Recent Posts

• Tracking Seasonality – Just Do It
• The Challenges of Project Management in SEO
• CRO & SEO in Harmony with Responsive Websites
• Offerpop; the social media campaign tool
• How SEO Will Change in 2012?

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Tracking Seasonality – Just Do It

With the majority of businesses, the passing of time causes a change in customer behavior. The laws of physics state that an object in motion will remain in motion, however without proper study, one cannot predict where that object will go or how it will act. The same applies to your customer base. If you don’t keep track of where your customers are coming from, what they are looking at, and where they end up, then you will not be able to accurately predict how they ultimately come to the decision to make a purchase.

In the world of online marketing, which encompasses Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising, a business has every advantage they could possibly need. We can track what site a customer came from, what keywords they typed to get to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they went to. We can tell all sorts of things about your online customer base, but you HAVE to have tracking set up in order to know where to go next.

Seasonality is a big factor in the paid search world. If you are in the moving, storage, or real estate industries, your business may peak in the summer months when students are moving out of the dorms for the summer, or people are moving because the weather is more pleasant. If you do not have Google Analytics installed on your website you will never know exactly how big of a jump in traffic and conversions you get in May, and what a sharp decrease they take in September when the weather starts getting cooler.

If you haven’t set up Analytics on your site just yet, but would still like to know how seasonality affects your business, check your monthly or quarterly taxes for profit estimates. If you look over the course of 2-5 years, you will more than likely begin to see a pattern. Please take into consideration large events that may have taken place, such as a change in ownership, location, or large marketing promotions that may have been rolled out.

In addition to using Google Analytics to track your seasonality, install incoming call tracking to accurately report the volume of calls you receive during specific time periods. You can even screen call quality through these systems, as all your calls will be recorded. In some instances, you can track them down to the keyword that someone typed in to produce the ad in the first place. These tools are invaluable in assisting a business to accurately read their customer base and plan accordingly.

Once you have determined whether or not you have a peak season (winter, summer, etc.), month, week, day, or even time of day, adjust your goals accordingly. Last year during October you may have pulled in $55K in revenue, but this year in October, make a goal to surpass that by 35%. Adjust your budget allocation, ad copy, and bids according to your seasonality. Without goals, your business is a race horse with a blindfold, meandering down the track with no finish line in sight. Know where you have been, and where you want to go with your marketing ventures to better gauge the success of your campaigns.

The Challenges of Project Management in SEO

In any business, project management plays an integral part in running an operation effectively. However, project management in the SEO world is very different than in other industries. As an SEO Specialist, my job consists of a variety of duties, but managing projects is a very important aspect of my job in order for clients’ work to be completed and their expectations to be exceeded.

When I first enter the SEO world, it kind of threw me for a loop. In college and at previous jobs, I was always the well organized and “do everything way in advance” type of girl. Deadlines, schmedlines. I could always prioritize and management my time for projects, but I quickly learned that project management in SEO doesn’t always work that way and this was something I had to adapt to. SEO project management is a unique discipline and it requires a special set of skills in order to push out a ton of client work each month. Whether you’re a PM or an SEO at an Internet marketing agency that manages projects yourself, these are the challenges you may face:

• Every single area of a business is affected by SEO, either directly or indirectly. A company’s strategies in the areas of marketing, public relations, development, etc. all are influenced by and change according to the company’s SEO efforts.
• SEO tactics or strategies constantly change. Since these techniques are based upon a search engine’s algorithm, all SEOs have to be prepared to make changes at the drop of a hat. Therefore, so does the PM, who has to change the clients’ timeline and expectations as well.
• SEO efforts can take a long time and immediate results aren’t always achievable. This was something I definitely had to get used to when I first started. After doing a month of link building, I wanted to see the fruit of my labor and have my client ranking on the first page of the SERPS. Yeah, that doesn’t happen until a few months later and if I have to be patient, clients have to be too.
• As you establish a rapport with your client, they can sometimes go beyond the scope of a project and add “extras” to your teams’ to-do list.  While customer satisfaction is your first priority, you can only be stretched so far until another proposal needs to be written up. If you constantly bend over backwards for all of your clients, you’re no longer being accommodating, you’re being taken advantage of and your SEOs begin pulling their hair out.
• Lastly, SEO efforts are also difficult to track and report than other business initiatives. Since results can take time, it’s important for an SEO or PM to monitor all progress and convince the client to stay on board.

