Posts tagged Affect
4 Ways PPC Goals Can Affect A Call Tracking Strategy
Sep 1st
Do eager prospects ever visit your website then call your sales team to learn more? If your answer is yes, at some point, you may have wondered how to measure a phone call as a conversion. While Web analytics tools track online conversions, you may also need a call tracking tool to measure phone…
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Using Query Volume to Affect Google Rankings
Aug 4th
According to Google, query volume has nothing to do with search rankings. But Martin MacDonald isn’t buying that, and might have evidence that search volume can affect Google rankings after all.
MacDonald, head of SEO for global media agency OMD (that’s this OMD, not the first OMD that comes to mind for Generation X), conducted a little experiment. By creating more search volume than usual for the term “Martin MacDonald SEO,” he was able to nudge his personal site up into the first page of Google results. Google also started appending “seo” to searches for Martin MacDonald in its suggest results.
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Assuming it works, what does that mean to you? You can’t influence what people search for, right? Wrong. MacDonald notes that some companies are spending ad money to tell people to “search for Samsung TVs” or the like. Of course, if your company doesn’t have a TV or radio advertising budget (and if you’re sitting there hoping to nudge the SEO results with search volume, that seems likely) then MacDonald has a few other tricks to suggest.
For example, MacDonald says that some companies use tweets that link to search results, instead of linking directly to the site. The same for company newsletters – if you’re convinced that search volume will help, link to search results instead of the page.
Does it work? MacDonald’s results seem to suggest that it does. It’s doubtful that Google is going to confirm it, of course, but I suspect we’ll see many more experiments in the near future to see how it turns out.
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How Will Google Affect SEO? – Entrepreneur (blog)
Aug 3rd
 Reuters |
How Will Google Affect SEO?
Entrepreneur (blog) With such an unbelievable early adoption rate, many internet marketing professionals are beginning to wonder if those "+1"s will also start affecting how businesses use search-engine optimization, or SEO. Google+ combines many popular features of … SEO Consult® Review Social Media Marketing Services Search + Social Signals = Success (And The Potential of Google+) Will restaurants add Google+ to crowded social media plates? |
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Your URL File Extension Won’t Affect Your SEO – Hit Search
Aug 2nd
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Your URL File Extension Won’t Affect Your SEO
Hit Search There are plenty of ways to improve your website’s Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, and the purpose of this series of articles is to illuminate the many ways that this is possible. … Internet Marketing SEO – It's Easy When You Know How WebiMax Ranks #1 in SEO Companies by topseos.com for August 2011 SEO Cheat Sheet, Ultra-Geek Style |
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AT&T to Start Data Throttling, How Will It Affect Users?
Jul 29th
AT&T has announced that starting on Oct. 1 it will throttle the data speeds of users with unlimited data plans who exceed bandwidth thresholds on its 3G network. AT&T is following in the tracks Verizon and Virgin Mobile in reducing data throughput speeds of its heaviest mobile data users. With more data-intensive apps being published everyday, how will AT&T’s data throttling affect users’ mobile experience?
AT&T’s announcement verifies rumors that started with 9to5Mac citing sources that it was inevitable that AT&T would make an announcement. A press release came from the Dallas-based AT&T in the afternoon confirming the throttling, which it says will affect the top 5% of its users. AT&T did not make it clear what the data threshold would be other than that it would be the top 5% of users that are still on unlimited data plans, which the company described as a “vast majority” of subscribers.
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How Much Data Before You Are Throttled?
9to5Mac gives some guidelines on to what kind of usage will achieve reaching the throttling threshold. The site says 12,000 emails or website visits, four streaming movies or five hours of streaming music. That all makes sense except for the last bit, which may be a typo as five hours of music certainly will not eat anywhere near 2.5 GB of data that is expected to cue the throttling. It is more likely to be about four or five days or so (not 24 hour days, but say six to eight hours a day or so). This is from experiment with data usage on AT&T by streaming Pandora radio over a cellular connection during a workday with either a Samsung Galaxy Captivate or Motorola Atrix on AT&T or an iPad on the Verizon network.
“Streaming video apps, remote web camera apps, sending large data files (like video) and some online gaming are examples of applications that can use data quickly,” AT&T stated in its release.
For the average consumer, a data cap and throttling will not be an issue. Most users do not approach 200 MB worth of data a month, let alone 2.5 GB. Yet, with Netflix and Hulu support coming to more devices and the drastic change in how people interact with media via mobile devices (smartphones in particular), habits are changing and mobile data usage is only going to go up. That is the reason that AT&T is instituting the data throttling plan but it may affect more users in the next several years than it would have in the past couple as usage patterns change.
For instance, with near constant streaming of music, heavy Twitter and email usage and the occasional picture upload, my data usage almost never topped 2 GB in any month and I am what you may consider a mobile “power user.”
Instant Uploads Increasing Usage
The Android app for Google Plus allows users to instantly upload photos they take in the background. It is one of Google Plus’s killer features. Pictures go to an online queue where they can be shared with various circles. I am a huge fan of instant upload and it has me sharing a lot more photos online than I ever had with Twitter or Facebook. Yet, instant upload has made my data use skyrocket. In the first day of July I used near 400 MB of data and for the month (with two days remaining) my data usage is near 4 GB. That is almost entirely through picture uploads related to Google Plus. Apps with instant upload capabilities will only increase in the future.
