank well for adopt a pet, or thinking about what to do with my pets, or those kind of things.

The other one that I think is a really good option is when you see small local startups kicking things off, so maybe it's somebody's personal project, something they're putting on Kickstarter, or something that they're launching for the first time and some friend of yours through a network or through Twitter or through Facebook, you've seen that they're launching this product through the TechPress. Great. Especially if they don't have a lot of venture backing and they're kind of on a tight bootstrap budget, maybe the founders still have day-to-day jobs, offer to kick in and help out. "Hey, do you need some help with your web marketing? I've done some things. I'm trying to build a portfolio, and I would love to show you guys how I can kick ass and then maybe build up some referrals in your network." They're going to be very, very grateful for that, especially those early stage folks who don't have time and energy to focus on the marketing components. So I really like those.

But I have a pro tip here. Make the offer very specific, and make your pens work too. Make the offer very specific. The reason being here is that if you offer to do some work, you can find yourself in these pro bono types of situations where there's just a lot of demands on your time, and as your business gets going or you have other projects you need to work on, those demands can become problematic. It can feel like a big conflict. So make sure that when you commit to something, you're committing to a very specific project that has a clear end date or that has a very clear end point. So once that project or that date has been reached, you can reach back out and say, "Hey, really loved working with you guys. I hope you'll recommend me in the future. I'd love to be able to use you as a reference for some future clients that I might get." Fantastic, but you've made that closure happen and sealed that deal. Of course, if they need more of your time, they can ask for it and those kinds of things, but you want to have that built in from the start. If you don't, you can get into a messy territory.

Number three, be a connector of people. Maybe you're an introvert or you have introverted tendencies and you don't love to go networking, that's okay. That's fine. But help people to find each other. Be on top of your local ecosystem in whatever world or niche you're in and whatever geographic region you're in. By being on top of what's happening in the field, you can say, "Hey, I noticed that you said you're looking for some software to help you with recruiting. I heard about The Resumator last week via TechCrunch or HackerNews or whatever. I'd be happy to make an introduction because I reached out to the founder there when I heard about it." Don Charlton, the guy from The Resumator probably doesn't need SEO help, but just as an example. And then help put those people together. If you have friends, if you have colleagues from former jobs, if you have people that you know through friends or family that have needs, putting them together and making those introductions can be fantastic. That becomes a referral source all on its own, and you will quickly see that other people who you've connected in the future will say, "Hey, you should meet so and so. She helped me connect with this person in the past, and she knows SEO stuff. So you should talk to her." Great way to get business.

Number four, choose a specialty. For goodness sake, especially right now it's critical because the field of web marketing is so crowded. There are so many people doing so many things that if you can choose a specialty and focus on it and then write about it and become known for it, this can really help your career.

I'll give you a great example. So this guy over here who I'm going to label AJ Kohn. So AJ, right, San Francisco-based SEO guy wrote what I consider the definitive guide to Google+ for marketing and SEO, and does a fantastic job of posting on there regularly. He's the only person I see in my stream who's really posting six, seven, eight, nine times a day, posting a bunch of interesting stuff, a bunch of fun stuff, personal stuff, whatever it is, great photography stuff that he always posts. He's made his topic area very unique. He started on Google+ in the very early days, was an early adopter of that. He wrote the definitive resource for it. By the way, he also wrote the definitive resource for Rel=Author and setting that up for sites, which I think is a great offshoot of that specialty. He contributes continuous updates to that and to other sites, like SearchEngineLand. He offers, obviously, to guest write for others, and he's showing off his skills by actually winning in that arena. When I do a lot of searches inside my Gmail account, which is the one that's connected to Google+, there's AJ, the stuff that he's Plus 1'd and shared and all these things, always ranking on page one for me because he shares so much content around the things that I consume. So he's done a great job of this.

There are tons of areas of specialty that still need or could use people in them. I would still say even old school kinds of things, like we need a new update to the old masters of curated research, guys like Dan Thies and Richard Baxter. We need someone who's getting into that world. We could definitely use someone to talk about the great advantages of Pinterest or LinkedIn. Chris from 97th Floor, Chris Bennett, does a phenomenal job with link-based still, infographics, interactive graphics. Once you get that association and are known for those specialties, people remember you, you have that branding, and then you're going to get recommended for these things. So find something you love and find the unique angle on it and the specialty. Phenomenal way to get content out there on the Web and get your name known.

Number five. This seems counter-intuitive, but when you're most desperate for business is when you make a lot of mistakes as an SEO consultant. I did this myself all the time, and I've talked to so many other people from the consulting and agency world who do this as well. They go, "Well, we have some people time free. I have some hours free. We really need the revenue coming in." So you expand to take on projects and customers that you normally wouldn't. The problem is that a lot of times, remember with accounts receivable, you're not getting paid with a credit card up front here. So you need to count on that trust factor and the likeability factor and the familiarity to make sure. It's actually a great idea when you're desperate to be able to say to someone, "Hey, I'm sorry. This is not in my wheelhouse. You're not the right kind of customer for me. I hope that you'll refer business my way, but let me point you over to this other person who does this work and who I think would be a fit." That interaction is oftentimes going to be much more positive than, "Yeah, let's start some client work. Well, I can't pay you that much, and besides I know you're desperate for business. So I'm going to offer you pennies on the dollar or 50% your normal rate. Then you're going to be locked into a contract with me, and by the way I'm unpleasant to work with." This makes for very frustrating stuff. So be cautious not to be accepting everything, to be cutting your rates, all that kind of stuff early on or when your business is struggling on the consulting side. A lot of the times, particularly in our field, you can take on some personal projects that are likely to either win you business over the long term or can actually be a channel for direct revenue, so anything from an affiliate project to a blog that sells advertising, this kind of thing.

Number six, my last recommendation and probably the best one I've got, this is via Wil Reynolds over at SEER Interactive. Help people. Help everyone you can and not just in the ways that are around marketing and SEO and social media and inbound. Help everyone you possibly can with anything that you can possibly do for them. So you see somebody who has a problem on Twitter, someone needs help moving something and you go, "Man, that guy's pretty cool. I'd really like to know him. You know what? I've got a van. I'm going to offer to pick up that chair that he needs at whatever furniture store. I'll reach out over Twitter or maybe I'll reach out over email." Fantastic, right? You have a friend who's out of work. I know you're struggling as well, right? You're trying to find clients. You obviously don't have a position for them, but it doesn't matter. As you're looking across clients, you're meeting with someone, maybe they don't take you up on it and you say, "Hey, I know that we didn't end up being your SEO agency. I didn't end up being your consultant, but I have a friend who's really good at project management and you said you were looking for a project manager position. I'd love to make the introduction." Fantastic, just by helping people in any way you can. There's a new local news site out there. There's a new neighborhood blog. Fantastic. Offer to contribute. Get to know all the people in the space. As you build up a network of people who know you and like you and who you've done nice things for in the past, you will have no problem winning clients and influencing referrals in the future.

All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to maybe seeing some tips from you down there in the comments, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

“We simply do not have the mail volumes to justify the size and capacity of our current mail processing network.” And with that, the Postmaster General dropped the ax on 232 mail processing centers around the country.

We’ve seen it coming for awhile, but the Post Office is such a staple in our world that I don’t think any of us really expected to see it fail. Then again, think about all the things you don’t mail anymore. Letters to friends and family have become emails, ecards have taken the place of invitations and announcements. Bills have gone “green” and banks no longer mail statements. The only upticks come from online retailers but even they have options other than going Postal.

Today’s press release states that the US Postal Service will have a $14 billion net loss at the end of this year. To stop the hemorrhage, they will close 140 processing centers by February 2013. That will likely be followed by another 89 closures in 2014. You can see a list of the centers here.

What this means for the average person is that mail delivery will take a little longer if you’re sending it out of your local area. 80% of First Class mail will still be delivered overnight.

What this means for the online retailer is you might have to start shipping via UPS or FedEx if you want to guarantee fast delivery. This is a tough spot because we know that shipping is a big factor in ecommerce. Shipping fees can make or break the sale and during the holidays, timing is extremely important.

In the end, we’ll all find ways to muddle through because it’s what we do and that includes the 13,000 employees who will be let go as a result of the closures. Maybe they all get jobs online.

For more information, visit the “Our Future Network” section of the US Postal Service online newsroom.

 

Minnesota has long been a state that’s prided itself on its commitment to education. Now the state has taken on the mission of becoming a technology hub as well, setting the goal to become one of the country’s top five technology states by 2020. Last week, we travelled to Minnesota to pilot two new programs designed to help students with an interest in technology get a jump on the job market, and learn directly from Google engineers over Google+ Hangout.

First, we partnered with Teach for America on a classroom mentorship project that pairs Google engineers with middle school science and math classes via Google+ Hangouts. A dozen Googlers paired up with classrooms in Minneapolis/St. Paul last week to introduce a curriculum modelled after Solve for X, Google’s initiative that celebrates technology-based moonshot thinking to solve real-world problems. In the coming weeks, each classroom will chose a big problem to tackle (world hunger, homelessness, climate change, etc.) and develop an innovative technology solution to address it—with help from the Google mentor who will join the classroom via Google+ Hangout for coaching sessions. We think hangouts are a great way to connect Googlers with classrooms far away, and are looking to expand this pilot to other states in the fall.


