SEO World

Here’s a challenge for all you marketers who are on top of your game: How do you make sure your marketing team is taken seriously within your own company?

One important step you should take is publishing a thorough, thoughtful, quantitative monthly report on your marketing team’s impact.

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Happy Friday the 13th!

You know that look your pets give you when you are vacuuming?

No not this look:

More like the ‘I will eat you if you get any closer’ look.. ?

That was the look on my face as I read reports today that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has formally requested that the FTC investigate Google’s new social search features for anti-competitive nature and privacy violations.

So what this did is prove? In my personal opinion it proves that someone at EPIC is either a complete fool or funded by Facebook. Here’s why it’s so amazing:

If I want to ‘violate privacy’ in the eyes of EPIC I’d do an image search (on any search engine) for ‘teen mirror facebook’ and I’d get a slew of images teens have taken of themselves in front of a mirror and posted to Facebook. That’s all I’d have to do, and by EPIC’s standards I’ve ‘violated privacy rights’ by getting access to these pictures which are marked ‘public’ on Facebook. This would be no different from me choosing to see search results from my Google+ interests.

If I wanted to make my browser anti-competitive in the eyes of EPIC I’d go into my search settings and I’d add a modifier for my search engine URLs that would add ‘facebook’ as a verbatim keyword that must be in every search result. By clicking those options I’ve now set my browser up for a big fall and stern letters should be written to the FTC immediately to urge them to spend millions of dollars investigating these horrible anti-competitive atrocities. Again, this is no different from me deciding to specifically look at Google+ results when searching.

Heck now that I’ve pointed out that browser software has pre-meditated options to allow anti-competitive behaviour, I guess EPIC will be writing letters to the FTC demanding to have the browser manufacturers investigated to put a stop to people having access to features which allow them to choose a particular service over another.

If my hair wasn’t so short I think I’d be pulling it all out right now in dismay over such examples of non-thought. Perhaps I’ll go trim Chia Bart instead, he’s almost getting ‘shaggy’ now.

If I took even more pictures we could animate Bart!

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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

2011 has been a phenomenal year for the SEO industry. Here at Distilled, we shipped a lot of work, much more than I would have believed possible. Our company is constantly reminded by our executive team (Will, Duncan, Tom, and Rob) to ship content and projects frequently. This year has been the year of “shipping” for Distilled, and I’d like to take this chance to highlight the most epic Distilled content from 2011, partially to resurface it and also to encourage all of you that you can accomplish way more in one year than you ever thought possible.

So here is Distilled’s most epic content from the year. It’s not based on number of tweets, or number of comments, or anything tangible. Instead, it’s based on what brought the biggest impact to Distilled, and hopefully the community.

Note: all the titles are links to the posts and content.

Guides

This year Distilled employees (and our epic intern) created guides to help the SEO community.

Linkbait Guide

Ed Fry’s Linkbait Guide was, in my opinion, the best SEO content published this year. Ed worked for two weeks on this guide and produced all of the videos and graphics himself. He walked us through the complete process of producing and launching linkbait, from working with designers to doing outreach and using PR.

What came out of it: This guide received hundreds of tweets, a couple hundred +1s, and gave us a shining example of incredible content, including photos, text, embeddable elements, and videos, with elements of lead capture integrated. And, this post received a link from Seth Godin’s blog. Boom!

Excel Guide

Mike Pantoliano’s Excel Guide for SEOs stepped us step-by-step through the beginning paces of Excel, skills that all SEOs need to use when doing keyword research or crunching any sort of data for clients. It includes a downloadable PDF and an example Excel workbook to practice on.

What came out of it: Because we moved domains in May, the social counts were lost, but it would be over 1,200 by now. This gift from Mike to the SEO community has helped out many, from feedback we’ve received. Oh, and it ranks 1st page for “Excel Guide” even though it does not have “Guide” in the title or URL.

