From the article intro: "If you haven’t heard about Google’s “Freshness Update” by now, I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it much more.
The short story is that Google is now “Giving you fresher, more recent search results.“. Marketing Pilgrim took a look at this update as well. So what’s next?
Well, “new” content is now ranking higher for many searches.
Looking around at various search results across the board, some of the results are astounding. As Rand Fishkin pointed out, a Google query for “Top Chef Texas” is almost entirely composed of content that is just days old. Changing the number of results to 100 doesn’t help much, either.
So how do you leverage this?
What can you do to try and ensure that you have a shot at “fresh” rankings?"
From the article intro: "With every skirmish in the ongoing war over SEO hats, I inevitably hear someone say “I built great content, and no one cared – content marketing doesn’t work.” I’m not here to deny it – sometimes, “great” content falls flat on its face.
Part of the problem is that we throw around that word like it’s self-evident (“Build great content! Tada!”), but the other part is that we just don’t give our own content a chance to succeed.
Too often, it's not the fault of the content or even Google, but what we do (or don't do) after we create that content.
Here are a few ideas for evaluating “great” content and putting it into action…"
Among the many factors that influence a purchase, color is one of those, that depending on the type of product, can have a major impact on buyers' decisions.
In this infographic you can learn how colors affect and influence North American people, as cultural differences make colors work in very different ways across different countries.
Special emphasis is given to identifying which colors work best and for what type of people/product.
Robin Good: David Strom of ReadWriteWeb shares his impressions on 17 different tools that can help you measure your social media effectiveness.
While making it very clear in the article intro that there are no truly reliable scores when it comes to measuring social media influence, engagement and reputation, David also points out to other generally underestimated aspects of such scoring and ranking systems such as trasparency of the criteria and algorithms used, its ability to identify original from simply "copied" content and to suggest weak and improvement areas.
From the article intro: "Oct. 27 was the first day of the Social Media for Customer Care Summit in New York, a gathering of some of the largest brands in the world focused on how social service can be leveraged more effectively.
Nearly every brand was struggling with the same three big questions, which became discussion topics and hashtags in their own right:
How can customer care better integrate with other functions across a company, like marketing?
How can an organization take the efforts of one or two pioneering individuals and employ it brand-wide?
How can social media be used to mitigate negative posts or a brand crisis?
Throughout the day, there were many strong ideas and lessons offered on these topic.
If you’re looking for SEO “secrets,” you’ll be disappointed by this post.
Although this is an internal document, and Google may not be happy about it being leaked, you won’t find a smoking gun here. What you will find is a training manual on Google’s philosophy of quality.
The key to proactive SEO is to understand how Google thinks. If you only chase the algorithm, you’ll always be reacting to changes after they happen.
Since the document in question is proprietary, I’m not going to link directly to copies of the document or quote large chunks of it.
I’m writing this post because I sincerely believe that understanding Google’s philosophy of quality is a fundamentally “white hat” proposition.
You’ve created contests, implemented giveaways and given superlative support to your company’s Facebook fans.
Your fan base loves your product and services, and it regularly engages and interacts with your page. Now that you’ve cultivated your online community, you can crowdsource some of your efforts.
If you aren’t familiar with the term, “crowdsourcing” is a play on “outsourcing.” But whereas outsourcing is offloading work to one specific entity, crowdsourcing opens the work up to the masses.
Perhaps the most widely known example is Wikipedia, where a community of users takes the responsibility to check and maintain the site’s information.
Facebook provides an interesting platform for businesses to crowdsource some of their efforts that, if approached correctly, can produce some great results.
Examples of “landfill marketing” – according to Made by Many include:
Gap “Denim Confessions” Campaign where people are invited to share the most daring place they’ve worn/removed jeans (sigh)
Kingsmill (bread brand) and its Kingsmill Confessions campaign clogging up YouTube with mindless and pointless digital landfill
McCain’s Say Goodbye to Guilt Facebook campaign where people are invited to share and broadcast guilty secrets with the brand
Nando’s (restaurant chain) ‘Nando’s Noise’ YouTube campaign – share what you say when you hear Nando’s brand, mix it and share some more
The forgotten, unloved and abandoned flotsam and jetsam of marketing. Are social media campaigns – like much advertising – the bum-fluff of human culture?
Great suggestions on how to make your press releases fill the expectations news agencies and companies have about them.
Excerpted from the article intro: "...a lot about press releases has changed – from their audiences to their formats.
Press releases haven’t exclusively been the domain of just professional media for years. In fact, a variety of publics and stakeholders are now legitimate audiences for press releases. And with that new audience has come new demands for press release content.
Readers want the underlying story, they want pictures, and they want video. They want to learn more about the topics of interest to them, and they want to experience the news, not simply read it.
Needless to say, long, impenetrable, self-serving, jargon-laden press releases are limping to their graves, groaning under the weight of ego-laden quotations and editing-by-committee."
From the article intro: "For those just getting accustomed to Facebook business pages and all they have to offer, the experience can seem daunting.
To give you a good sense of the various elements of a Facebook page and how to use those elements effectively, let's dissect the anatomy of a Facebook business page."
How much time are you spending on social media? Can you tell if it’s helping sales?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a framework for measuring the impact of your social media efforts?
That’s where Susan Etlinger’s new research for the Altimeter Group comes into play. Susan did qualitative research with 60 social media marketers and vendors to understand how businesses currently measure their social media performance.
Her goal: to develop a framework for tying social media performance to business goals.
