Robin Good: If you are seriously considering to jump on the Google+ bus and to do all that is needed to leverage the new social network and the unique benefits it may have on your SEO, check the advice provided in this article.
"Google+ Business Pages offer unprecedented search ranking advantages, so make optimizing your profile for both regular Google search and G+’s internal search your first priority.
Next you’ll want to make sure your profile “sells the follow.” Does it capture attention and say, “You’ll want me in your circles!” in those few seconds when someone takes their first look?"
Then, these that follow need to be your key stratgic steps:
Robin Good: Here is a truly comprehensive Google+ SEO guide which covers every aspect of Google+ and how it impacts your visibility inside search results.
Key sections in this guide include:
Google+ Search Facets
Google+ Search Results
Google+ People and Pages Results
Google+ Search Spam
Search+
People and Pages
Google+ Posts
Google +1 Button
Google+ Social Snippets
Google+ Content
Google+ Formatting
Google+ Brand Pages
Google+ Authorship
Google+ Influence
Circle Count
Three key takeaways:
1) Google+ search results are personalized but through some crowdsourcing I’ve been able to determine the search signals.
The most important signal is whether the query term appears in the Introduction, Employment, Education or Places lived section of your profile. Danny Sullivan rarely shows up in a search for SEO because he doesn’t have the term in any of those fields.
2) People and Pages are defined, curated lists of people by topic. That means there’s nothing you can really do to optimize for these slots.
3) Panda separated low-quality and high-quality sites. AuthorRank would do the same for people and their associated content. As the tidal wave of digital content roars in Google’s ears finding ways to sort the good from the bad quickly will be of increasing importance. Content without Authorship could become a second-class citizen.
Robin Good: Here is some great advice, and real-world examples of how Pinterest can be used to engage fans, create interesting content and making your brand more visible.
Key interesting approaches include:
- Creating contests in which fans create thematic boards that showcase your ideas, products or services
- Showcasing your fans using your brand or tools
- Arranging collections of valuable resources in-line with your brand interest
- Uncovering backstage pics and crowdsourced images of events
DoAttend is a great new web-based service which allows you to:
a) Create your event landing page easily and by being able to add images, links, and your preferred videos within an already professionally-designed web template.
b) Brand your event page with your logo and masthead.
c) Design your own event tickets with your own logo.
d) Customise the information you want to collect from attendees, ticket buyers and guests.
e) Create free tickets, paid tickets, and your own sale periods (good for offering early–bird tickets). Limit the quantity on sale or let them run wild. Create multiple discount coupons, configure them as percentages or absolute amounts and set their validity period.
f) Setup a LIVE Coverage page for your event, that streams live tweets and photos tagged on Flickr.
Collate what everyone's taking about into a single web page, that's accessible to anyone through a web browser.
g) Track your registrations and attendees and export all registration information to a CSV format anytime you want.
h) Send emails to attendees who've registered for your event. Choose from any one of the categories available (such as all completed registrants, attendees who've purchased a specific ticket, etc) and send a single email to every attendee in the category. Great for communicating last minute reminders to attendees before the event.
j) Print badges for all your attendees to wear on the event day. Customize the size of the badge, the information to display, font sizes and colors.
The service is optimized for both iPhone and iPads.
From the article: "To run a sustainable business online you need to create a marketing funnel where you siphon traffic from sources like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube into your funnel, and create your own traffic source.
What is the one important thing that’s needed to make money online? It’s not just people, traffic, or visitors that make you money online. It’s the relationship and trust you build with your visitors that will make you money online.
To get their names and email addresses, you need to have a really good lead magnet. A lead magnet is a good piece of content like a video, PDF report, or a case study that will help your potential subscriber and will entice him to give you his or her name and email address.
Step 1: Create a blog lead hunter
Your niche blog is a lead hunter that should focus on two things. One is providing valuable and fresh content to your visitors; the other is capturing the names and email addresses of your visitors...
Step 2: Create a squeeze page lead hunter
The sole purpose of this page, which I call a lead magnet, is to capture names and email addresses of visitors...
Step 3: Create a Facebook fan page lead hunter...
Step 4: Driving traffic to the lead hunter pages
- Blog traffic sources...
- Lead magnet traffic sources...
- Facebook Fan page traffic sources...
Step 5: What happens in the funnel?
Now, as you get a steady flow of subscribers from your lead hunters, you need to set your autoresponder with some killer content. Moreover, the combination of honesty and great content will build a strong relationship of trust with your subscribers...
