google+ Sign-in

Last Tuesday Google launched Google+ Sign-In for third party developers, they can now allow users to sign into applications using their Google+ account. This is Google’s latest attempt to get ‘normal’ people using the social network, it will also give the search giant plenty of user data to slobber over.

Google is claiming that its new sign-in functionality is more secure than the likes of Twitter and, in particular, Facebook. It also gives users sharing options so that their social networks aren’t spammed with app updates and activity. Google+ director Matt Waddell released an image taking an indirect (but quite obvious) shot at Facebook with the tagline ‘Try the red pill.’ Facebook have received criticism in the past for ‘social spam’, however, Danny Sullivan took a closer look at Google’s new feature and decided that it’s not too dissimilar.

Take a look at Google’s launch video:

Google: how search works

A busy week for Google, it also released a stunning interactive infographic called ‘How Search Works.’ If you haven’t seen it yet and are thinking, ‘urgh, another SEO infographic’, take a look it’s pretty cool. The infographic itself gives a pretty basic and general overview of how Google indexes and ranks websites, but it also has some useful stuff for professional SEOs.

The coolest part is probably the live spam screenshots which show examples of ‘pure spam’ that Google has penalised. This is updated in real-time and some of the examples are pretty humorous.

These pages are examples of ‘pure spam.’ They appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking and scraping content from other websites.

This page also goes on to list the types of spam that Google looks for and takes action on such as cloaking, keyword stuffing and unnatural links to/from a site.

Google also published data for the first time on manual actions, webmaster notifications and reconsideration requests. The data in these graphs is really interesting. The graph below shows the number of websites that have had manual action taken against them over the last 8 years and is broken down by the different spam types.

YAHOO CEO BANS WORKING FROM HOME

Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO, sent an email out to thousands of her employees last week in which she announced she was banning them from working ‘remotely.’

As a result, several hundred staff must relocate to their nearest Yahoo office by June or quit. Mayer’s said ‘to become the absolute place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we all need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices.’

Those who only work one or two days in the office will have to submit to the new regime. ‘Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,’ she says, ‘speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.’

groupon send andrew mason packing

It came as little surprise last week when Andrew Mason was relieved from his post as CEO of Groupon. The company has been going through a rough patch since going public just over a year ago, and its poor 4th quarter earnings sent its stock reeling.

Rumours of Mason’s exit have been floating around for a while now, and he seemed to be expecting it as on Thursday he released this letter to his employees on Twitter.

For Groupon Employees: jottit.com/v5wux/ (Apparently, sharing oranges is necessary but insufficient #leadership)

— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) February 28, 2013

‘After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding – I was fired today.’

Mason took full responsibility for his role in Groupon’s recent poor performance and told his former employees; ‘You are doing amazing things at Groupon, and you deserve the outside world to give you a second chance. I’m getting in the way of that.’

Groupon, now valued at less than £2 billion, is searching for Mason’s replacement. In the meantime, Executive Chairman Eric Lefkofsky and Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis are taking the reins.

That’s our weekly RoundUP of industry news, I’ll leave you with this little treat from Qualcomm:

The post Digital RoundUP 04/03/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Does Google consider SEO to be spam?

Matt Cutt’s breaks it down for us in his video:
“SEO stands for Search engine optimisation and essentially just means trying to make sure your webpages are well represented within search engines”.

And consider the honest to goodness SEO measures (as Cutts does here) taken by righteous and idealistic optimisers – such as:
1. Making sure your pages are ‘crawlable’, or in other words, accessible to SEs.
2. Including the right search terms.
3. Improving usability through good design and internal linking structure.
One Youtube commenter had this to say:

And Matt’s final thoughts….
“There are many, many valid ways in which people can make the world better with SEO”
So the answer is no then. Cheers Matt.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS75vhGO-kk

Google real-time analytics beta:

A new addition to Google Analytics (beta) will allow you to see real-time traffic data for your site. These new metrics include number of users on your site right now, which pages they are reading and referrals. The behaviour of potential customers coming at you live. Knowledge like this could be put to good marketing use.

Source: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html

Useful Takeaways from Day 1 of the SearchLove 2011 conference:

Joost de Valk, Tom Critchlow and Rand Fishkin are just a handful of names from the list of SEO aristocracy who gave speeches at the conference.

Here are some of the best bits:
http://www.koozai.com/blog/events/135-takeaways-from-searchlove-day-1-searchlove/

Adwords ceases to support Internet Explorer 6 and introduces ‘bid-per-call’:

This is a notice to Google Adwords users who browse with IE6. Get yourself a new version by the end of the year.
In addition – Adwords is rolling out a phone call bidding scheme for its users.
Sources: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/retiring-support-for-internet-explorer_27.html and http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/introducing-bid-per-call-in-adwords.html

Broken link checker plugin for WordPress:

This new WordPress plugin will check all of the content on your site for broken links, redirects and missing images. It will then notify you on your dashboard or by email.
Site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Google Maps allows you to see inside a shop!

Now, through the power Google, we can look inside a shop whilst exploring a Google map. The next generation of Street View. It just gets better and better.
I managed to get this far inside the comic store –

That shelf at the back looks a bit overloaded to me.

Site: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=33.742568,-117.820365&spn=0.004853,0.013561&sll=33.742814,-117.816672&layer=c&cid=7704649002191693046&panoid=qHPoNvOZOYBaFsE0vGCa5A&cbp=13,127.37,,0,11.85&gl=us&hq=comic+book+store+orange+county&t=h&vpsrc=0&cbll=33.742848,-117.816622&z=17

Insights into Google’s rating guidelines:

Dr. (SEOmoz) Pete lays down a few snippets of the recently leaked Google guidelines document; for those of you who missed it.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/16-insights-into-googles-rating-guidelines

And finally…

Many of you will have heard or seen ‘Take this Lollipop’. No more needs to be said – just go to the link here if you haven’t already and then check out this NY Times review (in that order).
Site: http://www.takethislollipop.com/

* A reference to the film – ‘Withnail and I‘

The post SEO Weekly Round-Up #13 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Raven Blog – Forecasting Traffic by Keyword Rank:

Do you ever feel buried under a mountain of metrics? Are you grabbing data here, there and everywhere in an attempt to wow clients that, most likely, do not appreciate the value of a beautiful looking bounce rate pie chart? And who can blame them?
The gumption-filled SEO team at Raven have come up with a useful approach to compiling reports which cuts out all but the ‘actionable analytics’ needed to expediently and efficiently run an online marketing campaign. Focusing on these three metrics: traffic, ranking and conversions – is sticking right to the point of a worthwhile SEO campaign. This is especially useful, or indeed, absolutely necessary for serving clients with smaller budgets or other time constraints.

Source: http://raventools.com/blog/how-to-forecast-traffic-by-keyword-rank/

And speaking of pie charts…..

Raven have done it again with an interesting post on how to rustle up an accessible backlink data chart. Charts and diagrams are created to enable the client (and us) to visualise certain sets of data. Without them we would have to resort to lengthy, continuous prose on the poor state of some client or others backlink profile. Raven’s backlink explorer tool allows you to classify backlinks by anchor text type (for example) which you can fashion into a useful and legible pie chart for use in the quest to prove the value, if not necessity, of SEO to your customer.

Source: http://raventools.com/blog/how-to-create-an-easy-to-understand-pie-chart-from-backlink-data/

Google’s rolling out changes to PPC quality score:

The new Google AdWords algorithm goes global this week which means quality scoring will change to factor landing page quality. Giving more weight to ads with landing pages most relevant to the search query will enhance the user’s experience as well as enabling PPC enjoyers to rank better for lower cost-per-click bids.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-tweaks-adwords-to-give-landing-page-quality-more-weight-95488

Google launches “trusted stores” program: 

Google’s new consumer championing scheme has launched this week and goes by the name of Google Trusted Stores.

Designed as an aid to online shoppers; reliable ecommerce sites with a history of timely shipping and good customer service will be furnished with a Trusted Stores badge for their site. Not only does this scheme highlight the trustworthiness of certain honoured vendors -  it offers protection against errors in billing, unfair or non-existent returns policy and slow shipping.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2114053/Google-Trusted-Stores-Launches-with-Etailer-Grades-Free-Purchase-Protection

Export your social data:

With this tool you can export your tweets or other social media data.

It comes with the following claim: “Free your data! Sometimes social networks can go too far. Overzealous privacy policies and poorly thought out redesigns abound! You have an exit strategy!”

Not bad if you want to see what your Facebook status was from 2007 but it will definitely not liberate your data from the clutches of Mark Zuckerberg.

Website: http://export.synack.me/

Daily Mail publishes pre-written “guilty” story for Amanda Knox:

A massive gaff from the Daily Mail who were all too keen to be the first getting news of Amanda Knox’s guilty verdict out there – they published:

“Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction…”

Over-efficiency has not paid off this time for the newspaper as Knox was found not guilty of murder (on appeal) but guilty of slander. No doubt as soon as the reporter heard the judge say ‘guilty’ – he or she hit the publish button.

Source: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/daily-mail-guuilt/

Linkstant – get notified when your site gets a new backlink:

Brought to us by Tom Critchlow and Rob Ousbey  – the Linkstant code, when placed on your site – will notify you as soon as your sites get any new backlinks. The advantage to using this code is the immediacy of getting live backlink information. This could have many useful applications from motivating your team of link builders  – or in running a reputation management project, as another aid in keeping an eye on reviews or other mentions (provided the critic has put a link to your site in there).  Indexing and crawling can take months, analytics can take several days. However, Linkstant is (probably almost) instant.

Website:  http://www.linkstant.com/

So that was the week that was. Happy online marketing and tune in again right soon for more SEO news, digital reviews and hi-tech tomfoolery.

The post SEO Weekly Round-Up #10 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Foursquare business pages

Foursquare have finally opened business pages to the masses. Previously, only the biggest of brands seemed to be allowed a business page that had to be created by Foursquare’s in-house development team. This move however should help open the location-based network to the rest of the business world.

More information about Foursquare business pages from Mashable.

Bing Webmaster Tools Update

Often overlooked and overshadowed, Bing’s webmaster tools offering has been given an update recently. The new look toolset consists of the usual account dashboard offering an overall view of site performance, and 3 tabs that give in depth detail of Bing views your site; crawl, index and traffic tabs.

More information about Bing Webmaster Tools Update from Ineedhits.

WordStream AdWords performance tool

PPC campaigns can be complicated, confusing and extremely tiresome. Any tool that helps to alleviate this stress, and give you more time to focus on driving results cost effectively is a life saver.

Once such tool has just launched; WordStream’s Adwords Performance Grader. It allows you to check your quality score, use of land pages and wasted spending among other things.

More information on WordStream AdWords performance tool from bnet.

MozCon 2011

MozCon 2011 was at the end of last month and was a massive hit. Luckily for those of us who didn’t get the chance go, Ken Colborn compiled a list of the top 6 highlights from the Seattle event.

More information on MozCon 2011 from Blastam.

SEO plugins for Excel

Continuing in the same vein, here is a site filled with great SEO plugins for Excel, ranging from one that finds available domain names to one that find duplicate content within spread sheets.

More information on SEO plugins for Excel from Niels Bosma.

SEOMoz image optimisation

Although an important part of on-site optimisation, image optimisation isn’t usually treated as such. However, Kasy Allen’s great post on SEOMoz showed the real importance of image optimisation, especially in food/recipe related images.

As well as showing the importance of image optimisation, she also explores the most important ranking factors for Google’s Image search.

More information on SEOMoz image optimisation.

Analytics reports

Everyone loves a useful tool, don’t they? Well here are 3 awesome tools to help reporting become more efficient, simple and focussed. There is one focussed on page efficiency analysis, one for visitor acquisition efficiency and one for paid search performance analysis.

More information on Analytics reports from Kaushik.

The post SEO Weekly Roundup #8 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is Dead (nearly)…Long Live Bing (?) -

The much prized and incredibly useful SEO tool Yahoo! Site Explorer is on its way to the great Infobahn in the sky. The transition to Microsoft platforms has rendered this much loved competitive analysis link gizmo superfluous and (according to Barry Schwartz) there is very little hope of Microsoft creating an equivalent to site explorer for its webmaster tools. Once market osmosis has occurred later on this year, Yahoo! Site Explorer will be no more.
Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/yahoo-site-explorer-offline-13687.html

Google Directory Shut Down – 

Google’s efforts to rationalise its services and expend more energy on the small but effective components has resulted in the closure of the cumbersome and less useful Google Directory. Google’s support for it has dwindled into nothingness over the past couple of years. With search predominating in our navigation of the web the DMOZ powered directory was something Google did not need. Another ‘death’ on the obituary of internet services but, unlike Yahoo! Site Explorer, it won’t really be missed.
Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2096661/Google-Directory-Has-Been-Shut-Down

Video extensions for AdWords –

Video ad extensions give the AdWords customer a chance to turn their text ads into a multimedia experience. The word is out, albeit spreading rather slowly, about the huge potential of Youtube for businesses with the will to make a video about their products or services and get it out there to their target audience. These videos will work in much the same way as other ad extensions, running only when the ‘+’ button is hit. This is a much cheaper alternative to TV advertisement campaigns which smaller companies could take advantage of.
Website: http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/videoextensions.html

AdWords Express is Launched –

AdWords Express is made with the small businessperson in mind. This product can be accessed by business owners who aren’t AdWords users and this is the group Google had in mind when they designed AdWords Express. Simplicity and functionality are important features of the system. An advert, a few company details and five minutes of your time are all that’s needed to launch a localised campaign.
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/making-local-online-advertising-easy.html

Photovine Launches –

A social media application for sharing photographs which goes by the name of Photovine is here. It’s from Google’s recent acquisition Slide but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the product website. The ’Photovine’ is created by users uploading pictures of themselves or their interests which are then thematically linked up with those of other, as of yet unknown, users – and this is how the ‘vine’ grows. A bit of prudence is recommended here as these images can be viewed by absolutely anyone. On a lighter note, maybe there is a marketing opportunity here.
Source: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/07/12/googles-mysterious-photovine-website-is-live-and-it-looks-like-a-social-photo-sharing-service/

Targeting Tablets with AdWords –

Now AdWords advertisers can aim their ads specifically at tablet users with full browser functions. The problem of a campaign which turns out to be ineffective for mobile devices but a hit on tablets can be remedied by selecting to targets tablets specifically in the AdWords settings.

Source: http://www.ppchero.com/tablet-targeting-now-available-in-google-adwords/

SEO Tips for Travel Bloggers –

SeoMoz blogger ‘Randfish’ expresses his astonishment at the popularity for a SEO training session at a travel writing conference. Evidently there is a real enthusiasm out there amongst bloggers for optimising their sites for search engines and it is to this end that the ‘SEO 101 for Travel Bloggers’ has been created. The segment entitled ‘I Don’t Want to Write for SEO; I Want to Write Great Stories’ also rings true for online marketers. We don’t want to put content out there that looks like it’s SEOed to the Nth degree. There is a certain satisfaction in the dissemination of good, wholesome, quality copy. And it works, ask Google.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-101-for-travel-bloggers

Facebook Updates the ‘Invite Friends’ Recommendation Function -

Businesses with a nice, trendy page on Facebook will benefit from the latest change to the way users can recommend things to their friends. ‘Inviting friends’ will send out a notification via email to the recipient of the invitation – who can then click through directly from their email message. If they haven’t changed their settings to stop these sort of emails, that is.
Source: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/07/19/facebook-introduces-new-invite-friends-marketing-tool-to-pages/

Interesting Google+ Statistics –

This is a fascinating collection of the ten most astounding Google+ stats brought to us by the Experian ‘Hitwise’ blog. According to analysts, the biggest concentration of Google+ users reside in East London.  Will we see a mass migration of disheartened Facebook users onto the new social network?

A must-read for all scholars of Google’s new social network and fans of statistics in general.
Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/jamesmurray/2011/07/10_things_you_need_to_know_abo.html

Yoast’s new XML sitemap PHP script –

Joost de Valk’s has cleverly spawned a new XML sitemap PHP script that draws together all static files such as PDFs or PHP on your website – indexing them within the sitemap and saving the bother of having to update this manually. Most importantly, a sitemap lets Google know that the static files are there.
Source: http://yoast.com/xml-sitemap-php-script/

Bing Testing Ads Within Organic Results –

Bing is experimenting with their search engine by sneaking a few adverts within organic results. Possibly the only success to be had by this method is when the SE user accidently clicks on the advertisement link, mistaking it for a desired result of their search. Microsoft’s Director of Search Stefan Weitz assures that they are not paid ads nor will it be something Bing keeps if it turns out to be a flop
Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-ads-mixed-results-13755.html

Bing quality scores -

Now for some PPC news from the SeoMoz team: Microsoft Adcenter have introduced a quality scoring system for keywords selected for campaigns. Gone are the days of setting a keyword to broad-match and letting it go ballistic in the hope of some cheeky extra traffic. ‘Dr Pete’ from the Moz gang ran a little test to see what would happen if he tweaked his campaigns – changing keywords from broad-match to phrase-match. Read the blog post below to find out the results.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bing-quality-scores-match-types-magic-wands

Twitter Button Analysis –

Adding this new Tweet gauging button to your site will enable you to monitor who is tweeting about you or your products. Identifying your top tweeters and rewarding them could be an effective marketing manoeuvre.
Website: http://www.wil.lt/

The post SEO Weekly Roundup Returns… appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Police.UK Launches & Fails – Well temporarily anyway. The release of Police.uk was greeted with great media hype and the day after its launch it experienced some serious downtime. For those of you who have not seen this it is a site that lets you see the number of crimes in your area. The break downs or categorisation of crimes are a little sketchy but it does make good use of maps. Defininetly worth 5 minutes of your time.

Website: http://www.police.uk/

Footer Link Practices – Michael Gray shares some great tips ways to build an effective footer. This is useful to both web developers and SEO’s and provides a nice overview. I personally like his use of the term ‘link brothel’ to describe sites that dump a large number of links within the footer. Nothing new here but worth a read.

Source: Building an Effective Footer

Site Re-Launch Checklist – Aaron provides a detailed breakdown of a website relaunch process. As SEO’s we know the trails and tribulations that relaunching a website can cause. Aaron has provided a nice list for which to refer back to.

Source: Website Relaunch Process

Corporate Link Building – There’s no real gems here but well worth a read. David shares his story on corporate link building.

Source: Corporate Link Building

Bing Apparently Copies Google, Yawn – This story has been raging on for little over a week now and is where Google accuses Bing of copying its search results. Google setup a low level test to see if the same results would appear in Bing. Some weeks later these did and to say Google is not best pleased would be an understatement. As you can imagine there has been a lot of accusations being thrown between the two parties.

Source: Is Bing Copying Google’s Results

Google Algorithm Update – As you can imagine this story got us slightly more exciting. It had been coming for a while but Matt Cutt’s announced that Google would be updating its algorithm to clamp down on sites that scrape or copy other sites content. There has been some interesting debate around this and it looks like article sites will be hit hard.

Source: Matt Cutts

The Benefits of Great Information Architecture – This is a post by Tony Adam (not the footballer, god help us) and provides a nice overview of information architecture and usability. This is particularly important on larger sites and is often more difficult than you think. Tony also uses a great example to describe the process.

Source: Benefits of Great Information Architecture

We hope you find these roundups useful and look forward to hearing from you.

The post SEO Weekly Roundup #1 from PushON appeared first on PushON Ltd.

If you are involved in any form of online marketing in the UK, you or your online team should be at SASCon if you want to  establish or maintain your competetive advantage.

The post The Best SEO, Analytics and Social Media Conference in the UK? appeared first on PushON Ltd.

An example taken from the Google blog is below:

The above example shows how potentially useful Browser Size could be in determining the best positioning for important information or purchase links. The best value would be to owners of ecommerce websites, to ensure the maximum amount of visibility is achieved for users.

We ran the PushON blog through Google Browser Size:

The data shows that 90% of users are able to see the full width of the blog, and 90% can see the initial paragraph from the latest blog post. For a blog, the articles are the key information you want to get across to your users, so 90% visibility for the first post is a nice statistic.

Minor changes to the positioning of items can make quite a huge difference, as Google provide an example of increased downloads:

…on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the “Download” button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn’t see the button before.

Want to try Browser Size out for yourself? Head over to the following link:
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

The post New Google Tool: Browser Size appeared first on PushON Ltd.

In many ways the praises of deep links go unsung but in fact play an integral part in SEO. When building a campaign we want to build both the domain authority and individual page strengths. Deep links tie in to page strength as we need to in some way to tell Google (and other search engines) that our sites also have excellent content on pages other than that of the home page. To do this we employ a number of internal and external link development tactics.

I will now outline some quick and easy ways to gain deep links.

Link Bait

This is something that i don’t play with nearly enough but i certainly have a great appreciation for it. Link baiting is essentially where you create a piece of content that preferably goes viral to help develop links. It’s something that people would look naturally want to link to. You could literally write several books on this topic but i would recommend checking out SEO Shark’s blog. One of my favourite examples of link bait is the search engine smackdown game. Work of genius. All I will say is that link bait is a kind of art and the pay off can be significant.

link baiting Vs viral search success

Article Submissions

Article marketing has come under some heavy scrutiny in the SEO field over the last few years but it still remains an effective tool for creating one way links. Creating a well written article with links pointing to several pages in your site can help develop your number of links however the strength of these links can be fairly low. At least they are on topic and relevant. Some of the more popular articles sites include:

EzineArticles
Go Articles
Article Base

Directories

I think directories still have there place in SEO and they can be a nice way to build deep links to your site. You will find many directories offer one link pointing to the home page with an additional 5 links pointing towards your inner pages. One that offer deep links are often paid. I have found this particular tactic to be extremely effective in getting inner pages to rank well in the past.

Social Media

The number of social media sites is growing all the time and many of them are now offering do follow links. It’s a nice and simple tactic but its worth spending the time developing profiles properly. I personally like Squidoo as you build the pages up and develop reasonably strong page ranked links.

Internal Linking

This is without doubt the easiest method to build deep links and is proven to be extremely effective. Pointing internal links to key pages not only helps develop there status but also points users to your key content. It’s important to not over do it and review your site structure and content first. Don’t forget to use that anchor text wisely.

There are of course many ways to build deep links and i have mentioned some of the main ones above. Another key one for example could be guest blog posts. My final bit of advice is to review your sites structure and content first and devise a focused strategy.

Happy Hunting……

The post The Easy Way To Build Deep Links appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Here is an example of organic local listings for a Bing search in Manchester:

As you can see there is little competition for Bing Local Listings at the moment and the results are not great, one nightclub, a cafe and a strip club…

The post How to get listed in Bing Local appeared first on PushON Ltd.