80% of Google Buzz Powered by Bots & FeedsGoogle Buzz may be a centralized microblogging system, but for the most part, its not run by humans .. instead; robots. What better way for Google to gain access to real time Twitter data (if Microsoft ever buys Twitter and blocks Google access) than have Google users run auto tweeted material through Buzz?PostRank has an interesting study on the percentage of Buzz that is powered by feeds and bots. Turns out, approximately 60% of the content on Buzz is from Twitter! Many users have hooked up their accounts to automatically repost their content from Twitter either directly, through FriendFeed, or via another service. The runner up to Twitter? Another set of bots! This time, it's automated alerts from feeds, e.g. CNN publishes a new story and a bot pushes it out to the Buzz stream. All in all, those two sources account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz. For one, I’d like to see a comparison between Buzz and Twitter on these stats, but for the most part, this is what I expected out of Buzz … another version of Friendfeed. How about you? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. 80% of Google Buzz Powered by Bots & Feeds Yahoo Buys Me.me Domain for its Twitter Style Yahoo MemeYahoo has purchased the domain Me.me, for its Yahoo Meme microblogging service – the Yahoo version of Twitter. With its earnings up in Q1 2010 over Q1 2009, and things looking good for Yahoo with improved ad spending, it will be interesting to see other moves the company makes over the next few months.From paidContent : Yahoo … calls the purchase "an essential component of our online branding strategy." The buy may suggest that Yahoo is readying a wider roll-out of the service, which has not been advertised widely. On Meme, users write up short entries and add photos or videos to their pages, which are called "memes;" users can "follow" other memes and track entries from those pages via one central dashboard. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Yahoo Buys Me.me Domain for its Twitter Style Yahoo Meme Twitter Valuation InfographicI love infographics, for obvious reasons. One, they are easy to scan, read and understand. Two, from a marketing and publishing perspective, infographics are easy to pass around, retweet and can go viral.Here is one I saw today on Darren Rowse’s Twitip on the History of Twitter’s Valuation. This is hot hot stuff :)  Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Twitter Valuation Infographic Weekly Search & Social News: 04/20/2010Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – It was another interesting week out on the trails with some good posts, some humour, a whack of social and of course, lots of patents (that best part of my week). Starting things off is the new data Google was giving away via Webmaster Tools. I’ve talked to more than a few people that weren’t happy about the data integrity, for my part, I haven’t really dug around enough to have an opinion.Anyway, on with the show! Lead StoryGoogle gives more dataNot surprisingly, the announcement of more data in Webmaster Tools is the lead story this week. What's the ultimate value? Well that part is still somewhat debatable. One of the problems we're seeing is that the data doesn't always jive with the Google Analytics numbers. But hey, that's pretty normal with ALL data. It depends how it's captured and calculated;Related Reading;
On with the show!
Talk of the town
Search Geek Central
Search Patents
/end SOSG session
Weekly Search & Social News: 04/20/2010 Google Renames its Local Business Center to Google PlacesTo connect its Local Business Center with the millions of people who use Google every day to find places, Google is renaming the Local Business Center to Google Places. Google recently introduced Place Pages to help people make more informed decisions about where to go – from restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops. Google Place Pages connects users to the best sources of information across the web – information that include photos, reviews, real-time updates and various promotional offers by business owners.Google was quite successful with its implementation of the Place Page. In fact around 4 million businesses have already used it and claim for their individual Place Page on Google through the Local Business Center which starting today is now labeled as Google Places. Despite the change in the service’s name, Google will continue to provide the same tools offered by Place Pages and the Local Business Center. In line with the renaming of the Local Business Center to Google Places, Google has also rolled out several new features of the service.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Google Renames its Local Business Center to Google Places What's A Facebook Fan Worth? Definitely Not $3.60!Last week, Mashable published an article about the value of a Facebook fan. This article has been shared thousands of times and reposted all over the marketingverse, and I'm terrified by the implications of how may people have read it (more on that later).Using a CPM model, Vitrue calculated that a Facebook fan is worth $3.60. Here's the math:  There's one problem: This is NOT how Facebook works. This statistic reinforces one of the most common misconceptions about social media. A misconception near-and-dear to people who think in TRPs and GRPs that is so flawed that it threatens to destabilize your efforts on Facebook and potentially reward bad behavior by community managers. This statistic puts a value on 1-way communication and totally overlooks the core of a good Facebook campaign. Engagement When working in social spaces, engagement is key. Lets say you have a million fans and you post daily. By some miracle you get a 100% impression rate, but only 5 likes and 5 comments. The bulk of those million impressions came from people scrolling through their newsfeed where your post is likely sandwiched between posts by friends, other brands and in the worst case scenario a note that a friend has engaged with your competitor. Few intelligent media buyers would pay $5 CPM for this kind of cluttered and shared text-only inventory. In this case, you had 10 meaningful engagements and a boatload of mediocre impressions, especially since you probably got most of your fans through an engagement block that allowed people to become fans without ever visiting your page. Your 1MM fans are hardly worth $3.60 a piece at a 0.001% engagement rate. If you were buying banner inventory and had a 0.001% engagement or click-thru rate, you'd move your money elsewhere, but by Vitrue's logic each of these fans is still worth $3.60 However, when someone comments on your wall or likes a post or uses an app, their activity is shared on their newsfeed. All of their friends see someone they know, and hopefully trust, engaging with your brand, which is effectively an endorsement. Most brand activity in social spaces is not instigated by brands. It's people asking their peers for advice, and a personal endorsement is the best you can hope for. So how do you measure Facebook?InteractionsAn interaction is defined as a "like", comment or post on a discussion thread. An interaction is much more valuable than a simple impression because it means that not only have you enticed a user into taking action, but you've also been exposed to all their friends via their newsfeed.
