Covario Study Finds Holiday Season Pushes Global Search Ad Spending by Tech …
MarketWatch (press release)
SAN DIEGO, CA, Jan 04, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Covario, Inc., the nation's largest independent provider of search marketing agency services and SEO software solutions, today issued its Global Search Spending Analysis, reporting that spending …

and more »

View full post on SEO – Google News

Small Business News from Gaebler.com

Survey Finds SMB Marketers Struggle To Nail Down ROI For Social Media, SEO And …
Small Business News from Gaebler.com
While many marketers have been successful in measuring email (47%) and direct marketing (41%) campaigns, significantly fewer are effective in measuring social media (26%), SEO (24%) and other initiatives. "The ease of tracking online metrics, …
Marketing and Measurement: Still Not So Perfect TogetherMarketing Pilgrim

all 2 news articles »

View full post on SEO – Google News

View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Pubcon Massive List

Miss #Pubcon? 2011 Vegas Recaps of Sessions & Links to Photos

Blogging

Free Formatting Checklist for Guest Authors and Paid Contributors – Ann Smarty

SEO

4 Graphics to Help Illustrate On-Page SEO – Rand Fishkin

7 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire *That* SEO Agency – The Future Buzz

What Google Plus Company Pages Are Teaching Us – Search Engine Land

8 Tips to Maximize Your Branded Presence in the Google Local Search Results – Blumenthals

The Clickthrough Rate Equation In Organic Search, Part Two – Search Engine Land

Update: Google Local Mixed Results Hit the Blender – Dream Systems Media

News

Twitter Communications Head Sean Garrett Leaving the Company – ReadWriteWeb

Bing Central: Bing’s New Self-Promotional User Hub – Search Engine Land

Identified, The Search Engine For Professionals, Opens Public Access To Its 50 Million Rankings – TechCrunch

Social Media

How NOT to Network on Twitter: 5 Common Pitfalls and how to Avoid Them – SocialNomics

What Google Plus Company Pages Are Teaching Us – Business 2 Community

3 Simple Ways Scheduling Tweets Can Help Brands… And 3 Ways It Can Hurt – Social Times

Now It’s Facebook’s Turn For 20 Years Of FTC Privacy Audits – Search Engine Land

Google

Google May Penalize Ad Heavy Pages – Search Engine Land

Keyword “Not Provided” By Google Spikes, Now 7-14% In Cases – Search Engine Land

Google+ Pages Now Open For Businesses, Brands, Places & More – Search Engine Land

PPC

An SEO Guide to Adsense, Ads and Placement – SEOmoz

Video

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

View full post on Search Engine Journal

SEO

- Custom Reporting using Google Analytics and Google Docs – The Ultimate Analytics Mashup – SEOmoz

- New Look for Places Results On Google.com - Search Engine Land

- The Ultimate Keyword Sorting and Organization Spreadsheet – Search Engine Guide

- Where Did Cached Pages Go On Google? – Search Engine Land

- 7 Habits of Highly Effective SEOs – Neil Patel

- 3 Steps to Social SEO for Your Boring-Ass Clients – Ross Rav, Youmoz

- Yes, EVERY Page Needs to Be Optimized- Nick Stamoulis

- Eyetracking & SEO: Fad, Fact, Or Fiction? – Shari Thurow, SEL

- There’s More To Life Than Links & Sex – Lisa Barone 2009 – Comments still apply today?

- Proof that Google’s Secure Search Now Affects More Users – Seer Interactive

- Advanced Google Analytics – Tips and Tricks – Fabian Alvares, Youmoz

- Yo! @MCHammer – Break Down These SEO Tips to Launch @WireDoo Search Engine – Yo! Yo! SEO

- A Practical Guide to SERP Profiling – Part 1 = Greg Boser

- A New Way of Looking at Ranking Factors – Danny Sullivan on SEOmoz

- Introduction To URL Rewriting – Paul Tero, Smashing Magazine

- SEO WordPress plugin to export commenters and find influencers w/ Domain & Page Authority – Wil Reynolds, SeerInterative