Despite these challenges, the right PM or SEO can effectively handle anything that comes their way if they have a unique set of skills to match up with the requirements of the job.  After all, their role is essential and they can be successful if they do the following:

• Try their best to create a plan of action. As mentioned above, things change. One day the SEO strategy is great, the next day, the team has to start from scratch, but even so, it’s important for the SEO or PM to keep all members of the team on the same page and for everyone to be working towards the same goal for each client.
• Speak the SEO language. Now if you’re an SEO, you know your stuff, but maybe the PM doesn’t know the terms you throw around on daily basis. In order to professionally propose a strategy to a client and manage their expectations, PMs have to know what they’re talking about too.
• In addition to knowing the SEO lingo, an SEO or a PM has to be able to break things down for clients who are not from planet SEO. It’s good to show the client your expertise, but if they look lost, explain things to them as if it were your mother.
• Judge the scope of projects effectively. This is where a little communication and your team’s ability come into play. A PM or SEO needs to plan a course of action for the client within a certain timeframe that does not overwhelm or puts restraints on other SEOs. Map out the steps that will be taken over the course of a few months and make promises you can keep.

After being in this industry a short time, I’ve seen companies make changes in how they go about managing projects. Larger companies prefer to have a bunch of PMs, while smaller firms tend to let the SEOs manage projects and engage with clients. It’s important to find the best method of project management for your business and I feel that anyone can adapt to the craziness of SEO as long as they’re determined and believe in what they’re offering to the clients.

For more information on project management, visit these resources:

Why Is Project Management Undervalued in SEO?

Project Management in SEO

Project Management for SEO

CRO & SEO in Harmony with Responsive Websites

SEO and CRO can celebrate together for responsive website development.

Responsive websites have been around for a relatively short while in the grand scheme of online marketing, but are growing more and more valuable in terms of usability and conversion potential. The ideal “responsive website” is a site that works and views well on all digital devices from computer monitors to smart phones. A responsive site bypasses the options of creating separate websites templates for different devices like iPhone and iPad, and deploys a more intelligent site that simply adjusts to the user’s device. This is wonderful for search optimization, because it eliminates the need for tracking a mobile-specific site and maintains identical content and near-identical structure from the display url down to specific page elements. In the SEO world, a responsive website is a dream come true. In the CRO world, responsive sites open doorways into a conversion rate frontier.

Mobile traffic is rocketing forward.

Mobile traffic has increased from 4% of total web traffic in Q4 of 2010 to 13% at Q4 of 2011, according to a recent study by Walker Sands Communications. This is astounding, though not surprising. Analytics gurus across the nation have seen mobile traffic increase over the years and understand a new future in mobile potential is coming and we need to prepare.

Convert users across multiple devices simultaneously.

That is, if you prepare for it. So what does this conversion rate frontier look like? Conversion campaigns on a responsive website page combine desktop, mobile, and tablet into one comprehensive campaign. While the devices need to be segmented separately, a unity can be gathered under one campaign. Responsive websites do exactly what we want websites to do: “we just want it to work everywhere!” In this case, we want them to convert everywhere! For example, lets say you have a business that generates online leads and you notice a growing potential with mobile users from your analytics data. Building a responsive landing page would allow you to continue testing and converting your current desktop visitors and your mobile users with the same page URL, content, message, call-to-action, and more. Google recently commented about responsive websites on their blog saying that “Creating two sites would allow us to better target specific hardware, but maintaining a single shared site preserves a canonical URL… and simplifies the sharing of web addresses”. Responsive website pages are a win-win for SEO, CRO, and PPC advertising campaigns alike.