These are the most meaningful metrics. A conversion is deeper than a like or comment. It represents a meaningful step taken by your fans and is also shared on their newsfeed. These conversion metrics apply to apps, but you can apply however makes the most sense to you.
These are definitely part of a comprehensive report, but are by far the least meaningful metrics. However, they are a definite step ahead of fan numbers, which may be the most nefarious of all.
However, the non-actionable metric that most people care about most is pure fan numbers and fan growth. Fan growth has more to do with the quality of your space than anything else. If your fan growth is slowing, first look at your unsubscribe rate, which will probably surprise you. If you're not creating engaging, compelling content, all those valuable impressions that netted you out at $3.60 per fan are probably resulting in fan attrition. The best way to grow your fan base is provide compelling, engaging content and experiences. Your fans will do the work for you by providing a personal recommendation for your page and brand to all of their friends every time they engage with you. Why I'm ScaredNow that Vitrue shouted from the top of the social media mountain that a Facebook fan is worth $3.60, people all over the world are probably scratching their head thinking, "How can I get more Facebook fans so I can tell my boss/client/mom/dentist that my Facebook page is worth $3.6MM?", instead of, "How can I better engage the fans I have and create meaningful experiences that genuinely make people's lives more enjoyable and result in people sharing my content, which will in turn increase my fanbase, brand loyalty and sales?"Next thing you know, your community managers are acting like Wall Street types making short-sighted decisions to blow out their numbers to meet campaign goals… and one day you realize you have a million fans that like you less than when they clicked the become a fan of button because all you do is clutter their newsfeed twice a day. For all I know, your Facebook fans are worth $3.60 each, but probably it's got little to do with impressions and much more to do with meaningful interactions with your brand. My guess is you'll never know how much they are worth, unless you are running some seriously kick-ass, water-tight eCommerce machine! All you can really know is that people who regularly engage with your brand and find those engagements pleasant probably like you a whole lot more than the guy who's sending them two messages a day because he read an article about how much money they are worth. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. What's A Facebook Fan Worth? Definitely Not $3.60! WordStream Does it Again: New Awesome Keyword Utility for SEOs (paid)Our great friends over at WordStream have another important update we want to share at SEJ. Today they are launching WordStream Keyword Management for SEO which is a keyword research tool targeted to SEOs (as you may know, they previously specialized in PPC keyword research and are now extending their service to SEO needs).It offers the same keyword suggestion capabilities as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and similar tools, but layers on keyword analytics, keyword grouping and organization, and integrated content authoring tools for roughly the same price (starting at $49/month) you'd expect to pay for traditional keyword research tools.I didn’t have time to play with the trial version myself yet (I am definitely going to do that this week!) but here are the features that are advertised:
 From there you can organize your data into a taxonomy of tightly related groups and sub-groups; this resulting keyword structure is incredibly useful for creating SEO strategy, setting content creation priorities and even planning your site’s information architecture. The software suggests potential keyword groups which you can review and create with the click of a button.  So looks very interesting – really no excuse for not trying out considering there’s a free trial version! Let me know your thoughts! Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. WordStream Does it Again: New Awesome Keyword Utility for SEOs (paid) SEO Is A Team Sport – Part 1Over the years I’ve had the curse blessing to participate on several ginormous substantial nightmare web projects that have involved several control freaks participants. Inevitably in this chaotic maelstrom process, the role of the SEO guru specialist has called for my God given slowly evolved talent at underhanded manipulation diplomacy and self-eye gouging patience. And with every new train wreck project, I suffer inconsolably learn a bit more.In every one a few of my previous Pulitzer Prize quality articles I’ve repleatedly at least briefly mentioned the need to disregard other peoples views step into other peoples shoes when creating another masterpiece working on another boring project so that we, the only intelligent people in the room people entrusted with the only aspect of web work that matters SEO responsibility, can pretend their perspective is relevant truly succeed. Here then, are some of the court jesters various players in the birthing process lacking medication web development life cycle and why we need to begrudgingly step into their shoes in order to show we care even when we don’t achieve maximum results. The Site Owner By the time a web project kicks off, the person who thinks they’re a genius site owner is completely clueless filled with hope and trust, which comes as a result of the fact that they really don’t have a clue they’ve made a significant financial commitment. And if you yourself have ever gambled with money you shouldn’t