A Brief Guide to Robots.txt and Five Mistakes to Avoid Irish Wonder explains the origins of the Robots.txt file, why it’s one of the most important SEO documents you’ll ever write, and five mistakes that can damage your site. What Is a Robots.txt File? An important, but sometimes overlooked element of onsite optimisation is the robots.txt file. This file alone, usually weighing not more than a few bytes, can be responsible for making or breaking your site’s relationship with the search engines. Robots.txt is often found in your site’s root directory and exists to regulate the bots that crawl your site. Standard Rules The “standards” of the Robots Exclusion Standard are pretty loose as there is no official ruling body of this protocol. - User-agent (referring to the specific bots the rules apply to) - Disallow (referring to the site areas the bot specified by the user-agent is not supposed to crawl – sometimes “Allow” is used instead of it or in addition to it, with the opposite meaning) Interestingly, today Google is showing a new message: 1.
Quantifying the ROI of Social Media Product Promotion Kevin Tate | October 16, 2012 | 1 Comment inShare19 How can you prove the success across your product engagement strategy? As brands' social commerce efforts have evolved over the course of 2012, the focus has shifted largely from pure social transactions toward social product discovery and engagement. While transactions are inherently measurable, how can you prove the success across your product engagement strategy? But how do you calculate the ROI of social product engagement with metrics like these? Example: "A Social Product Launch Experience" 2,500,000 social customers saw a post announcing a new product50,000 of them clicked the post to check it out25,000 of those watched the video or explored the "product story" page5,000 liked, commented on, or shared the product5,000 created a story via an Open Graph action (want, love, own)5,000 "allowed" the app in order to share content1,000 added it to a "basket" and clicked to the e-store to check out Discovery. Assigning Values Adding It Up
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Measuring SEO Success via Google Analytics By Jill Whalen If you've been reading much of what I've written over the years, you'll know that I'm not a fan of using search engine rankings as a measure of success for SEO. Thankfully, we have much better ways to measure SEO success today, thanks to tools like Google Analytics. While presenting an all-day SEO training class at the University of San Diego last week, I realized that many people who do SEO as part of their job don't always know what information in Google Analytics they should be looking at, nor how to find it. The Bare Minimum to Measure to Check on SEO Success If you do nothing else, you'll want to at least measure the following: Organic keyword trafficLanding pages from organic searchThankfully, all of the above can be found via Google Analytics' Standard Reporting. 1. To find these, simply click: Standard Reporting >Search > Organic >Primary Dimension: Keyword 2. To see exactly which pages they landed on, you can click the "Landing Page" link as the Primary Dimension. Jill
20 Stats That Explain Why Marketers Still Struggle to Measure Social Media ROI [Data] When it comes to social media, many marketers are still figuring things out as they go. This is especially true in terms of justifying their investment of time and money into social media marketing efforts. But LinkedIn launched 9 years ago. We've had 8 years to get to know Facebook, and 6 to wrap our heads around Twitter. 5) 52% of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social marketing. 6) 96% measure number of fans and followers, 89% measure traffic, 84% measure mentions, 55% track share of voice, and 51% track sentiment. What These Stats Say About the Struggle to Measure Social Media ROI For one thing, they say that marketers are scrappy. Reason #1: Lack of an Integrated System 7) By 2013, lead management campaigns integrating 4 or more digital channels are expected to outperform single- or dual-channel campaigns by 300%. 8) 60% of businesses do not have an integrated social media strategy. 15) Awareness, Inc
David Cameron racks up 90,000 followers in first Twitter weekend UPDATE -David Cameron last night passed the 100,000 follower milestone. It was a quick canter to six figures for the Prime Minister who marked the occasion with his ninth Tweet and a little dig at some bookmakers. It appears some bookies had doubted Cameron’s ability to pass the 100,000 follower mark during the week of the Conservative Party conference and have had to payout. The bookies should have called me. I was pretty sure he would quickly pass that mark this week. Oh the glory of hindsight. I’m told some bookmakers are regretting laying odds against this account passing 100,000 followers during conference.— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) October 9, 2012 Some have accused the PM of being a bit vain or boastful with that Tweet and wondering if he might have other issues on his mind.