Social Media

- Online Database of Social Media Policies – Social Media Governance

Marketing

- 6 Sure Ways to Commit Blog Suicide Part 2 – SEM-Group.net

- Why Does Great Content Fail? – Dr. Pete, SEOmoz

Mobile

- How Mobile Payments Will Evolve In the Next Several Years -ReadWriteWeb

Design

- A CRAP way to improve usability – UserFocus

- Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design – Harry Brignull

News

- How Facebook Ticker exposing your information & behavior without your knowledge – The Hacker News

Google

- Two honest Google employees: our products don’t protect your privacy – Christopher Soghoian

- Google Raises Local Search Stakes With New Places SERP – Greg Sterling, SEL

- Google Places Gets A New SERP And Yelp Continues To Win - Matt Sitala

- Google Officially Rolls Out Ads At The Bottom Of Search Results – Pamela Parker, SEL

- Giving you fresher, more recent search results – Google Blog

- Grow Google Plus Following with Google Search – Travis Campbell

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

View full post on Search Engine Journal

VS

- Should You Care How High Your Klout Score Is?  vs  Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score

SEO

- Google Removes The + Search Command – Search Engine Land

- How do you measure the success of your SEO work? – Jill Whalen

- Why Google Really Turned off Keyword Referrals for Logged in Users – MakeItRank.com

- Authority vs. Popularity in Search Engine Rankings – Bill Slawski

- How Users Search For Local Businesses + 5 Tips To Optimize Local Listings – SEL

- Why Aren’t You Using Twitter To Build Links – Seer Interactive

- 16 Insights into Google’s Rating Guidelines – Dr. Pete on SEOmoz

- A Framework for Site Reviews (with Examples) – Rand Fishkin

Local

- Google Places Adds a Range of New UGC Features – Mike Blumenthal

- It’s Time for Google Places to Treat Reviews Like a Grown Up – Mike Blumenthal

Social Media

- How To Create Facebook Subscription Lists – AllFacebook.com

- The Social Media Handbook – 57 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs – Neil Patel

- 60 Social Media Marketing Tips for the Holiday Season – Kerry Jones, BlueGlass

- 10 social media trends that agencies should know – Raven Tools

- 8 Great Twitter Tools That Will Get You Tweeting Like A Pro – Jeff Bullas

- 7 Money Saving Ways For Local Businesses To Market Themselves On Facebook – AllFacebook

- Why we’re not using Google+ to reach consumers, so far – GeekWire

- 50 Kloutless Ways To Get Value From Twitter – Outspoken Media

- Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far? – Tonia Ries

- 27 Twitter Tools To Help You Find And Manage Followers – Dainis Graveris

- A More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score – Klout Blog

- Klout’s scoring changes incite a riot of complaints – TheNextWeb

PPC

- Heroview – The Secrets Behind a Successful PPC Management Process with Crystal Anderson – PPC Hero

- Retiring support for Internet Explorer 6 – AdWords Blog

Video

- Video Marketing Process Breakdown – Nick Stamoulis

- Google Hides Search Referral Data with New SSL Implementation – Emergency Whiteboard Friday

Marketing

- 4 Steps to Understanding the ROI of Your Newsletter – Bruce Clay

Design

- Rotating Offers – the Scourge of Home Page Design – Wide Funnel

- ABC’s of SEO: J is for Javascript- Site Visibility

- 67 Elegant, Effective and FREE Website Graphics for Serious Online Publishers - Copyblogger

- Five Easy Ways to Improve Your Homepage – Kim Krause Berg

Google

- Export your sites blocklist from Chrome to your Google Account – Google Search Blog

- Google Hates Affiliates – SEOBook

- Opinion: Peering Behind Google’s Privacy Screen – Jonah Stein on SEL

- Google Transparency Report Now Shows User Data Requests – SEW

- Google Invests in Privacy for Profit - Rhea Drysdale

Humor

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

View full post on Search Engine Journal

Google Plus is very proud of its photo features, especially the instant uploads from Android phones, and today’s Plus update also adds new photo editing tools called Creative Kit. It has basic editing tools as well as filters like everybody has these days.

