From the original article: "One argument you hear all the time is that Google can’t possibly use something like bounce rate as a ranking signal, because bounce rate is very site-dependent and unreliable by itself. I hear it so often that I wanted to take a moment to say that I don’t buy this argument, for one simple reason.
ANY ranking signal, by itself, is unreliable.
I don’t know a single SEO who would argue that TITLE tags don’t matter, for example, and yet TITLE tags are incredibly easy to manipulate. On-page factors in general can be spammed – that’s why Google added links to the mix. Links can be spammed – that’s why they’re adding social metrics and user metrics..."
What really counts is:
a) Do people click on your site inside the SERPs?
b) How long people dweel on your site before returning to the search engine result page?
"Where these 2 metrics really shine is as a duo.
CTR by itself can easily be manipulated – you can drive up clicks with misleading titles and META descriptions that have little relevance to your landing page.
That kind of manipulation will naturally lead to low dwell time, though. If you artificially drive up CTR and then your site doesn’t fulfill the promise of the snippet, people will go back to the SERPs.
The combo of CTR and dwell time is much more powerful and, with just 2 metrics, removes a lot of quality issues.
If you have both high CTR and high dwell time, you’re almost always going to have a quality, relevant result."
Robin Good: Good post by Neil Patel at ProBlogger explaining one of the fundamentals of online marketing 2.0: create free, tangible value, like no other, with unique content assets that people will WANT to link to.
He writes: "A linkable asset is a piece of content that is responsible for driving lots of links to your site.
It could be an infographic that you update every year, but it’s usually much bigger and complex.
The Feltron Report is an annual report that’s like an infographic on steroids. It’s more than likely you’ve heard of the Felton Report. Its personal data from the life of Nicholas Felton, a designer and data guy, who’s been cranking out these reports since 2005. SEOmoz’s Annual Ranking Report is another annual report that is a linkable asset.
Distilled’s SEO Guide to Creating Viral Linkbait and Infographics and Smashing Magazine’s The Death of the Boring Blog Postare also linkable assets. Sometimes these assets are a simple widget like Bankrate’s millionaire calculator or egobait like the Ad Age Power150."
From the article: "Good writing matters in marketing; being able to articulate ideas clearly is key to capturing the attention of prospects."
Here some immediately applicable tips for effective call-to-action copy
1) Begin With Subjects & Verbs:
Verbs and subjects help us to quickly glean the meaning of a sentence, acknowledging this when crafting your online call-to-action is crucial when the attention of readers is more elusive. Verbs are the part of speech that generate the most shares on Twitter.
2) Include Numbers:
Numbers are a great way to break through the clutter of ambiguity, be specific about your offer, and set the right expectations. A number tells visitors exactly what they’re going to get, how much of it, for how long, etc.
3) Use Adverbs Sparingly:
Marketers should use adverbs in their call-to-action only if it aids in the understanding of the message.
Adverbs are the part of speech that gets the fewest number of shares on Twitter.
4) Keep it Between 90 and 150 Characters:
The standard advice for calls-to-action has been to keep them short and concise. Your CTA should contain enough information about the benefits and specifics of your offer.
5) Make Language Less Technical and More Practical:
Emphasize the benefits of the offer and how it can make your prospects smarter. Stay away from overly technical jargon.
Jay Jamison writes on Techcrunch: "Interest-based social networks have a markedly different focus and approach than Facebook.
The Pinterest, Thumb and Foodspottings of the world enable users to focus and organize around their interests first, whereas Facebook focuses on a user’s personal relationships.
Facebook offers us a social utility to deepen social connectivity with our existing social graphs, while these new interest-based social networks enable users to express their interests in new, engaging ways and offer authentic, high value connectivity with new people we don’t already know.
...
So if interest-based social networks focus first on an individual’s interest graph and Facebook centers on an individual’s social graph, which service will be the winner?
Both.
