12 Tips for Immaculate Seo on Wordpress Sites

By Marcus Taylor

I used to dream of a day when all of our client’s websites were built on WordPress. No more 6-month approval times for changing URL structures. No more 5-figure bills from web development agencies to customise our client’s bespoke CMS to enable SEO changes. Generally, less no’s and more yeses.

Today, roughly 60% of my clients use WordPress, which is a nice improvement on the 5-10% that it was back in 2009-2010. Of course, the type of client influences this number, but with 76,214,709 websites now powered by WordPress (as of writing), it’s probably not too dissimilar for most of us.

With the majority of the sites I work on being built on WP, like many of us, I’ve had to do a lot of experimentation around the best plugins, themes, and general tips for making WordPress great for SEO. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point for someone new to WordPress SEO. For those of you who’ve been optimising WordPress sites for donkey’s years, just skim the headings. There may be one or two suggestions that are new or that have slipped through the cracks on a site you work on.

So let’s start of with prevention, rather than cure.

#1 Use an exceptional theme to begin with

This will be unhelpful advice to most looking to improve their existing site’s SEO performance, but for new sites and clients who are in a rebuild, go for the best theme you can get your hands. This will eliminate most of the annoying and time-consuming problems, and put your site in a good position for years to come.

For less than $50, you can get a beautiful theme with bulletproof code, thoroughly tested cross-browser compatibility, ultra-responsive design (good on larger and small devices i.e. smart TVs and smart phones), and .po / .mo files for easy translation into multiple languages. Here’s a huge list of beautiful WordPress themes to get started with.

#2 Image Compression: WP Smush.it

I’m a big fan of image-heavy long-form content. Most of the posts I write these days are in excess of 2,000 words and have lots of images. To keep page load speed down with image-heavy content I recommend the Smush It image compression plugin, which does what it says on the tin; compresses images automatically as you upload them to the media library.

Smush It works both retrospectively and going forward. Install it, run it on all of your existing images, and then leave it to smush all of the images you upload in the future.

#3 Database Optimisation: WP Optmize

One of the downfalls of WordPress from a speed perspective is that all of your drafts are saved in the database forever, which means your database can get pretty clunky after a year or two of frequent blogging. I cleaned up a database for one of my sites the other day which had over 1,500 database entries for post drafts. Not good.

WP Optimize is handy as it means that only your past 7 or 8 drafts will be saved to your database. You can also set it to automatically spruce up your database at intervals by deleting any drafts that are more than a certain number of days old. Again, this just helps keep your website running at lightening speed.

#4 WordPress SEO by Yoast

No list on SEO for WordPress would be complete without a hat tip to Joost De Valk’s WordPress SEO plugin. Voted as one of the best plugins by the co-founders of WordPress, it’s not half bad. This plugin will tick off most major SEO issues that WordPress doesn’t do straight out of the box, such as producing an XML sitemap, auto-generating titles & meta descriptions based on excerpts and rules, integrating social & authorship metadata, and making the URL structures neat and tidy.

#5 SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links is a handy plugin for improving your internal linking from within body content. For example, you can set a rule to say whenever ‘Bas Van Den Beld’ is mentioned on StateofDigital.com, link to this page.

I recently installed this on a website that had 3,000 blog posts in a relatively competitive niche but hadn’t done a fantastic job of internal linking to the key pages they wanted to rank. After ~10 days of setting up some internal linking rules, the site increased from the bottom of page 2 to the middle of page 1 for its main keyword.

#6 BackupWordpress

About 5 months ago, a site that I spent a solid week building got hacked. It wasn’t backed up. I was pretty gutted. All the hard work done to make the SEO immaculate was lost, and I had to start from scratch.

Lesson learned: use a plugin like BackupWordPress to automatically backup your site to DropBox. I’m so paranoid about this now that I also use IFTTT to sync Google Drive and Dropbox, so that I always have at least two cloud backups of my websites!

#7 YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin)

An oldie, but a classic. YARPP adds a list of related posts to the bottom of every post, encouraging users to read other posts. Great for reader engagement, improving behavioural metrics, and internal linking.

YARPP being used on the EmuBands Distribution website

#8 SEO Friendly Images

I’m getting better, but I used to be awful at remembering to add alternative tags and image titles. This plugin was a lifesaver as it automatically creates ALT tags for any images you’ve forgotten to add them for, using the page title as the description.

#9 Gravity Forms for UGC pages & contact forms

One of the things that I find quite irritating with Contact Form 7, despite being a relatively decent and easy to use contact form plugin, is that the JavaScript files injected on every page of your site by default, which is totally unnecessary and has page speed implications. Enter Gravity Forms.

Gravity Forms is a great plugin with a tonne of different uses, including quick an easy form generation. It’s slightly more SEO friendly than the alternatives, and can also be used for UGC page creation (Richard Baxter has written a great guide on how to do that with Gravity here).

Another great thing about Gravity Forms is that they’re integrated with Zapier, which while not necessarily impacting SEO, means you can get really smart about connecting anything entered into Gravity to your CRM system, proposal software, cloud documents, or much more.

#10 WP Super Cache (or WP Total Cache)

Both of these cacheing plugins are great and will noticeably improve your WordPress site’s page load speed. I’m a fan of WP Super Cache, but a lot of people swear by WP Total Cache – I don’t think there’s too much in it, to be honest.

#11 SNAP – Social Network Auto Poster

I like SNAP because it fills in the blindspots of IFTTT and Zapier for promoting your content on social networks. Back in the day, when you created a post on WordPress you’d spend the next half an hour logging into all kinds of weird and wonderful social networks to promote the piece of content. Now, thanks to automation tools, you can just hit publish and let the Internet do its thing.