We also kicked off our first-ever youth entrepreneurship training as part of our Google for Entrepreneurs programs. The summit brought together 60 high school students from the Minneapolis STEP-UP program, an effort designed to place students from lower-income communities as interns at Minnesota businesses over the summer. Our goal was to give these students some basic training in Google tools like Docs, Apps, YouTube and Google+ so that they can enter their internships with a better understanding of how technology and the Internet can be of help to them, as well as spark these students with an entrepreneurial drive that will serve them well in these opportunities. After a morning of learning about Google tools, the students broke out into teams to pitch their own business ideas to solve challenges in education, government, transportation and the music industry. A number of mentors from the Minneapolis tech community joined us to help coach the students, and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak was on hand himself to help get the students started.


Science and technology disciplines are projected to add 70,000 jobs to the Minnesota job market by 2019. We hope by partnering with local organizations, we can help give students the inspiration and skills to enter that job market ready to excel.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of Community Partnerships, Google+

Dish Network is giving customers what they want — commercial free TV. The next sound you hear is that of network execs screaming.

The device that is causing all the ruckus is Dish’s Hopper, a DVR that allows you to automatically hop past all the commercials on a network TV show. You know, kind of like you already do with show’s you’ve recorded, only the Hopper does the work for you.

Understandably, the networks are furious. Commercials pay for the shows they produce. If networks don’t produce shows, then Dish Network wouldn’t have any content and they’d go out of business.

On the other hand, if Dish doesn’t keep their customers happy, they’ll go back to cable and again, Dish will go out of business.

Either way, they’re biting the hands that feed them. The question is, who has more clout, the consumer or the networks?

Dish is putting their money (literally) on the consumer. They know the networks will grumble, but in the end, it’s not like they’re going to stop making TV shows, though they could pull them off the Dish Network. The New York Times says that the networks are also offering Dish a taste of their own medicine by refusing to air Dish commercials. The Hopper ad is one of the most annoying commercials I’ve seen in a long time, so I’m behind the networks on that move.

The reality is, people skip commercials and when they don’t skip them, they walk out of the room to get a snack or use the facilities. Instead of fighting the Hopper, networks need to find new ways to engage the consumer. Instead of forcing an increasing number of commercials on viewers, networks should be rewarding them for their attention. Second screen apps are perfect for upping engagement. The Celebrity Apprentice app delivers the most points on questions asked during the commercials. If you want to win the game, you have to stay and watch.

What do you think? Is Dish making the right move by putting the customer in front of the client? Or is this going to come back to bite them someplace other than the hand?

 

 

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people sign up for Twitter to get closer to the things they care about — friends, businesses, celebrities, news and information from all over. If you’ve used Twitter for awhile, you know it can take some effort to find and follow the accounts that really reflect your interests. If you’re signing up for Twitter for the first time, we want that process to be easy and fast.

Currently, when new users come to Twitter, we show them all almost the same suggestions for what or who to follow. That isn’t ideal. Since you have individual interests, you should get individual suggestions. After all, even though millions of people love Justin Bieber, FC Barcelona or Kim Kardashian, not everyone using Twitter may want to follow them. A football fan in Italy who loves to travel may want to follow @chiellini, @walksofItaly and @nytimestravel. An aspiring chef who loves to laugh can follow @epicurious, @seriousrecipes and @SteveCarell. And a mom whose son is traveling in Australia can feel connected to him and keep up with the latest news where he is by following @smh.

To make it easier and faster for everyone to get started on Twitter, we’re beginning some experiments with tailored suggestions in a number of countries around the world. The first experiment will show new users a list of accounts that we recommend you follow, alongside a timeline filled with Tweets from those accounts. If you’re part of the experiment, you’ll see a Twitter experience that’s relevant to you right when you sign up. (Of course, you can always choose to not follow the suggested accounts that don’t interest you.)

New users may see a list of tailored suggestions (left) and a timeline with Tweets from those accounts (right) as they sign up for an account.

New users may see a list of tailored suggestions (left) and a timeline with Tweets from those accounts (right) as they sign up for an account.

If you’re a current user, you may see tailored suggestions in Who to follow so you can constantly find interesting and relevant accounts that are new to you. In both cases, we hope it’s effortless for the Italian football-and-travel fan to follow @chiellini, @walksofItaly and @nytimestravel. To see which accounts we’d recommend for you, visit our preview page.

Current users may see tailored suggestions in “Who to follow”.

These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

As always, we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience. For those who don’t want to tailor Twitter, we offer ways to turn off this collection. As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned earlier today, we support Do Not Track (DNT), which is reflected in our privacy policy as one of the ways you can indicate your preference. If you have DNT enabled in your browser settings, we will not collect the information that enables this feature, so you won’t see any tailored suggestions. We hope that our support of DNT highlights its importance as a privacy tool for consumers and creates even more interest and wider adoption across the web.

Additionally, new users will see an option to “Tailor Twitter based on my recent website visits” along with a link to “Learn more” when they create an account on Twitter.com. Current users will see a new “Personalization” section in account settings, with the same option to tailor Twitter. Of course, you can disable these options at any time, which will stop the collection of information for the feature and remove any tailored suggestions we have for you. You can even choose to turn off tailored suggestions from the preview page (which shows some suggestions we’d make for you).

Every day, experienced Twitter users are brought closer to the things they care about in unique, profound ways. Today’s experiment in providing tailored suggestions lets novice users go from zero to pro faster and more easily than ever before. So even if you’re not a football-loving Italian who wants to travel the world, we hope this experiment immediately makes Twitter yours, and you can start getting closer to the things you care about with just a few clicks or taps.

- Othman Laraki, Director, Growth and International (@othman)

Three new Google Search features are part of their “next generation search” project, Knowledge Graph. Info boxes, segmented results based on query context and suggestions based on popular queries negate the need to even click off the SERP for info.

With so many marketing channels now available to reach consumers, what’s a marketer to do? Whether it’s juggling across the new channels like mobile and social, or just trying to incorporate the more ‘traditional’ marketing channels like display and search — it’s...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

About a month ago, Microsoft informed us the Bing API would no longer be free and today is the day they migrated the Bing Search API to the paid platform. Microsoft said for the time being, the Bing API will still be free – to try out. But those with over 5,000 queries per month [...]

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

You’ve heard about SEO. You’re convinced SEO works very well for different kinds of online business. What you probably wonder is why it’s so powerful. That’s why I wrote this report – to show you not one, not five, not ten… but twenty-eight different reasons to...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

After 114,000 submissions and millions of your votes, second grader Dylan Hoffman of Caledonia, Wisc. is this year’s U.S. Doodle 4 Google National Winner. His doodle “Pirate Times” will be featured on the U.S. Google homepage tomorrow, May 18.

Hoffman, who attends the Prairie School in Racine, Wisc., responded to this year’s theme “If I could travel in time I’d visit...” with a colorful depiction of his dream visit to an era filled with swashbucklers. There, he’d “sail a pirate ship looking for treasure, have a colorful pet parrot and enjoy beautiful sunsets from deserted islands.” With his win, Dylan has come into some treasure of his own: a $30,000 college scholarship, a Chromebook computer and a $50,000 technology grant for his school. As an added bonus, Dylan’s doodle will grace the front of a special edition of the Crayola 64-crayon box, available this fall.


After this year's record-breaking submissions, choosing the National Winner and the four National Finalists wasn’t an easy decision. In addition to selecting Dylan, millions of public votes also helped us determine the four National Finalists, each of which will receive a $5,000 college scholarship:

• Grades 4-5: Talia Mastalski, Grade 5, East Pike Elementary School, Indiana, Penn., for her doodle “Traveling to me.” Talia says, “When I think of Google, I think of a wormhole leading me to knowledge. If I could travel in time, I would visit a similar wormhole into the future to find out about ME.”
• Grades 6-7: Herman Wang, Grade 6, Suzanne Middle School, West Covina, Calif., for his doodle “Retro City.” Herman says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit Retro City. A future city made of robots and humans.”
• Grades 8-9: Susan Olvera, Grade 8, SOAR Alternative School, Lafayette, In., for her doodle “Traveling Back to the Future.” Susan says, “If I could travel in time, I'd travel back to the future. If there is life on other planets, I believe we'd visit the natives as well as invent different ships and rockets for quicker transportation. With what we have accomplished currently, I believe the ‘future’ isn’t so far away.”
• Grades 10-12: Cynthia Cheng, Grade 11, Edison High School, Edison, NJ, for her doodle “A World of Adventure.” Cynthia says, “If I could travel in time, I'd visit the age of the Vikings. Though their tales of monsters may not have been entirely true, they were some of the greatest explorers in history. It would be a remarkable experience to share adventures and discover new lands with them.”

After the awards ceremony in New York City today, all 50 of our State Winners will unveil an exhibition of their artwork at the New York Public Library, where their doodles will be displayed from May 18-July 19. In addition, the artwork of all our State Finalists and Winners will be displayed at exhibitions in their home states across the country over the summer. Be sure to check out the local exhibition near you.

