Could You Use Kickstarter to Help Build Your Business?Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services One of the more interesting websites on the Internet has to be Kickstarter. This website is designed to allow you to build up a business idea by giving people a piece of the action (after a fashion – [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

I mean really, milk and cookies? Those two can’t stay together for more than 5 mins without ruining each other. Who is Google kidding?

The one thing that strikes me about this is that Google couldn’t even demo some search queries for finding Valentines gifts, and had to just show some random pixels on the screen?

Giving this a try on my own I suddenly see the problem, a Google search for the phrase, “a gift for the girl who has everything except me”, really doesn’t match anything.

So Google’s not cupid, and the video’s a bit stupid.. but there’s something about that doodle:

Aha! I’ve got it! The gay couple and the astronaut aren’t playing skip rope! That’s blasphemy! Someone call Google and get someone in charge on the phone!

It’s amazing that Google managed to toss that out without more ‘conversation’, I did get a kick out of articles like this blasphemy peice on WatchPlayRead’s blog.

Okay so it was a dry day for search engine optimization, but even nerds got into the spirit of the holiday. Speaking of nerdy, we have another macro image for anyone who wants to guess.
(Remember, we’re going to give credit to the winner right here on the blog, and on our social media accounts, so it’s a good ‘mention’ for the winning guess.

February Macro 3 – If you think you know what this is, or where this is, send us your best guess via Twitter or G+

View full post on Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

Content Marketing

Content marketing is not just about words, it’s about anything and everything that conveys a message to your customer. This includes images, videos, other rich media, and obviously the actual words on your website. Because of Pinterest’s appeal to aesthetics, it is now necessary for websites to seriously consider the images they use. This means stock photography is a thing of the past.

An Example

An important thing to remember about Pinterest is that images are the “hook” to your content. For example, say you have a great recipe for rice pilaf and you have just blogged about it on your food blog. Then a subscriber of yours sees it, and thinks the recipe is rice-tastic and then proceeds to Facebook it, Tweet it and Pin it. But let’s also say that you only included one image with your recipe and it’s a stock photo you found on Google images that’s pixilated and grainy. Well, when your awesome subscriber goes to pin this wonderful recipe and hits their “Pin It” bookmark (to be discussed later), the only image they can pin, to share your recipe, is the pixilated and grainy stock photo. Now, at first you may not see a huge problem with this. Well friends, here’s the issue… take a look at this example of the Food and Drink Pinterest feed.

Look how pretty! You’re pixilated grainy image will get lost in all the amazingness of other, good quality images. You won’t get any repins, or more importantly visits, because your photo doesn’t look appetizing compared to all of these great food shots. This is why images are now crucial to your content strategy.

Pinterest Share Tools

The “Pin It” Bookmark

The “Pin It” bookmark is something Pinterest has developed to make pinning new content easy. You install it by dragging and dropping it to your bookmark tool bar on your browser.

When you want to pin something you see on a page (lets continue with the recipe motif since I love food and I love to cook), you click the “Pin It” bookmark and it gives you options of images it found on the page for you to pin. For example, if I find this delectable recipe for garlic cheese rolls on RaptorToe.com and want to pin it, this is what I see:

Then I hit the “Pin It” bookmark, it gives me several image options based on how many image files were found on the particular page.

I can choose what image I want to pin, then add a description, and choose which board I want to pin it to. From there I can share it to other social networks if I wish.

Give pinners only GREAT options for images.

“Pin It” Share Button

You don’t want to leave it up to chance that pinners will choose the best image that conveys your content. Good news! You can install the Pinterest share button on every post/page of your site to give YOU more control of how your content is shared. You can specify the description to keep messaging consistent and in-brand along with specifying the image shared. Pinterest also provides an advanced code for multiple Pin buttons per page (used mainly for Ecommerce websites). How great are they?!

Pinterest “Follow Button”

If you have created a company or brand profile (if you haven’t already, you should) you can add a follow button to your website. This way, users can keep up with YOUR pins on Pinterest.

Consider This

Here are a few things to consider when implementing images:

• WHY are you using the image? Are you using an image just because? Does it have a purpose?
• What is the message you’re trying to convey and what message does it support?
• Can the image “stand alone”? Can the image convey the message by itself?
• Is the image compelling enough to draw a click?

Because Pinterest is like crack for ADD-ers, you probably have about .05 seconds to catch the eye of a Pinner. Asking all the above questions will help focus your images so Pinners will be anxious to share your content.

Search Engine Optimization

It’s well known that social media is playing a big role in Google’s ranking factors. Pinterest is now the next big social thing, and brands need to jump on the bandwagon if they are doing SEO.

Pinterest SEO Benefit

Yes, there is SEO benefit.

