From: verticalmeasures.com

Professional athletes like Shaquille O’Neal have long understood the positive externalities associated with developing a presence on social media as a direct means of interacting with fans. Although no college player is likely to accrue the three million-plus fans of @THE_REAL_SHAQ, Twitter and social media as a whole have been a real boon to college [...] Related posts:

1. Social Media Day in AZ: Expressing Your Social Media Story
2. Simple Social Media Marketing Tactics Amplify Your Brands Voice
3. Webinar: How Social Media Builds Inbound Links and High Search Rankings

Read Original: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/social-media/college-athletics-social-media-2010/

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From: google.com

If you’re managing a project, figure out what the scarce resource is (it’s not usually money). Climbing Everest? It’s warmth and weight you care about, not how much the sleeping bag costs.

If you’re creating a business, figure out what contribution you make and what you offer that your competitors can’t. If 1,000 people can provide typing services the way you do, don’t expect to get paid a premium.

Scarcity creates value.

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/1P1j_Ds3m1w/seek-scarcity.html

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From: sitepronews.com

Social media has long been touted as the latest and greatest Internet marketing tool that will bring new people to any online business seeking new customers.
For most online marketers, the social media environment appears over-hyped and ineffective. Between Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Delicious, online marketers waste plenty of time trying to tap revenue from [...]

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How to Out-Socialize the Gurus on Twitter and Other Social Media

Read Original: http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/09/30/how-to-out-socialize-the-gurus-on-twitter-and-other-social-media/

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From: google.com

With the introduction of Google Analytics’ intelligence engine came the ability to setup alerts for a variety of different metrics. Google extends alerts by allowing you to create them on top of custom segmentations - see video below for an example.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/SXLeInXYt0Q&hl=en_US&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="385" width="480"><br>
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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/0ag46T3PoU8/sn-4-20100713GoogleAnalyticsUsingCustomSegmentations.html

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From: google.com

Caroline Glick and others produced a parody regarding the flotilla thats been covered by most major news organizations worldwide. Google “ which owns Youtube “ decided to censor it from Youtube, which shows you the danger of having a single player controlling so much of the information highway.

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/OlMHer5kocg/sn-4-20100614GoogleCensorsFlotillaParodyVideo.html

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From: google.com

Last month Google announced an enhanced integration of Google Adwords reports inside of Google Analytics. This included access to 3 new reports and the ability to segment by 10 new dimensions. The new reports include: Day Parts Report, Destination URLs Report, and Placements Report.

The video below provides a 3-minute tutorial on how to use the day parts, placements, and other AdWords reports in Google Analytics.


<iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Hip0_I2K2z8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="385" width="480"><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2010/06/new-google-adwords-reports-in-google.html" class="bluelink">Comments

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/9iTtHRtU46A/sn-4-20100608GoogleAddsAnalyticsReportsToAdwords.html

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From: google.com

Over the past couple of weeks Google have been testing new background colours for their Adwords ads again. Google changed from their usual blue background to a yellow back in 2007 which is what we see predominantly today in the SERPs.

Now it looks like testing time again, I am connecting to a DC with a pink/purple shade background -

And also a much much brighter quite striking shade of blue -

Are you seeing any other colours?

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/JRSK15Rau_A/sn-4-20100601GoogleTestsNewBackgroundAdColors.html

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From: google.com

Google just announced their new Click to Call ads. Which seem to really make me think about this recent hilarious video created by The Onion. The 911 call using the Google phone is fantastic stuff.

<iframe class="embeddedvideo" src="http://media.theonion.com/flash/video/onn_player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="358" width="400"><br>New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users Ears

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/he0gMcVqaXI/sn-4-20100521GoogleAnnouncesTheirNewClickToCallAds.html

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From: google.com

If you visited Google Analytics in the last 24 hours you may have noticed a home page overhaul, now with access to the top support articles front and center, a product tour video...

… and a real time feed from the Google Analytics Blog. Here is a summary of the updates:

• Added dropdowns to the top navigation across the whole site so users can find their way to the content they want better. Try hovering over Product to see a dropdown.


• Updated the features scroller in the middle of the page with a more intuitive UI and cleaner look.


• Updated the News & Hightlights section, which now includes a link to a recent Forrester Research article, “Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics”.


