The New SEO Process: Stop Being Kanye
“To do effective SEO now, at the very least, you have to be a digital strategist, social media marketer, a content strategist, conversion rate optimizer, and a PR specialist.” The pieces of the puzzle are opportunity discovery, content strategy/development, technical development, social strategy/implementation, measurement and optimization. Also involved is not being like Kanye West. (SEOmoz)
New Yahoo CEO Says Display Advertising Is the Highest Priority
Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson said reviving the company’s struggling display advertising business is his “highest priority.” One analyst noted that Thompson seems to have a greater sense of urgency than his predecessors had. (Reuters)
13 Popular PPC Campaign Tactics to Avoid
Here’s a list of 13 common PPC tactics that sometimes work but can ruin an account. Among them are resting on the laurels of your top PPC campaigns, creating super-granular PPC campaigns, and creating separate search and mobile campaigns. (PPC Hero)
4 Foundational Secrets to PPC Advertising
Advertise where your prospects are; advertise when your prospects are receptive to your offer; match your offer to your prospect’s immediate desire: and focus on ROI, not cost. These are the four secrets to PPC advertising gleaned from the Central Drakensberg region of South Africa. (Search Engine Watch)
A List of Link-Building Strategies
Here’s a comprehensive list of link-building strategies, spanning the basic, to submission-based, to content-based, to linkbait and beyond. (Point Blank SEO)
What Email Marketers Need to Know About Sender Score
Sender Score is a metric from Return Path that offers insight into your reputation as an email sender. Here’s an overview of what Sender Score is, how to interpret it and what to do if you have a bad score. (HubSpot)
The Top 101 Overlooked or Overemphasized SEO Factors
If you’re looking for a competitive edge in your SEO efforts, take a look at this list of the top 101 overlooked or overemphasized factors in SEO. Some of the points include “Focus on your best; outsource the rest,” “Affiliate Summit is one of the best conferences to meet other SEO professionals” and “Algorithmically, spun content is effective when used properly.” (Microsite Masters)
How to Turn Your RSS Reader Into a Topic-Generation Machine
Here’s how to combine topic sources like Quora, top blogs and forums in your RSS reader. This post takes you from why you should use Google Reader, to how to discover RSS feeds, to organizing your RSS feeds, to the best RSS feeds for topic generation, to what you’ll uncover with this approach. (KISSmetrics)
13 Unconventional Link-Building Strategies
If you’re ready for some new link-building strategies, here are 13 to note. These include getting listed with the library, hosting a giveaway and building an app. (Search Engine Journal)
16 Different Ways Google Might Grab Content From Your Site
“You’re probably familiar with Google’s spider program, Googlebot, but there are many other ways that Google visits your website.” This post offers a rundown of 16 possible Google crawlers, along with questions about Google’s crawling behavior. (Coconut Headphones)
A Guide to Link Prospecting and Analysis
Creative link building, link prospecting, link scouting – whatever you call it, the idea is to look for opportunities to build links. Install the SEOmoz and Scraper Google Chrome extensions then embark on this five-step journey. (SEOptimise)
Baidu Look to Mobile Search for Growth
Baidu is looking to monetize its mobile search traffic and social media platforms this year to boost its growth outside of its traditional PC domain. “We do think mobile will become a very important channel to distribute our products and that has increasingly become true over the past quarter,” said Baidu’s chief executive. “And we think during the coming year, mobile will represent an ever larger percentage of our total traffic.” (Reuters)
‘Cookiegate’: Another Privacy Gaffe for Google
“Cookiegate” or “Safarigate” is the affectionate name given to the behavior of Google and other ad networks circumventing mobile Safari’s default “no third-party cookies” settings. (Search Engine Land)
Consumer Costs of Mobile Advertising
Because consumers are so closely tied to their mobile devices, “the consumer costs of mobile advertising may be more visible and less tolerated than those of other media.” The three interrelated costs from mobile advertising are time, money and battery life. (ClickZ)
4 Signs of a Dysfunctional Email Program
If you see any of these four things in your email program, it might be dysfunctional: 1) ivory tower effect, 2) warring factions, 3) strategy de jour and 4) analysis paralysis. (Mediapost)
Your SEO Isn’t to Blame
Your content – not Google, your competitors, your SEO or your link builder – is the blame for your lack of leads. A few bad-content issues are having a site focused on SEO at the expense of the customer experience, having a site filled with too much marketing-speak and making the site all about you. (SEO Copywriting)
5 Tools for More Efficient Link Outreach
Tout App, Boomerang, Rapportive, Citation Labs and BuzzStream are five tools that will help your link-outreach efforts. (Search Engine People)
Pinterest Drops Skimlinks and Might Try Ads
Pinterest has stopped using Skimlinks to make money off of pins. The company’s CEO said Skimlinks was a test, and that Pinterest is exploring ways to make money, such as affiliate links or ads. (Marketing Land)
Google Testing Results Pages With Fewer Than 10 Results
Google UK was spotted showing a search results page with limited results. The test isn’t yet confirmed, though Bing has done something similar. (Search Engine Land)
Twitter Accepting Sign-ups for Self-Serve Ad Program
Twitter is accepting sign-ups from small businesses interested in its self-serve ad program. “In a promotion with American Express, Twitter offering a $100 credit for free advertising to the first 10,000 businesses that register — you just have to accept American Express cards, or be a cardholder yourself. Oh, and the sign-up process also requires you to follow American Express on Twitter.” (TechCrunch)
DuckDuckGo Has Its First Million-Search Day
Search engine DuckDuckGo announced on Valentine’s Day that it had its first day with a million direct searches on Feb. 13. A year earlier, DuckDuckGo handled 176,000 direct searches. (Search Engine Land, Brafton)
62% of Popular Restaurant-Related Searches on Valentine’s Day Were Mobile
According to Google, mobile accounted for 62 percent of popular restaurant-related searches on Valentine’s Day. The company also noted that consumers were 560 percent more likely to click to call to make a call week over week during Feb. 7-14. (Google Mobile Ads Blog)
Be Careful Using AdWords for Keyword Research
“For the past decade, most of us in the field of search have relied on Google’s AdWords data (either in the public tool, the API or the tools inside AdWords accounts). It’s the best source we’ve got, but many marketers may not realize that sadly, the numbers and queries may not always match up to what’s actually happening on Google’s search engine.” Here’s are examples involving the phrase “blog traffic.” The moral of the story is that running discovery-focused searches in AdWords might not show you all the valuable/high-volume keyword phrases connected to a word or phrase. (SEOmoz)
Facebook Launches Verified Accounts and Pseudonyms
Starting today, Facebook will begin allowing prominent public figures to verify their accounts and opt to display a preferred pseudonym instead of their birth name. This ensures that people won’t subscribe to public updates of impostors and gives Facebook some muscle in its fight with Twitter to control the interest graph. (TechCrunch)
A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics
Google Analytics is dubbed easy, but there’s more than meets the eye. Here’s a look at how to plan, customer segments, goal and event tracking, and page categories. (Search Engine Watch)
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