Because Susan’s original research targeted enterprise-level companies, I interviewed her to add some small business insights. The following comments combine results of the research and that interview....
From the article: "If you’re unfamiliar with the term “tribe”, Simone stated, for her, a tribe was unified by one thing – passion.
Essentially anything people can get fanatic about / excited about, there is a tribe for that. She states, “We are complete internet marketing geeks. there are fitness tribes. celeb gossip tribes. there are tribes around SEO. Anything people are really jazzed about. there is a fountain pen tribe. ‘those people are whacked’.”
If you’re interested in creating a tribe, they suggest you start with something free: blog comments, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
Any free place where people can discuss similar things."
From the article intro: "After trawling through the internet for years (like most web developers do) to find coding solutions and thus saving hours of our own time, we thought it was about time we returned the favour.
Here's one that many people seem to be struggling with for which we've developed a simple solution.
There's already lots of tips out there to remove the Google Translate frame when dynamically translating your website, but as most of them point out, it only works once.
Try to translate to a subsequent language and Google falls over.
Excerpted from the article: "Would you pay to read news online?
Maybe not, as many online newspapers have learned. Publishers, on the other hand, are keen to make up for revenues they’re losing due to the decline of print.
Well, Google may have come up with an original solution to this equation – and it’s not One Pass.
Spotted by the Nieman Lab, Google’s latest experiment looks like a “survey wall.”
Indeed, readers have to answer a question before accessing content free of charge.
Google has announced that it has updated all text AdSense ads to allow for the title color of ads to be changed when the user moves their mouse over the title link while disclosing, without providing specific data, the color scheme combination that works best for CTR.
From the article intro: "Google has warned that black hat tactics are “unethical, overly aggressive marketing efforts where a company tries to manipulate search engine results in an unfair way.”
Despite Google’s warnings, many Internet companies persist in providing black hat SEO services.
The truth is, using black hat tactics on your site can be as scary as facing these slasher movie murderers."
Research shows that websites that create lots of content, build active social media profiles, and blog regularly are much more successful online than their peer.
This isn't a surprise though - We've all known that blogging, social media, and great content are the keys to successful inbound marketing.
How frequently should you post to your Facebook page? Check out these tricks and metrics to help boost your social engagement on the world's largest social network.
Many companies spend a lot of effort increasing the number of fans or “likes” on their Facebook pages, and they measure their social media effectiveness based on these numbers.
It’s good to get more people liking your pages, but the truth is the new Facebook doesn’t really care how many fans you have.
What matters are three things: the popularity of your post (affinity), its relevancy (weight) and its timeliness (time decay).
These three factors are the “edges” that Facebook’s algorithm “ranks” to determine what content is likely to be most interesting to your audience.
Let’s take a closer look at these factors that make up your EdgeRank:
Affinity is the score between the viewer and the ‘edge’ creator. How closely you are tied to the person creating the content determines this score.
Weight is the value given to the comments and actions any given post receives from your Facebook community. As they “like” it, comment on it, tag it, it gains in relevance to the community at large.
Time Decay is just that, the decaying value of the content as time passes. Today’s news is news. Yesterday’s news is history.
Gaining a high EdgeRank is contingent on creating the type of content that gets people to click on it in one way or another and to do so consistently. Here are some tips on how to create engaging content.
From the article intro: "Today’s biggest trends — the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time — are changing the landscape for business.
Consumers are connecting with one another, and in the process they’re becoming increasingly empowered and influential.
How these connected consumers discover, share, and communicate is different than the way they used to.
This change requires businesses to rethink their approach.
Organizations need to examine the impact of technology on consumer behavior and understand how connected consumers make decisions and influence the decisions of their peers.
Social networks are the NEW platform through which people connect to one another."
"This detailed description can provide your inbound marketing team with a clear vision of its target customers.
In the practice of traditional marketing, this target audience was commonly reached by deciding what TV shows they watched to determine where to place TV advertisement, figuring out what kind of music they listened to determine which radio stations to focus radio commercials, and knowing what they enjoyed reading so print ads were published in the right newspapers or magazines.
... three distinct differences between how marketers used to reach their target audiences, and how they must reach them today."
From the article intro: A technique called "like-gating" is becoming more and more widely used as a way to generate new Facebook fans -- and not without some critics.
The idea is that you offer exclusive content to those who 'like' your business' Facebook page, but only if they like the page.
The problem? How are your prospects supposed to know if they want to like the page if they don't know what the content is like?
Our take? Like-gating offers an incentive to prospective "fans," and it is an effective way to increase your reach on Facebook.
But the most important thing to remember is that you must continue to offer valuable content and conversations to establish an ongoing relationship long after the 'Like.'
...
Here is some inspiration from other Facebook pages to show you how like-gating can facilitate your page's growth and help you generate more leads from Facebook.
Below are 5 like-gating experiences to learn from.
from Danny Sullivan's intro: Google will now begin encrypting searches that people do by default, if they are logged into Google.com already through a secure connection.
The change to SSL search also means that sites people visit after clicking on results at Google will no longer receive “referrer” data that reveals what those people searched for, except in the case of ads.
Google announced the news on its blog here, saying:
As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver.
As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users.
The company also has a help page providing more information about it here.
Only For Signed-In Users; Single Digit Impact The change will only happen on Google.com, and only for those who are already signed-in at Google with a secure connection.
How many people do this?
Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who’s been involved with the privacy changes, wouldn’t give an exact figure but told me he estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.
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