Step 6: Promoting the right product
Make sure you treat your subscribers like friends, and recommend only products or services you think will genuinely help them...
From the article intro: "SPAM filters can be triggered for a variety of reasons, causing your email to skip recipients' inboxes and land straight in their SPAM box.
One of easiest ways to avoid SPAM filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email's subject line.
Trigger words are known to cause problems and increase the chances of your email getting caught in a SPAM trap.
By avoiding these words in your email subject lines, you can dramatically increase your chances of getting beyond SPAM filters.
Next time you sit down to write an email subject line, consult this exhaustive list."
From the article intro: "If you have been blogging for a while, chances are you are familiar with content scrapers.
Content scrapers are websites that steal your content for their own blogs without your permission. Some content scrapers will just copy the content off of your blog, but most use automated software that takes the content from your RSS feed and posts your content to their site like it is a new post."
What you ae going to find in this article:
1) some potential link building benefits to content scrapers,
2) how to find out what sites are scraping your content, and
3) what you can do if you want to either benefit from the linking standpoint or have them take it down.
Fivesecondtest is an web-based service which allows you to fine-tune your landing pages and "calls-to-action" by analyzing the most prominent elements of your landing page design and asking to your invited "testers" a set of simple questions.
How it works:
1. Create a new test Upload a screenshot or mockup, set some questions you want answered and wait for the feedback to roll in.
2. Users complete your test Testers have five seconds to view your image and must then answer the questions you have set.
3. View your results All of the responses are collected for you, the frequent keywords are extracted and then presented to you with beautiful graphs.
Robin Good: Here are 5 well-executed commercial landing pages analyzed and reviewed by Corey Eridon.
You can get a lot of useful insight by simply looking at how other companies have executed their landing page and improving on their mistakes.
If you are building a landing page, the illustrated examples and specific advice provided for each example in this article, can provide some valuable insight.
Lists are awesome for link building because someone else has already done some of the hard work for you. If you can find good quality, curated lists of websites, then you can be reasonably sure that you have found sites that are good ones to get links from.
You still want to run your own analysis and due diligence, but the end output is probably going to be a higher majority of quality sites than you would have gotten from pulling lists straight from Google SERPs.
The process I use can be broken down into the following:
1. Find your Lists:
There are multiple ways of doing this and there are probably more places to find them than you think.
- Curated lists found on other websites; - Top x type lists found on other websites; - Public Twitter lists; - Good quality directories;
2. Scrape together your master list:
Here are a couple of ways of pulling link targets from a page very quickly without building a tool.
- Multi-links for Firefox;
- Scrape similar plugin for Chrome;
3. Filter and prioritise:
Now we need to filter, sort and prioritise. Chances are that you have ended up with a pretty big list of potential link targets, so you need someway of knowing where to start to give you a good return.
From the article intro: "For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves.
Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs.
It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.
Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for."
This article illustrates you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business.
Highlights:
Whatever the conversion goal for the business, the key is to give the user a reason to keep moving through the flow, down the funnel.
Use the following methods to keep the user moving down the funnel:
Build user confidence by clearly articulating key benefits, backed by easy-to-digest proof points.
Streamline the content and design to focus on a clear call to action (in this example, to sign up for an email newsletter).
Remove friction at every step. Ask for the minimum amount of information, and reduce the number of fields, extra clicks and page-loading time.
Create an enticing hook, an itch that can only be scratched by completing the registration step.
Robin Good: If you are seriously interested in optimizing and continuously improving the traffic, engagement level and subscriptions / sales on your web site, this article can provide some good basic advice on how to extract the most valuable actionable info from Google Analytics.
Three areas are of critical importance for you: a) Acquisition
b) Engagement
c) Outcome - Goals
The three key engagement metrics that you should give highest priority and attention to, when it comes to engagement, are:
1) Pages per Visit: This is the average number of pages a visitor views when coming to your website. The more engaging your site is, the more inclined visitors will be to continue clicking beyond the entry page.
2) Average Time on Site: This refers to the typical amount of time visitors spend on your site, despite whether they continue to stay on the page they came in on or navigate elsewhere within your domain.
3) Bounce Rate: This represents the percentage of single-page visits to your site. It gives you a sense of how many visitors left your site from the entrance page rather than clicking further into your site as compared to total visitors. Like Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate can help you determine the performance of your entry pages based on the actions visitors take (or don’t take) after they’ve arrived on your site.