Pinterest recently updated their look and functionality so some of the SEO benefit has been lost. Previously with every pin, your website received one branded, do-follow, anchor text link. This is no longer that case. You now get one no-follow, image link. Some might argue the benefit is lost. I say, along with others, a link is a link is a link. You want your back link portfolio to look natural, what’s more natural than image links? And guess what, Pinterest links don’t go away.

Tracking Pinterest

One great thing about Pinterest is that is drives traffic. With most analytics packages it tracks under referral traffic. If you use Google Analytics, like me, it’s pretty simple to gather information.

To find referral traffic in GA (Google Analytics):

• Go to the left sidebar navigation. Click “Traffic Sources,” “Sources” and then “Referrals.”
• This will give you a list of all the sites that drive traffic to your website. In that list you will find “Pinterest.com” if you are receiving traffic from pins.
• Click “Pinterest.com” in the list, it will pull open the list of all the individual pins that send visitors. If you have goals or ecommerce tracking set up, you can then see which pins actually drove leads and sales. Very cool.

Affiliate Marketing

How Pinterest Makes Its Money

It has recently come to light that Pinterest has been attaching their affiliate code to URL’s when a pinner clicks through to a website. They have been using a program call Skimlinks to achieve this. According to Adrianne Jefferies’s blog post, Skimlinks crawls through all Pinterest links and checks if the URL points to a merchant store with an affiliate program (like Amazon). When they find one, the program automatically changes the URL to include the Pinterest affiliate code.

The Controversy

The controversy has been over Pinterest’s neglect in disclosing their affiliate program. I personally don’t take offense, and honestly don’t care. But I can see how not being forthcoming can rub some the wrong way. Those that are most perturbed are other affiliate marketers that have been making money off Pinterest by tagging URL’s with their code.

So for those of you who already have or are planning on implementing an affiliate program, Pinterest beat you to the punch.

To Wrap It Up

Pinterest appeals to a very specific demographic, and that requires change in your current online strategies. Don’t miss the boat on this, Pinterest is sticking around. Part 3 of the series will address branding, and how Pinterest can benefit your brand.

And in case you missed the first post, take a look at Pinterest… What Is The Big Deal? – Part 1

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Over the years there have been many different ways that people have been doing this; one of my personal favourites is using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. However useful this is, I still find it time consuming and painful, until thankfully along came Linkdex which came and helped ease the pain.

However helpful these tools have been in aiding my link building efforts, it is important as part of any SEO link strategy to think outside the box and establish links where your competitors are not present.

Like many others I am sure, I find quality link prospecting to be a slow process, and knowing where to begin is the hardest and most frustrating.  Hopefully, though, after reading this you’ll be able to analyse quicker and build better quality links.

What You Will Need Beforehand…

Before finding these links, you will need the following extensions installed to your Google Chrome Browser:

• SEOmoz
• Scraper

Step 1 | Change Your Google Search Settings

The first step is to change your Google Search settings, you will want to show 100 results per page rather than the standard results of 10.  This can be changed in the search settings as shown below:

Step 2 | Knowing Your Operator Queries

I discussed in a previous blog post of mine last month how to understand Google operator queries, and how they can help you better in the art of SEO.  The truth is that knowing these queries will help to aid you quicker in filtering and analysing useful link prospects.

Let’s take an example. With it being the start of London Fashion Week today, let’s say I was on the lookout for guest blogging opportunities to share the world of how great Holly Fulton’s and Dion Lees’ Show Spaces were. I would be thinking about different search query strings that would accept guest blogging opportunities, such as:

• “write for us” OR “guest post” “fashion”
• inurl:blog “write for me” OR “Guest Writer” “fashion”

Step 3 | Start Looking for Links

Once you have the extensions, configured your Google search settings and have narrowed down your search results with better defined operator queries, you can start link prospecting.

After displaying your search results, highlight the title tag from the listing and scrape the results using Scraper as shown below:

Once you have scraped the results, you should export them into a Google Docs file for analysis and research.  What you have now is a highly relevant set of sites to look at when building links.

Step 4 | Analysis and Research

The next step is for you to analyse and take note of the root domains using SEOmoz toolbar.   Once you have, I would recommend filtering them to make the largest at the top and start prospecting.

Step 5 | Engagement and Action

Finally, after having filtered the prospective links, it’s all up to you to go about and building the links!  Good luck!

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Link Building – a Helpful Guide to Prospecting and Analysis

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Yet here we are years later (well for most of us) and we are watching our Government pass legislation that will allow us to pay extra taxes for a black’end eye?

Without a shred of evidence to prove a need or direct correlation between monitoring and prevention, next week Canada will be facing a new law that not only requires ISPs to track subscribers, but also removes court involvement from the process giving police direct authority to seize information from ISPs.