How to Avoid Site Changes that Ruin User Experience and Conversions This entry is a guest post by Tom Howlett, a Digital Marketing Executive at Koozai. You can follow him on Twitter: @Koozai_Tom. How do you make general and SEO website changes without compromising your site’s user experience and ultimately the number of conversions made through the website? When you start to tinker with content and navigation elements to optimise pages, this can have a profound impact on visitor perception – for better or worse. So how can you make these website changes without spoiling the website experience you worked so hard to create? This post looks at a number of the most common and important considerations when making any new website changes. Common SEO Site Changes Page Titles This may seem like an obvious consideration, but it is important that when you create a new page for the site or are going through it with a fine SEO comb, that you create a unique title for each one. The title element is also an important consideration for helping to improve conversions. URLs
Marketing Research: Only 25% of marketers can show value to the organization Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President of Research and Thought Leadership at ITSMA (Information Technology Services Marketing Association), and Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing. Both were involved in recent marketing research, 2012 ITSMA/VEM Marketing Performance Management Survey: The Path to Better Marketing Results. The survey was conducted during the summer of 2012 via email and social media invitation through Twitter and LinkedIn, and included 405 completed surveys. Here is a chart outlining details of the respondents: Click to enlarge All respondents were analyzed by company type, company size and by a self-grading system (grade results included, and note that “D” was the lowest possible grade): Here are the key takeaways from the research: The missing middle Anecdotally, she attributes this to a rough stretch for marketers in the recent past with limited budgets and external resources. Creating connections Related Resources:
L'Oreal's Rachel Weiss On Social Media When Rachel Weiss, vp/digital strategy and marketing at L’Oréal, told Business Insider's Social Media ROI Conference that she stopped using Pinterest because "I got bored," we knew we had to grab her for a Q&A. Pinterest is the new darling of social media, and advertisers are already flocking to it because of its huge female user base. Pinterest would be a natural for L'Oreal, surely? Here's what Weiss told us about Pinterest — and Foursquare and Facebook — when she sat down with us recently to talk in more detail about her company's social media strategy. (The interview was edited lightly for length and clarity.) BI: What is L'Oreal's social media strategy, what kind of channels do you use, what resources do you put into it? RW: We are a big company with very many brands so each brand within L'Oreal acts as it's own individual company with its own strategy. And other brands … we look at L'Oreal everything in terms of the path of purchase and it's about advocacy, awareness, conversion.
4 Social Media Goals Every Business Should Measure Are you winging it when it comes to your social activity? The expression “social media ROI” gets tossed around frequently and you know it’s important. But where do you start and how do you relate what to measure online with your overall business goals? Here are four business goals, how social media can impact these goals and most importantly, how you can measure the impact of your social media efforts on these goals. Determine how each goal below relates to your specific business goals and then choose which social media results are relevant to measure. Goal #1: Raise Awareness of Your Brand Do you want to increase your brand recognition and online influence? It’s important to stay relevant. When customers are aware of your brand and interact with it on different social media sites, they are more likely to recommend it to their friends by liking posts on Facebook and retweeting you on Twitter. Brand awareness is a crucial first step in gaining a customer. Goal #2: Website Traffic Part A—Setup
Why You're Struggling to Measure the Value of Social Media In a recent report, Adobe examined the oft-discussed issue of how exactly to quantify the value of social media. What they found was that when it comes to measuring the ROI of social media, most marketers are using all the wrong tools. In fact, the vast majority of marketers included in their study of 225 companies relied exclusively on last-click attribution to measure the success of their social efforts. Last-click (aka last-touch) attribution is the form of tracking that most analytics tools like Google Analytics employ. It’s called last-click attribution because conversions are measured based on the most recent channel that brought a visitor in before they converted. Think of it like giving your most recent date credit for leading to your engagement rather than your first date. The problem with measuring social media through last-click attribution is that social channels tend to engage people at the top of the sales funnel rather than right before they buy. So what about you?
Sharing the floor – is social media helping women to find their voice? It is now a couple of weeks since an article in the American Political Science review, asserting that women speak less than men in group discussions, made headlines in the UK’s national media. The article itself is not for the casual reader, and I would have thought that it would be difficult for anyone who has attended a mixed gathering of more than five people to be remotely surprised by its conclusions. There have been many different theories put forward as to why it is that women tend to be quieter than men in discussions (my personal favourite is that women are more inclined to encourage others to express their opinions while men like to communicate status by talking loudly) but nobody could say that it was a shocking revelation. It is odd, then, that the communications industry should boast more women than men. The only area in the sector where women are significantly outnumbered is in broadcast – back to that talking thing, perhaps. So why is this?