Thanks to all of you who voted and helped us select this year's winner. Even more important, thank you to all of the students who submitted entries. Keep on doodling and we’ll see you next year!

Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Product Management

As we mentioned on Twitter last week, the Bing team have been busy over recent months bringing a new experience to Bing users to help them do more.

In this behind-the-scenes video you’ll hear the inside story from Online Services President Qi Lu and his team as they explain the new features and how Microsoft is taking search “beyond 10 blue links”.

“Like” what you see? The please “Like” it above or share with your followers!

Cheers

@MelCarson

Twitter may further separate itself from the social media crowd by doing something that some might think is anti-social media (at least from a business point of view). That something is allowing users to opt in to a ‘Do Not track’ mode when using the Firefox browser.

The New York Times Bits blog reports

It’s no secret that Facebook is worth about $100 billion because it collected personal data about its users. A lot of data.

Although Twitter tracks its users too — albeit in a much less aggressive way — the company has decided to take a different route. It announced Thursday that it is joining Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox Web browser, and giving its users the ability to opt-out of being tracked in any way through Twitter.

Twitter is doing this by enabling the Do Not Track feature in the Firefox browser that enables people to opt-out of cookies that collect personal information and any third-party cookies, including those used for advertising. The Do Not Track functionality will only work if a Web site agrees to acknowledge it.

Couple this action with Twitter’s recent vigorous resistance to turning over information about a user who was part of the Occupy Wall Street ‘movement’.

Because Twitter’s focus is more about the news and information that a user passes along vs. the user itself, they can play thins kind of user friendly game MUCH more easily than Facebook can. Facebook is completely dependent on the individual characteristics and data of users so advertisers can decide who they want to target. Twitter, on the other hand, is driven by keywords and hashtags which are different forms of determining what a Twitter user may or may not want to see with regards to ads.

Has Twitter found a way to further differentiate and distance itself from Facebook and even Google in the privacy realm? If yes then they have scored a rather large coup. Let’s face it, no matter what happens in Friday’s IPO Facebook will always be positioned as a necessary evil by users. This love / hate relationship is one that makes Facebook more susceptible to the whims of the individual especially if they are feeling wronged by the service (and, of course, another viable social option exists which is a big question mark).

Twitter is saying “Hey, it’s cool if we don’t have more data on you than you would like us to have.” and that is like a blast of fresh air in the day and age of ‘nothing is sacred or private in the online world.” Twitter is already different but this makes it more so and that is a very good thing for them and for users.

What’s another advantage of Twitter’s move in this direction. Well, how about having the news be “announced” by a high ranking official of the FTC? Yup, that’s the government telling an Internet company “Nice work!”. To Twitter that is priceless.

Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said in a statement, “As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned this morning, Twitter now supports Do Not Track.” Ms. Penner added: “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track.”

Twitter has been laying low as of late which isn’t hard to do in this Facebook IPO feeding frenzy. Maybe we should already start to ignore the IPO and see what the competition is doing? After all, unless you are getting rich from this IPO it should be business as usual and, despite the hype, there is much more to the social marketing world than just Facebook. Thank God for that.

As campaigns mature, keywords evolve from experiments to proven revenue drivers. Remembering to add a keyword to Bing after a successful trial in Google or remembering to expand a new top performing keyword across its other match types is easier said than done. With so much focus these days on the...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Is anyone really willing to admit that in the Internet marketing space the hype from agencies is far exceeding the reality at this point? I know it may be heretical to even imply this but I prefer to dabble in the truth rather than BS. In the Internet marketing space that point of view earns me the title of ‘contrarian’.

Well, I accept that title and look to results like those found by PulsePoint (reported by eMarketer) to further make the point. It appears that the agency side of the ledger sees their delivery capabilities in the three major areas of marketing as either ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ effective. Confidence is good I suppose but only if it’s based in reality. Otherwise it can be little more than salesmanship.

Why do I see things this way? It is just that SO many people I run into have major gripes about the ‘help’ they receive from agency providers, regardless the size of the business. The get sold a bill of goods (the same bill of goods that was drilled into a salesperson’s head as gospel) then when it comes to delivery there is a serious disconnect. Unfortunately, the way many agencies handle client engagements is in a ‘fake it ’til you make it’ mode. Delivery is done by underpaid and relatively inexperienced folks and, well, you can guess where it goes from there.

The next chart made me chuckle a bit. It shows just how confident agencies REALLY are. This chart shows the marketing priorities of these three groups. If agencies were truly as good as they claim don’t you think they would be more willing to measure results better?

The revolt by marketers and others seeking agency level help has been a long time coming and really it can’t come too soon. How many monthly retainers will it take for clients to finally yell “No mas!” and simply do the best they can in house since their results were not that much better after paying someone else?

Now, don’t think this is a blanket statement or indictment against the agency model. There are great providers out there. It’s usually the ones, however, that aren’t out there saying how good they but rather doing good work and living off referral business, that steer clear of this mess.

How do you feel about the agency side of the interactive space? What has been your experience? Are you an agency provider who disagrees with me? Then please let us know your thoughts in the comments. We can’t know unless you make yourself be heard.

No matter your approach, the mobile landscape is a tricky, expansive space of uncertainty filled with twists and turns that would give even the most solid minded developer or site owner points to pause. Here’s a guide to help you go mobile.

The Google Penguin Update is now mainstream after The Wall Street Journal covered it in a feature story named As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web. The story interviews a few small business owners who were hit hard by the update. One business owner saw his sales drop to $25,000 this...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Posted by Neal Cabage

Many websites have Google Analytics setup, but the majority are not making the most use of these resources. Often, analytics is an afterthought or is dismissed as merely a way of tracking the number of visitors on a given day. But there is so much more actionable data to be had with a little time and forethought.

In this post, I am going to talk a bit about analytics strategy and then provide examples of actionable data that can be tracked and how it might be useful.

Strategy

At a very high level, start by considering the goals of your site and how those map to your analytics tracking. Most eCommerce and Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses, for example, want to generate a purchase transaction. Services businesses such as consultancies may be looking to generate higher funnel leads that will eventually lead to contract for service offline, at a later time. Still others, such as news content sites, might define a goal as keeping a user on the site for a minimum amount of time or having them return a specified number of times within a month. Whatever your goals are, it is imperative to define those clearly - ideally before you even create your website, but certainly before setting up an analytics campaign.

Each of the above goals is possible to track using custom events, goals, events, and funnel tracking in Google Analytics. There's even a way to setup custom widgets on the dashboard and have reports and alerts emailed to you on a schedule as well, making it easier than ever to access highly meaningful performance metrics. There really is no excuse to still be using a tool as powerful as Google Analytics to merely track your page views day-to-day.

Define Your Goals

What should we be tracking? Let's take an eCommerce site as an example, since it has the most sophisticated and well-defined conversion funnel, and we'll demonstrate the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at each major step of the funnel that we might consider tracking. This should give a good idea of what's possible and get the creative juices flowing a bit. There are three major steps to the typical eCommerce funnel with an optional fourth step. Let's walk through each one:

i. Acquisition

We start by looking at how traffic was acquired. How were users sent to your website and from where? Although you may never attain 100% visibility, you'd be surprised just how much visibility you can achieve. You probably already know this through the standard analytics reports: that you can see keywords that were searched and on which search engine. Google also makes it very easy to integrate AdWords data to see exactly which AdWords campaigns are generating traffic and which are converting. Google also owns Feedburner, which provides yet another trackable channel for which you can directly attribute traffic.

Tagging is possible for anything outside of the Google-sphere, making it possible to add (utm) tags to the querystring of any URL you embed into an email campaign, social campaign, or banner marketing campaign. For many people, that's the point where the light really goes on, realizing that you can tag and thus achieve almost complete visibility of traffic sourcing, and factor all of this into your integrated analytics campaigns.

An example of using UTM tags to track external click events:

http://www.site.com/myproduct/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=300x250-banner&utm_campaign=myproduct

With all of these tactical tracking opportunities in mind, imagine the possibilities. Here are just a few examples of valuable KPI data points you might consider tracking as part of acquisition:

• Organic Search (SEO)
• Paid Search Marketing (SEM)
• Social Campaigns
• Banner Campaigns
• Links from External Sites
• Links from Online Videos
• Email Recipients
• RSS Subscribers

ii. Engagement

Once you've got the attention of your users, are you effectively driving that traffic toward your funnel or toward micro-conversion events that help to keep them engaged? Even if the visitor does not purchase something today, it can still be extremely useful to capture an email address, get them to subscribe to an RSS feed, or any number of other activities that will keep the communication channels open and continue to educate and qualify them in preparation for a later purchase. This is particularly true of larger purchases or services, which require longer time for transactions to mature.

