At the beginning of the New Year I decided it was time to clean up our State of Search Facebook page. That was very necessary because it had turned ‘old’ rather quickly.
It now looks like I have to ‘start all over’, Facebook just released their new Facebook Brand Pages. Until the end of March page owners have time to update their pages. You can switch to the new design before, but if you haven’t changed the settings by then Facebook will do it for you. (more…)
Back in January, I decided to start my own meetup group with a view to finding more females that work in the Digital Marketing Industry. This was based on my own experiences with the leading SEO conferences in the UK being extremely male dominated.
Arranging meet ups is a great way to help increase awareness of a brand in any industry and if done correctly in the first instance, can be fairly easy to maintain moving forwards.
In this post I want to share some of the things that I learnt from this and provide you with a little checklist to help you create a successful meetup group in whatever niche you are looking to target.
Thats the thing with Google. Suddenly, overnight, things seem to change with the search giant. All of a sudden an SEO, or nowadays even the SMO, the Social Media Optimizer, has to change their strategy because of the change Google made. Right? Well not always, in many cases if you understand the way Google thinks and works your basic strategy can stay the same, you just have to change some of your tactics. Make some minor adjustments and you continue to do well in the SERPS.
Google’s latest integration of Google+ into the SERPS might indicate there are more changes we have to make to our strategy to stay visible in Google. After all, we now have the ‘suggested users’ more prominent appearing in the results. And the results are mixed with social elements coming from Google products. How to make sure we are visible there? And how to become one of those suggested users? That last one I want to focus on here: I want to be one of the suggested users as much as possible. But how? Let’s analyze. (more…)
Maybe you have noticed that many of Google’s algorithm changes in the past have been focussed on getting attention for brands. Even in their latests update, they seem to be favoring brands by giving us “Better “Official” Page Detection & Boosting”.
SEOBook made this nice infographic to show us some history and perspective on the way Google looks at brands in their search results. (more…)
Incentivising people to search for your brand is more important than it ever has been. With personalised and social search growing in importance and prominence, the question that seems to be in the mind of a lot of online marketers is ‘how can we benefit from personalised or social search?’
The answer of course is to encourage more branded search traffic to make more searcher’s browsing history ‘biased’ towards results from your domain (Here’s a more in-depth explanation of how personalised search works by SEOmoz). (more…)
Last month Yomego, crunched the data with Alterian’s SM2 tool to create what they call “the world’s first Social Media Reputation Index.” This index tries to benchmarkt a brands popularity. They look at reach recency and satisfaction recency online.
This ‘algorithm’ resulted in a list of brands and how they are performing socially on the web. And they were smart enough to throw in an infographic. (more…)
There has been a lot of thought-provoking debate and discussion of late, (both here and elsewhere) around the issue of the importance and validity of keyword ranking as a sole measure of success in search engine optimisation.
As personalised search is now default for Google users, rank variations and swings can be witnessed first-hand by anyone trying a few searches; interacting with certain results, rinse and repeat.
Whilst I personally, think that rank checking; (providing clients are informed and educated as to the individual and variable effects of personalised search) is still a fundamental benchmark for SEO campaign effectiveness, I thought it might be useful to mention some other complementary measurements. (more…)
Money is what makes the world go around. And money could also be the trigger for many to take a step they otherwise might not have taken that easy or to get the attention of those who are otherwise hard to reach. So if you want traffic to your website, but it isn’t going fast enough, why not throw in some money?
Its a concept which many sites have tested, with different success. Some ‘bought’ traffic by paying for advertising, others have tried to give away stuff to get visitors to come back to their sites. Microsoft is probably the best or at least the biggest example of a site, in this case even a search engine, trying to ‘buy their way in’ by throwing in hard cash for every search with their cashback program. The most recent one going this way is real time search engine Leapfish, where you can win $100,000 in cash and prizes if you help the search engine reach the 20 million searches they want in 2010. (more…)
As you may have noticed State of Search is a group blog. Which means that its not just one person writing all of the content, but many more. On this site we have a few of the best bloggers in the business producing great content just for you.
There are many group blogs out there and running a group blog seems easy. After all, you don’t have to produce all the content yourself, and with a bloggersteam like we have it should be easy as hell.
Well…: wrong! Yes, the fact that great content comes from the different bloggers is the absolute plus for this website. It makes or breakes the success. But to get to that success you need to lay a good foundation. And if you are blogging for business it can even be hardere. In this post I’d like to share with you some tips on how to run a group blog. Based on my experience here and on Searchcowboys. I know, it’s not about search, but I hope it will benefit you. (more…)
We’ve all heard how important it is to “own your page one” and “lock out your brand SERP” and suchlike. I am a big believer in brand SEO myself, as from my perspective the plus-sides are not just limited to the ability to dominate a few pages of Google for a search on your brand name. Numerous additional benefits can be had, from the SEO benefits of citation/link matrix – to the traditional marketing benefits of brand and message ownership; most are pretty simple to achieve… (more…)
Yesterday I wrote about the definition of brand bidding and ad-hijacking, on how to prevent it and what „evil“ affiliates do to book trademarks that are „protected“ by Google’s complaint form.
As promised, today I will talk about the methods these affiliates use to hide their strategies and how you can monitor your brand to find out if your brand gets hijacked.
Affiliates have several possibilities to hide their strategies when they are abusing trademarks and hijack ad copies. First of all, most of them will use geo-targeting for their campaigns. When they know that the trademarkowner’s office is for example in Munich and the agency is in Berlin, they will cover other cities then Munich and Berlin, to prevent them to see the hijacked ads. (more…)
Editorial note: This post is not meant to give tips and tricks on how to do Brand Bidding and Ad-Hijacking, its meant to give insights on what is done and what is going on.
Two weeks ago, at SMX Munich, I was invited to speak on the blackhat PPC panel. I covered the exciting topic of brand bidding & ad-hijacking in Google Adwords. The topic is pretty actual at the moment, because of the decision of the European Court of Law of March 23 2010.
So what are brand bidding & ad-hijacking? The term Brand bidding is probably pretty clear for most: the use of brands as keywords in Google Adwords. Normally this is done not only by affiliates, but also by competitors, e-commerce shops, auction platforms, price comparison sites etc. (more…)
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