That is why it is interesting that AT&T only said “the top 5%” as opposed to giving a solid number, like 2.5 GB. In its announcement, AT&T also encourages users to consume data over Wi-Fi whenever possible, citing its free use of AT&T hot spots to AT&T customers. It is a good bit of advice, Wi-Fi generally will be faster and more reliable than data use and will not cut into your data cap or threshold. If the entire population of mobile users starts consuming more data on average, does that make the threshold limit go up correspondingly?
AT&T said in its release that it will warn users when they are near the throttling threshold and give grace periods to ease the impact of the throughput reduction. In any case, the trend from the cellular operators is clear: data usage has put a burden on their systems and they are going to start doing something about it. Throttling does not cost users any money and becomes a inconvenience only to a small subset of the populations. In that way it may be the most utilitarian way to address data management – a small amount of pain for the benefit of the most amount of users.
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How Will Google Plus Affect SEO?
Jul 13th
Google Plus has been live for barely two weeks, but inevitably, online marketers and search engine optimization experts are curious about how the new social product might influence organic search rankings in the future.
Officially, there’s no official indication of how Plus will affect SEO, but plenty of speculation and some obvious hints about where things may be headed.
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Signs Point to Social Factors Influencing Search Rankings
Even before Google rolled out the +1 button (a precusor to Google Plus itself), social factors from sites like Twitter and Facebook were already being baked into search engine result pages (SERPs), even if the extent of their immediate influence on Page Rank wasn’t immediately obvious.
For example, research has indicated that the number of retweets a link gets on Twitter has an effect on how it’s indexed on Google, or at least that was the case before Google quietly cut off the Twitter firehose from their search results and folded its real-time search feature earlier this month.
With Google Plus and the +1 button, the social activities are taking place on Google itself, so it’s hard to imagine things like the number of +1 button clicks a given page gets wouldn’t have an effect on that page’s organic rankings.
Twitter Remains Relevant, But Google Plus’s Impact is Less Clear
Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEO software vendor SEOMoz recently undertook some experiments on Twitter and Google Plus to see how these social media sites change search rankings, especially in light of recent changes to Google’s real-time search feature.
Fishkin created a series of unique, unindexed URL’s and shared them exclusively on Twitter before and after the Google firehose shutoff. He then shared another URL exclusively via Google Plus. In each case, he asked followers to retweet or reshare the post, but not to do so outside of the originating social site.
The results showed that even though the Twitter firehose was no longer flowing directly Google’s way, tweets and retweets still aid in page indexation. One possible factor here is the many tweet-scraping sites that automatically republish tweets outside of Twitter.com.
In the Google Plus sharing experiment, the test page was ranked #1 on Google within 2 hours, showing that Google’s new social product can help pages get indexed, although not quite as quickly as Twitter used to. In terms of actual rankings, the SEOMoz team wasn’t able to find a correlation there.
Too Early in the Game to Tell
It’s hard to imagine that Google Plus and the +1 won’t have a substantial impact on both indexation and ranking of URL’s in search results. Not only is the +1 button included on every post withing Google Plus and on content publishers’ Websites, but it’s literally sitting next to every single search result that Google returns. Whatever the algorithmic effect this may have in the future, right now it’s probably too early to accurately predict.
What do you think? Will Google Plus revolutionize SEO or do you see it having only a minimal effect?
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How Would a Website “Do Not Track” Law Affect Small Businesses?
May 5th
Fueled by concerns about privacy, legislation that would limit Websites’ ability to track users’ browsing history via cookies is currently making its way through the California legislature and the U.S. Congress.
The so-called “Do Not Track” legislation is favored by consumer groups and privacy advocates, but opposed by many online marketers, who fear it may limit their ability to monetize their content and services online. Since this type of data is used to target ads to people based on their history and preferences, some fear that establishing an opt-in-only system could hurt the effectiveness of those ads and, in turn, the revenue they generate. Today, Google became the first browser maker to officially oppose California’s version of the law.
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Neither bill is close to becoming law, but if passed, how would “Do Not Track” legislation affect small businesses online? This is the question explored recently in an article on Inc’s Website. Some small businesses who run advertising-funded Websites are concerned that a “Do No Track” law could cut into their revenue, which smaller operations may be less capable of recovering from.
In particular, cost-per-click (CPC) advertising could take a hit, since those ad units often utilize behavioral targeting to deliver ads that are more relevant and thus, more likely to be clicked.
It’s a bit early to tell, since the bills are still being debated and hashed out, but a system under which users have to opt-in to being tracked (rather than opting out), it seems likely that the effectiveness of online ads could be affected. In the meantime, some browser manufacturers have already rolled out their own tracking opt-out options.
While the legislation and the FTC framework that preceded it were born out of legitimate privacy concerns, depending on the final details, there’s a chance such a law could hamper the growth of some small businesses.
What do you think about the proposed “Do Not Track” legislation? Should small businesses be concerned?
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