Humans are inherently social creatures, and we define ourselves both by the people we know and our interests. We make decisions about where to eat, what to buy, where to visit, etc. based on a complex matrix of social relationships, past experiences, location, long standing interests and future goals. Today’s platforms approach our lives from different angles but both are integral to how we define ourselves and interact with the world around us."
What can you do to cut through the noise and get people to notice what you have to say?
The answer is CONTENT—interesting and compelling information that helps solve your customers’ problems.
Why Content? It’s interesting content that drives people to push that Share button or say to themselves, “Wow! This is a great article! I think I’ll subscribe.”
Here’s an analogy: If a big-time investor invited you to pitch your business idea to him, how much effort would you make to impress him?
I’m guessing that you wouldn’t dare show up without a compelling idea and a well-thought-out strategy. And yet most businesses do just that when it comes to social media marketing.
Given the opportunity to influence an online audience of potential customers, they simply show up without preparing a compelling message.
No wonder they don’t see the results they want with their social media campaigns. http://bit.ly/AkkhCK
Look at how a bad HubSpot landing page can be changed to improve performance, and learn how to apply these concepts to your own landing page design.
Here the key critical components to look after on your landing page:
1) URL Architecture - An optimized URL will help your landing page rank higher in search engines...
2) Navigation - The more choices you give site visitors, the more confused they will be...
3) Page Header - The copy used in your landing page header is one of the most important page elements, because it's what helps your page pass a user's blink test...
4) Form Header - Your form header should simply tell the visitor what exactly filling out that form will do...
5) Image Selection
6) Privacy
7) KeywordOptimization - Targeting long-tail keyword phrases like these on your landing page will not only drive more relevant search traffic and be easier to rank for than a head term...
8) ValueBuilding - Make the end benefit of completing the download crystal clear with the copy you include on your landing page, even if it does mean a few more lines of text.
9) Readable Format - ...Using bullet points, numbered lists, dashes, and headers helps make those chunks of text easy to scan through.
10) On-Page Social Sharing - You might think including social sharing buttons is a distraction just like the navigation in the first treatment, but on-page social sharing buttons don't take a user away from your landing page...
11) Pertinent Form Fields - The fewer form fields you can include on your landing page, the better.
Robin Good: If you have decided to move on to Google+ ground and start doing something serious about it, I wouldn't hesitate one second in recommending this truly thorough guide on setting up an effective marketing strategy via Google+.
Neil Patel at Search Engine Journal covers it all. From how to optimize your Google+ Profile and Circles to how to format your Google+ post and headlines, he does a thorough job of summarizing and explaining clearly what you need to do to make Google+ work for you.
Robin Good: By going beyond the superficial traffc data visible inside Google Analytics there is a treasure trove of valuable info, that only a few know how to get to.
Kristi Hines highlights for you where is that info and how you can get to it from Google Analytics data.
Specifically, she identifies a few key areas in which you can very useful info by looking deeper at Analytics:
1) Key Twitter users sending you traffic
2) Your most popular posts on Twitter
3) Which pages on your site get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search
4) Performance of your guest posts and your comments elsewhere
5) Traffic coming from LinkedIn shares, groups, answers or company pages
Robin Good: If you are looking to improve your reputation / visibility / branding online, Ann Smarty has a great report up on MarketinPilgrim, which has lots of great advice, information and helpful tools.
From the original article: "If you are blogging a lot and care about your brand name and what people see when they are searching Google for your name, here are exactly three things you need to do once to improve your Google search results branding:
1. Verify the Authorship of Your Articles
2. Create a Master Feed of Your Contributions
3. Claim Your Brand Name in Major Social Networks"
In the article Ann provides lots of detailed suggestions, examples and references while also providing specific free tools to use to execute each one of these steps.
Here six key things you should keep in mind if you want to do SEO optimization that leverages to the max the recent merging of Google+ results into the SERPs:
1) It will be more important than ever to be positively connected to people and influencers within the industries you represent.
2) Treat your Google profile like your own site. Assume that your actions always influence your GPA.
