How The Food Network Suddenly Spiked In Popularity & Why comScore Isn’t Buying It. In May 2011, the mantle of the most-trafficked food site according to comScore passed to Food Network from AllRecipes, who had held the position for over two years. What was its secret recipe? Buying an audience through the AdOn network – a recipe that apparently didn’t ultimately taste right to comScore. They determined the surge was due to “invalid” traffic and revised the numbers, putting AllRecipes back on top. Why comScore Numbers Matter So Much In today’s world of digital content powered by online advertising, advertisers and publishers alike keep a close eye on the numbers.
In turn, these numbers are used in board presentations to demonstrate growth, by sales teams working to convince advertisers to make big campaign spends, and by advertisers deciding where to spend ad dollars. We use the numbers to monitor industries and consumer behavior. Are the numbers accurate? As these numbers gain value, it becomes more enticing to game them. So should we trust the numbers? Your Landing Page, Their Site?
SEO is a game of tradeoffs and opportunism. Do you go after that single high-value keyword, or do you cede it to a big competitor while growing your long-tail traffic? Do you pay up for professional copywriters, or rely on user-generated content to fill up your pages? Will you write great blog content by spotting emerging stories the second they hit Twitter, or by writing thoughtful long-form pieces? One key choice that SEO campaign managers need to make is where their content should live. The standard practice is to write some good content on the site you’re optimizing, but to also sprinkle some guest content on other sites, both for recognition and for links. But in the most competitive verticals, maybe it’s not always ideal to have the sales funnel start on the site you’re optimizing.
Sometimes the best place for a landing page is on a site you don’t control. When To Put Your Landing Page On Someone Else’s Site How To Get SEO Value Out Of Off-Site Landing Pages Promote Branded Searches. The Word "Original" I'm 100% Convinced that 50% of PR and Social Media Metrics Are Wrong — Knowledge Center — NewComm Collaborative. Digital Advertising: Who Gets the Highest Ad Rates Online? - Advertising Age - Digital. Is It Time For A New Compensation Model For Search And Digital Marketers? Pay for performance is certainly not a new concept. But a number of digital marketing industry pundits have publically suggested that attribution measurement should drive a new compensation model for publishers and search engines that’s based on the actual contribution they make to each conversion and dollar of revenue, rather than for the credit that would be given using the “last click” method of measurement.
A lot can be said for the wisdom and fairness of such a compensation model given the ability of some attribution platforms to accurately and fairly calculate this credit. But gaining buy-in from all the disparate and competing constituencies affected by it would pose a significant challenge. Perhaps a topic for a future (much longer) column… However, one area where this same idea makes an awful lot of sense, and is more easily implemented, is in how brands or agencies compensate their own staffs for the success of their efforts.
Option #1 – Give Compensation Where It Is Due. Little Chef, Big Dreams. First opened in 1958, Little Chef is a chain of restaurants found along the highways and “A roads” in the UK. Currently operating 162 locations, Little Chef boasts of serving 10 million cups of tea, 12 million rashers of bacon, 10 million eggs, and 13 million sausages each year. At Little Chef you can sit down and order food, or take food to go, or just buy stuff. Sounds like a combination of Canada’s Tim Hortons and the US’s IHOP and 7-Eleven. Little Chef has just undergone a big revitalization of its identity, designed by London-based venturethree, and its restaurant design by Ab Rogers Design.
Old look of Little Chef. With a rich history and 93% brand recognition, this rebrand was about evolution not revolution. Detail of Charlie, above, and new script wordmark, below. I love evolutions, especially when they are well done. The essence of Little Chef is more relevant today than ever. Good to Go packaging, signage, trays, and products, above and below. SEO Content Writing - Love It or Others Won't. Keyword Insights: How Office Furniture Vendors Can Target Start-Ups. It’s a great time to start a company.
Incubator labs are springing up all over the place, sponsored by venture capitalists and universities. Universities are teaching entrepreneurial skill, and have programs to sponsor student startups. Massive layoffs over the past two years have forced new college graduates, and experienced former employees to strike out on their own. The emergence of social media and mobile platforms are providing thousands of start-up opportunities, and you can see them showcased at “network and launch” events such as the Web Innovators Group and Mass Innovation Nights. Search Behavior Categories So, how do these companies go about finding a source for office furniture? Several of the high-level search behavior categories have numerous sub-categories; the most prominent is the type category, which has 11 sub-categories of search behavior.