To begin thinking of KPI data points in the engagement segment of the funnel, consider what sort of user activities you could be implementing and the corresponding micro-conversion goals you could be setting. This may also help you realize that you could be doing more to engage your users. Here are a few examples of good engagement goals to track:

• Account signup
• Email signup
• RSS subscription
• Saving product to wishlists
• Adding item(s) to cart
• Contributing product ratings or reviews
• Watching video
• Content interactions (e.g. photo zoom, faceted search attributes, etc.)

iii. Conversion

You've made it from acquiring to engaging, and now you're finally converting that prospect into a paying customer. This is the point at which you're finally able to attribute cost and value to all of your efforts and begin making some decisions.

If you're spending money on paid search campaigns, you can see the precise value of each ad campaign, if you've integrated conversion tracking. You'll also be able to see percentage of conversions for other non-integrated channels such as SEO, social, and banner re-targeting. Plus, other details such as average order value and average time to complete a purchase, and you can segment those macro statics by channel to derive insights such as paid search converts with better velocity than social.

The KPIs to consider tracking at this funnel step are:

• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Return on investment (SEO, Social)
• Revenue
• Average order value
• Average time to complete order
• Average visits before conversion

     * Consider segmenting all of these KPIs by ad channel

iv. Loyalty

All of the above analysis can be very valuable, but is a bit myopic if take in isolation, particularly if you have return visitors or a more sophisticated sales and marketing operation that involves multiple touches prior to conversion.

Consider the more complex scenario of a prospect who visits your site, then sees retargeted banners on other sites (reminding them of you), so they sign up for your newsletter and eventually convert into a customer. And what if they come back a second or third time thereafter and purchase again. How do you attribute the sales? Does it all get attributed back to the 'first touch' interaction with one of your ads?

The new version of Google Analytics (v5) introduces the idea of a multi-channel funnel, which helps to address this issue. With a series of new reports, you can finally see which touch triggered the transaction, but you can also see the path and which other touch points may have assisted with that transaction. This can go a long way toward helping to understand the less tangible value of the early-stage-funnel 'assist' campaigns. For example, the social channel has notoriously low direct conversion attribution... But with multi-channel attribution, you can finally begin to see its role in setting up other activities later down the funnel to trigger a transaction.

Putting it all together

Hopefully, you are seeing the sort of user behavior and ad campaign performance insights you can mine from Google Analytics, if you take the time to define a strategy and properly implement the tracking and reporting. And that really is the key take away: analytics is a powerful tool that will provide substantial actionable data and enable you to make much smarter marketing budget decisions; but it requires clarity for your goals and how you drive traffic and engage your users. Without that clarity, you do not have a road map to setup a meaningful analytics campaign. Clarity and discipline is where many businesses get stuck and why so few practice meaningful analytics, outside of the major enterprise. But if you have clarity around your traffic generation and engagement activities and goals, you can generate highly informative and actionable data to super charge your marketing efforts, and that is a real competitive advantage.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

You don’t have to be a lifestyle-type site to win on Pinterest, you merely need to make your brand fun and create interesting, shareable images. Pinterest offers other benefits, including social links generated from content shared on Pinterest.

Earlier this week, Google Fellow Amit Singhal gave the opening keynote at SMX London. Although Matt Cutts has always been the public face of all parts of Google’s unpaid search, his realm is primarily web spam. Singhal has been speaking publicly more often (notably when Panda launched) and...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Posted by Designbysoap Ltd

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an on-site SEO consultant, a link-building specialist or an all-round ‘internet marketer’, content creation should be particularly high on your list of priorities. We’ve been hearing the phrase ‘content is king’ for years now, but given Google’s recent de-indexation of low-quality blog networks, the Panda updates and the new algorithm burning across the horizon, it seems it’s never been more true than in 2012.

It’s not difficult to understand the importance of high quality, unique and relevant content in the modern SEO industry; content of this type published on your own site can do wonders when it comes to link magnetism and social media metrics and similarly, can help you obtain extremely powerful links from high authority domains that might otherwise be out of your reach. But creating this content is easier said than done, particularly if you’re trying to compete in a crowded industry. Sure, if you’re working on behalf of a client in a fairly dull field it can be relatively easy to produce content that will attract attention, but competing in content-heavy industries like SEO, gaming and entertainment (for example) can be very, very difficult.

So how can you make creating high quality, shareable content easier? What processes can you follow to minimise the time you spend researching and thinking and maximise the time you spend creating and sharing your content?

To try and answer these questions I’ve put together the following article and infographic (a large chunk of my time working for Designbysoap is spent designing infographics) that aims to give you a structure for content creation, as well as some useful tips and tools. I hope you enjoy it and, more importantly, I hope it helps when it comes to creating high quality content for your own campaigns.

Click for a full size version if you'd like to print it.

Research

Typically, this is often the most time-intensive element of content creation, whilst annoyingly yielding the fewest results. I’ve spent numerous hours reading posts and analysing data that ultimately comes to nothing. Sure, it can be enjoyable and often rewarding in terms of learning about an industry, but it’s not always permissible to spend huge chunks of your time (or a clients’ for that matter) reading and searching only to end up with nothing to show for it.

Having said that, the research portion of your content creation process can often be one of the most important – delivering content based on flawed, incorrect, irrelevant or (perhaps worst of all) boring information will get you nowhere and will essentially nullify all your efforts in the latter stages.

Ultimately, you need to find out what’s popular in the area you’re working in. Your research needs to be around a topic that’s current, relevant to your industry, popular and, most importantly, likely to gain traction (whether that be via social media platforms, inbound links or attention from high profile sites).

To help you identify this kind of content, there are several excellent tools at your disposal;

Google News – helps you highlight areas of interest and current news

Google Trends – helps you hone into specific topics in any given area of interest

Google Insights – helps you discover what people are searching for around an area of interest. Great if you’re writing blog posts

Digg, Twitter, Reddit – helps you find out what’s popular with the readers, what kinds of topics are receiving the highest level of sharing

These are the platforms I turn to first, but there are plenty of others (Cracked, AllThingsNow, Bing News, Fark, etc.), all of which will add to your level of insight around any given topic. Now, these can certainly help you find up to date, reliable and current information and can be invaluable when it comes to highlighting the most popular topics, but they don’t solve the problem of minimising the time you’re spending on research.

This is where a phenomenal tool from SEOGadget comes in, that makes ingenious use of Excel and Google Docs. I hugely recommend you follow the link and save a copy of the document to your own Google Docs (when you’ve finished reading this post of course), as it will save you a massive amount of time and effort during the research stage. The tool allows you to add a search query within the excel document, after which it will pull in invaluable data from Google News, Google Insights, Twitter, Bing News, Digg and numerous other platforms. You can not only quickly and easily find out what’s hot, but you can see the most popular topics on a range of social media platforms and highlight the top and rising searches around any given topic. There’s a fair bit more to it, but I’ll leave you to discover all it has to offer - suffice it to say it’s a perfect tool for the content creation research stage.

Ideas

Once you’ve got a solid set of data and a firm grip on the type of information likely to be shared, you need to start brainstorming some ideas on how you’re going to present the information.

The first thing you need to decide is the angle from which you’re going to approach the information. It’s no good just re-formatting a post or piece of content that already exists (you see this a huge amount when it comes to content creation, particularly in the SEO industry), you need to add something new or interesting to what you’ve already got. Can you come at the information in a new way? Or add something new to the story? Can you produce something unique to the industry?

Essentially, you’re looking at how you’re going to present the information you’ve gathered (an in-depth blog post, a video, a static infographic, an interactive infographic, etc), how you’re going to approach the subject (informative, analytical, satirical, etc) and how you’re going to add something beneficial or attractive to the target audience (drawing new conclusions, bringing together lots of pieces of information, attempting to shock, informing, entertaining, etc).

An excellent example is SEOmoz's own Google Algorithm Change History; all of this information is available elsewhere on the internet, but by pulling it all together and keeping it up to date, they've provided a piece of content that makes life easier for readers (bringing all the information together in one place), keeps them up to date (by displaying the latest information) and provides new insight (by viewing the complete history of algorithm updates, you can see the progression Google has taken, which offers far more insight and value than a post discussing just the most recent change).

Sometimes, it’s enough to simply be first – as long as the content you’re producing is high quality. A great example from a different industry is the Angry Birds Space infographic (section included below). This was the first quality infographic to be published on the latest Angry Birds installment; a game that saw a huge amount of buzz across news platforms for reaching 10 million downloads in just three days. The infographic is not only very nicely designed, but gained a decent amount of traction. Only two days after being published, the infographic has seen over 1,000 Facebook likes:

Infographic section via PlayVille

You can also gain a decent amount of traction by focusing your content around an upcoming event - a great example is the F1 2012 Season infographic (a section of which is included below). The infographic doesn't necessarily offer anything new, but took advantage of the excitement surrounding the start of the new Formula 1 season, resulting in a very high placement for the infographic.

Infographic section via Autoblog

Another excellent idea is to try your best to involve other people in the idea (or even the research) stage; specifically, people you know have an influence in the industry you’re working in.

Let’s say you’re producing an infographic on console gaming – why not email some people from Destructoid, G4TV, Gamespot, IGN, etc. and ask them what they’d like to see in an infographic. Or give them a collection of your ideas and ask them which they think is the best – not only does this involve influencers in the early stages of your content creation, but it can help massively when it comes to placement and promotion.

