Posts by Bas van den Beld

Bas van den Beld is a speaker, trainer and online marketing strategist. Bas is the owner of Stateofsearch.com. -- You can hire Bas to speak, train or consult. -- More articles and bio from Bas van den Beld
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Google Testing or Rolling Out Sources Results? (UPDATED)

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Google is giving us more and more information within the SERPS which makes that we don’t need to be clicking on results anymore or we get many different kind of results to choose from. It is a matter of time before Google is actually answering the questions we are putting up into our search bar.

As a matter of fact, I am now seeing some results which do just that: giving us semantic results in the right navigation of Google. Specific searches are giving me specific answers. The interesting part is that it is only showing it to me on Google.co.uk and they log me out. (more…)

Yahoo Offering Small Businesses a Marketing Dashboard

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I do many different types of training sessions. Many of the times it is in company, which means that its a large company which centrally organizes which products and tools they use.

Sometimes I do ‘open’ training sessions. In these sessions I usually get small business owners. They are looking for ‘free’ or ‘cheap’ tools with which they can track their online performance: analytics of sites of course, but also online mentions, brand reputation.

There are many free tools out there which you can combine and which can be quite useful. Most of them however are very ‘global’, not local. Yahoo now decided to get into the local opportunities by offering (US only for now) a “Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard”, a tool which will show you how your local online marketing is doing. (more…)

60.000 Twitter Accounts & Passwords (Many Duplicates) Published on Pastebin

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Twitter is looking into a possible hack on their systems when last Monday almost 60.000 Twitter accounts were published on Pastebin, a site which is usually used to share code between coders, but is often used by hackers to share stolen data.

It seems as if many (almost half so far) of these accounts were either Twitter bots, spam or duplicates. So far it is not sure if any ‘real’ accounts were published. According to Twitter many of the passwords are also not correct or not connected to the right names. Still, a list of almost 60.000 accounts with passwords showing up without a trace of who posted them is worrying. (more…)

Groupon’s Troubles

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Are offer sites like Groupon or Livingsocial the future or have they already surpassed the hype? With Facebook and Google getting into offers you would say that the ‘offer business’ still is booming. But is there room for sites who do just that?

Looking at Groupon’s recent history you can see the offer site is running into a lot of bumps. If they can get over them without damage remains to be seen. This infographic looks at a specific part of Groupon’s problems: the financials. How does it look? See for yourself… (more…)

Google News Gets A Fresh Up, Incorporates Google+

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When it comes to breaking news the past few years all sites have been surpassed by Twitter. Something breaks, there is always someone on Twitter talking about it. People tend to get their first news from Twitter, because its fresh. They will then start to look for news services for confirmation and more information on the news they found on Twitter.

Google News has always been a place where Google gathers all the data from news sites, making it a place, they hope, where people can find anything on ‘breaking’ stories. But Google News until now ‘only’ showed news sites as sources. Google now adds elements to that to make it more ‘fresh’ and real time. It is just not Twitter, its Google+ they are putting in there. (more…)

Google Puts Even More Focus on Local and Fresh Content

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It has become a monthly drill now: Google posting their updates, the SEO community reporting on the updates. The ‘openness’ Google is giving us at least helps us bloggers to write about some things ;) . But it also helps us get some insight in the number of changes Google is making daily. Last year at a conference I explained that Google makes over 500 changes a year. At this rate it is more like 700 changes which the search engine is making every year.

This month Google announced another 52 changes. The biggest one off course being “Penguin”, which is not mentioned in the post as such, but is mentioned separately as “our latest algorithm improvement to help you find more high-quality sites“.

All the changes are mentioned here, but I wanted to highlight a few which might be extra interesting to take a look at. Google clearly seems to have had a focus on local and fresh content push in the past month. Also we need to keep looking at our snippets. (more…)

UK and France Completed in Yahoo-Microsoft Search Alliance Implementation

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Yahoo and Microsoft have been working hard in the past year to integrate their search marketplaces. Their goal is to give advertisers a one-stop-shop for both search engines. Both search engines are taking the transition one step at a time.

After first the US, now all digital advertisers and publishers in the United Kingdom, Ireland and France have been transitioned to Microsoft adCenter. Next up: Germany, Switzerland and Austria. (more…)

The State of Affiliate Marketing: European Affiliate Report for 2011

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Affiliate Marketing is a constantly moving industry. Which its why its good to have organizations like Affiliates 4U organizing events like A4U Expo and trying to keep us informed. And that is also why it is a good thing that they do research into the state of affiliate marketing.

Recently they conducted the European Affiliate Survey which gives us some great insights into the State of the Affiliate Market. The numbers in some cases are shocking. Did you know that almost 72% of Dutch companies see Google as their main concern for their earnings? And that in Sweden 78% use paid search to generate the majority of traffic? (more…)

Friday Talk: Jean-Benoit Van Bunnen About Bing’s Search Strategy

There always is a lot of talk about Google, but what are Microsoft’s plans with Bing? Are they going to get into the serious business? Many want Bing to succeed, just because they believe Google needs competition.

In this Friday Talk you get to listen to the plans that Microsoft has with Bing, or at least the plans they had a year ago. Bing’s Jean-Benoit Van Bunnen talks about that at the Search University.

Bryan Eisenberg on “Using Google To Lift Your Conversion“

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At Fusion Marketing Experience it is all about experience (the title says it all right?) and how you should look at different channels and integrate them: Think about what you are doing.

When it comes to both ‘experience’ and thinking about what you are doing Bryan Eisenberg is the person you want to have opening the day on your conference as keynote speaker. He shoots tips like he’s shooting hail and will get you wide awake early in the morning.

His keynote on day 2 of Fusion Marketing Experience was a talk about how you can better optimize your PPC efforts by looking at who you are targeting. The good thing about this talk however is that everything he explained can simply be transferred to any other channel where you can do the same. (more…)

Opinions On The Google Penguin

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The latest Google Update, which for a change is not named “Panda”, but “Penguin”, has again gotten a lot of webmasters and SEOs on their back heels. They are discussing whether or not this was a good thing, whether or not Google is to blame for websites losing their entire traffic and they are discussing what will be next.

All the discussion is interesting, in the end my opinion is: don’t focus it all on Google, make sure your traffic comes from many different sources. Submitinme decided to look at all the comments and put them in an infographic which you can find below. (more…)

Book Review: Global Search Engine Marketing by Kristjan Hauksson and Anne Kennedy

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At SES New York a few weeks back I got a copy of the book “Global Search Engine Marketing” from Kristjan Mar Hauksson. His co-author Anne Kennedy wasn’t there, but I have known both of them for quite a few years now and I can tell you that these two know their international stuff. They travel the world, do business around the globe and have done global work, including some voluntary work at SEMPO. You can trust these two to write a book about International Search allright!

The moment that Kristjan gave me the book was nice, because you could see how proud he was with the book. He had been working really hard on it and it had paid off. So off course I started reading the book with anticipation. Not just because I personally like Kristjan and Anne, but also because I am someone who has an ‘international hat’ on. I am Dutch, but focussed on search world wide. So this book might just be made for me! Find below my review of the book with an overview of what you can expect from it. (more…)

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