Adapt or die

If you are considering a separate mobile version of your site, you may want to reconsider. Building a responsive website that works across multiple devices will serve you better in the search marketing landscape. Quite honestly, the timing for planning a responsive website is better than ever. Start diving into your analytics now to uncover historic mobile data. Has the percentage increased or decreased? Why? Are mobile users increasing on your site and do they have a high bounce rate? Responsive website development, under the close eye of conversion optimization, will capture your users and provide new opportunities for website growth.

If you find this as interesting and inspiring as we do, contact us and let us know.

Offerpop; the social media campaign tool

There are various different marketing campaign tools on the market that allow you to run social media events, contests, giveaways, etc., but there aren’t many that allow you to customize your campaign to the extent that Offerpop does. Built in to the platform, Offerpop offers instant landing pages

This web-based marketing platform presents the opportunity to fully engage and interact with the consumer allowing brands to create effective marketing campaigns. Upon registering on their website, you will receive a fourteen day free trial to run the campaign of your choice. This includes; tug of war, sign up, referral, photo contest, fan faves, exclusive, and many more for Facebook and various other campaigns for Twitter. The best part about Offerpop, is it’s extremely easy to use!

After logging in, you will be brought to your dashboard, which lists all of the possible campaigns available for Facebook and Twitter. From there you simply choose the type of social media campaign you’re interested in running and enter in the necessary information, select fields for a sign up form, and bada-boom. Launch your social media campaign, engage with your consumers, and watch your statistics grow.

What sets Offerpop away from its competitors, is the wide variety of campaigns, extremely user-friendly dashboard, and their competitive pricing.

How SEO Will Change in 2012?

Last year it was panda and now its penguin. Forums, blogs, emails and articles all over the web are claiming to know everything about the latest update, how to get out of a penalty or the perfect and ultimate solution to the latest Google algorithm changes. Personally, I feel it is way too early to even know what is going on and what the exact solutions are to avoid a penalty. The fact is no one truly knows yet because the dust hasn’t settled and everyone is still trying to test new tweaks and strategies.

All I can do is tell you what we have been doing and some of the tweaks we implemented to adjust for the new update.

Proper Onsite

This is probably the easiest and most necessary change you should make: De-optimizing your site. Perform a full onsite by checking for dead links, correct any 301’s and 404’s and correct any coding errors if necessary (check with http://validator.w3.org for W3C validation). Make sure your onsites are not over-optimized with an excessive amount of keywords in the title tag and internal links on pages of your site, repetitive keywords in the title tag and urls, etc. Having too many keywords dilutes the power of all other keyword. So spread them out internally and have dedicated pages with proper content to best create relevance and rankings. Have original and non-duplicate content throughout your site for the spiders to index with at least 300-500 words per page and a low-keyword density.

Au Naturale

You are going to have to change up your anchor text to make it appear more natural and give you a varied keyword profile. It is better to have less exact match and more long tail and branded keyword as anchor texts. Basically avoid “over optimizing” and use a wide range of anchor texts.

1) Add fillers such as “click here” “visit”, etc. and other adjectives. Yes it is generic but it will appear more natural.
2) Adding Naked URLs or sometimes referred to as raw urls. www.yourcompany123.com, yourcompany.com, http://yourcompany.com, etc.
3) Mix in your company name, brand name, product name and even your state into your keywords
4) Use Google’s Keyword Tool in Adwords to find broad matching terms to the keywords you are trying to rank for and use those as anchor texts as well.

Ugghhh…..Quality over quantity.

As much as I hate this phrase since it’s commonly overused by every SEO in the industry, I have to say it here because its super important, especially after this update and for the future of SEO. Getting quality content is difficult, and what is even more difficult is finding a quality site to put it on. It isn’t as easy as everyone makes it to be but it can be done with some time, dedication and patience. So what to do and how to actually do this?

There are thousands of blogs out there who are in dire need of quality and original content. Find them in your niche and write an article. It’s that simple. Don’t keyword stuff or use that article and spin it 20 times with an automated spinner. Create JUST one and use it ONCE, NO keyword stuffing (use the keyword no more than two times and use the above methods to vary the anchor text) and after it is live, spend some time and promote it socially through Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Pinterest, 2.0 sites and social bookmarks.

