Lee Kantor (Atlanta Business RadioX), Dawn Ely (Corporate Conversations Host & President of Palladium Chief Legal Officers) & Christian Griffith (VP Digital Strategy, Freebairn & Co.)
Lee Kantor (Atlanta Business RadioX), Dawn Ely (Corporate Conversations Host & President of Palladium Chief Legal Officers) & Stacy Williams (Prominent Placement))
If you weren’t able to tune in to hear the livestream of “Corporate Conversations” last Tuesday, here’s an audio clip of just my portion of the show, and here’s a longer clip including the first half with Christian Griffith of Freebairn & Company.
Not always seeing your title tags in Google SERPs? Last week there was a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog entitled Better page titles in search results where the blogger, Pierre Farr, explained how Google chooses the title tags to show in their search results. He says Google may choose to display an alternate title for your page using algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for users to recognize relevant pages in the search results.
As with most things related to Google’s search results, it all comes back to relevancy. Read more…
According to Google, “… rich snippets provide you with the ability to help Google highlight aspects of your page. Whether your site contains information about products, recipes, events or apps, a few simple additions to your markup can result in more engagement with your content — and potentially more traffic to your site.” Most of us are familiar with rich snippets and know they can increase click through rates for search results.
We know rich snippets are important, but implementation can be daunting and confusing. I’m not going to attempt to discuss the technical aspects of rich snippets or go into a how-to lesson — I’ll leave that to the experts. Google Webmaster Tools recently published a series of instructional videos about rich snippets. Video topics include a general introduction, types of rich snippets, product searches and troubleshooting, among others.
Not sure if you have rich snippets? Google also has a rich snippet testing tool that allows you to see if a web page contains a rich snippet markup, and, if so, preview the search result for that page.
Does your site contain rich snippets? Use the tool and find out (it’s painless, I promise). Yes? Good for you! No? Try them out and see whether rich snippets have an impact on your click-through-rates.
SEMPO Atlanta has partnered with AiMA to cohost their Holiday Bash on Thursday, December 8. It’s been called the “most anticipated holiday party of the season!” Internet marketers of all types will be mixing, mingling, toasting, and generally creating holiday cheer. Don’t miss it!
Thursday, December 8, 2011
6 pm – 11 pm
Tongue & Groove
Lindbergh Center Station
565 Main Street NE
Atlanta GA 30324
Cost: $25 for SEMPO Members, $40 Non-Members, $50 at the door. Register here.
If that isn’t enough Atlanta marketing holiday festivity for you…AMA Atlanta is offering a holiday mixer this Thursday, December 1 at Twisted Taco. More info about that event. Hope to see you at one or both events!
By most accounts, Black Friday was a huge success. Despite the shaky economy and the threat of occupy Black Friday protests, sales were the strongest since 2007 as national revenue increased 6.6% to a record $11.4 billion according to ShopperTrak.
But customers reported mixed feelings about the various deals and many retailers reported thinning crowds after the midnight surge. And as the now infamous “pepper spray” incident at Walmart proved, once again, Black Friday shopping is not for the faint of heart.
Needless to say, Cyber Monday presents a better experience for many and experts are predicting that Cyber Monday 2011 will be the biggest online shopping day in history, with online sales expected to exceed $1 billion dollars. Read more…
At first glance, one might think landing page A/B testing and multivariate testing are long and involved processes. However, Google Website Optimizer takes much of the pain and manual work out of the picture and simplifies the process. Today I’m going to talk specifically about A/B testing, and I’ll discuss multivariate testing in an upcoming post.
To begin an A/B test, you need the original landing page URL, the variation landing page (or pages) URL and the conversion page URL. Keep in mind, the more variations you have, the longer it’ll take to declare a winner. When you set up the experiment in Google Website Optimizer, Google will give you different tracking scripts to include on each page of the test. A set of control and tracking scripts will need to be implemented on the original landing page, and a tracking script needs to be implemented on each page variation. Lastly, you also add tracking script to the conversion page. Once all of the tracking scripts are in place, Google validates the pages. Next you can preview the versions of the pages you’re testing and launch the test. Voila – your A/B test is ready! Read more…
Categories: Google, Online Marketing, Paid Search, SEM, SEM General, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Usability, User Experience Tags: landing page testing, landing pages, usability
Several members of the PPI team attended the SEMPO Atlanta event, “The Future of Web Analytics”. Three speakers provided great insights on analytics to the packed house at the Google office in Atlanta. SEMPO members join us via webcast from Chicago, New York, and Santa Monica. Provided all the opportunities for a huge technology fail, the evening went remarkably well. Also, it was great to meet SEMPO Global president, Chris Boggs. I’ve always been impressed by the amount of support our local chapter receives. Read more…
Ask any SEO expert and they’ll tell you that link-building is the least fun and most tedious part of the job that we all otherwise love. There are a myriad of ways to generate inbound links for a website, including creating good “linkbait” content, optimized press releases, social media, directories, article marketing, partner links, authoritative links, and more. Any link-building campaign worth its salt must also include analyzing who’s linking to other relevant sites (industry sites, competitors and such) and attempting to get links from their link sources too.
To say this is a chore is an understatement. It involves using a search engine or software tool to download the links pointing to another site – there may be hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of links. Then someone has to go through those links by hand to take a look at the sites they’re on and determine if the site’s good quality and likely to link to their site. And then they need to dig around to find the site owner’s contact information and email or call them to ask for a link. All this has to be tracked, as a great deal of follow-up is usually required. It’s an incredibly important thing to do; unfortunately it’s also very time-consuming.
Read more…
I’m asking this as a personal question about your search habits – this isn’t a blog post on how to actually conduct an online search. Stop and think about it for a second. Step back a bit and think about how you use search on a personal basis on the weekends and at night when you’re not working. And this isn’t a rhetorical question – really think about it. You might learn something.
My search habits have evolved quite a bit during the five years I’ve been a search marketer. I used to pride myself on the number of ways I could conduct a search on the same topic and find all sorts of different results. I’d show off to my family – “Look honey. Here’s a BETTER way to search for a condo at the beach.” And then I’d launch into a tutorial of how to conduct searches and get the most relevant results. I’d explain about relevancy to the search query, ramble on about backlinks and how sites get ranked organically, and pontificate on the differences between paid and organic results. My family and friends were astounded by my abilities – or at least I think they were.
Now, however, I must admit I’ve become a lazy searcher. Read more…
Google has recently reclassified link data in Webmaster Tools. The latest update is designed to closely align your backlinks with how you define internal and external links. Due to this major change, many sites can expect to see a decrease in external links and an increase in internal links, depending on how your site is arranged.
Previously, links that were categorized as internal had to start with your site’s exact URL. If they started with something other than your site’s exact URL then they were considered external links. For example, if you entered your site as www.prominentplacement.com/bestSEMfirm/Google , links from www.prominentplacement.com/bestSEMfirm/Google/Professionals would be considered internal, but links from prominentplacement.com/bestSEMfirm would be considered external. As such, links from www.prominentplacement.com and prominentplacement.com would be considered external.
Here is a quick lesson on how Webmaster Tools views different types of domains Read more…
