October 2009 Posts from the Internet Marketing Blog
Brush Up on Your Social Skills: The Week in Social Search
I hope you're not feeling antisocial out there, because today's roundup is all about social search.
There were several big announcements this week in the world of social and real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced agreements with Twitter. Bing's Twitter search is live, but it doesn't seem to work all that well – when I searched for my username, instead of getting a string of my tweets and @replies, I got this:
Um, OK, but why? Why doesn't it just search for my username and return all the results? I can see why the "top links shared in tweets about" thing would be interesting/useful, but why is that the default search behavior? What if that's not what you're looking for?
... Click here to read full postGoogle PageRank Update: October 29, 2009
Google updated their Tool Bar PageRank (TBPR) last night, October 29, 2009. I noticed the change around 9 p.m. last night, when I visited CNN.com and saw an all-green PR 10 tool bar, which caught my attention immediately. Previously, I believe they were PR 8.
With the lastest update, the WordStream home page (now PR 5) and many of our top level pages have risen in rank. So too have our blog posts, with many previous unresolved pages resolving and now achieving TBPR.
... Click here to read full postTop SEO Candy Websites
It's Halloween time again. Time for fright flick gore-arathons, Trick-or-Treaters, and...um...oh yah, bucket loads of Halloween CANDY! I'm sure many of you are stocking up on jumbo bags of fruity, chocolately or gummy candy treats for the roving bands of costumed kids that will soon descend upon your doorstep, that is unless you're one of those people who give out bags of chips or boxes of raisins as "treats," which BTW is a great way to get your house egged.
And with Halloween only days away, what better time to roll out some SERP analysis and crown the Top SEO Candy Websites. Let's find out who's doing a killer job at optimizing their on and off page elements for the Web's top candy queries.
So sit back, relax and enjoy, 'cause this edition of our "Top SEO Websites Series" is gonna' be SWEET!
... Click here to read full postMonthly Blog Roundup: WordStream's October Highlights
October is winding to a close, and if history has taught us anything, November comes next. And with it, a candy hangover, my birthday, and pervasive Xmas music, in roughly that order—none of which I'm particularly looking forward to. So let's take this opportunity to look back—at our most popular blog posts from the past month, that is:
Advanced Link Building: Clone Your Most Successful Link Profiles – Resident link building expert Ken Lyons explains how to analyze your link profiles step by step and then replicate your best link prospects.
... Click here to read full postAnalyzing Bounce Rate Using Compete Destination Analytics
Bounce rate has become a hot topic in the search community. It's a bit of a buzz word, and if you're doing any sort of SEO or even PPC consulting you'll likely have clients concerned about theirs. In analyzing a site's bounce rate, I like to look at three main factors:
Bounce Rate Factor #1: Traffic Source
Often times the place traffic comes from (search, direct, referral) can have a major impact on bounce rate and can be an indication of irrelevant traffic (some perhaps that you may be paying for). There are a variety of ways you can quickly diagnose problems using analytics packages.
... Click here to read full postGoogle "Triple SERP Listings" or Double Indented SERP Results on Google.com
Not sure if this is getting rolled out everywhere but Larry spotted this last night and we're seeing it in a lot of SERPs:
Pretty interesting. Really I think it's just more emphasis on domain authority. Not unlike site links and the search within search bar, a triple listing allows Google to crowd the SERPs with the single destination they've deemed sufficiently authoritative.
The criteria for attaining a double listing had been that you would need to push both pages into the cluster of ten a searcher was viewing. I haven't done a lot of testing but I find it hard to believe this is still the case, given the frequency with which I'm seeing the triple listing.
... Click here to read full postInterview with the Experts: Ruud Hein
Ruud Hein is a Dutch family man living in Canada. Newsweek-recommended web publisher and blogger in his own right, he works at the SEO company Search Engine People where he's an internal SEO consultant and blog editor. See also: @ruudhein.
Can you describe a typical day in the life of Ruud Hein?
06:50 – Put on coffee, start TweetDeck so it populates, take shower; make breakfast for my youngest daughter and my wife.
07:45 – Open TweetDeck, scan TwitScoop column; check if the world has made it through another night. Decide on which topic I want to track today. Check Cre8asite Forums. Check if blog posts on SEP and SEO Scoop have gone out.
... Click here to read full postThe Future of Content Creation: Keyword Research on Steroids
Wired this week published a fascinating profile piece on a company called Demand Media: "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell." The company's approach to content generation almost sounds like science fiction or satire, but it's real, and it works. It's a purely algorithmic, data-driven method of prioritizing content designed to rank on the first page of the Google SERPs: basically keyword research in hyperdrive. And like it or not, this may be where we're all headed.
... Click here to read full postAdvanced Link Building: Clone Your Most Successful Link Profiles
Link builders often talk about competitive link analysis and exploring your competitors' link profiles to find link opportunities. The logic here is a link profile that works for one site may work for a similar site. And executed properly, this can be an effective link strategy.
But I'd like to share a link building tactic you've probably never read about. It's very effective and based on the same approach and logic as competitive link analysis. Besides analyzing links on competitor sites, you should also be examining your own link profiles for link opportunities, specifically the profiles of your best performing pages. The objective here is to replicate the success of your strongest ranking page on your weaker ranking pages.
Why is this link building tactic successful?
... Click here to read full postUsing Google Analytics Advanced Segments for Keyword Research
The following is a guest post by Marshall Sponder of WebMetricsGuru.
Google Analytics has some very powerful capabilities for keyword research that are often overlooked. Using advanced keyword segments, you can find and isolate buckets of keyword traffic (organic, paid, or both) and their destination landing pages, in mass – and that can be very useful for your optimization efforts.
Take one of my blogs, ArtNewYorkCity.com – I’ve written about shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art quite a lot over the years. Taking all of my keyword traffic that contains the word “Metropolitan,” I can create an advanced keyword segment in Google Analytics.
Below is a list of all those keywords.
... Click here to read full post
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