The new Lawful Access legislation even goes further, allowing the Police to enable and monitor the tracking mechanisms built into modern cell phones for up to a year, without court involvement.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m an SEO and not a politician or a lawyer. This is my take from reading a few news articles on the pending law and the variety of details is a bit staggering, I just about spat my coffee on the screen reading this clip from the Montreal Gazette:

if the so-called Lawful Access law is passed, it would give police access to webbrowsing history and sensitive personal information, and would grant greater permission to track the cellular phones of suspects

“Webbrowsing history” seems a bit far fetched, but it’s not impossible to track this info at an ISP level and since the move itself seems a bit nuts, I can see why reporters might be going a bit overboard reacting to the details.

I know that my browsing history, especially when I am working on back-links/research for clients, is a confidential business asset. I cannot fathom how a court of law would suggest it’s fine for a police officer to have access to such info without warrant. Even if the officer obtaining the information is above suspect, are the people working with the officers above reproach to the point where court involvement is moot?

Obviously, with a week to go people are getting anxious about the possibility of this passing, so I urge folks to take some time to look it over. I know that if I was more skilled with law I’d be giving it a serious review as the prospects seem frightening and the motivation is questionable/lacking.

View full post on Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

QR Codes are great for getting offline marketing messages online quickly. Adding QR Codes to typical offline marketing material such as posters, flyers, business cards or event badges allows the user to see the message instantly.

With all these offline marketing activities being used, how can the business track what is working and what isn’t? Well, with Google Analytics and I am sure most other analytics packages, you can put tracking codes directly into the QR Code and track when users scan the code.

Below is a step by step guide to tracking QR Codes in Google Analytics.

1. Choose the URL that you would like the QR code that you are generating to return once scanned.

Example: www.oxondigital.co.uk/register/

2. Now create your campaign tracking code that you will use to identify the traffic that you receive from the different marketing activity you are running. You can do that by either using the Google URL Builder tool or my GDocs campaign tracking spreadsheet.

Example:

Campaign Source: University-Flyer
Campaign Medium: QR
*Campaign Content:
Campaign Name: OxonDigital4

This will provide you with the following URL to use:

http://www.oxondigital.co.uk/register/?utm_source=university-flyer&utm_medium=qr&utm_campaign=oxondigital4

*Using the campaign content tag you can differentiate between the ads. In the example above I could have used the Campaign Content to differentiate between the different campuses (Wheatley, Headington, Botley).

3. Now that you have your URL with the correct tracking code, you need to find a QR Code generator or use one of the following:

- http://createqrcode.appspot.com/
- http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
- http://goqr.me/

The example below shows the outcome of what we have just created. Give it a try by scanning the QR Code on your smart phone.

4. Now place the QR code on the relevant marketing material that you are going to distribute.

5. To see the results of the tracking code, you need to go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns

6. Now that you have your campaign data you are more than likely wanting to delve further into your analytics to see metrics such as types of devices and locations.

To do this you will need to create an advanced segment or two. This can be done in a number of ways, two of which I have shown below.

Segment 1

Include > Metric = Medium > Exactly Matches > Campaign Medium (QR)

This segment will bring back results that were generated using the campaign medium name of QR.

Segment 2

If you are using lots of different QR Codes you might want to split them by campaign name and campaign medium to delve into the specific marketing channel at the time.

Include > Metric = Medium > Exactly Matches > Campaign Medium (QR)

AND

Include > Metric = Campaign > Exactly Matches > Campaign Name (OxonDigital4)

Once you have created your segments, you will be able to delve further into the data you have received.

The above shows you how you can track your QR code. So whether you put them on a poster, event ticket, t-shirt or coffee cup, you will be able to see what traffic they have generated to your targeted page and/or website.

How do you use QR Codes? Are you making sure that you are tracking your offline marketing channels with techniques such as QR Codes? I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter @danielbianchini

Thanks to Dan Barker for help on some aspects of this post
<image credit>

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Tracking Your QR Codes to Bring Offline Marketing Online

Related posts:

1. Tracking Online Marketing Campaigns in Google Analytics
2. Google Analytics Location Tracking Changes: Where Has London Gone?
3. Social Media Marketing

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Do You Need to Buy a Mailing List?Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services

As I’ve said here in the past, there are two basic ways to create or rather get an e-mail list. The first way is to build one yourself, over time by constantly pushing your offerings and giving your customers something [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

It can be difficult to track the exact position of keywords in Google since a number of things can affect the outcome. Personalized search, local results, and different data centers can all dramatically influence the rankings you see. Google’s algorithm changes more than 200 times a year, so rankings also fluctuate from week to week or day to day. Overall, you should be looking for trends in your rankings.