If these people give you valuable insights or information, then include them in your content (in the sources section of an infographic, or via a credit link in a blog post) – you’d be amazed how much more willing people are to share things when they’re credited with a hand in the research or production.

Placement

Once you’ve gathered your information and you have an idea of the type of content you’re going to produce, you need to try and identify where the content is going to be placed.

Obviously if the content is going on your own website, then this is less of an issue, but if it’s a link-building exercise then having an idea of the kind of site you’ll be aiming for can make a big difference to how you approach the creation stage.

It can be a good idea to start your outreach before you approach the actual creation of your content, as confirming a placement beforehand will make your life much easier in terms of considering the target audience. If you know where the content is going to be placed, then you can tweak the language, style and tone you adopt throughout the piece in order to maximise your chances of appealing to their readers.

Conversely, you don’t necessarily need to have confirmed the placement location before you start work on the production stage. Often you may find it easier to convince sites to place your work once they’ve actually got something to look at, rather than trying to tempt them with just the concept. If you’re planning on completing your outreach once you’ve finished the content creation stage, then you should at least have an idea of the sort of website you’re going to be targeting. Don’t specifically aim content at one website before you contact them, as if they turn it down you may struggle to place it somewhere else.

When it comes to contacting specific websites, your best bet is to write a concise and polite email to the most relevant person at the organisation, then follow this up with a call a day or two later. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from your preferred placement, it’s still worth giving them a call just to check they’ve received your email and even if they turn it down, you’ve got a contact you can use for future pieces.

Creation

So you’ve done your research, you’ve got your content and you’ve got an idea of where you’re going to place the piece – now it’s time to actually create your content.

Giving you advice on the creation stage is a little tricky, as it will depend on what type of content you’re putting together. To overcome this, I’ll quickly cover the two most popular content types; blog posts and infographics.

Infographics

Having produced around 100 infographics personally over the last 18 months (and overseen scores more), I consider them to be one of my main areas of expertise. One of my major pet hates when it comes to infographics is people telling me that there are ‘rules’ to infographic production – there aren’t. An infographic doesn’t have to tell a story, it doesn’t have to avoid using text at all costs, in fact it doesn’t have to do anything other than display information that is either complimented by, or portrayed via graphics. So don’t get too caught up in the non-existent infographic ‘rules’ and just focus on producing something that is engaging to your target audience.

Some topics will require more text than others, particularly if the data is qualitative rather than quantitative. A lot of people will use phrases like ‘don’t make me read’ when they’re looking at infographics, but you should give your audience more credit – people don’t mind reading, as long as the information you’re including is concise and adds something to the visuals. If you can visualise it (i.e. statistical information), then do, if you can’t then don’t worry too much about it, people will forgive you.

Try and create an immediate impact with the visuals and draw readers into your infographic as early as possible, the most obvious place to do this is with the title. It’s amazing how many people are happy to just type the title in a nice big font and then move on to the rest of the content. But if you look at some of the best infographic designers (and the most popular infographics online), you’ll see that the title is a fantastic opportunity to grab the reader with a strong, relevant visual. I’ve included a few examples below to show you what I’m talking about (please note these are just a part of the original graphic -- there is a lot more to see when you click on the link underneath each image!):

Infographic section via the Designbysoap blog

Infographic section via Volvo

Infographic section via HotelshopUK

Infographic section via Geekosystem

When it comes to visualising the data you’ve got, try and keep a consistent theme throughout the infographic, whether that’s through your choice of visualisation methods, the colours used or the style of design. If you can help it, try and avoid using too many infographic ‘cliches’ – a good example of this is using a line of six person icons to visualise a statistic like ‘60% of people use people icons in their infographics’.

Just try and be as creative as you can (which I realise isn’t really all that helpful, as it’s like saying ‘be more musically gifted’), and don’t take the lazy approach just because you’d like to get it finished.

My last point is on orientation – generally speaking, if you’re going to be placing the infographic online then you’re probably better off opting for a portrait infographic, rather than a landscape one. This is because it’s far easier to use online and usually allows you to use a longer file (people will always prefer to scroll up and down as opposed to left and right, if the web page even allows it).

Blog Posts

It seems like an obvious thing to say, but in-depth blog posts are far more likely to encourage sharing than a quick post that just skims over a topic. Long blog posts are great as long as they’re adding value to a topic – you should be informing, educating or entertaining your readers as much as you possibly can.

Include relevant, quality outbound links that are useful to your readers – if you find a good tool during your research phase, link to it. If you find a post that offers an alternative argument to what you’re saying, or adds additional information, link to it. Too many people are hesitant to link out from their blog posts, worried that it will give readers a reason to leave their page. Trust me, if you’re producing high quality content, they will come back (for example, when I’m reading blog posts and I come across a link I want to follow, I tend to open it in a new tab and then continue reading).

Again, it seems obvious, but pay attention to grammar and punctuation – it’s hard to come across as authoritative if your content is full of spelling mistakes, misplaced commas and missing capitalisations. It might sound strange, but grammatical errors can also put off people from sharing your content and you want to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of shares and links. If writing isn’t your strong point, then get someone else to proof read your articles before publishing, particularly if you’re sending them out as guest posts.

Another good tip is to try and engage your readers as early as possible in the post – the best places to do this are the title, the sub-title and the opening paragraph. There are many different ways to do this; provocation, humour, questioning, etc. just make sure you grab people as early as you can. Bear in mind it’s the title that will encourage click-through rates when it comes to blog front pages and aggregation networks such as Inbound.org. Having said this, don’t be deliberately misleading with your titles – sure it can increase click-through rates and traffic to have a title that draws attention, but if it’s erroneous then you’re far more likely to piss people off than you are to encourage sharing.

You should also try and help your readers as much as possible; something that often means not assuming knowledge on their part. Unless you’re writing for particularly high level, technical websites, it’s best not to over-use entropic language without clearly explaining yourself. If you’re writing a post full of tips, explain things to your readers – rather than just saying do this, tell them how to do it.

Another valuable tip is to try and break up the copy in particularly long articles – use sub-headings and paragraph breaks to make the article look less dense and more accessible to readers. You should also make sure you’re using images in your posts, not only do they break up long sections of text nicely, but they can often be extremely helpful, particularly in tutorials and ‘how-to’ articles (screenshots can be especially useful). When it comes to sourcing images, you should either be creating them yourself or using an online platform such as Shutterstock or Creative Commons, rather than just stealing them from other websites. Having said this, the latter is permissible in some situations, just be sure to include credit links to avoid upsetting other webmasters, and check the copyright laws in your country. Don’t forget to properly name and alt tag your images either – it’s amazing how often you see people missing this potentially valuable ranking signal.

Publish

So you’ve spent hours putting together a high quality piece of content, now it’s time to get it live. Hopefully you’ll have started your outreach before putting the content together, but if you didn’t, now’s the time to start sending some emails.

I would always advocate aiming as high as you possibly can (as long as the quality of the content is good enough), as it never hurts to try. When we’re advising our link-building engineers on gaining high profile placements, we get them to put a list of five or six potential placements together, in order of domain authority, traffic or level of engagement via social media (depending on the post content and what we’re trying to achieve). From there you can start at the top and work your way down, until someone agrees to place your content.

Once a placement has been confirmed, make sure you’ve got an idea of when it will be published, so you can start sharing as soon as possible. You should also keep up a level of etiquette when you’ve posted on someone else’s website – push the content as much as you can, link to it from other posts and send as much traffic and social media engagement as humanly possible. This not only makes the link more valuable, but will encourage the administrator to publish your posts in the future. You should also keep an eye on the comments and reply to as many as you can; keep up the level of engagement and discussion and be involved.

Promote

It’s amazing how many times we see people produce fantastic content, and then just leave it to either reach a large audience or, more often, fall flat on its face. If you’ve gone through all the effort of researching and producing a high quality piece of content, then you should continue that effort through to the post-publishing stage.

It’s true that if your content is good enough and it’s published on a high profile platform, then it will likely achieve a high level of social media traction and natural inbound links, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your best to push it as best you can.

You should aim to utilise as many avenues as you can to promote your content, including social media, news aggregators, infographic publication sites and inbound links from other domains (particularly applicable if you or your team writes lots of related guest posts). I could include a massive list of sites you can use, but honestly it depends on the vertical in which you’re working. Instead, check out this awesome link building strategies post, this list of infographic distribution sites, this post on finding the perfect content promotion platform and this handy list of social bookmarking websites.

You should also try to reach out to influencers in the industry you’re working in, whether that be via phone, email or social media platforms. The success of this practise will depend on a variety of factors (including the content itself, the domain it’s published on, the author, the way you choose to make contact and the area of discussion), but it never hurts to try. If you made the effort of reaching out to people during your research and ideas phase as suggested, then you may find you get some great traction via some very influential people.

So that’s about it for my guide to creating good content – did I miss anything? Disagree with anything I said? Let me know in the comments below.

