The 10-5-10 social media routine: You must matter

These are the annotated slides from my presentation at SEMPDX Searchfest today. I talked about social media, having a productive routine and building a powerful campaign without sucking up 4 hours a day: Your daily social media routine – stuff that matters View more presentations from Ian Lurie…

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/conversationmarketing/MRJI/~3/7duZxB80tOg/the-10-5-10-social-media-routine-you-must-matter.htm

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How Mobile, Social & Trust Are Shaping Local Search Usage [Study]

Online local listings are the most trusted and relevant results to access local business information, especially as consumers are adopting new technologies, applications and social networks, according to a new study from comScore and Localeze.

Source: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/mOSuyoaN4GE/How-Mobile-Social-Trust-Are-Shaping-Local-Search-Usage-Study

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Non-Google Link Strategy: An Example of Stealth Link Marketing

Link opportunities are everywhere. You just have to stop thinking about Google in order to see them. It isn't easy. Yes, Google is important, but nothing is better than doing significant business regardless of which way the Google winds blow.

Source: http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/~r/sewblog/~3/1BCGuQVZTvg/Non-Google-Link-Strategy-An-Example-of-Stealth-Link-Marketing

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Website Auditor Review: A Full-Featured On-Page Optimization Tool

Website Auditor is one of the 4 tools found in Link-Assistant's SEO Power Suite. Website Auditor is Link-Assistant's on-page optimization tool.

We recently reviewed 2 of their other tools, SEO Spyglass and Rank Tracker. You can check out the review of SEO Spyglass here and Rank Tracker here.

What Does Website Auditor Do?

Website Auditor crawls your entire site (or any site you want to research) and gives you a variety of on-page SEO data points to help you analyze the site you are researching.

We are reviewing the Enterprise version here, some options may not be available if you are using the Professional version.

In order to give you a thorough overview of a tool we think it's best to look at all the options available. You can compare versions here.

Getting Started with Website Auditor

To get started, just enter the URL of the site you want to research:

I always like to enable the expert options so I can see everything available to me. Next step is to select the "page ranking factors:

Here, you have the ability to get the following data points from the tool on a per-page basis:

• HTTP status codes
• Page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords
• Total links on the page
• Links on the page to external sites
• Robots.Txt instructions
• W3C validation errors
• CSS validation errors
• Any canonical URL's associated with the page
• HTML Code Size
• Links on the page with the no-follow attribute

Your next option is to select the crawl depth. For deep analysis you can certainly select no crawl limit and click the option to find unlinked to pages in the index.

If you want to go nuts with the crawl depth frequently, I'd suggest looking into a VPS to house the application so you can run it remotely. Deep, deep crawls can take quite awhile.

I know HostGator's VPS's as well as a Rackspace Cloud Server can be used with this and I'm sure most VPS hosting options will allow for this as well.

I'm just going to run 2 clicks deep here for demonstration purposes.

Next up is filtering options. Maybe you only want to crawl a certain section or sections of a site. For example, maybe I'm just interested in the auto insurance section of the Geico site for competitive research purposes.

Also, for E-commerce sites you may want to exclude certain parameters in the URL to avoid mucked up results (or any site for that matter). Though there is an option (see below) where you can have Website Auditor treat pages that are similar but might have odd parameters as the same page.

Another option I like to use is pulling up just the blog section of a site to look for popular posts link-wise and social media wise. Whatever you want to do in this respect, you do it here:

So here, I'm included all the normal file extensions and extension-less files to include in the report and I'm looking for all the stuff under their quote section (as I'm researching the insurance quote market).

The upfront filtering is one of my favorite features because I exclude unnecessary pages from the crawl and only get exactly what I'm looking for, quickly. Now, click next and the report starts:

Working With the Results

Another thing I like about Link-Assistant Products is the familiar interface between all 4 of their products. If you saw are other reviews, you are familiar with the results pane below.

Before that, Website Auditor will ask you about getting more factors. When I do the initial crawl I do not include stuff that will cause captchas or require proxies, like cache dates and PR. But here, you can update and add more factors if you wish:

Once you click that, you are brought to the settings page and give the option to add more factors, I've specifically highlighted the social ones:

I'll skip these for now and go back to the initial results section. This displays your initial results and I've also highlighted all the available options with colored arrows:

Your arrow legend is as follows:)

• Orange - You can save the current project or all projects, start a new project, close the project, or open another project
• Green - you can build an white-labeled Optimization report (with crawl, domain, link, and popularity metrics plugged in), Analyze a single page for on-page optimization, Update a workspace or selected pages or the entire project for selected factors, Rebuild the report with the same pages but different factors, or create an XML sitemap for selected webpages.
• Yellow - Search for specific words inside the report (I use this for narrowing down to a topic)
• Red - Create and update Workspaces to customize the results view
• Purple - Flip between the results pane, the white-label report, or with specific webpages for metric updates

Workspaces for Customizing Results

The Workspaces tab allows you to edit current Workspaces (add/remove metrics) or create new ones that you can rename whatever you want and which will show up in the Workspaces drop-down:

Simply click on the Workspaces icon to get to the Workspaces preference option:

You can create new workspaces, edit or remove old ones, and also set specific filtering conditions relative to the metrics available to you:

Spending some time upfront playing around with the Workspace options can save you loads of time on the backend with respect to drilling down to either specific page types, specific metrics, or a combination of both.