Noise There is a lot noise in the office furniture AdWords data. Sub-Categories Search Behavior Model Categories in More Detail Type. Image Is Everything: How To Get Your Non-Product Images To Show In Search Results. Here’s the first question: what is the business value of having one of your images come up at the top of Google’s search results? I don’t mean Google Image Search, I mean the first organic results (aka SERPs) seen on Google.com for a particular keyword?
If you have an e-commerce site, the value is pretty obvious. And, there are multiple ways to get your product image to appear in the top results – primarily through feeds into Google Shopping or via paying for product images in Google AdWords (using ad extensions). Non e-Commerce Images? But what if you don’t sell a traditional product and don’t have a traditional product catalog? As in, no standard e-commerce / product offerings. Is there business value to having one of your images front and center on Google’s main organic SERPs? Now, you could have endless internal debates within your company about the value of getting that image there, and you may come to the conclusion that the SEO effort needed may outweigh the potential benefit. Google Now Supports “Author” Tag. Google announced support of the authorship markup, enabling content sites to help identify their authors on the site and across the web.
The markup links up authors to content, for example, this content would be linked up to my name and can be used to find all the stories I’ve written here and on my other sites. It uses the rel attribute, so all you need to do is add the rel=”author” to your author’s hyperlink on the article page. For example: Written by <a rel=”author” href=”.. /authors/mattcutts”>Matt Cutts</a>.
As Google explained, this tells search engines: “The linked person is an author of this linking page.” The rel=”author” link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page. Plus you can use the rel=”me” to communicate to the search engine that the links on an author page all represent the profile of the same person. Say that Matt is a frequent contributor to <a rel=”me” href=” more about Matt</a> Related Stories:
Automatic Algorithms Are Fundamentally Changing The Shape of SEO. Many SEOs and SEO agencies aspire to run SEO automatically, using technology. Not surprisingly, it turns out that search engines are thinking along similar lines. Ilya Segalovich, the CTO of Yandex, mentioned during my visit to Yandex in Moscow, that he expects it to become easier to build search engines and that Google and Yandex’s competition is most likely to come from technologies based largely around “open source” style software readily available to developers. The specific technologies which are likely to become “commoditized” in this way include crawlers, indexing and even machine learning algorithms. Says Ilya, “You won’t need 2,000 engineers to build a decent search engine. At some point, this will make search more competitive because more search engine components will be readily available and you’ll have the ability to achieve reach quickly.”
Don’t Ask A Search Engine Engineer How To Rank Your Site! Yes, you have to be named “Andrey” to get a senior post at Yandex! Your SEO Competitor Gaining On You? There is a great thread at Cre8asite Forums on the topic of what to do when your SEO competition is gaining on you within the search results. It happens all the time, you watch a specific set of search results and you slowly see a specific site climbing up to your ranks.
What can you do to make sure that site does not pass you? Moderator, EGOL, replied saying that you make your site better. He said: For an information site I would improve the content on the pages that are being defeated. Produce content that is best-on-the-web for your topic and that can attract links that will lift you in the rankings. Promote those pages to all relevant traffic on your site with the hope of collecting some links, "likes", tweets, etc.For a retail site... He also recommended that you create more than one page on your site targeting that keyword phrase and see how it does. Administrator, Iamlost also came in and offered a defensive strategy against low quality sites gaining in the ranks.
Most SEOs Believe In Risk Free Links. A few months ago I ran a poll asking if you believe in penalty proof paid links? We had over 200 responses and I am a bit surprised to see that most SEOs believe in penalty proof paid links. 53% of those who replied said there are penalty proof paid links, whereas only 26% said there is no such thing. Another 20% answered that they do not know. I honestly felt that more SEOs would either say there is no such thing as a penalty proof paid link or say they did not know. I am a bit shocked to see so many SEOs saying they are confident that they can pay for links and not get caught. Are you surprised? Image credit: Jim Sher on Flickr. Friends Don’t Let Friends Use NoFollow. This is an old, old issue, but one that keeps cropping up. People keep using nofollow. Why? Please, tell me why? The nofollow tag is bad, bad, bad for SEO campaigns. The only time you should use it?