With that in mind there are numerous tools that can help you track rankings. One way to track rankings is to use filters within Google Analytics. More information about this is available on Yoast’s blog.

This information can also be gathered through Google Webmaster Tools. In your Webmaster tools click on “Your Site on the Web” and then on “Search Queries.”  This will give you the average position on Google for your site for a given term.

Paid options also exist that allow you to track very specific terms.  Rank Tracker is a paid option that automatically checks your search engine rankings and shows you if your site has moved up or down in the search results.  It can also help you discover profitable keywords you may not have considered on your own.

The SEO Moz tool is another good option that will track rankings from Google, Bing and Yahoo in any country.  This tool pulls rankings automatically and provides some nice charts to show progress.

Authority Labs in another paid tool that provides fully automated reports, allowing you to track local results, international keywords, and a large volume of keywords.

Advanced Web Ranking and Rank Checker are additional services that can be useful for tracking web rankings.

There are a lot of good ways to track search engine rankings.  If you have additional SEO services or tools that you like to use for tracking rankings, feel free to leave a comment.

View full post on SEO.com » Blog

As with selling any service, selling SEO services is an extremely challenging task. Here are my observations of two opposite ends of the spectrum of what SEO consultants often experience with selling SEO services.

Give me a two day optimisation strategy

We’ll often get contacted with the following, “We want a two day web optimisation strategy implemented.” Many neophyte consultants lick their lips and pounce on the ‘opportunity’ with alacrity. They start shooting off proposals, buffing up their hallowed methodology, and more.

A more sane, measured and customer-serving response to the request for a two day optimisation precess is, “Why?”

That always stops people in their tracks. “Why do you want a two day strategy implementation for your website and how do you know that’s the right thing for you?”

In the act of asking that question, you start actually consulting. And if you engage in a real dialogue on the basis of those questions you will gain bracing insight into the real issues, challenges and aspirations of the potential client. You may also get a bracing introduction to the assumptions they’re making — many of which are potentially untested.

It may well be that a two day implementation process is like a relatively empty vessel, into which (after suitable diagnostics and appropriate design) you can pour content that will actually serve their needs and best interests. But it may also be that a half day audit would suffice, and the real action needs to take place at their organisational levels, or with a different group of people, or may require preliminary contact with customers or other stakeholders. It could be that a six month process is needed.

My recommendation to companies who put out a request like the one above, and get a proposal back in response, is to disqualify the person or agency from further consideration, as the request has no meaning without further exploration.

And if you are an agency or a freelance consultant and receive a request like the above, differentiate yourself meaningfully by helping to get to the core of what’s driving the request, rather than getting infatuated by the format proposed.

Avoiding the panacea of empty process

Here’s another common challenge. An organisation decides they need to create a SEO strategy or a digital marketing strategy and manage its roll-out. They get an agency with a strategy implementation process, anchored in the balanced scorecard or some other framework. As they proceed, courtesy of this framework, they are deluged with meetings, with process charts, with communiques, and eventually they arrive at what they perceive to be ‘The Holy Grail’. Namely, they have a clear map. All inconsistencies are removed (at least on the charts anyway), and the path forward glitters like a mythical ‘Yellow Brick Road’.

The problem in the map is not the territory, and it never has been. The problem is that underlying the process clarity are dysfunctional relationships, misguided leadership behaviours, poorly aligned teams, social networks that don’t operate well, departmental practices that may be out of kilter with strategic aspirations, information hoarded rather than shared, a culture that is ossified with past practices rather than vitalised by future aspirations. And eventually the ‘knowing/doing gap’ will become that much more profound.

My humble advice is that once you have process clarity, you have to convert that into a more human map: of behaviours-in-action, team composition and alignment, presence of vibrant or nullifying relationships, communication and network effectiveness, leadership role-modeling and relevant efforts at culture-shifting in order to make the processes actually manifest. Until these adaptive elements are infused into the process steps, to humanise and actualise the processes, we run the risk of trying to run the world from an operating manual.

It doesn’t work. In fact, most of us don’t even run our computers from a manual. We get some hands-on experience while drawing on some guidance, then tinkering and adapting based on results. Alas, in an organisation there are many more moving parts, and my ‘tinkering’ can have expensive consequences if not synergised with the learnings and efforts of others.

Process clarity and human engagement must march together. You can see an organisation as a collection of processes and plans. Fair enough. But you can even more meaningfully see it pulsating with human performance. In other words, the subtotal of all the actions, interactions, behaviours, collaboration and communication between all the people who make a difference to the success or failure of the organisation. You can see the organisation as a patchwork quilt of teams, conversations and acted upon commitments. These are human dimensions, or as I’d like to call it, the ‘human ranking factor’ and if not addressed, all the gewgaws and trinkets of process clarity will be fallow and leave your strategic marketing vision unfulfilled.