In this article you can find also a simplified review of the "Goals" function inside Google Analytics and how it can be best used.
Check out also the new Google Analytics features reviewed here:
From the article intro: "Anyone building a brand or business page on Google+ quickly comes to a rather unsettling realization: at no point in the process does Google do anything to check that you have any real connection to the brand name on your page.
...but
Google has provided a way for you to verify your page to Google.
As a verified page, you should get preference in Google and Google+ search results, and you’ll also qualify for Direct Connect when it rolls out more broadly. (Direct Connect allows searchers on Google to go straight to your Google+ brand page by entering a “+” in front of your brand name. It is currently available only to a select few brands.)
If you use the fullest version of the badge, it even displays friends of the visitor who have +1ed you, a +1 button, and an “Add to Circles” button. The +1 button will display your aggregated number of +1s from your home page, your Google+ Page, and any AdWords ads you’ve linked to +1."
From the article: "Many consumers have now discovered that they can use social networks to actually find a company that deals with the product or service they need.
So how can your company get to the top of a social media search page?
By using keywords.
Here are some of the places and different ways you can use keywords on your social media pages.
#1: Find the right keywords for your social media accounts:
it’s important to realize that the keywords you decide to use will be different for different social media accounts. It is not a “one keyword fits all” operation.
#2: Use the keyword in photo captions:
The goal is to use keywords on your social media site whenever possible. One of the first things you can do is use these keywords to describe your company photos.
#3: Use your keyword when linking and tagging webpages:
Social media keywords generally work best with sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, but this ideas works just as well when it comes to Twitter.
#4: Include the keyword in your headline...
#5: Include your keyword in your summary and “about” section..."
I selected this piece today because it is timely and relevant, social media is part of the equation but the focus should be on social business, which is the bigger picture. It's important to package your content and repurpose it to fit the social network(s) where your audience resides. This interview talks about
In this interview with McKinsey and Compay, John Battelle, founder & chairman of Federated Media Publishing says.....
**Marketers need to shift their mindset from being a publisher to engaging an audience.
To paraphrase:
Marketers are starting to see an ecosystem of paid, owned and earned media that they're very interested in feeding through social interactions and content marketing.
Here's what caught my attention:
Marketers have always created content, print and radio ads, 30-second spots, display banners
****But they never have really seen these elements as an integrated corpus of content living in a digitally driven ecosystem
**Marketers need to become engagement publishers
**"Increasingly, [marketers] are realizing that this social media space involves an ongoing conversation. Assets never really go away."
**Building conversation “inventory” at scale
I agree that all brands probably should be on Facebook, but what you really need is an integrated strategy that has – at its root – the brand's own domain, independent from any platform other than the Internet itself.
Measuring the success of conversational engagement
These things are very hard to directly measure from a simple click. And often, as we know, the people who click are not the people you want as customers anyway.
**So you need a bridge to that kind of insight that gives a media buyer the justification to say that this new technology is worth the investment.
**Marketers have been very interested in understanding how their content is amplified in the past few years
**Now there is technology that allows us to automatically collect and present this data (More in detail in interview)
**The best companies create communities of interest that are independent:
**they are rooted in the independent Web, with expressions on Facebook, or as an iPhone or Android app – those all become instances of their brand.
** Companies should create a circulatory system through which they can promote different aspects of their messaging and interactions with their community.
**If you're going to be a brand with a publishing approach to marketing, you must have an independent taproot that isn’t controlled by anyone but you.
Put out your branches and feelers everywhere. Integrate that experience and let your content and messaging flow through it.
This wonderful piece was written by Lisa Barone on Outspoken Media. I loved reading this because her insights are right on the money. How do I know? Because I've been on Pinterest for a week and this social network takes you beyond all the buzzwords, the how to articles and lets you connect with others in ways that have the potential to create deeper engagement that can is definitely beginning to show ROI in more ways than one.
Here's an excerpt that captures the essence of what she is saying. I highly recommend you read the comments as well.
Excerpt:
"Anyone who knows me will tell you: I’m completely commitment phobic. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of emerging social media networks. I cringe whenever a new one is released because I simply Can’t.
"For me, the social network doing that right now is Pinterest.Wait? Pinterest? Is that really anything more than an outlet for pictures of sleeping cats, fancy home décor and items deemed orange?
It is.
I’ll tell you why I love it and why, as a brand, you should love it too.