Sponsor

What’s Hot On Google Plus

What’s Hot appears underneath new posts inside the main stream as well as in the Sparks area on the left sidebar. It’s a new way to discover content on Plus that makes a nice algorithmic complement to the right-now real-time search tool. Discovery on Plus is now nicely positioned between the ways Facebook and Twitter work.

Ripples: Watch Sharing Happen

Ripples is a sexy feature that lets you visually follow the flow of a conversation. It even incorporates some analytics. That’s much more data than other social networks give casual users about their posts. Very Google-y. Visual representations of data are catching on at the Googleplex. The Google Analytics team also recently introduced a flow visualization tool.

Creative Kit for Photos

Google touts 3.4 billion photo uploads as its favorite metric of the success of Plus. When Android users (who have turned on Google Plus) take a photo, it uploads automatically, so that’s sort of cheating. The photos are kept private until a user decides to share them on Plus, which then makes them visible instantly. If Google talked about how many photos were shared, then we’d have a real sense.

Today’s update gives Plus users some tools to spruce up their photos, which may increase sharing as users get more excited about photos. Trendy filters and Halloween gimmicks aside, Plus users can do much more with photos now.

The editing tools are desktop-only for now, but I’d put money on them coming to mobile apps soon.

What do you think of these new Google Plus features?

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

SEO

- 7 Technical SEO Wins for Web Developers – Distilled

- The Meta Keywords Tag Lives At Bing & Why Only Spammers Should Use It – Search Engine Land

- Social Signals & SEO: Focus on Authority – Eric Enge on Search Engine Watch

- Google Questions & Answers from Matt Cutts Live Q&A – Sept 2011 – StepForth

- 5 SEO Issues That Can Affect A Link Campaign – Search Engine Land

- A Writer’s Guide to Working With Keywords (Without Tearing Your Hair Out) – Nicki Porter, Copypress

- HTML5 and SEO: New Strategies for Optimizing Code – Vertical Measures

- 7 notes from the inhouse SEO to agency SEO’s – State of Search

Analytics

- Making search more secure: Accessing search query data in Google Analytics – Google Analytics Blog

- Google Whores Out Users With False Privacy Claims – Yoost de Valk on SEOBook

- Google To Begin Encrypting Searches & Outbound Clicks By Default With SSL Search – Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land

- SEO Under Attack – The Google Analytics Keyword Data Apocalypse – Alan Bleiweiss on SEJ

- Now We Will Need To Pay To See Keyword Referrer Data? – Shaun Anderson

- Google Turning the Lights Out on Organic Data – Opinion by Tony Verre – Tony Verre on SEJ

- Dennis Goedegebuure’s Thoughts on Changes in Google Analytics – SEJ

- Discussion: Impact of Google’s Encrypted Search? – Sphinn

- Dear Google, This is War – Ian Lurie on Search News Central

- What Google’s encrypted search means for Raven – Raven Tools Blog

- SEOs Strike Out as Google Encrypts Signed-in Search Data - Jonathan Allen, Search Engine Watch

- Say goodbye to branded vs. non-branded SEO analysis? – Hugo Guzman

Internet Marketing

- 3 Tested Email Marketing Templates You Can Use Right Now – Copyblogger

- Mastering The Content Workflow – Lee Odden, TopRankBlog

- The Do’s And Don’ts Of Infographic Design – Smashing Magazine

- The 60-30-60 Framework: A Non-Writer’s Help Guide – Search Engine People

Social Media

- Beta launch of bitly’s search platform and reputation monitoring service.- Bit.ly

- HOW TO: Get More Twitter Followers [INFOGRAPHIC] – AllTwitter

- 7 Ways Universities Are Using Facebook as a Marketing Tool – Mashable

- The 5 Crucial Rules of How to Handle A Social Media Crisis, Search Engine People

PPC

- 25 Tips For Giving Your PPC Campaigns a Boost – Search Engine Watch

- PPC Secret Weapons & Brand Cannibal Combat with Melissa Mackey – aimClear

Design

7 Blog Design Tips from a Content Strategist – Six Revisions

News

- How the US government and Google will watch you – Elevate Local

- The Fed Plans to Monitor Google, Twitter, Facebook – Search Engine Watch

- Google Hands Wikileaks Volunteer’s Gmail Data to U.S. Government – ReadWriteWeb

Humor

- Matt Cutts Capturing Baby Pandas! – Search Engine Roundtable

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

View full post on Search Engine Journal

Mastracci also uncovered Google Voice integration, which will not require phone numbers, new photo browsing options including photos from Messenger, new, clearly labeled privacy presets and a feature like Facebook’s wall, letting users post on each other’s profile without showing up in others’ streams.