Image credit: mootown

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. The Challenge of Selling SEO & Forgetting the ‘Human Ranking Factor’

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The study had researchers message the participants 7 times per day over 14 hours for 1 week asking the participants if they were experiencing a desire at the moment or had experienced an urge within the last 30 minutes.

The researchers went on to ask the participants about the type of desires they felt, the strength of the desire and whether or not it conflicted with other desires and if they resisted or submitted to their urge.
Researchers said that there were 10,558 responses and 7,827 "desire episodes" reported.

The study found that that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. Their paper says highest "self-control failure rates" were recorded with media. "Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money."

It is especially hard for people to resist the desire to work even when it conflict with other goals such as socializing or leisure activities because "work can define people’s identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked."

Hofmann suggested that the desires for media may be harder to resist because of its high availability and also because it "feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist," according to the Guardian.

"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time," he said to the publication.

Hofmann said that he and his team of researchers made it very clear to participants that answering the BlackBerry phones did not count as a case of submitting to an urge. He said that participants did not feel a need to use them, and the phones only alerted them once in a while and "if anything was more annoying than pleasing" he believed. He added that there was nothing else the Blackberrys could have been used for besides answering back to researchers. The study results are expected to be published in the journal Psychological Science.

View full post on Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

Account structure 

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user’s Facebook account. Campaigns are the second tier that sit under the account level. Unlike in Google Adwords where ads are held within ad groups, campaigns hold ads within Facebook. It’s at the campaign level that daily budgets are assigned. Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creative, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it’s best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads as it would make reporting and managing budgets so much easier.

Step 1 – get your target demographic right

Begin by making a list of demographic segments you want to target or make sure you are clear about who your client wants you to target. It’s always handy to ask your client to describe exactly who their target consumer is. This should be your first step in setting up your Facebook advertising campaign.

E.g. targeting list:

• Females, age 18-30, who like Kim Kardashian and live in Orlando.
• Males, age 25 and older, engaged or in a relationship, and interested in weddings or honeymooning.

Step 2: create your ads

Facebook has no process to save ads without submitting them for editorial approval. This is one of the greatest weaknesses to the user interface and the ad creation process and is a serious pain the rear. Therefore, it’s most efficient to submit one version of an ad for each social segment for approval at the time of research. It would be a complete waste of time if all your ad variants didn’t pass editorial scrutiny. Once the draft ads are approved, you’ll be able to tweak, duplicate and build ad variations and resubmit.

Step 3: designate the landing page

If the landing page has not already been determined, designate or create a page that is relevant to the draft copy. It’s extremely important to make sure the landing page is relevant for two reasons:

1) Facebook editorial might reject ads that take users to pages that aren’t relevant.

2) You would see a very high bounce rate, which means your time, effort, and money will be wasted.

Therefore, I cannot stress enough the importance of a great landing page. It’s often best to create specific landing pages solely for PPC campaigns. Trust me, the investment in development time will yield higher return on investment and provide a more effective PPC campaign.

Step 4: create your ad copy

The ad title, image, and body need to be reasonably related to pass editorial review. Again, choosing relevant images and writing compelling ad copy are critical to receiving higher click through rates.

Step 5: define your customer

This is the fun part. Use all the targeting attributes to fully target your social demographic segment.

Step 6: select your campaign

If you’re creating your ads on the web interface, click on “create a new campaign” and make sure you either change your budget to “lifetime budget” or change your daily budget to £1.00. This will ensure you don’t overspend your budget mistakenly. I’ve had to keep stressing myself to make these changes as I have had to endure some painful lessons in the past.

Step 7: set your bid and place your order

Once the demographic targeting is done, set your bid to £0.01. You set the bid so low because there’s no way to pause ads until after you’ve placed your order. Placing your bid at £0.01 will almost guarantee your ads won’t display and spend your valuable budget.

Step 8: repeat above steps

Once you’ve completed the above steps, find the little green button at the top right hand corner of the page that reads “create an ad” and click it. Go through the above steps until you have a paused campaign with an ad for each segment in it. Hopefully none of your ads will be rejected. If they do, all you need to do is make the recommended changes and resubmit them.

Getting the account structure right

Now that you’ve got a basic structure in place, let’s discuss best practice campaign lay-out. Most clients want to test more than one ad’s creative to the same target audience. While it’s tempting to dump a lot of ads targeting various segments in one campaign bucket, the result can be a big mess. Unfortunately Facebook does not currently allow you to sort results by demographic group. So you can’t isolate performance of ads by gender, education, interest or other criteria with a few clicks. This needs to be done manually, so setting things up with a bit of foresight goes a long way.