Post by John Pring from Designbysoap Ltd.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Ethan Lyon

The latest major update by Google (Penguin) did a hatchet job on sites participating in link networks. As a result, many webmasters are hunting down websites that might appear to be a part of a link network and severing ties. However, those sites themselves could be a link network by connecting and optimizing anchor text links between each of the sites.

Keep in mind there are many sites that have optimized anchor text pushing link juice to their other domains, but have not been penalized. People link between their sites. It’s natural. It happens. However, Google’s dial is way high for link networks, and optimizing links between your sites could make you appear to be a network.

But before you freak out and do a full-blown investigation to figure out why your rankings took a nose dive, read Dr. Pete’s post. It’s critical to not overreact.

If you do suspect you’ve been smacked by Penguin, below is one of many processes of finding your own link network and how all of your sites are inter-connected.

For this exercise, you’ll need either a subscription to SEOMoz’s OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSEO and Screaming Frog. The example uses MajesticSEO because its index is larger, but it is not necessary.

Let’s begin with even finding all of the sites you or your client might own:

What websites do I own again?

1. Plug main each domain you own into ReverseInternet.com:

2. Look at the other sites on the same IP and nameserver and that share the same Google Analytics and AdSense code:

3. Once you have a list of all sites that share the same IP, nameserver, Google Analytics, and AdSense codes, find the ones you or your client owns. Keep on drilling down to create a comprehensive list of all sites potentially owned by either you or your client. Keep in mind other sites on the same IP or nameservers or have the same Google Analytics and AdSense codes might not be owned by the same person.

Now you need to see how they’re connected!

How are my websites connected?

The next step is to pull the backlinks from MajesticSEO.com for all of the sites, regardless of whether you think you own them into one Excel sheet. If the site does not have links pointing to it, use MajesticSEO’s historic index.

We want to see how the sites have received links from the same company currently and historically. This view helps us understand how Google might have seen them as interconnected and have perceived the sites as a link network. (Note: If you have less than five small sites, you may be able to cut ahead and start with using Screaming Frog.)

1. Log into MajesticSEO (yes, you need to sign up).

2. Explore the domain:

3. If the site does not have current backlinks, use the historic index to see how it was once getting links:

4. Create a report:

5. Create a domain-level report so you can see as many links pointing to your site as possible:

6. Go to your reports page:

7. Select the report you just made and click the download:

8. Now prepare your download:

9. Go to your downloads page:

10. Now you can FINALLY download your report, unzip it, and open in Excel.

11. Repeat this process until you have all of your links in one Excel sheet, stacked on top of each other and only one header.

WOW, that’s a lot of data. How can I see through the noise?

You could have 1,000,000,000 plus links in your spreadsheet and performing calculations on 1,000,000,000 is without a doubt going to break Excel and leave you incredibly frustrated. Additionally, we only need if and how the sites are connected, not how many links pointing to them.

1. Once you have all of the websites the company owns, we need to clean the URLs so we can remove duplicate links (from source to target URLs).

2. Copy and paste the target and source URLs into new columns as seen in this example:

3. Select the clean target and source URL columns by selecting the source column holding shift then select the target column so it looks like this:

4. Use the find / replace function to remove http://, https://, www. and every directory by finding finding /* and replacing with nothing:

and

5. Now you should have two columns that have a clean target and source domains:

Next you need to remove duplicates. Select all of your data and go to the data tab in Excel, then select the remove duplicates button:

6. Unselect all columns then only select your clean target and source columns:

Now remove duplicates.

7. Now we need to see which sources are linking to our target URLs to find how we’re interlinking. Use the countif() function, using the clean target URL as the range and clean source URL as the criteria:

8. Let’s filter our countif() statements by everything over 0:

Let's visualize this!

Often times it’s a lot easier to see how we’re interlinking instead of looking at a bunch of rows. This will make it easier to spot clusters of sites interlinking.

1. Take the clean target and source URLs from the above spreadsheet and paste them into a Google Docs spreadsheet:

2. Let’s go to Google Docs and create a Google Fusion Table:

3. Select the spreadsheet you just made:

4. Now you should have your spreadsheet in Google Fusion Tables. Go to the experiment menu and select the network graph option:

5. VOILÀ! Finally, you can see how all of your sites are interlinked:

Let's burn (or no-follow) this network!

While we can use MajesticSEO or OpenSiteExplorer to find links between our sites, some of these links might have changed, and we want to find the most updated links in our network, so let’s use Screaming Frog.

Why not use Screaming Frog to begin with? Well, if you have 500 sites, running Screaming Frog on all of them could take quite a while so we would use MajesticSEO or OpenSiteExplorer to knock through them more quickly (especially, if you're talking about very large sites). If, however, you have just four or five sites (as found by ReverseInternet.com), you can forgo the above steps and jump into Screaming Frog.

1. Go to the Screaming Frog application and run a report on each domain:

2. After the report has finished, go to the External tab, then Export > All Links:

3. Now we need to copy and clean the source and destination URLs to see the exact places and anchor text we’re using to link between our sites:

4. Just like before, we need to see where our target URL is also the source URL. This will help pinpoint where we’re interlinking. Just as before, use the countif() function.

5. Let’s filter by countif() cells over 0, then look at the anchor text to see if we might be over-optimizing:

6. Now, let’s remove those over-optimized links if necessary!

Wrap up

You might be saying, “It’s completely reasonable to link between your sites. The GAP does it!” Guess what buddy? You’re not the GAP. Chances are, if you’ve been in link networks and have one of your own, you’re under Google’s microscope. Before you fire off that reconsideration request, you need to do EVERYTHING that could potentially be against their guidelines. Having a bunch of sites interlinking with optimized anchor text is one of them.

Okay, okay, there are legitimate reasons for linking between your sites. One is your other site offers a different product in another country. It would be a bad user experience to remove the links for people that want your products in their country. You might want to no-follow those links so there is no question that you’re not "inflating your pagerank."

At the end of the day, you want to do your homework to make sure you’re covering all bases before filing a reconsideration request. Removing a few links, in my opinion, isn’t enough. But then again, I’m an Excel data nerd. :)

Feel free to hit me up on Twitter for any questions: @ethanlyon and Google+ or at SEER Interactive.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Google and the National Security Agency's possibly secret relationship will remain secret. The Federal Appeals Court has upheld the NSA's decision not to release information confirming or denying if they have a relationship with Google.

A Business’s Reputation Is More Vulnerable on the Social Web was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

There’s a fascinating story in the Atlantic of one historian’s ongoing social experiment intended to reveal the nature of “truth” on the web. He teaches a U.S. History course at George Mason University called Lying About the Past. The curriculum has uncovered a fragile balance between truth and fiction within online communities as students craft a hoax to see how long it can pass as fact. Outside of academia, one prankster and entrepreneur duped Facebook into believing Abraham Lincoln patented a pre-cursor to social networking.

The lesson the Atlantic draws from the evidence is that the more trusting the community and the less centralized its communication, the more vulnerable it is to believing misinformation. Facebook is susceptible to propagating falsities with viral while Reddit collectively scrutinizes. It’s better to a safe skeptic than a sorry sucker.

The findings are a cautionary tale for citizens of the web who avoid becoming victims. But the implications for businesses are equally pressing. A tarnished reputation can do serious damage to a business’s viability. If falsehoods or negative reviews of a business or people close to it crop up online, corrections or rebuttals can come too late to mitigate lasting damage. Active reputation management has always been a necessity of online business, but emerging search and social integrations magnify the issue.

Yesterday Bing launched its new socially enhanced search interface. Billed as another leap beyond blue links, the three column format dedicates the right-hand column to social activity in the searcher’s network. Reviews, both good and bad, become more visible when members of a searchers network have made comments about a business. Google has also made clear its intentions to continue to add social signals to rankings as well as SERP display, saying We think the web is better when it’s social.

Address your online vulnerabilities, be they from negative SEO sabotage or increasing prominence of social mentions. What’s being said about your business online? Isn’t it time to find out?

Automaker tells ClickZ it will continue advertising on the social site. While General Motors may halt Facebook advertising, according to a Wall Street Journal story today, Ford has a different attitude toward paid promotions on the social site.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Posted by Dr. Pete

I spend a lot of quality time in Private Q&A here on SEOmoz, and I recently passed a milestone – 1,000 private questions answered since we re-launched the system (just over a year ago). Not surprisingly, we see a lot of the same questions and concerns pop up over time, and I’d like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way (please tell me my suffering wasn’t in vain). This post is an attempt to distill the biggest lessons from those 1,000 questions…

1. Dogma Will Get You Killed

You finally got your head around SEO best practices, and then you tackled your first e-commerce site, only to find that nothing worked the way the blogs told you. Search is algorithmic, so we assume it follows the same rules for everyone. In theory, it usually does, but those rules are incredibly complex and situational. Google claims over 200 ranking factors, many of those factors are probably multi-part, the algorithm is changing more than once per day, and there’s occasionally a manual intervention to really screw things up.

It’s good to know the basics (and there are some best practices), but you have to learn to roll with the punches. Even something as “simple” as de-indexing a few dozen pages rarely goes as planned, and can take weeks or months. Measure, evaluate, and adapt. If one tag or tactic isn’t working, consider your options.