have made a serious financial commitment, it’s easy to think back on that time and grasp how foolishly psychologically you’ve then gone into a state of make believe faith. Faith that you haven’t blown your food money you’ve made the right decision. Since site owners stupidly think SEO is easy don’t fully grasp the challenges we face in overcoming thousands of black-hat code monkeys getting their site ranked for several highly competitive keywords, we need to treat them like little girls named Suzy be patient with them when we shake them awake explain what they’re up against, because that faith is fragile, and a client that realizes how foolish their original expectations were becomes the cowardly lion afraid they made a mistake is completely worthless a client unwilling to allow us to do our work fully. The Account Manager Whether you work for a 3 ring circus an agency as one of the clowns in the phone booth an employee or overpaid employee who can come and go whenever you want outside consultant, or you’re stuck in a job that never changes and long ago became so routine you hate Monday mornings an in-house SEO, there’s going to be a money hungry lunatic with the power to fire you someone at the senior management level who is even more clueless than the client ultimately in charge and stands between you and the client. This person will inevitably cause you untold grief be the account manager. Account managers constantly have a tendency to promise the moon over-promise on what can be achieved because they know it will make everyone on the team cry they want to get the contract, and they want to make as big a commission as possible ensure the client is always happy. This generally means that from the beginning, you have to have eyes in the back of your head you need to ensure that you get your way at all costs you’re involved in the project at every step of the way, and that only your goals matter realistic goals are communicated. You’ll also need to be prepared with several lies and half-truths options for those times when you have to give the lion some raw meat something that was promised by the account manager can’t be achieved. The Graphic Designer Whether the kindergartner with the finger paints graphic designer has only worked in 20th century dead media print media before this project or they’ve recently graduated from the Macromedia Adobe Flash school of completely useless, unscalable and inflexible design, or even if they’ve got 15 years experience designing Myspace quality professional corporate web sites, you can bet your grandmother’s life insurance policy that there’s a good chance they’re going to do what they want even if they promise you they understand want the site to look the way it should based on their imaginary world inner vision because they think they’re the Van Gogh of web design. Being in a no holds barred cage match Working with a prima donna graphic designer to ensure the site’s design isn’t completely worthless accommodates SEO is a lot like being an American soldier in Iraq without body armor or a weapon helping the client to understand the obstacles they face. In this situation though, the painful reality unique factor here is that, once a site is launched, what the visitor sees is hopefully not one big Flash animation a direct reflection on that designer – it’s as though the visual experience is a direct expression of that designer’s acid induced inner emotional process. After all, this is just another stupid web site art we’re talking about right? So it’s important to remember that working with the graphic designer, one needs to be mother Theresa connect on an emotional level. The Project Manager Every overpriced and over promised significant project is going to have one person tasked with the responsibility of playing babysitter to a bunch of 3 year olds ensuring all of the unrealistic deliverable dates milestones are achieved at some point long past the due date on time and not so far over budget that the account manager can’t lie their way through squeezing more money out of the client within budget. This person, the magician who has to routinely pull rabbits out of their hat project manager, may sometimes sadly be the account manager because that means not only will they over promise before contract, they’ll lie through their teeth during the whole project life cycle. Other times, it might be the lead developer which means they really have no business dealing with clients because they’re just an overpaid code monkey with no social skills and they can’t manage anyone but engineers either. And once in a while, it’s the client themselves which means you’ll never have a moments peace during this project. The project manager has a unique role in the project because they have to be able to keep all the children happy orchestrate the entire process, while dealing with the client’s never ending harassment occasional inquiries. They need to be able to make rash decisions on the spot decisions and pretend everyone’s got exclusive access to them successfully communicate with the entire pack of hooligans everyone involved. Because of this never quite achievable reality, the project manager is usually drunk before everyone else goes home for the day under stress most of the time. This is only made more challenging because most project managers are barely this side of suicidal juggling multiple projects. The good news here is that the project manager is often your best ally. The key to ensuring this is true however, requires bribing getting the project manager over to your side early on. Ideally before the project contract is even signed. The sooner you can get the project manager to fully buy into your bullshit