Example 1: messy structure

• Baseball campaign:

• baseball bat ad
• baseball ad
• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2
• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

• Basketball campaign:

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2
• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

• Football campaign:

• football boots ad
• football boots ad 2
• football ad

The problem with the above structure is that Facebook’s algorithm decides which ads in your campaign are served. I suspect the algorithm is more optimised for Facebook to maximise its profits than for you to get coverage across all your ads equally. Because Facebook automatically rotates through each active ad in a campaign, it’s really important that the algorithm is comparing apples to apples.

Example 2 : better structure

• Baseball bat campaign -

• baseball bat ad
• baseball bat ad 2

• Baseball campaign -

• baseball ad
• baseball ad 2

• Baseball glove campaign -

• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2

• Baseball shirt campaign -

• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

• Basketball campaign -

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2

• Basketball trainers campaign -

• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

• Football campaign -

• football ad
• football ad 2

• Football boots campaign -

• football boots ad
• football boots ad

You could go even more granular:

• Baseball bat campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball bat ad
• baseball bat ad 2

• Baseball bat campaign (age 25-35)

• baseball bat ad
• baseball bat ad 2

• Baseball campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball ad
• baseball ad 2

• Baseball campaign (age 25-35)

• - baseball ad
• - baseball ad 2

• Baseball glove campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2

• Baseball glove campaign (age 25-35)

• baseball glove ad
• baseball glove ad 2

• Baseball shirt campaign (age 18-24)

• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

•  Baseball shirt campaign (age 25-35)

• baseball shirt ad
• baseball shirt ad 2

•   Basketball campaign (age 18-24)

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2

•  Basketball campaign (age 25-35)

• basketball ad
• basketball ad 2

•  Basketball trainers campaign (age 18-24)

• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

•  Basketball trainers campaign (age 25-35)

• basketball trainers ad
• basketball trainers ad 2

• Football campaign (age 18-24)

• football ad
• football ad 2

• Football campaign (age 25-35)

• football ad
• football ad 2

• Football boots campaign (age 18-24)

• football boots ad
• football boots ad 2

•  Football boots campaign (age 25-35)

• football boots ad
• football boots ad 2

The above structure will be very handy when you need to monitor performance and also to make sure your end of month reporting is fairly straightforward.

A/B Testing

I love what one of my previous bosses told me during an internship programme I was completing some time ago. He said in my role I am not allowed to hold an opinion. If I need to push something forward, I’d need to substantiate it with tangible facts. I find A/B testing a great way to substantiate my proposals and recommendations, such as which campaigns to allocate more budget to, what type of images do I want, what type of message tone works with users, which type of call-to-actions work best, what colours are users more receptive to etc. By using A/B testing, you can obtain actual numbers, which can help you in your decision-making process.

Therefore, it is extremely important that you test different headlines, switching body copy, testing different images etc. It’s important to test at least a couple of ads per campaign. But don’t overdo it with loads of ads at the same time. As mentioned above, Facebook’s not going to give each ad a true chance to perform at its best even in rotation but will skew toward an ad the algorithm perceives as successful.

What’s in a name?

The last tip is to make sure you name your campaigns logically. The last time I checked, Facebook’s web interface allows a user to sort campaigns by most columns, while power editor does not support sorting. The ‘all campaigns’ page defaults to an alphabetical sort by campaign name every single time the user returns back to ‘all campaigns’, even after another sorting column was chosen previously. This can be extremely frustrating, so planning your naming standard early on will save your heart from increased blood pressure.

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to naming conventions, but make sure they make sense to you when sorted alphabetically and that it also makes sense to someone who will work on the account in your absence. I generally use the following format as a guide -

[promotion name]-[product name]-[duration]-[special targeting metric]

e.g. Christmas deals – Trainers – 01 Dec/05 Dec 12 – males

Conclusion

The most essential take-away from this post is to plan ahead and be organised. Unless you use an in-house account management tool or you use a third party account management tool, managing Facebook campaigns can be fairly exhaustive. Hopefully the above tips will keep you in good stead. I’m sure you have some nuggets of wisdom to share too, so please feel free to leave your comments below.

Image credit: marcopako

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign

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Can You Make Money Selling PLR Products?Post from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services

You know the old saying where a good salesman can sell snow to an Eskimo? Well, even though PLR products are ubiquitous, it is indeed possible to make money selling them as well. Don’t believe me? Read on and find out [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

SEO Director

A director may be one of the most important hiring decisions as far as online marketing personnel goes.  A talented SEO director can make or break an SEO strategy.  This individual is ultimately responsible for measuring and growing online marketing metrics.  Finding someone who has vision and is well-rounded is critical.  Look for a director who has experience in research, analytics and actually reports on metrics.  Experience writing and implementing SEO strategy along with other online verticals such as conversion optimization, paid search and lead generation are just a few skills you want to add to your check list.