Currently, IFTTT enables you to send content to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (via Buffer), LinkedIn, and many others. However, you can’t auto-post to Reddit, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, or any of those, which is where SNAP comes in.

#12 WPSocial

WPSocial goes one step beyond Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin in terms of filling out social network meta data. It’s great for setting rich snippet microdata settings and controlling which page types you want to display authorship and social mark-up on.

Summary

I’ll leave it there for now, as I think these tips probably represent the 20% that will have 80% of the difference. That said, I’m sure there are a tonne of other great plugins, tips, and insights out there – so if you know any that should be added to the list, feel free to share them in the comments.

Post from Marcus Taylor on State of Digital
12 Tips For Immaculate SEO on WordPress Sites

Source: State of Digital

12 Tips for Immaculate Seo on Wordpress Sites

Google Updates Search with Resturant Menus

By Tariq Ali

Next time you are getting ready to head out to eat, search Google to make sure the restaurant you are considering has what you want on their menu. Google officially announced the new search feature is now available Next time you’re planning a brunch or a date night, check to make sure the menu has […]

The post Google Updates Search With Resturant Menus appeared first on ISEdb.COM.

Source: ISEDB

Google Updates Search with Resturant Menus

Facebook Updates Paper App with New Features

By Chris Crum

Facebook has released a new update for its Paper news reader app.

It will now let users share articles via Facebook Messages, text message or email, and turn sound effects off. It also now supports languages that use multi-stage input, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The app was first released on February 3rd, and is only available for iPhone in the U.S. for the time being.

“Your Paper is made of stories and themed sections, so you can follow your favorite interests,” Mark Zuckerberg said of the app when he first announced it. “The first section in Paper is your Facebook News Feed, where you’ll enjoy inspiring new designs for photos, videos, and longer written posts. You can customize Paper with a choice of more than a dozen other sections about various themes and topics—from photography and sports to food, science and design. Each section includes a rich mix of content from emerging voices and well-known publications.”

Here’s the iTunes description:

Explore and share stories from friends and the world in immersive designs and fullscreen, distraction-free layouts. Paper includes your Facebook News Feed and sections about your favorite topics.

As Josh Constine at TechCrunch points out, the app’s sharing feature includes the following URL: fb.com/trypaper, which could get more people to give the app a try.

Image via Facebook

Source: WebPro News 1

Facebook Updates Paper App with New Features

Bing Saves is Now Available to All in Open Beta

By Zach Walton

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I wish I could bookmark this Web site in anything other than my browser?” You probably haven’t, but Bing thinks you might have.

Last month, Bing introduced a new feature called Bing Saves. It’s essentially a bookmarking feature within Bing that allowed you to save Web sites to your Microsoft account and visit them later. The logic behind this appears to be that you might want to save some Web sites for later use, but don’t feel they’re important enough to warrant a bookmark in your browser.

When it first launched, Bing Saves was only available to a select number of people. Search Engine Land points out that the beta is now available to all so you can start saving Web sites.

If you feel the need to use Bing Saves, you simply have to visit the Web site. From there, you’ll see a list of trending Web sites and a Public Feed of saved Web sites. To start adding personal bookmarks, you just need to add the “Save on Bing” button to your Web browser.

The Bing Saves feature is still in beta, but it will probably become a real product. After all, a similar feature has already been added to the Bing mobile app. In the recently updated Bing app for iOS, you can now bookmark search results for later use.

Image via Bing

Source: WebPro News 2

Bing Saves is Now Available to All in Open Beta

Twitter Warns a Bunch of Users of Hack, Resets Their Passwords in Error

By Josh Wolford

An email sent to some Twitter users warning them that their accounts may have been compromised was sent in error, according to Twitter.

“Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We’re reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account,” said Twitter in an email to some users.

Of course, users took to Twitter to ask if this warning was legit.

Over the last day or so, you may have seen plenty of tweets that look like this if you searched the network:

Hey @twitter is this e-mail requesting to reset my password really coming from you? pic.twitter.com/06fvP8I8eS

— Teddy Satrio Wibowo (@teddysatrio) March 4, 2014

Although the message was in fact from Twitter, it was sent in error.

“We unintentionally sent some password reset notices tonight due to a system error. We apologize to the affected users for the inconvenience,” said Twitter in a statement.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. A little over a year ago, Twitter sent the same email to many users–but that time the company had a reason. In November of 2012, Twitter believed that a small subset of user account had been compromised, but they accidentally reset too many user passwords–way more than they felt had possibly been compromised.

Source: WebPro News 1

Twitter Warns a Bunch of Users of Hack, Resets Their Passwords in Error

A Few Adwords Extensions Here, a Few Adwords Extensions There

By Haukur Jarl

Ever since Google updated the way AdWords calculates Ad Rank it‘s more important than ever to utilize ad extensions and if you haven‘t used them before I strongly suggest that you start now. Extensions can assist advertisers to push out more relevant information per impression while at the same time increase visibility which is essentially then name of the game.

Below is a mock-up version of the (relatively) new Ad Rank formula, note the question mark between Quality Score and Ad extensions. According to Google the “… expected impact from those extensions is factored into your Ad Rank” (source: http://goo.gl/SPHiqj), It’s still uncertain as to how they calculate the estimated performance, hence the question mark.

In the following article I’ll walk through some of the extensions available to you via Google AdWords. If this is the first time you hear about this feature you can find them here:

Sitelinks extension

Sitelinks are a neat way of promoting other pages (e.g. related products and offers) within your website alongside your ads which users might be interested in. You can associate up to 20 sitelinks with your campaigns or ad groups (note that Google does not display more than six at a time), create sitelinks specifically for mobile or desktop/laptop devices and lastly create a custom schedule around them.