The ImportXML Guide for Google Docs

Dave Sottimano created this guide in June to follow up on Tom Critchlow’s How to Build Agile SEO Tools Using Google Docs. While officially a blog post, this guide is broken into sections from beginner to advanced, and includes some premade toys and resource for you to play with. A guide for the ages (or at least until ImportXML stops working in Google Docs

What came out of it: The effects of this are harder to quantify, as it only received 93 tweets. In that regard, I think it was one of the most under-exposed pieces of content throughout the year.

How to Build Agile SEO Tools Using Google Docs

The original post by Tom that set off the Google Docs craze in the second half of the year. Tom showed us how to use ImportXML and other formulas within Google Docs for many different purposes. This has helped many of us expedite and automate a lot of our work and has spawned a whole host of tools that people have hacked together.

What came out of it: So many helpful tools and blog posts. Some of these include:

• Dan Shure’s 6 Related Search Operator Tips & Google Doc Tool
• My own Link Prospecting with Twitter Tools and APIs
• SEER’s ImportXML Cookbook
• All | of | Tom | Anthony’s | Tools

Using Tools & APIs To Track Your Social Media Strategy – SEO Tools

In this guide (I can’t call it just a blog post), Tom took us through a number of free tools that can help define a social media strategy. Then, he taught us how to pull social metrics into Google Docs and gave us the scripts to do so. Tom never ceases to amaze me with how giving he is with his time and talents, and this is a post I reference often.

Tools

Tom Anthony bashed together a bunch of ad-hoc tools for many different purposes. Bookmark each of these, download the sheets, pillage and steal, do what you have to do in order to use these.

Competitive Analysis in under 60 Seconds

In this post, Tom uses the SEOmoz API to pull domain and link metrics, then displays it as a graph to show search results saturation across your keywords. Brilliant!

International SEO Backlinks Tool

Tom also knocked together a tool for Hannah Smith’s Mozcon presentation that attempts to identify the language of the page, as well as the separate areas of the site by language so that you can then clean the data in Excel. Boom!

Link Profile Tool to Discover Linking Activity

Mr. Anthony also put together a tool to show backlink profiles. It uses the SEOmoz CSV export and rates the linking domains by DA. Once you copy and paste the data, the tool visualizes the breakdown of the DAs of the linking sites. This tool is especially useful for seeing if a client has been buying links, like so:

SERP Turkey

Perhaps the most awesome of Tom’s tools that he has put out this year, this tool uses MechanicalTurk and allows you to split test meta descriptions and title tags for click through rates BEFORE you publish! You push variations to Mechanical Turk, the users then provide you a code, and the tool shows you the clickthrough density. OMG I think I might die from the awesomeness:

Go to the tool here

3 Tools for Quick Checks of Social Metrics

Tom built a chrome extension to allow you to quickly pull all the social metrics for the page you are on, like so:

Download the extension

He also included in this post a Simple Bulk Social Metrics tool that you can export into a CSV. AND he provided a Google Doc to pull even more bulk metrics. WOW.

Videos

For some reason, this was the year of the video for Distilled. We decided to tape our SEO conferences and sell them online. Tom also did a few Appsumo videos.

So this section is self-serving, but I wouldn’t put the content in this post if I did not truly believe that it is some of the most valuable content you will come across from the past year.

AppSumo (startups)

Tom Critchlow did a video for Appsumo called “SEO for Startups”. He wrote a post about it here. Unfortunately the videos no longer work, but I encourage you to do what you can to get your hands on them.

Google Docs Unleashed

Tom shared his Google Docs expertise with Appsumo and world in this video. He showed the power of Gdocs for SERP scraping (sshhhh), pulling in info with APIs and other simple scripts, and much more. Watch this video to help with learning Google Docs wizardry.

Linklove SEO Videos

I would be remiss to not include the Linklove videos from both London and Boston. As a personal aside, I went to the London conference before I worked for Distilled and returned home to hit the ground running and take a 99% competitive term from 16 to 5 in just 4 weeks. Boom!