2. One-trick Ponies Make Good Glue

I wrote an entire post recently on this topic, specifically link-building vs. on-page SEO. People naturally get comfortable with one aspect of search marketing (link-building, on-page, social, etc.) and then want to “perfect” it, but at best they hit diminishing returns fast. At worst, they’re putting band-aids on URLs while they bleed to death from a huge link wound. I’ve seen sites with spotless on-page SEO that have been stuck for months suddenly leap through the rankings because they’ve acquired a few good links. On the flipside, I’ve seen sites that were a total mess but had solid link profiles miraculously improve when their on-page problems were fixed.

3. A Link, by Any Other Name…

…might still stink. In the rush to build links, too many people, especially people with brand new (read that “highly vulnerable”) sites, make the mistake of thinking that all links are equally good. It’s no mistake that my most linked to blog post in Q&A is Rand’s 2010 post “All Links are Not Created Equal”. It’s not just a question of spam and penalties – link value varies tremendously with the page, placement, density of links, and on and on.

Case in point: I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen spend months on a DMOZ link only to have it buried on a page that has little or no internal PR or isn’t even indexed. Link-building is not just a numbers game. I’m not making a white-hat argument – it’s just SEO fact. Some links are better than others. Don’t waste your time on junk.

4. You’re Not a Black-hat Genius

Sorry to break it to you, but better to hear it from me than Google. First of all, if I can spot your paid links and gratuitous spam in 5 minutes of looking at Open Site Explorer data, how hard do you think it is for Google, who can essentially see the entire link-graph at a glance? Obviously, they don’t always get it right, and plenty of spam slips through the cracks, but the algorithm isn’t stupid, either. Ethics aside, the practical problem with black-hat SEO isn’t that it doesn’t work – the problem is that 98.7% of people do it badly.

At the risk of kicking you while you’re down, I also have to add that your link circle/wheel/tetrahedron isn’t brilliant, no matter what your mom says. Just because you’ve cross-linked 157 Squidoo lenses doesn’t mean that you’ve built an impenetrable web of black-hattery. If your link wheel were a Disney movie, the theme song would be “The Circle of Crap.”

5. On-page Is Getting Messier

I keep wanting to write a post on Google’s recent advice about pagination (and rel=prev/next), but then I get so angry I’m afraid I might turn green and start fighting alongside Iron Man – not that that wouldn’t be awesome. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong (although I think the advice is horribly over-generalized and often ineffective), but that they’ve put a tremendous burden on webmasters. Implementing a proper canonicalization + pagination scheme on a dynamic site with hundreds of thousands of pages is incredibly complicated, and requires not only substantial development resources but stellar communications between the SEO and dev teams (if you’re lucky enough to actually have teams of both). Add in HTML5, schemas, and the whole mess of other new options, and it’s only going to get more complicated.

6. Check Your Headers

Sorry, that wasn’t particularly helpful, so here’s an easy tip. When something isn’t going right and you don’t know why, check your page headers. Job #1 is to make sure that crawlers see what you see (or think you see). It’s unbelievable how often a problem comes down to a bad redirect, status code, or other crawler accessibility issue. There are tons of header checkers, from web-based to bookmarklets – I still use this header checker over at SEOBook.

7. Use Basic Tools Well

There are some great SEO tools out there, but I see the same issue in SEO that I do in writing, time management, and basically every single 21st-century human endeavor. We’re so busy chasing shiny new tools and the perfect app that we don’t bother to learn how to use any of those tools effectively. You can go a long way with a solid header checker, Google’s “site:” operator, a link analyzer (like our own Open Site Explorer) and a desktop crawler (I highly recommend Screaming Frog, but Xenu is still great, too). Master the “site:” operator and learn how to use it with “inurl:” and “intitle:”, and it’s amazing how many on-page problems you can diagnose. Stop chasing every new tool and learn how to use a handful really well. You’ll save a lot of time, money, and holes in your drywall.

8. Learn When to Be Patient

Patience may be the toughest skill any good SEO eventually has to learn. There are times when you’ll need to react quickly to a problem, especially a technical problem (like a bad redirect or site outage). There’s a fine line between reacting and over-reacting, though. One of the most common mistakes I see in technical SEO is when someone makes a change, it doesn’t immediately improve their rankings 24 hours later, and so they revert it or make another change on top of it. Even if it doesn’t make the problem worse (and it usually does), you’ll never be able to measure which change worked. Make sure your changes went live, that Google has acknowledged them (i.e. crawled and cached), and that you can measure the impact or lack of impact. Don’t change your strategy overnight based on bad information (or no information).

9. Stop Scheming & Get to Work

This post was originally “8 Lessons…”, but when I wrote #4 I got so annoyed that I had to follow it up with maybe the most important SEO lesson I can teach you. Are you ready? Here it is (warning: this may be inappropriate for younger readers)…

DO THE FUCKING WORK.

The most frequent excuse I hear in Q&A is “I don’t have time to…” Let me ask you something. Isn’t this your business we’re talking about? Isn’t it your livelihood? Isn’t it the thing that puts food on your table and clothes on the backs of your children? You’d better damned well find the time. If 80% of your traffic is coming from Google, and you don’t “have the time” to do the hard work of improving your product, creating unique content, and participating in your industry, then here’s the simple truth: no blog post is going to save you.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

How do you really feel about Facebook? Do you trust it? Would you give it your money? Is it fun? Is it safe? These are just a few of the questions asked in a recent AP-CNBC poll and the answers they got. . . well. . . they weren’t exactly surprising. But hey, we love data here so let’s take a look!

Who is on Facebook?

Facebook is a keeper for most of the US. 56% of all Americans have a Facebook page. 3 in 10 use it everyday with younger users visiting more often.

Those who don’t have a page, 35% say they have no interest or they have better things to do with their time. 22% stay away because they think it’s bad or not right for their age group.

Advertising:

• About 8 in 10 Facebook users surveyed say they hardly ever (26%) or never (57%) click on online advertising or sponsored content when using the site.
• Most (54%) say they would not feel safe purchasing goods and services on Facebook. Among the site’s most frequent users, half say they would not feel safe making purchases through the site.

Trust:

• 59% of Facebook users do not trust the site with their personal information and have little or no faith in the company to protect their privacy. A slight minority (13%) trust the company completely or a lot.
• Just 18% of Americans have deep confidence in Zuckerberg’s ability to run a large publicly traded company like Facebook, another 40% say they are “somewhat confident.”
• About a third of the public (36%) has a favorable impression of the Facebook founder, while 14 percent hold an unfavorable opinion and 20 percent say they’ve never heard of him or don’t know how they feel.
• The Social Network filmgoers have a more favorable impression of Zuckerberg than others (51% favorable compared to 31% among those who have not seen it).

Facebook vs The World

Facebook as a whole scores a net positive favorability rating, with 51% holding favorable impressions of the company compared to 23% who have an unfavorable impression.

• 27% of those surveyed have a favorable impression of Twitter. 4% said they never heard of it.
• 71% favor Google
• 17% of those polled have a neutral opinion of Facebook

And my favorite stat:

• 2% have never heard of Facebook.

Need more information? CNBC has put together a whole Facebook-lolapalooza site with everything you ever wanted to know about the social media giant, its founder and its prospects for the future. Let’s just say that as of right now, everything’s coming up dollar signs for Zuckerberg and the gang.

Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

If you didn't see last month's post on enhancements to AdIntellignece for API users, there was some info in there about an action you'll need to take before this month is out.  As we've hit the half-way mark in May, now is probably a good time to post this quick reminder:

KSP 5.5 and 6.0 API Deprecation

• Please note that KSP 5.5 and 6.0 are being deprecated and API users need to move to AdIntelligence v8.
• As an adCenter API user, to continue to take advantage of Ad Intelligence make sure you code to API V8 as applications coded to earlier KSP API versions will not function after May 30th
• How to Move to V8

Feel free to leave a comment with any questions!

Twitter used to be one of my favorite web destinations but in recent months I’ve nearly walked away from it thanks to the overwhelming overflow of information. It’s what happens with social media, you start following a few people you really enjoy then you add the obligatory follows and work follows and brand follows and soon it’s too much to handle.

I only follow 126 people and I get a new tweet every minute. What about the people who follow 300 accounts? Keeping up is impossible.

(Cue the trumpeters) Announcing the new Twitter Email Digest!

The digest is broken into two parts. The top features the most Tweeted stories from your followers. Below that are the hottest Tweets according to your followers. Meaning, you may not follow the Tweetee but someone on your list does.

The good news here is that an email like this is easier to take in at a glance. If it works right, you’ll be up on the hottest stories flying around Twitter.

The bad news is that it’s more of a “discovery” digest than a summary digest. It feels like it’s designed to link you to new people instead of keeping you up on the top Tweets in your group. I haven’t seen one of the digests personalized with my Tweets yet, so it’s hard to gauge the usefulness.

If you want to try the new Twitter digest, just go to the Notifications tab in Settings and check the box. Oh, wait. Twitter already checked it for me. How nice of them.

Has Twitter delivered a new digest to your email box? I’d like to know what you thought of it. Is the content relevant or not worth your time?

