Facebook has finally implemented some well overdue changes to their ‘Pages’ feature which means that administrators will now be able delegate just that bit more effectively. The two features currently being rolled out are the ability to schedule posts and option to create different tiers of access and control. Like I said, well overdue 
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To be really successful in both search and social my strong opinion is that you need to do research. Not just on which rankingfactors are important, but, maybe even more important, on your target audience.
Whenever I do training sessions I tell my students to find and research this target audience, find out who they are and what they do.
Research who will potentially be visiting your site, who has the need for your products and who is potentially going to be your ‘brand advocate’ by spreading your content around the web.
To find these target audiences is one thing, the next thing is to actually tailor your content so it will appeal to them. Appeal so they will find it and appeal so they will act on it. To be able to tailor that content its important to figure out for example what people are searching for. The question my students always ask me: “Where do I start and is there a tool for that?”. (more…)
Recently I have for the first time been involved with website re-design and creating valuable on-site directions for site visitors to improve the user’s online experience. My professional background is not too tech-heavy therefore I started by looking at the psychology of online users to gain an understanding (in the deeper sense) why someone is visiting your website and what the motivations are for doing so.
I came across the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who is best-known as the architect of the notion of ‘flow’, as well as being one of the leading researchers on ‘positive psychology’. His theory is that people are at their happiest when they are in “flow” mode. In other words the condition where motivation, attention and the current situation meet resulting in a kind of productive harmony or feedback. The challenging part for us marketers though is to create the right conditions for individuals to achieve this state. The art though is to strike the right balance between the skill of the performer and the challenge of the task level. If one or the other is too easy/difficult ‘flow’ will not occur. So how can we transmit that to a website? To increase the likelihood for your visitor to experience the flow state try to remove unnecessarily distractions from your site. Reason being that once the visitor is in the ‘flow’ he/she has to ‘automatically’ block stimuli that are interfering with the task/purchase/sign-up engagement. Therefore we ought to help users not to get distracted. (more…)
Have you always wanted to learn SEO but you didn’t know where to start off? There is a lot to find on the web that can help you. And there are many books you could read. And there are many people you could follow who might be able to tell you more. But where to start? Our friends at Koozai decided to make this (interactive) infographic, to help you out a bit. Enjoy! (more…)
Now that many of us in the search marketing space have come to terms with some of the dilemmas associated with Google Search Plus Your World (GSPYW), Google’s new privacy policy and the endless stream of figures coming out of Google celebrating the number of “users” of the Google+ platform it’s high time that brands and sites of all shapes and sizes start weighing up whether participating in Google+ is right for them (if they’ve not already done so).
I will make a few points up front that will hopefully help you decide whether or not Google+ is right for you and your site, but I will also raise some key concerns with indexation and potential manipulation of competitor search results that I have not seen widely covered thus far. (more…)
Ever since the start of the website about two years ago we have had one thing which was a bit annoying: we didn’t ‘have’ the @stateofsearch Twitter account. That account was taken by an Italian artist who lived in Dublin. We tried contacting her in different ways to try and take the Twitter account of her hands. After all, she had not used the Twitter account since she claimed it in 2009. There was only one tweet on it. We never got in touch with her and were therefor “forced” to use the Twitter account @state_ofsearch, so with the underscore.
We have ‘lived’ like that for two years. Until today. As of today we now own the Twitter account @stateofsearch. All followers of @state_ofsearch have been ‘moved’ to @stateofsearch, so if you were following us already: don’t worry, you will still see the same updates, you only have to keep an eye on the @replies you do towards us, but we’ll keep monitoring that, also because we also own @state_ofsearch. And if you are not following us: what? Do it right now!
The process of getting the Twitter account seems long, in fact it turned out to be quite easy. Within 10 days everything was fixed. Let me explain how I got the account, without actually getting in touch with the account owner. (more…)
So the new year has started, which means most people have New Years Resolutions. Some believe it’s a ‘fresh start’, though in some cases you could argue whether or not that is the best way to go.
For me the start of the New Year also meant that we were going to welcome several new bloggers to the website. There are more to come, but we welcomed three already. Setting up new bloggers means I had to give them accounts, create their profile pages and update the bloggers page. That made me realize I had to update something else: our Facebook page. Bryan Eisenberg always tells me that you have to keep improving your site, Facebook page and other properties constantly. He actually gives me homework for that. For the Facebook page, that ‘improving’ had been a while.
So I decided to sit down and ‘clean up’ the State of Search Facebook page. In this post I want to take you through some of the cleaning up I did. Because maybe it is time for you to do some cleaning too? (more…)
This is a guest post written by Kev Strong. Kev is an online marketing consultant at Newcastle Upon Tyne based digital marketing agency, Mediaworks. A lover of all things search and an ex-web developer, Kev Strong (a.k.a Goosh) is a specialist in advanced search engine optimisation.
Working with clients with hundreds of thousands of pages on their website is a cumbersome task to keep on top of; Ensuring that your analytics code, be it Google Analytics, CoreMetrics or any other analytics package, is present on on every page is another thing entirely.
During a recent project at Mediaworks, I encountered the possibility that Google Analytics was not installed on every page of a client’s website. Unfortunately, the solution I previously relied on (SiteScanGA) is no longer available and whilst there are great tools out there for checking if GA is installed on an individual page (e.g. GA? For Firefox) there is not an easy, non-enterprise way to check if Google Analytics is installed on every page.
Thankfully there is a solution to this problem by using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, Excel and a little jiggery-pokery. (more…)
In my presentations I often have several slides in there which are all about using bloggers to get more visibility in search engines. Bloggers already have rankings, already have webpages which are being well indexed by Google and already have authority. Why not use that authority? The big question however is: how can you find them?
One example I gave in my presentation at A4U was about how Universal Film Studios had used only seven influential bloggers to spread their message about the new Harry Potter Theme Park they were launching. Its a good example of how to build up your brand without actually spreading the message yourself.
Another good example I give more often is the one of Sony. When launching a new LCD Television, they looked for the influential bloggers in their industry and used them to spread the word about the new television even before the TV was actually for sale. They didn’t use the press until the television was actually in the stores. They gave the bloggers previews, send them pictures and videos and had them discussing it. That made that when the TV actually was there Sony dominated the search results. Not just with their own site, because they gained a lot of links out of the use of the bloggers, but also through the bloggers-websites. They were the ‘other’ results on the page. And they were all talking about the Sony TV. Some branding that was. (more…)
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