3) Treat +1s like links. Meaning, don’t +1 things that are spammy, because it may adversely affect your GPA.
4) When other sites publish your guest posts, make sure they not only link to your site, but also link to your G+ profile using rel=”author”.
5) Try to have your own content +1′d and shared by as many people as possible.
6) Strive to get links on a profile with an assumed high GPA.
Robin Good: Ethan Lyon at YouMoz has put together a great simple tool inside a Gdoc spreadsheet (public, free and open) that allows you to automatically find sites and blogs where you can make guest posts.
Guest posts on other quality and thematically-relevant sites is an effective strategy to build quality incoming links to your site.
I have tried out this litte great gem and I must say: it does work. You simply input the keyword representing the topic you want to write guest posts for, and the spreadsheet automatically kicks out URLs that you can go and check out right away.
This great tool scans Twitter to find messages that offer opportunities for guest posts and lists them for you.
Bing has launched “Linked Pages,” which allow people to link sites related to themselves in search results for when people search for the person’s name.
Pretty interesting, especially since Bing allows users to simply add links that they just like.
“Search for yourself,” suggests Ian Lin of Bing Social Search. “Try including your city, school, or employer – for example ‘John Smith Bing’ – to find more results and start linking. Links can include your blog, a personal website, organizations you’re associated with, activities you’re involved with or just sites you like. And as your interests and activities change, you can easily link more. So now when your friends search for you, they’ll not only see trusted results from Bing, but also the pages and sites you’ve linked.”
"With Linked Pages on Bing, you can decide how you look to your old roommate, your first crush, or a new friend".
You can add your links at bing.com/linkedpages.
The Linked Pages are in Beta and US-only at first.
Robin Good: Return Path has released a new free web service which allows you to check the content of your yet-to-be-sent newsletters and to verify it for any possible deliverability issues, before it's too late.
"A free service of Return Path, the Sender Score algorithm rates the reputation of every outgoing mail server IP address on a scale from 0-100.
Gathering data from over 60 million mailboxes at big ISPs like BellSouth and Comcast, Return Path records if people frequently unsubscribe or report spam from certain email senders, and then assigns you a Sender Score based on that monitoring.
Your Sender Score will continue to change depending on your email sending habits and the responses of your recipients.
It's a crucial number to stay on top of, because mail servers will often check your Sender Score before deciding what to do with your emails. The lower your Sender Score, the harder time you'll have getting into someone's inbox.
There are plenty of things that can impact the deliverability of your email, but Return Path reports that 83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox, it is due to a poor sender reputation.
Even if an email network or ISP doesn't query your Sender Score to determine whether they will deliver your email, the factors used in determining your Sender Score are similar to those used by email networks and ISPs to determine your sender reputation.
As such, the score is a great, free email sender reputation tool to ensure you are aware of and have the opportunity to fix any deliverability problems."
Here the variables taken into account to generate the Sender Score:
Complaints
Volume
External Reputation
Unknown Users
Rejected
Accepted
Accepted Rate
Unknown User Rate
"Scores are calculated on a rolling, 30-day average and represent the rank of an IP address against other IP addresses, much like a percentile ranking.
The closer your score is to 0, the worse it is, and if you're close to 100 like Return Path is in this sample report, well you're in pretty great shape."
From the article: "...The new SEO process is not about chasing the algorithm; it’s about fulfilling the needs of the people the algorithm serves.
It’s about creating and discovering the content that resonates with the people that a business is trying to reach and then also covering the technical bases required to get results.
It’s about understanding the connections between keywords in the mind of your target audience in order to optimize for them effectively.
And most importantly, it’s about having SEO become the driver of the marketing mix rather than the outcast. No doubt SEO will remain the esoteric “Calculus of Marketing” but it’s time to prove that we can actually do the math so to speak."