Below is a screenshot which displays two competing advertisers, one with sitelinks and one not. Notice how the top advertiser takes up much more space while at the same time promoting more pages related to the topic I searched for.

In addition to all of this you can show additional details with your link; these are commonly known as “enhanced sitelinks” and there are two sides to them. One is that Google finds data within your account that matches the sitelink in question and displays it, the other one is that you can add and edit a description yourself.

The copy guidelines behind enhanced sitelinks are similar to writing an ad text; link text (headline) can include max. 25 characters and both description lines can include up to 35 characters. I personally have not seen enhanced sitelinks often on SERPs and when I’ve seen them it’s after I I’ve done a branded search. To me that indicates a very strict policy around them but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t add them.

Additional notes about sitelinks:

1. Each Sitelink needs to have a unique landing page URL, you can’t use the same URL as you’re using in the corresponding ad copy.


2. You need to have good to great Quality Scores in order for them to show.


3. Your ad needs to be displayed above or below organic results.


4. Try to keep the link text as short as you can, that way you’re more likely to have sitelinks shown.

For more information visit: http://goo.gl/gvkcMe

Call extension

If phone calls are important to your business then Call extensions should definitely interest you, especially if you’re running a local campaign (e.g. restaurants). This extension allows your users to easily get in touch with your business and like sitelinks, they can appear in different formats. On desktop/laptop and tablet devices the phone number appears with the ads but on smartphones you’ll get a click-to-call button (see the below screenshot)

There are two sides in the way you can track your phone call performance;

1. In the US, UK, French and German you have the option of opting into the Google forwarding phone number service. It allows Google to create unique phone numbers which in return allows them to track e.g. phone call conversions. These conversions count calls that last for a certain amount of time defined by you. I recommend that you take into account the average waiting time before pick up so you don’t count conversions that aren’t actual conversions. Using Google forwarding phone number also allows you to see how many times your number was manually dialed versus clicked on


2. Google currently doesn’t support forwarding phone numbers in other markets unfortunately which means that you can’t track phone calls as precisely as in the aforementioned markets but you’ll still get statistics as to how many clicked on the click-to-call button.

Additional information:

1. Call extensions can be used with location extension which is a double win for any advertiser running a local campaign


2. One of the biggest fails I’ve seen from companies that don’t offer 24/7 phone support is not creating a custom schedule. This is very easy to set up when you create a call extension.


3. You can have AdWords only serve call extensions on mobile devices.


4. You have the option to display both headline & phone number or just the phone number (which would replace the headline)

For more information visit: http://goo.gl/MYJrIt

Location extension

If your business has a physical location where you conduct most of your business, you should make it easy for users to find it. There are two ways to set up location extension:

1. Manually enter the address (Legacy location extension)


2. Connect your Google Places and AdWords accounts together and import the information (Upgraded location extension) – I prefer the Upgraded version.

Below is a screenshot that displays an ad with call, sitelinks and location extensions – a beautiful sight if you ask me. The ad takes over most of the „goldenbox“ and is in top position which creates a perfect scenario for a click. The extension appears as a link with the associated location name, in this case it‘s „Keflavik Internation Airport, Reykjanesbær“.

When a user clicks on the link he or she is taken to a Google Maps page where they can e.g. ask for directions to see whether your store is close by.

Additional information:

1. In some countries (like Iceland, sigh…) Google does not allow account managers to manually add locations, here is the complete list of countries that can: http://goo.gl/3BspbT. That means that they’re only able to use this via a Google Places connection.

For more information visit: http://goo.gl/A9U68a and http://goo.gl/IIPlCz

Review extension

Being able to communicate trust towards possible customers is very important and even though you know that your business rocks it can sometimes be hard to convince users that you are everything they’re looking for. That’s where Review extensions come in handy.

Review extensions allow you to include a review from third party websites with you ads on the Google search network and can give your message a tremendous boost and credibility while at the same time assisting you in generating more elbow space on SERPs. This extension is especially brilliant for account managers that currently use quotes in their ad texts as it allows them use that space to deliver a richer message.

There are essentially two ways to set this up

1. Exact quote: means that you copy and paste the text as it is on the source you’re taking it from as well as include the source name. The name needs to be included in the source URL (e.g. naming a source Awesome Reviews requires you to direct users to the page www.awesomereviews.com).


2. Paraphrased: means that you can word the text a bit differently from how it’s actually written on the original source but you need to keep the same tone.

Both ways are limited to 67 characters in total which includes Source and Text

Keep in mind that Google’s advertising policy around Review extensions is strict but they basically require that the review is visible in the source and that the source itself is credible (here’s a link to Google’s review extensions advertising policy).

Additional information:

1. Only English reviews are currently supported


2. Publishers can request that the review is removed via an opt-out form found here

Conclusion

Keep in mind that extensions are known to have poorer %CTR when compared to click-through-rate on headlines (ads) but instead they help you get more real-estate on SERPs. There are more extensions currently available to you that I definitely recommend that you read about: App Extensions and Previous visit-, Seller rating- & Social annotations. On top of these there are new extensions currently in beta that look really promising like image and email extensions.

What’s your favourite extension?

Post from Haukur Jarl on State of Digital
A few Adwords Extensions here, a few Adwords Extensions There

Source: State of Digital

A Few Adwords Extensions Here, a Few Adwords Extensions There

Google’s ‘completely Clear’ Stance on Disavowing ‘irrelevant’ Links

By Chris Crum

We knew that when Google launched the Disavow Links tool, people were going to use it more than they should, even though Google made it clear that most people shouldn’t use it at all.