SEO Specialist

A search engine optimization specialist is going to be your Director’s right-hand man.  Look for someone with a history in quality link building.  A good SEO specialist will have examples of past work success and will be able to give guidance when building a solid link building portfolio.  Someone with experience in customer relations or engaging in customer interaction will be important, especially in today’s online environment where social media is large part of any successful online marketing strategy.

Link Builder

A good link builder is worth their weight in gold.  Anyone can find links to sites with low page rank or domain authority.  A solid link builder will understand quality link building and how to build a link portfolio that looks natural to the search engines.  They should not be satisfied with just link building but link maintenance as well so that overall link quantity continues to rise year after year.  It is important to find someone with networking skills that will build relationships which will convert into .edu, .gov and other high value links.

Content and Copywriter

We have all heard that “content is king”.  While this remains true, that content must be unique and engaging.  Consumers are demanding a better surfing experience and the search engines are continuously updating their algorithms to look for content that is truly written around what searchers want to see.  A good copywriter can write onsite content, informative press releases, occasional industry blogging, and engage in social media updates.  Each of these tactics will only become more important as your online presence grows.  Critical skills also include someone is who is great at research, and can write quickly while remaining articulate and creative.

Outsourcing

As a final part of your SEO team consider hiring experts in the respective field.  Having someone analyze your strategy and link portfolio with fresh eyes, one who knows what to look for, will give you an advantage over your competition.  Keep in mind that there are many options for SEO agencies and consultants.  Look for an agency, like SEO.com, that rank for related search terms in the SEO industry, can provide good case studies of past successes, and can map how they are going to show you success metrics for your campaign.  An agency will typically have all of the above resources at your disposal, as well as tools and the capability to efficiently build links to your site that would otherwise be outside of your reach.

View full post on SEO.com » Blog

This is the last in our series of "Which Social Sites Do I Use?" In Part 3, we discussed how to link your social sites together to maximize their effectiveness. In this last installment we will cover some commonly used terminology to help get started in the world of social media.

Twitter Tweets/RT & Mentions:

• A tweet is simply a message posted on Twitter. While all agree on usage of tweet as a noun, people disagree on whether you "tweet" or "twitter" as a verb.
• RT stands for retweet: Users add RT in a tweet if they are reposting something from another person’s tweet.
• A mention is any Twitter update that contains @username anywhere in the body of the Tweet; this means that replies are also considered mentions.

Google +1 Button, Circles & Sparks:

• The +1 Button: Each time you click +1, you’re adding to the batch of sites that you are attaching to your online profile. You’ll find your full list of +1′s in a special tab on your public Google profile. You can show your +1′s tab to the world or choose to hide it.
• Circles: You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles make it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.
• Hangouts: Bumping into friends while you’re out is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, spontaneity hits the web. Whether you’re home in your pajamas or hitting the streets with your mobile phone, video hangouts let you bring up to 9 people into your world. It’s the next best thing to everyone being there.
• Sparks: Google Spark would start on a single idea. Then, this idea would grow from collaborators’ comments, likes, and other ideas branching from this "spark". There would be connections, more connections and collaborating, and soon, a whole tree of ideas and support. A web of ideas revolving around a single motion, a single vision, linked by tags, keywords, and web links.

Facebook Likes & Recommends:

• The Like Button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website. People are more accustomed and more familiar with this term. It is considered a more subtle action, and some people might feel less hesitant about liking something (rather than recommending it).
• Recommend Button is a considered a stronger action than a "Like" and usually works well for negative (but interesting) content such as news stories. Followers may be more compelled to click a recommended link in their feed though some people may feel less compelled to make such strong action as a "recommendation" There is a perception that you would only recommend something that you firmly agree with or feel confident about recommending. Recommend also places a larger snippet in the Facebook news feed.

Take-Aways:

• Don’t rely only on Social Networking. Use it in conjunction with a well developed, multi-tiered approach with might include traditional advertising.
• Be willing to commit a significant amount of time, stay engaged and offer quality content.
• Social media is about building up relationships online and instilling trust in your brand.
• Engage with a deep understanding of your long-term business goals and mission statement and integrate them as part of an overall marketing strategy.
• Put Social Buttons only to the most important networks on your site. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many.

