From: searchenginewatch.com

If you haven’t already seen it YouTube has recently added two targeting features which enable advertisers to have more control on what videos their ads are placed on. Age restriction and video or channel URL restriction. Age restriction is not a self service feature, and will require you to work with your official Youtube representative but URL restriction is a feature you can enable yourself.

Click to read the rest of this post...

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/5TjhDkrgOe0/100902-173600

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: sitepronews.com

Imagine, if you will, Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that states: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and that Harry Potter’s “magic” will soon be realised through advanced technologies that are nearing a “Singularity”, the dawn of a new civilisation.
For over three decades, futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

The Singularity, Google and the new civilisation

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/09/02/the-singularity-google-and-the-new-civilisation/

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: sitepronews.com

The most significant and perhaps the hardest part of website optimization is link building. Website promoters beat the bushes trying to discover the blooming valleys of premium quality links to pick up some juicy links there. However, it isn’t that easy and quite often all efforts may be in vain.
But as the saying has it: [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Link Bait: Put Your Link Building on Steroids

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/09/02/link-bait-put-your-link-building-on-steroids/

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: google.com

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/0G3-ytoxpx8/better-than-nothing-is-harder-than-you-think.html

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: google.com

Via way of the Bing Maps team we hear about a new resource The Global Action Atlas “ the application allows users to peer into areas where our planet needs help and recognizes efforts across the globe to help people in need, protect plants and animals, preserve diverse cultures (Source: Bing Maps blog).  The actionable themes availble from the Atlas include:

• Conservation: Includes categories on animals and plants; fresh water; landscapes; migrations and corridors; and oceans and coastal areas.


• Climate Change: Focuses on projects having to do with forest conservation and management; renewable energy; reforestation; and ocean impacts.


• Cultures: Features projects focusing on preserving endangered languages; cultural preservation; archeology; and indigenous rights.


• Energy:Focuses on technology; energy efficiency; and energy investment.


• Exploration: Focuses on taking action to help preserve our planet; to explore its mysteries through sustainable travel; and to raise awareness about cultures and environments, and science and adventure projects.


• Humanitarian Affairs: Includes projects focusing on water and sanitation; emergency relief; health; education; empowering women; and poverty and hunger.

For more information about National Geographics Global Action Atlas, visit the National Geographic site.

Comments

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/tf4GaHUD8Zc/sn-4-20100511BingRollsOutGlobalActionAtlas.html

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: google.com

Hat Tip to Andy Beal on pointing our direction to this hilarious video of Conan O’Brien’s visit to the Googleplex. Apparently Conan has been making his rounds in the tech space - as he was at Twitter/Intel a couple of weeks ago.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/u7TwqpWiY5s&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="280" width="500"></iframe>

Comments

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/FLW6WvJrqnc/sn-4-20100510GoogleGetsASpecialVisitFromConanOBrian.html

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: google.com

Posted by randfish

It’s been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.

If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu, don’t worry; it’s perfectly normal. We’re the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let’s walk through it together, shall we?

Big Improvements to PRO Membership

It’s a good day to be PRO; we’ve just released:

• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that’s designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it’s part of PRO, you’ll find it in the Dashboard.

• The web app has made some big improvements and we’re now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There’s also some cool new functionality I’ll cover below.

• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.

• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.

If you’ve been curious about what’s in PRO membership, there’s a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect.

Zoinks! A New SEOmoz Website

Rub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We’ve done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:

• A new home to Learn SEO. I’ve recorded an “Intro to SEO" video and we’ve made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)

• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We’ve re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we’ve kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we’re planning to do even more with it in the future.

• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)

There’s lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.

The Web App is Now in Public Beta

Our private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.

We’ve also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.

As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we’re feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.

Still Ironing Out Some Kinks

There’s a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner’s Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you’ve already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we’ve also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting “new” comments in a post - that should be back soon.

I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we’re expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we’re hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.

We Love Your Feedback

If you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we’d love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a “Feedback” button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.

Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let’s just say you ain’t seen nothing yet

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Mh3b668WMpY/a-new-day-a-new-seomoz

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: searchenginewatch.com

Today Apple launched Ping. You can get the full story on ClickZ who covered the announcement. Were you expecting apple to launch a music social network today?

Click to read the rest of this post...

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/sAfvJDWYj08/100901-172045

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: verticalmeasures.com

In just over a week, I’ll be presenting the Vertical Measures Webinar, “Protect Your Online Reputation While You Still Can!,” on September 9 at 11:30 a.m. EST (8:30 a.m. PST, 10:30 a.m. CST). I’ll discuss why you must protect your good online name, and simple techniques to do so . In preparation for my big [...] Related posts:

1. Online Reputation Management Expert Interview with David Wallace
2. How to Use Link Building for Reputation Management
3. Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management

Read Original: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/expert-interviews/online-reputation-management-expert-interview-with-andy-beal/

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: sitepronews.com

So Google wants to decide for you what emails are important and what emails aren’t. See MediaPost’s ‘Around the Net’ at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=134756.
From what I’ve read one of the key filtering factors will be addresses or people it recognizes. It seems the Web has spawned this notion that the only people you should communicate with are [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Is Google’s New Email Filtering For You?

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/09/01/is-google’s-new-email-filtering-for-you/

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: google.com

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/pT5hvkL35jI/launching-the-shipit-workbook.html

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: google.com

Posted by Dana Lookadoo

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.  

Presentation Off

Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their “Presentation Off” to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).  

Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:

1. Don’t sell to people who have to be convinced of SEO. It’s best to sell to those who know about SEO, those who know they need it. Then, you  never pitch SEO ever again. Will explained why you don’t sell SEO in the pitch:
   
   • You pitch SEO before that.
   • Selling the client on SEO is a separate conversation, if necessary at all.
2. Will has been asked to help model the business impacts of SEO changes. such is a different story.
   