A person doing some SEO work posted a question in the Google Webmaster Central product forum (via Search Engine Roundtable) that many others have probably wondered: Should I use the disavow tool for irrelevant links?

In other words, should you tell Google to ignore links from sites that aren’t related to yours? The answer is no.

Google’s own John Mueller jumped in to say this: “Just to be completely clear on this: you do not need to disavow links that are from sites on other topics. This tool is really only meant for situations where there are problematic, unnatural, PageRank-passing links that you can’t have removed.”

Google updates and manual action penalties have caused a lot of webmasters to re-evaluate their link profiles. Many have scrambled to get various links to their sties taken down, often going overboard (or even way overboard).

For the record, Google still views backlinks as “a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results.”

In other “how Google views links” news, Matt Cutts just put out an 8-minute video about how Google determines whether your links are paid or not.

Image via Google.com

Source: WebPro News 2

Google’s ‘completely Clear’ Stance on Disavowing ‘irrelevant’ Links

Here’s How Google Determines Whether or Not Your Links Are ‘paid’

By Chris Crum

Google put out a new 8-minute video about paid links. Matt Cutts talks about the various things that the search engine takes into consideration when determining whether or not links are “paid”.

99 percent of the time it’s abundantly clear, he says. Sometimes, not so much.

He notes, “These are some of the criteria, but just like the webspam guidelines, they basically say, ‘Look, anything that’s deceptive or manipulative or abusive we reserve the right to take action on.’ It’s the same sort of thing. If we see a new technique that people are trying to exploit people’s trust or something like that, we’re willing to take action on that as well.”

He points out that the FTC and other government agencies have guidelines about disclosure, and that Google’s thinking is pretty much aligned with these.

One thing Google takes into consideration is the actual value of what someone is getting for something.

“If you go to a conference, and you pick up a free t-shirt that’s probably pretty low-quality, that’s probably not going to change how you behave, right?” Cutts says. “That’s not going to change your behavior. On the other hand, if someone pays you outright $600 to link to you, that is clearly a lot of value. So on the spectrum of a pen and a t-shirt all the way up to something of great value, that’s one of the criteria that we use. Another good one is how close is something to money? So again, the vast majority of the time, people are actually giving you money. Sometimes people might say something like, ‘Hey, I’d like to send you a gift card. Gift cards are pretty fungible. You can convert those to money and back and forth not too easily. On the other hand, something like ‘I’m going to give you a free trial of perfume’ or ‘I’m going to buy you a beer’ or something like that,” that’s less of a connection. But we do look at how close something is to actual money whenever we’re looking at those kinds of things.”

“If someone goes and buys you dinner, and you write a blog post four months later, and the dinner wasn’t some huge steak dinner with eighteen courses or something like that, that’s probably not the sort of thing that we would worry about.”

I’d be curious to know how they’d go about figuring that out anyway. It’s unclear exactly how many courses it takes.

“Another criterion that we use is whether something is a gift or a loan,” he continues. “So imagine, for example, that somebody loaned out a car for someone to try out for a week versus giving them a car. There’s a big difference there because if you’re loaned a car for a week you still have to maintain the insurance on your car, you still have to make sure you have a place to store it , whereas if someone gives you a new car, that is something of a completely different nature. So if somebody’s giving you a review copy, and you have to return it, that’s a relatively well-respected thing where people understand, “Okay, I’m trying this out. I’m a gadget reviewer or whatever, and I get to see whether I like this camera or whatever, but I do have to send it back. Whereas if someone sends you a camera, and says, ‘Oh, you know what? Just keep it,” that’s going to be something that’s much closer to material compensation in our opinion.”

“We also look at the intended audience, and it can be hard to judge intent, but bear in mind, the vast majority of the time, the intent is crystal clear when someone’s giving you actual money to buy links, but take for example, suppose someone went to a Salesforce conference. You know, so they’re at Dreamforce, and they represent a nonprofit, and so they manage to say, ‘Okay, I’m a nonprofit, and I like to try out your service,’ and so at Salesforce conference or Dreamforce, they got a year’s free use of the service. Now, the intent there was not to get someone to embed paid links within an editorial blog post. The intent was to try to sign somebody up, see how they liked it….they can be someone who could tell other people about it…maybe it’s a subscription or a trial where they get six months free, and then after that they either have to convert or start paying money or something along those lines. That is something where the intent is not trying to get links for SEO value. It’s so that people can try it out.”

Cutts then goes on to compare such a scenario to Google giving out gadgets at Google I/O – something critics have often pointed out when this discussion comes up.

“Another thing to consider is whether or not it would be a surprise,” he says. “So if you’re a movie reviewer, it’s not a surprise that somebody probably lets you into a theater, and maybe you watch the movie for free. That’s not something that’s going to be a surprise. If it was a reporter for a tech blog, and they said, ‘Give me a laptop, and I get to keep it,’ that would be a surprise…and it would be something that was not reviewing the laptop. Just like, “I’d write about your startup if you give me a laptop.’ That would be the sort of thing that really should be disclosed.”

In the end, you probably know if what you’re doing is wrong, but it’s really also about whether Google perceives what you’re doing to be wrong. Hopefully, this will give you a better idea of what to expect on their end.

Source: WebPro News 2

Here’s How Google Determines Whether or Not Your Links Are ‘paid’

Best Read Articles of February 2014

By Bas van den Beld

February went over as if it was the shortest month of the year. Oh wait, it is. And still we managed to get so much great content published again! Since it’s the first workday of March we thought it would be nice to show you which great articles were the best read articles in the past month. Enjoy!