Social media and networking is responsible for the biggest revolution in marketing and is undoubtedly responsible for the changing face of modern business networking. Staying engaged with your followers through social media allows businesses to stay closely connected with contacts, followers and customers in ways that traditional advertising and marketing could not.

Any business that is not fully engaged in social media is missing out on a increased customer base, increased sales and the potential for unparalleled growth.

View full post on Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

1. What is it?
2. How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns?

So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

I won’t go into a whole explanation of what HTML5 is now – I will leave that for the web design blogs – but the highlights as I understand them are:

• A more descriptive set of markup tags; for example, nav, article, aside and footer
• The introduction of Canvas element could be used for rendering graphs or images dynamically without the need for browser plugins

It is apparent from this list that there are some pretty big changes between HTML4 and HTML5. For example, I’m guessing that every SEO will spot the third bullet point – video without the need for Flash – and realise the obvious content indexing benefit this will offer as a result.

But will you get any direct benefit from being first to the party (so to speak)? Will changing your site to HTML5 be a quick route to top spot in the rankings? Well, the simple answer is no! And you don’t have to just take my word for it either; Googler John Mu left the following responses to related questions on the Google Webmaster Central Help Forum:

In general, we work hard to understand as much of the web as possible, but I have a feeling that HTML5 markup is not yet as widely in use (and in use correctly) that it would make sense for us to use it as a means of understanding content better. As HTML5 gains in popularity and as we recognize specific markup elements that provide value to our indexing system, this is likely to change, but at the moment I would not assume that you would have an advantage by using HTML5 instead of older variants.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2d4592cbb613e42c&hl=en

and

In general, our crawlers are used to not being able to parse all HTML markup – be it from broken HTML, embedded XML content or from the new HTML5 tags. Our general strategy is to wait to see how content is marked up on the web in practice and to adapt to that. If we find that more and more content uses HTML5 markup, that this markup can give us additional information, and that it doesn’t cause problems if webmasters incorrectly use it (which is always a problem in the beginning), then over time we’ll attempt to work that into our algorithms. With that in mind, I definitely wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your implementing parts of your site with HTML5, but I also wouldn’t expect to see special treatment of your content due to the HTML5 markup at the moment. HTML5 is still very much a work in progress, so it’s great to see bleeding-edge sites making use of the new possibilities.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1d3850aec4e3dd96&hl=en

Although both of these comments date from late 2010, there doesn’t seem to have been any further opinion put forward to suggest that this is not Google’s current view, or not that I have found anyway.

So does this mean that you should ignore it all together? Well, no. This may sound odd having seen the opinions offered by Google, but there do seem to be some credible theories of the indirect benefits of implementing HTML5.

First, due to the fact that HTML5 is still a relatively “new” technology, a number of people will link to other sites that are using it. This means that an HTML5 site or piece of content (an infographic for example), if implemented well or uniquely, will accumulate links and social signals naturally. Check out this music video from Arcade Fire, which makes use of HTML5 and Google Maps to personalise the video to you. I’m not a fan of their music but I shared the link. Obviously this will only be a benefit until HTML5 becomes commonplace.

As well as this, it is believed that HTML5 will reduce the volume of code required to render a page, so it therefore has two indirect benefits. The first is that it will improve page load speed, which is a minor ranking factor, as well as having an effect on conversion. Secondly, it should increase the likelihood that information would be found by the search engine bots, as a result of them being able to process more site pages (if you believe that the search engines expend a limited amount of resources on a site).

Finally, you will be ‘future proofing’ your site. Even though Google’s current position is that it will not aid rankings, the Webmaster Tools responses imply that it may do in the future once it is more widely adopted.

When HTML5 becomes a web standard, I believe that at some point it will be worked into the algorithm as a result of its wide use. Being an early adopter means there should be an immediate boost if and when it is added to algorithm. It is also safe to assume that this change wouldn’t be publicly announced, so you will get a short competitive advantage until everyone else catches on.

Anyone who has read some of the other posts around on HTML5 and SEO are probably thinking I have missed out one of the most obvious benefits – the new markup. From what I have seen, a lot of people believe that it will indicate to the search engines what type of content is on a page and how important it is, meaning you are really able to draw attention to content.

While this may be the intention, I personally believe the ease with which this may be manipulated to promote low quality sites is such that it is likely only ever going to be a low value ranking factor, if it is one at all. It is very similar to the keywords metatag, which was so easily abused that Google finally discounted it as a ranking factor. If all you have to do is to put content within a certain tag to boost its rankings, everyone will do it.

So overall, while I personally wouldn’t recommend that a site change to HTML5 as some kind of SEO silver bullet, there are enough incidental SEO benefits to make it worthwhile to work into new builds or redesigns, or to use for content generation (such as infographics).

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. HTML5 & SEO

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