Online Marketing News for Smart People – August 2013

It’s all about online marketing and how can you make more profits for your business… and you can read about it here. This new blog posts contains the latest news and information about internet marketing strategies.

Enjoy!

SEO and PPC

A few days ago Moz studies the qualities that have a strong association with high rankings in Google. They found that +1’s are the second most important factor behind the authority of the page itself and they found that posts shared on Google+ are indexed nearly instantly.

According to a recent report from ComScore, Yahoo topped Google in US Internet traffic for the first time since 2011. But who’s responsible for this resurgence? That would be CEO Marissa Mayer. A year after Mayer took over Yahoo, the company’s stock price was up 100 percent. Engineers wanted to work for Yahoo again. Mayer’s move to the top of Yahoo during the summer of 2012 was a shock for almost everyone. Here’s a good read to understand this move – The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography.

Continuing his battle with SEO companies, Google publish this month:

“Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines… Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.

For example: There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.”

Still use press release for SEO? Forget it! Read Google Press Release Links. So, (PR) links gained, for SEO purposes – intended to manipulate ranking – are against Google Guidelines.

Google has recently published frequently asked questions about the rel=”author” tag. For example, you cannot use mascots in the author image, you shouldn’t have multiple Google+ profiles for multiple languages, and authorship isn’t for product listings. Here are more details and authorship questions.

Bing’s Duane Forrester published a list of things that influence the position of a website in Bing’s results. Although the list was for Bing, it is very likely that the same factors also influence the position of a website on Google. According to Duane, the following 15 elements have a positive influence on the rankings of your web pages (if used correctly):

1. Title tags
2. Meta Descriptions
3. Clean URLs
4. Images and Alt descriptions (also called alt tags)
5. H1 tags
6. Rel=Canonical
7. Robots.txt
8. Sitemaps
9. Social sharing options
10. Unique content
11. Depth of content
12. Matching content type to visitor expectations (text, images, video, etc.)
13. Usability Page load times (to a certain point – faster is great, but not at the expense of usability and usefulness)
14. Crawlability (AKA discoverability, so can we actually get to all your content)
15. News – if you are actually a new site, submit for inclusion

There are several things that can have a negative influence on the rankings of your web pages:

1. Meta Keywords (fill them in if you like, keep it short and relevant, but not a big ranking factor)
2. Duplicate URLs
3. Overly long URLs (no set number, but you’ve all seen these)
4. Cloaking (comes down to your intent, but risky business for sure)
5. Link buying
6. Selling links
7. Link and like farms
8. Three way links
9. Content duplication content
10. Auto following in social media

One of the key factors of any successful SEO campaign is quality content – content that is unique, compelling and useful. That quality content can come packaged in a variety of ways: blog posts, articles, text on landing pages, white papers, reports, infographics and more. Discover 5 internal resources to mine for SEO content.

SEO isn’t just about driving traffic to your website. It can actually be used to increase your sales. Just think about it: what’s one of the main reasons you use search engines? Read more about how to increase your sales through long tail SEO.

And a big change roll out with Adwords: Google Keyword Tool has officially been replaced by Keyword Planner. The Keyword Planner allows local SEO and SEM professionals to get keyword search volume data at city level with better geographic segmentation and the ability to bundle geographic regions.

Bing Ads are delivering a number of new innovations in it’s interface, improving infrastructure and working hard to give the market an offering compatible with Google AdWords. When advertisers spend 80% of their time in Google AdWords, it’s easy to miss some of the fantastic features and functionality that Bing Ads has to offer.

Social Media

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging. Here are the 10 laws of social media marketing.

The Forbes top 50 social media power influences of 2013 is quite an astounding list. For the most part, these are the people who influence the biggest and best brands and top selling books the most. These are also the people who have been in business a long time. It is important when assessing who is the best to analyze who really has a following. This means not just bots but real people that interact. Peek Analytics was used to measure influence.

LinkedIn brings “a new streamlined look that will give group managers and group members the ability to customize and visually differentiate their conversation space.” Learn more about new look for LinkedIn Groups from here.

Twitter announces related headlines feature: “You will see a new ‘Related headlines’ section on tweets that have been embedded on websites. This section, which you can view from the tweet’s permalink page, lists and links to websites where the tweet was embedded, making it easier to discover stories that provide more context.”

Tumblr is a blogging and social platform that houses more than 132 million blogs and is among the top 15 websites in the United States. But do you really know how to use Tumblr for your business?

Did you heard about The Man Who Would Not Use Facebook For Anything Less Than A Million Dollars? That’s an interesting story. He makes extensive efforts to encrypt his communications, blocks out ads on his web browsers and maintains his own server. He uses even a “dumb” mobile phone that does not transmit personal unencrypted data.