1. Travel 360: A Unique Perspective on the Online Travel Industry for 2014

State of Digital and Linkdex provide you with a 360 look on the Travel industry. A unique free e-book with all the insider strategies and insights

Written by Bas van den Beld

Read the article

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2. What a Marketer must Understand from the Acquisition of WhatsApp

Facebook strategically needed to be there where its former (and future) audience was going, apart setting the base for a further expansion in the emerging and rising economies, and for that reason it has bought Whatsapp.

Written by Gianluca Fiorelli

Read the article

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3. How to Use Paid Tools to Solve the “Not Provided” Google Analytics Problem

A detailed review of OpenLinkProfiler.org, a free backlink analysis tool. Exploring all of the features and functionality and providing an expert review.

Written by Jo Turnbull

Read the article

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4. Boutique or Broad? Finding your perfect agency partner

A CMO usually struggles with making the right choices for agencies. Finding the perfect agency is more than just choosing a type of agency. Andrew Girdwood explains.

Written by Andrew Girdwood

Read the article

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5. OpenLinkProfiler.org – A Free Backlink Analysis Tool

A detailed review of OpenLinkProfiler.org, a free backlink analysis tool. Exploring all of the features and functionality and providing an expert review.

Written by Ned Poulter

Read the article

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6. Link Building in 2014 – 6 Old School Tactics Brought Up To Date

Think that the tactics of old aren’t valuable any more? Think again. Here we show you how to update your link building efforts for 2014.

Written by Matt Beswick

Read the article

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7. 16 Tips for Successful International Business Travel

Do you travel for business? Take a look at these 16 tips for a successful business travel Aleyda has compiled after going to 9 countries in the last year!

Written by Aleyda Solis

Read the article

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8. How to Analyse, Optimise & Automate Multi-Channel ROI Calculations

Polly Pospelova shows how to analyse, optimise and automate ROI calculations by creating a universal dashboard to monitor multi-channel CPC.

Written by Polly Pospelova

Read the article

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9. It’s Still a Link Building Business

Link Building is still the major factor for search engine rankings, however SERPs are not as clean as we would like to believe.

Written by Neil Walker

Read the article

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10. Sharenting – Is It What Your Child Would Want?

Two thirds of UK babies have been posted on a social media network within one hour of their birth. In this post I’m going to have a look at sharenting.

Witten by Laura Phillips

Read the article

Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
Best Read Articles of February 2014

Source: State of Digital

Best Read Articles of February 2014

How to Create Persuasion Momentum with Sem

By Joseph Kerschbaum

How to Create Persuasion Momentum with SEM was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It takes 7 to 13 touches to deliver qualified leads, explains Online Marketing Institute in a recent two-part series (part 1 / part 2). The gist: prospects considering a substantial purchase need time for research, consideration, and then action. As marketers, we need to acknowledge this decision-making behavior, and we need to determine a strategy that captures these touch-points and delivers quality leads and sales.

As paid search managers, we know that most visitors don’t convert on the first visit. In fact about 98% of people don’t convert upon first visit. Why does this happen? Why can’t people just pull the trigger on their first visit to your website? Let’s review the stages of the consideration process of major purchases:

Members of your target audience begin by thinking about their general problem and they start running search queries through the search engines. As those folks get more educated, their search queries get smarter and more specific. Eventually, members of your audience are more aware of their options (you and your competitors) to solve their problem, and they start to make comparisons. At the end, your prospect knows what solution is a good fit for them or their company — and hopefully that’s you!

Sure, the purchase process isn’t always this clean, easy and linear. People hop back and forth between devices, channels and priorities on any given day, and this can be extremely challenging for SEM managers to monitor, manage, and optimize. This is where persuasion momentum comes in. Go ahead and embrace the fact that your audience may need to be touched 7-13 times before they will convert — and forge a plan to get your persuasion momentum rolling!

Persuasion Tactics

As an SEM manager, you have a wide array of tools at your disposal that will help you stay in front of your audience through the entire consideration process. These strategies include varying channels and devices.

Here is a short list of tactics you should consider in order to gain those critical 7-13 touches that should gain the attention of your target audience. Note that this list is focused on SEM/Display/Social; it doesn’t include email, direct mail, phone calls, and other offline touch points. There are numerous other tactics you can add to your persuasion momentum strategy.

• Standard Display Remarketing: “Standard” means remarketing that you can utilize via Google AdWords or another third-party platform.


• Remarkeing Lists for Search Advertisers (RLSA): This tactic is available through Google AdWords. RLSA is also great for targeting competitor keywords for individuals who have visited your website previously. (They are looking at your competitors!)


• Video Remarketing: AdWords now offers the option to remarket to people who visit your YouTube page or watch any of your videos.


• Social Remarketing: Utilizing FBX to remarket on Facebook.


• Facebook Custom Audiences: You may need to get in front of individuals who may have already converted (requested information, etc.). You can upload your email marketing lists into FBX and target these people on Facebook.


• Search Companion: This tactic involves targeting the Google Display Network via search queries. This means you target specific queries on Search and your ad shows up on the Display Network.

Remember that all touch points are not created equal. Some tactics target users who are in a passive frame of mind and others target individuals for whom you may be top-of-mind (active behavior). Each of these tactics may have more value to your company and campaign. You will have to conduct some trial-and-error to get the right mix for your business.

Active Behavior

Passive Behavior

The objective of these tactics is to stay visible to your audience. Or perhaps rattle their memory into action when they see your remarketing ad and they haven’t converted yet.