Searchlove SEO Videos

Searchlove, just a couple of months ago, was quite possibly our best conference yet and our first in New York City. With speakers ranging from Rand Fishkin and Michael King to Noah Kagan and Michael Gray to Wil Reynolds and Dave Minchala (are you convinced yet?), this was world class training that would be well worth your time and money to access.

We hope you have enjoyed all of the content we have created this year. Here’s to looking forward to 2012 and all the shipping and epic content that awaits.

As our COO Will likes to say, “Watch this space.”

John Doherty is an SEO Consultant in the Distilled New York City office. John’s work time is filled with data consumption and strategic awesomeness, while his free time consists of extreme sports, travel, and bad reality TV.

Follow @

John Doherty

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distilled

Ever needed a compelling, reliable stat to help make a point, round out a blog post, or make your ebook even more data-driven? Think Insights with Google, Google’s new information and resource hub for marketers, has got you covered!

Officially out of beta today, Google’s new resource offers helpful tools, studies, trends, stats, and videos to give marketers the data they need when they need it. Use the Real-Time Insights Finder to gather information about your business’ target audiences, or simply browse through the site’s Facts & Stats. Pretty handy, huh? That’s not all, so give the site a breeze-through, and start incorporating some valuable insights and data into your marketing efforts.

We’ve found some pretty awesome marketing stats you can use, for starters. Check them out!

Internet Usage

1) In the last 4 years, the web has gone from 100 million websites to 250 million. (Source: Netcraft, Dec 2010) Tweet This!

2) 75.5% of the US population uses the internet. (Source: eMarketer, January 2011) Tweet This!

3) Millennials engage in over 14 different internet activities, while those ages 65+ engage in mainly 7. (Source: Generations Online, Pew Internet 2010) Tweet This!

4) 67% of consumers researched online prior to purchase during the holiday season. (Source: Post Holiday Learnings for 2011 Google/OTX, Jan 2011) Tweet This!

5) In 2011, the average shopper consults 10.4 sources prior to purchase, twice as many as a year ago. (Source: Google/Shopper Sciences, Zero Moment of Truth Macro Study, U.S., Apr 2011) Tweet This!

6) Nearly 50% of US internet users will redeem an online coupon this year. (Source: eMarketer, May 2011) Tweet This!

7) Online advertising spending is shooting upward, passing the $ 30 billion mark in 2011 and approaching $ 50 billion in 2015. (Source: eMarketer, June 2011) Tweet This!

By 2015, we expect that 50% of all display ads will be rich media ads. (Source: Google, Watch This Space, 2011) Tweet This!

Mobile Use

9) 31% of Americans own a smartphone. (Source: ourmobileplanet.com) Tweet This!

10) 75.7% of the population uses mobile phones. (Source: eMarketer, August 2011) Tweet This!

11) There are 90.1 million smartphone users, 29% of the population. (Source: eMarketer, August 2011) Tweet This!

12) Only 33% of advertisers have a mobile optimized website. (Source: Google/Ipsos/TNS, Global Perspectives: The Smartphone User & The Mobile Marketer, Jun 2011) Tweet This!

13) 53% of searchers purchase as a result of a smartphone search. (Source: Google/OTX, The Mobile Movement, U.S, Apr 2011) Tweet This!

14) 70% of smartphone users use their device while shopping in-store. (Source: Google/OTX, The Mobile Movement, U.S, Apr 2011) Tweet This!

15) 71% of smartphone users have searched after seeing an ad. (Source: Google/OTX, The Mobile Movement, U.S, Apr 2011) Tweet This!

16) There will be 81.3 million tablets sold worldwide in 2012, up from 15.7 million in 2010. (Source: eMarketer, December 2010) Tweet This!