If you don’t notice, in May, Google+ Places was replaced by Google+ Local integrating their organic Google+ search, Google+ Maps, and mobile features on one tab. Google promised that new and exciting features would continue to roll out that would enhance the experience for local business owners when customers searched for them. Here are some powerful ways to promote your local business using Google+ Local.

Instagram is cool way to connect with your socially engaged consumers. There are 130 million active users on Instagram every month, and every day 1 billion photos are liked. Use the app right, and you could have an instant viral marketing success. Use it wrong, and your efforts on this young site could be a big empty fail. Here are 52 tips on how to market on Instagram.

WordPress Themes, Plugins and Frameworks

WordPress 3.6 (nickname Oscar) was released. Then, the highly anticipated Genesis 2.0 – which includes support for microdata among it’s many new features – was unleashed on the world. It is not hyperbole to claim that the worldwide web will never be the same.

The question on everyone’s mind is “what’s new with WordPress 3.6 and Genesis?”

The first place to check for the former, of course, is the codex. It lists the new features, like a new default theme – Twenty Thirteen. Another feature to be excited about in WP 3.6: auto-saving. You’ll appreciate the quote from Mark Jaquith that you can read here, plus get details on some other new features.

WordCamp San Francisco recently occurred. Check out Matt Mullenweg’s latest “State of WordPress” address, plus other highlights here.

Now on to Genesis 2.0. For a rundown of new features, plus links to new child themes already out, read Brian Gardner’s release post at StudioPress.

StudioPress WordPress theme of the month – Education Theme. Features six color and layout styles, custom background and menus, featured images, and it’s mobile responsive. With kids and even parents (some of us anyway) doing so much of their web browsing on mobile devices these days, school sites almost have to be responsive to stand a chance at being useful.

Moving forward, Evangelist, a new WordPress theme by ThemeFuse, was built with a church, charity or prayer group website in mind. It comes packed with a working event calendar, the possibility to upload prayer books and sermons for download and much more.

There’s also a new auto WordPress theme specifically for those who need a great showcase for their car showroom.

It has all the bells and whistles that such a website would need, check out more details – AutoTrader. A stunning, responsive auto WordPress theme excellent for an online vehicle marketplace or an auto motor magazine or blog.

Nexus is a versatile magazine theme packed full of custom widgets and content modules that give you control over your page. The challenge of any magazine theme is to take massive amounts of content and present it to the reader in a clear and structured manner.

Nexus has fun and unexpected elements, including the scrolling social icons (each with a unique related color), some interesting sliding hovers on the homepage featured content section, and a lovely gradation on the footer.

Now about some plugins… would you like to manage all client appointments in WordPress? Appointments+ is a powerful, flexible and easy-to-use plugin. Take, set and manage appointments and client bookings without having to leave WordPress. It’s perfect for many businesses that schedule time with clients, such as spas and salons, photographers, consultants and life coaches, sales executives and web designers.

Need some WordPress tips? Once in awhile you have to move a WordPress site to a new domain. When that happens you don’t want lose all of the traffic that you’ve been getting at the old domain. This is where a good old-fashioned 301 redirect comes in handy.

In the mobile marketplace, we have WordPress for iOS 3.7. This release introduces a revamped Reader, some under-the-hood improvements for account management, and lays the groundwork for some neat things to come..

Do you blogging? Read these 120 marketing tactics for blogging success. This is maybe the longest infographic in the world but it has some awesome tips to make your blog rock.

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Small and Local Business

What differentiates successful entrepreneurs from their peers? Are there certain qualities they share? I think so. But I also think it’s important to acknowledge that timing, luck and simply being in the right place at the right time play a part in many success stories. Decades of personal experience and mentoring have taught Stephen Key that successful entrepreneurs share these five qualities.

No matter what kinds of sales, promotions or content you have on your website, if the page isn’t loading fast enough, you’re losing customers. User experience and satisfaction, as well as search engine rankings are all impacted by your pages’ load times. E-commerce businesses and sites need to be speedy in order to keep their customers happy and their revenue stream going in the right direction. Here’s what you need to know about site speed, page load time and your business’s bottom line.

Launching a startup isn’t easy. There are countless things to do and one of the biggest jobs is to try and get press coverage in a time when mainstream sites, bloggers and journalists are already being bombarded with pitches. Therefore, a great way to get that traction is to get in touch with those blogs that simply love covering exciting new companies. Awesome concepts can go viral which is every entrepreneurs dream. Here are 8 free websites that you can submit your startup to for free and have a decent chance of actually being covered.

If you’re looking to find home services ranging from movers to interior designers, you’ll be able to do it all on Yelp by the end of the year. The popular review site will be adding a new option to book services online through a partnership with online marketing company ReachLocal. ReachLocal announced the beta version of it’s online booking system ReachCommerce, and is using the platform to integrate it’s services with consumers on Yelp.

PS: just in case you’ll need this, scientists invent hangover-free beer! It doesn’t have a name and it’s not yet commercially available, but they have done it.