In the future, look for a discussion of how you can structure your campaigns to best utilize this strategy, along with how to establish tracking in order to establish which channels work best for your business.

Source: Bruce Clay

How to Create Persuasion Momentum with Sem

Ellen Breaks Twitter Record at Oscars

By Chris Crum

A tweet from Ellen DeGeneres during the Oscars on Sunday night – a photo of her with eleven other celebrities from the audience (taken by Bradley Cooper) has set a new record for retweets.

It even crashed Twitter at one point (though those familiar with the “Fail Whale” know that’s not quite as big of an accomplishment).

Here it is:

If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014

2,626,197 retweets and 1,329,296 favorites as of the time of this writing.

That’s a whole lot more than the previous retweet record holder, which was a tweet from President Obama, which has just over 780,000 retweets and close to 300,000 favorites.

Four more years. pic.twitter.com/bAJE6Vom

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

According to Twitter, there were over 14.7 million tweets containing terms related to the Oscars telecast during the live show.

The envelope please….to @TheEllenShow – this is now the most re-tweeted Tweet with over 1 million RTs. Congrats!

— Twitter (@twitter) March 3, 2014

Twitter notes that Ellen’s follower growth was 47 times more than her average daily growth after the show.

Ellen’s tweet saw 254,644 tweets per minute (TPM). The other moments that drove the most Twitter conversation, according to the company, were: Ellen delivers pizza to the audience (158,159 TPM); and Gravity wins sixth Osacar – for film editing (135,330 TPM).

The most tweeted about nominees during the evening, according to the company, were Jennifer Lawrence, Brad Pitt, Alfonso Cuarón, Cate Blanchett and Sandra Bullock.

Films that got the most mentions were Gravity, Frozen, 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Images via Twitter

Source: WebPro News 1

Ellen Breaks Twitter Record at Oscars

Help Us Find the State of Seo

By Bas van den Beld

As you know we have a background in search, having been called “State of Search” for more than two years. And we write a lot about the topic of SEO as well. On top of that we like writing e-books and white papers. The newest e-book we are working on at the moment is a look at SEO: what is the State of SEO and where are things headed. Take for example the term SEO, is that still relevant?

We are looking at this from many different angles, with an e-book as result. For this we would like your input. We want to know how you think the State of SEO is. So we created a small survey. You can help us by taking about five minutes to fill in this survey. As a token of our thanks you will receive a copy of the report once it’s done!

While you are at it, can you help us find as many people as possible to fill this in? Both agency and in-house? Just tweet this:

---

Come and help out an fill in this 5 minute survey about SEO. I did and I’m now getting the report!
Click To Tweet – Powered By CoSchedule

---

So start filling in the survey!

Thank you so much!

Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
Help us find the State of SEO

Source: State of Digital

Help Us Find the State of Seo

Top 5 Must Haves on a Small Ppc Campaign Budget

By Polly Pospelova

Managing AdWords campaigns well is time consuming, but here is a list of things you should do even on a small budget.

Eliminate ineffective keywords and ad groups

This tactic helps to achieve 3 things at the same time:

1. decrease costs


2. lower cost per conversion


3. increase conversion rate.

To manage ineffective keywords properly you need to have conversion tracking setup and working properly in your AdWords (or Bing) account. It’s best to focus on each campaign or ad group separately because cost per conversion varies from campaign to campaign. If you don’t have much time, work at the account level

1. Set the date range to the last 2-3 months.


2. Go to keywords and sort them by cost in descending order.


3. Review your top spending keywords one by one. If cost >= average cost per conversion (or cost per conversion you would consider acceptable) then pause that keyword.


4. If there are no such keywords, go to ad groups tab, sort your ad groups by cost in descending order and if cost >= average cost per conversion then pause that ad group.

Choose devices and channels which are right for you

This tactic helps to cut costs and move your budget to a better converting channel. If your campaigns are limited by budget you can cut costs by opting out of search partners or mobile devices on the campaign level.

1. Set the date range to the last 2-3 months.


2. Go to ‘Campaigns’ tab and segment your data by ‘Network’ or ‘Device’:

• Devices.Review costs and cost per conversion separately for desktops, tablets and mobile phones.If your cost per conversion is much higher or there are no conversions from a particular device, I would recommend not to show your ads on that device.(see example of a campaign where cost per conversion from mobile devices is almost double that from desktop computers)
  

  

  
  

  Unfortunately, enhanced campaigns only allow you to opt out of mobile devices (it can be done on campaign settings tab). You cannot opt your campaigns out from showing ads on tablets, so you need to optimise your website for tablets as a matter or urgency.

  
  

  Remember, if you advertise on tablets but your website isn’t ready for tablet devices, you can waste up to 30% of your whole budget on traffic which will never convert.

  
  

• NetworkSearch ads are eligible to show not only in Google search, but also on Google search partners too. Segmenting by ‘Network’ you will see how effective your advertising is on Google search partners websites.If your cost per conversion is higher or search partners don’t bring any conversions opt out of search partners (you can do it on the campaign settings tab):
  

  

  
  

  All the same steps are available in Bing too. Bing shows performance broken down by device and network. Fortunately, Bing allows you to opt out from advertising on tablets if your website isn’t ready for these devices.

  
  

Use remarketing in search if it helps you to close the deal

Remarketing in search ads lets you show ads in Google search results but only those users who previously visited your website but didn’t convert. You can show a completely different message or improve on your original offer and be certain that nobody else but the users who already know you will see it. This feature is an absolute must for a mature advertiser. It delivers leads at very lost costs, which is important for small ppc budgets.

Leverage location targeting

You can target specifically those areas where your business operates. Leveraging geo targeting helps to increase performance and cut costs.