Analyzing a Page

When you go to export a Website Auditor file (you can also just control/command + a to select everything in the results pane and copy/paste to a spreadsheet) you'll see 2 options:

• Page Ranking Factors (the data in the results pane)
• Page Content Data

You can analyze a page's content (or multiple pages at once) for on-page optimization factors relative to a keyword you select.

There are 2 ways you can do this. You can highlight a page in the Workspace, right click and select analyze page content. Or, you can click on the Webpages button above the filter box then click the Analyze button in the upper left. Here is the dialog box for the second option:

The items with the red X's next to them denote which pages can be analyzed (the pages just need to have content, often you see duplicates for /page and /page/)

So I want to see how the boat page looks, highlight it and click next to get to the area where you can enter your keywords:

Enter the keywords you want to evaluate the page against (I entered boat insurance and boat insurance quotes) then select what engine you want to evaluate the page against (this pulls competition data in from the selected engine).

The results pane here shows you a variety of options related to the keywords you entered and the page you selected:

You have the option to view the results by a single keyword (insurance) or multi-word keywords (boat insurance) or both. Usually I'm looking at multi-word keyphrases so that's what I typically select and the report tells you the percentage the keyword makes up of a specific on-page factor.

The on-page factors are:

• Total page copy
• Body
• Title tag, meta description, and meta keywords
• H1 and H2-H6 (H2-H6 are grouped)
• Link anchor text
• % in bold and in italics
• Image text

Website Auditor takes all that to spit out a custom Score metric which is mean to illustrate what keyword is most prominent, on average, across the board.

You can create a white-label report off of this as well, in addition to being able to export the data the same way as the Page Factor data described above (CSV, HTML, XML, SQL, Cut and Paste).

Custom Settings and Reports

You have the option to set both global and per project preferences inside of Website Auditor.

Per Project Preferences:

• Customer information for the reports
• Search filters (extensions, words/characters in the URL, etc)
• Customizing Workspace defaults for the Website reports and the Web page report
• Setting up custom tags
• Selecting default Page Ranking Factors
• Setting up Domain factors (which appear on the report) like social metrics, traffic metrics from Compete and Alexa, age and ip, and factors similar to the Page Factors but for the domain)
• XML publishing information

Your Global preferences cover all the application specific stuff like:

• Proxy settings
• Emulation settings and Captcha settings
• Company information for reports
• Preferred search engines and API keys
• Scheduling
• Publishing options (ftp, email, html, etc)

Website Auditor also offers detailed reporting options (all of which can be customized in the Preferences area of the application). You can get customized reports for both Page Factor metrics and Page Content Metrics.

I would like to see them improve the reporting access a bit. The reports look nice and are helpful but customizing the text, or inputting your own narratives is accessed via a somewhat arcane dialog blog, where it makes it hard to fix if you screw up the code.

Give Website Auditor a Try

There are other desktop on-page/crawling tools on the market and some of them are quite good. I like some of the features inside of Website Auditor (report outputting, custom crawl parameters, social aspects) enough to continue using it in 2012.

I've asked for clarification on this but I believe their Live Plan (which you get free for the first 6 months) must be renewed in order for the application to interact with a search engine.

I do hope they consider changing that. I understand that some features won't work once a search engine changes something, and that is worthy of a charge, but tasks like pulling a ranking report or executing a site crawl shouldn't be lumped in with that.

Nonetheless, I would still recommend the product as it's a good product and the support is solid but I think it's important to understand the pricing upfront. You can find pricing details here for both their product fees and their Live Plan fees.

Source: http://www.seobook.com/website-auditor-review-full-featured-page-optimization-tool

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Google Affiliate Marketing Infographic

Sharing is caring!

Please share :)

Embed code is here.

You can embed the above graphic on your website here.

Have feedback? Please contribute in the comments.

Source: http://www.seobook.com/google-affiliate-marketing-infographic

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Google Plus: Average User Spends Only 3 Minutes Per�Month!

During a conference call with Google investors in late January, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google+ had surpassed 90 million users. Although the growth rate for the social network has been phenomenal, Google has unnaturally propelled its growth by automatically creating Google+ accounts for all new Google users. In addition, the company has refused [...]