• Added a new box to the bottom right that allows the user to flip through our Strategic Solutions, including the recently announced Application Gallery.

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/xr7Uk_w3768/sn-4-20100518GoogleAnalyticsHomePageGetsAnOverhaul.html

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From: google.com

I found this rather interesting bug over at Google today.

When doing a search for Victoria BC Lawyer, in the Local Business results I found that only one of the seven results were actually for law offices! The remaining 6 were for doctors as well as a government publishing office.

One would think that Google has been doing this long enough to not make such a big error “ 1 out of 7 results relevant to the search?  Thats pretty poor if you ask me.

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/5F1tUC6jFX0/sn-4-20100518GoogleLocalSearchGetsABitConfusing.html

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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.

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

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From: google.com

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Social media is becoming more and more important as the days go by; how else would I get my tri-weekly fix of XKCD delivered to me? Many people know about the marketing benefits from social media profiles, but sites like Facebook and Twitter can make a significant difference in your SEO campaign, too! This week, Rand shows us five great ideas for using these sites to help with your SEO strategy.

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Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re talking about social media profiles. A lot of marketers, a lot of people in the SEO field know and realize that social media profiles can be valuable for their marketing efforts on the Web. But they don’t know exactly how to use them or where to use them. That’s what I am going to try to help you with today. So, what we have are five great ideas around how to leverage your social profiles to help with SEO and then some specific tactics and recommendations on each one that I think even some of the advanced folks will find pretty valuable.

So, let’s start here with direct links. You can see that, basically, I can take my profile on a LinkedIn, a Twitter, a Facebook, a MySpace, a Digg, a Reddit, a Hacker News. There are tons of these, hundreds of these. In fact, I’ll link you over. We’ve got sort of a list going on SEOmoz somewhere. You can take these, create profiles on here, and these profile pages oftentimes will have a followed link, sometimes will have a no followed link, but even that’s okay, and point that link over to your website. So, essentially, MySite.com is now getting some credit. And this pen is getting thrown in the trash. Oh, I missed. Sadly missed.

When you do this, you do a couple of things. Number one is, when they are followed links, obviously you are getting direct link credit. When they are no followed links, sometimes people are picking these up and scraping them and you get credit from elsewhere. Sometimes you are just seeing the fact that, oh, someone finds you on those places. You’ve commented somewhere. They’re checking out your profile. They can follow that link over to your website. So, having these profiles exist and having the links point back to the right kinds of places on your website is critically important, very valuable.

Number two, SERPs domination. Now, when you are doing SERPs domination, what you are essentially trying to achieve is to fill up the top results with results that are let’s say positive or at least that you control what goes into those results. Places like Twitter.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, and even places that are a little more random in the social media sphere, like a deviantART or a Drawer.com, those types of places will all help you to potentially fill up these results. There are a few critical things that you are going to need to do if you want to get these ranking well though. You can’t just create them. Tons and tons of people just create them. Lots of spammers just create them.

You need to fill up the profile with good information. You also need to participate relatively heavily in the site, at least initially. What you want to get going, if this is LinkedIn, you want to participate in LinkedIn Q&A. You want to actually import your email address book so that you form all of those connections. If this is Twitter, you want to start following people and topics. You want to start getting listed into the Twitter lists. You want to start having people following you and tweet at you. If this is Facebook, you’re going to need those same sorts of connections. Whatever the community is, you need to build up a robust profile with actual content. Fill out all the minimum requirements. Maybe even go overboard and start adding lots of content yourself to your profile. Also, you want to contribute heavily so that this gets indexed by the search engines. It becomes popular on the social site and it gets you into the SERPs.

It is also very valuable to link to these. This is one of my sort of pro expert tips. What I personally love to do is everywhere I speak, everywhere I am asked to give a talk, everywhere that features a quote from me or features my profile for a webinar or something like this, I always ask them to use the same biography. That bio quote includes, it will say, “Rand Fishkin is the CEO and cofounder of SEOmoz.” That links to our website. And, “He wrote ‘The Art of SEO’.” That will link to the O’Reilly site. Then, you know, “You can follow him on Twitter at RandFish,” and that will link back to this Twitter profile site. Every time I give a speech, give a webinar, or participate in something offline, those links add up and help to make my profile rank better. It is a great, great way to go in terms of building links to those individual profiles. A really smart way to leverage offline and online marketing together.

