The Week in Review

4 Marketers Doing It Right and Wrong on Facebook

Facebook has received a large flow of advertising dollars this year – about $3.8 billion projected. But what are the results of companies taking to Facebook pages? Most businesses don’t create any business value or sustainable advantage. Here’s a look at how Amazon, Step2, TripAdvisor and Louisville Slugger are faring. (AdAge.com)

SEO Christmas Wish List

Here’s a wish list from a “good SEO.” It includes requests to have our keywords back, to get some more data, to have a budget for a training session or three, for peace and for toys. (Search Engine Watch)

30 E-Books to Help You Master Inbound Marketing in 2012

Here’s a list of 30 e-books that will help you wrap your mind around inbound marketing, which is made up of three steps: 1) get found, 2) convert and 3) analyze. (HubSpot)

3 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Site With YouTube

YouTube gets 3 billion daily views, which makes it the third most visited website in the world. “As a marketer, there’s an absolutely incredible potential with YouTube if you deploy the right strategy. Imagine each of your videos as ‘mini websites.'” The three traffic-getting strategies are to tell people exactly what to do, use the video description box and use a call-to-action overlay. (Social Media Examiner)

5 Marketing Lessons It Took a Long Time to Learn

Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics, shares the five marketing lessons it took him a long time to learn, through trial and error. They are: 1) being the category leader isn’t the only path to success; 2) focus on the opportunity, not the market leader; 3) think like a consumer; 4) free advertising can be your best promotional tool; and 5) social media can absolutely drive sales. (SEOmoz)

Don’t Scale Back on SEO in 2012

“Businesses that have found SEO success and businesses that are still struggling to achieve the ranking that they desire often make the same mistake. They scale back on their SEO.” The key to SEO being a potentially steady stream of sales and leads is continued investment. Scaling back on SEO is shortsighted and opens the door for competitors to sneak up on you. (Search Marketing Standard)

Google Tablet Within 6 Months

Google’s Eric Schmidt announced yesterday that his company was aiming to unveil its own tablet within the next six months. He spoke of “brutal competition between Apple and Google Android.” (VentureBeat)

SEO Roundup for 2011

A lot of search-related events happened in 2011, including Panda, Google censoring keyword data and Yahoo Site Explorer going down. This post lists more significant moments in search this past year and includes action items for each. (Evergreen Search Marketing)

5 SEO Tips for Getting Mobile Apps Ranked in SERPs

The opportunity for mobile app visibility in Google organic search results is a “collision between Desktop and Mobile worlds: the explosive popularity of apps are reshaping the Web’s link graph around the App Store and Android Market sites.” Among the five tips offered here for optimizing your apps for the first page of Google rankings on brand queries are to feature your brand prominently in the app name, include your brand name in the link text that points at app download pages and cross-promote your app to mobile users, searchers and bots. (Search Engine Land)

68% of Advertisers Will Boost Display Advertising Dedicated to Video Ads in 2012

According to “Digital Video Advertising Trends: 2012,” a study from Break Media, 68 percent of advertisers are set to increase the share of online display advertising devoted to video ads in 2012. Increased spending on video ads will come primarily from TV budgets, non-video display budgets and overall advertising budget growth. (Break Media)

The No. 1 SEO Issue of 2011: Technical Problems

“The simple fact of the matter is that Googlebot is not yet so advanced that it will rank a site with perfect content but no links and poor SEO, over a site with average content but loads of links and perfect SEO.” Duplication, redirection, robots exclusion, hosting and site speed are among the more regular technical issues to pay attention to. (Receptional)

The Past 12 Months in SEO News

Here’s a recap of the biggest SEO news in 2011, from Google confirming social signals affecting rank in January, to Google accusing Bing of copying results in February, to Google giving guidance on what quality sites are in May – and beyond. (Zazzle Media)