****One of the great things social media has done is that it’s undeniably changed theway businesses and consumers are able to interact.
****It broke through an imaginary wall that had long divided the two and allowed businesses to share parts of themselves which, in turn, allowed consumers to seek out businesses that are weird in the same way or that believed in the same things.
Last November I spoke at TEDx about how through the Web, weird became profitable.
****Weird became something businesses could leverage. To me, that’s where social media is most effective –
****when businesses use weird to be strategically authentic and show customers their essence. It’s when they let certain parts of themselves hang out so their customers can get to know whose behind the product or service that they love so much.
And that’s what Pinterest does really well. It epitomizes what is right and powerful in social media. Sure, Mashable may still use it to hoard marketing infographics for page views, but that’s not how it’s most effective.
**Pinterest works best when brands show customers what’s going on below the surface".
Jon Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing as a valuable article on listening, one of the key skills every individual or company needs to further refine in the near future. He writes:
"...I believe that one of the master skills of any marketer, manager, or educator is the ability to listen perceptively to what our prospects, customers, staff and community members are saying.
...there are many forms of listening.
a) Passive listening – the kind we do when we are listening to a seminar but we’re really scrolling through Pinterest.
b) Selective listening – the kind that I might practice when I’m discussing something with someone and mostly I’m thinking about what I’m going say next.
c) Active listening – the kind where we are discussing something with someone and reacting only to the words being said.
d) Perceptive listening – the kind where I hear and interpret the words, but I also consider what the person is thinking and perhaps how they are acting as they say the words.
Perceptive listening is by far the most complex because it requires you to be totally focused, completely mindful and, well, perceptive of what’s really going on."
"Facebook recently rolled out some new metrics that give better insight into what your community wants from your page, enabling you to grow your fans and interactions."
"[Here the most important] metrics to help you decipher what is going right and wrong on your page."
#1: Main Insights
First click on Main Insights and you see a graph of the activity for the last month. When you click on the individual columns, you will sort the posts by descending value in the column. The most important of these columns are Engaged Users and Virality.
#2: Reach
The statistic to watch here is the number of people you are reaching more frequently. This is your core audience.
#3: Likes
The area to watch in this section is the Where Your Likes Came From graph. We can go back and track the posts on the wall to see what happened during the spikes.
#4: People Talking About This
This number is publicly displayed on the left sidebar under the number of Likes. This figure is a great measure of actual engagement...
Google's announcement for Search, plus Your World, opens up new ways of using search as well as an unexpected secondary feature/update which is going to make happy anyone who needs to frequently check Google search results without "personalization".
"Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about.
These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search."
Google introduces today three new features:
1) Personal Results
which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2) Profiles in Search
both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3) People and Pages
which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks.
N.B.: Google is also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results.
That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings.
Social media-loving ninjas, gurus, and wizards may once have touted their Klout. But if the recent spate of criticisms over the company’s privacy, transparency, and methodology is any indication, these days, Klout is out.
Creating a professional-looking landing page is no easy task. Especially if you are not a geek or a web designer, trying to put together a web page that does its job of informing clearly while capturing your prospect name and email is definiteòy a challenging task.
Unbounce is one of the best services out there that can be used for this very purpose. I have tried it, used it and I do recommend it to my all online web publishing students. It is "that" good.
I am quite happy therefore that Abhimanyu Ghoshal has decided to find the time to write this good introductory article about Unbounce and the good things it offers.
ReportGrid is a new web-service that allows any web publisher to create well-designed charts and graphs out of the traffic being recorded on his web pages and to easily publish them online.
Two critical items characterize this service:
1) Quality visualization of web analytics data
2) Tools to publish it online
As a user you have a lot of control in selecting what kind of data visualization approach you want to use and what data to bring in, but, to me, the key innovation here is the use of analytics data for "public" promotion and marketing purposes.
In 2004 I wrote: "...Though I am aware of breaking out from the traditional approach to the use of Web server statistics, but I would strongly suggest independent publishers, reporters, bloggers and online journalists of all kinds, to make (a representative sample) of their log server stats publicly available.
...
My recommendation is: Make it completely transparent for everyone to see how well you are doing.
The more transparent you are, the more credible your information will be."
If you are looking to track, monitor, manage and optimize different key social media-related perfomance indicators you probably some kind of dashboard where to do this work.
In this well-organized collection by Barry Hurd you can find anything from the very basic to the most sophisticared solutions at your disposal.
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
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