Number three, so, brand awareness. On a lot of these sites when you are participating, when you are doing good things to get those direct links and doing good things for SERPs domination, you are also getting a lot of brand awareness. This is really important from the perspective of you don’t want to contribute to social media sites, particularly if you are a brand representative or a representative of your company or a representative of your personal brand in a way that would be contrary to how you would like your brand to be perceived. I know this is more sort of a marketing communication discussion, a little bit less SEO. But it is critical for SEO as well, because people who find a divergence between who you are on Twitter and Facebook versus who you are on your blog are going to be put off a little bit. There is that emotional disconnect that happens when you see that a brand or a person isn’t being authentic to itself. That is why it is critical to maintain those.

The other thing is you do want to make sure that you are leveraging these in smart ways. If you have a Facebook profile that you’re trying to build up, you are definitely going to want to link to it from your own website. I want this site over here pointing to Facebook and referencing it and making this sort of a conversion focused action that will drive people to participate. Remember that you can get network effects out of these. When you are updating your statuses, when you are providing information on these, you want these to be followed by people but you want to make sure that they are the kinds of things that people want to see, that they want to share. You can’t just be adding junk content.

It has to be updates not only that are sort of interesting and valuable, but updates that will make other people look good when they share them. We’ve talked about this principle a few times at SEOmoz. The idea in the social media world is even bigger. When you look at what gets re-tweeted, what gets re-shared on Facebook, what gets re-blogged on a platform like Tumblr, it’s the stuff that makes the person who is sharing it look good. Right? So, when I tweet out something about SEO, if it is just self- promotional, not a lot of folks are going to tweet that. But if I tweet out something that is interesting research about the field, a lot of other SEOs are going to tweet that because it is going to make them look good to their followers. That is what you are trying to achieve.

Number four, drive traffic and second order links. Right? So, with a lot of these social pages you have the opportunity when you produce content on them—when I tweet, when I do a Facebook status update, when I blog on Tumblr, when I contribute a LinkedIn status update, even when I contribute a post on a social news site like a Reddit or Hacker News or Digg or Delicious or something like that—to potentially promote a link. Those links will drive direct traffic, usually in proportion to the number of people that are following me.

But there are lots of other principles at work here, too. That’s I why I recommend you check out something like “The Science of ReTweets” by Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. It will tell you things like there are certain times of day that are more optimal. There are certain words that are more optimal and less optimal to use. There is certain phrasing and formatting. In particular, this is a pro tip for Twitter stuff. Make sure that you don’t start the tweet with the link. Start the tweet with some copy. And you actually want to make sure that you have some extra content at the end of it. Potentially, one of the things that we’ve seen is that having either a hyphen or a colon before the link, announcing it, is really good, and that having hash tags, if you put a hash tag here right after the link, it will sometimes make the link stand out less. So the optimal way to go is text introducing the link, link, some additional text, and then if you want a hash tag or a reference or a via or those kinds of things.

Remember that if you do a direct re-tweet, it won’t show as coming from you. So if you can make those tweets unique when you are sharing a URL, you are likely to get paid more attention as well. The great part about this is you don’t just drive traffic with these, you also drive these sort of second order effects. I’ll show you an example. My friend Kang here from up above has found this link. I’ve tweeted it out. Then he goes to MySite.com. He visits whatever page I’ve tweeted there. Then he thinks, “Oh, well, that’s actually pretty interesting.” So, Kang’s blog now links directly to it. This is why it is so important to be building that type of content that is share worthy, which we talked about a second ago, and to be tweeting, sharing, linking to, and Facebook status updating and LinkedIn status updating with those types of things. They are the kinds of things that will drive those second order effect of links and that will help you do SEO in the long run.

All right, final one here. Number five is that social media profiles can be a source of content for your site, both direct and inspirational. This means that social profiles can help you build the content that you need to have on your site in order to perform well in the engines, in order to target the long tail in a lot of cases. I’ll show you what I am talking about. And even to do some exciting link based stuff.