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SearchEngineJournal/~3/Lv4_8100kH8/

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Writing Google Places Reviews to Improve Rankings

by Dave Cosper

A business owner recently asked me how to go about building positive reviews in a way that would "optimize" their Google Maps listing. This is about as provocative a topic as it gets in the Local Search community, I know, but it's also an unavoidable subject worth addressing. Search marketers ponder the same "How To" question, if for nothing else to try and understand every aspect of local search ranking factors and translate this to practical advice for SMB's.

Google Places has become an essential tool in increasing popularity of a business on the Web to attract local consumers. It is a huge opportunity for local businesses to get exposure, but ranking in Google Places does not happen automatically - and building reviews takes time (any effort to improve ranking should be measured in months not weeks).

For every local search, Google does its best to display relevant businesses, favoring those its algorithm determines to be prominent (well-established) and well-liked in the area.

If Google made a habit of recommending local businesses that offered poor products and service, how long do you think people would continue using Google Maps? So Google has more confidence in "recommending" a local business if it has mostly positive reviews and ratings.

Google Places reviews have four primary signals that affect local search ranking:

1. Volume of reviews/ratings
2. Velocity of reviews/ratings
3. Sentiment of reviews/ratings
4. Keywords in reviews

Volume

The quantity of reviews needed to improve rankings depends on the business type and the number of reviews relative to local competitors. It's important to identify how many reviews competing listings have acquired and use this as the relative benchmark.

Velocity

Amassing lots of reviews is great, but acquiring them all in bulk or too quickly is not - this will set off red flags. Steadily building quality reviews is ideal.

Sentiment

While most review building strategies focus on soliciting reviews from happy customers, a natural distribution of mostly positive and even some negative reviews is best. There are a number of signals Google relies on, and crawling review content and extracting sentiment analysis is one of them.

Keywords

The quality of the written review is also important. While keywords in the review have been shown to help a listing rank, it's important that the description not appear spammy. Keyword stuffing in reviews is NOT good. But, the appearance of multiple reviews with consistent use of the right keywords, used sparingly, typically has a very positive impact on rankings for those particular keywords - especially long-tail keyword phrases.

Some examples:

Not good: General dentist Dr. Williams in Chicago, IL provides general dentistry and general dental care procedures, such as: Chicago general dentistry for children, general dentistry in Chicago for adults, and Chicago general dentist for seniors.

Good: Chalk up another great appointment with Dr. Williams in Chicago. He really cares about your teeth and takes the time to explain all procedures to make you feel comfortable. The entire staff is very friendly and prices are reasonable. Beyond general dentistry he also offers cosmetic dentistry like dental implants and natural looking filings. I highly recommend Dr. Williams!

To sum up Google's review policy: No fake reviews, no keyword-stuffed reviews, and no direct incentives for reviews. And apparently, according to Mike Blumenthal's blog, representatives of Google claim on-site review stations are permissible and even encouraged.

Additionally, other factors of influence include quantity, velocity and sentiment of reviews stemming from relevant third-party sites: IYPs, vertical/niche directories, and data aggregators, Facebook page likes, social media mentions on sites like Twitter, Foursquare check-ins, and Google+ shares. The entire local-social-mobile ecosystem is becoming increasingly more connected and continuing to play a bigger role in ranking.

Google's assessment of reviews also relies on the relative prominence of the person (account) posting the mention. A person with a history of quality reviews, on Hotpot for example, carries more weight.

The Anatomy of Stellar "Optimized" Reviews:

After five or more reviews, an average star rating with the total number of reviews appears on the search results page along with the listing:

It's common to see a boost in both ranking and conversion once five reviews are achieved and the average star rating has been activated - as long as the reviews are good!

Optimally, the person writing the review places the best descriptive text at the very beginning of the review as a concise summary statement. The summary can then be expanded upon in the rest of the review. Google routinely places select keywords from the review in bold.

Below is an example of how bold keyword phrases appear in the published review:

Google also offers review guidelines to share tips on how to write constructive reviews. Some of these tips include how to make the reviews informative and insightful, using real stories and not stuff that didn't actually happen, being nice even with negative reviews by making them constructive and not disrespectful, and finally writing them using proper grammar - avoiding excessive capitalization or punctuation.

Spammy Reviews Can do More Damage than Good:

What happens if business owners write their own (fake) reviews? The business can end up in Google purgatory!

Google employs a number of measures to prevent fake reviews including checking to see if reviews are being left by an email address tied to the business's domain or stemming from the same or similar IP address. If Google is suspicious of fake reviews or sees too many reviews all happening over a very short period of time, the listing could wind up suspended and perhaps even permanently blacklisted if the tactics are blatant enough.

Bottom line is, if you own a business you need to commit to an effective and long-term strategy in building online reviews. Instead of direct incentives, focus on encouraging happy customers at, or shortly after, the point of sale. From a local search marketing standpoint, this topic cannot be ignored. After all, Google Maps is, at its core, a recommendation engine.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/dave-cosper/writing-google-places-reviews-to-improve-rankings.php

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