17) 43% of US adults say they’d be willing to give up beer for a month if it meant they could keep accessing the internet on their smartphones. (Source: Google/OTX, The Mobile Movement, U.S, Apr 2011) Tweet This!

18) 36% of US adults say they’d be willing to give up chocolate for a month if it meant they could keep accessing the internet on their smartphones. (Source: Google/OTX, The Mobile Movement, U.S, Apr 2011) Tweet This!

19) Mobile advertising spending will top $ 1 billion for the first time in 2011, before reaching $ 4.39 billion in 2015. (Source: eMarketer, September 2011) Tweet This!

Search

20) There are 191.4 million search users. (Source: eMarketer, July 2011) Tweet This!

21) 82.6% of internet users use search. (Source: eMarketer, July 2011) Tweet This!

22) 16% of the daily queries on Google have never been seen before. (Source: Google Internal Data 2011) Tweet This!

23) Search directly drove 25% of all online device purchases. (Source: Value of Search for Wireless Product Launches Study Google/Compete, March 2010) Tweet This!

24) Advertisers achieve a 7:1 ROI on investments in search-based marketing. (Source: McKinsey & Co., The Impact of Internet Technologies: Search, Global, Jul 2011) Tweet This!

25) US advertisers will spend $ 14.38 billion on paid search in 2011, compared with $ 12.33 billion on display. (Source: eMarketer, June 2011) Tweet This!

26) Including location or phone information in a search ad increases click-through rate 6-8%. (Source: Google Internal Data, Q4 2010) Tweet This!

27) Adding seller ratings to a search ad can boost click-through rate by over 10%. (Source: Google Internal Data, Q3 2010) Tweet This!

28) Two-line sitelinks increase click-through rates by more than 30%*. (Source: Google Internal Data 2011, *Compared to standard AdWords ads) Tweet This!

Social Media

29) There will be 79.1 million US mobile social network users in 2015, up from 49.4 million in 2011. (Source: eMarketer, December 2010) Tweet This!

30) 88% of US companies over 100 employees will use social media for marketing by 2012. (Source: eMarketer, November 2010) Tweet This!

31) 57% of people talk more online than they do in real life. (Source: Alex Trimpe via Ogilvy — February 21, 2011, ThinkQuarterly, Google) Tweet This!

Video

32) Over 100 million people make a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc.) every week. (Source: Google Internal Data, Q3 2011) Tweet This!

33) Recommendations from other people account for 60% of all video clicks from the YouTube homepage. (Source: The YouTube Recommendation System, Sept 2011) Tweet This!

34) Consumers exposed to a YouTube homepage ad are 437% more likely to engage in a key brand activity on the same day than those unexposed. (Source: Google, Impact of YouTube Homepages On Brand Engagement, U.S., Dec 2010) Tweet This!

35) By 2012, internet video will account for over 50% of consumer internet traffic. (Source: Cisco, Jun 2011) Tweet This!

36) YouTube Mobile gets 400 million views a day. (Source: YouTube Press Statistics, 2011) Tweet This!

37) More than 13 million hours of video were uploaded to YouTube in 2010. (Source: YouTube Press Statistics, 2011) Tweet This!

38) There are 48 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube. (Source: YouTube Press Statistics, 2011) Tweet This!

39) Over 3 billion videos are viewed each day on YouTube. (Source: YouTube Press Statistics, 2011) Tweet This!

40) Online video advertising spending will grow 52.1% to $ 2.16 billion in 2011, before reaching $ 7.11 billion in 2015. (Source: eMarketer, June 2011) Tweet This!

Are you effectively incorporating data into your content to make your marketing even more compelling?

Connect with HubSpot:

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HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Less than a month after Google released its social media site, Google+ to the public traffic has declined significantly, according to a Massachusetts research firm. A study by Chitika, an analytics company, showed that traffic on the site has declined 60 percent since the site opened up to all users on Sept. 20.