Creating a Successful SEO Strategy for an Affiliate Website

SEO for an affiliate-based website used to be about picking a marketing, buying a keyword-laden domain name, doing a search on Overture and picking the top 50 keywords in your niche. Then you’d generate pages with about 400 words of content on each one and start on linking. Today, this process is much harder. Now you have to pay attention to brandable domain names, unique content, user-generated content and creating a point of difference. (Marketing Land)

Facebook Lawsuit Against Ads ‘Liked’ by Friends Can Proceed

A California judge rejected Facebook’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought against the social network by people who claim showing ads that their friends “like” violates a California law regarding commercial endorsements. (Bloomberg)

Creating Win-Win Link-Building Scenarios

Link-building efforts fail for two reasons: links were not obtained or only low-quality links were generated (e.g., comment, nofollow and low-quality directory links). To make link building a win-win situation, free tools, guest blogging and link purchases are tactics that should be used in unison. (Search Engine Watch)

5 Signs Your SEO Stinks (and Solutions)

If your SEO victories are short-lived, content seems like it was produced by an SEO writer from the late ’90s or SEO strategy doesn’t acknowledge social media marketing, it might be time to ask some questions. Here’s a look at give signs your SEO program needs work, along with how to fix each problem. (Search Engine People)

Size Matters for Mobile Advertising and CTR

According to data from inneractive, there’s a clear correlation between the size of the screen of a mobile device and the CTR. This is another confirmation that tablets will be leading the way in 2012. (TechCrunch)

Yahoo Search Trends: Holidays 2011

Here’s Yahoo’s view of search trends for this year’s holiday season. Included are findings that searches for “Charlie Brown Christmas” this month are up 1,929 percent, while searches for “LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer” are up 11,531 percent. The top three Christmas searches this month were “Christmas cards,” “Santa Claus” and “Christmas trees.” (Yahoo! Search Blog)

6 Ways to Recover From Bad Links

Undoing the damage from bad SEO isn’t easy. Before you start to repair, make sure it’s bad links that got you into trouble. Once you’ve confirmed that, consider these six things: 1) wait it out, 2) cut the links, 3) cut the page, 4) build good links, 5) appeal to Google and 6) find a new home. (SEOmoz)

Top 10 Most Important Search and Social Marketing Stories of 2011

The death of Digg, the Arab Spring, Facebook Timeline and Gestures, Google+, and the Google Freshness update are among the 10 most significant search and social marketing stories of the past year. Among the resolutions to make for 2012 are to clean up unfavorable backlinks; devote some of your ad spending on Facebook paid ads; and boost your presence and value on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. (Search Engine Watch)

What Do People Look at on Facebook Brand Pages?

A webcam eye-tracking study for Mashable by EyeTrackShop analyzed what participants look at on top Facebook brand pages. The study found that users almost always look at pages’ walls first, usually for at least four times longer than any other element on the page. Also, "Victoria Secret’s page was the only one in which people looked at the profile photo — a busty woman in a brassiere — before they noticed the Facebook wall." (Mashable)

ReadWriteWeb Doesn’t Get SEO

A story on ReadWriteWeb appears to hint that the writer doesn’t know much about SEO. Included is a simple visual illustration to clarify what modern SEOs do. (The Future Buzz)

SAY Media Acquires ReadWriteWeb for Around $5 Million

SAY Media, an ad network, has acquired ReadWriteWeb for around $5 million. But why is an ad network buying up media properties? Glam Media and AOL are among other examples of this. (TechCrunch)

The Golden Age of Facebook Advertising

With Facebook possibly going the IPO route in 2012, the social network will be forced to fix the holes that cause so many advertisers to fail. Better tracking and true split-testing, frequency capping and scheduling, and more focused targeting are changes that will usher in Facebook’s golden age of advertising. (Social Media Explorer)

5 Golden Links for Link Building and Beyond

In a series of the 12 Days of SEO, this post highlights five resources to help link-development efforts: Mentionmapp, Analyze Words, iSpionage, SiteBeam and — well, what do you say? (Outspoken Media)