Key elements of the new SEO process analyzed in this guide:
Opportunity Discovery
Market Research
Audience Research
Analytics Mining
Social Listening
Quantitative Analysis
Keyword Research
Site Audit
Asset Inventory
Content Audit
Brand Relationships
Offline Assets
Competitive Analysis
Measurement Planning
Content Ideation
Content Production
Technical Build
Implementation Audit
Social Strategy
Link Strategy
PR
Contests
Events
Social Media
Measurement
Reporting
Link Reporting
Optimization
Brand Buy-In
Each element is analyzed and discussed as to explain its importance and how to effectively leverage it.
Robin Good: According to Klout there are at least 16 different types of online influencers, ranging from those who love to actively share and participate, to those who more quitely like to explore, observe and report.
The Klout Influence Matrix identifies these specific 16 types:
As in my case, you may likely feel that you belong in more than one of these categories.
What matters is your ability to develop greater sensitivity for the differences that make up these profiles and to cull more attentively those that you feel are closer to your character and objectives.
Check also Lisa Barone, co-founder of the firm Outspoken Media (New York), who in contrast, proposes a simpler list in Small Business Trends: The Five Types of Influencers On The Web.
From the article intro: "Google Search Plus Your World builds traffic a bunch of ways.
The best (so far) is the ‘Plus Box’: The Google Plus Box.
...
Question is, how does Google decide which pages and profiles get that coveted spot?
Also, how does Google decide which search queries get the plus box, and which ones don’t?
Key takeaways:
The top factors for plus box placement appear to be, from most to least important:
Reach
Circle membership
Freshness
Post frequency (if your posts are good)
Average plus ones per post
Re-shares and replies (comments) per pos
And, Google’s far more likely to show a plus box for broad concepts with low commercial intent, versus niche terms with high commercial intent
Here’s what I recommend you do, if you want your best shot at an organic placement for your plus profile:
Circle influential people with big circle membership.
Comment on and re-share their stuff.
Post frequently. At least a few times a day.
Try to gain relevance for the non-commodity term that fits your industry. “Design”, not “Designer”. “Fashion”, not “Jeans”."
If you want to check out an in-depth report, that leveraged also the contribution of other 40 SEO experts, provides lost of detailed info and stats, I do suggest you take a dive into this interesting report from Ian Lurie.
From the original article: "Landing pages have evolved a lot over the past five years.
1) Landing Pages 1.0
The prototypical structure: a headline, a short description or some bullets, a small image (“hero shot”), and a form.
Most of the fields on the form were required. The “submit” button was still in vogue. And the payoff for filling out the form? A phone call from a sales rep.
2) Landing Pages 2.0: The Beginning Of Best Practices
Best practices were things that everyone using landing pages could — or should — follow.
They included:
- A/B and multivariate (MVT) testing — test, test, test your ideas - “message match” continuity between ads/emails and their landing pages - shorter and friendlier forms with better calls-to-action (CTAs) - emphasis on text content (not Flash!) to improve SEO and quality scores - “social proof” with logos, awards, certifications, testimonials, etc.
3) Landing Pages 3.0: Beyond Best Practices
...now driving conversion programs from a higher set of principles:
1. Deliver meaningful, context-relevant content 2. Present that content with an engaging, affective design 3. Offer a compelling, but not coercive, “next step” to take"
Robin Good: I was recently looking for a way to engage my paying customers proactively to ask them what they would want to improve or change inside my online campus, when I stumbled into Customer Thermometer an interesting new service, which allows you email blast your contact list with a specific question and an easy and very visual way to reply.
The service provides lots of good analytics to keep under tabs your fans needs and desires.
Robin Good: If you want to examine and question some of the critical issues that may be influencing the performance of your site / business online, this video lesson from SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin can provide you with lots of valuable and actionable insight.
Achieving greater effectiveness in selling whatever you are proposing online is not just a matter of proper tagging and SEO optimization tasks. There are a lot of other factors mixed in with those that determine, beyond what search engines may think, how credible, reputable and worth of my time and money your site really is.
And that's where you should spend more attention.