1) If you don’t have a subscription to Myblogguest.com Get it now. This is the most underrated service available for content distribution. It will be the best money you spend and you will have a connection to hundreds of bloggers dying for content. Provide them with quality and original content and they will not hesitate to receive another article from you in the future. Build a trusting relationship and do it right the first time and they are all yours. I will take a list of bloggers over a list of backlinks any day.

2) This is essential and necessary to find blogs looking for content with some of these Google Search commands.

Keyword + “write for us”
Keyword + “write for me”
Keyword + “become a contributor”
Keyword + “contribute to this site”
Keyword + “guest blog”
Keyword + “guest blogger”
Keyword + “guest Column”
Keyword + “guest article”
Keyword + inurl:category/guest
3) Use Followerwonk to find bloggers in your niche. This is another great site to use to find bloggers. Not only are you finding bloggers who may be looking for content to publish on their site but they have FOLLOWERS. Publishing an article on a site is great and all but it’s so much powerful if they are going to tweet it to thousands of people and more than likely if they have a Twitter account, they are going to have a Facebook, YouTube, Google + and Pinterest account.

Ask and you shall receive

Question/Answer sites. There are so many out there and a lot of questions are unanswered. This one is so simple. Find an answer site, find a question relating to the keyword or to the company and answer it. You may need to do the research on the question but that time spent is well worth it because most of them allow a naked URL or a keyword in it as a source. You don’t have to use your website as the source, you can also link it an article you created as a source if it is RELEVANT…and RELEVANT is the huge factor in this type of link building because if you are not relevant to the question, you will be removed. So take the time and answer it correctly and link it to a relevant source. Even linking it to an article you created for your website will work. Take this one step further and add Google Alerts to keywords and phrases for some questions so as soon as you get an alert for “How do I maintain my widget”, you can be the first one on the scene to answer the question.
Link Diversity and Good ole’ Link Building

In most, if not all, niches creating pure quality content is not going to get you ranked. Period. I still firmly believe that you will still need to some good ole’ link building to have a diversified backlink profile. And whatever you do, don’t stop link building. Nothing looks worse than if you have been constantly doing SEO for the past year or so and then you just stop “cold turkey” in the months of March and April whether you have been hit or not by the infamous letter in Webmaster Tools or dropped off the grid. And worst of all do not attempt to remove bad links from Google – nothing is more suspicious than you trying to de-index backlinks. Here are some tools & strategies you can use for some good ole’ link building.

1) Ontolo – This one is first because I had a major bone to pick with this site a year ago and I refused to use it until now. My fellow co-worker Oliver Feakins raved about how awesome it was and how everyone in the industry was using it. I personally thought it was horrible. The interface was horrendous, impossible to navigate and after an hour trying to figure out what it even did for the first time I gave up on it. But now…..holy shit did they make it so much better. It wasn’t until a couple months ago that I even knew what it did. It uses Google Search Commands (see link for some Google Advanced Operators http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html which is another strategy you can use to get links) to find relevant categories you are looking for. It works great now and I have been using it for the past several months and am able to pull some quality links from the service. They have a free version that does what I need it for.

2) SEOmoz and Majestic SEO are two essential sites you should subscribe to. They both have a great number of SEO tools that will provide you the ability to find quality links but the #1 tool I commonly use on both is the backlink explorer tool. Cherry pick and stealing your competitor’s links. You will be able to pull up backlinks that have been indexed and if they were able to get a link from a site, so can you.

3) If you haven’t been doing it before, now is the time to have diversification in your backlinks. Mix it up with local SEO, forum posts, press releases, Wikis, articles, guest posts, bookmarks, Twitter, Facebook business profiles, infographics, images, PDFs and yes even the dreaded evil directory listings.