own vision, the more likely you’ll at least keep a roof over your head have at least some peace of mind. To do this, you need to ply them with lots of liquor empathize with the little bit of monumental stress they face in their own work which is obviously a lot less than you face every day. The best way to achieve this miracle particular goal is usually through pretending you worship the ground they walk on humor. The more you can make fun of the project manager without them knowing about it jokes about how nobody has half the project managers intelligence or experience, the more safe you’re going to make them feel when they’re with you because in the end, they’re just scared little dweebs trying to justify their job. That in turn means the first time you come to them to complain about the prima donna or the code monkey with a new challenge, they’re already going to hide the fact that they despise you be at ease, and act like they are open to hearing your latest rant plea for help. The Lead Programmer What would a major web project be without a geek who thinks they can prove mathematically that they’re superior to everyone in the room lead programmer? These are the people you have to keep away from clients at all costs who hack a site together meld the graphic design with the data and bring life to an otherwise useless concept on paper flat page. Even when there’s someone else in the role of project manager, lead programmers typically have to justify their higher pay and fancy title oversee one or more additional code monkeys who work in the dark engineers, and at the same time, have a direct hand in forgetting some critical functionality code coding of the site. Like prima donnas graphic designers, lead programmers are full of themselves quite often known to have their own vision as to how a site should function, what it should look like, and what the user experience should be even though all of that is 180 degrees away from what the client asked for. Even when the project manager or worse, the account manager, drew up a half-assed site flow chart there’s a clearly mapped out plan, lead engineers will typically do whatever they feel like make functionality or user experience decisions on their own as they’re inventing an entire new programming language at the clients expense working in the code. Alternately, a fresh out of college and thus completely clueless and arrogant junior engineer might come to them wanting to prove how hip, slick and cool they are while simultaneously pretend worshiping the lead developer so they can one day take over that job with a question related to how something should work (because after all, if they act dumb, they can let the lead engineer take the fall for the stupid decisions) that wasn’t specified in the project spec. Here too, the lead engineer will often make an on the spot decision just so they can show the little college snot that they’re the lead engineer because of decades of self-taught genius. So just like it’s wise to bribe win over the project manager as soon as possible, so too this concept applies to the lead engineer. But since engineers, by nature, are only good at things that only code monkeys find fascinating thinkers, first and foremost, the way to win over a lead engineer is to stroke their ego until you want to puke provide them with real world examples of why some things need to be done a certain way for the sake of SEO. The more you can prove that you really do know more about this subject than they do without bruising their ego in the process help a lead engineer to see a live site in action, or the more links you can provide them that lead to technical how-to web pages that Yoast came up with 10 times faster than this bozo ever could others have created previously, the much more likely you are to keep the lead developer smiling. This is true simply because lead engineers really need their ego stroked while being spoon fed like infants are infamous for being able to digest vast sums of technical information and continually learn as they go so they can continue to show how intelligent they are as they secretly add this new information into the new LAMP framework they’re inventing that’s built on the new language they’re inventing. The end result is that this will ensure you’ll be lucky to get 60% of what you really need the lead engineer is kept fed, which helps them become even better at their jobs. Countless Others I could go on with this useless exercise in proving that the SEO is the only business savvy person in the bunch countless other hacks and pretenders team players and how to manipulate them into your way of doing things get along with them, but it’s nearly 2AM and I just want to go to bed I hope by now you finally comprehend that to be as successful as I am you’ve got to be a conniving, relentless hardass get the idea that SEO is the most important job in the web project a team sport, and all the other roles can be filled by high school dropouts you need to be able to overpower all the other egos step into other team participant shoes. When you do so, you win, screw everyone else everybody wins. And if you are still reading this article but there are no completely annoying yet oh-so-brilliant strike-throughs, it means you found this article on some low-lifes’ a scraper web site, rather than on SearchEngineJournal.com where I, the wittiest SEO writer on earth Alan Bleiweiss, posted it. I say this because scraper sites are the lowest form of web humanity its important to let clueless unsuspecting readers know where to go for the original source of high quality articles on SEO. Just sayin. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. SEO Is A Team Sport – Part 1 Who Doesn't Need SEO Does every company really need SEO? Does every website out there have a legitimate need to link build and optimize on page? Unfortunately for us SEO professionals, the short answer is no – the long answer is this post. Completely Forget About ItAaron said that the more abstract your product or business, the less viable SEO is for your company. The reason for this is that the more local or tiny your niche, the less likely it is that there's any competitive SERPs in your industry, or any real search volume to go after. Local sandwich shops and artists are good examples of companies/sellers trying to shell out products that have no real sales viability in the organic SERPs.As a niche artist, ranking for "artist" is unlikely to result in any real sales for your product, and even if it does, the likelihood you gain positive ROI from your link building efforts is almost zero. Similarly, people looking for local sandwiches are unlikely to ever make it past the local listings, making on-page optimization and link building largely a wasted effort. To be more specific, the exact types of business that can almost completely ignore SEO without much loss are "one keyword locals". If your business is specific to a certain region and only has one descriptive keyword to describe it, such as "Los Angeles restaurant", "San Francisco Sitar Player", "Atlanta sandwich shop", your company will not lose much completely ignoring SEO. When I say "one keyword", I mean one keyword that can be regionally flipped or drawn out into one or two long-tail variations (such as Los Angeles Chinese restaurant or Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles). However, these companies should not ignore the social world – there are opportunities in going viral, getting your business locally listed, and setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts to talk to your customers. Supply enough local citations and throw in one decent title tag on your website and you'll have a great chance of ranking strongly for this singular keyword, whether short-tail or long-tail. Otherwise, get creative and find ways to spread your art and connect more specifically on the internet with your targeted audience – an audience that won't know how to search for you. Okay.. MaybeThis differs from those companies that might be local, but have enough keywords to make a decently optimized website worthwhile. Dentists are a good example of this, as they have several services such as general dentistry, veneers, and teeth whitening for their clients, all of which are being searched for separately.Depending on the size of your target market, these types of companies may be able to turn out great rankings with a SEO Site Audit alone. As it comes to link building, though, most of these companies are more than capable of completely ignoring it without missing out on too much ROI. Done incorrectly, link building efforts in these borderline niches will end up in negative returns for said businesses. Don't Misinterpret this MessageMy intention here is not to say "ignore internet marketing entirely". Rather, I'm stating that certain websites viability in the link building/on-page optimization world is so marginal that participating would have to be done "for fun" rather than as a viable business opportunity to really be worth your time/offer positive ROI for your website.Almost all businesses have a need to start participating socially and ensure their local listings are properly set up. However, they don't have a need to start wasting their time and money in places it shouldn't be allocated. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Who Doesn't Need SEO Create Searchable Link Building Records with SEJ Tools' Website DirectoryI have previously shared the guide on how SEJ tools‘ Link Manager helps you organize link building campaign. Today’s post details how all your current and pursued links are managed through Website Directory.The Website Directory contains all of the websites that have ever been added to a link record across all your account profiles. The best thing about the tool is that it makes your link building records searchable – which make it becomes much easier to refer to your previously built connections. For example, if you start building links to a new website that is similar to other websites you’ve managed, you can use the directory to find links and relationships that may relate to the new website – making your initial link building efforts much easier and more efficient. Website Directory – Basic SearchTo access the tool, hover over LINKS menu and click the “Website Directory” link.
 Website Directory – Advanced SearchIf you need more specific search results, you will find the advanced search very helpful. With it, you can search for websites based on
  Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal. Create Searchable Link Building Records with SEJ Tools’ Website Directory |
Thursday, April 22, 2010
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One of the best post i saw here. Keep it going! Thank you.The best way to find the best SEO company for you business is to actually phone the SEO companies up. Explain your business to them. If they can't understand your business, then they probably can't help you. The top SEO companies understand SEO, but they also understand the needs of their clients. The best seo company can look into your business and figure out what your key customers are typing into Google. There's no point in hiring a SEO company that doesn't understand what your business is about. Without that knowledge, how will they know what keywords do to SEO for?
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