For example, if your customer audience is based in Ramsey, there is no need to target other cities.

To define your Geographical settings go to Settings, All settings and then Locations.

Know your negative keywords

Always analyse negative keywords before setting up a campaign with a small PPC budget. It will help to avoid wasting money and poor results at the start of a campaign.

There are many tools which can help you find your negative keywords. The best way to start your research is to use Google Keyword Planner or just Google search.

If you are selling ‘leather shoes’ in the UK just type it into Google search and predictive search will show you the terms associated with your search query. You will see straight away what is irrelevant. For example, you may want to add ‘philippines’ or ‘pakistan’ into your negative keyword list.

Related search terms displayed at the bottom of search results are also very useful:

The same tactics can also suggest relevant keywords you may have missed.

If your campaign has run for a while and accumulated history, review the search terms that brought your visitors to the site and find out if any of them are irrelevant.

Investing time into negative keyword research pays off, it helps to decrease cost and increase CTR.

Everyone has a different way of optimising AdWords accounts. There are hundreds of other things you can do to increase your reach, increase your conversion rate and lower your costs, however not all of them are quick or cheap fixes. Things like conversion optimisation, ROI optimisation or design and development of great landing pages take time and cost money. But if you cover the above basics, even in on small budget campaign, you will be pleasantly surprised with the results you get.

Post from Polly Pospelova on State of Digital
Top 5 Must Haves on a Small PPC Campaign Budget

Source: State of Digital

Top 5 Must Haves on a Small Ppc Campaign Budget

Digital Marketing Research Publications for Week 9 2014

By Bas van den Beld

State of Digital wants to provide you with the best information out there. And in Digital things keep changing all the time, so it’s difficult to keep up-to-date. But we are here to help you!

Every Friday we will be giving you an overview of research done around the world, published on the web somewhere. Research you can then use in your marketing efforts, whether it’s optimising a campaign or making sure your superiors will walk the route you plan to walk.

Here’s the overview of research in week 8 and 9.

Digital Marketing General

Multitasking TV Viewers Primarily Focus on the Television

Devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops and portable gaming systems have made it easy for consumers to multitask while watching television. However, a November 2013 study by TiVo found that three-quarters of US TV viewers were more focused on what was on the tube, even when using a second screen.

Read More >>>

Demographic Stats About US Millennials

Nielsen looked at the behaviour of US Millennials: from online to offline habits, structuring its analysis around some myth-busting findings.

Read More >>>

CMOs Aren’t Keeping Up With Their Own Social Media Spending Forecasts

Heady forecasts about social media spending are one thing (and they’re certainly an indicator of enthusiasm), but actual spending is another. And results from the latest edition of The CMO Survey from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business indicate a continued gap between plans and follow-through on the part of US CMOs.

Read More >>>

The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2013, US

Forrester’s annual overview of US consumers’ behaviors and technology attitudes by generation, based on Forrester’s North American Technographics surveys and our ForecastView data.

Read More >>>

Branding

Men Open to New Brands; W-O-M and Ads Key for Awareness

More than 6 in 10 men aged 18-49 said they’re open to choosing new brands across several categories when shopping for the household, according to a new report from Defy Media. The study paints a picture of a more involved male shopper than some stereotypes would lead one to believe, with a majority of married men surveyed claiming to shop for groceries and household supplies more frequently than their spouses.

Read More >>>

What Happens After a Good or Bad Experience, 2014

Some 23% of consumers will give feedback directly to companies following a very good service experience, but 32% will do so following a very bad experience, finds the Temkin Group in newly-released survey results.

Read More >>>

Are Consumers “Falling Out of Love” With Brands?

A couple of new studies take a look at consumers’ relationships with brands, with one arguing that consumers are “falling out of love with brands” and that “brands are in crisis.” Indeed, Mindshare’s “Culture Vulture 2014” finds that only 47% of North American consumers last year agreed that they like to pass on interesting things they see or hear about brands, with that figure having steadily fallen over the past few years, from 66% in 2010.

Read More >>>

Social Media Marketing

The State of Social Marketing 2014

Socialbakers conducted a social media pulse check across 82 countries and 20 industries to discover what marketers are focusing on, and more importantly, what they’re not.

Read More >>>

Brands prefer Instagram 4x More than Vine for Twitter Posts

The blogosphere has recently been ablaze about Instagram and Vine’s destinies, after Instagram introduced its own video feature last June. Would users abandon Vine’s video service for Instagram? Or would the two be able to peacefully coexist?

Read More >>>

Consumers As Likely to Trust Foreign Secret Service Org.s As Social Networks With Their Data (PDF)

A new study released by the Global Research Business Network (GRBN) reveals that few consumers in the US and UK actively trust various types of organizations with their data.

Read More >>>

51% of Facebook Referrals Came From Mobile

Shareaholic, a content discovery and sharing platform, found in a recent report that 51 percent of Facebook referrals come from mobile.

Read More >>>

80% of UK users access Twitter via their mobile

Mobile is written into the DNA of Twitter. That’s underscored by new research from Nielsen that reports 80% of UK users access Twitter via their mobile device.

Read More >>>

77% of College Students Use Snapchat Daily

A new study found that more than three-quarters of college students — 77%, in fact — use Snapchat at least once per day.

Read More >>>

E-commerce

UK Online retail sales up 18% year over year

A surge in UK business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce sales in January 2014 reflected growing consumer and business confidence. According to data from Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) and Capgemini, online retail sales increased 18% year over year.