4) Deep Linking. So you have already spent hours doing the keyword research for your website. Then you spent even more hours doing the sitemap and onsite of the website carefully choosing what keyword should go to what page. So why are you linking all of your anchor text to the homepage?? This is common sense but this is so important that it needs to be addressed. Link the keyword to the specified page of the website that you outlined in your onsite or the most relevant page on the site to increase relevance and build authority for inner pages. Google wants relevancy and users want what they are searching for. As Google’s algorithm is evolving almost everyday I believe that bounce rate and time on site are going to be playing a bigger role in the future. A high bounce rate and low time on site may be an indicator to Google’s algorithm that your site is not relevant to a given keyword – you could be penalized or dropped.

Negative SEO: A Dark and Evil Force

While watching the latest Whiteboard Friday on seomoz.org, Rand Fishkin introduced me to a new term in SEO, negative SEO. Negative SEO is the practice of trying to destroy your competitor’s SERPs rankings by pointing hundreds and thousands of spammy links back to your site using a competing keyword.  It’s a scary realization that others can affect your rankings with bad links.

Another scary realization, there are actually sites that exist that can be hired to purposely, as they put it “destroy your competitor”. That is the actual tagline of the site negativeseo.me . Tactics such as spam blasts, splogs, paid links, etc. are used to point bad links back to your site and make your rankings drop. Totally unethical and complete black hat spammy SEO stuff. People are essentially hijacking other sites rankings.

I was pointed to the Traffic Planet Forum where a case study was done to test whether or not it was possible for a site to rank negatively due to outsider influences. Between March and April they decided to spam blast two sites, one being Dan Thies’ site seofaststart.com and the second site being the site that promotes this tactic, negativeseo.me . After a month of negative SEO tactics directed at these two sites, the results are as follows:

seofaststart.com
dan thies – number 1 (still number 1)
seo – not in top 1000 (down from number 11)
seo service – not in top 1000 (down from number 34)
seo book – number 34 (down from number 3)

negativeseo.me
negative seo – number 6 (down from number 2)
destroy your competitiors – number 13 (down from number 1)

What Does It Mean?

Looking at the results from the case study, it seems that negative SEO is very probable and could destroy an earnest company’s website in less than a month, that is if a small amount of not so white hat links already exist.  However, Fishkin has some doubt over whether a wholly clean site can be taken down by these negative efforts. So he has challenged negative SEO guru’s to try and employ their tactics on either his personal blog or the seomoz.org site so that he can bring to light the plausibility of clean sites being hit.

The Red Flag

One of the leading indications that this might be happening to you is if you have backlinks that are unaccounted for from paid link sites and very spammy looking pages. However, what about the folks that do not have access to Webmaster Tools or some other software to show your backlinks? Well… it seems like they can wave goodbye to their virtual presence on Google. Destroying a small business can take as little as a month. Bigger companies may take a few months to a year to see the negative affects in their rankings.

The moral of this story:

Watch your backlinks! If something seems off and looks spammy, report it to Google Webmaster. In Google’s eyes, you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent. But the proof is in the pudding, or the case study, negative SEO is real and it is happening. So my shout out to Google and Matt Cutts, start focusing your efforts to figure out how to combat this rising issue of negative SEO.

Is Google’s Penguin Update Turning SEO Upside Down…Again?

For those of you that do not know, Google announced recently that they would be going after over aggressive SEO tactics. On April 24th Google officially rolled up the Penguin update. This is by far one of the most aggressive stances on SEO we have seen. Forums and blogs have been alive with chatter from website owners who have been getting nasty emails from Google in their Webmaster tools accounts. Many are seeing their website traffic shrink by 50% threatening their very existence.

Now ask any seasoned SEOs and they will tell you that Google has been making these threats for years now with very little action. This has changed dramatically in the last couple years as the web spam team at Google has been hard at work adding ton’s of updates meant to clean up low quality sites and content farms. The web has been ablaze recommendations of how to avoid getting dinged with the over-optimization penalty. After last week it became painfully clear that nobody is safe from these changes after Seer Interactive received a penalty. These guys are a top-notch firm and their owner (Will Reynolds) is a constant speaker on SEO in conferences across the country. These guys are the definition of ethical SEO. Seer’s recent blog post was very humble in sharing their experiences with the rest of the SEO community. SEO professionals banded together to create awareness of the erroneous penalty and it was reversed within a day.

Although nobody can say for sure what exactly qualifies for an “over optimization penalty” several SEOs have stepped forward and proved some guidelines to follow. There are supposedly hundreds of factors that can trigger this penalty but here are a few things to look out for:

Excessive keyword usage

This is very commonly found in both title tags, meta descriptions and body content alike. Each page should target around 2-3 keywords tops and used be used appropriately throughout your website in conjunction with quality content. Write for people, not search engines and it’s important that understand that first page rankings are nothing without quality engaging content behind it.

Overused HTML elements

Overusing H1 tags as well as alt tags are an easy way for search engines to gauge over excessive tactics. Think is a how newspapers use heading on their stories. There is only one main heading used to describe the content. It should entice people to read through the article. Smaller heading attributes like H2 and H3 headings can be used sparingly to keep interest and attribute to the natural flow of the content.

Duplicate or weak content

Pulling in content from other sites, or respinning existing content is something that is pretty easy for Google to spot. Make sure your content is written to engage and convert your site visitors. Give your website a value proposition by offering unique content that gives the users something useful. Consider adding other forms of content such as video, whitepapers or visual aids like infographics. Please, Please, Please – Don’t dump a bulleting list of keywords on your page just to try and obtain a presence for these keywords. How does this help anybody?

Overaggressive internal linking structures

I see this all the time and it is so easy to avoid. Overaggressive internal linking schemes can include a singular anchor text throughout your site linking to your home page. Site-wide footer links targeting specific keywords are also a considered spammy and pretty useless to the end user. Internally link your content where it makes sense and avoid linking multiple links on a page to the same page targeting the same anchor text.

Excessive or “un-natural” backlink profile

Phew! Where do I start? Let’s start with bluntly obvious – Stay away from Paid links, links from spammy sites, blog networks, automated linking programs, link farms, reciprocal linking schemes and completely irrelevant sites. I always tell clients that link building should look like we were never there. Nothing stands out more that a backlink profile that goes from 100 links to 1000000 links in 6 months and then stops. Make link building a part of your overall web marketing campaign. Put your PR and social outlets to work for you cultivating valuable backlinks and social signals. This is the new SEO and it’s time to face the facts.

It’s important as search changes that you evaluate your SEO strategies to change with the times. Make sure you keep one eye open to the news in the industry and know when to adjust. There is also something to be said for a holistic, sustainable approach to SEO that is more about user experience and quality over cheap tricks and spammy tactics. Every situation is different and my only advise is to make sure you have a seasoned guide to walk you through the jungle that is modern SEO.

Did Home Depot Just Try to Pull A Fast One on Google?

Yes they sure did, but they got busted! The world’s largest home improvement specialty retailer recently was caught trying to solicit links from their network of nearly 2,000 service providers. However, this wasn’t another typical paid link situation like the JCPenney and Overstock cases. Home Depot deliberately provided false information to their vendors and demanded links from their sites.

 Home Depot sent out an email to their vendors who they recommend for installation projects. The email, written by a Home Depot Representative, suggested that the service partner place a link to a particular page with specific anchor text in order to “support” the Home Depot Company. Of course as the email spread, it was picked up by a few SEO experts such as Bill Hartzer and thanks to him, we have the email.

From: The Home Depot – Home Services

Sent: Monday, April 9, 2012 PM

To: [email address removed] xxxxxx

Subject: Online advertising for Installation Services

SERVICE PROVIDER COMMUNICATION

Date: April 9, 2012

To: All US Service Providers

From: Home Services Operations

Re: Online advertising for Installation Services

SUMMARY 

The Home Depot is in the process improving our online advertising efforts for our installation services. We are using our brand authority and marketing power to increase traffic to our site and convert customers. We would like to extend this benefit to all of our business partners and are requesting that you add a link on your site to relative key words that will aid our related installation page authority. Please note that the hyperlink does not have to be visually indicated.

