Archive for the ‘SEO & PPC’ Category

Facebook aims to learn as much about it’s individual users as possible in order to display contextually relevant, paid advertising to them. What does your profile say about you, personally? And, which of that information is Facebook “mining” to pin down precisely who you are, and what products and services you might be interested in?

Let’s look at the user inputs on Facebook.

First, it’s a social network, so they’ve got your connections mapped out. They know who you know, and they know who they know, and how they’re connected. They know how often you talk to certain members, and can make assumptions as to how close you are, or would like to be. They know who’s pictures you look at. But what does Facebook do with these insights? Other than suggesting “virtual gifts” on your pal’s birthday, I don’t think Facebook does much with the data that establishes “connectedness”, other than to provide that data to 3rd parties for a fee; background check services, I would imagine.  ... Read This »

It has been observed among the SEO community that content farms such as eHow, HowStuffWorks, Mahalo and Wikipedia receive a disproportionate and undeserved share of top rankings for competitive search terms. But, being the conspiracy theorist that I am, Google must be ranking these sites well for a good reason.

Here is the conspiracy:

Certain words or phrases imply a corresponding search intent, beyond relevance and quality. If I were to search “buy a car,” I wouldn’t expect Google to return news, how-to guides, images, videos, or maps – these do not match the consumer-oriented intent of my search. I want to buy a fricking car!

Take this search for example: “Banner Ads”

 ... Read This »

Matt Cutts, the head of “web spam” at Google, says that you should focus on creating great content, and that people will naturally link to your website over time, which will eventually help your search engine rankings. That’s nice, and I would like to believe him, but there is a mountain of data compiled by SEO experts that suggest otherwise. Off-page SEO – the solicited acquisition of links pointing back to your website – still works and is big business. There are ways to not only increase your link-ability, but to increase your online influence by leveraging major social networks.  ... Read This »

Consider a random, non-specific piece of content. It could be a blog post, an article, a picture, video, song or any other piece of digital information you can fathom. The content of the content is not important for what I am about to discuss. This post is concerned with why people share links more on a social network like Twitter than they do on a network like Facebook.

“Facebook is for friends,” is what you’re probably thinking. Good. Facebook is for friends, and you are interested in social media optimization. Your friends aren’t. They are your friends, probably in spite of your interest in things like social media optimization, and since they aren’t interested in this very specific topic, you may not feel compelled to share something so arbitrary to them.  ... Read This »

What are your visitors thinking? Ideally, they are thinking what you tell them to, and if you’re in the online game to make money, it is in your best interest to encourage them to buy something. Regardless of the type of site you run, converting visitors to do the thing that you want them to do – the thing that you’ve been working so hard to get them to do – is what makes your website successful.

Many websites are designed for the user first, and profitability second, which is perfectly acceptable if you aren’t in it for profit. Twitter remains unmonetized, Bing still isn’t turning a profit, and Digg just recently took serious action to levy their regular losses. Facebook… poor Facebook… isn’t monetized very well, in my opinion, despite their millions of users. I, a small time blogger, certainly have no place telling these well-funded, well-managed organizations how to model their businesses, but if it were me, I’d pay more attention to my typical user’s mindset.  ... Read This »

Take what you know about on-page and off-page SEO and push it to the back of your mind, because those basic SEO concepts do not apply to the following.

Question: What do Google and Digg have in common?

Answer: Social Voting.

A considerable portion of Google’s ranking algorithm gauges behavioral data directly from the search results pages. First-page search results are a lot like the top stories on Digg in that once a particular link reaches page one, voting behavior can mean either rising to the top, or getting burried. But instead of clicking a “Digg Button,” Googlers casually click on related search results, the accounting of which can be used to measure a web page’s top ten worthiness.  ... Read This »

SEO should be approached holistically, from the perspective that you can do less and achieve more by coupling basic SEO concepts (on-page and off-page optimization) with PR, branding, buzz and viral marketing. These have been branded as art-forms, but if you really take a step back and look at how they work, you will find them very deducible.

Viral marketing simply means that you do a little bit of push marketing up-front to individuals who will talk about you with their friends, who will talk about you with their friends, to the N-th degree.

There are 3 basic viral concepts you should understand well:  ... Read This »

1. Viral Attribute – A characteristic of your content that makes it passable.
2. Viral Seeding – Promoting your content among influencers or influential networks.
3. Viral Mechanism – The mechanism by which content is passed along.