Rand goes over a number of very important factors like:
Robin Good: Kipp Bodnar at Hubspot suggests that remarkable content, niche identification, personality and thinking beyond the classic computer screen interface are the keys elements in developing a sound content strategy for the future.
Here the essence of what he recommends:
1. Find Your Niche
Your niche isn't the product you sell. Rather, your niche is the subject matter that is of greatest interest to your prospective customers. If you sell supplies to auto body shop owners, then your niche is content about operating a successful auto body shop in every facet of the business, even those for which you don't have products to sell.
2. Balance Quality and Velocity of Content - The challenge of content in the online media landscape is that content has to be high quality enough to stand out, but also be agile enough not to be out of date the moment it's published. ...
3. Have a Personality - Don't be Bland
Don't be afraid to be fun, sarcastic, edgy, or any other tone that aligns with your brand and products.
4. Start Planning Beyond the Desktop Computer Screen
...Start thinking about what your content looks like in a world without mice (the computer kind). It will have a huge impact on how we design our content and collect information from our leads.
"...nearly half of what determines the rank of your site is based upon the types of links driving to your site."
And it is true, that even now, knowing the tactics and skills required to build incoming quality links to a web site, can still be tangibly beneficial to the visibility of that site inside the SERPs.
In this 10-point guide to link-building, Neil Patel provides a good basic roundup of popular approaches to link building while providing inspiration and examples on how to do it.
Here an excerpt of the ten key points he discusses:
Rule 1: Write content that attracts Editorial In-content Links
Rule 2: Fix other people’s broken links
Rule 3: Create a desirable image library
Rule 4: Offer to write a column or do a guest post
Rule 5: Go to where your target audience hangs out
Rule 6: Fill gaps in content
Rule 7: Contact big media at the right time
Rule 8: Approach government or education sites
Rule 9. Buy links without penalty
Rule 10: Know the difference between a good and a bad site"
For each one of the Rules, Neil provides a good explanation of what he means, and some real cases or examples of how you can do this too. He also provides links to some useful resources, tools and examples.
Robin Good: X-Events, as I like to call them, are events that extend beyond the physical time-bound reality of a conference or workshop arena, into the time before and past the event to create an ongoing wave of interest and discussion around a specific topic.
Donna Kastner, on the blog site of Cvent, an event company, brings forward a simple set of ideas that can help any conference organizer or promoter to understand how to leverage and "curate" event assets and opportunities to extract lots more value and ROI.
Key suggestions:
1) Capture: With so many rich multi-media capture tools at our fingertips, it's getting easier to collect and archive master files of learning conversations. Don't miss your best archivists -- the attendees, themselves. ...
2) Edit: Invest time to glean the most valuable nuggets and serve them up in bite-sized chunks, one piece at a time. How about a series of 2-minute videos that weave together to form something no one else can match? How about a Cliff-Notes outline of key discussion points from workshops?
3) Catalog: Don't make attendees dig through your content "junk drawer" to find what they need. Think through how you might catalog these golden nuggets for easy, just-in-time access.
4) Remix: If you've invested time in items 1, 2, & 3, here's where things really cook. You now have a learning "smorgasbord" where you can mix new combos to refresh and apply key learnings. Make sure this knowledge feast includes a nice mix of documents, audio, video, and more. How about pulling together soundbites & stats to design Infographics? Follow-up webinars? How about a series of small group web discussions (Google+ Hangouts?)
James Altucher tackles three issues on Techcrunch: "Why self-publish rather than use a traditional publisher, why entrepreneurs should self-publish, and finally, HOW does one go about self-publishing."
A few highlights from the article:
"...when I self-publish I make about a 70% royalty instead of a 15% royalty with a traditional publisher. I also own 100% of the foreign rights instead of 50%."
"You won’t make a million dollars on your book (well, maybe you will – never say never) but just being able to say, “I’m a published author” extends your credibility as a writer/speaker/enterpreneur when you go out there now to sell your book, syndicate your blog elsewhere or to get speaking engagements, etc."
"I used createspace because they are owned by Amazon and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within"
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