If you’re selling links or doing something that could be interpreted as selling links, and want to avoid getting banned. The Story I’m not going to cover the entire tragic tale of the nofollow attribute. The short version: Google introduced this thing called the link rel=nofollow tag. That caused all sorts of hysteria in the SEO community. The Nerdy Explanation Basically, nofollow now ‘burns’ PageRank.
Q: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea? Matt Cutts: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. The short version: Using nofollow, even in comments, will reduce the effective PageRank of the linking page. NoFollow doesn’t preserve PageRank. The Muggle Explanation. 3 SEO Myths About Information Architecture. PageRank sculpting, siloing, link-juice flowage, SEO architecture — these are keyword phrases that often make my skin crawl.
The reason? I commonly hear these words come from search engine optimization (SEO) professionals in reference to a website’s information architecture (IA). Yet, when I am among my information architecture colleagues? I rarely hear these words, if at all. What happens when I explain to my information architecture colleagues how PageRank sculpting is supposed to work?
They look at me as if I have lost my mind, because no professional information architect, that I know of, determines a website’s information architecture and corresponding navigation schemes based on a math equation from Google. Where is the disconnect? To help SEOs understand an information architect’s point of view, here are some of the common myths and misconceptions that search engine optimizers have about information architecture. Myth #1: SEO is SEO & IA is IA Amen to that, Alan. Key Takeaways. How I Got A 300% Retail Sales Explosion With 30 Minutes Of SEO. I’ve lived by this rule since 1997: If you name your products using the keywords customers search for to find and buy what you sell, you’ll do better selling online than if you use the manufacturer’s name or industry jargon for your product names. I’ve been working on product pages on online stores for a long time, and I don’t get too excited about new techniques or tricks for boosting sales by optimizing product pages.
I think I’ve near ‘bout tried everything I’ve read about or seen online. We’re always testing stuff, and trying new things, but every once in awhile something sneaks up and gets me! In today’s episode, I’m going to share how I spent less than thirty minutes optimizing a single product page which resulted in a 300% explosion in sales on that SKU, which rocked my world a little bit. It made me wonder what else I’m missing out on! You Broke The Product Page In IE8 Back in November, I got an email from my production manager that a product page was messed up in some browsers. Googlehackers. From Clicks To Calls. As 2010 closes, I believe we are seeing the beginning of a transformation in digital marketing: what we at Marchex call “the call economy.” Although built on the backs of established online marketing tactics, the advent of a market for leads delivered through phone calls under a performance-based model represents a massive shift in how advertisers can efficiently acquire new customers.
For a very broad range of search advertisers, both large and small, the targeting of search terms and purchase of clicks is mere prelude to what they consider the ultimate outcome, and the one over which they have the most direct influence when converting a lead: a phone call. Whether the advertiser is a SOHO accountant or a national insurance giant, the clicks they drive are generally rendered valuable only in the context of their ability to lead to actual conversation.
Performance. Transparency. Phones are becoming computers. Computers are becoming phones. When you can buy calls, clicks seem exorbitant. Excuse Me While I Have A Ranking Report Rant. I had lunch today with a young, ambitious entrepreneur. He’s fresh out of a prestigious tech university, has a fledgling company and visions of shaking up a big industry. He wanted to talk about search. Him: “I’m pretty psyched, we just launched about 4 months ago and we’re already ranking number one for <insert obscure phrase>.” Me: “So, how much traffic is that generating?” Him: “Well, none.” Me: “So how useful is that ranking?” Him: “Well, if we can rank for that, I just need to get us ranking for terms that will get us traffic.” Me: “errr. . .” I hate ranking reports. They convey progress while hiding failure. Personalization An increasing number of searches return personalized results; this can be based on things like previous user behavior (i.e. my search for “news” returns CNN, because I visit CNN so frequently) or geo specific searches (i.e. my search for “restaurant” returns Seattle restaurants) or searches based on a social graph.
Local & Other Stuff Changing Results Query Variations. FB CPM and CPC. Ethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer. 21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries. 3 Common Link Building Questions Answered By 4 Experts. How To Get The Most Search Engine Marketing Value From Key Content Initiatives. The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research. Search Engine Optimization Tips, Articles & Tutorials. CollinsDengLiFei-Fei_ECCV2008. 3 Dangers Of A Website Redesign For B2B SEO. SEO Theorems and Principles.