Sponsor

Mastracci is co-founder at a social customer service site called gri.pe, and he’s a former StumbleUpon employee. He’s also the developer of a Chrome extension for Google Plus called Replies and more. He shared his discoveries in a blog post and several subsequent posts on Plus. He was able to turn on the privacy and photo features and post UI screenshots.

The new privacy presets range from “Public on the web” to “Lockdown,” with two intermediate options. They’re not optimal for all users, but the menu Mastracci discovered includes clear explanations of what each preset does. For users who don’t feel like painstakingly adjusting privacy settings, these four choices are clearly labeled and can be selected with one click.

If Google does launch Experts as a Q&A service, it could have interesting implications for Quora, who just announced threading, voting, images and editing to its comments yesterday. These are major overhauls for the preeminent Q&A site, but they only bring it up to par with Google Plus’ commenting features. If Google Experts has the same posting mechanics as Plus, it will launch with Quora’s conversation features right out of the gate. Quora has excellent topical browsing and tagging, but Google’s pretty good at identifying and serving up relevant search results. This would be a neat move for Google Plus, especially considering Facebook Questions’ failure to fly.

If Google launches Experts as a Q&A feature in Google Plus, would you use it?

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb

It is an interesting play by CNN. Zite is a powerful news reading iPad app with a lot of excellent functionality. It operates almost like a “Pandora for news” that gives users serendipitous resources based on inputted interest and usage. Yet, outside of being a cool iPad app, Zite is driven by some interesting technology that could be of great use to CNN.

Sponsor

Zite takes many things into account when surfacing news. It integrates Facebook and Twitter along with inputs that readers are presented within articles. Yet, Zite is not just a feed reader or social aggregator the way Flipboard is. Zite’s backend is built off of Worio, a social search “discovery engine” designed for serendipitous content discovery. As such, it crawls content as much as it uses direct feeds from users’ social accounts.

Worio, as its own stand-alone product, did not taken off. Yet, Zite pivoted from the search engine to Zite with now-CEO Mark Anderson as an advisor. Anderson will stay on as CEO and run day-to-day operations from the company’s office in San Francisco while founder Ali Davar will remain the executive director and Mike Klass the CTO in charge of research and development. Anderson will report to KC Estenson, general manager of CNN Digital.

“When I became CEO of Zite, I was faced with a difficult choice: take venture capital and race to build Zite into a viable business or join forces with a large company and work with a larger pool of resources,” Andserson wrote on Zite’s blog today. “Despite many attractive paths in both directions, Zite chose to be acquired by CNN. We found a partner who shares our vision and our passion for building an incredible discovery platform.”

To Remain Content Agnostic

Anderson also said that Zite will in no way feature CNN, Turner or Time Warner (which owns CNN) content in any way. The platform will remain content agnostic.

“We see a trend developing here, one that is about the future of content discovery, and we believe that increasingly people will come to learn about new types of content based as much upon their personal interests and passions as they do the news of the day,” Estenson said in a open letter regarding the acquisition.

In the history of news media, CNN seems to be the perfect candidate to take over a digital startup like Zite. CNN disrupted traditional TV news by launching the first ever 24-hour new network and CNN.com has been at the leading edge of technology and website design for the last several years. CNN now has a wing in its digital division solely dedicated to mobile apps, starting with the iPad and likely coming to other mobile platforms.

Zite had a little controversy upon its launch in March. It was sent cease-and-desist letters from a plethora of media companies that because of the way it stripped ads out of aggregated content. It rectified the situation shortly thereafter and Anderson was brought on board to be the CEO, replacing Davar.

Discuss

View full post on ReadWriteWeb