One of the tactics that I really liked is a specific one, and I’ll talk about a couple, is to use YouTube. YouTube sometimes will have very popular videos. When they are reference videos, or they are longer videos, or they have sort of tougher to understand content or the kind of content were someone might actually want to parse it in text form, you can personally transcribe. Add some value, right? Break out the things that are important. Bold them. Highlight some quotes. That kind of thing. Build, essentially, your own version of that video. You can embed the video from YouTube on your site, have a commentary and transcript. Do an SEO friendly title. Now you’ve created great content using, leveraging someone else’s YouTube video. This kind of thing is just a phenomenal way to build content in a scalable way. You know that this is interesting stuff. You know this is stuff people care about because it has lots of views. It has become popular. Lots of people are tweeting it and sharing it. So you can follow up and capitalize on that.

You can do this as well with things like Twitter. If people are tweeting links or tweeting a conversation back and forth—you’ll see TechCrunch do this all the time, where they’ll take an interesting conversation or Media Gazer, those kinds of sites—they’ll take an interesting conversation back and forth and they’ll republish it with sort of screenshots of the tweets back and forth between people. They’ll do a little bit of analysis. That will become a blog post. A permanent piece of content that other people will reference and link to and comment on and add content to. That means you can potentially earn rankings and traffic for those in the engines as opposed to tweets, which dissolve. I really liked a quote that was tweeted today that was for Brett Tabke. He said that the instant a blog post is created that content starts living forever and producing SEO forever. The instant a tweet is created it starts dying. Right? It starts going away. It becomes temporal. It fades in the background.

You can also use this for more direct kinds of content generation. That is to say, particularly on sites like Twitter, which essentially are very temporal in nature. As we’ve discussed, you can take this content that you produce, I tweet a few times a day, some of them are very interesting links, some of them are interesting content, and I can reproduce them in sort of a daily digest on my site. A blog post if I’d like. An archiving system. That content is priceless, right? I’ve carefully crafted those 140 words, but what are they doing for my SEO? Nothing. That is why it is so valuable to potentially releverage the content that you are creating in a walled garden environment, like Facebook, something like LinkedIn, particularly something like Twitter that is temporal, into this format on your own site and have the opportunity to rank for it.

All right, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

If you have any tips or advice that you’ve learned along the way, or have a question, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/cdOlWMsg7oc/five-ways-to-use-your-social-profiles-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

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From: searchenginewatch.com

According to comScore Video Metrix, 178 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 14.3 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.2 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.

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Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/sgw1SVfQ2O4/100930-143738

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From: searchenginewatch.com

First spotted at Webmasterworld, BingBot arrived yesterday, and Bing later confirmed a staged rollout is underway a couple days ahead of schedule.

Bing noted that you’ll continue seeing traffic in your server logs mostly from MSNBot, but will transition to (and be completely replaced by) BingBot traffic (Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0 +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) over the next few weeks.

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Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/FaiOOBO4rwU/100930-133123

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From: searchenginewatch.com

Google added a Latin-to-English translation tool today. Not great quality, but it makes for some unintentionally funny reading.

You can read the original Google post here (all in Latin), but here’s what you get when you translate the post using their own new tool:

I came, I saw, I translated the words
9/30/2010 12:01:00 AM

That language barriers be torn away and the knowledge of the world is made accessible and useful, translation systems of many languages of the nations were created by us. Today, we announce the first language translation system by which no native speakers now make use of: the Latin. Being but a few speak Latin daily, year by year more than a hundred thousand American students receive the National Latin Exam. Besides many people all over the world study Latin.

This Latin translation system rarely be used to translate e-mails or understand the subtitles of YouTube videos. But many that are ancient books of philosophy, of physics and of mathematics are written in Latin. But many thousands of books are in Google Books, who have whole passages in Latin.

Translating by machine from Latin is difficult and our grasp of grammar not without error. The Latin is unmatched because most of them Latin books have already been written and only a few of the new shall be hereafter. Many have been translated into other languages and these translations we use to train our translation system. Since this system translates books well similar to those from whom he learned, our ability to translate famous books (such as The Gallic War Caesar ‘s) is already good.

The next time you find a Latin passage or you need help with the Latin writings, try this.

Jakob Uszkoreit, Software Engineer

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Read Original: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/3tzHUo4I720/100930-124545

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