 

 

Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Cross-posted from the Inside Search Blog

Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily.

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:

1. Find the right thing
Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results:

This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent—your results are more relevant because we understand these entities, and the nuances in their meaning, the way you do.

2. Get the best summary
With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item. For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.

The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she had two children, one of whom also won a Nobel Prize, as well as a husband, Pierre Curie, who claimed a third Nobel Prize for the family. All of these are linked in our graph. It’s not just a catalog of objects; it also models all these inter-relationships. It’s the intelligence between these different entities that’s the key.

3. Go deeper and broader
Finally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons (one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise:

We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical “People also search for” feature. One my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!

We’ve begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users. It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets—read more about how we’ve tailored this to mobile devices. And watch our video (also available on our site about the Knowledge Graph) that gives a deeper dive into the details and technology, in the words of people who've worked on this project:

We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.

Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering

Got up two mornings in a row at 6AM and it’s taken two strong coffees to appreciate that the sun is shining today. However (and how nerdy have I become!?) the first SMX session ‘Social shares, the new link building’ woke me up and cheered me up to no end. There must be many of you -tucked away in an office somewhere- that are the only one in their office dealing with PPC, SEO or social. Isn’t it nice to meet colleagues that a similar job to you at a conference & discuss...(read more)

Who hasn’t been a victim of retargeting or remarketing ads? Most of you must have had ads following your user journey and it works… As a marketer, it’s always good to learn about new techniques and not miss out on the opportunity to build stronger relationships with your customers and drive conversions. We are at the SMX event in the Famous Chelsea Football Club in one of the most modern conference centres in London and the first panelist on stage is Guy Levine, CEO, Return...(read more)

It wasn’t Siri that was recommending the Lumia as the best smartphone to some last week; it was Wolfram Alpha. That won’t happen again, now that Wolfram Alpha has made changes to to fix problems it had dealing with customer reviews. Reviews Weren’t Weighted To Account For Number...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Ever have a bad experience with a sales person in the interactive space? That question is kind of like asking if you have ever felt the urge to breath first thing in the morning.

I come from the sales side of the ISP and SEO industry as part of my interactive background. In my time, I did OK. In that time I also saw MANY who did not do OK and wondered what they said in an interview to get hired. That’s the way it is with most sales positions which is why turnover is so high and ‘opportunities’ are more than most other job segments.

Part of the trouble is the learning curve for sales folks especially in a space that changes as rapidly as Internet marketing does. It’s very different than those who are actually delivering the services being sold. Sales people usually have a 30,000 foot knowledge of what they are selling. Many know just enough to close a deal. Once again this is normal although I won’t go so far as to say it is good. In fact, I would bet that many service delivery folks are ready to jump through the screen right now. Sorry.

Apparently the folks at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) have seen trouble in the area of digital media sales that has gotten so bad that they have introduced a certification program for this important group in the overall mechanism of Internet marketing. The IAB’s press release states

“The certification program will help raise the level of professionalism in the digital field by allowing salespeople to demonstrate their knowledge of the complex interactive environment,” said Michael Theodore, Vice President, Member Services, IAB. “Much like examinations in other fields, this test will give current job holders and job seekers a ‘score card’ to prove their understanding of the most important concepts, guidelines, and best practices in digital advertising. Businesses also benefit by ensuring that they have the most competent sales teams possible.”

Let’s just say this is a long time coming. I would venture that most of the trouble that the industry experiences from customers and clients who have been burned by a provider of any kind are, at the very least, the indirect result of sales incompetence. I am very comfortable saying that because I have been guilty of displaying that incompetence (which was rooted more in ignorance rather than me being a sales scumbag) in the past.

Selling in the interactive space is a difficult thing to do especially since everyone is an ‘expert’ (Now that is where TRUE certification needs exist as well. If we could develop a client certification process that would solve all the problems in the interactive world). This certification concept is a good idea so at least a baseline of competence can be established thus creating a more professional sales force.

So who is behind this along with the IAB? Well to name a few there is CNN Money, Conde Nast Media Group, Disney Interactive Media Group and many more. Let’s just say it’s not a fly by night effort to extract money from people (I hope at least!).

So what will be covered?

• Differentiating the benefits of digital versus traditional media
• Describing digital advertising formats
• Defining key digital advertising tools and technologies
• Calculating media mathematics
• Adhering to compliance standards/policies
• Understanding differences in digital ad formats
• Prospecting for new clients
• Aligning digital advertising products with client objectives
• Comprehending internal and third-party research
• Analyzing, launching, and monitoring digital advertising campaigns and data
• Reviewing opportunities to renew or upsell digital advertising campaigns

To be sure it’s not exactly an Ivy League load of work for qualification. The press release describes it further

There is no formal coursework required for the “IAB Digital Media Sales Certification” examination. Designed for salespeople with 2-5 years of experience in the digital industry, it is recommended that candidates have a strong command of current industry issues, players, and operations, as well as a broad understanding of every major digital platform. The test costs $350 for IAB members and $450 for non-members.

While certifications can be obtained anywhere and sometimes the concept rings hollow the main thing this program has going for it is that it comes from the IAB. If Joe’s School of Digital Media Sales were doing this, it would be a non-story. But this is the IAB and they have seen enough evidence to put together this program to try and clean up whatever it is that prompted this course of action.

What do you think about this kind of program? Should there be more like this for sales and delivery folks alike? Do you think it really helps? Will it add value? Will it build confidence?

Let us know in the comments.

In a shocking development, a research company has chosen this particular week, of all weeks, to post their forecast for what is in store for social media ad spending in the US over the next several years. Do you think it was just dumb luck that it coincides with Facebook’s IPO ?

Hey, who can blame BIA/Kelsey for jumping on the train that is the Facebook IPO Express? Here is the picture version of this predicted US social media spend through 2016.

Let’s consider the whole Facebook IPO thingy in light of these numbers. In 2011, Facebook did somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion in revenue. That revenue is in total, not just in the US. What percentage of revenue is international I don’t know. Right now US users number somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million which would be about 17% of Facebook’s total user base.

It is likely that the US market spends more than most, however, and it is fair to think that the US proportion of revenue contribution is higher than that 17% of total users. With the US numbers for ad spend which are projected here, one wonders where all the revenue will come from in the future to support the reported valuation Facebook will receive this Friday.

Let’s compare this to Google whose market cap sits just below $200B but did just under $38B in revenue last year and is tracking to go well north of $40B this year. Does anyone else see a disconnect with valuing Facebook at 50% of Google’s market cap while only currently generating less than 8% of Google’s total revenue? Marry that with the Kelsey numbers that caps the social media advertising spend potential at $10B annual in TOTAL for the US (remember all that spend won’t be just for Facebook) 4 years from now and you have to scratch your head just a little.

Facebook will need to do something other than advertising especially if that facet of their business is being called out by some as ineffective.

The other side of the Kelsey data shows that Facebook’s idea that their advertising value is best for big brands could be right on point as much of the ad spend will be on a national level.

But wait. If national big brands will be the bulk of ad spend in social media in the next four years (according to this study only mind you) but Facebook is being outed as being ineffective by some big brands (which could be turned around to also read that said big brands and their agencies are clueless as to what they are doing in social media advertising) then where is all the revenue for Facebook going to come from to support what is supposed to be an earth shattering IPO?

One assumes that it would have to be the international market that Facebook is banking on but with a shaky world economy and very different approaches to media and advertising in different areas of the world (as well as China currently being a walled garden of sorts) how reliable will that be for Facebook?

I am not a financial analyst. I have not done any type of in depth analysis here. I am just looking at some numbers that are being thrown around and wondering if Facebook math is creating a “1 + 1 = 3 or more” scenario.

I have no skin in this game and I, like the rest of us, would figure out a way to carry on in this world if Facebook were to do a MySpace. I’m not saying that will happen at all but anyone who can add 1 + 1 and get the correct answer should have a few questions here, don’t ya think? I would also be just fine if Facebook hit a grand slam and killed this thing. It will be what it will be.

So what do you think it will be?

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

There is a phenomenon within organizations that causes productivity to decline as teams grow larger. This phenomenon is described in economics as a diseconomy of scale and is caused by at least three factors including increased communication costs, duplication of effort, and top-heavy management....

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Don't try too hard to look for dates and names of updates. Rather, look more to the effects as Google’s algorithm evolves so you can adapt accordingly. What really matters is that Google is looking harder at link spam now, so you should be too.

Yesterday I covered a WebmasterWorld thread where SEOs were complaining that Google has been removing tons of free web directories from their index. I conducted some random tests and did notice some of these free web directories not coming up in Google. Later in the day, Terry Van Horne began...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

The premise is simple – PPC and display are both media buys trying to achieve similar outcomes; both are forms of ‘bought media’ and now with display moving to a biddable environment both now require quantitative skill sets to manage them. It’s not a tough sell to convince a budget holder that a...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

For many B2B and considered purchases, buyers go through several stages of evaluating the market and choosing a seller. Different stages naturally benefit from different kinds of landing pages and conversion strategies. Here, we’ll take a look at the very top of the funnel, to see how three...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.