   • He showed the Mozzers how  to look at the prospective client’s industry and give them some unique data.
   • He shared an Excel file to help you (us) control a lot of assumptions.

Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!> 

Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:

Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO

1. Get engineers & developers on your side. Explain how SEO will benefit their projects to help them boost speed, grow browse rate (pages/visit), improved accessibility, minimize errors, increase usabiltiy.
2. In pitching SEO, you can then go one step further to help them sell their project(s) with SEO. From there, help sell other projects for marketing, design, sales, etc.

Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic:

<If you’re taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet...>

Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.

“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average.”

Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:

1. Show competitors in SERPs.
2. Match it with yeyword demand.
3. Show how they are doing, side-by-side.

 

And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.

OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.

Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”

She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:

1.     What is your website trying to do?

2.     If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?

3.     What is the biggest threat to your success?

You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)

Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:

• Social Network Filters – combine
• Google Image Search - Low hanging fruit if you SEO out of images
• Cascading Filters – see LunaMetrics.com for tips on customizing advanced filters – something that’s NOT in Google Analytics documentation.

Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised.

MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any  number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().

Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”

Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics

Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:

1. Filter the data so you are getting the data you want to manipulate
2. Segment the data so you can see the right data in different ways
3. Customize reports so you can compare valuable data sets, find intersections & relationships
4. Take the resulting insights and dive deeper
5. Use those deep dive insights and make them actionable for your company
6. Show the action items (not the data) to your company
7. Last but not least…do the analytics victory dance.

Whew… surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no… more typing at high speeds:

Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO

Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:

High Priority Tactics:

• Sitemaps
• Education
• 301s
• Template SEO – fixing titles, captions, linking
• Rel=canonical
• Rewriting urls
• How much it will make? What’s the cost/traffic potential

Low Priority Tactics:

• Page load time / site speed – most of time they don’t care, but upper mgt does care. It’s only 1 of 200 signals.
• URLs
• Link Flow
• Video SEO
• Duplicate content
• CMS Overhaul
• W3C compliance

Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don’t budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn’t have an end point.

Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:

Optimize all assets!

Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.

Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:

• rel=”canonical” is a band aid and solves the problem.
• Google is not necessarily crawling organically for video, which puts focus on video XML sitemap.
• Webmaster Tools reports a lot of errors.
• Title is the most important element.
• Analytics suck!!!!!!!!
  • Omniture – over reports search referrers
  • Webtrends – under reports search referrers (have to add images)
  • Google analytics doesn’t scale – in middle of search referrers.

 Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.

Tom Critchlow

Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:  

• Head terms – main terms, everything you can put in a calendar and plan for
• Mid-tail – hot trends, cyclical demand, triggered by QDF
• Long-tail – 4+ words, opportunity since 20-25% of the queries Google sees today they have never seen before.
• QDF = Query Deserves Freshness
• QDF is riddled with spam, returns 90% malicious links.
• Tip: Publish Fast – Cite Fast!!

 Keyword harvesting tools:

• Google Search Suggest
• Ninja tip: Geolocation – Google Search Suggest is geo-specific
• Google Related Searches      
• Mozenda + API = WIN
  • Mozenda is a paid tool http://mozenda.com/ Easy to use paid tool.
  • Input terms and get long tail key phrases that don’t show up in AdWords tool and long-tail, niche.
• Look at other data sources. Don’t restrict yourself to keyword tools, and use other data sources relative to your niche.
  • Look at how people tag stories on Delicious

The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)  

 

Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)

Build an SEO friendly CMS:

Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:  

Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:

• Delicious tags – todo, toread (API)
• Foursquare top checkins (API)
• Local events calendar (API)
• Yahoo Answers (API)
• Wikipedia discussions of your keyword (APIish)
• No API? – Mozenda ftw!
• More: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/api-and-dataset-cheatsheet-building-quick-dirty-tools

The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:

It’s not that hard! <sigh>   Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc  that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.  

Thank you, Tom!

Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits

Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.

Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.

The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:

She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:

Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.

She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.

Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization

The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.

Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.

Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:

How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ...

Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:

1. Unclear call-to-action
2. Too many choices
3. Asking for too much info
4. Too much text
5. Not keeping your promises
6. Visual distractions
7. Lack of trust

We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.

Do you like this post? Yes No

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/NcKLi9TQIoM/day-1-at-the-seomoz-training-raceway

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: searchenginewatch.com

At some point during the crush of Connected Marketing Week, Experian Hitwise announced the launch of two new premium Search Intelligence products that can improve your search marketing performance. I just found the press release in my email, so I hope you don’t mind if I finally get around to reporting the “news.”

Click to read the rest of this post...

Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/8RWiOAifrK8/100901-074215

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: sitepronews.com

There are many ways to deal with customer support at your website. Which method you choose will depend on how large your company is, what your customers want, and what you feel most comfortable with.
One of the classic ways of handling customer service and support is via telephone. This is often the preferred methods for [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How Will You Handle Customer Support for Your Site?

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/09/01/how-will-you-handle-customer-support-for-your-site/

Permalink /// Comments (0)

From: sitepronews.com

Because of the available analytics tools today, it is now very possible to track virtually your visitor’s behavior. Having easy access to detailed data, marketers have become used to the thought of tracking consumer attitude in other aspects of marketing. For example, the information they can obtain from email marketing campaigns, can be really helpful.
But [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

More Information About Email Click-Through Rate

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/09/01/more-information-about-email-click-through-rate/

Permalink /// Comments (0)

Page 1 of 734 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »