Monthly Archives: October 2014

Fast Five in Search – Week 43, 2014

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The year is fast coming to an end and it seems like the big online brands are all rushing to launch products or services before 2014 wraps up. So today we have a mixed bag of brand announcements, as well as some interesting trends in mobile advertising.

Here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1) Google Penguin 3.0: Worldwide Rollout Still in Process, Impacting 1% of English Queries by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land. Google is in the process of rolling out their latest iteration of the Penguin algorithm update. In this post, Barry looks at what’s been tweaked, when it rolled out and who has been affected so far.

2) Mobile Ad Revenues Soar as Search and Directories Flatten Out by Emily Alford of Search Engine Watch. In 2014, mobile revenues increased by a whopping 76 percent from $3 billion to $5.3 billion from the $3 billion reported at half-year 2013. $2.7 billion came from mobile search, while $2.5 billion came from mobile display. Emily looks at reasons for the incredible performance and areas of overlap with other advertising revenue.

3) Facebook Launches “Pseudonymous” App Rooms That Lets You Create Forums About Any Topic by Josh Constine of TechCrunch. Facebook has launched a new mobile app that has everyone talking. Called *Rooms*, the app lets you set up a mobile-only discussion space about any topic.

4) Mobile Search Ranking Study: Rank Number One or Not Rank at All by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land. A new study from seoClarity finds that if you do not rank in the number one position in the mobile search results, the click-through rate drops off significantly, so much so, that ranking number barely matters.

and finally…

5) Universal Event Tracking: A New and Improved Way to Track Your Sites’ Activities in Bing Ads by Nishant Gupta of Bing Ads. Bing Ads has introduced Universal Event Tracking (UET) to advertisers worldwide. UET allows advertisers to define and track performance and conversion goals important for their business. This is the official launch announcement from Bing Ads.

Happy reading!

*Image courtesy of Threadless.

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Fast Five in Search – Week 42, 2014

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This week, I’ve been setting up social media accounts for a new start up biz. We’ve been discussing what content would be the best to invest time in and things are starting to get exciting, especially in the lead up to Christmas.

So the inspiration for this week’s Fast Five is: “Where should you invest your time in terms of content marketing and how can you use social media channels to get your shiny new content out there amongst the great unwashed?”

Here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1) Should You Invest Your Organic Efforts on Twitter or Facebook? by Ryan Ernst of Social Media Today. In this post, Ryan makes the argument that organic reach on Twitter is currently outperforming organic reach on Facebook and explains why.

2) Digital Business: Getting Real About Social Media Results by Daniel Newman of Social Media Today. I like this article, because it tears down the unrealistic expectations that many businesses have about the impact social media can have on their bottom line. Yes, you can get that occasional magic bullet social piece that goes viral overnight. But in all likelihood, your investment in social channels will take just as much time – if not more – to pay off as your regular marketing efforts.

3) The Top 10 Corporate Blogs of 2014 by Nick Cicero of Social Fresh. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, if you’re stuck for original ideas, perhaps your content marketing can imitate that of the 10 corporate blogs independently voted as having the best content in 2014.

4) Tip: The Vanilla Ice Rule of Content Marketing by Jason Keath of Social Fresh. The title of this post caught my eye straight away, perhaps because I’m a bit of an 80’s tragic. But the post is basically explaining the 80/20 rule – where you can concentrate most your efforts on a single piece of content that you know has been / will be successful – just like the one hit wonder Vanilla Ice. So spend more time on less content. Easy, right?

and finally…

5) How to Increase Your Conversion Rate With Social Media by Neil Patel of Social Media Examiner. This post has actionable tips on how to use Social Login, Social Checkout and Social Sharing methods that you can apply straight away to boost your conversions. I was especially intrigued to see the use of Social Checkout – a method of allowing your customers to purchase on your site by logging in via one of their social accounts, rather than forcing them to sign up to your site first. Great tip!

Happy reading.

*Image courtesy of Threadless.

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Q and A: Will changing my PDF document title impact my search rank?

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QuestionHi Kalena

When optimizing a PDF, Adobe Acrobat allows users to choose if they want to display the document’s file name or its title in the title bar at the top of the document (File>Properties>Initial View>Windows Options).

During a recent talk about PDF creation I was asked if changing what’s displayed from the default file name to the actual document title would have an impact on search results.

My gut feeling is that it has a positive impact, but I don’t know enough about SEO to actually confirm this. Do you know?

Thanks heaps!

Cheers
Diane

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Hi Diane

Your gut is right! The way you name your PDF file can impact where it ranks in search results.

A lot of webmasters believe that PDFs can’t be indexed, but in fact, Google has been able to index PDF files since 2001. Despite the different encodings used in PDFs, Google can extract useful data from them, provided they’re not encrypted or password protected. If text is embedded as images, Google can even process the images with OCR algorithms to extract the text.

Just like other web pages, PDF files have the ability to rank highly in search results, depending on their content, if they have been optimized and also depending on the way they’re embedded and linked to from other web pages.

Google uses two main elements to determine the title shown for PDFs: the title meta-data within the file, and the anchor text of links pointing to the PDF file. You can influence the title shown in search results for your PDF document by updating both. Doing this gives the algorithms a strong signal about which title to use.

Links embedded in PDF files are treated similarly to links in HTML: they can pass PageRank and other indexing signals, and Google may follow them after crawling the PDF file.

You can pick up some more tips for optimizing PDF files in these resources:

Hope this helps.

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Google Analytics: Workshops in Auckland, Wellington

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google-keyI’ve been running training workshops in conjunction with the Institute of IT Professionals (IITP) here in New Zealand now for over 2 years and really enjoy it.

The next round of workshops coming up are on the subject of: Using Google Analytics to Increase Website Traffic and Conversions.

These half-day workshops will show you step-by-step how to set up Google Analytics and what key metrics to track in order to measure the success and improve the performance of your web site. Included will be real-life case studies, practical examples and sample reports that you can immediately adapt to suit your own requirements.

Whether you’re an IT staffer, marketer, coder, manager or business owner, making sense of your web traffic and conversion rate is hugely important to understanding if your online business is thriving or floundering.

At the end of the course attendees will be able to:

  • Set up a Google Analytics account
  • Implement Google Analytics tracking code into their site
  • Determine which are the most important web site metrics to track
  • Track visitor pathways that lead to conversions
  • See how their web site visitors are interacting with their site
  • See what keywords are providing the most traffic to their site
  • See what web sites are providing the most traffic to their site
  • See what pages on their site are the most popular
  • Track various marketing campaigns in Google Analytics e.g. AdWords, SEO, email campaigns
  • Determine the best performance indicators for their web site
  • Interpret analytics data and make web site decisions based on that data
  • Create meaningful web site analytics reports for customers and stakeholders

Below are the details and booking links for Auckland and Wellington events, so please share with anyone you know who might benefit from attending:

Using Google Analytics to Increase Website Traffic and Conversions – Auckland
Date: 13 November 2014
Time: 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: CBD Office Level 4, 17 Albert Street, Auckland

Using Google Analytics to Increase Website Traffic and Conversions – Wellington
Date: 10 November 2014
Time: 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: NZICA Level 7, Tower Building, 50 Customhouse Quay, Wellington

Hope to see you there!

 

Fast Five in Search – Week 41, 2014

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I had a student ask me about video optimization this week. By video optimization, I mean SEO for videos uploaded to her company YouTube account. Naturally, she wanted her company videos to appear at the top of the search results when anyone conducted a search on YouTube for her business brand.

I referred her to a couple of my favorite video SEO resources and thought that perhaps you readers may find them useful too.

Here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1) How to Optimize Video: Step by Step Instructions by Jennifer Osborne of Aim Clear. Although this post is a little dated, most of the content is still relevant and it contains some tips you won’t see anywhere else.

2) Moz Whiteboard Friday: SEO for Video Content by Scott Willoughby of Moz. Well, Scott is just the post author, but the content is actually provided in video format by Rand Fishkin in one of his ever-helpful Whiteboard Friday videos.

3) Video SEO: A Technical Guide by Joost de Valk of Yoast. An incredibly clever guy, Joost is the creator of several uber-successful WordPress plugins and knows an enormous amount about SEO. This was the first post I found that waded into the technical concept of meta markup for video content.

4) Distilled Guide to Online Video Marketing by Cheri Percy of Distilled. These guys don’t do things by halves. Big fans of downloadable white-papers and reports, the Distilled crew have created this Guide as a PDF doc for download. It’s pitched as “a practical and expansive guide covering all aspects of online video marketing” and it totally delivers on that promise.

and finally…

5) Schema.org Markup for Videos by Some Poor Guy Who Didn’t Deserve a Name But Apparently Deserved Sub-Titles of Google. This video posted on Google Webmaster Tools Help explains how using schema.org on-page markup to describe your videos will allow Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to index and show your videos in search results.

Happy reading!

*Image courtesy of Threadless.

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