Read More >>>

International

Internet and mobile platforms are driving growth in Sweden’s ad market

Digital expenditure is driving Sweden’s advertising market, and the internet will remain the largest single ad channel in 2014, according to the “Marknadschefsbarometer Q4 2013” issued by Dagens Media and Netigate – Sweden.

Read More >>>

What’s Next for Ecommerce in Spain?

Where is Spain’s retail ecommerce market headed in 2014? That’s what a December 2013 study by the Foro de Economía Digital and marketing agency Kanlli set out to learn.

Read More >>>

87% of American Adults Now Access the Internet (PDF)

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has released the results of a new survey examining internet use in the US. The study finds that among adults, 87% use the internet, email, or access the internet via a mobile device

Read More >>>

Online Sharing Behaviors of Hispanic Consumers

A recent study released by ShareThis in partnership with Mindshare and Unilever contains some intriguing data regarding Hispanics’ propensity for social sharing, as well as the influence those sharers have.

Read More >>>

Advertising

Social Ads Proving to be Highly Effective

Social was a better bet than portals, networks, and exchanges last year for reaching users that can be consistently marketed to (“user quality index”), according to the latest quarterly “Global Media Intelligence Report” from Neustar Aggregate Knowledge.

Read More >>>

Mobile

UK Viewers Taking to TV on Tablets

eMarketer estimates that almost three-quarters of UK internet users—nearly 57% of the entire population—will watch video content via the internet at least monthly in 2014.

Read More >>>

More than Half of UK Smartphone Owners Use Their Phones in Stores

More and more UK consumers are reaching for smartphones while browsing in physical stores, according to a February 2014 report, “Agile Consumer 2013,” commissioned by Cheil Worldwide. Its research partner OnePoll conducted the study, which looked at a wide range of shopping behaviors involving smartphones, from general research to price-checking and purchasing, in Q4 2013.

Read More >>>

For Most Global Mobile Internet Users, Phones Are The Primary Device For Surfing the Web

6 in 10 mobile internet users from 14 key markets around the world say they typically go online to surf the web mostly (37%) or exclusively (23%) from their mobile phone, says InMobi in a new survey conducted by Decision Fuel and On Device Research.

Read More >>>

Tablet Web Browser Usage Patterns on a Typical Day

In a new report, Chitika has taken a look at how tablet usage – in this case web browsing only, not applications – fluctuates during a typical day. The analysis averaged out hourly ad impressions over a 2-week period from Chitika’s network for the iPad, Microsoft Surface, and Android tablets, reaching some fairly unsurprising but nonetheless interesting conclusions. Predictably, the iPad dominated in overall usage; each tablet sees very similar usage patterns.

Read More >>>

Analytics

CMOs: Most Projects Still Aren’t Using Marketing Analytics

Most projects fail to use available or requested marketing analytics, report American CMOs responding to the latest CMO Survey conducted by the Duke Fuqua School of Business. The study’s results indicate that on average, only 32.5% of projects use analytics – and that’s actually a slight improvement from the past couple of biannual studies, where usage has hovered around the 30% mark.

Read More >>>

See more research from other weeks here

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Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
Digital Marketing Research Publications for week 9 2014

Source: State of Digital

Digital Marketing Research Publications for Week 9 2014

Optimizing Events Online and In-person: Smx, Pubcon, Google Hangouts and More

By Kristi Kellogg

Optimizing Events Online and In-Person: SMX, Pubcon, Google Hangouts and More was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Hot off the presses, it’s the event optimization edition of the SEO Newsletter. We dive into optimizing your experience at a live event — perfect timing, what with next month’s SMX and Pubcon conferences. Read on for a peak at what the February SEO Newsletter has in store.

FEATURE: Attend SMX West for Inspiration, Education and Network Building

In the feature article, longtime SMX attendee (and SMX Advanced presenter) Virginia Nussey shares many benefits you stand to gain from attending SMX West in San Jose, March 10-13. In Attend SMX West for Inspiration, Education and Network Building, Nussey breaks down those benefits, which include:

• Catch up with all the latest in Internet marketing news, digital strategies and search engine developments.


• Train with the brightest minds in boot camps dedicated to search engine optimization, social media management, paid search and digital marketing.


• Listen to insights from the likes of Google Search Engine Vice President Amit Singhal and Search Engine Land Founding Editor Danny Sullivan.

BACK TO BASICS: A Social Media Guide to Event Attendance

In A Social Media Guide to Event Attendance, I let you in on my top tips for maximizing social engagement, specifically during live events. Those tips include:

• Using and identifying the most relevant event hashtags.


• Mentioning speakers, influencers and attendees whenever possible.


• Taking advantage of 200% engagement increase sharing a photo can cause.

But Wait, There’s More …

In the Hot Topic, learn why Google+ is taking off. Once denounced as a ghost town among Internet marketers, it’s now the place to be thanks to SEO benefits, Google Authorship tie-ins, Hangouts on Air and more. In Education Matters, read up a new online course for copywriters looking to add B2B SEO work to their resume. The Success Works B2B SEO Copywriting Certification Course teaches writers the ins and outs of content creation for the web for B2B businesses specifically, focusing on keyword research, keyword discovery, competitive analysis in the post-Hummingbird era and much more. In addition to all this, you’ll get the roundup of February’s top developments in the Internet marketing space.

Bruce Clay, Inc. is committed to providing thought leadership and transferring knowledge to our many readers through the SEO Newsletter and the Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog (recently topping WebMeUp’s list of “remarkable” blogs from digital marketing agencies). Want the SEO Newsletter delivered straight to your inbox each month? Sign up here.

Source: Bruce Clay

Optimizing Events Online and In-person: Smx, Pubcon, Google Hangouts and More