There is much talk online about why the site may have dropped so significantly. When Google+ was first introduced by invitation only, people were clamoring for invitations and its growth spurt was reported to be faster than Facebook’s initial growth spurt. Here are some of the reasons being given for the decline:

1. Failing to be different—from the International Business Times: “Google+ needs to underscore the ways in which it differs from Facebook. Currently, Google+’s key differentiating feature is its group video chat offering called Hangouts. On Google+, users can “start a hangout” and invite other friends to join.”
2. Failing to keep people engaged on the site—from Business Week:” I can see a lot of dabbling in Google’s service—and the occasional flare-up around a specific post, usually a strong opinion or a photo—but not much sustained usage…”
3. Is there a social media overload? From Kristin Burnham of CIO-“… the supply of users for social media sites is limited, especially when some have become entrenched in one or two social networks already. Switching from one to another must have significant benefits, the report says, and users complained at the start that Google+ looked and felt like a repackaged Facebook…”

Many technology writers have pointed out that the numbers do not spell doom for Google+. The dip could be attributed to a normal “cooling off” period after the initial excitement. However, Facebook has made strides to imitate some of Google+’s features, like the popular “Circles” that let you control what you share. Facebook still has an edge on Google+ when it comes to engaging companies, but Google officials have promised to introduce a way for brands to use their social media site.

Google officials have not responded to the report. What do think? Have you used Google+?

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HigherVisibility

As a genre, sci-fi is a mint for publishers and film makers. There are so many fabulous sci-fi movies and ways to see them – in the cinema, online with Virgin or in the air with Virgin America – that it is hard to know where to start. Their popularity with geeks has never waned, but the mainstream audience appeal has surged ever since Jane Fonda in ‘Barbarella’ and Sigourney Weaver in ‘Aliens’ which made sci-fi sexy

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Sex sells. There is nothing new there. Canny film makers and their marketers have encouraged costume designers to go for tight fitting, body hugging outfits or cut them down to as little as possible for both the male and female actors. You don’t meet too many dowdy people in space.

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And the marketing penchant for the sci-fi zeitgeist spills over into advertising as well. Despite science fiction being explicitly futuristic, many of the photo shoots have a retro flavour to them, often harking back to the vision and designs of the future from 30 to 50 years ago. Given the state of budget cuts in NASA and other space programs, sadly we don’t see many signs of space-age looks being needed in the too near future.

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A long time ago in a galaxy far away, this sexy shoot profiled Agent Provocateur’s Mission to Earth – New World Order line of lingerie with storylines about a super race of women from planet Voluptura.

Wonder Woman’s cloak of invisibility is working

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Grey magazine add a little bling to sci-fi. Are they triffids on her shoes slowly rising up her body?

Warning – model may have been poured into these trousers

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Jewellery designer Jeanine Romo did a sci-fi steampunk inspired shoot with photographer Charles Song.

Could be a scene from Mission Impossible XXII

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Even musicians and singers get in on the lunar look. Christina Aguilera looks ready to rumble some bad aliens.

Rocket ‘n roll

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Swimwear works well in space for some bizzare reason even though it could be impractical. Kim Kardashian is looking for the sea of tranquility and hoping for a little splash if she can get those boots off.

Kim Kardashian channels Barbarella

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Sometimes there is just a shoot for fun. Photographer Robin Cook must have had a ball (and access to some fab costumes) doing a shoot commemorating arguably the greatest trilogy of them all.

Robin Cook Star Wars photo shoot with slightly creepy faceless figures and Toto

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More Robin Cook photography with a slightly ill-fitting storm trooper costume. If that is the dark side, any wonder Darth Vader turned.

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And then sometimes sci-fi is unfathomable. Shahrukh Khan, Bollywood actor, did some pictures with his children and then tweeted them. Go figure.

Bavatar?

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No related posts.

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SEO Expert – Baba Pandey SEO expert from Nepal