Search Advisory   Brought to you by Prominent Placement, Inc., provider of search engine optimization services and pay-per-click advertising

SEMPO Atlanta is pleased to present our first event of 2012, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses who want to grow their companies through search and online marketing.

SEARCH MARKETING FOR SMBs

WHEN: Thursday, March 8, 6:00 – 8:30 pm
(6:00 – 7:00 networking & cocktails, 7:00 – 8:30 panel discussion)

WHERE: Park Tavern, 500 10th St. NE, Atlanta, 30309-4272 (corner of Piedmont Park at Monroe)

COST: FREE for SEMPO Members (Join SEMPO today)
$25 for non-members in advance ($35 at the door)

MODERATOR: Neal Wilson, Microsoft Senior Search Evangelist

PANELISTS:
Jeff Campbell, VP of Resolution Media
Neil Goodman, SEM Specialist at AT&T
Stuart Santos, VP of National Sales & Media at CityGrid Media (a division of IAC Interactive)

FOR MORE INFORMATION AND TO REGISTER, CLICK HERE

Thank you to SEMPO Atlanta’s sponsors: Satellite, Google, Yahoo & Bing.

It’s a happy day at my house each month when the latest issue of Wired magazine arrives.  That said, and considering how particular I am about grammar, typos and such, I was dismayed to read the article “Proper Spelling?  Its Tyme to Let Luce!”

Author Anne Trubek asserts that “Consistent spelling was a great way to ensure clarity in the print era.  But with new technologies, the way that we write and read is changing, and so must spelling.”  Trubek gives examples of how even the idea that there are correct and incorrect ways to spell words is fairly recent in civilization’s history.  And she points out what a mess the English language is, even with all our rules. Read more…

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.

As millions of us are furiously jotting down ideas for our personal New Year’s Resolutions, here’s one resolution corporate communicators and marketers ought to include: adding an online newsroom to their websites. Consider this fact for a moment: less than half of all businesses even have an online newsroom. The intent to develop one is pending, however. And 2012 is almost here. But for now, this means that the majority of PR folks, corporate communicators, and marketers lack any sort of online newsroom presence. Talk about an untapped market! Given the recent Freshness updates – where preference is heavily tilted towards breaking news, such as the upcoming Presidential primaries or Occupy Wall Street, and frequently updated customer reviews on new products, like Amazon’s Kindle Fire – it’s clear that Google is increasingly relying on a website’s online newsroom as the primary source of trending, newsworthy, and up-to-date content. Read more…

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…

In an earlier post, I discussed how to use Google Website Optimizer for A/B testing, and now I’m going to briefly touch on conducting multivariate tests with Google Website Optimizer. As with A/B testing, Google’s tool takes away much of the grunt work.  Before you get started, consider these tips to help your test run smoothly – choose a page with high traffic, start off small by testing only a few elements, and pick a high volume type of conversion.  Also, as I mentioned in my last post, the more variations you have, the longer it’ll take to declare a winner.

To begin, you’ll need the following:

• The URL of the page you’d like to test
• Identify the sections of that page you’d like to test
• The URL of the conversion/success page

Read more…

Google is nothing if not experimental. This can be a rather large and particularly uncomfortable pill to swallow – especially for search marketers. Normally those of us at SEM agencies love testing. User testing, A/B testing…you name it, we test it. And many of the brightest minds in the field write endless articles on the benefits of testing and experimenting.

But when Google begins rolling out new changes, we tend to collectively hold our breath.

Earlier last week Google announced a new way forward to improve user relevancy and transparency. Read more…

The AdWords Display Network functions much differently than the Search Network. Yes, an advertiser can still use keywords to target web users, but they function in a less clearly defined manner. For display, Google takes an ad group’s keyword list and matches the subject of the page opted into the display network with the theme of the ad group established by its set of keywords. This means that individual keywords do not act alone as they do in the search network, and that no keyword-level data is available to measure the effectiveness of a particular keyword. So, instead of optimizing the keywords ads are running for, an advertiser has to resort to other targeting strategies. Thankfully, AdWords has a number of targeting options and allows an advertiser to narrow down where ads appear by layering these different options.
Read more…