Linking to The Home Depot website will benefit our business partners by increasing the page authority of your website.  Page Authority predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well in search results.  Ranking high in search results will assist with driving more relevant traffic to your website.

We look forward to working with you on this mutually beneficial marketing endeavor. Please refer to “Action Required” for next steps and instructions on implementation.

ACTION REQUIRED 

*Create the link using the following format:

[Link Text]

URL:http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs/stores/ servlet/ContentView?pn=SV_HS_Home_Insulation

Link Text: “Carpet Installation” or your preferred text.  Please request the Keyword List spreadsheet for a larger sample of keywords to use for your preferred text. Below is a sample of preferred text to use for flooring:

Carpet flooring

Carpet install

Carpet installation

Below is an example of the HTML Code necessary in order for the link to appear properly on your web page:

Carpet installation 

*Ensure that the link is displayed in the correct format and located on the appropriate page related to The Home Depot’s corresponding installation category. Provide us with the URL of the page where the link will be once it is live on your site.

*Please send a confirmation email to xxxxxx at xxxxxx@homedepot.com once you have implemented the link on the appropriate page that includes the URL.

“On this mutually beneficial marketing endeavor,” yeah, I don’t think so. As you can see in the letter, Home Depot requires their vendors to place a link on their page that leads back to the Home Depot site. The company makes their vendors believe it is to their benefit by stating that they are making an effort to increase the Page Authority of all their vendors’ sites. As we know, it doesn’t work that way! If anything, Home Depot’s Page Authority would go up, not theirs. And then to say that the link doesn’t necessarily have to be visible…oh, here is where the Black Hat SEO occurs. Sneaky, sneaky!

After hearing of the situation, Google began investigating Home Depot and here’s what Google had to say…

“It’s simply untrue to tell vendors that linking to a specific page will automatically increase the vendors’ page authority. Likewise, encouraging websites to make hidden links to a website can lead to violations of our quality guidelines that result in demotion or removal of pages from our index. We will be monitoring this situation closely and taking appropriate action.”

Experts aren’t completely sure if Google will ban Home Depot from their indexes. It actually depends on whether or not the vendors implemented the links in the way Home Depot had requested. Google penalizes for hidden links, but Home Depot claims to have spoken with Google to rectify the situation and ensures that a follow-up email will be sent out to those service providers to correct the errors from the previous email. As you can see, you don’t want to try to pull a fast one on Google because sooner or later, they’ll find out. Stick to proper SEO tactics and if you want to make sure your site follows Google Webmaster Guidelines and never gets banned, hire a trustworthy search marketing firm.

The New Facebook Timeline: If You Can’t Beat Em’, Join Em’

As I am sure you are already aware, Facebook has once again forced us into a new version of the reining social media network. Thanks Mark Zuckerberg for influencing me to spend more time updating my Facebook timeline than trying to promote world peace. Facebook’s profile has now been replaced with the new layout called Facebook Timeline. Frankly, I was not thrilled about this change because I did not feel like going through the mundane task of updating my Facebook, however I have come to embrace this new concept. This new layout provides its users with a timeline of their Facebook history, from photos, events, apps, etc. arranged in the order in which they happened. Essentially making Facebook “stalking” much easier to manage.

And so it goes that with any new change, there is always hesitancy and the big question “how will this impact our business?” Well other than the fact that social media companies now need to put in the extra effort to update these changes for their clients, this new timeline proves to be advantageous for business users.

With change, come new opportunities. The new Facebook timeline gives businesses the chance to capitalize on their marketing campaigns and customize their timeline accordingly. My major hang up of this new timeline concept was what the heck I was going to use as my “cover photo”. So I chose a picture I had taken of a flower (I know, I know, so cliché). However cliché my photo might be, this cover photo in conjunction with the profile photo provides the opportunity for businesses to really advertise their brand and logo. As a billboard would show off the main product and point of the advertisement, so should your businesses cover photo. Make sure the photo grabs your follower’s attention and showcases what you are all about!

Captain Morgan has melded their logo into their cover photo to make one cohesive piece that clearly represents the product they are marketing for.

Another advantage to this new layout is it enables businesses to highlight the milestones of their business in an easy to view timeline. Photos now appear larger on the timeline, essentially overshadowing the text info. This can yield huge reward for businesses with catchy photos, because lets face it, people would rather look at a picture to sum something up than read a paragraph.  So promote away via your most market worthy photos!

Designer, Kate Spade, has also capitalized on showcasing their brand in the cover photo along with their tail tale logo.

Now to touch on posting, status updates and more goodies. The timeline displays the top 4 most used apps front and center beside the “about me” section. So choose the apps most important and essential to your customers, however the photos app will always appear first. One of the new features of Facebook, is the ability to post a story to your timeline. This story can be “starred” and made to either stay at the top of your page or it can be displayed along the width of your page, essentially making it pretty darn hard to miss. This is something businesses should take advantage of if they want their followers to acknowledge a new event or product.

So now you can sleep at night knowing your business is not in jeopardy from the new Facebook timeline. It’s here to stay (well at least for the next 6 months until they figure out a new way to frustrate us all over again) so embrace it and use it to your businesses advantage!

Google Adwords Updates – Better Than A Stick In The Eye

Recently Google has gone out of its way to make usability updates to the Adwords interface. If you are a frequent user of Adwords, you know that this is uncommon. More often than not, either no updates are made for months, or Google acts like a nanny dealing with a 3-year-old drawing pictures in sharpie on the living room wall. This means that mostly Google just likes taking away things I use every day. Like custom shapes in geo-targeting. I’m not saying it was a bad move, Google, but it certainly wasn’t to increase usability. And if I have to add cities in one at a time every time I need to target a custom area, I may make like an unemployed, middle-class white girl with dreadlocks, and occupy your corporate office.

On a positive note, the updates Google has released within the last month have actually made the interface easier to use, which is a fun and interesting surprise.

1. Location Targeting – Ok, so yes, they took away the most useful tool they had in specific geo-targeting, and yes this ticks me off beyond belief due to the cluster-F of errors my campaigns went through after that change rolled out. How can you make it up to me, Google? Well a new car would be nice, but I will be momentarily satisfied with the following update to location targeting.

In days of yore, you can to whip out a dictionary and your thesis paper from Philosophy 201 to figure out what Google meant when it asked if you wanted to target based on location or search intent. The wording was confusing, to say the least, and I was never really sure if I picked the right answer. If chosen incorrectly, my clients in Philadelphia could be getting phone calls from Columbus, OH, and this makes me look like a schmuck. I really hate looking like a schmuck. So Google thought, “hey, you know what would help people use our amazing advertising platform? Wording that makes SENSE!”. I applaud you, Google. But just this once, so don’t let it go to your head.

2. Display Advertising – Google snuck a mini-update in there without me noticing. I stumbled upon this little gem while checking on a client’s managed placements, and then immediately became enraged that only one client had this update. I have one client who has 20 display campaigns. TWENTY. That is a lot of campaigns spending money without any way of optimizing for keywords.

In this newest update, I can view what keywords are causing my ads to show, and within the same Display Network tab, I can look at the managed placements that are receiving those clicks. Brilliant! If you don’t think that this will change the way you manage display campaigns, well, you’re a moron. It’s the one thing your campaign needed, you know, KEYWORDS. I am so happy I might cry.

3. Quality Scores – the most recent update seems to be more in-depth thought on the topic of quality scores. Nevermind the fact that the factors that determine a quality score are vague and inexplicable. According to Google, much like a wafer-thin fashion model, you’ve either got it, or you don’t. This update allows Google more opportunities to tell you whether or not you’ve got “it”.

apparently I shock Google with my above average click-through-rates.

I cant be the only search marketer in the world completely frustrated with Google’s quality scores. Or maybe I am.

I will continue to hope that future updates in Adwords are as forward thinking as the previous three. Maybe they will come up with an acceptable and reasonable alternative to custom-shape geo-targeting (You see what I did there? It’s called bitterness). Until then Google, I’ve got my eye (just one) on you.